Curses!

Gideon settled back, too, looking down at the cloud sheet, and let his mind run back. The events at Tlaloc were painful to think about professionally as well as personally. He was, though he would hardly say such a thing aloud, a dedicated anthropologist, devoted to the field and intensely protective of its standards and reputation, both of which were gratifyingly high, generally speaking.

But Howard Bennett had violated those standards in an almost unimaginable way, and since then Gideon had rarely spoken of it. Most people he knew would have been surprised to learn he had been on the scene. Still, Julie had a point. She had a right to know more about it. Anyway, judging from the determined glint in her eyes, he wasn't going to get away with keeping it to himself any longer.

He started from the beginning. “You know what I remember most when I think about it? How hot it was.'

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Chapter 3

* * * *

'Hot” didn't begin to describe that memorable afternoon. It had been like a steam bath, only worse because there was no way to get up and walk out. The temperature had been a hundred degrees, the relative humidity had been a hundred percent, and breathing had been like inhaling through a wad of warm, wet cotton.

The brief rain had ended twenty minutes before, one of those hot slashing torrents that fell on the jungle canopy like a waterfall and then stopped as if someone had turned off a tap. Already the half inch of water that had slicked the ancient Mayan ceremonial plaza of Tlaloc had disappeared, sucked down through the porous soil of Yucatan and into the great natural limestone caverns below. The moment the rain had stopped the sun had reappeared, enveloping the world in vapor. The dense green foliage that pressed in on the plaza from all sides, the thousand-year-old stones of the crumbling temples, the thatch-roofed archeologists’ shed—all hissed and steamed in the rain's aftermath.

Gideon was sitting on the veranda of the shed, at the rickety work table nominally under the protection of the eaves, but now mostly in the sun. Like everything else, he was, if not hissing, at least steaming. It poured from his sweaty khaki work clothes, from his curled, stained straw hat, from his very pores. He took another swig from the scarred bottle of warm grapefruit soda, grimaced, wiped his perspiring forehead with an equally wet forearm, and thought wistfully and fleetingly of Yosemite in the snow, and of the cool and windy Mendocino coast. Then he sighed and returned his attention to the brown, roughly globular object, also steaming, on the work table in front of him. It was the latest find brought up by the divers from the cloudy green depths of the sacrificial cenote: a human skull, the fourth so far.

He turned it slowly in his hands. Like most Mayan sacrifices it was young. None of the sutures had even begun to close, which meant it hadn't lived to make it out of its twenties. Nor out of its teens, he thought, running his finger over the chewing surfaces of the teeth. One of the third molars had fallen out after death, but the other one was freshly erupted, as cleanly sculpted as a dentist's model, with no wear on it. That would make eighteen or nineteen a reasonable guess at age. And guess was the right word. Third-molar eruption was wildly variable, but what else was there to go on? After the first twelve or fifteen years, the skull has precious little to reveal about age until the thirties. That left a lot of room for guesses.

'All right, Harvey,” he said to the pudgy, balding twenty-five-year-old with the studious manner who sat attentively beside him, “what would you say about age?'

Harvey Feiffer adjusted his posture alertly. “Um, eighteen to twenty?” he ventured. “The left third molar —'

'Good. What about sex?'

'Um, female?'

'Right again. How do you know?'

'Gee, lots of things. There's no supraorbital ridge, and the occipital protuberance is practically nonexistent. And those mastoid processes are just smooth little bumps.'

Gideon nodded his approval. In some ways Harvey was one of his better graduate students. He worked hard and he was enthusiastic about anthropology. He had jumped at the chance to accompany Gideon to Yucatan as a research assistant.

'What else do you see when you look at it?” Gideon asked. 'Whom do you see?'

'Um, whom?” Harvey chewed on the corner of his lip, wiped sweat from under his collar with a handkerchief, and timidly took the skull, being careful to cradle it in his palms in the approved manner. No fingers in the eye sockets. “There are a lot of interesting things, really,” he said, buying time. “It's on the small side, and definitely brachycephalic, although not as much as the cranial deformation makes it look.” He darted a glance at Gideon to see if he was on the right track and received a noncommittal nod. Then he glided his stubby, nail-chewed fingers lightly over the surface as Gideon had taught him to do. “The, uh, superior and inferior nuchal crests are poorly developed, and the temporal lines...'

Here in a nutshell was Harvey's problem; an overmeticulous concentration on minutiae, a relentless focus on detail at the expense of pattern and meaning. He had been a late convert to physical anthropology, switching as a junior after hearing Gideon give an all-university lecture on the evolution of the primate hand. Until then he had been a sociology major, and Gideon wondered if both fields hadn't been bad choices, for Harvey Feiffer had the precise and exacting soul of a good accountant.

Once, in an unusually loose moment over a couple of beers, he had said to Gideon, “You know what's so great about physical anthro? There's nothing to argue about; there are right answers. In sociology, if you say, like, familial norms determine infant behavior, the first guy you meet on the street will tell you that's wrong; his kid had a personality all his own from the minute he was born. But if you point at a bump on a bone and announce it's the anterior obturator tubercle, boy, it's great—nobody says peep.'

'...and the nasal bones are typically Mayan,” Harvey was now rattling on, “and there seems to be a hole drilled in the upper left incisor. Oh, and there are some Wormian bones at the lambdoidal suture, and—'

Gideon repressed a sigh. “Harvey, hold on. Step back from it a minute.” Obediently, Harvey leaped up. “No,” Gideon said with a smile. “I meant step back mentally. Try to look at the skull as a whole, as part of a person. What can you say about her?'