Aaron Elkins: Skull Duggery

There was a huge, irregular hole in the left side of the skull, involving parts of the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal bones. He was certain that this “open defect,” as it was called in the bland jargon of forensic science, was postmortem. Bone is pretty much the same color through and through, so if it had been inflicted at the time of death its edges would have been the same color as the rest of the skull. But the edges of this “defect” were distinctly paler than the rest of the skull, indicating that the bone had been exposed to the elements for some time before the break occurred and the defect had nothing to do with the cause of death.

He returned to the desk out front, where the man was now struggling with another set of copies, trying to get the dog-eared carbons to go around the roller.

“Excuse me. You have a skull in the old dining room-”

“The Zapotec princess,” he said without looking up.

“Yes. I wonder if it would be possible to take it out of the case. I’d like very much to have a closer look.”

“No, no, no, no, no. It’s against the rules.”

“It’s not merely out of curiosity. I’m an anthropology professor-”

“Rules are rules. If I let you break them, then I’d have to let everyone break them, wouldn’t I? And then where would we all be? Where would it end?”

“I understand your point-”

The man looked up suddenly from his task. “Unless of course, you’re interested in purchasing it?”

Gideon stared at him. “It’s for sale?”

“Not ordinarily, no, of course not. But you, you’re an anthropologist, a professional person. That puts an entirely new cast on things, you see.”

No, Gideon didn’t see, but having gone to all this trouble, he did want to have a better look at the skull. “Yes, I see that. Well, yes, I might very well be interested in purchasing it.”

“In that case,” said Mr. Castellanos-Jones, springing rabbitlike from his chair, “let us make haste. Time is money.”

He grabbed a ring of keys from his desk, led Gideon to the case, and removed the skull with its saucer, laying them gently down on the only free corner of the ponderous, thick-legged dining table. “What do you think?”

“Hard to say,” Gideon said, rotating it to see all sides.

“I can let you have it for one hundred American dollars, which is a professional-courtesy price, in that you are an anthropologist…”

“Mmm…” Gideon was absorbed in his examination. When it had been in its case, he hadn’t been able to see the rear portion of the skull, but now he could, and he had revised his earlier opinion. The hole had been inflicted after death, yes, but in a way, it probably was related to the cause of death. Extending onto the occipital bone-clear through the occipital bone-from the rearmost margin of the hole was a deep cleft-not a fracture, but a cleft -that had been hacked into the living bone. Ancient or modern, whoever this was had had his life ended by a wicked blow with something like an ax or a machete. And he guessed that the cleft had weakened the bone around it and possibly contributed to the later breakage.

“I see that the, er, imperfection concerns you,” Castellanos-Jones said. “Yes, I had forgotten about that. Taking it into consideration, I can let you have it at a discount of, ah, umm, twenty-five percent? Seventy-five dollars, all told.”

Gideon had turned it over and was now studying what was left of the teeth. They were in terrible shape, most of them rotted to nub-bins, some to the size of corn kernels. That was probably what had led Dr. Ybarra, the medico legista, to declare that the skull was Pre-Hispanic. Nowadays, you only saw teeth like these in archaeological specimens, among peoples whose diets had consisted largely of stone-ground grains. Pulverizing corn between a mano and a metate, or between a stone mortar and pestle, also produced minute fragments of pulverized stone, and it was these fragments that could grind down tooth enamel, bringing on decay and gum disease, and turning the dentition into wreckage like this.

Ybarra had been right, he decided; this was not a modern skull. There was no conceivable connection to Tony. Reluctantly, he concluded that it had all been a wild goose chase. Whatever the reason Tony had tried to kill him, it had nothing to do with this “Zapotec princess.”

“I should probably mention,” said Castellanos-Jones, “that several other parties, one of them a prominent educational institution, have shown interest in this specimen. It may very well be gone by next week.”

“Well, yes,” Gideon said, placing the skull back in its saucer, “but I’m afraid I don’t-” He stopped in mid-sentence, his forehead wrinkled, the image of the rotted teeth still in his mind. Wait a minute…

“Opportunity missed is opportunity lost, you know. And opportunity seldom knocks twice. Why, whatever is the matter? Are you all right, professor?”

Gideon was staring so hard, so fixedly, at the skull that he had alarmed Castellanos-Jones. With staggering suddenness and mind-bending simplicity, everything had clicked into place. Why Blaze had been killed thirty years ago, why Manolo had been killed a few months ago, why he himself had damn near been killed yesterday. There were details missing, yes, but the overall picture had leapt into focus as crisply as if he’d turned the knob on a pair of binoculars. It was almost too crazy to be true, and yet…

“Yes, I’m okay,” Gideon said. “Would a check be all right? I don’t have seventy-five dollars with me.”

“A check will be fine.” He paused, Smiling, with his hands neatly folded at his waist, like an old-fashioned department store floor-walker. “Would you like that wrapped?”AN hour later Gideon pulled up in the parking lot of the Hacienda Encantada. He had tried calling Marmolejo, but Corporal Vela had answered, telling him that the colonel was in Teotitlan, at the Hacienda Encantada. That suited Gideon perfectly, and it was with building excitement that he climbed out of the van, carefully cradling the skull (he had declined Castellanos-Jones’s offer to wrap it) in the palm of one hand, thumb lodged in the foramen magnum, the conveniently thumb-sized opening in the base for the entry of the spinal cord, and his other arm holding it protectively against his body the way a runner holds a football.

He saw Marmolejo at once. He was sitting at one of the larger tables on the terrace with Jamie, Annie, Carl, and Julie. Spread out in front of them were mugs of coffee and plates of mid-afternoon pastries: turrones, sweet rolls, and galletas (sugar, anise, and cinnamon cookies), the aromas of which made his mouth water.

“I see Dorotea’s back,” he said, approaching the table.

“Oh yeah,” Annie answered. “Back and happy as a clam-well, as happy as she gets. She has no problem working for Josefa.” She tilted her chin at the skull. “Who’s your friend?”

“Ah, my friend, yes,” Gideon said. “Well, that’s an interesting story. But I don’t want to interrupt-”

“There’s nothing to interrupt,” Marmolejo said. “I was simply partaking of the generous hospitality offered. Our business for the day is finished. Unfortunately, I fear we’ve come no closer to enlightenment.”

“Oh, I think that with the help of my friend here-” He patted the skull. “-I might be able to provide a little of that.” He pulled out a chair, sat, and set the skull on the table in front of him.

“Ouch,” Carl said, looking at the jagged hole in the side. “Looks like somebody whacked him.”

“Yes. With an ax or something like it.”

Annie turned the skull to face her. “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.”

Gideon smiled. “You’d be surprised.”