Skulduggery

by Carolyn Hart

  Nobody could disbar an anthropologist.

  An anthropologist could be fired, Dan pointed out.

  But I was stubborn and Dan, admittedly, had a lot more to lose. It made sense. So now Buddy waited for me to start up the ladder.

  The Great Break-In.

  “You shouldn’t have a bit of trouble, dear,” Miss Chow whispered encouragingly.

  No, I didn’t think I would have any trouble, but it was hard to start climbing, anyway. The grey sky, the cold wet air—and the police car pulling up at the curb.

  I gingerly straightened the brown knapsack on my shoulders, it pressed a little uncomfortably against the bandages under my jacket, and started up the ladder, awkward in dark blue baggy trousers and a padded Mao jacket. Buddy’s voice carried clearly even after I clambered over the parapet onto the balcony.

  “Hello, Officer, how are you today? We’re hoping to finish up this scene before it rains. Second time we’ve shot here and we had to wait for all these damn sunny days to pass, storyline needs clouds . . .”

  The policeman murmured a question and Buddy swept right on and I could hear snatches of it “. . . Athena Productions . . . my cameraman, Alfred Wu . . . great story, see, this Manchurian general and a Russian woman agent . . . side of City Hall looks exactly like this building on T’ien An Men Square in Peking . . . okay, get those spots in place . . . move the boom this way . . . you’ll excuse me, Officer . . .”

  The parapet was tall enough to hide me as I knelt near a window in the shadow of one of the thick pillars that supported the French Renaissance roof. The knapsack lay in front of me, open and with several tools spread out that the officer would have found very interesting.

  A physical anthropologist must achieve mastery of a number of diverse tools and many sophisticated techniques, so I had a fairly wide acquaintance with lots of gadgets, but I’d never used glasscutters before.

  I slipped on the protective goggles, put on soft leather gloves and held the battery-powered cutter to the glass.

  Buddy’s voice, easy, friendly, relaxed, drifted up to me.

  Why didn’t that dammed policeman go away?

  It was a huge window. I didn’t try to figure out how it was locked or even whether it was locked for I knew it would not have been opened in so many years that it would be stuck tighter than the Salvation Army to a kettle. I was on my knees for the windowsill was only two feet above the roof. I pushed the button on the cutter and held the blade to the glass then, in a panic, turned it off. Its sharp nasal whine shocked me and I was sure there would be shouts of alarm from below.

  Nothing but Buddy’s ebullient voice, “Come back and see us again. Officer. It’s always a pleasure . . .”

  I took a deep breath, switched on the cutter and, running it from right to left, sliced a two-foot-long horizontal line, then turned the cutter down for a foot and a half.

  I stopped again, took another deep breath, and pulled the fist-sized suction cup from the knapsack. Pushing it firmly in the center of my square and keeping a firm grip on it, I switched on the cutter, sliced the bottom horizontal line then turned up for the final vertical cut.

  The rectangle of glass lifted neatly out. I laid it carefully on the balcony, well out of my way, then loosened the suction cup and dropped it back into the knapsack.

  I lifted out a small quilted pad, spread it on the sharp lower edge of my entryway, then leaned inside. Dark and empty halls stretched to my right and left. I listened for a moment, then dropped the knapsack inside. Behind me and below, I could hear Buddy, still having a high old time, instructing Dan, “Stop right there, yeah, halfway up, look back over your shoulder; My God, you hear troops coming, that’s right, shock and dismay, okay, cameras ready . . .”

  I climbed through the hole in the window carefully, very carefully. Two feet of knifesharp glass, even under cover of a quilted pad, had my close attention. Once inside, I scooped up the knapsack, turned to my right and ran softly up the wide marble-floored hallway. It looked and smelled like any public building anywhere. I passed the closed doors to a courtroom and wondered if that was where Miss Chow’s meeting had been held. I was picturing Miss Chow and a long line of little old ladies, round hopeful faces, clasped hands, slacks and soft slippers, picturing them and wondering at their thoughts that day so the sudden sharp sound was even more unexpected and shocking.

  I stopped, lifted my head and listened. It was such a simple homely sound to drag the breath from my lungs, set my heart to pounding. The click of a closing door. But I had no business here. There was no tale I could spin that would explain my presence in this darkened hallway.

  If a door closes, someone has gone in or out. I listened for footsteps and looked frantically about for a hiding place. The hallway stretched up and down, stark, bare, empty. No place to hide.

  The thick quilted Mao jacket was hot. Sweat beaded my face, slid down my back.

  Nothing happened. It was utterly still, no footsteps, no voices, nothing but the quick sound of my breath and, far away, distant as a train whistle in the night, the faint chatter of Buddy, directing his troupe.

  They were waiting for me. Every instant that I hesitated increased their risk and mine. That policeman might wonder, might check to see if a movie company did have permission to film outside City Hall. So, one feather-light footfall after another, I tiptoed on up the hall, fearing each instant that a door would open, signaling the end of my charade.

  But wasn’t that, I realized suddenly, what I wanted to happen? Wouldn’t that give me the easiest out of all? If I were caught, who could blame me? Then I could see that my museum director was called and the FBI. Peking Man would be recovered with no more chance of loss or damage.

  I passed closed and darkened doors their legends inscribed on frosted glass, Public Utilities Commission, Purchaser of Supplies.

  At the end of the hall, I stopped, looked to my left down another long hall and saw the bright white square of light shining through the frosted glass of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development. Directly across the hall was my goal. Room 279 with its modest inscription, WOMEN.

  Someone worked overtime behind that lighted door. Some diligent public servant. I could tap on the door and Peking Man would be found—and forever lost to Jimmy and Miss Chow. There wouldn’t be a sale at 7:30 pm to start the fossils off into an uncertain future.

  Peking Man would be safe—if I knocked on the door.

  But I didn’t have the fossils in hand yet.

  Still tiptoeing, I moved quietly up the hall to Room 279. It, too, was an old-fashioned door with a frosted glass panel. I turned the knob, stepped inside and softly closed the door after me.

  I stood in a small rectangular anteroom. It opened into the washroom with lavatories on the left wall, the toilet cubicles on the right. Just to the left of me, in the anteroom was a dusty worn sofa, its back cushions missing, its two maroon seat cushions lumpy and misshapen.

  Again I had trouble breathing. But, this time, it wasn’t fear. It was the same breathless excitement that marks the beginnings of any step into the unknown.

  One hurried step and I was beside the sofa. I slipped the knapsack off my back, rested it on the cold marble floor. It was dusky in the anteroom, the only light coming through windows in the washroom that opened onto an airshaft.

  I pulled out a portable flashlight, sat it on its base, switched it on. The light was aimed at the sofa and my body was between the flash and the door to the hall. It shouldn’t show a bit.

  Then, quickly, quickly, I pulled out the scissors. It was easy to find her neat professional stitches and I could hear her gentle voice telling me so earnestly, “You see, I almost never leave Chinatown, but, when I knew I must hide Peking Man, I felt very desperate for a hiding place. I go to so few places, my sewing factory, the hospital, Portsmouth Square. And then I thought of the time we went to City Hall to ask for more housing. Oh, there must have been seventy-five or a hundred of us! Everyone treated us so nicely and, while I was
there, I did need to use the restroom and I remembered the sofa, such a, well it isn’t kind to say of government property, but such a shabby worn wreck of an old couch and I thought then that if anybody would just take a needle to it, it would look better; the cushions ripped, you know, and then I thought it would be such a good place to put the bones for who would ever think of looking inside one of those old lumpy maroon cushions?”

  Nobody, but nobody, I crooned to myself, as I snipped along that firm line of stitching.

  The entire staff of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development could have entered the restroom en masse and I wouldn’t have noticed because my fingers were poking inside the opened seam and I felt cardboard.

  The shabby cardboard suitcase was wedged inside. I tugged and strained and pulled it out. It wasn’t locked. The lock was broken. I lifted the lid, rustled through the wadded up newsprint used as padding, and then, in the dim light of a flashlight, kneeling on the scuffed floor of a public restroom, I looked at the most incredible collection of fossils ever salvaged from man’s early days.

  Two skulls and there, yes, a piece of jaw, half a femur, a muslin bag filled with teeth. It was the most complete skull that caught my gaze, drew my fingers. I held it close to my face, so close, the empty eye sockets level with my eyes.

  You stood on a windswept hill, I thought, hurried down faintly seen trails, knelt to make fire, you prayed and loved and laughed; you are a part of me and all the millions of men everywhere, you are from our beginnings and you are here now, this instant; my fingers feel your bone, know your reality.

  I don’t know how long it was before I stood, a little stiffly, replaced the fossils, smoothed down the crumpled newspapers, shut the suitcase and crammed it into the knapsack. Then the scissors and, switching it off, the flashlight.

  I opened the door to the hallway. Nothing had changed. Light still shone through the frosted glass panel of the office across the hall.

  I took one step, two, nearer that door, my hand outstretched. There wasn’t any question, really, about what I should do.

  Peking Man was irreplaceable. He had been lost once, hidden for more than a quarter of a century. Five steps more, the turning of a knob and Peking Man would be safe forever.

  I closed my eyes, then, heartsick, opened them and took another step.

  Outside, daring jail and embarrassment, Dan and Buddy waited. Dan must be tired now, clinging to that awkward rope-ladder, and even Buddy must be flagging, trying to keep up the presence. And Alfred, who was good enough to bring his crew and make it all possible, faced trouble, too.

  Now, close to the lighted door panel, I could hear the sound of typing in the room beyond.

  Jimmy was waiting for me, too, his swollen lacerated back bandaged now and, surely, something taken to ease the pain. But Jimmy waited to see if the bones would come and the sale go through and the Green Door Hotel be saved.

  The Green Door Hotel. Forty-three old people. No, forty-two since Ru’Lan Wong died. No, my mind circled around, forty-three because her room would have been taken by now, refuge for another old and lonely soul.

  Old ladies like Emily Chow and old men like the one who gripped the doorframe ‘til his hand whitened and asked, though he knew the answer, “Where will we go? What will happen to us?”

  Peking Man’s safety or their home?

  Peking Man’s fears had long since been laid to rest, no tears to run down his face. Did it much matter where bones were laid when people had no beds?

  My hand touched the cool metal of the knob. Just a twist, a quick decided turn, and the decision would be made.

  And, an unattractive voice whispered within, you know that things always come out and—if you take the bones, help put them up for cash—well, the truth will come out someday and, when it does, Ellen Christie, there will go your job and your future.

  I loved my work. I was proud of it. Without it, I would be diminished, not quite a person.

  A down-at-heels cheap hotel, a city’s better off without that sort.

  Emily’s face and that small, so small figure on the stretcher and old hands clinging to a doorframe.

  My hand fell away from the knob, I tightened my grip on the knapsack, turned and ran up the hallway.

  Screw my career.

  NINETEEN

  Life is a series of gambles, little guesses as to how the dice will roll. Will it rain today, shall I carry an umbrella, is the hot dog fresh, shall I walk this way or that?

  Sometimes the gambles are for bigger stakes and your hands sweat as you await the roll.

  “For God’s sake,” Jimmy had pled, “don’t look at me!”

  But he had agreed, reluctantly, that Dan and Miss Chow and Buddy and I could be there, part of the milling hundreds that night in Chinatown, Chinese of all ages, dark-coated old ladies, families, babies in arm, and thousands of whites, students, housewives, tourists, natives, everybody jammed shoulder to shoulder, lining the parade route fifteen deep to watch the most magnificent parade of the year when Chinatown’s dragons, symbols of luck and prosperity, wind up and down hilly streets, tossing their massive heads, whipping back and forth their sinuous tails; huge, jaunty, glorious.

  Every curb along the parade route was full by six-thirty. Vendors hawked balloons and boys darted up and down the streets, tossing firecrackers. The rat-a-tat-tat of the exploding firecrackers mingled with the vendors’ patter and the restless shuffling surflike noise of thousands of people, talking, moving a little this way and that, waiting, laughing.

  Even the rain couldn’t ruin this parade. Umbrellas sprouted along the curbs like varicolored mushrooms, newspapers were folded and balanced atop heads, caps donned, and nobody went home.

  I pulled up the hood on my raincoat and blessed my fleece-lined après-ski boots as the rain turned heavier, sweeping in shimmering waves to glisten in the light of the fire truck spotlight that was turned down Grant to light the way for the parade.

  Spectators, hunching close for warmth now, spread around the gate to Chinatown, the three-tiered greenglazed tile arch that marks Chinatown’s beginnings on Grant. The parade would climb up Grant to the gate then turn east on Bush, not traversing the actual heart of Chinatown for the streets were too narrow and the danger of fire too great.

  Jimmy stood beneath the street light just past the gate on the west side of the street. Over the shoulder of his raincoat hung a red leather bota and, in his right hand, he carried a woven straw shopping bag. Enough, certainly, to make his identity sure.

  Dan, Miss Chow, Buddy and I each waited on a separate corner so we wouldn’t be noticeable as a group, just in case Mr. Wilkie Lee’s helpful young men were wandering the streets.

  This was where I made a little gamble. The street was filling when we first came but we were still early enough to choose our spots and I maneuvered so that I ended up standing in the cover of the pagoda-like roof on the west side of the gate that spanned Grant. I could, if I turned a little sideways, see back to the lamp post where Jimmy waited.

  The light shone down on Jimmy’s face.

  I was gambling that at some point the man Jimmy was going to meet would stand in the shaft of light from the lamp post. Just for an instant. That was all I would need.

  Anthropologists have to be a nosy bunch to find out things their subjects might just as soon not reveal. So, sometimes, it’s helpful to make pictures without the giveaway brilliance of a flash. If your camera is good enough and your film is fast enough, all you need is a little light. Just a little, just for an instant.

  I had my Nikon, dangling from a strap at my wrist, and it was loaded with Kodak Tri-X film. All I needed was just an instant—and a face beneath a lamp post.

  Jimmy would be furious if he knew. But there was no reason why he should ever know. I would watch and, at the right instant, lift my hand, take a picture—or, with the incredibly quick speed of a Nikon, two or three.

  I wasn’t sure of my motive. I had, in the last three days, done the unexpected, su
rprised myself so often, that I felt a little like a stranger to myself. I had decided, against my better judgment, against all training and instinct, to let the fossils be bartered away. Now I wanted a picture of the buyer. To put in my scrapbook? But, still, it was something, a tiny link to the fossils; not enough, perhaps, but something.

  So we all waited in the rain. I clung to my camera and Jimmy stood in lamplight, holding the woven straw shopping bag.

  We heard, first, the rising sound of cheers. The crowd moved restlessly, like penned cattle. Far down the sloping street, a band swung from Market onto Grant. The parade was coming!

  I glanced at my watch. Fifteen past seven. It wouldn’t be long now. One more time, I looked quickly over my shoulder, but Jimmy still stood alone, no one near him, no one noticing him.

  It was a good-natured rowdy free-tongued crowd. Every time the rain grew heavier, some few along the curb would open and raise umbrellas and the cry would go up, “Down with the umbrellas, down in front so everybody can see, hey, what’s the matter with a little rain,” and, slowly, one by one, all the umbrellas would be drawn down except for one flamboyant white one decorated with orange flowers. It only waved a little higher.

  “For shame,” a voice cried above me and I looked up to see a bearded youth perched precariously on the concrete crossbar that ran beneath the pagoda roof. Rain spattered on his face, but he was grinning. “Hey, white umbrella,” he yelled, “don’t be such a turkey,” but the umbrella stayed high. He looked down, saw me watching, and laughed aloud, “Hey, isn’t this fun!”

  I smiled back, enjoying his good humor. “Be careful,” I offered, “that looks a little slippery.”

  “It’s the best view in Chinatown. Those five-dollar bleacher seats on Kearney can’t touch it.”

  Then a murmur ran through the crowd, a high-rising swell of excitement, for the first dragon had turned from Market onto Grant and was beginning to writhe and curve up the hill, the lights along its spine bobbing and weaving as the boys beneath it ran from side to side up the street.