[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
therefore perfect for my purposes, and traced the last two drawings carefully.
I then put the diary back into its hiding place and tried to sleep.
I must have fallen asleep almost immediately, but awoke about two a.m., as I
had begun to do almost every night. I lay in the darkness for a while, and
then once again felt the impulse to go out in the dark.
I dressed, then slipped down the stairs to the front and looked outside. The
television van was still there, but all the lights were out, and I could see
two people in the front seat of the van, silhouetted against the streetlights.
Both appeared to be sound asleep. The other reporters seemed to have left for
the night, although I had no doubt they would be back in the morning. There
was, however, a police car on the street, and its occupants were very much
awake, reading newspapers by the car light.
I returned to my room, and went out again through the bathroom window. I
waited for several minutes, hidden in the tree, until the security officer we
had hired completed his patrol of the perimeter of the property and
disappeared around the corner.
Then I was off and running away from the hotel, down the darkened residential
streets toward themuseo. Once again I waited in the darkness of the little
garden at the back, and then went in through the back door. This time I went
down to the basement, trying in the darkness to retrace the route I had taken
with Antonio Valesquez a few days earlier.
Even the emergency lighting was not on down here at night. I switched on my
flashlight and made my way past the storage shelves that lined all the
hallways. As I turned the corners grotesque faces and figures of Maya gods
Page 146
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
seemed to leap out at me, caught in the beam of my flashlight.
I remembered that this was Ix, day of the night sun, the Jaguar God, that
passed through the underworld each night. It felt as if themuseo came alive at
night, and these statues really were the gods of the underworld, waiting for
their human victims. I ll admit I was terrified, but I pressed on.
Antonio had said that the last time he had seen Don Hernan, he had been
greatly excited or agitated about something, and he had been leaving the
fragments room. It was there that I headed, although I had no idea what to
look for.
I let myself in, and found the little desk in the middle of the room where, I
knew, in the daylight, someone was cataloging the collection on the computer.
I pulled down the blind that covered the glass in the doorway and taped it
into place, then I turned on the little desk light. I was reasonably sure that
the security guard would do little more than take the elevator to this floor
and shine his light around from there. It was too creepy a place for him to do
much more than that.
It is amazing what you can learn about people from their desks. The owner of
this desk was a woman by the name of Maria Benitez. That much was easy to
ascertain: there was a nameplate on the desk. Senora Benitez had four lovely
children, three boys and a daughter, their photographs all lined up where she
could see them while she worked. She doted on her youngest, the little girl. A
crayoned stick drawing of a house, a mother, and child the tree in the yard,
the people, and the house all exactly the same scale, in the style of children
everywhere was given a prominent place on the desk.For Mommy, love, Frida, it
said.
Maria Benitez was a very neat and organized person, and the orderly desk
reflected that. I turned on the computer and logged on using her name. Then
there came the prompt I was dreading:password. I tried the usual stuff, first
name spelled backward, Merida, the name of themuseo. Incorrect password, the
screen flashed.Try again. I wondered how many tries you got before you got
locked out entirely.
I looked around the desk again. My eyes fell on the child s drawing.Frida, I
typed.
I was in.
Page 147
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
It took me a while to figure out how the collection was being cataloged. In
time I realized that objects were coded by type, but also by location. I kept
running back and forth between the computer and the drawers that I had opened
by taking the key from the desk drawer as I had seen Antonio do when we were
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]