Tendler, the receptionist. Josefa was Mexican and Annie was American, but both, he knew, were somehow related to Mr. Gallagher, as was everybody else in a management position at the Hacienda. From the beginning it had been a family affair.
As usual, Josefa had little to say. Elderly and increasingly deaf, she gave him a grunted buenas tardes and immediately set to attacking her enchiladas de pollo con mole poblano. Annie, also as usual, was more talkative.
“You don’t look your usual cheerful self, Chief,” she said in her perfect, idiomatic Spanish.
Sandoval had always found Annie easy to talk to-always a smile at the corners of her mouth, that one; never grumpy or taciturn, a good talker and a good listener both-and before they’d gotten to their coffee and flan he’d told her the whole story.
“We looked and we looked. It’s nowhere to be found, Anita. You don’t know how I hate to turn in my report without having found it. The policia ministerial will find it, I know they will-they have so many resources at their disposal-and we will look like bumbling incompetents. I will look like a bumbling incompetent.”
“You’re positive it’s not still in the body somewhere?”
“Yes. Well, not positive, no, but that is what Dr. Bustamente says. And I’m afraid to poke around in that thing myself. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I don’t want to do it.” He shuddered. “And then on top of that, there is the report I am required to file with the policia ministerial. How do I do that, what do I write? I know nothing of such things. The last time this happened, everything I did was wrong, but did they tell me how to do it right? They did not.”
“Couldn’t Dr. Bustamente help you with that?”
“Bustamente,” he said scornfully and drew himself up. “I refuse to give him the satisfaction.”
“Chief Sandoval,” Annie said slowly, “I have an idea.”
He looked at her with a modest upsurge of hope. An idea was one idea more than he had. “Yes?”
“You know I’m going to the United States in a couple of days. Well, my cousin Julie is arriving tomorrow to take my place, and her husband is coming with her on vacation. I’ve never met him, but he’s a forensic scientist who works on such things all the time. He might be able to help you, to examine the body, maybe find the bullet, or at least give you some advice. Maybe he could help you with your report. I’m sure he would know about these things.”
Sandoval considered. “But would he be willing to do that? A prominent man, on vacation, after all…”
“From what Julie tells me about him, he’d like nothing better.”
“He hasn’t seen that thing,” Sandoval muttered.
“What have you got to lose by asking him?”
“Indeed, nothing,” Sandoval said thoughtfully.
“He’s supposed to be very famous, you know. They call him the Skeleton Detective.”
“Skeleton detective.” Sandoval uttered a short laugh as he dug into the flan, then uttered what was for him a rarity: a joke. “I suppose you wouldn’t happen to know any mummy detectives?”
“Not enough chiles in the flan,” Josefa muttered in her thickly accented English, possibly to them, possibly to the flan itself. “She’s supposed to be such a wonderful cook, how is it she don’t know to put enough chiles in the flan?”
FOUR
It was a view of the ancient city that the builders themselves had never had, and had never imagined that anyone, not even the great birds of the air, could ever have.
Julie had nudged him from an in-and-out doze to look at it.
“We there? Already?” Gideon murmured, eyes not yet altogether open.
“No. Almost. But look down there. I’m not sure if it’s Aztec, or Mayan, or what, but I knew you wouldn’t want to-”
“If it’s near Oaxaca,” he said, yawning, “then it’d be Mixtec or Zapotec. Where exactly-” His eyes popped all the way open and then some. “Wow, that’s Monte Alban! I didn’t know we’d see it from the air. What a sight.”
At twelve thousand feet the Mexicana jet had dipped its wings to afford the passengers a better view, and he hungrily drank it in. He’d been to Monte Alban before, but he’d never seen it from above, and from here, looming over a countryside of small, rectangular farms from its table-topped mountain setting, it was truly stunning, the second-grandest city in all of ancient Mesoamerica (only Teotihuacan, on the outskirts of Mexico City, was larger). Its creation was an accomplishment of unimaginable effort. The mountain had not always been table-topped. In one of the great feats of antiquity, the Zapatecos had leveled it in about 500 BC and had then begun building their monumental terraces and plazas and step-pyramids and tombs. It had been a thousand-year project.
“There, that’s the Grand Plaza,” he whispered, “and that’s the ball court, of course, and that’s the Observatory, although nobody knows if that’s really what it was used for. And-”
“It’s gigantic,” Julie said. “How many people lived there? There must have been thousands.”
“No, nobody. As far as we know, it was never used as a habitation center. There’s no water source, for one thing, unless you go down the mountain, and the mountain’s well over a thousand feet tall.”
“So it was ceremonial? All that?” They were both craning their necks as the site disappeared behind the plane’s wing.
“That’s the best bet. It’s in a great place for military purposes-you must be able to see for fifty miles in every direction-but there’s no evidence of its ever being used that way. There are a lot of theories, of course, but the one I buy, and this is really interesting…”
As it is with many people, Gideon’s strengths were also his failings. An animated, witty lecturer, always among the university’s most popular professors, he did sometimes overdo it. Among his most endearing, most annoying traits-derived from the optimistic premise that everyone must surely be as fascinated, as mesmerized, by archaeology and anthropology as he himself was-was to treat the world as his classroom. “Launching into lecture mode,” Julie would whisper warningly to him when he got carried away among friends, or even simply “lecture mode.” In fact, just a murmured side-of-the mouth “launching” was usually enough to do the trick by now. The moment he realized he was at it he ceased, usually with some embarrassment. He knew enough droning old pedants to live in dread of turning into one. But when it was just the two of them, good sport that she was, Julie was disinclined to stem the flow.
He was still at it twenty minutes later, bubbling with enthusiasm, after the plane had landed at Xoxocotlan International Airport (usually referred to, for obvious reasons, as Oaxaca Airport), a small, single-terminal affair with a couple of runways carved out of a landscape of dry brown fields.
“But think about how hard it was to build. Shaving off the top of a mountain was just the start,” he said as he pulled their bags from the luggage rack. “All those huge stones they used to build it had to be dragged all the way up from the valley floor almost fifteen hundred feet below-a hundred and fifty stories. Think about that. These were small people; the men were only five feet tall or so. How did they do it? They hadn’t figured out the use of the wheel for transportation yet. And what about shaping the stone? They had no metal tools. How did they do that? Why did they do it?”
“Carl,” she said.
“And how did they-what?”
“The man coming toward us-the cowboy. That’s my Uncle Carl. He’s here to pick us up.” She shook her head, smiling. “God, he never ages. He looks the same as he looked fifteen years ago. More than fifteen years ago.”
Julie gave her uncle a happy hug, then made the introductions. Gideon liked him right away. A lanky, loose- limbed man, perhaps an inch shorter than Gideon’s six-two, he was in denims and scuffed boots and carried a hat in his hand; not the ubiquitous straw campesino ’s sombrero that was on just about every male head in rural Mexico, but a genuine cowboy’s ten-gallon Stetson (although Gideon had read somewhere that a ten-gallon hat would hold only three gallons of water), convincingly sweat-stained and curled.
Gideon saw right away why he reminded Julie of Gary Cooper. He was appealing in the same lean, rawboned way, graceful and awkward at the same time, with a weathered, wise, kind/stern face and a reserve that somehow managed to convey both shyness and a serene self-assurance. He even had a lazy Western twang to go along with
