Little Tiny Teeth

by Aaron Elkins

  “I scared them half to death by showing up, apparently out of nowhere,” Phil said, “but I got them to open up with my celebrated friendly, open, and unthreatening manner.”

  “And Inca Kolas spiked with rum,” Gideon said. “Am I permitted to ask a question yet?”

  Phil responded with a gracious wave. “Speak.”

  “Did you happen to inquire as to what happened to the body?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” Phil said. “They said he staggered away, fell over the edge into the river, and disappeared.”

  “No, that part never happened. When your brain is blown apart, you don’t do any staggering. You drop where you are.”

  “Yeah, you already told us that. So my guess is they just picked him up and dumped him in the river themselves. Either way—”

  “—he’s in the river,” said John.

  Any further thoughts were interrupted by an excited clamor from the crew members on their break down below at the riverfront. They were jabbering in pidgin Spanish, pointing down into the water, and calling, apparently, to Gideon. He was able to understand a few words: “Oiga, esqueletero! Aqui le tengo unos huesos!” Hey, skeleton man, I have some bones for you!

  He jumped up. “They’ve found some bones.”

  “More bones?” John said, getting up too. “What is it about you, Doc? Do you bring this on yourself?”

  “That’s what Julie thinks,” Gideon said, laughing, as they made their way down the bank. “And remember your weird friend Hedwig, in Hawaii? She thinks it’s because of my aura.”

  The three Indians were on a narrow, muddy, log-littered beach, and one of them, in the act of tossing a cigarillo into the water, had spotted what he was sure was a human skull, caught by an eddy and lodged in a pool formed by a tangle of downed tree branches.

  “It’s him!” Phil exclaimed the moment he saw it, gazing placidly back up at him from empty eye sockets, through twelve inches of brownish water. “The nail-gun guy.”

  “Looks like it,” Gideon said. It was a human skull, all right. There was the expected round hole in the forehead, just right of center — no radiating or spiral cracks, just a clean hole — and a jagged-edged empty space where the back of the head should have been. No mandible was visible. “Should be easy enough to confirm, though.”

  He leaned down, and grasping a branch for support, dipped into the water with his other hand and brought up the broken skull. The Indians, whom he half expected to quietly back away and leave, sat down and watched avidly. The perforated disk of bone from the warehouse door was still in his fanny pack. He took it out, wrinkling his nose a little — the fanny pack would have to go; it was getting nasty in there, what with the heat and humidity making the still-fresh bone fragment reek — and fitted it to the circular hole in the skull, which had to be done from the inside because the beveling of both the hole and the disk made it impossible to do from the front. This was no problem, however, what with the fist-sized hole in the back of the skull. He adjusted the disk until he had its irregularities matched to those of the hole and gently pressed it in. It slipped in with a solid little click, and held. A perfect fit.

  “Consider it confirmed,” he said. For a while he held the skull up to his face, turning it this way and that. “Amazing,” he murmured.

  “What is?” John asked, after it became clear that further elucidation wasn’t on its way.

  “Well, look at it,” Gideon said. “This guy was killed yesterday afternoon, not even twenty-four hours ago, and look at this thing! It’s perfectly clean… okay, a little crud clinging to the inside of the brain case and the nasal aperture, and in the orbits, and so on — back of the palate, auditory meatuses, hard-to-reach places — but no muscles, no ligaments, and just a few shreds of tendon. In the lab, it’d take a colony of Dermestid beetles weeks to get it this clean.”

  “Piranhas?” said John.

  “Si, piranhas,” the three crewmen agreed in sober unison.

  Gideon nodded. “I really didn’t believe they were as fast as this, though. And all these tiny scratches over every square millimeter of it… as if it’s been… well, scoured with a pad of heavy-duty steel wool.” He shook his head. “Amazing,” he said again. “If you look closely, you can see that most of the scratches are really nicks, kind of triangular in cross section.”

  “Little… tiny… teeth,” John said.

  “Little tiny pointy teeth,” Gideon amended.

  “Gideon, did I just hear you say you used beetles to clean your skeletons?” Phil asked.

  “Uh-huh,” he said abstractedly. “Dermestids. You get them from biological supply houses. There’s nothing like them for corpses. They love to eat dead flesh.”

  “Big deal, so do I,” John said.

  “Mmm,” said Gideon. He had sat down on a log with the skull and was slowly turning it in his hands again, studying it from various angles, running his fingers over eminences and concavities, gently inserting them into the nasal aperture, stroking the teeth.

  “I always thought you boiled the bodies or used some kind of caustic or something. You just put them in a tank with a bunch of beetles?” Phil persisted. He was fascinated with the idea. “Gideon? Are you there? I think we’ve lost him again,” he said to John.

  “He’ll be back,” John said. “You just have to be patient.” They seated themselves on a log to await his return.

  It took him another minute to surface again. “Well,” he murmured, “it’s a male, all right; not much doubt about that. The rugged muscle-attachment sites, and these rounded orbital margins, and the bilobate mental eminences—”

  “That means he’s got a square chin,” John said for Phil’s benefit. Over the years of his association with Gideon, he had picked up the occasional bit of forensic jargon. “That’s just the way these people talk, you see. It’s to make sure no one else can understand them.”

  “I know, I’m very familiar with the language myself.”

  “—all those things yell ‘male.’” Gideon continued, more or less talking to himself. “And he’s a grown man, in his thirties at least, and probably not more than, oh, fifty or so. All we have to go on there are the cranial and palatine sutures. None of them are still anywhere near open, but none of them have been obliterated yet either, inside or out. Now, as to race…”

  Another period of intense, silent examination and palpation before he looked up again.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure he’s not an Indian, at any rate. The nasal aperture is too narrow, the nasal sill is too sharp, there’s no prognathism to speak of, the malars aren’t very prominent at all; if anything, they’re reduced. And you can see that the interorbital projection is pretty high…”

  “True, true,” said John, as if he still knew what Gideon was talking about.

  “… and the palatine suture… well, see? It’s really jagged, not at all straight, and the mastoid processes” — he fingered the rough, cone-shaped eminences to which the large muscles of the neck attached — “see how narrow they are? Almost pointed, not stubby. And no sign of shovel-shaping on the incisors. No, there’s nothing about this guy that makes me think ‘Native American.’ And definitely not one of the local Indians. He’s way too big.”

  “What then?” Phil asked.

  “White, I’d say. Everything points to Caucasian.”

  He had the skull upside down on his lap, so that the palate and the teeth were uppermost. John and Phil leaned forward to see. So did the crewmen, from a distance.

  “Guy could use a dentist,” John said. “It hurts just to look at those teeth.”

  “Most of them, yes. They’re crumbly and discolored and full of caries, and two of them are missing and, ugh, here’s an abscess well underway. He’s let his teeth go for years, maybe decades. The poor guy must have been in some pain, and if he’d lived, it was going to get a lot worse. But it’s these two that are really interesting.” With his ballpoint pen, he tapped the two right bicuspids.

  “Oh, yeah, lo
ok at that,” said Phil. “Fillings. He’s had a little dental work done.”

  “But not just any dental work,” Gideon said, “excellent, expensive dental work. This is gold, gold foil, and beautifully applied. You don’t see this type of work anymore. It sure as hell isn’t the kind of work you ever would have seen down here.”

  “So the guy’s not from around here, that’s what you’re saying?” Phil said.

  “Well, yes, but it suggests a little more than that. When you find this kind of dentistry on a down-and-outer, a guy whose teeth haven’t seen a dentist in twenty years, it usually tells you one of two things. Either he’s somebody who once had money, but who’s seen a change in fortune, or else, more likely—”

  “Or else,” John said, “he spent some time in prison, where they took better care of his teeth than he could get for himself on the outside.”

  Gideon nodded. “Correct.”

  “Not too surprising, considering what he was doing when he got himself killed,” said John.

  “Hey, am I wrong?” Phil asked. He was staring at the shallow, eddying pool from which the skull had come. “Or are there some more bones down there? There, see? Caught in the branches, right on the bottom, a couple of yards—”

  “You’re right!” Gideon said. “Vertebrae. Human too. And that’s the mandible under there!” He slapped the side of his head. “How could I not have looked! There might be more. Let’s fan out a little along the shore. Phil, could you ask these guys to do the same? I bet there is more. Something like the pelvis tends to get caught because it’s so big and irregular… I’d really like to see the pelvis… .

  But there wasn’t anything else. Only the mandible — the lower jaw — and a collection of vertebrae. Seven of them to be exact: all seven cervical vertebrae, the ones closest to the skull, the vertebrae of the neck. Somehow or other, the poor guy’s head and neck had gotten lodged there in that niche. The piranha had stripped them, and the bones had remained behind, almost as clean as the specimens you’d get from a supply house. Where the rest of what was left of him was at this point was anybody’s guess.

  When they had fished them all from the water and laid them on a piece of plywood that one of the crew had brought from the construction area to keep them out of the mud, Gideon started with the mandible as the most likely one to provide more information, but there wasn’t much. The first thing was to fit it to the skull to make sure that they were really from the same person, and this was quickly verified. The few healthy teeth abutted perfectly and the two mandibular condyles fitted neatly into the glenoid fossae of the temporal bone, or as neatly as was allowed by the absence of the cushioning cartilage that would have been there in the living person. Beyond that, it pretty much confirmed his assessment of race and sex, and that was it. No interesting anomalies, no visible injuries, new or old. No additional clues to the living man.

  On his knees in the muddy soil, he began to arrange the vertebrae in their top-to-bottom anatomical order, from C-1 to C-7, on the plywood sheet. The first two and the last one were easy, of course. C-1, the atlas, was like no other vertebra in the spinal column, essentially a simple ring — no spinous process, no vertebral body — a sort of collar on which the skull rested. C-2, the axis, had the smooth upward column of the odontoid process, essentially a pivot on which the atlas, carrying the skull, rotated, which was how one is able to freely turn one’s head. And C-7 was bigger than the others, so that was simple too. The middle four were a bit harder to differentiate, and Gideon settled down to comparing them two by two.

  “Can I ask you a dumb question?” said Phil. “What are you doing all this for?”

  Gideon continued working. “Well, I’m trying to learn a little more — ah, this is C-3, and this is C-4 — about who this guy was — that is, what he was like.”

  “Yeah, but what difference does it make what he was like? I mean, who cares? There’s no way to actually identify him, is there?”

  “Well, no, not by me—”

  “He can’t help himself,” John explained. “He never met a skeleton he didn’t want to know better. You ought to know that by now.”

  Gideon smiled. “You never know what you’re going to find,” he said as he figured out the final two and laid all seven in a row. “But there’s always something interesting.”

  He leaned forward to study them, propping his hands on the plywood. Sweat dripped onto the board from the tip of his nose. Minutes passed. The crew members lost interest and wandered a few yards upstream to sit on a nest of fallen trunks, light more cigarillos, and chat among themselves. Phil lost interest and went to join them, but John sat down on a log and remained to watch. He had seen Gideon pull too many surprising and instructive rabbits out of the hat to go wandering off.

  “Ah, there is something interesting,” Gideon said after a while, then quickly lapsed back into silence, picking up the vertebrae one by one, peering at them, poking at them, turning them round and round. John, well accustomed to this, waited patiently, twiddling — literally twiddling — his thumbs.

  What had caught Gideon’s attention were the two lowest vertebrae, C-6 and C-7. Both had suffered some pretty serious injury to their vertebral bodies — the thick cylinders of bone that stacked one upon the other (separated only by the soft, pulpy, and so often troublesome intervertebral discs) to form and give strength to the vertebral column. Both bodies had a collapsed, caved-in look, especially at the front. He showed them to John, comparing them to the healthy, solid look of the others.

  “Whoa,” John said, getting down on his knees in the mud beside Gideon to have a closer look and to handle them. “They look… it’s like someone just grabbed them with a pair of pliers and squeezed the hell out of them.”

  “That’s not a bad metaphor, actually, but what did the squeezing were the vertebrae above and below them. These are compression fractures, John. They’re not broken in the usual sense of a fracture — that is, they’re not broken, as in ‘broken into pieces’ — they’re squashed. The pressure on them has compressed the cancellous bone inside.”

  John was holding the C-7, running his fingers over the surface. “So what would do something like this?”

  “Well, a lot of the time they’re associated with osteoporosis, where the bone is already thin and weak, and maybe the person falls and lands square on his rear end, and that jams the vertebrae up against each other. Sometimes the person doesn’t even know there’s been a fracture.”

  “You mean it doesn’t hurt?”

  “Oh yeah, it hurts all right. But it’s not like when you actually break a leg, or an arm, or a rib — snap — when that happens you know it the minute it happens. But something like this — he might just think he’s got a chronic headache or a pain in the neck from a strain, or a sprain, or something like that. People will go months before they finally see a doctor.”

  John fingered the crushed part and grimaced. “Man, I think I’d know it.”

  “But what’s interesting about these particular bones is that this guy wasn’t osteoporotic. Except for these two vertebrae, everything else that’s left is fine. That’s one thing that’s odd about it. The other thing is… mmm…”

  “The other thing is… ?” John prompted patiently.

  “That you don’t see this kind of thing in the neck. It usually occurs down in the lower thoracic or lumbar vertebrae, right in that S-curve in our backs, because that’s where the pressure on your spine is concentrated — one of the unfortunate outcomes of our walking around on two legs instead of a more sensible, balanced four. When you see it in the cervical segment, it’s usually something like a motorcycle accident, or an automobile crash where the person’s head is driven up against the frame of the windshield, say. But in something like that, you’d expect some associated trauma, whereas in this case the other bones don’t show any. The skull’s fine — other than that hole, of course — the mandible’s okay, and none of the other five vertebrae are damaged. In fact, the only times I can remember c
oming across cases like this one were… I’ll be damned. Is it possible… ? I bet…” He trailed off in mid-sentence and wandered abstractedly upstream to where Phil and the crew members were yakking away like lifelong buddies.

  “Were what?” John yelled after him. “Is what possible? Damn it, I wish you wouldn’t—” With a sigh and a shake of his head, he followed after him.

  Gideon spoke in Spanish. “Chato, the other day, the first day of the cruise, when we were all meeting each other, you were there, standing on the side.”

  “Yes,” Chato said warily.

  “And when Cisco got introduced as the White Shaman, you laughed and called him something else.”

  “I mean nothing bad, señor, I only joke with my friends, I very—”

  “No, I realize that. I just need to know what you called him.”

  Chato licked his lips and looked to his pals for help, but they gaped blankly back at him.

  “You’re not in any trouble, my friend; there’s nothing to worry about. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “I called him… everybody calls him… the White Milkman.”

  “Ah, that’s what I thought,” Gideon said with satisfaction. “And why was he called the White Milkman?”

  “What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?” Gideon heard Phil ask John.

  Chato’s explanation, a torrent of overexcited pidgin Spanish-English, was too much for Gideon, and he had to ask Phil to translate. Phil listened, nodding, then explained:

  Cisco had been labeled the White Milkman by many of the locals in Iquitos in sarcastic reaction to his self-aggrandizing references to himself as the White Shaman. Cisco’s knowledge of authentic shamanism, it seemed, was held in low repute by those who—

  “Fine, fine, but why do they call him a milkman, specifically?”

  “Because that’s what he is. Well, not the kind who delivers milk — there’s no such animal in Iquitos, because apparently nobody drinks it — but there’s this little dairy farm nearby that makes cheese, the one and only Amazonian dairy farm they ever heard of, and sometimes he worked there, taking care of the cows, milking them, feeding them—”