Skull Duggery (23 page)

“Okay if I join you?” he asked, having already plopped heavily into a spare chair.

“Sure,” Julie said. “Where’s Preciosa?”

Tony snorted. “Preciosa’s not exactly what you’d call a morning person. Hey, mamacita,” he called in Spanish toward the open window of the kitchen, “the big boss is here and he’s hungry. How about some breakfast?”

“I see you, I see you,” was the mumbled reply. “It’s coming, it’s coming.”

“Coffee first.”

“You’ll get it when you get it.”

“What a sweetheart,” he said, grinning. “Not a grouchy bone in her body. So, Gideon, you like it here? Having a good time?”

“A great time, Tony, and the Hacienda’s beautiful.”

“Yeah, but are you finding anything to do for fun, aside from looking at bones? It’s not like there’re a million things to do around here.”

“Well, true, but that’s not such a bad thing. This morning I was thinking about spending some time at one of the archaeological sites.”

“Oh yeah? Gonna go up to Monte Alban?”

“No, I’ve been there before, and anyway, I didn’t want to make a long drive. I thought I’d just go down to Yagul. It’s the closest one.”

“Yagul? You know, it’s funny. It’s like fifteen miles down the road, but even though I grew up right here where we’re sitting, I’ve never been there myself. When I was a kid, I wasn’t interested, and after I came back… well, I just never got around to it. It’s like how New Yorkers are always telling you they never got around to going to the Statue of Liberty. But one of these days…”

“Well, why don’t you come with me? I don’t expect to stay very long, maybe a couple of hours. We’d be back by noon at the latest.”

Tony looked as if he was considering it, but then he shook his head. “No, I better not. I got all kinds of stuff to do around the place. If I don’t finish finally rewiring the meeting room on this trip…” He rolled his eyes, signifying Gideon knew not what. “What the hell. Ah, hey Maribel, that’s my girl,” he said with a grin as one of Dorotea’s young nieces came out with a full breakfast on a tray and set it out on the table for him. A slight movement of Tony’s hand along with an incipient little flinch and a stifled giggle from Maribel suggested that a slap on the bottom would have been administered had Julie not been there.

“So, Julie,” he said after a swallow of coffee, a fond look after Maribel, and a sigh of pleasure over either or both, “what about you? How’s it going? They’re not working you too hard, are they?”

“Not at all, Tony. It’s been fun. I have some things to finish up with Jamie this morning, and I think that’ll be it. At noon I’m going into Oaxaca with Gideon.”

“Oh yeah, to look at an old skull, huh? Whoa, that sure sounds like a ton of fun.”

“Well, I have a hunch I might get a good meal out of him too, if I play my cards right.”

Tony arranged his plates to his liking with surprisingly meticulous care: juice and melon on the left, frittata in the center, coffee and toast on the right; plates then nudged until they were all equally spaced. Then he was ready to eat. “Hey, Gideon, tell me something,” he said as he buttered the toast. “I’ve been thinking about that skull. I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I don’t get it. What’s the point of looking at it? Where’s it gonna get you?”

Gideon was fresher this morning, and it was something he didn’t mind talking about, especially since it was only to Tony and not to Carl and the others. “It was something Julie said yesterday. She was wondering if it might be Manolo.”

Tony’s eyebrows went up. “Manolo? The guy Blaze…? You think somebody killed them both? Jesus Christ, where did that come from?”

“It was just a thought,” Julie said. “Nobody ever did find out for sure what happened to him, and there was a lot of money involved.

Down here, it would have been a fortune. I couldn’t help wondering if maybe somebody killed the two of them for it.”

“Yeah, but… look,” he said, slathering jam on the toast, “let’s say for the sake of argument somebody really did kill them both. How would you know it’s him? Wouldn’t you need to know what he looked like?”

“It’d help, but it’s not strictly necessary.”

“I suppose you could ask Carl or Jamie; they’d probably remember, but don’t forget, it’s been thirty years. Me, I can’t help you out there, I never even saw the guy. Missed him by a couple of days.”

“I don’t really need to know what he looked like, Tony.”

Chewing away at his frittata, Tony frowned. “So how…?”

“Easy. I just look for maxillomandibular fixation paraphernalia.”

The chewing stopped. “Maxillo…?”

“I look to see if his face is held together with pins and wires and plates.”

“ Ohhh, I get you. Yeah, good point. Carl busted his jaw for him, didn’t he?”

“Right. And since he was never seen again, he was probably killed-if he was killed-within a few days of having it fixed, so they wouldn’t have taken out the wiring yet.”

“But wait a minute, Gideon,” Julie said, her brow wrinkling. “The Zapotecs wouldn’t have known how to wire broken jaws, would they?”

“I doubt it. As far as I know, that’s a nineteenth-century invention.”

“That’s what I thought. So if they saw wires in this skeleton’s jaw, wouldn’t they have known right away that it couldn’t be ancient?”

“Not necessarily. The Aztecs, Mixtecs, Mayans, and the rest of them may not have known how to work with a living skull, but they sure knew how to work with a dead one. There are mosaicked skulls, and turquoise-decorated skulls, and skulls ornamented with loads of silver or polished pyrite… and skulls that actually have the mandible reattached. It’s possible that that’s what they assumed this was.” He shrugged. “I figure it’s worth a look anyway.”

“Okay, yeah, I can see all that,” Tony said, “but even so, even if it is him, where does it get you? The cops can’t do anything, can they? It’s over fourteen years.” He shook his head. “Stupid law.”

“You’re right,” Gideon said. “They can’t.”

“So what’s the point?”

Julie finished the last of her coffee and put down the cup. “The point,” she said, “is that Gideon has never met a skeleton he didn’t want to know better.”

Tony laughed his gravel-on-a-tin-drum laugh. “Well, what the hell, chacun a son gout,” he said surprisingly: French for each to his own .

Yagul.

Contrary to what he’d said to Tony, he wasn’t here simply because it was the closest site. He had been a twenty-year-old junior at UCLA when he’d first come across its name in a Mesoamerican prehistory survey course, and it had been one of the factors that had turned him into an anthropology major. “An intermittently occupied Mixtec-Zapotec site of limited archaeological significance,” his textbook had called it, “located in the eastern Valley of Oaxaca, a remote area of central southern Mexico, and thought to be concurrent with Mitla (of which it is sometimes considered an inferior imitation) and Monte Alban, more important settlements to the north. Its most notable feature is a ball court with fretted stone mosaics of a conventional style, believed to be second in size only to the far more impressive court at Chichen Itza.”

This decidedly lukewarm description notwithstanding, the deliciously exotic sound of it, Yah-goohl, had stirred his youthful and adventurous soul. It was the kind of word you might expect to hear from the first Venusian to visit Earth when he stepped from his flying saucer and held up a two-fingered, vaguely hand-like appendage in greeting: “Yah-goohl, Earthlings.”

A little something of its magic was lost when he learned that it was Zapotecan for dry stick, but it had remained a symbol of the strange, prehistoric, fascinating places that a career in anthropology might take him. I will stand among the ancient stones of Yah-goohl someday, he had told himself, and with such travels in mind he had started out in the sub-discipline of archaeology. But within a year it had been evolution, bones, and physical anthropology that had snared him for good, so that, until Julie had brought up the idea of coming to Oaxaca a few weeks ago, it had been more than two decades since the site had even crossed his mind.

And now here he was, taking it all in from a rise at the edge of the otherwise empty parking area at the end of a rough, two-mile-long dirt road, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by scrubland and dry river beds; not a sign of modern humanity in sight, other than a ramshackle booth at the entrance with a hand-painted wooden sign: ENTRADA 10 PESOS. But no one was in the booth to collect the fees, and it looked as if no one had been in it for a long time. Obviously, Yagul didn’t get enough visitors to make it worthwhile. That was equally clear from the potsherds that littered the ground, just sitting there for the picking; you didn’t find those at Monte Alban or Teotihuacan.

He’d Googled the site earlier to refresh his memory and located plenty of material (what was there that didn’t have plenty of material on Google?), so he’d known what he would find, but still, it was bigger and more interesting than he’d expected. There were three main areas. In the center was the famous ball court, as well as the imaginatively named “Palace of the Six Patios,” originally probably civic/ religious offices, but now a roofless, moldering warren of stuccoed stone-and-clay walls and foundations. From this central area, stone steps led up a sizeable hill to the walled “fortress,” which probably had been a defensive compound. And in an area east of the ball court was a group of sunken tombs.

The best thing about it, he thought with selfish pleasure, was that he had it all to himself. No iron-lunged tour guides with yellow umbrellas, shouting commands at their obedient, beaten-down herds; no yelling kids scrambling over the stones and crying when they skinned their knees; nothing noisier than the sound of his shoes on the stony pathways, and an occasional whisper of breeze sighing through one of the runty trees that had sprouted here and there around the ruin. But it was still early, barely nine o’clock, so it was likely that other people would be showing up as the day wore on. He decided to hit the tombs first, before that happened. They were a labyrinth of semi-subterranean chambers that were bound to be small and cramped, best seen without company.

They were as dank and stuffy and constricted as he’d imagined, but every bit as interesting too, made all the more atmospheric by the sparse shafts of daylight, filled with slowly swirling dust motes, that provided all the illumination there was. He spent a blissful half hour prowling from chamber to chamber-mostly on his knees; the openings were only about three feet high-examining and touching the geometric stone mosaics and the strange, Olmec-style heads carved in bas-relief on the walls, and in general happily communing with the spirits of people long, long gone.

When he crawled blinking into the sunlight, he practically bumped into a pair of hairy, bowling-ball-calved legs topped by green walking shorts.

“Hey, here you are!” came from two feet above the shorts. “I was looking for you.”

“Tony!” Gideon got to his feet. “I thought you couldn’t make it.”

“I figured, what the hell, the wiring waited this long,” Tony said. “And Preciosa isn’t gonna be conscious until eleven anyway, and if she has to get breakfast herself, no big deal, she can handle it. So what’s in there, the tombs?”

“Yes, want to have a look?”

“Do I have to crawl around on my hands and knees like you were?”

“Afraid so.”

“I’ll give it a skip, then. What else is there to see? What’s this ball court you were talking about?”

“I was just going to head for it. It’s right over there.”

“Okay if I go with you? Maybe I’ll learn something.”

“Sure, come on,” he said affably, but the truth was he’d have preferred to be alone. For once in his life he wasn’t in the mood to lecture. He wasn’t really there as an anthropologist, he was there delivering on a promise he’d made to himself a long time ago. Anthropologist to the core he might be, but there was an almost mystical side to him that surfaced every once in a while-a long while-and this was one of those times. He didn’t want to talk or to think with any rigor about the archaeology of the place, he wanted simply to bask in its antiquity and foreignness, to walk paths that had been trodden by the sandaled feet of the Mixtecs and Zapotecs before him, to take pleasure in passing his hand over stones that had been laid in place well before the birth of Christ, by people who, despite the best efforts of science, would remain forever mysterious and unknowable. Still, if Tony was making the effort to learn, Gideon could be counted on to make the effort to instruct.

The ball court at Yagul consisted of an open, flat, rectangular field of play about two hundred feet long. Second in size to the one at Chichen Itza it might be, but it was a distant second. The court at Chichen was a good three times longer, or as the guidebooks never tired of saying, “as long as two football fields.” Still, it was an impressive structure, bordered on both sides by masonry walls that were nearly vertical to about hip height, where there was a narrow horizontal “bench,” and then sloped back and up from the playing field, to be topped by flat stone platforms about thirty feet above the playing surface. At one end of these walls, as usual, there was a flight of stone steps up to a landing, where they turned ninety degrees and continued to the platform at the top. Also as usual, the steps varied wildly in height, from eight or nine inches to a foot and a half. Tony had trouble with his balance negotiating some of them-had he had something to drink between breakfast and now?-and Gideon had to give him a steadying hand, but eventually they made it to the top with Tony breathing heavily.

Once they got there, they stood at the corner of the platform, looking down on the playing field, while Gideon told Tony as much as he remembered about the ancient game. Which wasn’t much.

It had been enormously widespread in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, he explained. Well over a thousand courts had been found so far, wasn’t that amazing? Different cultures had varying versions, and nobody today could say for sure what the rules were, but judging from reliefs and from a modern variant of the game, it was something like a combination of volleyball and soccer, with the object being to keep the ball in play, but using only the hips, although in some later versions the forearms were used, or even rackets “Didn’t they, like, used to sacrifice the losers?” Tony asked. “Cut their heads off right in front of the crowd?”