It is this uncanny ability to sense when someone is lying that has prompted doctors and scientists to refer to people with this particular form of aphasia as “human lie detectors.” It was this sensitivity to the subliminal tones of deception that Alice was reacting to with such anxiety.
Bern knew what was happening.
Becca Haber didn’t acknowledge Alice’s audible moan, but she heard it, and from the disconcerted look on her face, Bern thought that she understood its derisive tone, as well.
“Look,” she said, “do you mind if I smoke?” And she bent down to her purse on the floor and took out a pack of cigarettes before Bern could respond. She quickly lighted one, and then stood, her eyes still avoiding Alice, and walked over to the glass wall, where she looked out at the late-morning light on the surface of the lake. She stood there, her back to Bern, the smoke billowing in front of her as white and dense as spun sugar in the summer glare.
She was nervous, and he thought there was more to it than the awkwardness of Alice’s undisguised skepticism. He stood and threw a look of admonishment at Alice, who rolled her eyes again, this time in silence, and then he joined Becca at the glass wall.
“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Why didn’t you just take this to the police to start with? Why come to me?”
“Because I want to know first… if this is, or isn’t, him,” she said without turning to him, her face inches from the glass. “If it isn’t… well, then, I was just screwed out of my money. If it is, then I want to check into my legal rights, from an international perspective. I want to know what my options are-what I can expect to encounter-when I walk in there and tell the police that some kid in Mexico City sold me my husband’s skull in a paper sack.”
“Why not go to the lawyer right now?” Bern suggested. “That seems reasonable. Then you’d know what you’re up against no matter what happens.”
She turned to him.
“That’s not the way I see it,” she said. She drew on the cigarette, her eyes on him. “There are just too many unanswered questions the way it is.” She turned her head aside, lifted her chin, and blew the smoke into the room. “I don’t have anything. Nothing. Just that he’s gone and this kid sold me this…” She nodded toward the skull. “And if it’s not… him, then I don’t have anything. Just a missing husband, which is nothing but a conversation, right?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”
“Well, it’s not a conversation I want to have,” she said.
That sounded reasonable. What could he say? The lies could be insignificant, embarrassing things, private things that were legitimately none of his business. The circumstances weren’t the normal kind that he was used to dealing with. Usually, these requests came from state or federal law-enforcement agencies or some other institution.
“How’d you get it across the border?” he asked, hoping he sounded curious rather than suspicious.
“Yeah, well, I paid someone to smuggle it across,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t going to go through customs without a hassle, some kind of long rigmarole.”
“And you just happen to know people who do that sort of thing.”
She smiled for the first time. “I was in Mexico City. All things are possible there. Things like that anyway.”
“How do you know it’s the same skull?”
“I made teeth impressions in modeling clay, top and bottom. I told them I wouldn’t pay the rest of the money on the other side unless the impressions matched. They did.”
“Oh! For in the single sort of thing!” Alice blurted.
Again, Becca resolutely ignored her, but when Bern glanced Alice’s way, he saw her head was tilted dramatically to the side, and her eyes were rolled heavenward, as though she were enduring the most unbelievable silliness.
“I’d have to consult an anthropologist,” he said. “I’ll have-”
“I’ve already done that,” Haber said. “I knew from the article that you’d need to know the race and sex of the skull before you could work on it. And besides, I needed to know if I’d been sold some… thing out of a graveyard in one of the colonias. I took the skull to Dr. Graciela de Aceves, an anthropologist with the Autonomous University of Mexico. She thought it was an American Caucasoid, based on data presented in Rhine and Moore’s findings. She said to mention those names to you, that they’d mean something to you.”
They did. And he knew of Dr. de Aceves’s work, too. She was a well-respected medical anthropologist.
“I have a letter from her,” Becca added, “if you want to see it.”
Bern was surprised. If he had been in Becca Haber’s shoes, Dr. de Aceves would have been the one person in all of Mexico that he would have gone to. The fact that she didn’t go to one of the scores of less qualified professionals scattered throughout the country meant that Ms. Haber knew a thing or two about doing things the right way.
She was studying him, trying to read what he was thinking. She was six feet away, her arms folded as she leaned one shoulder against the glass wall. The truth was, he wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with work right now, and she had offered over the telephone earlier to double his fee if he would drop everything and get right on it. That was enticing. He saw no reason why he shouldn’t go ahead with the project.
Of course, there were Alice’s dramatics, but again he reminded himself that if Alice was detecting falsehoods in Haber’s story, it didn’t necessarily have to mean that they were in the category of mortal sins. Maybe Haber was having an affair with her husband’s best friend and didn’t want to bring that into the equation. Maybe her husband had been having an affair with her sister, and she understandably wanted to leave that out of it, too. Maybe she wasn’t even married to the guy. Maybe… hell, maybe anything.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
“Great,” she said, but her face didn’t register great. Maybe there was a little relief, but if that’s what it was, there wasn’t a whole lot of emotion in it. It wasn’t as if she was happy to finally be headed toward a situation that might bring her closure. It was more like she had gotten a business negotiation settled.
“You’ll have to leave it,” he said.
“Yeah, okay. How… long?”
“Let me spend some time with it. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”
She gave him her name and a telephone number at a residential hotel downtown on the lake.
That was it. She didn’t want to hang around to ask him questions. She didn’t want him to explain anything about his process, about what he would do first. She didn’t ask, as private individuals often did, if she could watch him work. Becca Haber had done what she wanted to do, and she wanted out of there.
He could hardly blame her. Alice’s behavior had been a little over the top.
Becca stepped over to the coffee table, put out her cigarette in an ashtray, and picked up her purse. With Alice staring rudely at her, she headed for the door without looking around.
At the courtyard gate, he told her he’d call her the next day, then watched as she walked to her car and drove away.
When he got back to the studio, Alice had opened one of the tall, narrow windows along a side wall and was dumping out the cigarette that Becca Haber had left in the ashtray.
“If there was a tune flight into the sails,” she said saucily, “it was a long way from the side of her hair.”
She returned the empty ashtray to the table.
“Good going,” Bern said sarcastically. “You were terrific, Alice. What the hell got into you anyway?”
She shrugged, went back to her stool, and started drawing. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at the skull on the table.
“Well, I’m going to do it anyway,” he said.
“Over without a care,” she said with deliberate indifference, not looking up from the sketchbook. “Anyway, the brushes won’t feel like lady flowers.”
Bern looked at her. Sometimes he wondered about the two of them. Talking to her was like talking to yourself, because it really didn’t go anywhere. But somehow it seemed to make sense a lot of the time anyway. If Alice didn’t know that they weren’t communicating, then who the hell was he to worry about it? They seemed to do all right whatever was happening.
“She really got under your skin, didn’t she?” he said, walking over to the coffee table. “I’ve never seen you quite like that before.” He sat on the sofa in front of the skull and studied it.
