“Or harpooned, or crossbowed, or beaned with a charro lasso, or speared, or arrowed, or knitting needled, or war clubbed,” Highhawk added. “They wanted all that stuff to come out too. Anything that might be a weapon, from Cheyenne metate stones to Eskimo whale-skinning knives. It was quite an argument.”
Highhawk did an abrupt turn through a doorway into a long, bright, cluttered room lit by rows of fluorescent tubes.
“The conservatory lab,” he said, “the repair shop for decaying cannonballs, frayed buggy whips, historic false teeth, and so forth, including—if the computer was right—one Tano War God.”
He stopped beside one of the long tables which occupied the center of the room, rummaged briefly, extracted a cardboard box. From it he pulled a crudely carved wooden form.
He held it up for Chee to inspect. It was shaped from a large root, which gave it a bent and twisted shape. Bedraggled feathers decorated it and its face stared back at Chee with the same look of malice that he remembered on the fetish he’d seen in Highhawk’s office. Was it the same fetish? Maybe. He couldn’t be sure.
“This is what the shouting’s about,” he said. “The symbol of one of the Tano Twin War Gods.”
“Has somebody been working on it?” Chee asked. “Is that why it’s here?”
Highhawk nodded. He looked up at Chee. “Where did you hear the Pueblo was asking for it back?”
“I can’t remember,” Chee said. “Maybe there was something in the
Highhawk laid the fetish gently back in the box. “Anyway, I guess that when the museum got the word that the Pueblo was asking about it, somebody over in the Castle sent a memo over. They wanted to know if we actually had such a thing. And if we did have it, they wanted to make damn sure it was properly cared for. No termites, moss, dry rot, anything like that. That would be very bad public relations.” Highhawk grinned at Chee. “Folks in the Castle can’t stand a bad press.”
“Castle?”
“The original ugly old building with the towers and battlements and all,” Highhawk explained. “It sort of looks like a castle and that’s where the top brass has offices.” The thought of this wiped away Highhawk’s good humor. “They get paid big money to come up with reasons why the museum needs eighteen thousand stolen skeletons. And this—” He tapped the fetish. “—this stolen sacred object.”
He handed it to Chee.
It was heavier than he’d expected. Perhaps the root was from some tree harder than the cotton-wood. It looked old. How old? he asked himself. Three hundred years? Three thousand? Or maybe thirty. He knew no way to judge. But certainly nothing about it looked raw or new.
Highhawk was glancing at his watch. Chee handed him the fetish. “Interesting,” he said. “There’s a couple of things I want to ask you about.”
“Tell you what,” Highhawk said. “I have a thing I have to do. We’ll go back by my office and you wait there and I’ll be right back. This is going to take—” He thought. “—maybe ten, fifteen minutes.”
Chee glanced at his own watch when Highhawk dropped him at the office. It was nine twenty-five. He sat beside Highhawk’s desk, heels on the wastebasket, relaxing. He was tired and he hadn’t realized it. A long day, full of walking, full of disappointments. What would he be able to tell Janet Pete that Janet Pete didn’t already know? He could tell her of Highhawk’s coyness about the fetish. Obviously it was Highhawk who had brought the War God up to the conservancy lab to work on it. Obviously he’d known exactly where to find it. Obviously he didn’t want Chee to know of his interest in the thing.
Chee yawned, and stretched, and rose stiffly from his chair to prowl the office. A framed certificate on the wall declared that his host had successfully completed studies in anthropological conservation and restoration at the London Institute of Archaeology. Another certified his completion with honors of a materials conservation graduate program at George Washington University. Still another recognized his contribution to a seminar on “Conservation Implications of the Structure, Reactivity, Deterioration, and Modification of Proteinaceous Artifact Material” for the American Institute of Archaeology
Chee was looking for something to read and thinking that Highhawk’s few minutes had stretched a bit when he heard the sounds—a sharp report, a clatter of miscellaneous noises with what might have been a yell mixed in. It was an unpleasant noise and it stopped Chee cold. He caught his breath, listening. Whatever it was ended as abruptly as it had started. He walked to the door and looked up and down the hallway, listening. The immense sixth floor of the Museum of Natural History was as silent as a cave. The noise had come from his right. Chee walked down the hallway in that direction, slowly, soundlessly. He stopped at a closed door, gripped the knob, tested it. Locked. He put his ear to the panel and heard nothing but the sound his own blood made moving through his arteries. He moved down the hallway, conscious of the rows of wooden bins through which he walked, of the smells, of dust, of old things decaying. Then he stopped again and stood absolutely still, listening. He heard nothing but ringing silence and, after a moment, what might have been an elevator descending in another part of the building.
Then steps. Rapid steps. From ahead and to the left. Chee hurried to the corridor corner ahead, looked around it. It was empty. Simply another narrow pathway between deep stacks of numbered bins. He listened again. Where had the hurrier gone? What had caused those odd noises? Chee had no idea which way to look. He simply stood, leaning against a bin, and listened. Silence rang in his ears. Whoever, whatever, had made the noise had gone away.
He walked back to Highhawk’s office, suppressing an urge to look back, controlling an urge to hurry. And when he reached it, he closed the door firmly behind him and moved his chair against the wall so that it faced the door. When he sat in it he suddenly felt very foolish. The noise would have some perfectly normal explanation. Something had fallen. Someone had dropped something heavy.
He resumed his explorations of the documents on Highhawk’s untidy desk, looking for something interesting. They tended toward administrative documents and technical material. He selected a photocopy of a report entitled
ETHICAL AND PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN CONSERVING ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM OBJECTS
and settled down to read it.
It was surprisingly interesting—some twenty-five pages full of information and ideas mostly new to Chee. He
