The Mayan Secrets

“Bartolomé de Las Casas.”

Chapter 16

Sam and Remi stepped out to the curb at the airport and found Selma waiting for them in the Volvo sedan. Zoltán was sitting sedately on the backseat of the car. Remi ducked into the backseat and sat beside Zoltán, who licked her face while she hugged and petted him. “Zoltán. Hianyoztal.”

“What did you say?” Selma asked.

“I said I missed him. I missed you too, but you aren’t a Hungarian dog.”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” said Selma. “Hi, Sam.”

“Hi, Selma. Thanks for coming to meet us.”

“It’s a pleasure. Zoltán and I have been moping around the house since the robbery at the university. David Caine calls every day, but I told him you’d get in touch when you were home.”

“That reminds me. We won’t be here long. We’re going to Spain,” said Sam. “But first we want to meet with you and David. We can bring one another up to date on everything and then get busy on the next step.”

“All right. When we’re home, I’ll get going on your reservations,” said Selma. “It’s a shame you’re leaving. While you were in Guatemala, the workmen completed the painting and finish work. Your house is, well, your house again.”

“No carpenters, painters, or electricians left?” said Remi.

“Not one,” Selma said. “I even had a cleaning crew in to be sure there’s not a dimple of a bullet hole, a microscopic stain from a drop of blood, or a sliver of broken glass anywhere. Everything’s new.”

“Thanks, Selma,” said Remi. “We’re grateful.”

Sam said, “We’ll try to keep it nice by not discharging firearms in the living room.”

Remi said, “Selma, I want you to spend some time with me before we meet with David Caine. I need to know everything you’ve got about Bartolomé de Las Casas and about the four known Mayan codices.”

“I’ll be delighted,” said Selma. “I’ve been hoarding information on those topics since you were in Mexico.”

Six hours later, they were on the ground floor of the house, sitting around the conference table. In the center was a photocopy of the letter from Bartolomé de Las Casas.

Sam said to David Caine, who had just arrived, “I think Remi would like to start.”

“I just want to say thank you to Selma for having photographed the letter before turning it over to me,” David interjected.

Remi began. “By the time the Dresden Codex’s existence became widely known, an Italian scholar had made a tracing of it. Before the Madrid Codex ever got to the Museo América de Madrid, a French abbot made a copy. The Paris Codex was copied by the same Italian scholar who traced the Dresden. Somebody at the Bibliothèque Nationale actually threw the original in a bin in a corner of a room, which damaged it, so it’s a good thing there was a copy.”

“An interesting set of coincidences,” said David Caine. “Where are you going with it?”

Remi said, “We know that this codex was at one point in the hands of Bartolomé de Las Casas. This letter proves that he touched it, that he knew it was important and thought it must be saved.”

Selma said, “We know that he was a passionate defender of the native people’s rights and a believer in the value of their cultures and that he studied and spoke their languages.”

David Caine slapped his hand to his forehead. “Of course! You’re saying there’s a chance that Las Casas might have made a copy.”

“We can’t be sure,” said Remi, “but we think it’s worth checking.”

“It’s a long shot,” said Caine. “As far as I know, there’s no mention in any of his writings of his making a copy of a Mayan book. He does mention seeing the priests burning them.”

“That would be a good reason not to mention his copy,” said Selma. “Books weren’t the only things getting burned in those days.”

Remi said, “After Las Casas left the mission at Rabinal, he became bishop of Chiapas, Mexico. From there, he went back to the Spanish court, where he was a very powerful adviser on issues having to do with the Indians in the colonies. And here’s the promising part. When he died in 1566, he left a very large library to the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid.”

David Caine considered. “You know, I think your observation about human nature may be right. Everybody in Europe who saw the importance of the Mayan codices seems to have made a copy. Even I made photographic copies. It was practically the first thing I did. If only I hadn’t given them up to those fake officials.”

Selma quickly diverted the conversation back to Las Casas. “Then we’re agreed. We know Las Casas saw it and was somebody who would have wanted a copy. If he made one, then it was almost certainly kept with his own books and papers rather than, say, submitted to the Spanish court. His books and papers are in Valladolid, Spain. If the copy existed, and if it’s been in a library in Spain all this time instead of the hot, humid Guatemalan jungle, then it will probably have survived.”

David Caine said, “That’s a lot of ifs. But to bolster the argument a bit, we know he would not have left any susceptible or incriminating papers in the New World, where his enemies, the Franciscans or the encomiendas, could find them. He definitely would have taken them with him to Spain.”

Remi said, “A lot of ifs, all right, but each one has a lot of arguments in its favor and not many against.”

“Let’s call it an educated, long-shot guess,” Selma said. “It really should be checked.”

Sam said, “Okay, Selma. Please make arrangements to get Remi and me to Valladolid. Make us a copy of the letter so we can recognize his handwriting if we see it.”

Sarah Allersby sat in the giant office of the Empresa Guerrero in the old part of Guatemala City. It had once been the business office in the capital of the powerful and wealthy Guerrero family. They had occupied the building from colonial days, until the modern civil war bled many of its businesses and made the younger generation leave for lives of leisure in Europe. The office was near the Palacio Nacional because the big ranching families, of necessity, had been involved in the government.

Through all of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, a man in the Guerrero family would push out his chair from the big mahogany desk in the office, take his hat and cane from the rack near the door, light a cigar, and walk up the street to government headquarters to protect and further the interests of the Guerrero family companies. The building had an impressive but low baroque façade, a set of double doors that were so heavy that Sarah Allersby had to have an electric motor installed to help her push them open, and floors of antique tiles made and decorated by the same craftsmen who had done the Iglesia de La Merced. The ceilings were fifteen feet high, and every few feet a big lazy fan still provided the proper subtropical atmosphere even though the air it circulated was air-conditioned to seventy-two degrees.

Sarah used a 1930s-era desk telephone with a scrambled line that was checked by her security people twice each day to detect a change in ohms of resistance that would indicate a listening device. She said, “Good morning, Russell. This line is safe so you can speak freely.”

The man on the other end had a contract with the Estancia Guerrero, but Sarah’s family had used his services many times in the years before they had acquired the Guatemalan holdings. He was the man who had impersonated an FBI agent in San Diego. “What can I do for you, Miss Allersby?”

“It’s more trouble over the item we picked up in San Diego. Sam and Remi Fargo have been here in Guatemala and even managed to find their way onto the Estancia. They’ve been defaming me and my company to anyone who will listen. They seem to think that the marijuana operation on the Estancia is mine, as though I were some tawdry drug dealer. They wanted the police to search my house and all of my properties, if you can imagine.”