Skull Duggery (26 page)

“Oh, sure. Probably just a coincidence that this particular guy, with a thoroughly healed fractured jaw-a total stranger-was seen wandering up toward the Hacienda a few months ago, and turned up dead just outside this peaceful, nonmurderous little village a few months later. What else could it be but a coincidence?” He looked up at Marmolejo from under arched eyebrows. “Yeah, right.”

“Yeah, right,” Julie concurred.

A few seconds passed and then Marmolejo sighed. “Yeah, right,” he said from the side of his mouth, in a strangled American accent straight out of The Sopranos.“WHAT sort of place are you looking for?” Marmolejo had inquired when they’d asked him to recommend a restaurant where they could have lunch in Oaxaca before going to the museum. “Did you want something on the lively side, in the middle of everything, with lots of noise and activity all around, or someplace quieter, more elegant, with real Oaxacan cuisine and ambience, of which few tourists would even be aware?”

They had surprised him by choosing the former, and so now they sat at an outdoor table on the arched, porticoed upper story of El Asador Vasco, the largest of the restaurants that bordered the Zocalo, axaca’s main plaza. They were glad they’d made the choice; what had happened at Yagul had shaken them both, and it was nice to be in a busy restaurant full of people chatting about normal, everyday things, and looking down on the green, well-kept public square, lively and bustling. There were strollers on the paths, sunbathers sprawled on the lawns, and sun-avoiders in the cool, dense shade of the laurel trees; there were street musicians, and vendors of baskets, of balloons, of herbs, of crickets (for eating), of colorful straw masks, of sliced fruits and sweets. A dozen or more of the mobile shoeshine stands with wheels and green awnings were doing a brisk business. At the other end of the plaza, an afternoon band concert was in progress, but only the oompah s of the tuba were audible at this distance.

Immediately below them was an old man playing the violin-Kreisler, Schubert, Dvorak-with such honeyed sweetness that Gideon had gotten up from the table to go downstairs and place a fifty-peso note in his open violin case. It was more than everything else in there put together, and the old man had shown his appreciation by asking what Gideon would like to hear. Gideon had told him that what he was doing was wonderful, and just keep doing it. The old man had taken him at his word: he’d been playing Dvorak’s Humoresque at the time, and now, fifteen minutes later, he was still playing Humoresque, looking upward to bow to them at the conclusion of each repetition.

“I grant you, it’s a pretty tune,” Julie said with a strained smile as he started on his fifth run-through, “but maybe you should go down and give him another fifty pesos and ask him to play something else.”

“I most certainly will not,” Gideon declared. “I like it, and it seems to be making him happy. If anybody else doesn’t like it, they can pay him to change.”

They were done with their appetizer of manchego cheese with olive oil and toast rounds, and their entrees had just been set down: sea bass with a grapefruit coulis for Julie, and huge Gulf shrimp over garlic-drenched linguine for Gideon. It was after two o’clock-Gideon’s deposition had consumed more time than expected-and the rich aromas practically had them salivating on the tablecloth. For a few moments, they happily shoveled in the food, only occasionally pausing for a sip of mineral water.

Julie suddenly blinked, struck by a thought as obviously as if it had hit her in the forehead. She put down her knife and fork. “That man… the drifter, the mummy… he really is Manolo.”

“Oh, I think so. The probability that-”

“No, I just thought of something else. Didn’t you say his name was Manuel?”

“Manuel Garcia. At least that’s what he told Sandoval.”

“That’s what I thought. Well, Manolo isn’t really a given name in Spanish. Would you like to guess what it’s a nickname for?”

He put down his knife and fork. “Manuel?”

“Exactly. It’s got to be the same man, Gideon.”

He nodded. “It sure is one more piece that fits. What was Manolo’s last name, do you know?”

“If I did, I’ve forgotten. But they’ll know at the Hacienda. What do you think the odds are that it’s Garcia?”

“Pretty good, I’d say. Sandoval thought it was fake, but now that’s looking doubtful.”

They finished their meals and sat back, contented, over coffee. “Thank God!” Julie exclaimed.

Gideon looked at her. “What?”

“He’s finally stopped playing Humoresque. He’s on to Mozart nowEine Kleine Nachtmusik. You mean you didn’t notice?”

“I guess not. I was thinking-if we’ve now identified Manolo, then what’s that skull in the museum?”

Julie shrugged. “Probably just what it’s supposed to be-some thousand-year-old Zapotec Indian.”

“But why would Tony want to kill me over that?”

“ If that’s the reason he tried to kill you.”

Gideon sighed. “What do you say we head on over to the museum and have a look? Maybe we’ll understand more in an hour or two.”EL Museo de Curiosidades was on Calle las Casas, only five short blocks west of the Zocalo, but in those few blocks Oaxaca went from urban chic to urban grit. Las Casas was a long, narrow, one-way street-if it had been shorter it would have been an alley-crowded with people and crammed with hole-in-the-wall shops and sidewalk stalls selling everything from rubber tubing and used automobile batteries to knock-off wristwatches and green high-top sneakers with pictures of Che Guevara or Daffy Duck on them. It was also the route to the second-class bus terminal, so it was choked with diesel fumes, and bumper-to-bumper with buses so old and beat-up that you expected to see them spewing nuts and bolts like cartoon cars.

The sidewalks were narrow enough to begin with, and with the encroachment of the curbside stalls, it was impossible to walk without continually shouldering aside people coming the other way, or being shouldered aside by them. Not once, though, did they encounter any rudeness or irritation; the locals had learned to live with it as a matter of course. Every now and then they got separated in the crush, but with Julie being half a foot taller than the average pedestrian, they had no trouble spotting each other over the heads of the crowd.

At the intersections, the pedestrian Walk signs made them laugh. They were, as Julie remarked, more Run signs than Walk signs. They allowed ten seconds to get across the street, and the dwindling seconds were shown: 10… 9… 8… Underneath the numbers was the moving figure of a man. At ten, the start of the countdown, he was sauntering along, but by five he had broken into a run, and by two he was running like hell, arms and legs churning. The live pedestrians, they noted, did not follow suit. They started at a saunter and they finished at a saunter, whatever the count. This resulted in an unabated storm of horn-honking (the drivers were not as polite as the walkers), which had no effect on the street crossers, but added considerably to the general sense of clamor, closeness, and commotion.

They were glad to finally see the museum. It stood on a corner, an old one-story adobe house, much the worse for the two centuries or so that it had been in existence, to say nothing of the last six or seven decades of diesel fumes. Seeing it answered a question that had been bothering Gideon: If the skull was what was worrying Tony, why had he opted for murder rather than going to the museum in the morning, when it was closed, finding some way to break in, and stealing the skull? Sure, there would have been risks involved, but there had been even more risks doing it the way he did. And whatever the risks, who would choose murder over theft?

The answers were on the house itself. There were few windows in the thick walls, and every one of them had not only an iron grill over it but a steel security shutter, all of which were rolled down. And while the entrance door was probably as old as the building, it had been cross-braced with studded steel bars. A guided missile might have gotten the place open for you, but nothing less.

In front of the building was a small courtyard enclosed by high adobe walls and secured by a head-high gate of ornate metal grillwork, overpainted so many times that the twining leaves and stems and flowers were hardly more than solid globs of black paint. The heavy old padlock on the gate was in the process of being shaken to make sure it was closed, by a small, pale, waspish man in a dark suit and tie.

“We’re closed,” he said to them in dour, unaccented American English. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.” He was a bit of a dandy, or at least he would have been in 1965, when his threadbare double-breasted jacket and inch-wide tie were still in fashion.

“You’re not open till four?” Julie asked.

“No,” he said, his voice rising as if it were something he had already explained to them a dozen times. “Tuesdays and Thursdays, one until three. Saturdays, one until five. Mondays twelve until three, and Fridays, twelve until two. Look at the sign,” he added irritably, gesturing at a small plaque so darkened by street grime and age that it was next to impossible to read.

“But it’s barely three o’clock now,” Gideon said. “Couldn’t you let us in just for a minute?”

“Impossible.”

“It really is important, and I don’t think it’ll take long. We’ll be glad to pay your admission fees, of course.”

Now the man was insulted. “It’s not a matter of fees. Standards must be maintained.”

“Well, sure, but-”

“I’m sorry. Now really, I must go, I must be on my way. Time is of the essence.” And off he went around the corner, shaking his head.

Julie and Gideon looked at each other. “Now who does he remind me of?” Julie wondered, looking after the scurrying, still muttering figure.

“ Alice in Wonderland?” Gideon guessed. “The Mad Hatter?”

They both laughed. “You might be right,” she said. “Well, what now?”

“I come back tomorrow, I guess. Between twelve and three. Standards must be maintained.”

“No, I meant us-what do you want to do right now? Do you-” The phone in her bag went off and she dug it out. They both went to stand right up against the wall of the building, out of the central flow of foot traffic, which until then had been parting around them and then coming together again, the way a stream does around a boulder. “Oh hello, Javier-” she began brightly, then quickly sobered. “Oh. Did he say anything before… Okay, I see. Yes, I appreciate that. Yes, of course I’ll tell him. Thanks, Javier.”

“Tony’s dead,” Gideon said as she put away the phone.

“Yes. He never regained consciousness.”

“I-” He stopped speaking and shook his head.

Julie looked hard at him. “Gideon, you have nothing to blame yourself for. What else could you do?”

“I know that, Julie, it’s just that…” But it was hard to sort out his feelings, let alone to put them into words. Of course Tony’s death was Tony’s own doing; of course it was inadvertent on Gideon’s part. It had just happened, and Tony alone was to blame. Still, there was no avoiding the simple fact that Tony Gallagher, alive yesterday, was dead today. He would be mourned-and missed-by his family. And the unavoidable truth was that if Gideon Oliver had never come to Oaxaca, he would still be alive.

She squeezed his hand. “It was not your fault,” she said firmly. “And the others aren’t going to blame you, believe me.”

He nodded. “I hope not.” One more shake of his head, this time to clear it.

“I wonder if we’ll ever find out what it was all about now,” Julie said.

“Pretty doubtful. Javier’s probably going to drop the whole thing now. From a legal point of view, there’s nothing to be done. Tony’s dead. There’s nobody to be prosecuted.”

“No, he’s going to keep pursuing it; he made a point of telling me so, and he wanted me to make sure you knew.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I guess he’s gotten intrigued, and he needs to see how all the strands of this thing fit together. That sounds more like the old Marmolejo; none of this ‘statute of limitations’ baloney.”

She nodded. “Anyway… back to what we do now. You want to head on back to the Hacienda?”

“Well, if you want to…”

“But you don’t?”

“Not really, no. Marmolejo’s people are probably out there talking to them right now, so everything’s probably in an uproar. And they’re going to be in a state of shock about Tony-that he’s dead, and how he died. They’ll have a million questions. I just don’t feel up to facing that right now.”

“Okay, I can understand that. Why don’t we do some sightseeing and then have dinner here by ourselves? Then you won’t have to face them until tomorrow, when it’s all sunk in. And we can give ourselves a pleasant afternoon. I’d say we’ve earned it, especially you.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Gideon agreed

They threaded their way through the swarms (all the foot traffic seemed to be against them as workers apparently headed for the bus terminal for transportation out to their villages), back to the Zocalo, bought themselves a guide pamphlet (there wasn’t anything that could properly be called a guide book) at one of the stalls, and spent the next four hours seeing the sights: the grand old Palacio del Gobierno, now a museum; the cathedral; the Museum of Pre-Hispanic Art. When that wore them down, they returned to the now-emptying Zocalo to drink coffee at an outdoor cafe and watch the sinking sun burnish the tops of the laurels and the arched porticoes of the surrounding buildings. Then they walked a couple of blocks to El Naranjo, the other restaurant that Marmolejo had recommended in the event they wanted “someplace quieter, more elegant, with real Oaxacan cuisine and ambience, of which few tourists would even be aware.”

The place lived up to advance billing, a cool, quiet, skylighted interior courtyard in a well-kept colonial building, with Moorish arches, a seventeenth-century floor of green stone tiles, and a trickling stone fountain. And a full-sized orange tree (el naranjo) in the middle. They ate chicken with mole coloradito, drank local beer, and never once talked about murder, or skulls, or Tony Gallagher and his clan.