Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

“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 policia 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 the 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.”