by Aaron Elkins
Nava silenced him with a brusque motion of his hand. “All right, just tell me about it. And speak more slowly, for God’s sake. I already have a headache.” He jerked up the cuff of his shirt, grasped the face of his watch between thumb and forefinger, and studied it, sending a clear message: I am a busy man. My time is extremely valuable. I will allot a little of it to you, but be quick about it.
Still, he listened to what Sandoval had to say, or at least he allowed Sandoval to talk without interrupting him, other than the occasional finger-waving “Yes, yes,” to hurry him along—for almost five minutes. But he made it no secret that his mind was elsewhere. He asked no questions and jotted down only a couple of brief notes.
Obviously, he wasn’t much interested in the case, for which Gideon couldn’t blame him: a drifter, his body subjected to the depredations of the desert for half a year before anybody found it, with no apparent clues as to who had killed him or why—there wasn’t much the policía were going to be able to do about it, or, frankly, much impetus for them to try. Nava was doing pretty much what an American police Sergeant would do in his place: going through the motions for the record. But most American sergeants, or so Gideon hoped, would have done it a little more courteously.
Sandoval too was quick to spot the lack of interest, and it cheered him up perceptibly. His thoughts flowed across his mobile face as clearly as if he’d spoken them: maybe this wasn’t going to be as bad as he’d feared, maybe they’d just tell him to go ahead and bury the body and they’d get around to it when they could sometime, maybe—
Nava had been thumbing abstractedly through the thin folder that Sandoval had supplied, and his first question, interrupting Sandoval in mid-sentence, was directed at Gideon. He held up the report on Garcia’s body.
“You’re Professor Oliver? You wrote this?”
“Yes.”
“It’s in English.”
“Yes.”
“But obviously you speak Spanish.”
“Speak, yes—a little. But I don’t write it well enough for a police report. I assumed you’d have somebody here who could translate. I’ll be glad to help.”
“Mm.” Nava’s lips, barely visible under his mustache, were pursed. Sandoval held his tongue, only too happy to have the sergeant’s attention directed at Gideon and not at him. However, when Nava spoke again it was to Sandoval. With a jerk of his head at Gideon, he said, “If you think we are paying for his report, you’re mistaken. It was authorized without my permission. God knows we spent enough on your last case. Unless you have a budget for it, he will have to go without his fee.”
“There’s no charge for my services,” Gideon said, more curtly than he’d intended, but the continuing rudeness from Nava and from the guard had riled him. In most matters he didn’t have a particularly short fuse, but some things could quickly get under his skin, and gratuitous rudeness from people in positions of power was one of them. Especially when they were gun-toting guys with necks that were thicker than their heads. Bullying was what it was, plain and simple. Still, he understood all too well that he was in a culture not his own, with mores he wasn’t accustomed to. His readiness to take offense at this sort of treatment in similar situations had gotten him into difficulties more than once before. He resolved to do better at holding his temper, if for no other reason than to keep from getting Sandoval into trouble.
Fortunately, Nava hadn’t even noticed his sharpness. He was thinking, his fingers drumming on the desk. He lifted his head and called: “Cruz! Who knows English around here?”
The reply came over the partition from the next cubicle. “The colonel speaks very good English, Sergeant.”
“Maybe, but I’m not bothering him with this. The less he knows about what’s going on, the happier I am. Is there no one else?”
A moment of thoughtful silence. “I’m pretty sure his adjutant knows some too. Corporal Vela.”
“That will be better. All right, I have something for you to take to him for translation.”
“Now?”
“No, next month. Of course, now.”
Another mustached, slab-like face loomed up over the shoulder-high partition, although on Cruz it came only up to the middle of his chest. Where do they get these monsters? the physical anthropologist in Gideon wondered. In Mexico, especially this far south, you wouldn’t expect to run into too many men over five-seven or five-eight. But he’d yet to see a member of the policía ministerial who wasn’t a good six-two, and built like a UPS truck to boot.
With the cubicles as compact as they were, Cruz didn’t have to come around for the report, simply reaching a brawny, black-clad arm down for it.
“Now make sure you ask the colonel first if it’s all right with him if we borrow Vela for a few minutes,” Sandoval cautioned, handing it up to him. “We don’t want to get into trouble with him.” Gideon thought he saw Nava’s right hand make an incipient sign of the cross, a warding off of calamity. “You know what he can be like.”
“I know, I know.”
Nava began to wrap up their interview, but Cruz was back before a minute had gone by. “The colonel wants to see him,” he told Nava.
“He does?”
Sandoval paled. “Mother of God,” he said in English, “I don’t want to see no colonel.” He looked futilely around him for help.
“Not you. Him.” Cruz pointed at Gideon. Sandoval closed his eyes and sagged with relief.
“Him?” Nava was puzzled. He looked at Gideon, looked at Sandoval, and looked again at the folder, reassessing. Was there more to this than he’d realized, some import he hadn’t grasped, something on which he’d better make sure he was up to snuff?
“All right, Cruz, if the professor wouldn’t mind . . .” An inquiring pause, a newly polite manner, to which Gideon responded with a nod to show that no, he didn’t mind. “. . . take him there, please.” Then he turned to Sandoval with freshened interest and a deferential gesture. “Perhaps, Chief Sandoval, if you would be kind enough to go over this in a little more detail. . . .”
Trailing behind Cruz, Gideon, wondering himself why a colonel—a very high level in the Mexican police system—would take an interest in something like this, walked down the corridor past another half dozen cubicles, where the hallway widened out to create a sort of anteroom in front of a wooden door, a real door that opened and closed, the first he’d seen here. Beside it was a desk at which yet another six-foot-plus cop in black sat at a computer. Corporal Vela, Gideon assumed, and was proved correct when he picked up a telephone, hit a button, and said: “He’s here, Colonel. Yes, sir.”
He got up, went to the door, opened it, and politely motioned for Gideon to enter. “Please,” he said in English.
Gideon sucked in a breath, stood up straight, promised himself not to lose his temper, and walked into a room that was like the important offices in the building must have been in the glory days before the place was chopped up into cubicles: a shining slate floor (instead of tired old linoleum); a high plaster ceiling (instead of a low-hung one of acoustic tiles) edged with ornate floral cornices; tall, mullioned, Gothic-arched windows on two sides; heavy, black, old furniture in a sort of Hispanic-Victorian style, oiled and gleaming. All very imposing and forbidding, as if designed to make a petitioner or a miscreant feel inconsequential, vulnerable, and small. Add a few age-darkened fifteenth-century Spanish paintings of crucifixions and martyrdoms, Gideon thought, and it would have made a fine office for a deputy grand inquisitor. There were age-darkened paintings on the walls, all right, but they were portraits of high-collared nineteenth-century officials and bureaucrats.
In the exact center of this room, under a rudely hammered iron chandelier that had once held oil lamps but now had electric bulbs in ornamental hurricane-lantern fittings, was a massive, carved desk. At it was the fear-inspiring colonel himself, under the circumstances an astonishing sight. Dwarfed by the huge desk and his thronelike carved chair, looking directly at Gideon, he hardly seemed to be a member of t
he same species as the gorillas Gideon had been running into until now; closer to a marmoset, and a good-humored, wise old marmoset at that. Nor was he swathed in grim matte black either, but wearing a Yucatecan guayabera, the embroidered, open-throated, and distinctly informal white shirt worn outside the trousers. On his lined, clean-shaven, mahogany-skinned, twinkly-eyed face was a perfectly delighted grin.
“Hello, my friend,” he said in elegantly accented Englih. “How are you? And how is your beautiful wife, the charming and gifted Julie?”
Astounded, even speechless for a couple of seconds, Gideon stared at him. “. . . I don’t believe it. . . . Javier?”
“None other,” said Colonel Javier Marmolejo, coming out from around the desk (and not coming up much higher than he’d been when sitting in the big chair). They shook hands warmly and even tried a brief, gingerly abrazo, although their size difference made it awkward, and neither of them went in much for such things in any case.
They stepped apart to look each other over. “Well, you’ve gotten a little older, Gideon. Is that a bit of gray I see in your hair?”
“Yes, a little,” Gideon said. “I have to say, you sure look exactly the same.” This was a bit of a lie. seen close up, Marmolejo had grown even more wizened than he’d been before; he was beginning to look less like a monkey than the mummy of a monkey. But there was no mistaking the wit and intelligence that still flashed in his eyes. “Except where’s the ever-present cigar?” Gideon asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without one before.”
“Oh, I’ve given up cigar smoking. At my age, one has to care for one’s health.”
Gideon couldn’t help laughing. “You mean cigar holding,” he said. The Marmolejo he remembered had always had a cigar around, all right, but it was strictly a prop cigar. Gideon couldn’t remember ever seeing him light it.
Happily chuckling, Marmolejo took him by the arm to a grouping of handsome leather armchairs and a low table in a corner of the room near the windows. “My old friend, I was amazed—thrilled, as you can imagine, but amazed—to see your name on the report. What in the world brings you to Oaxaca?”
“I’m here on vacation, Javier. Julie is filling in for her cousin at a resort in Teotitlán, and I’m along for the ride. But I still don’t—”
Marmolejo laughed and held up Gideon’s report. “And this is how you spend your vacation? Performing forensic analyses on corpses? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“Well . . . this just came along. I mean, I just happened to be . . . Hey, never mind about me. What are you doing here? The last time I saw you . . .”
The last time he’d seen him had been in Mérida, on the Yucatán Peninsula, where he had been an inspector in the Yucatecan State Judicial Police. Gideon had met a lot of interesting and unusual policemen in his life, but Javier Alfonso Marmolejo took the cake, a real one of a kind. Half Mayan Indian, born in his Mayan mother’s village of Tzakol, a huddle of dilapidated shacks near the Quintana Roo border (Gideon had been there once; what he chiefly remembered were the pigs sunning themselves in the middle of the single, muddy street), Marmolejo had not learned Spanish until he was seven, when his father moved the family to Mérida. At ten, he was one of the army of rascally, going-nowhere kids selling takeaway snacks of sliced coconuts and grapefruit and orange slices from homemade carts around the main market square. Against all odds, he had gotten himself through school and saved enough to buy his way into the then graft-riddled Yucatecan police department. A drastic cleanup a few years later had resulted in throwing out half the police force, but Marmolejo’s integrity and abilities had been recognized and he’d been kept on. A few years later he’d graduated from the national police academy in Mexico City—one of the few provincial cops to do so, and probably the first Mayan Indian—and, in his forties, had gone on to a master’s degree in public administration from the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán. He’d studied English and German, he’d become an educated man, and now, in his mid-fifties, here he was a full-fledged—
“. . . full-fledged colonel!” Gideon said. “In Oaxaca, five hundred miles from Mérida. How did that happen?”
“A thousand, actually,” Marmolejo said. “And although I am indeed a full-fledged colonel, as you are generous enough to point out, I am not a colonel in the Oaxacan police force but in the PFP, the Federal Preventive Police, to which I applied three years ago and to which I was subsequently admitted. My assignment to Oaxaca is a temporary one.” He eyed Gideon, his head cocked. “Why are you smiling?”
Gideon was smiling because he was remembering a comment a mutual friend had once made about the striking incongruity between Marmolejo’s furtive, cunning appearance and his often elegant English: “You look at the man and you expect ‘I don’ got to show you no steenkin’ bedge.’ Instead, you get Ricardo Montalban.” And he was smiling because he was still thinking about the absent cigar, remembering Marmolejo’s uncanny ability to have an unlighted one wedged in his mouth on and off throughout the day without making a gummy, oozy mess out of it. Unlike most unlit-cigar fanciers, he didn’t chew on the things any more than he actually smoked them. There had been a running joke about it in Yucatán: Do you think he really has more than one cigar, or is that the same one he brings with him every day?
“I’m smiling because I’m just so damn glad to see you again,” Gideon said, which was also true enough on its own. “But go ahead. If you’re with the federales, what are you doing behind a desk in Oaxaca?”
His responsibilities with the PFP, Marmolejo explained, involved straightening out local police forces with less than stellar reputations, an assemblage in which the Oaxacan policía ministerial was—or at any rate, had been—a prime member. The initial impetus for sending him here had come in 2006, when federal police more or less had to take over the city during a string of violent antipolice protests with which the local police couldn’t cope. In the aftermath, the feds had concluded that a general housecleaning was in order and Marmolejo had been one of three experienced federal cops temporarily assigned to high-level line positions in Oaxaca. He functioned as the titular head of homicide investigations, but his primary responsibility was to mount a thorough review of past cases. The Oaxaca police, beset by graft, negligence, and plain old bungling, had a sorry history of dubious case closures and unresolved investigations, and it was Marmolejo’s job to dig out the worst of them and rectify what could be rectified. Not only could he reopen old investigations; he’d been given full authority to demote, indict, or summarily boot out dishonest, obstructive, and incompetent cops. He had in fact, done exactly that with his predecessor in this fine office, the notorious, corrupt, and roundly hated Colonel Salvador Archuleta, at that time the second most powerful cop in Oaxaca.
No wonder Sergeant Nava wanted to keep on his good side.
“Interestingly enough,” Marmolejo told him, “one of these ‘cold cases,’ as you call them, and a relatively recent one at that, involves this same village of Teotitlán and this same Chief Sandoval of yours. I was looking at it only this morning.”
“Yes, he was telling me about it.” Gideon hesitated. “I can’t say he was too happy with the way the police ran things then. He’s petrified at the idea of going through it again.”
Marmolejo nodded. “I’ve been going over it, and I can’t say that I’m too happy with it either. And as you might guess, it is a case that disturbs me deeply.”
“It does? Why?”
Marmolejo scowled. The question surprised him. “Why? A young girl, an innocent barely into her teenage years, murdered after God knows what was done to her, her body callously thrown down a mine shaft and left for the worms? An investigation ended after a single month, with the child never identified, with no one charged, no credible suspects named? How can I not be disturbed?”
“I see. I didn’t know she was so young.”
“Yes, only thirteen or fourteen. Or so the forensic report concluded. The remains had been there for some time, you see. They
were skeletonized.”
“It was a skeleton?” Again Gideon hesitated, not wanting to give offense. But being Gideon, he was interested. “Um, are you sure it was a girl? I mean, when you’re dealing with someone as young as that, determining sex from the skeleton can be tricky.”
“Can it?” Marmolejo asked. “I didn’t realize.”
“More than tricky, really. You see, if the secondary sexual characteristics—the ones on the outside—haven’t fully developed yet, the skeletal indicators aren’t all that reliable either. In fact, until you get to eighteen or so, you’re on pretty thin ice when it comes to sex. I mean, a competent anthropologist might be maybe sixty or seventy percent confident, but that’s not good enough to be much use in an investigation, and it’s sure not good enough to go into court with.”
“You don’t think so? If all my leads had a sixty or seventy percent chance of proving accurate, I would be a happy man. And a far more successful policeman.”
“Not when it comes to sexing a skeleton. Look at it this way. sixty percent right means forty percent wrong. But there are only two sexes to begin with, so you can do damn near as well flipping a coin, and it’s a whole lot less work.”
“Yes, I see your point.” Marmolejo considered. “This interests me. Would you be interested in seeing the report for yourself?”
“If you think I might be able to help, sure.” Or even if not.
“Good.” Marmolejo went to the door. “Alejandro, can you put aside what you’re doing and translate something for Professor Oliver, please? The forensic report on the unidentified child from Teotitlán del Valle. And bring me the entire file.”
As he returned, Gideon was struck all over again by what a truly tiny man Marmolejo was. Standing no more than five-two in his ridiculously small, well-cared-for oxfords, and dressed in guayabera and neatly pressed, light blue trousers, he seemed as improbable a cop as Sandoval. But Gideon knew better. Marmolejo was quick-witted, astute, and thorough, with an enviable intuitiveness, a kind of outside-the-box sixth sense that Gideon liked to think had something to do with the mystical teachings of his Mayan heritage—or rather that he would have thought, had he not been the thoroughgoing rational empiricist that of course he was.
