Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 05 - Curses!

by Curses!

  Abe's narrow back was toward the stairs, blocking the newcomers’ view, but when he heard the footsteps behind him he twisted to the side so they could see.

  "So,” he said, his eyes glowing. “what do you think of this?” He was as excited as Gideon had ever seen him.

  With good reason. It was the codex all right, wedged in the angle between wall and step. Battered by the cave-in, crumpled at one corner, cracked at another, but basically sound. It was still open to the same place.

  Gideon's burst of laughter drew startled looks from the others. Marmolejo in particular looked at him peculiarly, but how could he explain how funny it was? All that grave, dedicated work by the Committee for Mayan Scholarship, all the paper they'd generated, all that brilliant strategy to prevent Howard from selling the codex—and here it had been all the time, bruised and buried, but eminently safe under tons of rubble.

  He stared at it, drinking up the sight; the ancient codex, the shadowy stone passageway, the vibrant old man. “Congratulations, Abe. What a—"

  He stopped, frowning. Something had caught his eye a few feet from the codex. A small, unnoteworthy knot of gnarled, sticklike objects the color of driftwood, barely visible, protruding half an inch from the rubble that still covered the bottom steps and the base of the stairwell. “Just a minute,” he said.

  He put a hand on Abe's shoulder and worked his way around him, gingerly stepping over the codex. The height of the uncleared rubble made it impossible to stand up straight. He hunkered down and brushed some dirt away with his fingers.

  "Leo,” he said, “would you twist that lamp so it's focused here?"

  He ran his fingertips over the sticklike objects and pulled away some more debris. The others watched him, curious and silent. No one seemed to want to ask what they were.

  "It's a right elbow joint,” he said without preamble, “still mostly buried.” He pointed to the visible ends of each of the bones. “Humerus, ulna, radius."

  "Articulatio cubiti," Harvey said automatically.

  "Do you mean a—a human elbow joint?” Worthy stammered.

  Gideon nodded.

  "There's a skeleton under there?” Worthy had paled. In the lurid illumination his face looked like wax.

  "I'm afraid so,” Gideon said.

  "Maybe it's—well, it's probably just an old one. You know, another Mayan burial."

  "No,” Gideon said, “it's only a few years old. I can—” But Worthy was already disturbed enough, and Leo and Julie didn't look too happy either. There wasn't much reason to explain that he could still smell the candle-wax odor of the drying fat in the bone marrow. And that would surely have been gone after a few years. Besides, most of the joint cartilage was still there, and even a few shreds of ligament.

  "It's recent,” he said simply.

  But not that recent. There was no trace of rancidity left, nor any sign of the insects and vermin that had performed the cleanup. And the cartilage was brittle and brown. The conclusion was inescapable—and self- evident, given a moment's thought. When he looked up at the faces peering down at him with sharp, puzzled concentration, it was clear that no one had failed to grasp it. He said it anyway.

  "Whoever this is was killed when the tunnel caved in. Not before, not after. There can't be any doubt about it."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter 20

  * * * *

  No one said anything for several seconds. The whirring of mental gears in the thick air was almost audible, Gideon's among them. Who was killed? Why? How? Had someone stopped Howard from stealing the codex, only to die for his efforts? Had there been a struggle? Had the weakened walls collapsed as a result, burying the codex and its defender together, so that Howard had had to slink off empty-handed, to wait for his chance to return? It was no more bizarre than some of their other theories, and it would explain a lot.

  Only whose skeleton was it? Everyone was accounted for. Of the 1982 crew members, three were here on the stairway right now, two were at the hotel, and the others, those who had chosen not to return, were safe in the United States. Abe had talked to all of them by telephone when the dig started up. Then who...

  It was Marmolejo who supplied the answer.

  "So,” he said softly. “Avelino Canul, at last."

  Avelino Canul, the doughty little Mayan foreman who had supervised the local laborers during the earlier dig. Avelino, who had disappeared the day after the cave-in. The police had tried to locate him, but only halfheartedly. Given the corrupt and incompetent Colonel Ornelas's reputation, there had been nothing extraordinary about a Mayan (or anyone else, for that matter) who chose to run off rather than stay for police interrogation, even if he was guilty of nothing. And Avelino, it turned out, had had a few scrapes with the law in the past as the result of a long-standing fondness for rum.

  The general consensus had been that he had gone to ground in his village just over the Guatemalan border, and when Howard's letter had arrived to explain things—so they'd thought—they had abandoned the search for him. As the colonel had pointed out, if he wanted to stay hidden in his own village, among his own people, there was no way the police were going to find him—even a half-Mayan policeman like Marmolejo. And in Guatemala they had no authority anyway. They had left it at that, but Marmolejo had always been vaguely troubled; it had not satisfied his need for closure. More than once he had wondered aloud to Gideon about the fate of Avelino Canul.

  "Mr. Partridge,” he said.

  Worthy jumped. “Pardon? What?"

  "Avelino and the other laborers were dismissed when the day's work ended. How do you suppose he got back here?"

  "How do I suppose? What would I know about it?"

  "You were here at Tlaloc, on guard."

  "I—well, yes, but—it was dark. There wasn't any fence. The man was an Indian, used to the jungle. He knew the trails better than anyone. He could easily have come back without being seen."

  "Yes, I suppose that's true. Well, why do you suppose he would do that? You think he wished to steal the codex himself? Perhaps they fought over it?"

  "I'm sure I have no idea. Why ask me?” He swallowed hard. Marmolejo had frightened him.

  "No matter, senor," the inspector said pleasantly. “I'm sure matters will become clear as we progress."

  * * * *

  The rubble burying the bones was easy to remove, but it took an hour and a half because Marmolejo very properly insisted on exposing the skeleton bit by bit, layer by layer, with frequent photographs. The work was done by the two policemen, using their fingers as their main tools, and there was little for Gideon to do beyond observing and providing an occasional suggestion.

  Meanwhile, Abe meticulously finished preparing the codex for removal and placed it with exquisite care in a padded crate supplied by the police. Simply getting it into the crate took twenty minutes. Quite a difference from the Howard Bennett approach.

  When it was safely packed away, two other uniformed policemen—the entire Yucatecan State Judicial Police force seemed to be at Tlaloc—were detailed to carry it to the hotel safe to await the arrival of officials from the Institute. Abe, caught between curiosity about the skeleton and concern for the codex, opted for the codex and left with it.

  Gideon and the others remained sprawled on the steps above, watching dreamily. An exhaust fan had been set up because of the celluloid-acetone fumes, and the air was now relatively cool and dustless. It was an oddly peaceful time, free-floating and slow-paced. There were still questions, but a big corner had been turned; they were now closing in on the answers instead of getting farther away. And of course there was the recovery of the great codex to be chewed over and relished.

  By three, the skeleton was three-quarters freed, lying on its left side facing the ascending staircase, still partially embedded in the debris. Under the left wrist, the snapped metal expansion band of a wristwatch could be seen sticking out of the rubble. One of the policemen had reached to pluck it out, only to be stopped by
a tart reprimand from Marmolejo. Didn't they know better than to pull things from the dirt? Everything would remain until exposed by careful digging. It was of great importance to view and photograph all objects in their natural relation to one other.

  Gideon smiled to himself. Marmolejo would have made a hell of an archaeologist.

  At three-thirty Marmolejo told the two policemen who had been doing the digging to quit. They had started early and it had been a long day; the rest of the job could wait until morning. They stopped gratefully and went to the landing above, settling down against the wall with the tea jug.

  "Dr. Oliver,” Marmolejo said, “I wonder if enough is visible for you to look it over?"

  "Sure, if you want.” He had begun to wonder when—or if—Marmolejo was going to ask him. This time he'd known better than to offer his services unrequested. He rose and started up the steps. “I'll go and bring my tools from the work shed."

  "Ah, how long do you suppose your examination might take?"

  "It depends. Three or four hours."

  Marmolejo looked pained. He had been in the stairwell since before 7:00 a.m. “In that case,” he said reluctantly, “I think we might better wait until morning. We can have it fully ready for you then."

  "I could take a preliminary look now,” Gideon said. He didn't want to wait until morning any more than Marmolejo did. “At least see if I can confirm sex and race. Age, maybe. That kind of thing. Then tomorrow I can get my stuff and do a more thorough job."

  Marmolejo brightened. "Por favor," he said, then expressed to the others, firmly but discreetly, his reservations about having the Tlaloc staff remain as an audience, inasmuch as sensitive police business was about to be discussed. Perhaps they might continue their work in other parts of the site, or return to the hotel if they pleased?

  When Julie got up with them, he signaled to indicate that she could stay, but she seemed relieved to go. Julie had a healthy enough interest in skeletal analysis (what choice did she have, married to Gideon?) but this was the first time she'd been in on the grubby nuts and bolts of it, and she hadn't been looking altogether happy about sharing a confined space with a freshly unearthed skeleton.

  Marmolejo waited until they left, then nodded briskly to Gideon.

  Seen up close, the skeleton was battered but well preserved, still held tenuously together at many of the joints by onionskin-like shreds of ligament. There was a tangle of rust-colored hair under the skull, but that told little. With the leaching and staining that would have gone on in this limestone rubble, who could tell what color it had been originally? Cross-sectional analysis would probably have something to say about race, but that would have to be done in a laboratory, under a microscope.

  There was little in the way of clothing; just leather sandals and a blood-stiffened pair of shorts that had nearly rotted away. Shorts and sandals—had that been what Avelino had been wearing? Probably; it was what most of the men there had been wearing. If there had been underwear on this body, it was now indistinguishably matted to the outer shorts. As always, clothes on a skeleton made it seem less real, like a Halloween prank, but there was nothing whimsical about this. The rib cage was crushed, with some of the costovertebral articulations torn apart; the right pelvis was cracked and twisted away from the left; the left clavicle was fractured; the mandible was broken and gaping crookedly, with some of the teeth shattered or knocked out; and the left side of the cranium was caved in.

  At least it was dry.

  There wasn't much else to say about it that was good. The poor bastard had been squashed flat in the cave-in, and Gideon said as much.

  Marmolejo looked at him without expression. "De veras?" he inquired wryly, managing it without opening his mouth around his cigar stub.

  Gideon smiled. Yes, really. But there were a few other things of interest he might be able to come up with too. Best to start with basics. He squatted next to the skeleton, elbows on his thighs, and looked at the ruined pelvis. Gingerly, with Marmolejo's permission, he used a trowel to lift some of the decayed remnants of the shorts. They stuck to the bone a moment, then popped off.

  "Well, it's definitely a male,” he announced. That was simple enough. Everything about the pelvis shouted it: obtuse pubic angle, rounded ramus, rectangular sacrum, narrow sciatic notch. They should all be so easy.

  Marmolejo nodded. So far so good.

  Delicately, Gideon used the tip of the trowel to pick some cartilage from the pubic symphysis, the place where the right and left pelves join between the legs. Of all the surfaces on all the two hundred and six bones in the human body it is there, in that hidden and private place, that the signs of age and degeneration are most clearly and ineradicably engraved, decade by slow decade.

  With the trowel held loosely in his hand he studied the narrow, rippled surface of the bone.

  "Fifty years old,” he said after a few seconds. “Give or take five years."

  "Ah,” Marmolejo said, pleased. “Avelino, he was forty-seven.” He darted a sidelong look at Gideon. “Did you happen to know that?"

  No, Gideon hadn't known.

  Then he got down to serious work. He examined the long bones, roughly measuring a femur and a humerus against the yardstick of his own hand and forearm. With Marmolejo's approval he used his fingers to pull out some of the dirt that had lodged in the jaws, the eye sockets, and the cranium itself. He scooped out most of the dirt beneath the skull, leaving it somewhat precariously supported on a rim of debris. Each small load of dirt was placed in a separate, precisely labeled envelope for sifting by the police forensic team.

  He had one of the policemen move the lamps so that the light shone horizontally across the bones, highlighting the ridges and hollows and irregularities that could tell so much, if only you knew what to look for. And then, lying prone in the dirt, propped on his elbows, he studied them, fingering the surfaces, probing them, thinking, calculating, speaking only to ask for increasingly finicky readjustments of the lamps. Twenty minutes passed. Twenty-five.

  "A preliminary look will be fine,” Marmolejo said.

  After half an hour the inspector became openly restive, walking back and forth on one of the stairs; two small steps one way, pivot, two steps the other. Like a wolf in a cage. Marmolejo did not enjoy being an observer

  Gideon, engrossed in a set of unusual protuberances on the mandible, hardly noticed him. There were two bumps on each side of the jaw, right on the mandibular condyles—the knobs that fit into hollows on the sides of the skull to form the hinges of the jaw. He'd found nothing similar on the rest of the skeleton, so he knew it wasn't some generalized bone condition. Just two sharp little tubercles on each condyle, one on the outside, one on the inside. Only one thing could conceivably cause them, and that was the forceful, habitual use of the external pterygoids, the inconspicuous little cheek muscles that had their insertion points right there.

  Peculiar, but probably of no importance. Yet he knew those spiky little buttons would nag at him until he made sense of them. Hadn't he run across something similar before? The memory was there, but just out of reach. All right, then figure it out from scratch. What did the external pterygoids do? They were part of the chewing apparatus, of course; thick, triangular little fiber bundles that protruded the lower jaw and moved it from side to side in the complex and improbable process of human chewing. But a lifetime of ordinary chewing wouldn't produce these bumps. So what he needed to figure out was...no, wait a minute. It had been that Pittsburgh case...

  Marmolejo's impatience finally got the better of him. “Well, are you able to tell me nothing? Can we say for certain that it's Avelino, or can we not?"

  "What?” Gideon surfaced slowly, his mind still on the tubercles. “Uh...no,” he said.

  "No, you're unable to say, or no—"

  "No, it's not Avelino."

  Wrong answer. Marmolejo's half-closed eyes opened briefly, then slitted again. The cigar stub jerked irritably. “Just like that? One look and the answer is no?"

/>   Gideon glared up at him, matching irritation for irritation. If Marmolejo thought it was such a quick look he should have tried it on his elbows and belly. The back of Gideon's neck ached from keeping his head up, his left hand had fallen asleep, and when he lifted his elbows from the pebbly debris, they felt as if a set of tacks were being pushed into them. He stood up, rubbing the numb hand.

  These remains, he explained crisply, were assuredly not Avelino Canul's, whatever the inspector wanted to believe. This had been a man anywhere from six feet tall to six-feet-two, judging from the quick-and-dirty measurement of the humerus and femur, and Canul wouldn't have been anywhere near that.

  "I will check,” Marmolejo said. “I'm certain I have his height in my files."

  Gideon merely looked at the five-foot-tall Marmolejo. What difference did the files make? Couldn't he remember how small Avelino was? Who had ever heard of a six-foot Maya?

  Besides, he pointed out, in almost every way the skull was everything that a Mayan skull was not. The cranium wasn't wide and round—the Mayan brachycephalic norm—but long and narrow, a typical northern European dolichocephal. The cheekbones were curving, not squared; the palatal arch was V-shaped, not U-shaped; the orbits squarish and smoothly bordered, not sharp; the face as a whole was rugged and large-featured, not smooth and compact. In all, a classic Caucasoid skull, suitable for an illustration in a textbook.

  And there was more—

  But Marmolejo withered under the assault and lifted a resigned hand. “I submit,” he said, and even managed a small, not unfriendly smile. “I know when I am beaten.” He stared thoughtfully down at the skeleton.

  "Who, then?” he murmured.

  Gideon waited until the inspector's wide-set eyes swung up to meet his.