Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  He was still at it twenty minutes later, bubbling with enthusiasm, after the plane had landed at Xoxocotlán International Airport (usually referred to, for obvious reasons, as Oaxaca Airport), a small, single-terminal affair with a couple of runways carved out of a landscape of dry brown fields.

  “But think about how hard it was to build. Shaving off the top of a mountain was just the start,” he said as he pulled their bags from the luggage rack. “All those huge stones they used to build it had to be dragged all the way up from the valley floor almost fifteen hundred feet below—a hundred and fifty stories. Think about that. These were small people; the men were only five feet tall or so. How did they do it? They hadn’t figured out the use of the wheel for transportation yet. And what about shaping the stone? They had no metal tools. How did they do that? Why did they do it?”

  “Carl,” she said.

  “And how did they—what?”

  “The man coming toward us—the cowboy. That’s my Uncle Carl. He’s here to pick us up.” She shook her head, smiling. “God, he never ages. He looks the same as he looked fifteen years ago. More than fifteen years ago.”

  Julie gave her uncle a happy hug, then made the introductions. Gideon liked him right away. A lanky, loose-limbed man, perhaps an inch shorter than Gideon’s six-two, he was in denims and scuffed boots and carried a hat in his hand; not the ubiquitous straw campesino ’s sombrero that was on just about every male head in rural Mexico, but a genuine cowboy’s ten-gallon Stetson (although Gideon had read somewhere that a ten-gallon hat would hold only three gallons of water), convincingly sweat-stained and curled.

  Gideon saw right away why he reminded Julie of Gary Cooper. He was appealing in the same lean, rawboned way, graceful and awkward at the same time, with a weathered, wise, kind/stern face and a reserve that somehow managed to convey both shyness and a serene self-assurance. He even had a lazy Western twang to go along with all this; Montana, Gideon thought, or the Dakotas. The only off-note was the sharply delineated fish-belly-white expanse of skin from just above his eyebrows to his thinning widow’s peak. Clearly, the hat he was holding in his hand was rarely off his head in the outdoors.

  His daughter Annie, for whom Julie would be filling in, was waiting at the curb outside, beside a dusty red Ford Explorer SUV with the Hacienda logo, a photographic blowup of a man and a woman on horseback on the side. Annie, like Julie in her mid-thirties, was plump and pretty (in a squirrel-faced kind of way) and as voluble and feisty as her father was strong and silent. Her welcoming hug of Julie involved emphatic, bilateral cheek-to-cheek air kisses, during which her steady stream of chatter never missed a word.

  “Dorotea’s making a late breakfast snack for you,” she was chirping as they got into the van. “Quesadillas de queso; she makes them with epazote and green chiles . . . yum! I wasn’t going to join you—I’ve already had breakfast, but I’m making myself hungry. Maybe I’ll have just one. . . .”

  Gideon sat in front with Carl, so that Julie and Annie could catch up more easily, and the two women gabbed happily away about people he’d never met, with names either unknown to him or only hazily familiar. He had grown a little sleepy again—it was just after eight o’clock in the morning; they had taken a red-eye from Mexico City rather than staying the night at an airport hotel—so he was content to sit quietly and watch the scrub-dotted countryside slide by, so starkly different from the green, cool ambience of the Olympic Peninsula. And Carl was the sort of man who was just as happy, or probably more so, to be sitting in companionable silence as he would be to making conversation.

  The airport was on the south side of the city, on the way to Teotitlán, so in no more than ten minutes they were free of the bustle of city traffic and the scrawled political graffiti, and out in a wide, flat valley checkered with the same small, rectangular farms he had seen from the air. Most were communally owned, he’d read, a result of the sweeping nineteenth-century reforms of Benito Juárez. Here in Oaxaca, Juárez’s home, virtually all of the old haciendas and large ranchos had been broken up. There were alfalfa plots, corn, garbanzos, maguey (for making mezcal), cereal crops for animal feeds . . . not that he could tell one from the other, of course, but so he’d read and so he believed.

  There were small communities on the flanks of the distant dun-colored hills on either side, but buildings in the center of the valley, along the highway, were scarce. There was an occasional isolated roadside tourist shop—weavings, mezcal, crafts—but no businesses geared to the locals. And those few scattered dwellings that existed near the highway were in small family compounds enclosed within high whitewashed walls, although every now and then one in brilliant tangerine orange, or canary yellow, or chartreuse green would bring him suddenly awake.

  When, after a while, he was awake enough to tune in to the conversation behind him, Annie was bringing Julie up to date on things at the Hacienda. Her uncle Jamie, the resort bookkeeper, had indeed left for Minnesota a few days ago to have his knee operated on. Annie would be staying through today so she could orient Julie on things, but she would head for Winston-Salem the next morning to wrap up the last of her divorce. Tony Gallagher was back home in Mexico City at the moment—

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Julie said. “I’d love to have seen Uncle Tony.” Tony, being Carl’s brother-in-law, wasn’t actually Julie’s uncle, but she had come to refer to him that way when she was working at the Hacienda. She had felt strange calling him “mister,” she had once explained to Gideon, and she’d been too shy to call him “Tony,” so “Uncle Tony” it had been. For whatever reason—perhaps that he was younger—Tony’s brother Jamie, who had exactly the same relationship to her that Tony did, was just plain Jamie. Interestingly enough, Annie, who was niece to both of them, called neither of them “uncle.”

  “You will see Tony,” Annie said. “He’s planning on coming down in a couple of days.”

  “You mean Tony doesn’t live here?” Gideon asked. “He lives in Mexico City?”

  “On the outskirts,” Annie said. “In Coyoacán. In this fabulous gated community surrounded by other rich Yanquis, assorted strung-out rock stars, and the occasional Colombian drug lord. He only comes down here once a month or so for a few days.”

  “So who runs the Hacienda? I mean, who’s in charge?”

  “Nobody’s in charge,” Julie said. “It’s a family affair. No boss, really. Right, Uncle Carl?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess that’s true,” Carl said. “We just kinda get along, muddle through, you know? Jamie makes sure we get the bills paid, and Annie kinda keeps an eye on things around the place, keeps us all in line. Not that much to it, really.”

  “says you!” Annie said, then loyally added: “And you do plenty too, Pop. The place wouldn’t even exist without you.”

  “Aw, hell, I just look after the horses,” Carl said softly.

  “But Tony does own it?” Gideon asked.

  “Oh, Tony owns it, all right,” Carl said with a nod. “You got that right.”

  “Okay, fill me in a little, would you, folks? Tony Gallagher is an American, isn’t he? How did he come to own the Hacienda Encantada?”

  “Well, yes, he’s an American citizen, all right,” Annie said, “because he was born there, but he was raised on the Hacienda, although it wasn’t the Hacienda back then. See, his father—my grandfather—Julie, didn’t you ever tell this husband of yours all this stuff?”

  “Of course I did. He just didn’t pay attention, although he did put on a pretty good act.”

  Julie and Gideon both laughed, and she reached forward to give his shoulder an affectionate squeeze with just a little bit of a wicked twist at the end. The thing was, it was exactly the kind of thing he was always accusing her of when she failed to commit to memory some fascinating point he’d made about skeletal morphology or protohominid locomotion.

  And the excuse he gave now was just about as lame as hers usually were. “I guess it didn’t seem to appertain to anything concrete at the time. Now that
I’m here, it’s become highly germane.”

  “Appertain,” Carl said, appreciatively rolling the word around his mouth, trying it out on his tongue. “Highly germane. Whoa. Does he talk like that all the time, sweetie?”

  “I warned you,” Julie said. “He’s a professor.”

  “Right,” said Gideon. “It’s what I do. Hey, I even know some better words than that. Wait till you get to know me. But go ahead, tell me about Tony.”

  “You tell him, Pop,” Annie said. “Pop knows the whole story better than anyone.”

  “Well, okay, sure,” Carl drawled. “Guess I better start with the place itself. . . .”

  A hundred and fifty years ago, the Hacienda Encantada had been a genuine hacienda, a real working sisal ranch, including a small factory where the sisal was made into rope. But by the 1940s the property, then an eccentric compound of decrepit nineteenth-century buildings surrounded by almost eighty acres of maguey plantings from which the sisal had been made, had stood, unused and moldering, for twenty years. It had been bought in 1947 by Annie’s grandfather, Vince Gallagher, a wounded Army veteran who had combined his military payout with his life’s savings to live out his dream of ranching in some sunny, warm place as far away from his home in International Falls, Minnesota (officially the coldest city in the continental United States) as possible. Knowing little about either ranching or farming—before the war he had worked as a steamfitter—he hired an “agricultural consultant,” on whose advice he tore out the exhausted old magueys, replacing them with tobacco plants and coffee trees, and invested heavily in stock for fighting bulls and fine Arabian riding horses.

  Things didn’t work out as hoped, however. The consultant turned out to be a crook, bullfighting turned out to be illegal in Oaxaca (who knew?), and the plantings had a hard time of it in the rain-starved hills. Only the horses, against all odds, were a success, but only a modest one. Worst of all, his new Mexican wife, the beautiful, flashing-eyed Beatriz, decided after her first trip to the United States that she liked International Falls better than Teotitlán and began spending more and more time there with the Minnesota Gallaghers, who were glad to take her in, not only having taken a genuine liking to her, but relishing the chance to penalize Vince for having chosen to leave in the first place. And with medical care far superior to what was available in Mexico, she made sure to be in Minnesota for the birth of each of her three children. Eventually she would spend more than half the year there, almost always taking their children with her.

  It made for a lonely life for Vince, who, underneath his romantic expatriate veneer, was really a family man at heart. Still, he managed to keep the place going—barely—by raising and selling his horses, and later on by boarding them and working with an Oaxaca tour agency that specialized in back-country treks. In 1975 he brought in Carl, the Montana-ranch-raised son of an Army buddy, to handle that end of the business, and there Carl had remained ever since.

  In 1978, Vince, a two-pack-a-day man (three packs a day in his twenties) had died from complications from the emphysema that had plagued him for ten years, and Tony Gallagher, then about twenty-five, a year older than Carl was, had taken over the ranch.

  “Tony was the oldest of his children?” Gideon asked.

  Annie answered for Carl. “That’s right. Tony was the oldest, then my mother—Blaze was her name—and then Jamie. In fact my grand-mother died giving birth to him, do I have that right, Pop?”

  “Well, not long after. Anyway, to go back to after Vince died and Tony took over . . . Whew, talk about a new broom. . . .”

  Carl paused to give his full attention to making a left turn from the highway. As with everything else, he was a focused, deliberate, unhurried driver—he took his time, patiently waiting a good twenty seconds for a rattletrap pickup coming from the other way to approach and get safely by. (“Go, already,” Annie mouthed silently, rolling her eyes.) Finally, when the highway was clear for as far as the eye could see, he turned onto a narrow, potholed, shoulderless, utterly deserted, but more or less paved road. The rusted green sign read, 2 KM TEOTITLÁN. In front of them the road crested a low rise, then disappeared into dry, gently undulating brushland dotted with small farms, with the stark brown hills in the distance. Carl took up the story again as they started down.

  Tony Gallagher, young as he was, had a good head for business and was a natural salesman besides. There were a couple of Mexico City mining outfits that had been angling for mineral rights to the land—gold and silver concessions—but Vince had been turning them down in hopes of getting them to up their offers. Tony took a different, tougher tack: They wanted the mineral rights? Fine, but the only way they were going to get them was to buy the land itself. He maneuvered them into a bidding war and eventually sold off almost all of the original rancho, seventy-five of the eighty acres, for almost $500,000—this was in 1980 money—keeping only the hacienda complex itself.

  The mining operations failed, but Tony had made out like a bandit. He used the money to restore the hacienda buildings and convert them to a high-end dude ranch/retreat/resort, and within three years the Hacienda Encantada was in the black. After that he’d made a lot of money in the markets. He’d made his primary home in Coyoacán since 1995, living there now with his fourth wife, the Miss Chihuahua 1992 second runner-up. But every now and then he liked to spend a few days at the Hacienda to see how things were going, make some simple repairs—he loved working with his hands—

  “Ha!” Annie cried. “Working with his hands is right! He comes up here to get away from his nutball wife Conchita and make himself a sweet little love nest with whoever his current local sweet patootie is. The repair work’s his cover with Conchita.”

  “Annie,” Carl said, “that’s not the kind of thing I like to hear coming out of your mouth.”

  “I thought I was being generous,” Annie said. “You guys will meet her, don’t worry; he loves to show them off. Who is it now, Pop? Is it still Preciosa the Pretentious? It must be a year now. Isn’t he about ready for a new one?”

  “Come on, now, Annie,” Carl said, “that’s no way to talk about your uncle.”

  “Hey, am I knocking it? More power to him, I say. I just wish he had better taste.”

  “Annie—”

  “You two will love Preciosa, she of the swanlike Neck,” Annie said. “I guess she’s some kind of international hotel management consultant. Tony met her at a conference in Mexico City where she was a speaker. Every time she shows up here, she’s got some new harebrained scheme that he makes us try.”

  “Annie,” said Carl, “don’t you think you’re being a little hard on her?”

  “What, swimming with the Fishes wasn’t harebrained?”

  “Well,” Carl said, “it wasn’t a bad idea to begin with. It just didn’t work out.”

  Annie emitted a honk of a laugh. “I’ll say! see,” she said to Julie and Gideon, “she was all worked up about the idea of putting in a kind of swimming with the Dolphins attraction?—like they have in Hawaii?—in a mostly dried-up pond we have out back, so we lined the whole thing with concrete—it cost a mint—but of course, dolphins can’t make it here, so she went to work to find a local fish that could, and that wouldn’t mind a bunch of humans floundering around with it. Unfortunately, the one she came up with, carpa cabezona , had an English name that seemed to turn off the Americans for some reason. Don’t ask me why, but swimming with the Bighead Carp just never caught on.”

  Even Carl joined in on the laughter with a soft, throaty chuckle.

  “But you know,” Annie said, “we’d put a lot of money into it—”

  “Tony had put in a lot of money,” Carl corrected.

  “—on water flow control, and drainage technology, and so on, so the next year, Preciosa has an even better idea of how to recoup. ‘I know, let’s turn the pond into a therapeutic mud bath!’ So we did. Well, the problem there was that the people who put it in were pool people. They didn’t really know how to drain a mud bath prope
rly or keep it clean, so within a couple of months, you didn’t want to be within two hundred yards of it.” She made a face. “Ooh, that was nasty.”

  Carl had to agree. “That was pretty nasty, all right.”

  “On the other hand,” Annie said, “Preciosa’s a hell of an improvement over the one before. Rosie was really—”

  “All right, that’s enough now,” Carl said sharply. “Tony’s affairs are—” He corrected himself. “Tony’s personal life is not your affair. Not mine either.”

  “Yes, Pop,” Annie said meekly.

  Gideon thought a slight shift of subject was in order. He turned toward the back. “And your mother, Annie, did she—”

  “We lost her,” Carl said curtly, closing down the conversation the way a slamming iron door closes down a corridor.

  Now what did I step into? Gideon wondered.

  FIVE

  IT was a while before he found out. The rest of the drive was completed without further talk, other than work-related dialogue between Julie and Annie, and when they reached the Hacienda there were some difficulties to contend with. For one thing, there was a minor kerfuffle over their room. It seemed that Josefa, who supervised the housekeeping staff, had gotten things mixed up. (“I’m shocked. Shocked,” Gideon heard Annie mutter.) Josefa had followed instructions to have their room spruced up, but she had mistakenly thought that they wouldn’t be arriving until the next day. Thus, the room was presently in mid-sprucing, its floor strewn with cleaning supplies, touch-up paint, and bedding and linens fresh and not so fresh. It would be a while before it was usable.

  In addition, two American women, in for a workshop to be conducted at the Hacienda, had been waiting there for twenty minutes, drinking coffee, impatient and angry, for somebody who spoke decent English to show up to register them and give them keys to their room.