A woman, slender, handsome, and middle-aged, had walked around the screen into the exhibit area.
“Dr. Hartman,” Highhawk said. “You’re working late.”
“You too, Henry,” she said, with a glance at Chee.
“This is Jim Chee,” Highhawk said. “Dr. Carolyn Hartman is one of our curators. She’s my boss. This is her show. And Mr. Chee is a Navajo shaman. I asked him to take a look at this.“
“It was good of you to come,” Carolyn Hartman said. “Did you find this Night Chant authentic?”
“As far as I know,” Chee said. “In fact, I think it’s remarkable. But the Yeibichai is not a ceremonial that I know very well. Not personally. The only one I know well enough to do myself is the Blessing Way.”
“You’re a singer? A medicine man?”
“Yes, ma’am. But I am new at it.”
“Mr. Chee is also Officer Chee,” Highhawk said. “He’s a member of the Navajo Tribal Police. In fact, he’s the very same officer who arrested me out there. I thought you’d approve of that.” Highhawk was smiling when he said it. Dr. Hartman was smiling, too. She likes him, Chee thought. It was visible. And the feeling was mutual.
“Good show,” she said to Chee. “Running down the grave robber. Sometime I must come out to your part of the country with time enough to really see it. I should learn a lot more about your culture. I’m afraid I’ve spent most of my time trying to understand the Incas.” She laughed. “For example, if I were your guide here, I wouldn’t be showing you that Night Chant display. I’d be showing you my own pets.” She pointed to the diorama immediately adjoining. In it a wall of great cut stones opened onto a courtyard. Beyond, a temple rose against a mountain background. This display also offered its culturally attired manikins. Men in sleeveless tunics, cloaks of woven feathers, headbands, and leather sandals; women in long dresses with shawls fastened across their breasts with jeweled pins and their hair covered with cloths. But the centerpiece of all of this was a great metal mask. To Chee it seemed to have been molded of gold and decorated with a fortune in jewels.
“I’d been admiring that,” he said. “Quite a mask. It looks expensive.”
“It’s formed of a gold-platinum alloy inset with emeralds and other gems,” she said. “It represents the great god Viracocha, the creating god, the very top god of the Inca pantheon. The smaller mask there, that one represents the Jaguar god. Less important, I guess. But potent enough.”
“It looks like it would be worth a fortune,” Chee said. “How did the museum get it?” As he said it, he wished he hadn’t. In his ears the question seemed to imply the acquisition might be less than honorable. But perhaps that was a product of the way he’d been thinking. No honorable Navajo could have sold the museum that mask of Talking God he had been admiring. Not if it was genuine. Such masks were sacred, held in family custody. No one had a right to sell them.
“It was a gift,” Dr. Hartman said. “It had been in the hands of a family down there. A political family, I gather. And from them it went to some very important person in the United Fruit Company, or maybe it was Anaconda Copper. Anyway, someone like that. And then it was inherited, and in the 1940s somebody needed to offset a big income tax problem.” Dr. Hartman created a flourish with an imaginary wand, laughing. “Shazam! The Smithsonian, the attic of America, the attic of the world, obtains another of its artifacts. And some good citizen gets a write-off on his income tax bill.”
“I guess no one can complain,” Chee said. “It's a beautiful thing.”
“Someone can always complain.” Dr. Hartman laughed. “They're complaining right now. They want it back.”
“Oh,” Chee said. “Who?”
“The Chilean National Museum. Although of course the museum never actually had it’s hands on it.” Dr. Hartman leaned against a pedestal which supported, according to its caption, the raven mask used by shamans in the Carrier tribe of the Canadian Pacific Coast. It occurred to Chee that she was enjoying herself.
“Actually,” she continued, “the fuss is being raised by someone named General Huerta. General Ramon Huerta Cardona, to be formal. It was his family from which the American tycoon, whoever he was, got the thing in the first place. Or so I understand. And I imagine that if their national museum manages to talk us out of it, the good general would then file a claim to recover it for his family. And being a very, very big shot in Chilean politics, he’d win.”
“Are you going to give it back?”
Highhawk laughed.
“I’m not,” Dr. Hartman said. “I wouldn’t give it back under the circumstances. I would be happy enough to give Henry here his bones back in the name of common sense, or maybe common decency. But I wouldn’t return that mask.” She smiled benignly at Henry Highhawk. “Romantic idealism I can approve. But not greed.” She shrugged and made a wry face. “But then I don’t make policy.”
“He’s coming to see it at the opening,” Highhawk said. “General Huerta is. Did you notice that story about it the other day in the
“I read that,” Dr. Hartman said. “I gather from what he told the reporter that the general is coming to Washington for some more dignified purpose, but I noticed he said he would also visit us to see“—Dr. Hartman’s voice shifted into sarcasm—“ ‘our national treasure.’ ”
“That’ll be a pain,” Highhawk said. “Special security always screws things up.”
“He’s not a head of state,” Dr. Hartman said. “Just the head secret policeman. We’ll give him a couple of guides and a special ‘meet him at the front door with a handshake.’ After that, he’s just another tourist.”
“Except the press will flock in after him. And the TV cameras,” said Highhawk, who knew a lot about such affairs.
Chee found himself liking Dr. Hartman. “He’ll be seeing quite a display here,” he said.
“No false modesty,” Dr. Hartman said. “I think so, too. I would be good at this if I didn’t have to spend so much time being a museum bureaucrat.” She smiled at Highhawk. “For example, trying to figure out how to keep peace between an idealistic young conservator and the people over in the Castle who make the rules.”
Chee noticed that Henry Highhawk did not return the smile.
