The Last Step

By Mike Wyatt

The Last Step is a fast-moving, exciting archeological mystery thriller set among the Mayan ruins in Copan, Honduras, including the magnificent hieroglyphic stairway rediscovered by Harvard archeologists in the 1930s. The statues of five Mayan kings adorn the stairway, whose thousands of carved hieroglyphic stones recording the kings' reigns were dislodged by ancient earthquakes. Unable to decipher the stones, the archeologists reassembled them at random on the stairway's 64 steps. They also purloined and shipped one king's statue to the Harvard Peabody Essex Museum, where it remains today.

Harvard graduate student Alexis Hoffman, who seeks to return the stolen statue to Copan and to decipher the stairway, teams with electronics whiz Ben Acebo to develop novel computer techniques to catalog, correctly reassemble and "read" the hieroglyphic stones, and to reconstitute worn stone carvings and drawings. She also convinces Ben, lawyer/amateur archeologist David Elliot, and a sculptor friend to create an exact copy of the stolen king statue. The four then embark on a hazardous journey to return the duplicate statue to Copan, reassemble the stairway's hieroglyphic stones, discover the location of vast treasures removed from the five kings' burial chambers under the stairway, and discern the true meaning of December 21, 2012 -- the end of 5000 years of Mayan history. According to Mayan lore, what happened then can be explained only by deciphering certain hieroglyphic stones correctly reassembled on the last and highest step of the reconstituted stairway.

The team encounters international intrigue and bewildering clues found on Copan statues and ceramics, and in the four surviving Mayan books in Mexico City, Madrid, Paris and Dresden, Germany museums. They also endure sinister events at Harvard, a harrowing flight to a remote Honduran island, a dangerous trip through mountain roads and rivers, drug criminals, murderous witchdoctors, man-eating jaguars, snakes, missing stairway stones, and unknown saboteurs to return the statue, find the kings' relocated treasures, and decipher the cosmic meaning of the stairway's last step.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781647017439

Book preview

Chapter One

The ancient trackless trolley rumbled and clattered along Huron Avenue as it wound slowly through Cambridge toward Harvard Square. Through its unwashed windows, a parade of shabby double- and triple-decker wooden frame houses, built so close together that their roof edges almost touched, flickered past in the late morning sun. Alexis wondered how many students like herself were crowded into them, busily creating and defining their personal work and living spaces, at the start of the new academic year.

At each trolley stop, young people—mostly students, judging from the books bulging from their backpacks—climbed onto the trolley, chatting loudly. A couple bounced into the seat behind Alexis. The young man asked his friend, Got a lecture this morning?

The young woman responded, Yeah. Sonnenburg. Comp Lit 141. You know, Camus, Sartre, Kafka. How about you?

Spanish 101. He leaned toward the young woman and smiled. Te adoro (I love you), Maria.

The young woman smiled back, rapidly fluttered her eyelashes, and whispered, Te adoro, Anton. They both giggled.

Understanding their West Side Story references in Spanish, Alexis smiled to herself and remembered that she had said something like that to someone several years ago, but his response was not as romantic, primarily because he didn’t speak Spanish.

Suddenly, the trolley lurched to a halt, and its front doors slowly squeaked open. The driver barked a guttural sound in his thick Boston accent, which Alexis deciphered as Cambridge Co-ommon. She sprang up and ran down the aisle toward the front doors just as they squeaked shut.

Darn it, she muttered, and pivoted to return to her seat.

The driver, seeing her frustration, smiled at her with a kind, almost paternal, look. If ya stay on, I’ll go around the co-ommon and drop ya off in the trolley tunnel undah Hahvahd Squeah.

Thanks, but I’d like to step off here, she said, returning the smile. I’m following my new landlord’s directions to Harvard Square and the Peabody Museum.

Suit yaself, grunted the driver as he leaned over, grabbed a lever handle, and swung the squeaky front doors open.

She stepped down from the trolley, crossed the narrow street, and stepped over the curb and onto the sidewalk, which crossed the small park, or common. She passed a decrepit wooden gazebo and continued walking to the other side of the green. She could see the red brick Harvard buildings looming a few blocks ahead, across Massachusetts Avenue. An acrid aroma of burning leaves wafted in the brisk autumn air, while the leaves remaining on the trees surrounding the common had turned to yellow and orange. She dodged several Frisbees flying across the sidewalk. The common was alive with students dressed in their consciously sloppy garb, shouting and chasing their Frisbees and each other, around the green. Back in St. Louis, she had imagined that Harvard students, considered the country’s best and brightest, would always appear conservatively and neatly dressed, carrying large books and chatting seriously, as they marched determinedly to their next important lecture or perhaps toward gaining greater wisdom in Widener Library. It would be the first of many misapprehensions about the Harvard experience that Alexis would have to abandon.

After crossing the common, Alexis turned right and continued down Massachusetts Avenue a few blocks south to Harvard Square. There, several narrow streets converged in a tangled knot of cars, people, and shops, in the middle of which stood a small raised concrete island containing a newsstand and a small shop selling overpriced unhealthful snacks, soft drinks, tobacco, and lottery tickets. A creaky old escalator with wooden treads descended alongside wider concrete stairs to the trolley and subway tunnels below. A long-haired, poorly dressed, probably homeless person sat on the concrete island next to the newsstand, with a badly written cardboard sign on his lap promoting some esoteric social cause while strumming a guitar and singing an off-key song. The Square certainly did not look to Alexis like the center of the universe, as the Harvard denizens were said to call it.

She hurried across busy Massachusetts Avenue, dodging car and bicycle traffic, and strode beneath a red-brick archway onto a walkway leading diagonally through Harvard Yard, a two-block-long multistory quadrangle enclosed by nineteenth-century red-brick coed undergraduate dormitories. The Yard was abuzz with students waving, shouting, and embracing each other. She noticed that the lawn was crisscrossed with well-worn shortcut paths to which the groundskeepers had long ago conceded defeat. She crossed the Yard, past the dark-gray stone statue of a seated robed John Harvard, who seemed to glare at her menacingly. With typical Midwestern self-deprecation, she thought, I’m here at last, taking my first step into the institution that many people regard as the greatest and most elite center of learning in the country. I only hope I’ll prove to be intelligent enough, hard-working enough, or both to survive.

Alexis exited the Yard and walked a few blocks farther toward the Peabody Museum, past students carrying lamps, chairs, rugs, and other used furniture and fixtures—probably left by outgoing students to be recycled by the incoming. She also passed a small construction site cordoned off by makeshift plywood panels, some of which read, in large graffiti-like letters, Brown Shoes Don’t Make It—the title of a once popular song. She looked down at her sensible brown Midwestern shoes and reluctantly agreed.

The red brick Victorian Peabody Museum, which looked more like a large apartment building than a renowned museum, gave no hint of the priceless art and archeological treasures it housed. Alexis wondered how many people walked by the museum every day unaware of its exotic contents. She hurried up its stone steps, through the main entrance, and into the central foyer. She approached an antique wooden desk, on which sat an Information sign, and behind which sat a woman with a tired face and frizzy hair wearing a docent’s jacket. The woman slowly looked up and with a wan smile said, not very convincingly, Can I help you?

Yes, please, Alexis replied. I’d like to see the statue of the Mayan king. Can you just point me in the right direction?

What is it with that statue? said the woman, half to herself. It sat here ignored for decades. But recently several people—mostly Hispanics, I’d say—have visited it. Some several times. One in particular, a rough-looking character. Obviously not a student or scholar. Anyway, go down that long corridor over there to the end and turn right through the swinging doors. The woman pointed to a nearby darkened corridor as she spoke.

Alexis strode down the long dark corridor, wondering why there would be a sudden surge of interest in such an esoteric relic, particularly by visitors who were apparently not students or scholars. At the end of the corridor, a small cardboard sign atop a flimsy metal stand announced the Treasures of Mesoamerica—the term customarily applied to the period during which the Mayan, Aztec, Olmec and other ancient cultures in what is now Mexico and Central America had developed, thrived for centuries and ultimately decayed and died.

She noticed that the sign included a handwritten addendum: Please note that this exhibit and room will be closed for an indefinite period, effective December 1.

She pushed through two swinging doors and stopped in her tracks. Across the small poorly lit room stood a large tall glass and wooden display case containing the carved stone statue she had studied for so many years and had come so far to see. She felt a lump in her throat and a shiver down her spine as she slowly walked a few measured steps toward the display case.

The statue with its pedestal stood about five feet tall and four feet wide, almost completely filling its display case. The life-sized regal figure of a seated man stared directly at her with wide-open menacing eyes. He was adorned with an elaborate tall headdress of once colorful quetzal feathers and long thin leaves, below which multiple headbands were strung across his forehead. From his ears hung elaborate circular jade earrings, from which smaller jeweled jade trinkets hung. Beneath a wide flat nose, his mouth, encircled by large lips, was wide open and shaped as if to utter a cry or entreaty. Additional jade and shell trinkets dangled from rings in his nose and from the corners of his mouth. Strands of fabric necklaces completely obscured his short neck. A loose-fitting gown studded with jade and laced with colorful seams was draped around his shoulders. About waist high, his hands emerged from the gown, fists clenched with the backs of his hands and wrists touching each other in an ancient pose intended to convey royal power and determination. Beneath his opposing fists, the gown fell a few feet between his legs onto the square pedestal, about four feet wide and a few feet high. Immediately below the statue, a row of stones bearing complex carved designs, each about five inches square, fit neatly within an indentation stretching across the front of the pedestal.

The statue looked like it was trying both to impress her and to shout some warning to her before its urgent message was frozen in limestone many centuries ago. Close up it seemed larger, more compelling, more threatening and more beautifully carved than she had imagined from the few faded photographs she had seen of it. She marveled at the careful carving of the many complex folds of the flowing gown and the fine details of the tassels incised at its bottom. She also noticed the hint of the original red, yellow, and green coloring of the statue’s surfaces, miraculously still faintly visible after so many centuries.

The statue was far more intriguing than she had anticipated. It clearly justified the considerable time and effort she had spent studying it, writing about it, and finding a way to get herself to Cambridge so she could see and analyze it firsthand. In just a few minutes, she had already noticed many unexpected aspects of its jewelry, clothing, coloring, and hieroglyphic carvings that were not visible in the few available photographs to which she’d had access.

Alexis walked slowly around the display case, paying close attention to the carved details on the sides and back of the statue’s headdress, ornaments, and gown. As she slowly circled the case, she thought she noticed, out of the corner of her eye, her reflected form on its glass walls, which moved as she moved. But then she realized that a figure on the other side of the display case was moving in the same direction as hers. She stopped moving, and the figure stopped. She started again and the figure also started again, remaining equidistant from her on the opposite side of the case.

She froze for a moment, wondering what was going on. Was the figure stalking her? Trying to avoid being seen by her?

She suddenly reversed course and confronted the figure, who turned out to be an attractive, preppy blond youngish-looking man in blue blazer with brass buttons, striped tie, gray slacks, and cordovan tassled loafers.

He looks like he’s trying to warn us of something, doesn’t he? said the young man, tilting his head toward the display case and smiling broadly at Alexis. Taken by surprise, she didn’t reply.

The man continued, "He’s from Copan, the ancient Mayan city in Honduras. He was snatched by some misguided Harvard archeologists in the 1930s and spirited out of the country without the knowledge or approval of the Hondurans. We think his name was K’ak Yipyaj Chan H’awil, ruler of the southernmost region of the Mayan empire in the eighth century AD. He’s one of a group of five similarly sized statues of rulers of Copan."

Actually, more precisely, the latter part of the eighth or early part of the ninth century, she responded confidently, without returning his smile.

Touché! he retorted. David Elliot, he said, smiling more broadly and extending his hand as he leaned toward her in a semiformal bow.

Alexis Hoffman, she replied, accepting his hand loosely but still not smiling. I’ve been studying the statue of this king and his period of Mayan history for several years, and I’m doing my PhD dissertation on him, his statue, and his historical period under the direction of Professor Fleming here at Harvard. I’m particularly interested in trying to determine if his statue, and the statues of the other kings in his group remaining in Copan that you mentioned, can shed some light on the meaning of the Hieroglyphic Stairway that covers one entire side of a huge stone pyramid, from the middle of which he was ‘snatched,’ as you put it.

Yes, I know all about that very unfortunate story, said David. It seems the 1930s Harvard archeologists also randomly reassembled the carved stones on the Hieroglyphic Stairway’s steps, which had been knocked loose and jumbled by several earthquakes. In the process, the archeologists completely obscured the stones’ meaning.

Alexis hesitated a few seconds. You don’t look like a student, she said.

"I’m not a student. I’m a venture capital lawyer here in Boston, but my major at Harvard College, before I went to the Law School, was in the Department of Art and Archeology, and I took several courses in which Professor Fleming lectured. He was always very critical of what the earlier archeologists had done in Copan, and he has tried for many years, unsuccessfully, to find a way to return the king’s statue to Honduras.

Nevertheless, bringing the statue here to the Peabody did spark renewed interest in Mayan history and culture, so we have the misguided archeologists to thank for that. In fact, I’m here today for a luncheon meeting of the department’s board of overseers, where the topic of possible return of the statue to Honduras is on the agenda again—much good may it do them. Some very powerful people on that board oppose returning the statue, for reasons they’ve never stated and I’ve never understood, and the board is not a democracy.

Well, said Alexis, I’m just a poor grad student from Washington U. in St. Louis, who wrote a monograph on the Hieroglyphic Stairway and the purloined statue, and my strong conviction is that it should be returned to Copan as soon as possible. I had the good fortune that Professor Fleming read the monograph on the internet. He contacted me, offered me a research fellowship, and here I am in what you Harvard people call the center of the universe. She allowed herself a short self-conscious smile as her gaze fell downward.

I’ve read your Copan piece too, said David. What a remarkable coincidence to meet you here! I fancy myself an amateur archeologist, and I, too, was surprised and intrigued by the stairway and the stolen statue when I went to Copan some years ago on a short expedition. I agree the statue ought to be returned as soon as possible, for several reasons.

She hesitated, then asked, Why are they going to close this exhibit in a few months, particularly since it has apparently generated new interest recently?

Dunno. Doris out front also told me about the recent interest, which sounds strange indeed. I’ll ask the board why the exhibit is being closed. Anyway, I’m off to my board luncheon. Nice to meet you, Alexis. Good luck on your work with Professor Fleming.

He bowed slightly, turned, and strode away smartly. Her eyes followed him as he walked away. She thought his smooth, forceful strides suggested he must be athletic. Then he disappeared through the swinging doors.

Chapter Two

It had been a good first week in Cambridge. Alexis found a small, cheap, and apparently insect-free flat in a triple-decker frame house on Aberdeen Avenue, in a friendly Irish/Italian Archie Bunker-like neighborhood in the far western part of Cambridge, almost into Watertown. She occupied the first floor of the house: small living room, dining room, kitchen, and two bedrooms, one of which she converted into a study, complete with desk made from two stacks of cinderblocks supporting a hollow-core wooden door. A little fresh paint and some cheap furniture from Good Will made it all fairly cozy. It was a few blocks from the Fresh Pond, a municipal reservoir encircled by woods, around which she could run three to four miles every evening on a fully lighted paved path. Aberdeen Avenue lies between Huron Avenue and Mt. Auburn Street, each with its trackless trolley line. Around the opposite side of the pond was a T-subway stop in Porter Square. All three lines ran to Harvard Square.

Her new landlord, Cholly (Charlie), was a tall, gruff, but friendly Boston cop who constantly tugged at his belt beneath his overhanging stomach in a relentless effort to keep his pants up. Cholly was a bit too friendly, but Alexis tolerated it because he drove her to Rocco’s used appliance store in Inman Square, where she bought a used refrigerator for forty dollars. As Rocco’s crew loaded it onto a delivery truck, Cholly chuckled, If it breaks down, you call me and I’ll make shuwah Rocco takes care of it. He winked at her and glared at Rocco.

Rocco got the message.

* * *

Alexis had called her mother several times, first to tell her that she had safely landed in Cambridge and to describe her new flat, and then to describe her first impressions of Harvard, its surroundings, the faculty, and the statue.

Well, it sounds like you’ve landed on your feet and have a decent place to live. Have you called Rory yet? asked her mother. "He has asked about you several times. He misses you terribly. He’s very proud of what you are doing. He’s such a nice young man. And he has a good steady job with the local government. Thirty years from now, he’ll have a pension you can both probably live on.

Also, your sister and your aunts and uncles are all asking about you, so be sure to call them as soon as you can.

Alexis winced, wondering when she would find the time to call her sister Susan and her extended family members, most of whom lived within a radius of a few blocks from her mother in south St. Louis.

I’ll call them, Mom. I’ve just been so busy putting my flat together, meeting new people, getting started on my dissertation, and adjusting to my new surroundings. This is all so new to me. The culture here is so different from the Midwest. People are very direct and impatient. Not a lot of small talk. They don’t hesitate to say or do things that might hurt your feelings. They are always ready to challenge you and your ideas.

Doesn’t sound very friendly to me. Not sure I’d like it there. You be careful—particularly of those smart-aleck Yankees who think they know everything.

Mom, don’t worry. I can take care of myself. And I’ll call Rory and Susan and the family very soon. Love you, bye.

She put down the phone and started to call Rory. Instead, she put on her sweat clothes and running shoes and ran up Aberdeen toward Fresh Pond.

* * *

During the week, she had claimed her cramped study cubicle in the departmental building near the Yard, in which she began to gather the books and other materials necessary for her research and writing on the Hieroglyphic Stairway and the stolen statue. The cubicle provided no privacy. Everyone who passed by could hear her speaking on the phone or to visitors and eavesdrop on what she was doing. However, the lack of privacy assured that she quickly met many fellow graduate students, and she soon discovered that she was one of the few who were studying the Maya and the only one focusing on Copan. The men in the department were only too eager to befriend and assist an attractive, slim, athletic young woman with short blond hair and a cheerful, unaffected Midwestern manner. As for the women, whether students or staff, they all seemed to know David Elliot. When Alexis mentioned his name, they smirked and rolled their eyes. He was obviously very popular with the department’s female population.

She also quickly realized that, in addition to her sensible brown shoes, her loose-fitting khaki pants and demure sweaters with flowery fringes did not conform to the unofficial Harvard dress code of studied single-color sloppiness.

Unfortunately, she had not yet connected with her sponsor and mentor, Professor Fleming. Several times she’d stopped by his office, buried in the bowels of the departmental building. But each time she went there, he was not in, so she decided to attend his next popular Friday archeology lecture and introduce herself to him.

* * *

On Friday afternoon, the sun had already begun to fade, and the autumn air had begun to chill. The sky’s color changed from orange to pink to mauve velvet, as Alexis strode toward Memorial Hall and the Sanders Theater lecture room. Now wearing suitably sloppy clothes, she paused to study Memorial Hall, a large red-brick Victorian pile with a cathedral-like rose window over the main entrance, gothic windows, multicolored slate roof, and a square central tower. In the growing darkness, the structure loomed ahead like an oversized version of the haunted house up the hill from the Bates Motel in the Hitchcock movie Psycho.

Inside the Hall, Sanders Theater was similarly Victorian—immense, gloomy, and wood-paneled, with a ceiling like an inverted wooden bowl, dimly lit by a circular iron chandelier holding several bare yellowish light bulbs. The lecture room had begun to fill with students chattering, mostly about the upcoming Princeton football game. As she worked her way down the side stairs toward the stage at the bottom of the bowl, she noticed that a short, squat man with distinctly Central American dress and features—jet-black hair, ruddy complexion, flat nose, large lips, dark eyes—was sitting in a chair leaning against the back wall of the room. He looked self-conscious and uncomfortable. At the bottom of the bowl, Professor Fleming stood and fussed with some