“Over here,” he said finally, and put his hand toward a glyph that had been partially obliterated by the crumbling of the stucco but was unmistakably a version of the same one I’d photographed in the first temple, back at camp. The four-petaled flower inside the squarish oval, but this time with no streamers attached. Once it had been pointed out to me, I couldn’t see how I’d overlooked it the first time. It stood out among the teddy bears, and it did not fit with the other glyphs either, almost as though a third artist had been at work. Too bad we didn’t have those cameras.
“There’s an easier way in,” said Jan, reading my mind, “but almost impossible to find from the outside at night. We will go out that way, leave Rikki to mark the entrance, and you and I will get the equipment.” He glanced at me. “If you don’t mind.”
Truce. I nodded.
At the other end of the vault was a small opening that looked completely blocked and was, indeed, a tight squeeze for Jan, who was not a large man, but then it quickly turned into a steep but spacious passageway made out of earth instead of rock, like a mine shaft. We climbed for fifteen minutes, the light bouncing ahead of us, and as we approached the end of the tunnel, it began to close around us once again until we came to another tight squeeze.
Though we were still inside, I could taste the first breath of night air and hear the faint throb of the frogs. Suddenly, I could hardly wait to leave the Underworld. “I’m smallest,” I said. “I’ll go through first.”
Jan hesitated, then handed me his flashlight, and I scrambled up into Rikki and Jan’s cupped hands and used their shoulders to lever myself out into the world. Tired as I already was, for a moment I thought about heading back to camp and leaving the two of them to their mysterious underground enterprise. Instead, I dutifully aimed the flashlight at the entrance so they could see their way out.
Naturally, the minute Jan and I had loaded ourselves up with the camera equipment, it began to rain. We were just stepping out of the shorter passageway for the hike back to where Rikki was waiting for us at the mouth of the shaft with only a penlight for company when the sky came bucketing down. You couldn’t see through it and of course we hadn’t brought the ponchos. And I wasn’t about to risk my cameras if I didn’t have to. I made eye contact with Jan, and he motioned with his drenched head for us to get back inside the passageway.
“What’ll we do?” I asked once we were out of the thunder of the rain. You could hear it, but it was muffled, like stones being shaken in a far-off box.
“Wait it out,” he said. “It will slow down soon—this is not the rainy season.”
So we spread out the wet packs and made ourselves comfortable on the floor against the wall. Then Jan turned off the light to save the battery. Silence, except for the hollow racketing outside. After a while I cleared my throat and said, “Rikki will crawl back inside the tunnel, won’t he?” It wasn’t actually meant to be a question—Rikki was a big boy, he could take care of himself—but it came out that way.
“Oh, yes,” said Jan out of the dark. I heard the snick of a match and the sound of him drawing on a pipe. I hadn’t known he smoked a pipe. I love pipes, don’t ask me why. Nobody at the tamburitza bar smoked them. Neither Milo nor Bruno smoked them. But somewhere in my misty infant days, I must have had a happy pipe experience with a person I’ve by now forgotten, somebody I trusted, whose fragrant pipe smoke was burned into my memory.
A little rosy glow lit up the bottom part of Jan’s face and the sweet aroma of burning tobacco rolled my way. I closed my eyes and took it in through my nostrils. Neither of us made any effort to talk. We were too tired after the long crawl, and there was too much left to do. Jan puffed away and I took surreptitious sips of his smoke and thought about my adventurous pal Dirk settling down and getting married.
Sometime during Jan’s second pipe, I closed my eyes and must have dropped off for a bit, long enough to have a dream, anyway. In the middle of it, I heard my name—Eva, Eva—being repeated softly, and at first I thought Stefan was calling me, the timbre was so close, and then I realized it was Jan, who was trying to wake me without startling me. “Look,” he said. “Down by your feet.” He had the flashlight on, but shielded by his jacket so the light was very dim. I could just make out something moving around in the passageway on four legs, not large but definitely alive. It was sniffing the air and its eyes shone wildly green. It turned, and I saw the sweep of a long tail.
“A coati snooping around to see what we might have in our packs,” he said. “I did not want it to frighten you.”
Half-asleep as I was, the coati looked like an emissary from another world. “Oh, wow,” I whispered.
The creature seemed more interested in me now that it had heard my voice and came closer, bobbing its small nose toward my boots. Sometimes on trips like these, I’ll find myself in a situation that is so un-Chicagolike that I start thinking about what it would have been like to stay there. But when I try to imagine Chicago, it is as weird as the place I’m in. So over the years, I’ve stopped trying to figure out why I’ve chosen the life I have. In spite of occasional bouts of homesickness for a home that doesn’t exist, it’s been a good way to handle things. Except that this unexpectedly trusting animal was all of a sudden making me feel wistful. Or maybe it was the pipe, still lingering in the air.
“Still raining?”
He nodded.
“You must know this place pretty well. Rikki said you were here for six years.”
He cleared his throat, nervous, probably, about talking so much. “There is no place like Tikal, that is certainly true.”
“What do you mean?”
He readjusted the flashlight so we could see each other’s faces. The coati was speculatively circling around us. “This is where the Classic Maya culture probably got started. If you are an archeologist, it is like getting to work at the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates.”
I nodded. I may be ignorant, but I can recognize the seat of Western civilization when I hear it.
“My training was all in Asia Minor. But years ago I met a Mayanist at a conference in England and he convinced me that the most exciting digs in the world were taking place here in Central America and Mexico.”
“Why?”
“The breakthroughs in glyph translation. It was finally starting to open up after centuries of false starts. It was the linguists and ethnographers who were responsible, not so much the archeologists. But I wanted to be here so that when they started to put together the written history of this culture and they needed people who knew the sites and where the inscriptions were, I could help.” He stopped abruptly, as though he’d just inadvertently dominated an entire dinner table conversation.
“Go on,” I said. “Please. I don’t know much about all this.”
But he’d withdrawn again. “Not much to tell. I was lucky enough to be here for some interesting burial discoveries, and my wife . . . well, being here for six years, you get to know a place because each site is different. You will see what I am talking about when we get to Palenque. To be here when the dynasties were being compiled was a rare privilege. I am glad Rikki could be in on part of it, even if he was just a child.”
“You have an outstanding son, by the way.”
In spite of the pipe, he looked as somber as ever. “How so?”
I didn’t much want to get into the details—I don’t like revealing my soft spots—but I did say that Rikki had an ability to relate to adults in a way that was almost unnerving, and that he was one of the most courteous teenagers I’d ever met. Also impressively intelligent.
Jan seemed pleased. “If things had gone better, he would have been a good epigrapher by the time he was twenty. He was taking what his mother taught him and training himself. I will never catch up with him as it is. I am better in the dirt.”
“So