Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  “I see. And what about Jamie? How did he strike you?”

  “Jamie? He’s gotten more than ever like Jamie—mousy, fussy, persnickety—”

  “Well, he is a bookkeeper.”

  “Gideon, I’m surprised at you!” She cried, but she was laughing. “That is hardly the kind of hackneyed, stereotypical remark that I expect from a respectable professor of anthropology.”

  Abjectly, he bowed his head. “You’re right. I don’t know what came over me. Strike it from the record.”

  “Consider it done. But Jamie—I’m making him sound worse than he is. He’s really nice, very likeable. Well, they all are, really. You’ll see. . . .” She sipped her wine pensively.

  “But?”

  “But—I don’t know, I used to envy them all so much, living this romantic, exotic life in Mexico. Now I find myself feeling a little sorry for them all. What a strange kind of existence they have down here, when you think about it. Carl, Annie, Jamie—Tony for that matter—they’ve lived here all or most of their lives, but they’re not Mexican and won’t ever be Mexican. They’re not really American anymore either, for that matter, except technically. They’re foreigners wherever they are.”

  “That’s true. Like the Man in the Iron Mask. Must be tough. The ones I’ve met so far, Annie and Carl, I noticed they both speak with a slight accent now, a kind of Mexican lilt. And my guess is that the Mexicans find their Spanish not quite right. It’s almost as if they don’t have a native language.”

  “And yet they do seem happy enough when you look at them. Or at least not unhappy.”

  “Well, different people have different reactions. Me, I’m the way you are. I’d have a hard time living between two cultures like that.” He got out of his chair and stepped over to a nearby hammock hanging between two posts. “I think I’m going to give this thing a try.”

  It was easier said than done, especially while holding a wine glass, but eventually he managed to get all his appendages safely in, while spilling no more than a couple of drops. “Mm, comfortable,” he said. “So tell me about what the work is like. Not too overwhelming, I hope.”

  “Couldn’t have been easier. One departure—a nice, quiet German family that’s been here a week—and no arrivals, so all I have to worry about are the feminist professors. So mostly I just ‘supervised.’ And with Jamie here now, I can stop worrying about receipts, or check stubs, or reconciling the bank statement, knock on wood. Those professors, whatever else you might say about them, are very easy guests, nothing high-maintenance about them. No special requests, no complaints. Mostly they keep to themselves, but they’ve signed on for several of the hikes and horseback rides that Carl leads.

  Seeing them around Carl, they don’t seem to be the man-haters you might think.”

  Gideon laughed. “I think Carl qualifies as an alpha male. I understand they make allowances for alpha males. Look, if there isn’t that much to do, do you think you’ll be able to take a day off and go see Oaxaca with me? And maybe one or two of the archaeological sites? Couldn’t Jamie cover for you for one day?”

  “Oh, I think I could, in a day or two. One archaeological site will be plenty for me, thank you, but the Oaxaca part sounds good. I’d like to see the city.” She thought for a moment. “Maybe even tomorrow, in the afternoon?”

  “Ah, no, not tomorrow. I told the colonel I’d look at another skeleton for him. But maybe the day after?”

  “Another skeleton. I’m shocked. shocked.”

  “Well, he asked me. By the way, I have another shock for you, or a surprise, anyway. That colonel I’ve been talking about—who do you think he turned out to be? Three guesses.”

  “Mm, let’s see. . . .” Julie sipped her wine and concentrated, looking up into the pale green, gently stirring branches of the tree. “Javier Marmolejo,” she said.

  Gideon almost choked on his wine. “How the heck did you come up with that?”

  “It wasn’t hard. I just mentally went over my list of all the Mexican policemen I know, and the total was one, and that one was Javier. So I took a wild guess. But how did he get to be a colonel in Oaxaca?”

  It took five minutes to explain, by which time they had finished their wine. “Another?” Gideon asked, trying to sit up in the soft, moving hammock. “Assuming I can actually get out of this thing.”

  Julie glanced at her watch. “No, it’s almost six. We’re all having dinner in Uncle Tony’s apartment. He likes to eat with everybody when he’s here. He’s read all about you, by the way, and he’s really anxious to meet you. Really, I think you’re going to like him.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I will. Cocky, loud, overbearing, self-centered, nasty . . . What’s not to like?”

  TEN

  TONY’S “apartment” was in the Casa del Mayordomo, the one-time plantation manager’s house, now divided into quarters for Carl, Annie, Tony himself, Jamie, and Josefa Gallegos, the housekeeping manager who was, Julie had told him, more of a charity case than an employee; she was Tony’s aunt by marriage, the widowed wife of his mother Beatriz’s brother.

  Other than the upstairs bathroom and bedroom, Tony’s unit consisted of one large, simple space with whitewashed walls that were hung with Mexican Primitive paintings. The room had been outfitted as a living room-dining room—a cove-like kitchen was tucked into one corner—with Mexican Colonial furniture, including a museum-quality, elaborately painted dinner table with the place settings—plate, spoon, fork (but no knife)—painted right on it.

  Julie and Gideon were the last to arrive. When they got there the others were clustered near one end of the table, where bottles of mezcal, wine, and beer were waiting (Gideon noticed that the painted surface had received a thick coating of plastic or polyurethane to protect it from spills) and from which hors d’oeuvres were being served by Dorotea’s two teenage nieces, who were her kitchen assistants.

  As Julie had implied, Tony had done some serious prepping on Gideon, and on forensic anthropology as well. With a few drinks apparently under his belt by the time they got there, he had quickly collared Gideon and pretty much appropriated him for discussion of matters osteological.

  Julie had said that, despite a few disagreeable personality traits, he was likeable, and he was: a big, blustery, affable guy with a voice that sounded like the clatter of the Eighth Avenue Express coming up through a grate in the sidewalk. Physically, he was not an attractive man. He bore a three-day growth of stubbly beard, trendy if you believed the fashion ads, but as usual with men who had a few too many chins and not enough neck, he wound up looking more scruffy than macho. He was, as Julie had said, considerably overweight, with the bulgy, button-popping look that comes from having recently put on a lot of pounds that haven’t yet figured out where they are eventually going to settle. His flushed, yellowish skin, and the threadlike purple tracery of broken capillaries that emerged from the stubble and crawled up his cheeks and onto his nose spoke of the dedicated boozehound. But if he was a drunk, he was a genial drunk, on this night at any rate, and he had clearly taken a liking to Gideon.

  “Hey, what are you drinking?” he said early on. “Is that wine? Nah, put that crap down, you gotta try this. You like mezcal?”

  Gideon didn’t know. “I’ve never tried it.”

  “Never tried it?” Tony was astounded. “Where’ve you been all your life?” He led Gideon to the drinks table and lifted one of several dark purple bottles with Hacienda Encantada labels. “Now, this stuff is special. This is made from maguey right on the property, the same plants they made the sisal from in the old days. I get it bottled at a distillery in Tlacolula. They only make a few cases a year. Okay, now do like I do.”

  Gideon did as instructed. The mezcal was poured into a shot-sized, cylindrical glass and placed on a saucer with four lime wedges and a cinnamon-colored spoonful of salt mixed with powdered chile peppers. A wedge of lime was dipped into the salt mixture, sucked on, and followed by a sip of mezcal. Four wedges, four sips. Then on to the next saucer. Bec
ause Gideon knew that tequila also came from the maguey and he had never developed a taste for tequila, he hadn’t expected to like it, but mezcal turned out to have a rich, smoky taste, more like Scotch than tequila.

  “It’s good,” he said truthfully, but turned down the offer of a third. Tony shrugged and poured one for himself. “Now, then,” he said, arranging the salt and lime wedges to his satisfaction, “I want to talk to you—” A slurp of lime, a sip of mezcal. “—about, like, racial differences in, like, cranial form. . . .”

  Ten minutes later, with Tony still monopolizing Gideon, the group sat down to dinner. “This guy,” Tony declared to one and all, with his arm draped collegially around Gideon’s shoulder, “this guy is famous. I Googled him; he’s all over the Net. The Skeleton Doctor.” The nape of Gideon’s neck was jovially, if a little too vigorously, squeezed. “Right, Gid?”

  “Actually,” Gideon murmured, “not that it matters—”

  “The Skeleton Doctor. They even had a TV show on him. On A&E.”

  “Well, not on me. I was just a small part of it. It was—”

  “And there was a whole article on him in Discover magazine.”

  That much was true, but Gideon was getting uncomfortable. Tony was at the head of the table with Gideon on his left and Julie on his right. The rest, other than Jamie, who was chewing his lip and brooding over something, were smiling at him, or at least in his general direction, with apparent interest. But long-time professor that he was, he was an old hand at recognizing the glazed, overly bright stare and glassy smile of a captive audience. Tony Gallagher in full throttle was a hard man to ignore or to interrupt; no doubt even harder when he also happened to be el patrón.

  In the end it was Tony himself who came to Gideon’s rescue, interrupting himself in the middle of a sentence. “Hey, Jamie, why the long face, as the bartender said when the horse walked into the bar? You look like you just lost your best friend.”

  “Oh—sorry, Tony. It’s nothing. I was just thinking . . .”

  Jamie was much as Julie had described him, a skinny, narrow-shouldered man with Woody Allen glasses and a sad-sack, permanently worried, Woody-Allenish demeanor to match. Gideon couldn’t help smiling, thinking of the wonderfully apt Yiddish word his old mentor, Abe Goldstein, would have used to describe him: nebbish. He had an aluminum cane hooked on the back of his chair, and it was obvious that he was still in some discomfort from his knee operation.

  “Come on, little brother, out with it,” Tony said amiably.

  Jamie hunched his shoulders. “Well, it’s just that I’ve been thinking about what you were telling me about on the way down, your new . . . installation. I put some working figures together, and honestly, I don’t see how we can make it work. I mean, I’m not criticizing—”

  “Oh yeah,” Tony cried, “I was gonna get around to that.” He removed his arm from Gideon’s shoulder and rearranged himself in his chair. “Everybody listen to this now,” he said, hammering on the table with freshened enthusiasm. “Jamie thinks I’m out of my mind, but you’re gonna love it. This is Preciosa’s idea, actually, and I think she’s really got something this time.” He looked proudly toward the foot of the table where Preciosa, his “current sweet patootie,” sat smiling.

  Only “sweet patootie” didn’t come close to conveying Preciosa’s looks. A tall, languid woman in her forties, exotic in a long-nosed, high-cheekboned way, over-made-up and overjeweled (six of her long, thin fingers bore rings, three of worked silver, and three with amethyst stones that closely matched her purple lipstick and eye shadow), she put Gideon in mind of one of those big wading birds, a heron or an ibis, exaggeratedly slow-moving and studiedly graceful. And, like a heron, endowed with an extraordinarily long and sinuous neck, so that her narrow head gave the impression of bobbing slightly on its slender support. As a physical type, she was as different from Tony as two people can be. Tony was one of those people who seemed to take up more space than he was entitled to, and to be made of something denser and heavier than plain flesh. The supple, lissome Preciosa seemed as if she could conform to any space available, like jelly, like smoke.

  Gideon could see that identifying her as the originator of the idea to come did nothing to increase the receptiveness of Carl, or Josefa, or Jamie; instead, there was a flurry of exchanged, wary glances and even a few rolled eyes. Annie’s feelings about her “harebrained schemes,” it appeared, were widely shared. Like Tony, however, Preciosa seemed oblivious to the reception, responding to Tony’s tribute with a slow, refined nod. Gideon had the impression that she might have enough English to get bits of the drift of what was being said, but not much more.

  At this point Dorotea’s nieces brought out chopped salads of avocado, corn, tomato, and jicama, along with bowls of cumin-scented dressing. Tony waited for them to finish setting them out, then made his announcement. “We—get ready for this—are gonna put in a temazcal.” He looked around with an expectant grin, but the only response came from Carl, and it wasn’t what Tony was hoping for.

  “A what?”

  Tony shoulders sagged. He looked at Carl disgustedly. “Aw, Carl—a temazcal, for Christ’s sake. It’s like sort of a—it’s hard to—it goes way back to the Aztecs, it’s—you tell them, Gid, you’re the anthropologist.”

  Gideon put down the forkful of salad—the first—that was on its way to his mouth. “To tell the truth, it’s not anything I’m all that familiar with, Tony, but I do know it’s something that was found in a lot of Pre-Hispanic cultures—Aztec, Mayan, Zapotec, Mixtec—a kind of ritual sweat bath or sweat lodge, something like what you still see in some Native American groups. It was probably in use right here in the Valley of Oaxaca. I seem to remember that herbs were involved, and that the rituals were basically connected to healing. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Tony cried, his exuberance having returned.

  “No, my love, that is not exactly what I had in mind,” said Preciosa, whose English was just fine—better than fine: Smooth, coldly formal, and elegantly accented. “Yes, of course we will have the traditional elements of fire and water and curative plants,” she said with a boneless wave of her fingers, “and people will sit naked on woven petate mats to drink herbal teas and meditate. But there will also be a more modern focus on the healing powers of crystals and aromatherapy, both of which, I might add, will provide a welcome avenue to the sales of many a high-profit item.”

  She sat back, regal and smiling, like an opera star surrounded by adoring fans.

  “Uh . . . did you say ‘naked’?” Carl asked.

  “Yes,” said Preciosa, “it’s the traditional way, but”—a condescending shrug—“if some people are too closed-minded for that, they can wear swimsuits if they choose. And don’t look so worried, Carlos, my dear, there won’t be any orgies. It’s not at all like that.”

  “If you say so.” Carl looked far from convinced.

  “But what”s it going to cost?” Jamie asked anxiously. “Have you taken into consideration the kind of facility it would require? You’re not just talking about some simple concrete-block cube. The specialized plumbing requirements, the ventilation—”

  Tony aimed a finger at him. “A new facility will not be necessary, my man. You know the empty room at the end of the storehouse that we don’t use for anything—well, cleaning supplies and stuff? Well, Preciosa checked it out and says it’d be perfect: no windows, solid stone walls, and stone floor And the rest of the building”s already plumbed, so how much could it cost to run pipes to it?”

  “And ventilation?”

  “Ventilation? We knock a couple of slits in the walls, high up.”

  “Slits in the walls? The health inspectors would never—”

  He was cut off by a contemptuous laugh from Tony. “Hey, I can take care of the health inspectors, trust me. Look, the thing is, Preciosa says these things are making a comeback all over the place—but not here in the Valley, not
yet. I checked it out for myself, and she”s right, there isn”t one; this would be the very first. It’ll be a hell of an attraction, a hell of an income stream. Do you have any idea of what these weirdos pay for that aromatherapy crap? And it costs next to nothing to get. So—what do you all think about it?”

  Not much, apparently. Tony”s question received no answer at all for a good five seconds, until Carl spoke.

  “It”s your money,” he said with amiable resignation. “As long as you don’t expect me to take my clothes off and get into it myself, it”s fine with me. One question, though—who”s going to run this thing? I mean, you can’t just have naked people running in and out and sitting around meditating together.” He frowned. “Or can you?”

  “Ah, that”s the beauty part,” Tony said. “Preciosa knows this healer, or teacher, or curandero, or whatever the hell you call him—they’re actually certified—who’ll run the sessions for us for half of what we charge, which is going to be a hundred and twenty bucks a pop. Valderano, his name is.”

  “Valeriano, mi gordito,” Preciosa corrected.

  “Whatever. The point is, we don’t have to worry about it, we just rake in the money.” He rubbed his hands together. “So, anybody else got anything to say—anything positive to say?”

  “Who”s supposed to keep it clean?” was Josefa’s mumbled comment. “Gonna need more help if you think it”s gonna be me.” Josefa, short, square-faced, square-bodied, and scowly (Gideon, seemingly in an animal-metaphor rut, was reminded of a slow, grumpy, old bulldog), was a woman in her sixties with a way of speaking that seemed not to be directed at any particular person, and rarely in response to any particular comment. She was like a radio that went on and off of its own accord.

  “Aw, come on, you guys,” Tony pleaded, his arms spread, palms up, “how about a little enthusiasm? Jamie, I showed you the figures. It”s doable, isn”t it?”