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you?”
    “No,” I said. “I’d probably feel the way Yaotl does.” But that wasn’t the point, and I said so. “Have you ever heard of a retired officer haunting a murder scene?”
    “Can’t say I have.” Takun looked deadly serious all of a sudden, his brow bunching above the bridge of his nose. “Hey, you think he did it? Killed the guy, I mean?”
    He started laughing.
    “Go ahead,” I said, “make fun of me.”
    “As if I need your permission,” he said. “Have a good morning, Colhua. And pray for the gods to have mercy on the mentally retarded.”
    It was a joke, of course, but there wasn’t anything funny about it. At least not to me.
    Yaotl had had no business being anywhere near Centeotl at that hour. I couldn’t help feeling that he was holding something back from me.
    The Investigator in me wanted to know what .
    • • •
    The morning was halfway gone when I got a call I never thought I would get in a thousand cycles. Necalli never thought so either, judging by his expression.
    “You’re kidding,” I said after he told me who was on the line.
    He shook his head, said “I’m not,” and handed me his buzzer.
    I put it to my ear and said, “Colhua.”
    “Investigator,” said the rich, cultured voice on the other end of the connection, “this is High Priest Itzcoatl. I would appreciate the opportunity to speak with you here in my sanctum. In fact, we could make it right now if you’re not too busy.”
    I had to smile. The High Priest of Aztlan was calling me .
    It wasn’t as if I had never seen Itzcoatl in person before—pretty much everyone in Aztlan had done so on one holy day another. But like everyone else, I had seen him only from a distance, looking up at him from the crowed street below his balcony.
    I had never spoken with him on the phone, much less in person. And I had certainly never been invited to his private sanctum.
    “Of course, High Priest,” I heard myself saying. “I can be there in. . .” I estimated the trip on the rail line and suggested a time.
    “Splendid,” he said. “I look forward to seeing you. Gods bless your house.”
    “And yours, High Priest.”
    The connection ended. As I gave Necalli back his buzzer, I saw that he was smiling too.
    “The High Priest,” he said. “Talking on the buzzer just like anybody else. I have to tell my mate when I get home.” His smile faded. “You know what he wants to talk about, right?”
    I did.
     



Chapter Four
    H uicton Itzcoatl was only a man, like me.
    He had been born in Aztlan a district over from mine. He had gone to the same kind of schools, attended the same kind of religious services, thrilled to accounts of the same ball court games.
    He was older than I was, sure, closer to my father’s age than my own. But what did that mean? Lands of the Dead, he didn’t look much older.
    And yet as we stood there with three of his attendants in his immense, echoing sanctum, shafts of morning light stabbing down at us through open slits in a high, vaulted ceiling, I felt like a child in his presence.
    But then, Itzcoatl was the venerable High Priest of Aztlan, speaker for the ancient gods. In his Mirror appearances, he was as charismatic as any public figure I had ever seen. When he stood on his balcony overlooking a crowd, conveying the gods’ blessings, he was—as one commentator had described it—“overwhelming.”
    Not because he was a big man. On the contrary, he was of average height, and lean—almost too lean. He wouldn’t have lasted ten heartbeats in the ball court.
    Yet there was something about him that seemed to exalt him over other men. Maybe the way he held himself, or the shape of his clean-shaven head, or the cast of his eyes.
    Itzcoatl had those light-colored irises, the color of amber, that people were born with from time to time. It was the legacy of the Euros who had come to Mexica with Cortez. Considered gods when they arrived on our shores, Cortez and his men had enjoyed their pick