Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

The three others ran up to him. “Arden, are you all right?” Gideon asked.

Scofield just stood there quaking; rippling shudders wrenched him all the way down to his legs.

John shook him roughly by the shoulder. “Are you hurt? What the hell happened?”

That brought him around, at least to the point at which he could speak, if not yet in full sentences, then in a torrent of disconnected chips and chunks of speech, from which at least some sense could be made. “Someone… I was just, just standing… that, that spear, it, it…”

It didn’t take long for them to understand that the obvious had happened. Someone had hurled a spear at the Adelita. Scofield had been watching the dolphins, his back to the nearby shore. He had seen nothing, heard nothing, when suddenly, next to him, the window exploded and the spear came crashing through, showering him with glass shards. The wooden shaft had actually brushed him in passing. Look, you could see the abrasion on the back of his right hand. And see the little splinters of glass stuck in his arm? He had almost been killed! But miraculously the point had passed him by. If it had been even six inches to the left…

“Come along, now, Arden,” Maggie Gray said in her teacherly, dismissive, Our Miss Brooks tone, taking his other arm. With some of the others, she had come to see what the clatter had been about. “Let’s go and sit you down in the dining room. I’ll get the splinters out of your arm. You’ve got some in your hair too.”

“Don’t patronize me, dammit,” he snapped at her, shaking his arm loose, but then, mumbling, let himself be led away, “Oh, hell, I’m sorry, Maggie… It was just so… I mean, if I’d been standing…”

John had been peering keenly at the shore, seeking out some movement, some glimpse of the thrower, but there was nothing; no stirring fronds, no flash of a brown body retreating into the undergrowth. He sighed and turned to Gideon. “So there aren’t any more headhunters, huh? Well, that’s sure a relief. They just spear you now.”

Gideon shrugged. “What do I know?”

Vargas, looking about as distraught as a human being could possibly be, waved helplessly at the mess in the bar and shook his fist at the shore. “Goddamn Indians, what have they got against my poor Adelita? Did I ever hurt them?”

“You mean this kind of thing has happened to you before?” John asked. “They throw spears at passing boats? It’s just something that happens?”

“No, no, it never happen to me before. I never hear that it happen to anyone.” He shook his head in distress. “Chato, where the hell are you? Bring a mop! Look at that window! Look at that bottles! What I’m supposed to do now?” The excitement was playing havoc with his English.

The question was presumably moot, but John answered anyway. “Well, first off, Captain,” he said mildly, “I’d suggest you get us a little further away from the shore.”

The suggestion snapped Vargas out of mourning his lost supplies and he ran clumsily toward the wheelhouse, shouting in Spanish. “Hulbert, quick, put us in the central channel, what are you waiting for? Hurry up, don’t waste any time… mother of God…”

Although the tip of the spear was still hidden from sight in the vodka carton, Gideon knew what it was. He had seen a pair of them in the South American collection of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. It was called a shotgun lance, used by several Indian groups in the Amazon basin. It was made by taking the barrel from a worn-out rifle or shotgun, pounding its base into a point, and then sticking a wooden shaft, honed to the diameter needed for a snug fit, into the muzzle end. It was, he knew, a man-killing spear (as opposed to the lighter ones used for hunting animals). But he thought he’d read somewhere that they had gone out of use by the 1950s, by which time new firearms had become more freely available. So how did…?

Maggie stuck her head out of the dining room. “Arden could really use a drink. Scotch.” The door popped briefly open again almost before she’d closed it, and once again her head poked out, one eyebrow raised. “For that matter, my dears, so could I.”

“I’ll get them,” Gideon said, stepping gingerly through the space where the window had been. “Looks like the bar’s open early today, anyway.”

In the dining room he found Maggie standing over Scofield and meticulously plucking bits of glass from his crew cut, which she then laid on some paper towels that had been spread out on the table. Scofield grabbed for his drink so convulsively that he spilled half of it. The other half went down his gullet in a single swallow, followed by a grateful sigh. Maggie, on the other hand, sipped primly, then went back to exploring Scofield’s scalp while Scofield, passive and docile, sat motionless. Gideon felt a highly inappropriate bubble of laughter trying to work its way up his throat. The thing was, it was like watching a pair of rhesus monkeys at grooming time.

He managed to stifle the thought, however. “Can I do anything else for you?” he asked.

“No thanks, I’m fine,” Scofield said, and indeed the Scotch seemed to have gone a long way toward restoring him. The ruddy little disks that were natural in his cheeks were coming back. He even tried a feeble little joke. “But I’m beginning to think that becoming an ethnobotanist might not have been such a great career move after all.”

Gideon smiled. “I’ll admit, you’re not having much of a day so far.”

“And it’s not even six o’clock yet,” Maggie dryly observed.

“Say, Doc?” John had opened the dining room door. “Could you come on out when you have a minute?”

His overdone nonchalance (John wasn’t much of a dissembler) made it clear that it was something important, and Gideon went out to join him. Most if not all the others were there now, gathered around the smashed bar, gabbling away and gesturing at the spear, which had been pulled from the floor and laid on one of the salon tables.

John pointed at its front end, which had formerly been hidden by the vodka carton. “Is that thing what I think it is?” he asked soberly.

Gideon bent to examine it. The others quieted down, watching. Attached to the base of the metal spear point by a length of twisted fiber was a sinister, misshapen object a little bigger than his fist.

“Ugh,” he said. “I hate these.”

Looking up at him was a distorted, monkeylike, yellowish-brown face made even creepier by the rim of beautiful, combed chestnut hair that framed it. A dangling length of string had sewn each eye shut, and three more knotted strands threaded through the grotesquely distorted lips. The nose too had been stretched to impossible proportions.

Gideon gingerly turned it to peer into the nostrils. He pressed a finger against the closed eyes. He moved the long hair aside to study the ears. Finally, he put it down.

“No,” he said.

It had been several minutes since John had asked the question and people looked confused.

Phil spoke for them. “No, what?”

“No, it’s not what John thinks it is.”

John’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s not a shrunken head?”

“It’s not a shrunken human head, which is what I presume you meant.”

“What the hell is it, then? A monkey head?” He frowned. “Do monkeys have eyebrows?”

“Not so to speak, no, but it’s not even that. It’s not a head at all. This is a tourist item. They make them from monkey skin or goatskin, and carve them and mold them to look like this, and add a little hair where they need to.”

“It’s true,” Vargas said. “You can buy such things in Iquitos.”

“You can buy them on eBay,” Gideon said.