Not for long, though. We spent a couple of nights in town prior to heading for the refugee camps, just to plan things out, and somewhere in the middle of that, Robert showed his cards. Our hotel was your typical tiny equatorial affair, heavily reliant on bamboo. I remember there was an enormous spider plastered to the outside of the window screen. Robert, wearing nothing but his boxers and his handsome skin, was propped up in bed on one elbow observing me with his connoisseur’s eye, which had put me into full basking mode. And then he said, apropos of nothing, “If you had a knife and you woke up and some guy was in your sleeping bag with you, would you stick him?”
“This person isn’t you?” I asked, still clueless.
He shook his head. “Some guy. You don’t know him.”
“Well, sure,” I said. “Of course.”
He shook his head and gave me his famous wry smile. “Wow.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“No guy’s going to crawl in with me, baby. How about this? You’ve got a gun and you’re out in the boonies and some guy is stealing your pack with all your food and chances are good you won’t get out alive without it. But you know he’s hungry and he’s got a family to feed.”
“But I’ll die if he takes my food?”
“Right.”
“I’d shoot him.”
He stared at me admiringly and shook his head again. “If he’s begging for mercy?”
“If he gives the food back, okay. Otherwise, it’s him or me.”
“This is so wild. This is exactly what I thought you’d say.”
“Really.” I was beginning to pick up the tone here, one I recognized through hard experience, though this was the first time I’d ever heard it coming out of Robert.
“How about if the guy who’s taking your food is me? We’ve been lost for three weeks and we’re out of everything except toothpaste and four crackers and suddenly I snap and grab for the pack and you’ve got a gun . . .”
“What’s going on here?”
“Just wondering, is all.”
“What do you think I’d do?”
“I hate to say, really.” He peered into my face. He was still grinning, but I was not. “Oh, come on now, Eva, lighten up. This is just a . . . what do you call it? Party game? Something to pass the time.”
I stared back at him. “I wasn’t bored. Were you? Is this relationship starting to bore you?”
His eyes shifted then, and he reeled in the little cruel streak I hadn’t known was there. Until, of course, we got safely out of the country and then it was, as I already figured it would be, goodbye dear Eva and best of luck and it’s been truly grand and I’ll never forget you, which naturally he did the second the next decent-looking female dove into view. But I’d told him the truth. I’d shoot. Because obviously—he’d just proved it—if I didn’t take care of myself, who would?
I could not, however, say what Stefan would do if his life were similarly threatened, and that made everything more uncertain. If he were being held captive, for example, would he even try to make a break for it? Or, good Catholic boy that he was, would he be unable to resist the call to martyrdom?
Chapter Two
Jan and Rikki and I had come upon something that looked like a small hill covered in shrubs and tree roots but that turned out to be a temple in disguise and the apparent object of our soggy hike. Rikki and I set up camp while our leader went somewhere with his high-powered battery lantern and didn’t come back for nearly an hour. “What’s he doing?” I asked Rikki, who said, “He’s checking things out inside the temple.”
“So we’ll be at it tonight already?”
He nodded. “My dad has been planning this for a long time.”
“What’s he up to? Do you know?”
He started to say something, then stopped. He didn’t shake his head, didn’t lie, just stopped.
“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot it was a big secret.”
“Not really a big secret,” he said. “But he can’t take a chance of it getting out there. He’s got his reputation to protect.”
That sounded like a direct quote. In fact, Jan had been quite adamant about the conditions of my employment. I was hired for three months, no more, and this was a private project, paid for out of his own pocket. I must agree not to discuss our work with anyone, nor could I sell any of my photographs or drawings afterward. My glum boss was up to something potentially ludicrous, it sounded like, or maybe even illegal. And I was making almost nothing in the way of quetzales for the privilege of sharing this adventure. “Are there snakes in that temple?”
“Víboras. Si. Maybe.”
I saw a porter get bitten once, by some kind of viper. We had been in a place where there were no doctors for two hundred miles and only one functioning jeep. I don’t like snakes.
Pretty soon Jan came back, silent as ever but with a hot little glow behind his glasses, and I could tell that whatever he was hoping to get on film was still there exactly as he remembered it, and tonight I would find out what it was. But first there was dinner to cook—a pot of beans and rice—and some fluffing up of the nest (I like a cozy tent) and then sitting by the cook fire for a bit while the sun started its long slide into the trees.
An hour later, Rikki and I were standing in front of the passageway, loaded up like pack mules with my equipment, waiting for Jan to set up a light inside the chamber. This was not one of those strange steep Tikal pyramids like the ones in the rainforest savior’s guidebook, but something much smaller and flatter that we were able to enter near ground level through a stone doorway that looked like an open mouth. “It is a mouth,” Rikki explained when I asked. “The mouth of a Witz monster. It takes you into what they called Xibalba, the Underworld.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“The land of the dead,” he added helpfully.
“Why is the temple so small? Aren’t they usually much bigger?” Straight out of the guidebook, but Rikki didn’t know the difference.
“This is an older section of the city,” he said. “It was probably built around 50 B.C., seven hundred years or so before the big pyramids were put up. Lots of times, they just built right over the old ones, but this one must have been in the wrong spot.”
Just then Jan called out that we should come in, and we shuffle-crouched down a long passageway filled with rubble, a perfect hideout for víboras, to a tiny room with a low stone bench at the back. Beneath the bench was an open shallow pit. Even in the dubious light from the big battery-powered lanterns, traces of red on the walls made it clear that this room had once been plastered and painted.
Jan seemed to know exactly what he wanted to do, though I could not figure out what he thought was worth photographing. The room seemed entirely empty except for the bench. He spent some time arranging the two lights in different ways, then beckoned. I went and stood beside him. He pointed to the faintest traces of something black on the wall behind the bench. If this keeps