Curses! by Aaron Elkins Page B

the guards from Chichen Itza walked over twice a day to have a look around."
    "Twice a day? But anybody—"
    "Julie, certain things you got to understand. You know how many archaeological sites there are in Yucatan?"
    Julie shook her head.
    "Well, you're even with everybody else,” Abe said. “Nobody knows. A thousand for sure; probably two thousand. In all of them there's stuff worth stealing, but that's a lot of places to guard twenty-four hours a day."
    "But still—"
    "They put a fence around it,” he said with a smile, “which is more than most of them have. But what kind of robber would it be who lets himself be stopped by a fence?"
    "Well, at least they've saved us some work,” Gideon said, brushing the dirt from his knees and standing up. “We'd just have had to redig those steps ourselves."
    "That's a point,” Abe said equably.
    "I don't understand you two!” Julie exclaimed. “How can you stand there so calmly? There have been looters in here! Who knows what they got away with?"
    "They didn't get away with anything,” Gideon said. “At least I don't see how they could have. They didn't do any new excavating. All they did was re-dig a few steps that we'd already excavated before the cave-in. We'd gotten down thirteen steps below the landing, if I remember."
    "Twelve, according to the site report,” Abe said. “Altogether, twenty-four down from here.” He looked at Julie. “So all they did was clear away some more of the rubble that fell down when Howard, that bum, caved in the tunnel."
    "Oh.” Julie subsided, looking unconvinced, and peered down into the dim shaft. “Is that where you found the chest? On that landing?"
    Gideon flicked on his flashlight again and the three of them walked down together. “Here it is.” The heavy chest was still in the little chamber, four massive limestone slabs standing on their edges around a fifth slab that served as the base, all of it grit-coated and painfully empty. The mutilated lid, since patched together, was now in the Museum of Anthropology in the capital.
    Gideon played the beam of light over the walls of the once-sealed room. No more fairyland down there; no pristine crystal cave. The stalactites and stalagmites were still there, but they had turned a dingy gray, thickly scummed with lichen and pulpy fungus. After a millennium of perfect preservation, five years of exposure to the fecund air of Yucatan had turned what had once seemed like glittering cascades of ice into nasty excrescences. There were even a few pallid, frightened-looking plants in crannies here and there, cowering deep inside a pyramid, ten feet below the surface of a sealed, windowless, lightless building.
    "So what were they looking for?” Abe said, as much to himself as to anyone else as they walked back up the stairs. “With a thousand places to hunt for treasure, what's so special about Tlaloc? And why dig under the temple, where it's already been dug once?"
    "Could they have heard about the possibility of another sealed room at the bottom?” Gideon asked.
    "No, no, this I doubt very much. De Waldeck's book was never translated from the French, and as far as I know there are only two copies, the one I saw at Dumbarton Oaks and one in Paris. No one ever even mentions it in the literature. Only by luck did I stumble on it myself. Besides, another sealed room is a long shot, no more. And even if there is one, who says there's anything in it worth robbing? No, if I was a looter I could spend my time a lot better."
    "The two of you keep assuming they knew exactly what they were doing,” Julie said, “but they probably just heard some stories about the codex being found here and decided to do a little exploring on their own."
    "Maybe so,” said Abe. “Anyway, they gave up before they got very far, thank God."
    Julie gestured at the tools that had been left behind. “I wonder if you frightened them off when you reopened the dig last week."
    "That seems like a reasonable