"It'd be a thought if I had a secretary."

She picked up the receiver. “Dr. Oliver's office…” She leaned her head back and laughed. Her hair brushed his temple and he aimed a kiss at it but missed. “Well, hello!” she said. “Yes, he is, right here."

"Thanks a lot,” Gideon grumbled.

Julie continued to listen on the telephone. “You're kidding!” she said, turning her head to look at Gideon. “He's not going to believe it."

She handed the telephone to him with a peculiar grin. “You're not going to believe it."

"Hello, Gideon?"

The old man's thin voice promptly brought out a smile. Abraham Irving Goldstein, his onetime professor and continuing mentor. Avram Yitzchak Goldstein of Minsk, who had begun his career in America as a seventeen-year-old peddling ribbons from a pushcart in Brooklyn, and ended it as a distinguished scholar. Abe Goldstein, longtime friend.

"Abe, hello! Where are you calling from?"

"Where should I be calling from? Yucatan. Listen, how would you like to come down here to Tlaloc for a few weeks and give me a hand on the dig? Julie, too, if she can get some time off."

Gideon covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked at Julie. “I don't believe this."

Abe, as a member of the board of directors of the Horizon Foundation for Anthropological Research, was at a Horizon-sponsored excavation about sixty miles from Merida, near Mexico's Gulf Coast. Tlaloc, a small Mayan ceremonial center, had been discovered only ten years before, and work had begun in 1980. But when a scandal had made the site notorious in 1982, the Mexican government's Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia had shut down the excavation. “For all time,” they had declared somewhat histrionically, “to bury the memory of this shameful hour.” Gideon had been there at the time, just finishing up work on the collection of human bones that divers had recovered from the cenote-the sacrificial well-a few hundred feet from the buildings, and he had been as shocked and disgusted as anyone else by what had happened.