Gideon almost choked on his wine. “How the heck did you come up with that?”
“It wasn’t hard. I just mentally went over my list of all the Mexican policemen I know, and the total was one, and that one was Javier. So I took a wild guess. But how did he get to be a colonel in Oaxaca?”
It took five minutes to explain, by which time they had finished their wine. “Another?” Gideon asked, trying to sit up in the soft, moving hammock. “Assuming I can actually get out of this thing.”
Julie glanced at her watch. “No, it’s almost six. We’re all having dinner in Uncle Tony’s apartment. He likes to eat with everybody when he’s here. He’s read all about you, by the way, and he’s really anxious to meet you. Really, I think you’re going to like him.”
“Oh, I’m sure I will. Cocky, loud, overbearing, self-centered, nasty… What’s not to like?”
TEN
Tony’s “apartment” was in the Casa del Mayordomo, the one-time plantation manager’s house, now divided into quarters for Carl, Annie, Tony himself, Jamie, and Josefa Gallegos, the housekeeping manager who was, Julie had told him, more of a charity case than an employee; she was Tony’s aunt by marriage, the widowed wife of his mother Beatriz’s brother.
Other than the upstairs bathroom and bedroom, Tony’s unit consisted of one large, simple space with whitewashed walls that were hung with Mexican Primitive paintings. The room had been outfitted as a living room- dining room-a cove-like kitchen was tucked into one corner-with Mexican Colonial furniture, including a museum- quality, elaborately painted dinner table with the place settings-plate, spoon, fork (but no knife)-painted right on it.
Julie and Gideon were the last to arrive. When they got there the others were clustered near one end of the table, where bottles of mezcal, wine, and beer were waiting (Gideon noticed that the painted surface had received a thick coating of plastic or polyurethane to protect it from spills) and from which hors d’oeuvres were being served by Dorotea’s two teenage nieces, who were her kitchen assistants.
As Julie had implied, Tony had done some serious prepping on Gideon, and on forensic anthropology as well. With a few drinks apparently under his belt by the time they got there, he had quickly collared Gideon and pretty much appropriated him for discussion of matters osteological.
Julie had said that, despite a few disagreeable personality traits, he was likeable, and he was: a big, blustery, affable guy with a voice that sounded like the clatter of the Eighth Avenue Express coming up through a grate in the sidewalk. Physically, he was not an attractive man. He bore a three-day growth of stubbly beard, trendy if you believed the fashion ads, but as usual with men who had a few too many chins and not enough neck, he wound up looking more scruffy than macho. He was, as Julie had said, considerably overweight, with the bulgy, button- popping look that comes from having recently put on a lot of pounds that haven’t yet figured out where they are eventually going to settle. His flushed, yellowish skin, and the threadlike purple tracery of broken capillaries that emerged from the stubble and crawled up his cheeks and onto his nose spoke of the dedicated boozehound. But if he was a drunk, he was a genial drunk, on this night at any rate, and he had clearly taken a liking to Gideon.
“Hey, what are you drinking?” he said early on. “Is that wine? Nah, put that crap down, you gotta try this. You like mezcal?”
Gideon didn’t know. “I’ve never tried it.”
“Never tried it?” Tony was astounded. “Where’ve you been all your life?” He led Gideon to the drinks table and lifted one of several dark purple bottles with Hacienda Encantada labels. “Now, this stuff is special. This is made from maguey right on the property, the same plants they made the sisal from in the old days. I get it bottled at a distillery in Tlacolula. They only make a few cases a year. Okay, now do like I do.”
Gideon did as instructed. The mezcal was poured into a shot-sized, cylindrical glass and placed on a saucer with four lime wedges and a cinnamon-colored spoonful of salt mixed with powdered chile peppers. A wedge of lime was dipped into the salt mixture, sucked on, and followed by a sip of mezcal. Four wedges, four sips. Then on to the next saucer. Because Gideon knew that tequila also came from the maguey and he had never developed a taste for tequila, he hadn’t expected to like it, but mezcal turned out to have a rich, smoky taste, more like Scotch than tequila.
“It’s good,” he said truthfully, but turned down the offer of a third. Tony shrugged and poured one for himself. “Now, then,” he said, arranging the salt and lime wedges to his satisfaction, “I want to talk to you-” A slurp of lime, a sip of mezcal. “-about, like, racial differences in, like, cranial form…”
Ten minutes later, with Tony still monopolizing Gideon, the group sat down to dinner. “This guy,” Tony declared to one and all, with his arm draped collegially around Gideon’s shoulder, “this guy is famous. I Googled him; he’s all over the Net. The Skeleton Doctor.” The nape of Gideon’s neck was jovially, if a little too vigorously, squeezed. “Right, Gid?”
“Actually,” Gideon murmured, “not that it matters-”
“The Skeleton Doctor. They even had a TV show on him. On A amp;E.”
“Well, not on me. I was just a small part of it. It was-”
“And there was a whole article on him in Discover magazine.”
That much was true, but Gideon was getting uncomfortable. Tony was at the head of the table with Gideon on his left and Julie on his right. The rest, other than Jamie, who was chewing his lip and brooding over something, were smiling at him, or at least in his general direction, with apparent interest. But long-time professor that he was, he was an old hand at recognizing the glazed, overly bright stare and glassy smile of a captive audience. Tony Gallagher in full throttle was a hard man to ignore or to interrupt; no doubt even harder when he also happened to be el patron.
In the end it was Tony himself who came to Gideon’s rescue, interrupting himself in the middle of a sentence. “Hey, Jamie, why the long face, as the bartender said when the horse walked into the bar? You look like you just lost your best friend.”
“Oh-sorry, Tony. It’s nothing. I was just thinking…”
Jamie was much as Julie had described him, a skinny, narrow-shouldered man with Woody Allen glasses and a sad-sack, permanently worried, Woody-Allenish demeanor to match. Gideon couldn’t help smiling, thinking of the wonderfully apt Yiddish word his old mentor, Abe Goldstein, would have used to describe him: nebbish. He had an aluminum cane hooked on the back of his chair, and it was obvious that he was still in some discomfort from his knee operation.
“Come on, little brother, out with it,” Tony said amiably.
Jamie hunched his shoulders. “Well, it’s just that I’ve been thinking about what you were telling me about on the way down, your new… installation. I put some working figures together, and honestly, I don’t see how we can make it work. I mean, I’m not criticizing-”
“Oh yeah,” Tony cried, “I was gonna get around to that.” He removed his arm from Gideon’s shoulder and rearranged himself in his chair. “Everybody listen to this now,” he said, hammering on the table with freshened enthusiasm. “Jamie thinks I’m out of my mind, but you’re gonna love it. This is Preciosa’s idea, actually, and I think she’s really got something this time.” He looked proudly toward the foot of the table where Preciosa, his “current sweet patootie,” sat smiling.
Only “sweet patootie” didn’t come close to conveying Preciosa’s looks. A tall, languid woman in her forties, exotic in a long-nosed, high-cheekboned way, over-made-up and overjeweled (six of her long, thin fingers bore rings, three of worked silver, and three with amethyst stones that closely matched her purple lipstick and eye shadow), she put Gideon in mind of one of those big wading birds, a heron or an ibis, exaggeratedly slow-moving and studiedly graceful. And, like a heron, endowed with an extraordinarily long and sinuous neck, so that her narrow head gave the impression of bobbing slightly on its slender support. As a physical type, she was as different from Tony as two people can be. Tony was one of those people who seemed to take up more space than he was entitled to, and to be made of something denser and heavier than plain flesh. The supple, lissome Preciosa seemed as if she could conform to any space available, like jelly, like smoke.
Gideon could see that identifying her as the originator of the idea to come did nothing to increase the receptiveness of Carl, or Josefa, or Jamie; instead, there was a flurry of exchanged, wary glances and even a few rolled eyes. Annie’s feelings about her “harebrained schemes,” it appeared, were widely shared. Like Tony,
