By
JOHN SCHERBER
IF WORDS COULD KILL
Language is the currency of
civilization. By listening to each other speak we learn of the achievements and
defeats of our family and friends, of our tribe, village or nation. From language we receive great truths as well as enormous lies. In the earliest days we could
only remember these narratives and pass them on by word of mouth. There were
people whose job it was to maintain these records in their minds. We may think
of them as primitives, but they were the same people who invented poetry and
history, and protected these ideas through the medium of ceremony and of repetition.
And even more, they were the progenitors of identity, because without them we
would not today know who we are, if we do, and where we came from.
In those parts of North America
controlled for millennia by the Maya, they developed a way to record this
information in books, and this early medium is now called a codex. The paper they were drawn on was
by them called huun. Because of the misdirected
religious fervor of the early friars in the Yucatán, only four of these codices
now survive. One of them is merely a fragment in a private collection. Today,
all of them are held in Europe, none of them in Mesoamerica, which is just one
more example of a looted cultural heritage.
This is where our story begins. What
if a fifth such codex was awaiting discovery in an ancient battered trunk in Mexico
City, the misplaced possession of an elderly widow who was now too addled to
recall its contents, if she ever really knew? What if this trunk was stolen and
the codex found by people who did not at first understand its true meaning or value?
Suppose it showed the Mayans rising in revolt against their pious Spanish
overlords in the early years following the Conquest, sacrificing the pious
padres by ripping their hearts out? What misuse could this unique and special
message be put to today by the Mexican government, by private collectors, by
the political militants lurking in the hills of Chiapas, looking for a new rallying
cry to revitalize their movement, whose momentum is failing by degrees? Even as
I write this I see that Subcomandante Marcos is retiring. Who or what can
replace him and his vision in an unfinished struggle?
This is also the point where the Paul
Zacher Agency of San Miguel de Allende is called to the scene, simply to
facilitate obtaining an expert’s opinion on the genuineness of the stolen codex to
arrange for its transfer to its new owner. It looks like more a case of
security than detection. What could be the risk? Is it only to do this out of
view, when the word of its discovery has already leaked out and several sets of
forces are being assembled to seize the ancient document? Can Paul Zacher and
his friends face the combined reach of both the Mexican government, eager to
recover a relic unlike any still in the Americas (and possibly suppress its
message), and the Zapatistas, who see in the codex a unique and historic call
to a new Mayan revolt, a way to bolster their sudden gap in leadership? The Zacher Agency is a good-natured army of three, but how much heat can
they take?
THE FIFTH CODEX
is the second of thirteen books in the Murder in México mystery series.
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