Mrs. Ulman pulled away, falling against the well-cushioned back of the orange couch. She closed her eyes and shook her head without speaking.
Porter gazed at his companion, bewildered.
Alred ignored the movement, but focused on their unspeaking host.
When Mrs. Ulman stopped shaking her head, she stood, sighed, and said without feeling, “Can I get you a drink?”
The two students waved the offer away politely, while Mrs. Ulman went to a short bar, pulled out a nearly empty bottle of vodka, and poured herself a glass. She swallowed and dropped her head.
“Mrs. Ulman,” Porter said, “truth is, we need to find out what’s…going on. The only way I can figure of doing that is by studying your husband’s work.”
Alred knew Porter was playing along with her own words, probably supposing them to be a ruse. He had only one thing in mind, obviously. If Mrs. Ulman had more to contribute to Porter’s dissertation, he needed it. Alred had told him about Ulman’s purported disappearance, and even mentioned the message written on the front page of Albright’s essay. Porter simply shrugged it away and continued his single-minded work on his peculiar translation of the codex. How could he translate it anyway?!
Mrs. Ulman’s reply was barely audible. “Third time I’ve heard that.”
“Mrs. Ulman, your husband was my favorite professor,” Alred said. She slowed her speech and reset her tone to a calmer note. “I studied under him before he went to Guatemala, and he’s written me since then. I hoped to continue his work. And now we’ve been given an assignment to do just that.”
Porter said, “In my case, this assignment is the last chance I’ll get to succeed at this university. If I fail, Stratford kicks me out. If there’s anything you could do for us, something you know about his work…it would be priceless. I really could use your help, Mrs. Ulman.”
Alred stared at him as if examining his weakness behind a magnifying glass. He wasn’t being very diplomatic, she thought.
Mrs. Ulman nodded, bracing herself up against the counter. As she turned, her arm hit the vodka bottle, and the liquor splashed over her clothes and poured into the carpet before she could catch it. She sighed, but it was almost a groan.
Alred chewed on her lower lip and looked at Porter, who met her eyes.
“I think,” Mrs. Ulman said with a pause, “I need to be alone.”
Porter and Alred nodded, stood, and thanked her for her time.
She led them to the door while Porter scribbled on a pad. Tearing out the paper as the door opened, he said, “This is my—”
“Right,” Mrs. Ulman said. “Dial you if I learn anything. I’ll just have to call everyone who came before you first. Hope you don’t mind.” She smiled a bitter smile which disappeared quickly.
Porter didn’t reply.
Once outside, the door closed behind Porter and Alred.
Opening the door to the bark-colored Toyota, Porter shot Alred a glance. “How did the FBI know Ulman mailed something to his P.O. Box?”
“Intimidation, probably,” said Alred. “Scared her to death. When they asked about mail, she probably mentioned the box. They would have seen the mail box hanging by her front door as they entered and assumed the rest. A logical guess. A housewife with a mailbox at home wouldn’t check a separate post office box regularly. And as a professor, Ulman would get mail at the university.”
“Why would he have an extra post box?” said Porter.
Alred looked at him across the top of her car. “Side projects, most likely. People get post office boxes for different reasons. Maybe it was a money-making scheme only the Ulman’s knew about.”
“A scheme?” Porter said, tilting his head at her as he climbed into the passenger seat.
“Doesn’t have to be illegal. Just some project where you’d get mail, but didn’t want people to know your home address. Something like that.” Alred looked up and down the street, then to the fuchsia sky.
In a shallow voice, Alred said as she fell behind the steering wheel, “I want to know what Arnott thinks he’s doing. Creep!”
“D’you just call me a creep?”
“No. The professor here before us.” Alred shook her head. “He’s trying to figure it all out before we can.” She lightly bit the inside of her cheek. “I’m going home.”
Scratching his five o’clock shadow, Porter looked back at the Ulman home.
The curtain in the window fell closed.
“She’s hiding something,” he said, not turning away. “She wouldn’t look us in the eye.”
“Yep,” Alred said, shifting her gaze back to the house. “But why?”
10:59 p.m. PST
Dear Stan,
Don’t die on me!
I know, you’re shocked I’m writing. The worst reputation I bear has to be my irregular letter-writing pattern. Truth is, I’ve written you a number of letters! Most of those even went into envelopes. But by the time I got close to putting a stamp on them, they were at least a month or two outdated.
Yes, when we served as missionaries together in Japan you taught me to purchase a number of spare stamps to have on hand. Well, we all have our weaknesses.
But this letter, you have to get!
I’ll jump to the point. You’ve been a field agent with the FBI for at least eight years now, haven’t you? Ten, maybe? Anyway, I’ve got a question that needs a quick answer: I’m working on something right now that would fascinate you. But I’ve just learned the FBI may get in my way.
I really need this!
I figure there must be a file or something. Most likely it’s all out of your reach. But if you can tell me anything about a Dr. Christopher Ulman and his work, I’d appreciate it. Word has it Ulman has recently disappeared.
Ulman found something in Guatemala that’s going to cause an uproar in the intellectual community. See the irony? He’s a professor with a gold mine—and he’s vanished! Yes, my imagination might play games with me from time to time, but if I know archaeologists—which I do!—they wouldn’t throw away a discovery of this magnitude—the type of thing they hope for all their lives.
I know I haven’t really said anything about what he found, but I have to make sure this letter gets in the mail. I’ll tell you more later.
Kiss your wife and kids for me.
The Church is still true.
Your friend,
John D. Porter
(P.S.—The
D
stands for
Dr. in Training
of course)
(P.P.S—Write back quick! You guys at the FBI might want him for something illegal, which may soon tie to what I’m doing. Actually, I doubt you really want him at all—not your department, if I’m right. But what do I know. If the FBI confiscates my project, I’ll fail out of Stratford University in a big embarrassing way. I really have to hurry. Too much to do. Sayonara!)
April 16
5:23 p.m. PST
Porter’s heart beat like a race horse just in sight of the finish line, like a medieval bellows loaded with metal and coal growing hotter and a brighter red, like a baby taking its first breath of the new world.
He drew his fingers from right to left across the rough paper.
With his right hand, he scribbled English words into a spiral notebook of sheets that had been turned too quickly and smashed together.
“No,” he said like an exploding light bulb. His eraser hit the white page with faint blue lines, and he scribbled the correct word.
A constant whisper came from his lips as he translated. He repeated words and parts of words in both his native language and the foreign tongue before writing again. Eight facial tissues soaked with sweat and wadded into twisted balls lay around the ancient codex, his notes, and the other piles of lexicons, histories, and atlases on his desk. He wished he had a handkerchief, a towel, or something. He couldn’t afford to get the document wet with the salty water running nonstop from his face.
With a clamor, Alred entered the sweltering office. She dropped her bag and gasped. “You have the heater on in here?!?”
“The date’s all wrong,” Porter said, his eyes wide and ferocious, concentrating on the words scrawled on the codex. His unprimed voice left his mouth with a growl as if he’d been sleeping for the last twelve hours and not working. He needed rest.
She could hear the vent, pumping hot air into Porter’s tiny office. But she couldn’t find a thermostat on the wall.
“Heating’s controlled from a central system. In all my years at Stratford, I have yet to find the controls,” Porter said without lifting his eyes. “What perfume are you wearing? Polo Sport?”
“There’s gotta be a way to turn this down,” she said, using a chair to boost herself up to the vent. Almost sacrificing her nail and the tip of her thumb, she successfully pulled the little lever on the metal grating, shutting the duct. Looking at it from the ground, however, she realized the aperture would only close halfway.
“We could go to Bruno’s,” said Porter, dropping his pencil. He stabbed both his tired eyeballs with his fingers and smashed them as if they were trapped cockroaches.
“What did you say?”
“Where the temperature sustains human life. Sorry, I—”
“No,” said Alred, “about the dating?”
Porter looked to the right of his chair. From amid the high stacks of indiscernible files, multicolored volumes, and stapled papers, he pulled up the last issue of
LOGOS, The Journal of Archaeology
. “In Albright’s article.” He flipped it open to a well marked page.
“Did you memorize it?” she said, looking at his yellow and green highlighting, blue, red, and black underlining, and the masses of notes he’d scrawled in the margins.
“Right here in the introduction Dr. Albright says he’s dated the KM-1 codex to 700 BC.”
“BCE,” said Alred. In the modern world of scholarship, there was a big difference between the terms
Before Christ
and
Before the Common Era
, though the years were essentially the same.
“Whatever.”
“He said he dated KM-1 based on the writing. He talks about that later in his paper,” Alred said, leaning over Porter and pushing red hair behind her ear. Porter realized he smelled a little too well-aged today and knew Alred recognized this also as she pulled back to a standing position.
“He’s guessing. And these footnotes?” Porter looked up at her. “They look like they’ve been added by someone else, an aid or something. I think Albright hadn’t returned to the states before writing the article.”
“You’re saying Albright raced to get his paper published?” Alred said, taking the seat opposite the desk. She couldn’t even stand by Porter, he stunk so bad. It came with not showering. His exuberance and panic at completing the task would make him a social outcast, she deduced.
Porter’s hair hung wet to his eyebrows. If he’d had Fabio-length locks, the sweat probably would have repulsed Alred out of the room. Nevertheless, Porter nodded and reached for another magazine. “I missed this. Too busy with my dissertation, I suppose.”
Alred examined the periodical as he flashed the front of it. Bold letters in a black cover read:
Archaeological Journal
.
Flipping to another spot devastated by his rainbow markings, Porter tossed the open journal onto Alred’s lap.
She looked down.
THE NEW MESOAMERICAN MYSTERY
Guatemala’s Hidden Treasure
by
Dr. Alexander Peterson, Ohio State University
“Ohio State University,” she read out loud.
“An obvious connection to Dr. Albright.”
“But this was Ulman’s discovery,” said Alred. “Why haven’t there been any essays by him?”
“Maybe there
have
been,” Porter said, leaning back in his chair, which squeaked with the sound of a thousand tortured mice. He put his hands behind his head and closed his exhausted eyes. He didn’t want to think about Ulman. Frankly, he wished Alred would go away. Porter preferred working with solitude, his quiet lover these past years.
Alred saw the codex on the desk. Porter weighed the volume through her eyes. She recognized it instantly, once she saw past the piles of other academic junk Porter had put there as if to hide it. The artifact held the same tan color of the other ancient Central American books she had seen.
The manuscript was thick, but the pages were surprisingly thin. Each page of the bark paper had years ago been attached to the page beside it until it looked like an unrolled scroll of great length. But instead of being rolled together, the pages had been bent toward each other to make it look like an accordion or an oriental paper fan that could close into one solid form. The codex was opened now, not unlike the way books open today.
Numerous colored glyphs washed across the pages. Different inks and paints had been used, and pictures were interspersed among the lettering.
Alred squinted as if to decide what language the codex had been written in.
Porter eyed her closely.
She had read and reread Albright’s paper by now, but still couldn’t come to grips with the possibility that Near Eastern devices were found in KM-1. But then, she didn’t know exactly what she was seeing right at this moment.
Porter held his eyelids parted only slightly. He smiled. That the terrible thing was on his desk would be enough to throw her logical mind into emotional chaos, he figured. He’d wait a bit.
Alred saw him appraising her, however, and recreated her unfeeling face with contemplative green eyes. “You don’t think these professors killed Dr. Ulman to get to his find.”
“Well,” Porter said, dropping his hands into his lap, “I didn’t say it. You seem to be more concerned about Ulman than the manuscript on my desk.”
“What is it?” she said nonchalantly, as if it didn’t matter as much as it did. All this time she’d done her work in her apartment, checking out books from the library and ordering others through the inter-library loan system. She’d kept her work quiet. Her prerogative. But in the end, she would need to face the archaeological evidence. Well, here it was.
“In tradition of the great scholars who wrote articles before we knew it was a race, I call this KM-2,” said Porter with a hand presenting the object like a new guest in the small room.