The raft Rudetsky made proved a godsend. Instead of my original idea of hanging small air bottles at each decompression level, we dropped a pipe which plugged directly into the demand valve on the harness and was fed from big air bottles on the raft itself. And I explored the cave in the cenote wall at the seventy-foot level. It was quite large and shaped like an inverted sack and it occurred to me to fill it full of air and drive the water from it. A hose dropped from the air pump on the raft soon did the job, and it seemed odd to be able to take off the mask and breathe normally so deep below the surface. Of course, the air in the cave was at the same pressure as the water at that depth and so it would not help in decompression, but if either Katherine or myself got into trouble the cave could be a temporary shelter with an adequate air supply. I hung a light outside the entrance and put another inside.
Fallon stopped complaining when he saw what we began to bring up. There was an enormous amount of silt to be cleared first, but we did that with a suction pump, and the first thing I found was a skull, which gave me a gruesome feeling.
In the days that followed we sent up many objects -- masks in copper and gold. cups, tolls, many items of jewellery such as pendants, bracelets, rings both for finger and ear, necklace Heads, and ornamental buttons of gold and jade. There were also ceremonial hatchets of flint and obsidian, wooden spear-throwers which had been protected from decay by the heavy overlay of silt, and no less than eighteen plates like that shown to me by Fallon in Mexico City.
The cream of the collection was a small statuette of gold. about six inches high, the figure of a young Mayan girl. Fallon carefully cleaned it, then stood it on his desk and regarded it with a puzzled air. 'The subject is Mayan,' he said. 'But the execution certainly isn't -- they didn't work in this style. But it's a Mayan girl, all right. Look at that profile.'
Katherine picked it up. 'It's beautiful, isn't it?' She hesitated 'Could this be the statue Vivero made which so impressed the Mayan priests?'
'Good God!' said Fallon in astonishment. 'It could be-but that would be a hell of a coincidence.'
'Why should it be a coincidence?' I asked. I waved my hand at the wealth of treasure stacked on the shelves. 'All these things were sacrificial objects, weren't they? The Mayas gave to Chac their most valued possessions. I don't think it unlikely that Vivero's statue could be such a sacrifice.'
Fallon examined it again. 'It has been cast,' he admitted. 'And that wasn't a Mayan technique. Maybe it is the work of Vivero, but it might not be the statue he wrote about. He probably made more of them.'
'I'd like to think it is the first one,' said Katherine.
I looked at the rows of gleaming objects on the shelves. 'How much is all this worth?' I asked Fallon. 'What will it bring on the open market?'
'It won't be offered,' said Fallon grimly. 'The Mexican Government has something to say about that -- and so do I.'
'But assuming it did appear on the open market -- or a black market. How much would this lot be worth?'
Fallon pondered. 'Were it to be smuggled out of the country and put in the hands of a disreputable dealer -- a man such as Gerryson. for instance -- he could dispose of it, over a period of time, for, say, a million and a half dollars.'
I caught my breath. We were not halfway through in the cenote and there was still much to be found. Every day we were finding more objects and the rate of discovery was consistently increasing as we delved deeper into the site. By Fallen's measurement the total value of the finds in the cenote could be as much as four million dollars -- maybe even five million.
I said softly, 'No wonder Gatt is interested. And you were wondering why, for God's sake!'
'I was thinking of finds in the ordinary course of excavation,' said Fallon. 'Objects of gold on the surface will have been dispersed long ago, and there'll be very little to be found And I was thinking of Gatt as being deceived by Vivero's poppycock in his letter. I certainly didn't expect the cenote to be so fruitful.' He drummed his fingers on the desk. 'I thought of Gatt as being interested in gold for the sake of gold -- an ordinary treasure hunter.' He flapped his hand at me shelves. 'The intrinsic value of the gold in that lot isn't more than fifteen to twenty thousand dollars.'
'But we know Gatt isn't like that,' I said, 'What did Harris call him? An educated hood. He isn't the kind of stupid thief who'll be likely to melt the stuff down; he knows its antiquarian value, and he'll know how to get rid of it. Harris has already traced a link between Gatt and Gerryson, and you've just said that Gerryson can sell it unobtrusively. My advice is to get the stuff out of here and into the biggest bank vault you can find in Mexico City.'
