The Professor turned out to be an elegant and very intelligent man with a soft Scottish accent.
"Penelope was here," Tyler informed Paco, who looked like he was about to have kittens.
"Tyler! What have you done?!" he whispered under his breath, looking for all the world like he was really reconsidering that machete.
"Nothing!" he assured Paco. "She was just, like. Here! Sat down at my table without permission by the way."
"What on earth is Penelope Redwine doing back in Aguascalientes?" Paco said, almost to himself.
The Professor looked between the two of them with a slightly amused expression.
"You young men are certainly having the time of your lives down here," he said. "Imagine! All these beautiful women throwing themselves at you."
"I think Penelope was mostly throwing my face at the table."
The Professor sighed.
"Ah, young love," he said. "And this other young lady, Serena? Joe's had some run-ins with her before?"
Paco looked like he was now considering the machete and the Professor.
"She stole the Vial of Dreams from Joe in Baghdad!"
"Still, he had a romance, did he not?"
And the Professor sighed again.
"What can I say? I'm an old romantic."
"Well, if you want the money you're paying Joe to result in artifacts for the museum, then you ought to be worried about all these women trying to get in our way."
"Oh, believe me, I am concerned," said The Professor, sounding not very concerned at all. He produced an honest-to-goodness fan, the kind Tyler had seen Spanish ladies use in old films, and fanned himself with it. He was on the chunky side as well, which could not be all that comfortable in the steaming jungle.
Tyler liked him, because it was clear the guy had money and wasn't evil, just weird and old. He felt like there were other, worse fates, than to be a weird old man with romantic ideas about the world. Long as he wasn't a bad person, of course, as Paco had described the other men who had come searching for things like Mu. There were riches on this earth to be had, but doing such things with ethics, such as they were, was a completely different story altogether.
"However," The Professor went on, "I have enough money that I am not interested in being a penny-dreadful villain. Certainly it is a boon to have these artifacts, but the adventure is a part of it, too."
He laughed, a little.
"You see, I pay Joe mostly in order to live vicariously through him, and Joe pays you because he is a good man, which is the entire reason I hired him in the first place. An old man has his investments, and one such as myself, with no progeny to speak of? Well, what can be called wealth, when I already have everything? The artifacts are important, but mainly incidental. I find wealth in stories, and those are what keep me going. Joe is, and always has been, a real fount of tale-telling. Beautiful duplicitous women, fighting alligators, finding treasure, what boy has not dreamed of such things, and a measure of girls too I assume or there would not be those beautiful duplicitous women out for bloodsport or whatever their motivations might be."
The Professor smiled, and Paco threw up his hands in defeat, and Tyler thought this guy was awesome.
"So, let me bankroll my foolish ideas, and if we happen to find a few golden artifacts and lost continents along the way, so much the better," he said.
"Wow, it's like that old show my dad loves, where the guy just gets to live on a rich dude's land in his own house and drive cool cars," said Tyler with fond appreciation.
The Professor now looked at him with real surprise.
"I confess I have no idea what you are referring to," he said.
Paco took out a knife and started to peel an orange with it. The knife was completely unnecessarily elaborate and sharp, but Tyler surmised that he used it because of those reasons, just to remind everybody that he had a knife.
"This is Tyler," he said, apropos of nothing, and Tyler gave him an alarmed look, but Paco didn't even look up from his orange. The man was still covered in dirt and grime, but Tyler had the impression he was doing that on purpose, too, as a kind of badge of tough-guy honor. He looked really cool, so that made sense, but he had no idea why Paco was breaking their incognito. Or his own, he supposed, as they hadn't agreed to it beforehand.
"Tyler?" asked The Professor, turning to look at the softie currently inhabiting the body of Prof Joe Mulcahy, avowed adventurer and rugged tough guy who probably saw an emotion and shot it on sight, unlike Tyler, who was a pretty normal dude in touch with his feelings and all that stuff, or so Trixie had told him when she was feeling generous one day.
"Yeah, Joe got bodysnatched or something, again, this is Tyler," said Paco. "He's from the future, as far as I can tell, claims he's a 'kid' despite being twenty-three, so I'm assuming the future is a lot softer than today. Anyway. He's learning the ropes. I already told him I can't kill him because he's using Joe's body, but maiming is still on the table, Joe can handle it."
The Professor finally looked absolutely enthralled, and turned to look at him.
"May I?" he asked, and Tyler nodded, although he wasn't sure what, exactly, he was agreeing to.
The Professor then started examining him, kind of like a doctor, in his eyes and ears, asked him to open his mouth, and so on. The examination seemed to end at the heartbeat, but The Professor was looking more alive than he'd seen him in a while, eyes sparkling.
"I cannot say exactly what it is, but there is a certain quality to their look," said The Professor.
"Penelope said the same thing," Tyler told them. "Oh. She's, uh. Also from another time period, apparently."
Paco leaped from his chair and pointed at The Professor with his knife.
"I knew it!" he said triumphantly.
The Professor waved at him.
"Yes, yes, you're very clever," he said. "Now sit down. We don't know if there is some plan afoot, or they mean us harm."
"I don't think Tyler means us harm."
"Thanks," said Tyler, appreciative of Paco's loyalty.
The Professor looked askance at him.
"Hm. Perhaps not," he said. "But it may be that these people are pawns in some greater game."
He brought out the golden square they'd found in the jungle earlier, and laid it out on the table.
"Shouldn't you hide that thing?" asked Tyler. "Seems like everybody's looking for it."
The Professor took out some spectacles and placed them on the bridge of his nose, peering down at it.
"On the contrary," he said quietly. "I want everyone to see it because everyone is looking for it."
Then he glanced over the top of his spectacles at Paco, who seemed to intuit there was something going on here, and Tyler, who followed Paco's lead, and concentrated on The Professor intently.
Almost without moving his lips, Tyler heard him say:
"Paco, Tyler. Keep an eye on everyone in the cantina. Take note of anyone looking over here too long, taking too much of an interest. Et cetera."
Paco's infinitesimal nod was only barely registered by Tyler, and then The Professor spoke in a normal tone, not too loud to be suspicious, and with a relaxed ease that would have fooled Tyler, had he not known there was some subterfuge in it.
"I translated it when you brought it to me. It reads as follows: there is a door near the sacred mark, two steps in one direction and then 1-4 1s turn 2½ times by the right, moving down to finish between 2."
He looked up at both of them, and then put the gold bar in an obvious and evident bag beneath his chair.
"That's very complicated."
The cantina, by this time, was crowded. And it was not five minutes later they discovered the bag was missing.
Paco nodded to The Professor.
"I'm on it," he said.
The Professor nodded, and took his Panama hat off the table, placing it on his head.
"After you. Tyler. Are you coming?"
Tyler stood up so fast he nearly knocked the table over, which wasn't really a great addition to whatever play The Professor and Paco were making, but instead of apologizing profusely he made it seem like he'd just had a few too many, and staggered outside with The Professor, into the jungle heat.
A couple of streets down, they found Paco with his knife to a man's throat, and The Professor's bag dangling from one arm.
The Professor sauntered up to them all casual-like, and made a great show of cleaning his spectacles.
Tyler had to admit he was impressed. This was just like watching a movie! Only this time, he was a part of it.
"I see you have not risen among the ranks of common thief, Rodrigo," said The Professor. "Mind telling me who it is you're working for?"
Rodrigo, who was apparently a known entity, just looked up and away, toward the jungle.
"Very well," said The Professor. "I could have Paco here kill you - "
And Paco put the knife against his throat -
" - or, and hear me out, you could work for me instead."
Tyler stared at The Professor, uncomprehending.
"You can't trust him! He just stole from you."
"Yes, for money, I assume," said The Professor. "And he may double-cross me, it's true. But I feel that in some cases, namely Rodrigo's, it is best to get people on your side instead of engaging with a turf war."
The Professor smiled.
"You see, you had mentioned that the descriptions were very complicated," said The Professor, sliding the gold square out of the bag. "They should be. Those were the instructions on how to dance Strip the Willow, which is complex indeed."
He looked down at the gold square.
"And this," he said, "is a receipt of payment for an order of bricks, from the kind of place where they would use gold the way that we use paper."
"So this was just...garbage, from the lost continent?" asked Tyler, amazed.
"More or less," said The Professor.
"Then, either those people were rich beyond our wildest dreams," said Tyler, "or something else is more valuable than gold to them."
"Exactly," said The Professor, putting on his spectacles. "Now, Rodrigo. How much is your loyalty worth? Because I will double it."
Rodrigo sneered.
"I cannot be bought," he said. "You foreigners, you think all alike."
Paco glared at him.
"I'm a local."
"You've become like one. You're more like one of them now than one of us."
Paco did not respond, but he was clearly stung by Rodrigo's accusation.
"Enough," he said, now drawing blood with the point of the knife. "Who are you working for?"
Rodrigo smiled.
"Why don't you ask him?"
And he looked straight at Tyler.