and twenty years. Caracol was a rival lowland kingdom like Uaxactún. You do know about the Maya wars?”
“Not really. I knew they were good at math. And I vaguely remember from fourth grade that they were supposed to be the peaceful ones as opposed to the bloody Aztecs.”
“That’s what everybody thought for a long time, until they started translating the inscriptions. Now we know they were a major warrior society and fought each other all the time, at first to get sacrifice victims, and then to build empires.” He pointed at a complex of smaller pyramids, some of them encased in scaffolding. “That’s the North Acropolis, where we’ll be working tonight. It’s got layers of older stuff under it. Along with building these two big central pyramids, Ah-Cacaw reworked the whole Acropolis after it had been damaged by Lord Water, the king of Caracol, in the siege of the 500s.”
Just then the sun, which had been hiding most of the morning behind a cottony sky made up of jungle steam and carbon dioxide, broke through, and the grass that stretched between the facing pyramids of the Great Plaza came to green life. I could imagine the view from up top. “Hey,” I said. “I want to climb one of those.”
Rikki seemed pleased. The best one, he informed me, sounding more like an adolescent tour guide every minute, was the 230-foot-high Temple IV, the tallest pyramid in the Petén, “except of course for the one at El Mirador.” I nodded sagely. Of course. I knew that. Didn’t everyone? “But,” he added, “only if you’re willing to hike some more to get there.”
A group of Italians in expensive leather hiking boots must have had the same idea. Clogging the Temple IV trail entirely, they looked like a family reunion where everyone had actually shown up, even the grandmother in her widow’s weeds. She was steadying herself on the arm of a magnetic, blue-jawed Romeo somewhat older than Rikki but definitely younger than thirty-four, which is code for “younger than me.” This did not matter; the sight of that glossy black hair combed back along the sides of his sleek head put me in mind of my first love, Peter, the stormy, self-absorbed film student I lived with during photography school, or maybe even of Robert, though neither of them, as far as I knew, had a drop of Italian blood. But they shared with him that restless, seeking quality that women, like stampeding buffalo, rush toward headlong. I like to think of myself as immune to the buffalo syndrome, but maybe not. Somehow, I’m always getting involved with guys who make me even more cynical than I already am.
After a minute, as though he could feel my eyes on him, he turned and gave me a long-lashed Italian stare over his shoulder. Now, I’m no great beauty—I’ve got the deep-set brown eyes, thick wren-brown braid, and long runner’s legs of a million other people from my ancestors’ part of the globe—but I’m slender and makeup free and come across as calm and non-neurotic, and I think that men, or a certain kind of man, must be drawn to that. This one seemed to be. I sent him back enough of a glance to let him know that if he could manage to park Grandma somewhere, I might be interested, and it was the old thing all over again. He began to slow, pointing out interesting shrubbery to the dour little widow and keeping an eye on me. This was my cue—and then I remembered Rikki. It was a damn shame, but there it was. “We’d better get in the passing lane,” I said, “or we’ll never make it to your precious temple.” His cheeks heated up—he’d apparently seen the whole pregnant interchange—but he took me by the upper arm and towed me around the group of chattering relatives. I felt the Italian shrug as we passed him on the left.
Temple IV was a slog indeed, most of it on a steep trail through cleared but unleveled earth with a number of immense tree roots acting as foot and handholds. The highest section of the climb involved a vertical ladder that seemed to lean out backward over the jungle below. At the top of the ladder, there was a bit of a scramble to get safely parked on the flat limestone slabs at the summit of the pyramid, and then we were sitting together, our backs against what was left of the roof comb, staring out over one of the last real rainforests in the world.
“People sneak sleeping bags up here sometimes,” Rikki said. “That’s the thing—to watch the sun come up from the top of Temple IV. The guards usually chase them out, though.”
“Have you done it?”
“My mom and I, when I was eight. Totally cool.”
It crossed my mind, then, that there was no woman in the picture, no wife of Jan or mother of Rikki. Now Rikki spoke of her as though eulogizing a dear departed. Poor kid. I knew enough not to ask, I wasn’t going to ask, and then he said, almost offhandedly, “When we’re done here, we’re heading up to Palenque for a while, so you’ll get to meet her.”
“I will?”
“You’ll like her. She’s great.”
I turned back toward the panoramic jungle scene and said, carefully, “Will your dad be with us?” which was code for “So they’re still married?” and he winced and said, “Of course.”
“Rikki,” I said, deliberately changing the subject after an appropriately long pause. “What’s up tonight? What am I shooting?”
“A tomb in North Acropolis. He doesn’t want to do it until all the tourists are out.”
“Is it going to be as exciting as last night?”
That got a smile out of him. “Better,” he said.
“Something to do with the famous Ah-Cacaw?”
He turned to look me in the face. We were sitting two feet apart in the shade of the roof comb, with the sun, just behind the massive blocks, backlighting his head. One of his ears, the one closest to the sunlight, looked translucent, like a baby’s ear or the ear of a very young animal. His lashes were thick as fronds. But he’d be grown up soon enough, out in the world like all the beautiful ones, playing the same game as the Italian on the trail. “You really don’t care about this stuff, do you?” he said.
“You mean about your precious Mayas?”
Silently, in the way his father might have done it, he put his arm out flat, palm down, and ran it over the scene below us.
I pushed him harder, payback for them keeping me in the dark. “This is all life and death to you two, right? Figuring out what happened here, why they abandoned their big cities? But hey, they’re all dead and gone now, so what’s the big deal?”
“I know,” he said. “I know.” But for a moment he looked startled, as though this were the first time the thought had ever crossed his mind. And I thought, poor kid. Sixteen, and still totally enslaved to his parents. For all our differences, Stefan and I were completely on the same page with the whole filial devotion thing. We’d both blown the family nest at the soonest possible opportunity.
Chapter Three
Weirdly enough, Stefan was not the first of my relatives to disappear. And in neither previous case was the outcome good. For a long time I assumed that my family was just unlucky, that we walked around under a curse, like the Kennedys, another tragic Catholic clan, if not nearly so rich and famous. My pregnant grandmother, for example, went missing a week before her thirty-second birthday. She’d gone to visit a friend in another village, which required a strenuous walk through a gloomy forest—this was Croatia in the early thirties, and being the peasant she was, she would have been walking—and just by chance or maybe through divine intervention (what Stefan would say), she had left my dad at home with my grandfather that morning. Bruno was eight. The Serbian king over Croatia had been assassinated six days before, allegedly by the Croatian Ustaše, hardcore nationalist militants who were willing to wreak any amount
