The astrology babe on the campus talk-radio station was babbling something about Venus coming into conjunction that night, and he’d just finished up with his office hours for the week. He was packing up to hit the library and pick up an obscure translation of the Popol Vuh he’d requested through interlibrary loan, when he heard the raised voices coming from his boss’s office two doors down.
‘‘Jesus, Anna! I don’t know where you’re coming from sometimes. You’ve been nagging me to set aside time for you, and now that I have, you’re too busy to grab a bite? For Christ’s sake, I can’t seem to win for trying these days.’’ The Dick’s voice carried a harsh, dismissive impatience that set Lucius’s teeth on edge.
‘‘Based on what? One night out of the past four months? That’s fair.’’ Anna was trying to keep her tone reasonable, but he knew her well enough to hear the hurt.
‘‘This isn’t about what’s fair or not. I’m trying to—’’ The Dick broke off. ‘‘You know what? Forget about it. I’ll just eat at the club.’’
A door slammed and footsteps rang in the hall. Once they’d passed, Lucius stuck his head out his office door and flipped the retreating form of Anna’s husband a double-barreled bird.
‘‘God, what a jerk.’’
For a second, he thought he’d said that, because he was sure as hell thinking it. Then he turned to find the sentiment shared by Neenie Fisher, a second-year grad student who’d only recently joined Anna’s team full-time.
She was petite and borderline mousy, with pale eyes and thin lips that didn’t exactly command attention. Rumor had it she was dating some sort of local grunge rock star, which suggested she could catch attention when she wanted it.
Not so much in the glyph lab, though.
‘‘Hey, Neenie.’’ Lucius glanced back to the empty hallway where Anna’s husband had been moments ago. He wanted to agree with the jerk comment and add a few of his own, but he usually tried not to bad-mouth Dick Catori out loud.
Neenie, however, had no such compunction. ‘‘I don’t get it. Anna is frickin’ gorgeous—why does she put up with that guy? Did you hear him? It’s like he doesn’t give a crap that she’s putting in overtime trying to translate a codex fragment that is, as far as I can tell, completely new to the literature. Doesn’t he get how huge that is? I mean, honestly. I’ll bet if he had some sort of economics emergency—is there even such a thing?— she’d let him bail on dinner. Heck, she probably has more than once, and I bet I can tell you the name of the emergency. My friend Heather’s in his Intro to Econ class, and she said that Desiree—’’
‘‘Stop.’’ Lucius capped a hand across Neenie’s mouth, having learned that there wasn’t much else he could do to shut her up when she got on a roll. ‘‘Back up.’’ He took his hand away. ‘‘What codex fragment?’’
The fact that she didn’t immediately launch into an explanation spoke volumes. Instead, her eyes went wide and she slapped her own hand across her mouth. ‘‘Oh!’’
Aware that they were out in the hallway, two doors down from Anna’s office, and she was likely to be in a pretty prickly mood after the spat with her husband, Lucius dragged Neenie into his office and shut the door. ‘‘You weren’t supposed to mention it to me, were you?’’
Eyes still wide, she shook her head, keeping her hand firmly over her mouth. ‘‘I promised,’’ she said, words muffled behind her hand.
‘‘So unpromise,’’ he said, as if it were no big deal, which it probably wasn’t to someone like her, a conduit through whom gossip flowed at approximately the speed of sound. ‘‘Come on . . . you know you want to tell me.’’
Looking undecided—which as far as he was concerned was a big step up from ‘‘Oh, shit, I’m gonna get canned if I tell’’—she dropped her hand from her mouth and looked around his office. ‘‘Well . . .’’
He followed her gaze, saw it lock onto a small, graceful figurine of a jaguar, and winced. ‘‘That’s real jade. And it’s hand-carved.’’
He’d gotten the effigy at a small open market at the foot of the Guatemalan highlands during one of his early trips out into the field with Anna. The statuette wasn’t old, but it hadn’t been cheap either.
She looked back at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘‘Then I guess a promise is a promise.’’
He scowled, grabbed the effigy, and held it out to her. ‘‘You suck.’’
‘‘I had brothers. Deal with it.’’ She accepted the jaguar and tucked it into her pocket, then gestured for him to lean closer so she could whisper her secret.
‘‘The door’s closed, for chrissakes. Just say it.’’
‘‘Fine. Go ahead, ruin my dramatic intro.’’ She straightened and made a face at him, but now that she’d given herself permission to give with the goods, she couldn’t hold it in a second longer. ‘‘The fragment is gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. Some of the glyphs are degraded, but you can still see an incredible level of detail, and the colors . . .’’ Her eyes practically glazed over at the memory. ‘‘God, the colors are so awesome now, it’s hard to imagine what it must’ve looked like when it was new.’’
‘‘Hello, Neenie?’’ Lucius waved a hand in front of her face. ‘‘Someone else in the room here, remember? Let’s focus. Okay, so Anna showed you a piece of a codex. What did she say, ‘Hey, Neenie, come in here and see what I got my hands on’?’’
‘‘No.’’ She shook her head. ‘‘It was more like, ‘Come in and close the door. Now, promise me this is just between us. Okay . . . what does this look like to you?’ ’’
And all of a sudden, he got it. Anna had called Neenie in because she didn’t know how to translate the glyphs yet, but she’d shown an almost uncanny knack for being able to identify the pictures themselves.
The writing system of the ancient Maya was seriously complex, the symbols often difficult to interpret, meaning that field epigraphers got real good at pattern recognition real fast, or they moved on, and they often asked one another’s opinions and went with the consensus vote, at least until something else in the text proved the interpretation wrong. It also meant that an epigrapher who didn’t want anyone else to know what she was working on might use, say, an untrained pattern recognizer to help with the gnarly stuff. Anna must’ve gotten stumped on something and needed a second set of trained eyes, but hadn’t wanted to use someone—namely him—who could translate the glyphs themselves. So she’d taken a chance on Neenie, not realizing that her vault had some serious leaks when it came to keeping secrets.
‘‘What did you tell her you thought it was?’’ Lucius asked, feeling an itch of excitement. If Anna was working on something huge, it would explain so much of what had gone on lately—from the stress she’d been under, to the weird working hours, to the fact that she’d been kicking him out of the lab as often as possible over the past week.
Yeah, he was cheesed that she hadn’t let him in on it, but he’d forgive her if it was the sort of thing that would land her—and, by extension, the senior member of her lab—on the cover of National Geographic or Smithsonian magazine or something.
Already envisioning the two of them suited up in full kit, posing beside the chac-mool throne inside the step-sided Pyramid of Kulkulkan at Chichén Itzá—because that was the sort of thing the big magazines wanted, even if the codex page had come from someplace else entirely and most of their work was done in a lab in Austin—Lucius almost missed Neenie’s answer.
Then he got it. And froze.
‘‘What did you just say?’’
‘‘I told her I thought it looked like a screaming skull.’’ Neenie gave him a weird look. ‘‘Are you okay?’’
No, I’m not. I just took a big whack upside the head with the every-glyph-groupie-for-herself stick.