Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

All the same, Duayne Osterhout was intrigued. “But it looks so… Why are you so sure it isn’t human?”

“Oh, a lot of things,” Gideon said. “This is a pretty good one, as they go, but there are some things that are almost impossible to duplicate in a fake head.” He turned the head upside down. “For one thing, as you see, where’s the neck opening? But, more important – there’s no nasal hair.”

“If it was real, it would have nose hair?”

“Oh yes. I’m talking about the bristly little things in the nostrils – they act as filters – that everybody has. They stay right there even when a head has been shrunk. To fake them, you’d have to plant each one separately, which would take a long time, and even then it’d be hard to make them look authentic. But since just about nobody knows to look for them, they don’t bother with it. And then, these threads from the eyes, from the lips – they’re obviously commercial twine, the kind you can buy at the local hardware store, not the kind you get from slicing palm fronds into narrow slivers and twirling them into a cord. And the ears…” He pushed back the hair. “Human ears are very intricately shaped, very difficult to reproduce convincingly. You can see how crude these are. That’s why these things always have so much hair hiding them.”

“Yes, yes, I do see,” Duayne said, nodding.

“And then the skin itself. There are tool marks on it, see? Burn marks too, right under-”

“Okay, enough already, Doc,” John said. “Now the next time we’re in the market for a shrunken head, we’ll know if we’re getting ripped off. But what’s it supposed to mean? Is it some kind of curse or something?”

“A warning?” Tim suggested. “Are they threatening us?” His eyes slid sideways to the slowly passing shore, now a safe three miles away.

Gideon put the head down and straightened up. “Beats the hell out of me. I’m reasonably sure it’s not meant as a gesture of welcome, but I’ve never run into this custom before: tying a head to a spear. On the other hand, I’m not exactly up on South American ethnography.”

They all stood staring down at the head as if expecting it to open its sewn-together lips and provide answers on its own.

“Chato says he knows what it is,” Vargas announced into the silence. Chato, the Indian crewman who had mutely conducted Gideon, John, and Phil to their cabins earlier, had appeared a few minutes before to begin mopping up broken glass and spilled liquor. But now he was standing on tiptoe, whispering excitedly into Vargas’s ear.

“ Que quieres decir, Chato?” Vargas asked impatiently.

The Indian began to whisper again.

“Speak up so everyone can hear,” Vargas ordered.

Chato, looking uneasy at the attention, raised his voice to just barely above a whisper. Not only was he almost inaudible, but he spoke in a Spanish-English-Indian patois with which even Phil had a hard time.

“Translate, will you, Captain?” Phil said.

Vargas accommodated him, translating after every couple of phrases. “He has heard of it before, this custom… In olden days, one of the native groups used it as a – a what, Chato?… ah, a death-warning, a revenge warning, to an enemy tribe… They would use… no, they would take… no, they would shrink the head of a killer, someone who had killed one of their own people, and they would attach it to a spear… and they would, they would throw the spear into the hut, into the wall of the hut, of the family of this killer… to tell them that one of them would soon die too… for the purpose of…” He searched for the English word.

“In retaliation?” Gideon suggested.

“Yes, professor, that’s correct, in retaliation.” He thought Chato was done and began to say something else, but Chato hadn’t finished. Vargas listened some more.

“Ah. You see, the fact that the victims received the shrunken head of their own kinsman back, that was to show the contempt that the attackers had for them… that the head wasn’t even worth keeping. And sometimes it would not be the head of the actual killer, but the head of another member of the enemy tribe. Sometimes two heads would be-”

“So… what’s this got to do with us?” Tim asked. “Why would they… I mean, what reason would they…?”

“Ask him what tribe,” Scofield said hoarsely. He had emerged from the dining room while Vargas was translating.

Vargas put the question to Chato.

“ Los Chayacuros,” Chato said.

“The Chayacuro,” Scofield said in a dead voice and then, as he sagged back against the dining room wall, laughter started gurgling out of him, limp, helpless laughter that built until it convulsed his whole body, so that he slid slowly down the wall into a sitting position on the deck.

The others stared at him, appalled. Vargas hurried toward him with his arms out, but Scofield, still shaking with deep but silent laughter, waved him off. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said when he finally stopped and sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “Oo, ow, that hurt.”

But he wasn’t all right. There were oily tears running down his cheeks and he was still giggling. “They want to kill me… they remember, don’t you see? They’ve waited for me all these years… can you believe it? All these years… They want to finish the job, they-”

Mel Pulaski stepped forward and reached down to grasp his hand. “Come on, Arden, get up,” he said disgustedly. “This isn’t doing anybody any good. Okay, you’ve had a hell of a scare, but it missed you. You’re okay, you’re fine. A couple of little nicks.”

“A hell of a scare,” Scofield echoed woodenly. “Yes, yes, it was certainly that.” Another little hiccup of laughter.

The big ex-linebacker pulled him unresisting to his feet. “Come on, let’s get you to your cabin.”

“I’ll do it,” Tim said, running up. “Come on, Professor, you want to lie down for a while. Easy does it now…” He took Scofield’s elbow and began to shuffle him tenderly forward the way a nurse would shuffle an aged patient down a hospital corridor to get a blood test.

That brought Scofield to sudden life. With a violent twist of his arm he shook the young man off. “Dammit, Loeffler, don’t treat me like a child! I’m a little shaky, yes – who wouldn’t be? – but I can damn well get to my cabin without your help!”

Tim’s face turned redder than Scofield’s. “But I wasn’t – I was only-”

“Oh, forget it, never mind,” Scofield muttered and strode off, steadily enough after the first tottery step or two, to the flight of stairs that led up to the cabins.

When he was gone, most of the others sank into the plastic chairs at the various tables, sighing, or shaking their heads, or otherwise expressing shock and discomfort. Tim was flushed and sullen. Gideon and John remained standing, leaning against the deck railing.

“My Lord, I wonder what that was all about,” Duayne said. “Why should he think these people, these… Chayacuro, would be trying to kill him?”

“Oh, I know what it was about,” Maggie said. “Most of us do, actually. Or at least the ones that know Arden.”

“So how about enlightening the rest of us?” John suggested.

Maggie shrugged. “Why not? Well, you see, it goes back quite a way. When Arden-” She stopped and turned to Mel. “Mel, why don’t you tell it? You’re the man who just wrote his life story.”

Mel made a face. “I didn’t write his life story. I wrote what he told me his life story was, which is a different thing. That old story about the Chayacuro that he’s been dining out on for thirty years? Who knows if it really happened? There’s nobody around to check it out with.”

“Well, obviously, something happened,” Gideon said. “He was pretty shaken up there.”