Talking God

Miss Mackinnon seemed to have sensed he no longer wanted conversation. She drove in silence. Leaphorn rolled a window down an inch in defiance of the rain, letting in the late-autumn smell of the city. What would he do next, after the awful interview ahead? He would notify the FBI. Better to call Kennedy in Gallup, he thought, and let him initiate the action. Then he would call the McKinley County Sheriffs office and give them the identification. Not much the sheriff could do with such information but professional courtesy required it. And then he would go and call Rodney. It would be good to have some company this evening.

“Here you are,” Miss Mackinnon said. She slowed the cab to avoid an old Chevy sedan which was backing into a parking space, and then stopped the cab in front of a two-story brick building with porches, built in a U shape around a landscaped central patio. “You want me to wait? It’s expensive.”

“Please wait,” Leaphorn said. When he had broken the news here, he didn’t want to wait around.

He walked down the pathway, following the man who had disembarked from the Chevy. Apartment one seemed to be vacant. The driver of the Chevy unlocked the door of apartment two and disappeared inside after a backward glance at Leaphorn. At apartment three, Leaphorn looked at the doorbell button. What would he say? I am looking for the widow of Elogio Santillanes. I am looking for a relative of Elogio Santillanes. Is this the residence of Elogio Santillanes?

From inside the apartment Leaphorn heard voices, faintly. Male and then female. Then he heard the sound of music. He rang the bell.

Now he heard only music. Abruptly that stopped. Leaphorn removed his hat. He stared at the door, shifting his weight. From the eaves of the porch behind him there came the sound of water dripping. On the street in front of the apartment a car went by. Leaphorn shifted his feet again. He pushed the doorbell button again, heard the ringing break the silence inside. He waited.

Behind him, he heard the door of apartment two opening. The man who had parked the Chevy stood in the doorway peering out at him. He was a small man and on this dim, rainy afternoon his form was backlit by the lamps in his apartment, making him no more than a shape.

Leaphorn pushed the button again and listened to the ring. He reached into his coat and got out the folder which held his police credentials. He sensed that behind him the man was still watching. Then he heard the sound of a lock being released. The door opened about a foot. A woman looked out at him, a middle-aged woman, slender, a thin face with glasses, black hair pulled severely back.

“Yes,” she said.

“My name is Leaphorn,” he said. He held out the folder, letting it drop open to reveal his badge. “I am looking for the residence of Elogio Santillanes.”

The woman closed her eyes. Her head bent slightly forward. Her shoulders slumped. Behind her, from some part of the room beyond Leaphorn’s vision, came the sound of a sharp intake of breath.

“Are there relatives of Mr. Santillanes living here?” Leaphorn asked.

“Yo soy,” the woman said, her eyes still closed. And then, in English: “Yes.” She was pale. She reached out, felt for the door, clutched it.

Leaphorn thought, the news I am bringing her is not news. It is something she anticipated. Something her instincts told her was inevitable. He knew the feeling. He had lived with it for months, knowing that Emma was dying. It was a fate already faced. But that didn’t matter. There was still no humane way to tell her even though her heart had already given her the warning.

“Mrs. Santillanes?” he said. “Is there someone here with you? Some friend or relative?”

The woman opened her eyes. “What do you want?”

“I want to tell you about your husband.” He shook his head. “It’s bad news.”

A man wearing a loose blue sweater appeared beside the woman. He was as old as Leaphorn, gray and stocky. He stood rigidly erect and peered at Leaphorn through the thick lenses of dark-rimmed glasses. A soldier, Leaphorn thought. “Sir,” he said, in a loud, stern voice. “What can I do for you?”

The woman put her hand on the man’s arm. She spoke in Spanish. Leaphorn didn’t catch her words. The man said “Callate!” sharply, and then, more gently, something that Leaphorn didn’t understand. The woman looked at Leaphorn as if remembering his face would be terribly important to her. Then she nodded, bit her lip, bowed, and disappeared from the room.

“You asked about a man named Santillanes,” the man said. “He does not live here.”

“I came looking for his relatives,” Leaphorn said. “I’m afraid I bring bad news.”

“We do not know him,” the man said. “No one of that name lives here.”

“This was the address he gave,” Leaphorn said.

The man’s expression became totally blank—a poker player staring at his cards. “He gave an address to you?” he asked. “And when was that?”

Leaphorn didn’t hurry to answer that. The man was lying, of course. But why would he be lying?

“He gave this address to the pharmacist where he buys his medicine,” Leaphorn said.

“Ah,” the man said. He produced a slight smile. “Then he has been sick. I trust this man, this Santillanes, is feeling better now.”

“No,” Leaphorn said. They stood there in the doorway, both of them waiting. Leaphorn had sensed some motion behind him. He shifted his weight enough to see the entrance of apartment two. The door was almost closed now. But not quite. Through it he could see the shadow of the small man, listening.

“He is not better? Then he is worse?”

“I should not be wasting your time with this,” Leaphorn said. “Did Elogio Santillanes live here once and move away? Do you know where I might find any of his relatives? Or a friend?”

The gray man shook his head.

“I will go then,” Leaphorn said. “Thank you very much. Please tell the lady I am sorry I disturbed her.”

“Ah.” The man hesitated. “You have made me curious. What happened to this fellow, this Santillanes?”

“He’s dead,” Leaphorn said.

“Dead.” There was no surprise. “How?”

“He was stabbed,” Leaphorn said.

“When did this happen?” Still there was no surprise. But Leaphorn could see the muscle along his jaw tighten. “And where did it happen?”

“Out in New Mexico. About a month ago.”

Leaphorn put his hand on the man’s arm. “Listen,” he said. “Do you know why this man Santillanes would have gone to New Mexico? What interest did he have in going to see a woman named Agnes Tsosie?”

The man pulled his arm away. He swallowed, his eyes misty with grief. He looked away from Leaphorn, toward his feet. “I don’t know Elogio Santillanes,” he said. And he carefully shut the door.

Leaphorn stood for a moment staring at the wood, sorting this out. The puzzle that had brought him here was solved. Clearly solved. No doubt about it. Or only the shadow of a doubt. The man with the worn, pointed shoes was Elogio Santillanes, the husband (perhaps brother) of this dark-haired woman. The brother (perhaps friend) of this gray-haired man. No more question of the identity of Pointed Shoes. Now there was another puzzle, new and fresh.

He walked down the porch, noticing that the door to apartment two was now closed but the light still illuminated the drapery. A dark afternoon, the kind of weather Leaphorn rarely saw on the Arizona-New Mexico border, and which quickly affected his mood. His taxi was waiting at the curb. Miss Mackinnon sat with a book propped on the steering wheel, reading.

Leaphorn turned and walked back to apartment two. He pushed the doorbell button. This one buzzed. He waited, thinking that people in Washington are slow to come to their doors. The door opened and the small man stood in it, looking at him.

“I need some information,” Leaphorn said. “I’m looking for Elogio Santillanes.”

The small man shook his head. “I don’t know him.”

“Do you know those people in that apartment over there?” Leaphorn nodded toward it. “I understand Santillanes lives in this building.”

The man shook his head. Behind him in the apartment Leaphorn could see a folding card table with a telephone on it, a folding lawn chair, a cardboard box which seemed to contain books. A cheap small-screen television set perched on another box. The sound was turned off but the tube carried a newscast, in black and white. Otherwise the room seemed empty. A newspaper was on the floor beside the lawn chair. Perhaps the man had been reading there when the doorbell rang. Leaphorn suddenly found himself as interested in this small man as he was in the slim chance of getting information that had brought him here.

“You don’t know the names of the people?” Leaphorn asked. He asked it partly to extend this conversation and see where it might lead. But there was a note of disbelief in his voice. Old as he was, Leaphorn still found it incredible that people could live side by side, see each other every day, and not be acquainted.

“Who are you?” the small man asked. “Are you an Indian?”

“I’m a Navajo,” Leaphorn said. He reached for his identification. But he thought better of that.

“From where?”

“Window Rock.”

“That’s in—” The man hesitated, thinking. “Is it in New Mexico?”

“It’s in Arizona,” Leaphorn said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for Elogio Santillanes.”

“Why? What do you want with him?”

Leaphorn’s eyes had been locked with the small man’s. They were a sort of greenish blue and Leaphorn sensed in them, in the man’s tone and his posture, a kind of hostile resentment.

“I just need information,” Leaphorn said.

“I can’t help you,” the man said. He closed the door. Leaphorn heard the security chain rattle into place.

Miss Mackinnon started the motor as soon as he climbed into the backseat of the taxi. “I hope you got a lot of money,” she said. “Back to the hotel now? And get your traveler’s checks out of the safe-deposit box.“

“Right,” Leaphorn said.

He was thinking of the small man’s strange, intent eyes, of his freckles, of his short, curly red hair. There must be thousands of short men in Washington who fit the Perez description of the man searching the roomette of Elogio Santillanes. But Leaphorn had never believed in coincidence. He had found the widow of Santillanes. He was sure of that. The widow or perhaps a sister. Certainly, he had found someone who had loved him.

And almost as certainly, he had found the man who had killed him. Going back to Window Rock could wait a little. He wanted to understand this better.

Chapter Fourteen

« ^ »

Over lunch, the day after their visit to Highhawk’s house, Chee and Janet Pete had discussed the man waiting in the sedan. “I think he was watching Highhawk, not you,” Chee had said. “I think that’s why he was parked out there.” And Janet had finally said maybe so, but he could tell she wasn’t persuaded by his logic. She was nervous. Uneasy about it. So he didn’t tell her something else he had concluded—that the little man was one of the sort policemen call “freaks.” At least the desert-country cops with whom Chee worked called them that—those men who have been somehow damaged beyond fear into a species that is unpredictable, and therefore dangerous. Finding a strange man tapping at his window in the darkness hadn’t shaken the small man in the slightest. That was obvious. It had only aroused curiosity, and then provoked a sort of aggressive macho anger. Chee had seen that in such men before.

He had given Janet his analysis of Highhawk. (“He’s nuts. Perfectly normal in some ways, but his sketches, they show you he’s tilted about nine degrees. Slightly crazy.”) And he told her of the carving of the fetish he’d seen in Highhawk’s office-studio.

“He was carving it out of cottonwood root—which is what the Pueblo people like to use, at least the ones I know. The Zunis and the Hopis,” Chee had said. “No reason to believe Tano would be any different. Maybe he was making a copy of the Twin War God.”

And Janet, of course, was way ahead of him. “I’ve thought about that,” she said. “That maybe John would hire him to make a copy of the thing. Maybe I guessed right about that.” She looked sad as she said it, not looking at Chee, studying her hands. “Then I guess we would give it to our man in the Tano Pueblo. And he’d use it to get himself elected.”

“Tell him it’s the real thing?”

“Depending on how honest our Eldon Tamana is,” Janet said glumly. “If he’s honest, then you lie to him. If he’s not, then you tell the truth and let him do the lying.”

“I wonder if anyone at the Pueblo could tell the copy from the real thing,” Chee said. “How long has the thing been missing?”

“Since nineteen three or four, I think John said. Anyway, a long time.”

“You’d probably be safe with a substitute then,” Chee said. He was thinking about Highhawk. It didn’t seem within the artist’s nature to use his talent in a conspiracy to cheat an Indian Pueblo. But perhaps Highhawk would be another one considered honest enough to require that he be lied to. Maybe he didn’t know why he was making the replica. In fact, maybe that carving wasn’t a replica at all. Maybe that cottonwood fetish in his office was something else. Or maybe it was the genuine fetish itself. Or maybe this whole theory was nonsense.

“Jim,” Janet said. “What do you think? Do you think they’re sort of being—that I’m getting sort of led into something?” She was looking down at her hands, gripped tightly in her lap. “What do you think?”

Jim Chee thought the way she had changed that question was interesting. He thought it was interesting that she didn’t ever actually pronounce the name of John McDermott. He wanted to say “Led by whom?” and force her at least to put some sort of name to it—if only the name of the law firm.

“I think something’s going on,” Chee said.

“And I think we should go somewhere quiet, and eat dinner and talk it over.” He glanced at her. “Maybe even hold hands. I could use a little handholding.”

She had been looking down at her hands. Now she gave him a quick sidelong glance, and then turned away. “I can’t tonight,” she said. “I promised John I would meet him. Him and the man from Tano.”

“Well, then,” Chee said. “I’ll ask you another question. Has Highhawk said anything more to you about this crime that hasn’t been committed yet? You remember that? You mentioned it when you called me at Shiprock. I think it was sort of vague. Some reference to needing a lawyer in the future for something that hadn’t yet happened. Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Janet said, looking at her hands again. “And tonight it’s really law firm business. John arranged to have Tamana come. He said he wants to get me involved in how to handle the problem. He wants me to talk to Tamana. So I could hardly get out of it.”

“Of course not,” Chee said. He was disappointed. He had counted on this evening stretching on. But it was more than disappointment. There was resentment, too.

Janet sensed it. “I guess I could,” she said. “I don’t know how long this man’s going to be in Washington. But I can try to call John and cancel it. Or leave a message for him at the restaurant.”

“No, no,” Chee said. “Business is business.” But he didn’t want to think about Janet and John McDermott having dinner and about what would happen after dinner. If I was honest with her, he thought, I would tell her that of course McDermott was using her. That he had probably used her when she was his student in law school, and ever since, and would always use her. He had never seen McDermott, but he knew professors who used their graduate students. Used them for slave labor to do their research, used them emotionally.

“Back to my question,” Chee said. “Did you ever ask Highhawk what he meant by that reference to the uncommitted crime? Did he ever explain what he meant by that?”

Janet seemed happy to shift the subject. “I said something like I hoped he wasn’t intending to dig up any more old bones. And he just laughed. So I said—frankly, this whole thing bothered me, so I said I didn’t think it was laughable if he was planning to commit a felony. Something stuffy-sounding like that. And he laughed again and said he didn’t intend to be guilty of making his attorney a co-conspirator. He said the less I knew the better.”

“He seems to know something about the law.”

“He knows a lot about a lot of things,” Janet agreed. “Nothing wrong with the man’s mind.”

“Except for being crazy.”

“Except for that,” Janet agreed.

“Can you arrange for me to see him again?” Chee said. “And I’d like to get a look at that genuine Tano fetish figure. You think that’s possible?”

“I’m sure there’s no problem seeing Highhawk. About the fetish, I don’t know. It’s probably stored somewhere in a basement. And the Smithsonian must be pretty selective about who has access to what.”

“Maybe because I’m a cop,” Chee said, wondering as he said it what in the world he could say to make anyone believe the Navajo Tribal Police had a legitimate interest in a Pueblo Indian artifact.

“More likely because you’re a shaman,” Janet Pete said. “You still are, aren’t you?”

“Trying to be,” Chee said. “But being a medicine man doesn’t fit very well with being a policeman. Don’t get much business.” Even that was an overstatement. The curing ceremonial Chee had learned was the Blessing Way. In the four years since he had declared himself a hataalii ready to perform that most popular ceremonial he’d had only three customers. One had been a maternal cousin, whom Chee had suspected of hiring him only as an act of family kindness. One had been the blessing of a newly constructed hogan owned by the niece of a friend, and one had been for a fellow policeman, the famous Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. “Did I tell you about singing a Blessing Way for Joe Leaphorn?”

Janet looked shocked. “The famous Leaphorn? Grouchy Joe? I thought he was—” She searched for the word to define Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. “Agnostic. Or skeptical. Or—what is it? Anyway, I didn’t think he believed in curing ceremonials and things like that.”

“He wasn’t so bad,” Chee said. “We had worked together on a case. People were digging up Anasazi graves and then there were a couple of homicides. But I think he asked me to do it because he wanted to be nice.”

“Nice,” Janet said. “That doesn’t sound like the Joe Leaphorn I always used to hear about. Seems like I was always hearing Navajo cops bitching about Leaphorn never being quite satisfied with anything.”

But it had, in fact, been nice. More than nice. Beautiful. Everything had gone beautifully. Not many of Leaphorn’s relatives had been there. But then the old man was a widower and he didn’t think Leaphorn had much family. Leaphorn was a Red Forehead Dinee and that clan was pretty much extinct. But the curing itself had gone perfectly. He had forgotten nothing. The sand paintings had been exactly correct. And when the final singing had been finished Old Man Leaphorn had, in some way difficult for Chee to define, seemed to be healed of the sickness that had been riding him. The bleakness had been gone. He had seemed back in harmony. Content.

“I think he just always wants things to be better than they naturally are,” Chee said. “I got used to him after a while. And I’ve got a feeling that all that talk about him being a smart son of a bitch is pretty much true.”

“I used to see him in court there at Window Rock now and then, and in the police building, but I never knew him. I heard he was a real pragmatist. Not a traditional Navajo.”

And how about you, Janet Pete? Chee thought. How traditional are you? Do you believe in what Changing Woman taught our ancestors about the power we are given to heal ourselves? How about you leaving Dinetah and the Sacred Mountains because a white man wants you to keep him happy in Washington? But that was none of his goddamn business. That was clear enough. His role was to be a friend. No more. Well, why not? For that matter, he could use a friend himself.

“What did you mean about getting to see the fetish as a shaman?” he asked.

“Highhawk would be very impressed if he knew you were a Navajo hataalii,” she said. “Tell him you’re a singer and let him know you would like to see his work. He’s setting up a mask exhibition, you know. Tell him you’d like to see the Navajo part of the show.”

“And then ask to see the fetish,” Chee said.

Janet looked at him, studying his expression. “Why not?” she asked, and the question sounded a little bitter. “You think I’m thinking too much like a lawyer?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well, I am a lawyer.”

He nodded. “You think I could see Highhawk tonight?”

“He’s working tonight,” she said. “On that exhibit. I’ll call him at the museum and see if I can set something up. Will you be at your hotel?”

“Where else?” Chee said, noticing as Janet glanced at him that his tone, too, sounded a little bitter.

“I’ll try to hurry it up,” she said. “Maybe you can do it tomorrow.”

It proved to be quicker than that.

Janet had shown him the Vietnam Memorial wall, the Jefferson Memorial, and the National Air and Space Museum, and then dropped him off at his hotel. Chee ate a cheese omelet in the hotel coffee shop, took a shower in his bathroom tub (which, small as it was, was huge compared to the bathing compartment in Chee’s trailer home), and turned on the television. The sound control was stuck somewhere between loud and extremely loud and Chee spent a futile five minutes trying to adjust the volume. Failing that, he found an old movie in which the mood music was lower-decibel and sprawled across the pillow to watch it.

The telephone rang. It was Henry Highhawk.

“Miss Pete said you wanted to see the exhibit,” Highhawk said. “Are you doing anything right now?”

Chee was available.

“I’ll meet you at the Twelfth Street entrance to the Museum of Natural History building,” Highhawk said. “It’s just about five or six blocks from your hotel. I hate to rush you but I have another appointment later on.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Chee said. He turned off the TV and reached for his coat.

Perhaps Janet’s idea of being followed had made him edgy. He looked for the car and he saw it almost as soon as he left the hotel entrance. The old Chevy sedan with the bent antenna was parked across the street and down the block. He stood motionless studying it, trying to see if the small man was in it. Reflection from the windshield made it impossible to tell. Chee walked slowly down the sidewalk, thinking that the small man hadn’t made any effort at concealment. What might that mean? Did he want Chee to know he was being watched? If so, why? Chee could think of no reason for that. Perhaps it was simply carelessness. Or arrogance. Or perhaps he wasn’t watching Chee at all.

His route to the Museum of Natural History would take him the other way, but Chee detoured to walk past the sedan. It was empty. He leaned against the roof, looking in. On the front seat there was a folded copy of today’s Washington Post and a paper cup. A street map of the District of Columbia was on the dash. The backseat was empty except that an empty plastic bag with a Safeway logo was crumpled on the floor. The car was locked.

Chee looked up the street and down it. Two teenaged black girls were walking toward him, laughing at something one had said. Otherwise, no one was in sight. The rain had stopped now but the streets and sidewalks still glistened with dampness. The air was damp, too, and chill. Chee pulled his jacket collar around his throat and walked. He listened. He heard nothing but occasional traffic sounds. He was on Tenth Street now, the gray mass of the Department of Justice building beside him, the Post Office building looming across the street. Justice seemed dark but a few of the windows in the postal offices were lit. What did post office bureaucrats do that kept them working late? He imagined someone at a drafting table designing a stamp. He stopped at the intersection of Constitution Avenue waiting for the Don’t Walk signal to change. Two men and a woman, all wearing the Washington uniform, were walking briskly down the sidewalk toward him. Each held a furled umbrella. Each carried a briefcase. The little man was nowhere in sight. Then, under the shrubbery landscaping the corner of the Justice building to Chee’s left, he saw a body.

Chee sucked in his breath. He stared. It was a human form, drawn into the fetal position and partially covered by what seemed to be a cardboard box. Near the head was a sack. Chee made a tentative step toward it. The trio walked past the body. The man nearest glanced at it and said something unintelligible to Chee. The woman looked at the body and looked quickly away. They walked past Chee. “… at least GS 13,” the woman was saying. “More likely 14, and then before you know it…” Probably a wino, Chee thought. Chee had seen a thousand or so unconscious drunks since his swearing-in as an officer of the Navajo Tribal Police, seen them sprawled in Gallup alleys, frozen in the sagebrush beside the road to Shiprock, mangled like jackrabbits on the asphalt of U.S. Highway 666. But he could see the floodlit spire of the Washington Monument just a few blocks behind him. He hadn’t expected it here. He walked over the dead autumn grass, knelt beside the body. The cardboard was damp from the earlier rain. The body was a man. The familiar and expected smell of whiskey was missing.

Chee reached his hand to the side of the man’s throat, feeling for a pulse.

The man screamed and scrambled into a crouching position, trying to defend himself. The cardboard box bounced to the sidewalk.

Chee jumped back, totally startled.

The man was bearded, bundled in a navy pea-coat many sizes too large for him. He struck at Chee, feebly, screaming incoherently. Two men in the Washington uniform hurrying down Constitution Avenue glanced at the scene and hurried even faster.

Chee held out empty hands. “I thought you needed help,” he said.

The man fell forward to hands and knees. “Get away, get away, get away,” he howled.

Chee got away.

Highhawk was waiting for him at the employees’ entrance on Twelfth Street. He handed Chee a little rectangle of white paper with the legend VISITOR printed and Chee’s name written on it.

“What do you want to see first?” he asked. Then paused. “You all right?”

“There’s a man out there. Sick, I guess. Lying out there under the bushes across the street.”

“Drunk maybe,” Highhawk said. “Or stoned on crack. Usually there’s three or four of them. That Department of Justice building grass is a favorite spot.”

“This guy wasn’t drunk.”

“On crack probably,” Highhawk said. “These days it’s usually crack if they’re dopers, or it can be anything from heroin to sniffing glue. But sometimes they’re just mental cases.” He considered Chee’s reaction to all this. “You have them too. I saw plenty of drunks in Gallup.”

“I think we have more drunks per capita than anybody,” Chee said. “But on the reservation we try to pick them up. We try to put them somewhere. What’s the policy here?”

But Highhawk was already limping hurriedly down the hallway, not interested in this subject, the braced leg dragging but moving fast. “Let me show you this display first,” he said. “I’m trying to get it to look just like it would if it was really happening out there in your desert.”

Chee followed. He still felt shaken. But now he was thinking again, and he thought that he hadn’t looked for the small man around the Twelfth Street entrance to the Natural History Museum. And he thought that possibly the reason he hadn’t seen the small man following him was because the small man might not have needed to follow. He might have known where Chee was going.

Henry Highhawk’s exhibit was down a side hall on the main floor of the museum. It was walled off from the world of museumgoers by plywood screens and guarded by signs declaring the area TEMPORARILY CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC and naming the display THE MASKED GODS OF THE AMERICAS. Behind the screen was the smell of sawdust, glue, and astringent cleaning fluids. There was also an array of masks, ranging from grotesque and terrible to calm and sublimely beautiful. Some were displayed in groups, one group representing the varying concept of demons in Yucatán villages, and another Inca deities. Some stood alone, accompanied only by printed legends explaining them. Some were displayed on costumed models of the priests or

“This one is mine, of course,” Highhawk said. “I did some of the others, too, and helped on some. But this one is mine.” He glanced at Chee, waiting a polite moment for a comment. “If you see anything wrong, you point it out,” he added. He stepped across the railing to the figure and adjusted the mask, moving his fingers under the leather, tilting it slightly, then readjusting it. He stepped back and looked at it thoughtfully.

“You see anything wrong?” he asked.

Chee could see nothing wrong. At least nothing except trivial details in some of the decoration. And that was probably intended. Such a sacred scene should not be reproduced exactly except for its purpose—to cure a human being. Talking God was frozen in that shuffling dance step the yeis traditionally used as they approached the patient's hogan. In this display, the patient was standing on a rug spread on the earth in front of the hogan door. He was wrapped in a blanket and held his arms outstretched. Talking God's short woven kilt seemed to flow with the motion, and in each hand he carried a rattle which looked genuine. And, Chee thought, probably was. Behind Talking God in this diorama the other gods followed in identical poses, seeming to dance out of the darkness into the firelight. Chee recognized the masks of Fringed Mouth, of Monster Slayer, of Born for Water, and of Water Sprinkler with his cane and humped back. Other yei figures were also vaguely visible moving across the dance ground. And on both sides the fires illuminated lines of spectators.

Chee's eyes lingered on the mask of Talking God. It seemed identical to the one he'd seen in Highhawk's office. Naturally it would. Probably it was the same one. Probably Highhawk had taken it home to prepare it for mounting. Or, if he was copying it, he would be making the replica look as much like the original as he could.

“What do you think?” Highhawk asked. His voice sounded anxious. “You see anything wrong?”

“It looks great to me. Downright beautiful,” Chee said. “I’m impressed.” In fact, he was tremendously impressed. Highhawk had reproduced that moment in the final night of the ceremonial called the Yei Yiaash, the Arrival of the Spirits. He turned to look at Highhawk. “Surely you didn’t get all this from that little visit out to Agnes Tsosie’s Night Chant. If you did you must have a photographic memory.” Or, Chee thought, a videotape recorder hidden away somewhere, like the audio recorder he had hidden in his palm.

Highhawk grinned. “I guess I read about a thousand descriptions of that ceremonial. All the anthropologists I could find. And I studied the sketches they made. And looked at all the materials we have on it here in the Smithsonian. Whatever people stole and turned over to us down through the years, I studied it. Studied the various yei masks and all that. And then Dr. Hartman—she’s the curator who’s in charge of setting up this business—she called in a consultant from the reservation. A Navajo shaman. Guy named Sandoval. You know him?“

“I’ve heard of him,” Chee said.

“Partly we wanted to make sure we aren’t violating any taboos. Or misusing any religious material. Or anything like that,” Highhawk paused again. He started to say something, stopped, looked nervously at Chee. “You sure you don’t see anything wrong?”

Chee shook his head. He was looking at the mask itself, wondering if there was an artificial head under it with an artificial face with an artificial Navajo expression. No reason there should be. The mask looked ancient, the gray-white paint which covered the deerskin patterned with the tiny cracks of age, the leather thongs which laced up its sides darkened with years of use. But of course those were just the details Highhawk would not have overlooked in making a copy. The mask he’d seen in the box in Highhawk’s office was either this one or an awfully close copy—that was obvious from what he had remembered. The tilt of the feathered crest, the angle of the painted eyebrows, all of those small details which went beyond legend and tradition that had lent themselves to the interpretation of the mask maker, they all seemed to be identical. Except in its ritual poetry and the sand paintings of its curing ceremonials, the Navajo culture always allowed room for poetic license. In fact it encouraged it—to bring whatever was being done into harmony with the existing circumstances. How much such license would Highhawk have if he was copying the Tano effigy? Not much, Chee guessed. The kachina religion of the Pueblo Indians, it seemed to Chee, was rooted in a dogma so ancient that the centuries had crystallized it.

“How about the basket?” Highhawk asked him. “On the ground by his feet? That’s supposed to be the basket for the Yei Da’ayah. According to our artifact inventory records, anyway.”

Highhawk’s pronunciation of the Navajo word was so strange that what he actually said was incomprehensible. But what he probably meant was the basket which held the pollen and the feathers used for feeding the masks after the spirits within them were awakened. “Looks all right to me,” Chee said.

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 Post?”

“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.

“We have to be going,” Highhawk said. “Well,” Dr. Hartman said. “I hope you’re en joying your visit, Mr. Chee. Is Mr. Highhawk showing you everything you want to see?”

This seemed to be an opportunity. “I wanted to see this,” Chee said, indicating the Night Chant and the world of masks around it. “And I was hoping to see that Tano War God that I’ve heard about. I heard somewhere that someone at the Pueblo was hoping to get that back, too.”

Dr. Hartman’s expression was doubtful. “I haven’t heard of that,” she said, frowning. She looked at Highhawk. “A Tano fetish. Do you know anything about that? Which fetish would they mean?”

Highhawk glanced from Dr. Hartman to Chee. He hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“I guess you could look it up in the inventory,” she said.

Highhawk was looking at Chee, examining him. “Why not?” he said. “If you want to.”

They went up the staff elevator to the sixth floor, to Highhawk’s airless cubicle of an office. He punched the proper information into his computer terminal and received, in return, a jumble of numbers and letters.

“This tells us the hallway, the room, the corridor in the room, the shelf in the corridor, and the number of the bin it’s in,” Highhawk said. He punched another set of keys and waited.

“Now it tells us that it is out of inventory and being worked on. Or something.”

He turned off the computer, glanced at Chee, looked thoughtful.

He knows where it is, Chee thought. He knew from the beginning. He’s deciding whether to tell me.

“It should be in the conservation lab,” Highhawk said. “Let’s go take a look.”

The telephone rang.

Highhawk looked at it, and at Chee.

It rang again. Highhawk picked it up. “Highhawk,” he said.

And then: “I can’t right now. I have a guest.”

He listened, glanced at Chee. “No, I couldn’t make the damn thing work,” Highhawk said. “I’m no good with that stuff.” He listened.

“I tried that. It didn’t turn on.” Listened again. “Look. You’re coming down anyway. I’ll leave it for you to fix.” Listened. “No. That’s a little early. Too much traffic then.” And finally: “Make it nine thirty then. And remember it’s the Twelfth Street entrance.”

Highhawk listened, and hung up.

“Let’s go,” he said to Chee.

Highhawk made his limping way down a seemingly endless corridor. It was lined on both sides with higher-than-head stacks of wooden cases. The cases were numbered. Some were sealed with paper stickers. Most wore tags reading CAUTION: INVENTORIED MATERIALS or CAUTION: UNINVENTORIED MATERIALS.

“What’s in all this?” Chee asked, waving.

“You name it,” Highhawk said. “I think in here it’s mostly early agricultural stuff. Tools, churns, hoes, you know. Up ahead we have bones.”

“The skeletons you wanted returned?”

“Want returned,” Highhawk said. “Still. We’ve got more than eighteen thousand skeletons boxed up in this attic. Eighteen goddamn thousand Native American skeletons in the museum’s so-called research collection.”

“Wow,” Chee said. He would have guessed maybe four or five hundred.

“How about white skeletons?”

“Maybe twenty thousand black, white, and so forth,” Highhawk said. “But since the white-eyes outnumber the redskins in this country about two hundred to one, to reach parity I have to dig up three-point-six million white skeletons and stack them in here. That is, if the scientists are really into studying old bones—which I doubt.”

Old bones was not a subject which appealed to Chee’s traditional Navajo nature. Corpses were not a subject for polite discussion. The knowledge that he was sharing a corridor with thousands of the dead made Chee uneasy. He wanted to change the subject. He wanted to ask Highhawk about the telephone conversation. What was he trying to fix? What was it that wouldn’t turn on? Who was he meeting at nine thirty? But it was none of his business and Highhawk would tell him so or evade the question.

“Why the seals?” he asked instead, pointing.

Highhawk laughed. “The Republicans used the main gallery for their big inaugural ball,” Highhawk said. “About a thousand Secret Service and FBI types came swarming in here in advance to make sure of security.” The memory had converted Highhawk’s bitterness to high good humor. His laugh turned into a chortle.

“They’d unlock each case, poke around inside to make sure Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t hiding in there, and then lock it up again and stick on the seal so nobody could sneak in later.”

“My God,” Chee exclaimed, struck by a sudden thought. “How many keys would it take to unlock all of these?”

Highhawk laughed. “You’re not dealing with the world’s heaviest key ring here,” he said. “Just one key, or rather copies of the same key, fits all these box locks. They’re not intended to keep people from stealing stuff. Who’d want to steal a section of a Civil War rowboat, for example? It’s to help with inventory control. You want in one of these cases, you go to the appropriate office and get the key off a hook by the desk and sign for it. Anyway, it all worried the Secret Service to death. About eighty million artifacts in this building, and maybe a hundred thousand of them could be used to kill somebody. So they wanted everything tied down.”

“I guess it worked. Nobody got shot.”

“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 Albuquerque Journal about it.” He shrugged. “Or maybe I’m getting it confused with the Zuni War God. The one the Zunis finally got back from the Denver Museum.”

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 read it carefully and slowly, stopping now and then to listen. Finally he put it back on the desk, put his heels back on the wastebasket, and thought about Mary Landon, and then about Janet Pete, and then about Highhawk. He glanced at his watch. After ten. Highhawk had been gone more than thirty minutes. He walked to the door and looked up and down the corridor. Total emptiness. Total silence. He sat again in the chair, feet on the floor, remembering exactly what Highhawk had said. He’d said wait here a few minutes. Ten or fifteen.

Chee got his hat and went out into the corridor, turning off the light and closing the door behind him. He found his way through the labyrinth of corridors to the elevator. He pushed the button and heard it laboring its way upward. Highhawk obviously had not returned by this route. On the ground floor he found his way to the Twelfth Street exit. There had been a security guard there when he came in, a woman who had spoken to Highhawk. She would know if he’d left the building. But the woman wasn’t there. No one was guarding the exit door.

Chee felt a sudden irrational urge to get out of this building and under the sky. He pushed the door open and hurried down the steps. The cold, misty air felt wonderful on his face. But where was Highhawk? He remembered the last words Highhawk had said as he left him at Highhawk’s office:

“I’ll be right back.”

Chapter Fifteen

« ^ »

Leaphorn called Kennedy from his hotel room and caught him at home.

“I’ve got him,” Leaphorn said. “His name is Elogio Santillanes. But I need you to get a fingerprint check made and see if the Bureau has anything on him.”

“Who?” Kennedy said. He sounded sleepy. “What are you talking about?”

“The man beside the tracks. Remember? The one you got me out into the weather to take a look at.”

“Oh,” Kennedy said. “Yeah. Santillanes, you say. A local Hispano then, after all. How’d you get a make on him?”

Leaphorn explained it all, from St. Germain to Perez to the prescription number, including the little red-haired man who might (or might not) be watching the Santillanes apartment.

“Nice to be lucky,” Kennedy said. “Where the hell you calling from? You in Washington now?”

Leaphorn gave him the name of his hotel. “I’m going to stay here—or at least I’ll be here for message purposes. Are you going to call Washington?”

“Why not?” Kennedy said.

“Would you ask ’em to let me know what they find out? And since they probably won’t do it, would you call me as soon as they call you back?”

“Why not?” Kennedy said. “You going to stick around there until we know something?”

“Why not?” Leaphorn said. “It shouldn’t take long with the name. Either they have prints on him or they don’t.”

It didn’t take long. Leaphorn watched the late news. He went out for a walk in what had now transformed itself into a fine, damp, cold mist. He bought an edition of tomorrow’s Washington Post and read it in bed. He woke late, had breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, and found his telephone ringing when he got back to the room.

It was Kennedy.

“Bingo,” Kennedy said. “I am sort of a hero with the Bureau this morning—which will last until about sundown. Your Elogio Santillanes was in the Bureau print files. He was one of the relatively few surviving leaders of the substantially less than loyal left-wing opposition to the Pinochet regime in Chile.”

“Well,” Leaphorn said. “That’s interesting.” But what the devil did it mean? What would call a Chilean politician to Gallup, New Mexico? What would arouse in such a man an interest in a Night Chant somewhere out beyond Lower Greasewood?

“They wondered what had happened to him,” Kennedy was saying. “He wasn’t exactly under close surveillance, but the Bureau tries to keep an eye on such folks. It tries to keep track of them. Especially this bunch because of that car bombing awhile back. You remember about that?”

“Very vaguely. Was it Chilean?”

“It was. One of this bunch that Santillanes belongs to got blown sky-high over on Sheridan Circle, near where the very important people live. The Chilean embassy crowd didn’t make enough effort to hide their tracks and the Department of State declared a bunch of them persona non grata and sent them home. There was a big protest to Chile, human rights complaints, the whole nine yards. Terribly bad publicity for the Pinochet gang. Anyway after that the Bureau seems to have kept an eye on them. And things cooled down.”

“Until now,” Leaphorn said.

“It looks to me like Pinochet’s thugs waited until they figured they wouldn’t get caught at it,” Kennedy said. “But how do I know?”

“That would explain all the effort to keep Santillanes from being identified.”

“It would,” Kennedy agreed. “If there’s no identification, there’s no static from the Department of State.”

“Did you ask your people here to give me a call? Did you tell them about Santillanes’ neighbor? And did you pass along what I told you about Henry Highhawk’s name being in Santillanes’ notebook?”

“Yes, I told them about the little man in apartment two, and, yes, I mentioned Henry Highhawk, and, yes, I asked them to give Joe Leaphorn a call. Have they called?”

“Of course not,” Leaphorn said.

Kennedy laughed. “Old J. Edgar’s dead, but nothing ever changes.”

But they did call. Leaphorn had hardly hung up when he heard knocking at his door.

Two men waited in the hall. Even in Washington, where every male—to Leaphorn’s casual eye—dressed exactly like every other male, these two were obviously Bureau men.

“Come in,” Leaphorn said, glancing at the identification each man was now holding out for inspection, “I’ve been sort of expecting you.”

He introduced himself. Their names were Dillon and Akron, both being blond, Dillon being bigger and older and in charge.

“Your name is Leaphorn? That right?” Dillon said, glancing in his notebook. “You have identification?”

Leaphorn produced his folder.

Dillon compared Leaphorn’s face with the picture. He examined the credentials. Nothing in his expression suggested he was impressed by either.

“A lieutenant in the Navajo Tribal Police?”

“That’s right.”

Dillon stared at him. “How did you get involved in this Santillanes business?”

Leaphorn explained. The body beside the tracks. Learning the train had been stopped. Learning of the abandoned luggage. Learning of the prescription number. Going to the apartment on the prescription address.

“Have you checked on the man in apartment two?” Leaphorn asked. “He fit the description of the man the attendant saw in Santillanes’ roomette. And he was curious.”

Akron smiled slightly and looked down at his hands. Dillon cleared his throat. Leaphorn nodded. He knew what was coming. He had worked with the Bureau for thirty years.

“You have no jurisdiction in this case,” Dillon said. “You never had any jurisdiction. You may have already fouled up a very sensitive case.”

“Involving national security,” Leaphorn added, thoughtfully and mostly to himself. He didn’t intend any sarcasm. It was simply the code expression he’d been hearing the FBI use since the 1950s. It was something you always heard when the Bureau was covering up incompetence. He was simply wondering if the Bureau’s current screwup was considered serious by Dillon’s superiors. Apparently so.

Dillon stared at him, scenting sarcasm. He saw nothing on Leaphorn’s square Navajo face but deep thought. Leaphorn was thinking about how he could extract information from Dillon and he had reached some sort of conclusion. He nodded.

“Did Agent Kennedy mention to you about the slip of paper found in Santillanes’ shirt pocket?”

Dillon’s expression shifted from stern to unpleasant. He took his lip between his teeth. Released it. Started to say something. Changed his mind. Pride struggled with curiosity. “I am not aware of that at this point in time,” he said.

So there was no purpose in talking to Dillon about it. But he wanted Dillon’s goodwill. “Nothing was written on it except the name Agnes Tsosie—Tsosie is a fairly common Navajo name, and Agnes is prominent in the tribe—and the name of a curing ceremonial. The Yeibichai. One of those had been scheduled to be held for Mrs. Tsosie. Scheduled about three or four weeks after the Santillanes body was found.”

“What is your interest in this?” Dillon asked.

“The agent-in-charge at Gallup is an old friend,” Leaphorn said. “We’ve worked together for years.”

Dillon was not impressed with “agent-in-charge at Gallup.” As a matter of fact, an agent stationed in Washington wasn’t easy to impress with an agent stationed anywhere else, much less a small Western town. In earlier days agents were transferred to places like Gallup because they had somehow offended J. Edgar Hoover or one of the swarm of yeasayers with which he had manned the upper echelons of his empire. In J. Edgar’s day, New Orleans had been the ultimate Siberia of the Bureau. J. Edgar detested New Orleans as hot, humid, and decadent and presumed all other FBI employees felt the same way. But since his demise, his camp followers usually exiled to smaller towns agents considered unduly ambitious, unacceptably intelligent, or prone to bad publicity.

“It’s still not your case,” Dillon said. “You don’t have any jurisdiction outside your Indian reservation. And in this case, you wouldn’t have jurisdiction even there.”

Leaphorn smiled. “And happy I don’t,” he said. “It looks too complicated for me. But I’m curious. I’ve got to get with Pete Domenici for lunch before I go home, and he’s going to want to know what I’m doing here.”

Agent Akron had sat down in a bedside chair just out of Leaphorn’s vision but Leaphorn kept his eye on Dillon while he said this. Obviously, Dillon recognized the name of Pete Domenici, the senior senator from New Mexico, who happened to be the ranking Republican on the committee which oversaw the Bureau’s budget. Leaphorn smiled at Dillon again—a conspiratorial one-cop-to-another smile. “You know how some people are about homicides. Pete is fascinated by ’em. I tell Pete about Santillanes and he’s going to have a hundred questions.”

“Domenici,” Dillon said.

“One thing the senator is going to ask me is why Santillanes was killed way out in New Mexico,” Leaphorn said. “Out in his district.”

Leaphorn watched Dillon making up his mind, imagining the process. He would think that probably Leaphorn was lying about Domenici, which he was, but Dillon hadn’t survived in Washington by taking chances. Dillon reached his decision.

“I can’t talk about what he was doing out there,” Dillon said. “Agent Akron and I are with the antiterrorist division. And I can say Santillanes was a prominent member of a terrorist organization.”

“Oh,” Leaphorn said.

“Opposed to the regime of President Pinochet.” Dillon looked at Leaphorn. “He’s the president of Chile,” Dillon added.

Leaphorn nodded. “But you can’t tell me why Santillanes was out in New Mexico?” He nodded again. “I can respect that.” In the code the FBI had developed down the years, it meant Dillon didn’t know the answer.

“I cannot say,” Dillon said. “Not at this moment in time.”

“How about why he was killed?”

“Just speculation,” Dillon said. “Off the record.”

Leaphorn nodded, agreeing.

“The effort that was made to avoid identification suggests that it was a continuation of the Pinochet administration’s war against the Communists in Chile,” Dillon said. He paused, studying Leaphorn to see if this needed explanation. He decided that it did.

“Some time ago, a Chilean dissident was blown up here in Washington. A car bomb. The State Department deported several Chilean nationals and delivered a warning to the ambassador. Or so I understand.” Dillon returned the same cop-to-cop smile he had received a few moments earlier from Leaphorn. “Therefore, the Chilean security people at the embassy seem to have decided they would wait until one of their targets was as far from Washington as possible before eliminating him. They would try to make sure the connection was never made.”

“I see,” Leaphorn said. “I have two more questions.”

Dillon waited.

“What will the Bureau do about the little man in apartment two?”

“I can’t discuss that,” Dillon said.

“That’s fair enough. Does the name Henry Highhawk mean anything to you?”

Dillon considered. “Henry Highhawk. No.”

“I think Kennedy mentioned him when he called the Bureau,” Leaphorn prompted.

“Oh, yeah,” Dillon said. “The name in the notebook.”

“How does this Henry Highhawk fit in? Why would Santillanes be interested in him? Why was he interested in Agnes Tsosie? Or the Yeibichai ceremonial?“

“Yeibichai ceremonial?” Dillon said, looking totally baffled. “I am not free to discuss any of that. At this point in time I cannot discuss Henry Highhawk.”

But Henry Highhawk stuck in Leaphorn’s mind. The name had been somehow familiar the first time he’d seen it written in the Santillanes notebook. It was an unusual name and it had rung some sort of dim bell in his memory. He remembered looking at the name in Santillanes’ careful little script and trying to place it, without any luck. He remembered looking at Highhawk’s photograph at Agnes Tsosie’s place. He knew he had never seen the man before. When Dillon and Akron had gone away to wherever FBI agents go, he tried again. Clearly the name had meant nothing to Dillon. Clearly, Leaphorn himself must have run across it before any of this business had begun. How? What had he been doing? He had been doing nothing unusual. Just routine police administration.

He reached for the telephone and dialed the Navajo Tribal Police building in Window Rock. In about eleven minutes he had what he wanted. Or most of it.

“A fugitive warrant? What was the original offense? Really? What date? No, I meant the date of the arrest? Where? Give me his home address off the warrant.” Leaphorn jotted down the Washington address. “Who handled the arrest for us? I’ll wait.” Leaphorn waited. “Who?”

The arresting officer was Jim Chee.

“Well, thanks,” Leaphorn said. “Is Chee still stationed up at Shiprock? Okay. I’ll call him there.”

He dialed the number of the Shiprock sub-agency police station from memory. Office Chee was on vacation. Had he left an address where he might be reached? Navajo Tribal Police rules required that he would, but Chee had a reputation for sometimes making his own rules.

“Just a second,” the clerk said. “Here it is. He’s in Washington, D.C. I’ll give you his hotel.”

Leaphorn called Chee’s hotel. Yes, Chee was still registered. But he didn’t answer his telephone. Leaphorn left a message and hung up. He sat on the bed, asking himself what could have possibly drawn Officer Jim Chee from Shiprock to Washington. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn had never, never believed in coincidence.

Chapter Sixteen

« ^ »

Leroy Fleck simply couldn’t get his mind relieved. He sat on the folding lawn chair in his empty apartment with the telephone on the floor beside him. In about an hour it would be time to go out to the phone booth and put in his once-a-month check-in call to Eddy Elkins. What he was going to say to Elkins was part of the problem. He was going to have to ask Elkins to wire him enough money to get Mama moved, enough to tide him over for the two or three days it would take The Client to pay up. He dreaded asking, because he was almost sure Elkins would just laugh and say no. But he had to get enough to move Mama.

Fleck had on his hat and his coat. It was cold in the apartment because he was trying to save on the utility bill. What he was doing while he was doing all this thinking normally brought him pleasure. He was hunting through the classified ad section of the Washington Times, looking for somebody to talk to. Normally that relieved his mind. Not tonight. Even with talking to people he couldn’t get Mama out of his thoughts. The worst of it was he’d had to hurt the Fat Man. He’d had to threaten to kill the son of a bitch and twisted his arm while he was doing it. There just wasn’t any other way to make him keep Mama until he could find another place. But doing that had opened things up to real trouble—or the probability of it. He’d warned the man not to call the police and the bastard had looked scared enough so maybe he wouldn’t. On the other hand, maybe he would. And when the police checked his address and found it was phony—well, who knows what then? They’d be interested. Fleck couldn’t afford to have the police interested.

The tape recorder on the box against the wall made a whispering sound. Fleck glanced at it, his thoughts elsewhere. It whispered, and fell silent. The microphone he’d installed in the crawlspace above the ceiling of the Santillanes apartment was supposed to be voice activated. That really meant “sound activated.” A lot of what Fleck was recording was Mrs. Santillanes, or whoever that old Mexican woman was, running her vacuum cleaner or clattering around with the dishes. At first, he had sometimes played the tape before sending it off to the post-office-box address Elkins had given him. He’d heard a lot of household noises, and now and then people talking. But the talking was in Spanish. Fleck had picked up a little of that in Joliet from the Hispanos. Just enough to understand that most of what he was taping was family talk. What’s for dinner? Where’s my glasses? That sort of stuff. Not enough for Fleck to guess why Elkins’ clients wanted to keep track of this bunch. It had seemed to Fleck from very early in this assignment that these folks next door were smart enough to do their serious talking somewhere else.

He found an ad that sounded promising. It offered an Apple computer complete with twelve video games for sale by owner. Fleck knew almost nothing about computers, and cared less. But this sounded like a family where the kids had grown up and the item for sale was expensive enough so the owner wouldn’t mind talking for a while. Fleck dialed the number, listened to a busy signal, and picked up the paper again. This time he selected a gasoline-powered trash shredder. A man answered on the second ring.

“I’m calling about the shredder,” Fleck said. “What are you asking for it?”

“Well, we paid three hundred and eighty dollars for it, and it’s just like new.” The man had a soft, Virginia Tidewater voice. “But we ain’t got no use for it anymore. And I think we’d come down to maybe two hundred.”

“No use for it?” Fleck said. “Sounds like you’re moving or something. Got anything else you’re selling? Several things I need.”

“Not moving,” the man said. “We’re just getting out of gardening. My wife’s developed arthritis.” He laughed. “And she’s the one that did all the work.”

From there, Leroy Fleck led the conversation into personal affairs—first the affairs of the owner of the item offered, and then Fleck’s own. It was something he had done for years and had become very good at doing. It was his substitute for hanging out in a bar. Keeping Mama in a rest home had made bars too expensive and the people you talked to there tended not to be normal anyway. Fleck had discovered more or less by accident that it was pleasant and relaxing to talk to regular people. It happened when he decided that it would be nice for Mama to have one of those little refrigerators in her room. He’d noticed one in the want ads, and called, and got into a good-natured conversation with the lady selling it. Mama had thrown the little refrigerator on the floor and broke it, but Fleck had remembered the chat. And it had become a habit. At first he did it only when he needed to relieve his mind. But for the last few years he’d done it almost every night. Except Saturday. People didn’t like to be called on Saturday night. With practice he had learned which ads to call, and how to keep the conversation going. After three or four such calls Fleck found he could usually sleep. Talking to somebody normal relieved the mind.

Usually, that is. Tonight, it didn’t work. After a while the man selling the trash shredder just wanted to talk about that—what Fleck would pay for it and so forth. Fleck had then called about a pop-up-top vacation trailer which would sleep four. But this time he found himself getting impatient even before the woman who was selling it did.

After that call he just sat there on the lawn chair. To keep from worrying about Mama, he worried about those two Indians—and especially about the one who had come to his door here. Both of those men had really smelled like cops to him. Fleck didn’t like having cops know where to find him. Normally in a situation like that he would have moved right out of here and got lost. But now he couldn’t move. This job Eddy Elkins had got him into this time kept him tied here. He was stuck. He had to have the money. Absolutely had to have it. Absolutely had to wait two more days until the month was up. Then he’d get the ten thousand the bastards were making him wait for.

He went into the kitchen and checked the refrigerator. He had a little bit of beef liver left and two hamburger buns, but no ground beef and only two potatoes. That would handle his needs tonight. But he’d need food tomorrow. He didn’t even have enough grease to fry the potatoes for breakfast. Fleck put on his hat and his coat and went out into the misty rain.

He returned with a plastic grocery sack and an early edition of the Washington Post. Fleck knew how to stretch his dollars. The bag contained two loaves of day-old bread, a dozen grade B eggs, a half -gallon of milk, a carton of Velveeta, and a pound of margarine. He put the frying pan on the gas burner, dumped in a spoonful of margarine and the liver. Fleck’s furniture consisted of stuff he could fold into the trunk of his old Chevy, which meant nothing in the kitchen except what was built in. He leaned against the wall and watched the liver fry. As it fried he unfolded the Post and read.

There was nothing he needed to know on the front page. On page two, the word Chile caught his eyes.

TOP CHILEAN POLICE BRASS VISITS; ASKS MUSEUM TO RETURN GOLDEN MASK

He scanned the story, mildly interested in the affairs of his client. It told him that General Ramon Huerta Cardona, identified as “commander of Chilean internal security forces,” was in Washington on government business and planned to deliver a personal appeal tomorrow to the Smithsonian Institution for the return of an Inca mask. According to the story, the mask was “golden and encrusted with emeralds,” and the general described it as “a Chilean national treasure which should be returned to the people of Chile.” Fleck didn’t finish the story. He turned the page.

The picture caught his eye instantly. The old man. It was on page four, a single-column photograph halfway down the page with a story under it. Old man Santillanes.

“Oh, shit!” Fleck said it aloud, in something close to a shout.

The headline read:

KNIFE VICTIM PROVES TO BE CHILEAN REBEL

Fleck slammed the paper to the floor and stood against the wall. He was shaking. “Ah, shit,” he repeated, in something like a whisper now. He bent, retrieved the paper, and read:

“The body of a man found beside a railroad track in New Mexico last month has been identified as Elogio Santillanes y Jimenez, an exiled leader of the opposition to the Chilean government, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced today.

“The FBI spokesman said Santillanes had been killed by a single stab wound in the back of the neck and his body removed from an Am-trak train.

“ ‘All identification had been removed from his body—even his false teeth,’ the spokesman said. He noted that this made identification difficult for the agency.

“The FBI declined comment on whether any suspects were being investigated. Two years ago, another opposition leader to the Pinochet regime was assassinated in Washington by the detonation of a bomb in his car. Following that incident, the Department of State issued a sharply worded protest to the Chilean embassy and two members of the embassy staff were deported as personae non gratae in the United States.”

The story continued, but Fleck dropped the paper again. He felt sick but he had to think. He had guessed right about the embassy, and about why they had wanted him to kill Santillanes a long way from Washington, and why all that emphasis had been placed on preventing identification. How the hell had the FBI managed to make the connection? But what difference did that make? His problem was what to do about it.

They weren’t going to send him the ten thousand now. No identification and no publicity for a month. That was the deal. A month without anything in the papers was going to be proof enough he hadn’t screwed it up. And now, what was it? Twenty-nine days? For a moment he allowed himself to think that they would agree that this was close enough. But that was bullshit thinking. All they needed to screw him was the slightest excuse. They looked down on him like trash. Like dirt. Just like Mama had always told Delmar and him.

He smelled the liver burning in the frying pan, moved it off the burner, and fanned away the smoke. Elkins had told him that Mama was right. He hadn’t remembered telling Elkins anything about Mama, certainly wouldn’t have normally, but Elkins said he talked about it when he was coming out from under the sodium pen-tothal—the stuff they’d given him when they fixed him up there at the prison infirmary. Right after the rape.

Elkins had been standing beside his bed when he came to, holding a pan in case he threw up the way people sometimes do when they come up from sodium pentothal. “I want you to listen now,” Elkins had told him in a whisper right by his face. “They’re going to be coming in here as soon as they know you can talk and asking you questions. They’re going to ask you which ones did you.” And he guessed he had mumbled something about getting the score evened with the sons of bitches because Elkins had put his hand over Fleck’s mouth—Fleck remembered that very clearly even now—and said: “Get even. But not now. You got to do it yourself. You tell the screws that you don’t know who did you. Tell ’em you didn’t get a look at anybody. They hit you from behind. If you want to stay alive in here, you don’t talk to the screws. You do your own business. Like your Mama told you.”

“Like your Mama told you!” So he must have been talking about Mama when he was still under the anesthesia. It was all still so very vivid.

He’d asked Elkins if they had really raped him the way he seemed to remember, and Elkins said they truly had.

“Then I got to kill ’em.”

“Yes,” Elkins said. “I think so. Unless you want to live like an animal.”

Elkins was a disbarred lawyer with some seniority in Joliet and he understood about such things. He was doing four to eight on an Illinois State felony count. Something to do with fixing up some witnesses, or maybe it was jurors, for somebody important in the Chicago rackets. Fleck understood that Elkins had kept his mouth shut and taken the fall for it, and that seemed to be the way it worked out. Because now Eddy Elkins was important again with some Chicago law firm, even if he couldn’t practice law himself.

For that matter, Elkins had been important even in the prison. He was just a trustee working as a male nurse and orderly in the prison hospital. But he had money. He had connections inside and out and everybody knew it. When Fleck came out of isolation, he found he had a job in the infirmary. Elkins had done that. And Elkins had helped him with the big problem—how to kill three hard cases. All bigger than him. All tougher. First he’d started him pumping iron. Fleck had been skinny then as well as small. But at nineteen you can develop fast if you have direction. And steroids. Elkins got him them, too. And then Elkins had showed him how a knife can make a small man equal to a big one if the small man is very, very fast and very cool and knows what to do with the blade. Fleck had always been fast—had to be fast to survive. Elkins used the life-size body chart in the infirmary office and the plastic skeleton to teach him where to put the shank.

“Always flat,” Elkins would say. “Remember that. What you’re after is behind the bones. Hitting the bones does you no good at all and the way past them is through the crevices.” Elkins was a tall, slender man, slightly stooped. He was a Dartmouth man, with his law degree from Harvard. He looked like a teacher and he liked to teach. In the empty, quiet infirmary he would stand there in front of the skeleton with Fleck sitting on the bed, and Elkins would tutor Fleck in the trade.

“If you have to go in from the front”—Elkins recommended against going in from the front—“you have to go between the ribs or right below the Adam’s apple. Quick thrust in, and then the wiggle.” Elkins demonstrated the little wiggle with his wrist. “That gets the artery, or the heart muscle, or the spinal column. A puncture is usually no damn good. Any other cut is slow and noisy. If you can go in from the back, it’s the same. Hold it flat. Hold it horizonal.”

Elkins would demonstrate on the plastic skeleton. “The very quickest is right there”—and he would point a slender, manicured finger—“above that first vertebra. You do it right and there’s not a motion. Not a sound. Very little bleeding. Instant death.”

When it was time for him to go into the yard again, he went with a slender, stiff little shank fashioned of surgical steel and as sharp as the scalpel it had once been. Elkins had given him that along with his final instructions.

“Remember the number for you is three. There are three of them. If you get caught with the first one you don’t do the last two. Remember that, and remember to hold it flat. What you’re after is behind the bone.”

He had been twenty when he did it. A long time ago. He had yearned to tell Mama about it. But it wasn’t the sort of thing you could say in a letter, with the screws reading your mail. And Mama hadn’t ever been able to get away to come on visiting days. He felt badly about that. It had been a hard life for her and not much he’d done had made it any easier.

The liver had that burned taste. And the hamburger buns were pretty much dried out. But he didn’t like liver anyway. He only bought it because it was about half the price of hamburger. And it satisfied what little appetite he had tonight. Then he put on his hat and his still-damp coat and went out to make his call to Elkins.

“There’s not a damn thing I can do for you,” Elkins said. “You know how we work. After twenty years you ought to know. We keep insulated. It’s got to be that way.”

“It’s been more than twenty years,” Fleck said. “Remember that first job?”

The first job had been while he was still in prison. Elkins was out, thanks to a lot of good time and an early parole. And the visitor had come to see him. As a matter of fact, it was the only visitor he’d ever had. A young lawyer. Elkins had sent him to give Fleck a name. It had been a short visit.

“Elkins just said to tell you to make it four instead of three. He wants you to make it Cassidy and Dalkin and Neal and David Petresky. He said you’d understand. And to tell you you’d be represented by a lawyer at the parole hearing and that he had regular work for you after that.” The lawyer was a plump, blond man with greenish-blue eyes. He was not much older than Fleck and he looked nervous—glancing around all the time to see if the screw was listening. “He said for me to bring back a yes or a no.”

Fleck had thought about it a minute—wondering who Petresky was and how to get to him. “Tell him yes,” he said.

And now Elkins remembered it.

“That one was sort of a test,” Elkins said. “They said you couldn’t handle Petresky. I said I’d seen your work.”

“All these years,” Fleck said. “Now I need help. I think you owe me.”

“It was always business,” Eddy Elkins said. “You know that. It couldn’t be any other way. It would just be too damned dangerous.”

Dangerous for you, Fleck thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead he said: “I simply got to have three thousand. I’ve got to have enough to get my Mama moved.” Fleck paused. “Man, I’m desperate.”

There was a long silence. “You say this involves your mother?”

“Yeah.” In Joliet he had talked to Elkins a lot about Mama. He thought Elkins understood how he felt about her.

Another silence. “What’s your number there?”

Fleck told him.

“Stay there. I’ll make a contact and see what I can do.”

Fleck waited almost an hour, huddled in his damp coat in the booth and, when he felt the chill stiffening him, pacing up and down the sidewalk close enough to hear the ring.

When it rang, it was The Client.

“You dirty little hijo de puta,” he said. “You want money? You bring us nothing but trouble and you want us to pay you money for it?”

“I got to have it,” Fleck said. “You owe me.” He thought: hijo de puta; the man had called him son of a whore.

“We ought to break your dirty little neck.” The Client said. “Maybe we do that. Yes. Maybe we cut your dirty little throat. We give you a simple little job. What do you do? You screw it up!”

Fleck felt the rage rising within him, felt it like bile in his throat. He heard Mama’s voice: “They treat you like niggers. You let ’em, they treat you like dogs. You let ’em step on you, they’ll treat you like animals.”

But he choked back the rage. He couldn’t afford it. He had to pick her up right away. He had to get her to a place where they’d take care of her.

“I know who you are,” Fleck said. “I followed you back to your embassy. I get paid or I can cause you some trouble.” Then he listened.

What he heard was a stream of obscenities. He heard himself called the filthy, defecation-eating son of a whore, the son of an infected dog. And the click of the line disconnecting.

Standing in the drizzle outside the booth, Fleck spit on the sidewalk. He let the rage well up. He’d get the money another way, somehow. He’d done it in the past. Mugging. A lot of mugging to come up with three thousand dollars unless he was lucky. It was dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Only the ruling class carried big money, and some of them carried only plastic. And the police protected the ruling class. And now there was something else he had to do. It involved getting even. It involved using his shank again. It involved getting the blade in behind the bone.

Chapter Seventeen

« ^ »

What I want to know, for starters,” Joe Leaphorn said, “is everything you know about this Henry Highhawk.“

They had met in what passed for a coffee shop in Jim Chee’s hotel, surrounded by blue-collar workers and tourists who, like Chee, had asked their travel agents to find them moderately priced housing in downtown Washington. Leaphorn had donned the Washington uniform. But his three-piece suit was a model sold by the Gallup Sears store in the middle seventies, and its looseness testified to the pounds Leaphorn had lost eating his own cooking since Emma’s death.

With the single exception of his Blessing Way ceremonial, Jim Chee had never seen the legendary Leaphorn except in a Navajo Tribal Police uniform. He was having psychological trouble handling this inappropriate attire. Like a necktie on a herd bull, Chee thought. Like socks on a billy goat. But above the necktie knot Leaphorn’s eyes were exactly as Chee remembered them—dark brown, alert, searching. As always, something in them was causing Chee to examine his conscience. What had he neglected? What had he forgotten?

He told Leaphorn about Highhawk’s job, his educational background, the charge against him for vandalizing graves, his campaign to cause the Smithsonian to release its thousands of Native American skeletons for reburial. He described how he and Cowboy Dashee had arrested Highhawk. He reported how Gomez had shown up, how Gomez had agreed to post Highhawk’s bond. How yesterday Gomez had appeared at Highhawk’s house. He described Highhawk’s limp, his leg brace, and how Janet Pete had come to be his attorney. He touched on Janet Pete’s doubts about the Tano Pueblo fetish and what he had seen in Highhawk’s office-studio. But he said nothing at all about Janet Pete’s doubts and problems. That was another story. That was none of Leaphorn’s business.

“What do you think he was doing at the Yeibichai?” Leaphorn asked.

Chee shrugged. “He doesn’t look it but he’s one-fourth Navajo. One grandmother was Navajo. I guess she made a big impression on him. Janet Pete tells me he wants to be a Navajo. Thinks about himself as a Navajo.” Chee considered that some more. “He wanted to be sort of initiated into the tribe. And he knew enough about the Yeibichai to show up on the last night.” He glanced at Leaphorn. Did this Navajo version of pragmatist-agnostic know enough about the Yeibichai himself to know what that meant? He added: “When the hataalii sometimes initiates boys—lets them look through the mask. Highhawk wanted to do that.”

Leaphorn merely nodded. “Did he?”

“We arrested him,” Chee said.

Leaphorn thought about that answer. “Right away?”

Leaphorn picked up his coffee cup, examined it, looked across it at Chee, took a small sip, put it back in the saucer, and waited. “Stuck around about two hours,” he said. “Right?”

“About,” Chee agreed.

“You didn’t just stand around. You talked. What did Highhawk talk about?”

Chee shrugged. What had they talked about?

“It was cold as hell—wind out of the north. We talked about that. He thought the people wearing the yei masks must get awful frostbitten with nothing on but leggings and kilts. And he asked a lot of questions. Did the paint on their bodies insulate them from the cold? Which mask represented which yei? Questions about the ceremonial. And he knew enough about it to ask smart questions.” Chee stopped. Finished.

“About anything else?”

Chee shrugged.

Leaphorn stared at him. “That won’t get it,” he said. “I need to know.”

Chee was not in the mood for this. He felt his face flushing. “Highhawk was taping some of it,” Chee said. “He had this little tape recorder palmed. Then he’d pull it up his sleeve if anyone noticed it. You’re not supposed to do that unless you square it with the hataalii. I let that go. Didn’t say anything. And once I heard him singing the words of one of the chants. What else? He and this Gomez went into the kitchen shed once and ate some stew. And when Dashee and I arrested him, Gomez came up and wanted to know what was going on.“

“If he knew as much as he seemed to know, then he knew he shouldn’t be taping without the singer’s permission,” Leaphorn said. “And it looked to you like he was being sneaky about it?”

“It was sneaky,” Chee said. “Hiding the recorder in his palm. Up his sleeve.”

“Not very polite,” Leaphorn said. “Not as polite as his letter sounded.” He said it mostly to himself, thinking out loud.

“Letter?” Chee said, louder than he intended. The edge in his voice was enough so that at the next table two men in Federal Express delivery uniforms looked up from their waffles and stared at him.

“He wrote a letter to Agnes Tsosie,” Leaphorn said. “Very polite. Tell me about this Gomez. Describe him.”

Chee was aware that his face was flushed. He could feel it, distinctly.

“I’m on vacation,” Chee said. “I’m off duty. I want you to tell me about this letter. When did that happen? How did you know about it? How did you know about Highhawk? What the hell’s going on?”

“Well, now,” Leaphorn began, his face flushing. But then he closed his mouth. He cleared his throat. “Well, now,” he said again, “I guess you’re right.” And he told Chee about the man with pointed shoes.

Leaphorn was unusually good at telling. He organized it all neatly and chronologically. He described the body found beside the tracks east of Gallup, the cryptic note in the shirt pocket, the visit to the Agnes Tsosie place, the letter from Highhawk with Highhawk’s photograph included, what the autopsy showed, all of it.

“This little man in the next apartment, he fit the description of the man in Santillanes’ compartment on the train. No question he was interested in the Santillanes bunch. Any chance he and Gomez are the same?”

“Not the way you describe him,” Chee said. “Gomez has black hair. He’s younger than your man sounds, and taller and slender—none of those weightlifter muscles. And I think he lost several fingers.”

Leaphorn’s expression shaded from alert to very alert. “Several? What do you mean?”

“He was wearing leather gloves, but on both hands some of the fingers were stiff—as if the gloves were stuffed with cotton or maybe there was a finger in it that didn’t bend. I took a look every chance I got because it seemed funny. Strange I mean. Losing fingers off both hands.”

Leaphorn thought. “Any other scars? Deformities?”

“None visible,” Chee said. And waited. He watched Leaphorn turning these mangled fingers over in his mind. Chee reminded himself that he was on vacation and so was Leaphorn. By God, he was simply not going to let the lieutenant get away with this.

“Why?”

Leaphorn, his thoughts interrupted, looked startled. “What?”

“I can tell you’re thinking those missing fingers are important. Why are they important? How does that fit with what you know?”

“Probably they’re not important,” Leaphorn said.

“Not good enough,” Chee said. “Remember, I’m on vacation.”

Leaphorn’s expression shifted into something that might have been a grin. “I have some bad habits. A lot of them involve doing things to save time. A strange habit for a Navajo, I guess. But you’re right. You’re on vacation. So am I, for that matter.” He put down his coffee cup.

“Where do I start? Santillanes didn’t have any teeth. All pulled. But the pathologist who did the autopsy said there was no sign of any reason to have them pulled. No jawbone problems, no traces left by the gum diseases that cause you to lose your teeth. I wondered how Santillanes lost his teeth. You wondered how Gomez lost his fingers.” Leaphorn took the final sip of his coffee, signaled the waiter. “You see a connection?”

Chee hesitated. “You mean like they both might have been tortured?”

“It occurs to me. I guess they’re Chilean leftists. The right wing’s in power. There’s been a lot of reporting of the secret police, or maybe the army, knocking people off. People disappearing. Political prisoners. Murder. Torture. Some really hideous stuff causing investigations by Amnesty International.”

Chee nodded.

“I think we should go talk to Highhawk,” Leaphorn said. “Okay?”

“If we can find him,” Chee said. “I called this morning. Called his house. Called his office. No answer. So I called Dr. Hartman. She’s the curator he’s working for at the museum. She hadn’t seen him either. She was looking for him.”

“Let’s go try to find him anyway,” Leaphorn said. He picked up the check.

“I didn’t tell you about last night,” Chee said. He described how Highhawk had taken the telephone call, then left saying he’d be right back, and never returned.

“I think we should go on out there. See if we can find the man. Try his house and if he’s not there, we’ll try the Smithsonian.”

Chee put on his hat and followed.

“Why not?” he said, but even as he said it he had a feeling they weren’t going to find Henry Highhawk.

They took a cab to Eastern Market.

“Stick around a minute until we see if our party is home,” Leaphorn said.

The cabby was a plump young man with a mass of curly brown hair and fat, red lips. He pulled a paperback copy of Passage to Quivera off the dashboard and opened it. “It’s your money,” he said. “Spend it any way you like.”

Leaphorn punched the doorbell. They listened to it buzz inside. He punched it again. Chee walked back down the porch steps and rescued the morning paper from where it had been thrown beside the front walk. He showed it to Leaphorn. He nodded. Punched the doorbell again. Chee walked to the window, shaded the glass with his hands. The blinds were up, the curtains open. The room was empty and dark on this dreary, overcast morning.

“What do you think?” Chee said.

Leaphorn shook his head, rang the bell again. He tried the doorknob. Locked.

“Curtains open, blinds up,” Chee said. “If he came home last night, maybe he didn’t turn on the lights.”

“Maybe not.” Leaphorn tried the door again. Still locked. “I know a cop here,” he said. “I think we’ll give him a call and see what he thinks.”

“FBI?” Chee asked.

“A real cop,” Leaphorn said. “A captain on the Washington police force.”

They took the cab to the public phone booths at the Eastern Market Metro station. Leaphorn made his call. Chee waited, watching the cabby read and trying to decide what the hell Highhawk was doing. Where had he gone? Why had he gone? How was Bad Hands involved in this? He thought of Bad Hands in the role of revolutionary. He thought of how it would feel to have your fingers removed by a torturer trying to make you talk. Leaphorn climbed back into the cab.

“He said he would meet us at a little coffee place in the old Post Office building.”

The cabby was awaiting instructions. “You know how to find it?” Leaphorn asked.

“Is the Pope a Catholic?” the cabby said.

They found Captain Rodney awaiting them just inside the coffee shop door, a tall, bulky black man wearing bifocals, a gray felt hat, and a raincoat to match. The sight of Leaphorn provoked a huge, delighted, white-toothed grin.

“This is Jim Chee,” Leaphorn said. “One of our officers.”

They shook hands. Rodney’s craggy, coffee-colored face usually registered expression only when Rodney allowed it to do so. Now, just for a moment, it registered startled surprise. He removed the fedora, revealing kinky gray hair cropped close to the skull.

“Jim Chee,” he said, memorizing Chee’s face. “Well, now.”

“Rodney and I go way back,” Leaphorn said. “We survived the FBI Academy together.”

“Two misfits,” Rodney said. “Back in the days when all FBI agents had blue eyes instead of just most of them.” Rodney chuckled, but his eyes never left Chee. “That’s when I first learned that our friend here”—he indicated Leaphorn with a thumb—“has this practice of just telling you what he thinks you have to know.”

They were at a table now and Leaphorn was ordering coffee. Now he looked surprised. “Like what?” he said. “What do you mean by that?”

Rodney was still looking at Chee. “You work for this guy, right? Or with him, anyway.”

“More or less,” Chee said, wondering where this was leading. “Now I’m on vacation.”

Rodney laughed. “Vacation. Is that a fact. You just happen to be three thousand miles east of home at the same time as your boss. I think maybe I was blaming Joe for something that’s a universal Navajo trait.“

“What are we talking about here?” Leaphorn asked.

“About the Navajo Tribal Police sending two men”—he pointed a finger at Leaphorn and then at Chee—“two men, count ’em, to Washington, Dee, Cee, which is several miles out of their jurisdiction, to look for a fellow which us local cops didn’t even yet know there was a reason to be looking for.”

“Nobody sent us here,” Leaphorn said.

Rodney ignored the remark. He was staring at Chee.

“What time did you leave the Smithsonian last night?”

Chee told him. He was baffled. How did this Washington policeman know he had been at the museum last night? Why would he care? Something must have happened to Highhawk.

“Which exit?”

’Twelfth Street.“

“Nobody checked you out?”

“Nobody was there.”

Surprise again registered on Rodney’s face.

“Ah,” he said. “No guard? No security person? How did you get out?”

“I just walked out.”

“The door wasn’t locked.”

Chee shook his head. “Closed, but unlocked.”

“You see anything? Anybody?”

“I was surprised no one was there. I looked around. Empty.”

“You didn’t see a young woman in a museum guard’s uniform? A black woman? The guard who was supposed to be keeping an eye on that Twelfth Street entrance?”

Chee shook his head again. “Nobody was around,” he said. “Nobody. What’s the deal?” But even as he asked the question, he knew the deal. Highhawk was dead. Chee was just about the last person who’d seen him alive.

“The deal is”—Rodney was looking at Leaphorn now—“that I get a call from my old friend Joe here to check on whether there’s any kind of report on a man named Henry Highhawk and I find out this Highhawk is on a list of people Homicide would like to talk to.” Rodney shifted his gaze back to Chee. “So I come down here to talk to my old friend Joe, and he introduces me to you and, what do ya know, you happen to be another guy on Homicide’s wish list. That’s what the deal is.”

“Your homicide people want to talk to Highhawk,” Chee said. “That means he’s alive?”

“You have some reason to think otherwise?” Rodney asked.

“When you said you had a homicide I figured he was the one,” Chee said. He explained to Rodney what had happened last night at the Smithsonian. “Back in just a minute, he said. But he never came back. I went out and wandered around the halls looking for him. Then finally I went home. I called him at home this morning. No soap. I called his office. The woman he works for was looking for him too. She was worried about him.”

Rodney had been intent on every word.

“Went home when?”

“I told you,” Chee said. “I must have left the Twelfth Street entrance a little before ten thirty. Very close to that. I walked right back to my hotel.”

“And when did Highhawk receive this telephone call? The call just before he left?”

Chee told him.

“Who was the caller?”

“No idea. It was a short call.”

“What about? Did you hear it?”

“I heard Highhawk’s end. Apparently he had been trying to tell Highhawk how to fix something. Highhawk had tried and it hadn’t worked. I remember he said it’didn’t turn on,’ and Highhawk said since he was coming down anyway the caller could fix it. And then they set the nine-thirty time and Highhawk told him to remember it was the Twelfth Street entrance.“

“Him?” Rodney said. “Was the caller a man?”

“I should have said him or her. I couldn’t hear the other voice.”

“I’m going to make a call of my own,” Rodney said. He rose, gracefully for a man of his bulk. “Pass all this along to the detective handling this one. I’ll be right back.” He grinned at Chee. “Quicker than Highhawk, anyway.”

“Who’s the victim?” Leaphorn asked.

Rodney paused, looking down on them. “It was the night-shift guard at the Twelfth Street entrance.”

“Stabbed?” Leaphorn asked.

“Why do you say stabbed?”

Now Leaphorn’s voice had an impatient edge in it. “I told you about what brought me here,” he said. “Remember? Santillanes was stabbed. Very professionally, in the back of the neck.”

“Oh, yeah,” Rodney said. “No. Not stabbed this time. It was skull fracture.” He made another move toward the telephone.

“Where did they find the body?” Chee asked. “And when?”

“A couple of hours ago. Whoever hit her on the head found the perfect place to hide her.” Rodney looked down at them, the tale teller pausing to underline his point. “They laid her out on, the grass there between the shrubbery and the sidewalk, and got some old newspapers out of the trash bin there and threw them over her.”

Chee understood perfectly the sardonic tone in Rodney’s voice, but Leaphorn said: “Right by the sidewalk and nobody checked all morning?”

“This is Friday,” Rodney said. “In Washington, the Good Samaritan comes by only on the seventh Tuesday of the month.” And he walked away to make his telephone call.

The only remaining sign that a corpse had been on display under the shrubbery adjoining the Twelfth Street entrance to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History was a uniformed policeman who stood beside a taped-off area. He was whistling idly, and he glanced at Rodney without a sign of recognition. Probably too young.

Inside, Rodney’s badge got them through the STAFF ONLY doorway. They took the elevator to the sixth floor and found that Dr. Hartman was not in. A young woman who seemed to be her assistant said she was probably down on the main floor at her mask exhibition. And no, the young woman said, Henry Highhawk had not showed up for work.

“Did you hear what happened?” she asked. “I mean about the guard being killed?”

“We heard,” Rodney said. “Do you know where we can get the key to Highhawk’s office?”

“Dr. Hartman would probably have one,” she said. “But wasn’t that dreadful? You don’t expect something like that to happen to someone you know.”

“Did you know her?” Rodney said.

The young woman looked slightly flustered. “Well, I saw her a lot,” she said. “You know. When I worked late she would be standing there.”

“Her name was Alice Yoakum,” Rodney said, mildly. “Mrs. Alice Yoakum. Is there a way we can page Dr. Hartman? Or call down there for her somehow?”

There was, but Dr. Hartman proved to be either unreachable or too busy to come to the telephone.

“It might not be locked,” Chee said. “It wasn’t when I left. If he didn’t come back who would lock it?”

“Maybe some sort of internal security,” Rodney said.

But nobody had locked it. The door opened under Rodney’s hand. The room was silent, lit by an overhead fluorescent tube, the blinds down as Chee remembered them. Highhawk’s gesture at keeping his light from leaking out into the night was now holding out the daylight.

“You leave the light on last night?” Rodney asked.

Chee nodded. “He said he was coming back. I thought he might. I just pulled the door closed.”

They stood inside the doorway, inspecting the room.

“Everything look like you left it?” Rodney asked.

“Looks like it,” Chee said.

Rodney picked up the telephone, dialed, listened. “This is Rodney,” he said. “Get hold of Sergeant Willis and tell him I’m calling from Henry Highhawk’s office on the sixth floor of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. He’s not here. Nobody’s seen him. Tell him I have Jim Chee with me. We’re going to look around up here and if I don’t hear from him before then, I’ll call back in—” he glanced at his watch “—about forty-five minutes.” He cradled the telephone, sat in Highhawk’s chair, looked at Leaphorn who was leaning against the wall, then at Chee by the window.

“Either one of you have any creative thoughts?” he asked. ’This isn’t my baby—nor yours either for that matter—but here we are knee deep in it.“

“I’m asking myself some questions,” Leaphorn said. “We have this Highhawk vaguely connected to the knifing of a terrorist, or whatever you want to call him, out in New Mexico. Just the name in the victim’s notebook. Now we have him disappearing, I guess, the same night this guard is killed here. But do we know when the guard was killed?”

“Coroner said the first glance looked like it was before midnight,” Rodney said. “He may get closer when they have the autopsy finished.”

Leaphorn looked thoughtful. “So it might have been either shortly before, or shortly after, Highhawk walked out of here. Either way?”

“Sounds like it,” Rodney said. He glanced at Chee. “How about you?”

“I’m thinking that this is the world’s best place to hide a body,” Chee said, slowly. “Tens of thousands of cases and containers lining the halls. Most of them big enough for a body.”

“But locked,” Rodney said. “And some of them, I noticed, were sealed, too.”

“They all use the same simple little master key,” Chee said. “At least most of them must use the same key, or you’d need a truck to haul your keys around. I think you just pick up a key, sign for it, and keep it until you’re finished with it. Something like that.”

“You know if Highhawk had a key?”

“I’d guess so,” Chee said. “He was a conservator. He would have been working with this stuff all the time.”

Leaphorn put his forefinger on a hook which had been screwed into the doorjamb. “I’d been wondering what this was for,” he said. “I’d guess it was where Highhawk hung his key.”

No key hung there now, but the white paint below the hook was discolored with years of finger marks.

“Let’s go look around,” Rodney said. He got up.

“He took it when he left,” Chee said. “And before we go looking, why not make a telephone call first? Call maintenance, or whoever might know, and ask them if they found anything unusual this morning.”

Rodney paused at the doorway, looking interested. “Like what?”

Chee noticed that Leaphorn was looking at him, smiling slightly.

“Chee’s a pessimist,” Leaphorn said. “He thinks somebody killed Highhawk. If somebody did, it would be tough to drag him out of the building—even with the guard dead. Not many people around at night in here, I’d guess, but it would only take one to see you.”

Rodney still looked puzzled. “So?”

“So this place is jammed with bins and boxes and cases and containers where you could hide a body. But they’re probably all full of things already. So the killer empties one out, puts in the body, and then he relocks it. But now he’s stuck with whatever came out of the bin. So he looks for a place and dumps it somewhere.”

Rodney picked up the telephone again. He dialed, identified himself, and said: “Give me the museum security office, please.” Judging from the Rodney end of the conversation, Museum Security had no useful information. The call was transferred to maintenance. Chee found himself watching Leaphorn, thinking how quickly his mind had worked. Leaphorn was still standing beside the open door and as Chee watched, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, grimacing slightly. He was wearing black wing-tip shoes burnished to a high gloss. Leaphorn’s feet, as was true of Chee’s, would be accustomed to boots and more breathing space. Chee guessed Leaphorn’s hurt and that made him conscious of the comfort of his own feet, at home in the familiar boots. He felt slightly superior. It served Leaphorn right for trying to look like an Easterner.

“A what?” Rodney was saying. “Where did they find it?” He listened. “How large is it?” Listened again. “Where did it come from?” Listened. “Okay. We’ll check. Thanks.” He hung up, looked at Chee.

“They found a fish trap,” he said. “Thing’s made out of split bamboo by somebody-or-other. They said it had just sort of been pushed up into a passage between two stacks of containers.”

“How big?” Leaphorn asked.

Rodney was dialing the telephone again. He glanced up at Leaphorn and said: “Big as a body.”

Chapter Eighteen

« ^ »

First, Leroy Fleck called his brother. It was something he rarely did. Delmar Fleck had made it very clear that he couldn’t afford to have contacts with a convict—particularly one known to be his relative. Delmar’s wife answered the telephone. She didn’t recognize his voice and Leroy didn’t identify himself to her because if he did, he was pretty sure she would hang up on him.

“Yeah,” Delmar said, and Leroy got right to the point.

“It’s me. Leroy. And I got to have some help with Mama. They’re kicking her out of the home here in the District and the one I found to move her into wants more advance money down than I can handle.”

“I told you not to call me,” Delmar said.

“I just got to have some help,” Leroy said. “I was supposed to get a payment today, but something held it up. Ten thousand dollars. When I get it next week, I’ll pay you right back.“

“We been over this before,” Delmar said. “I don’t make hardly anything at the car lot, and Faye Lynn just gets tips at the beauty shop.”

“If you could just send me two thousand dollars I could come up with the rest. Then next week I’ll send it back to you. Western Union.” Next week would take care of itself. He would think of something by then. Elkins would have another job for him. Elkins always had jobs for him. And until Elkins came through with something bigger, he’d just have to go on the prowl for a few days.

“No blood in this turnip,” Delmar said. “It’s already squeezed. I couldn’t raise two thousand dollars if my life depended on it. We got two car payments, and rent, and the credit card, and medical insurance and—”

“Delmar. Delmar. I just got to have some help. Can you borrow something? Just for a week or so?”

“We been all over this. The government takes care of people like Mama. Let the government do it.”

“I used to think that, too,” Leroy said. “But they don’t actually do it. There’s no program for people like Mama.” Silence on the other end. “And, Delmar, you need to find a way to come and visit with her. It’s been years and she’s asking about you all the time. She told me she thought the Arabs had you a hostage somewhere. She thinks that to keep her feelings from being hurt. Her mind’s not what it used to be. Sometimes she don’t even recognize me.“

There was still only silence. Then he heard Delmar’s voice, sounding a long ways off, talking to someone. Then he heard a laugh.

“Delmar!” he shouted. “Delmar!”

“Sorry,” Delmar said. “We got company. But that’s my advice. Just call social services. I’d help you if I could, but I’m pressed myself. Got to cut it off now.”

And he cut it off, leaving Fleck standing at the telephone booth. He looked at the telephone, fighting down first the despair and then the anger, trying to think of who else he could call. But there wasn’t anyone.

Fleck kept his reserve money in a child’s plastic purse tucked under the spare tire in the trunk of his old Chevy—a secure enough place in a society where thieves were not attracted to dented 1976 sedans. He fished it out now, and headed across town toward the nursing home, counting it while he waited for red lights to turn green.

He counted three hundreds, twenty-two fifties, eleven twenties, and forty-one tens. With what he had in his billfold it added up to $2,033. He’d see what he could do with that with the Fat Man at the rest home. He didn’t like going back there like this. It sure as hell wasn’t the way he had it planned, or would plan anything for that matter. He normally would have been smart enough not to make an enemy of a man when you were going to have to ask him a favor. But maybe a combination of paying him and scaring him would work for a little while. Until he could pull something off. He could make a hit out at National Airport. In the men’s room. The blade and then off with the billfold. People going on planes always carried money. It would be risky. But he could see no choice. He’d try that, and then work on the tourists around the Capitol Building. That was risky, too. In fact, both places scared him. But he had made up his mind. He would fix something up with the Fat Man to buy a little time and then start collecting enough to get Mama someplace safe and decent.

The Fat Man wasn’t in.

“He went out to get something. Down to the Seven-Eleven, I think he said,” the receptionist told him. “Why don’t you just come on back later in the day? Or maybe you better call first.” She was looking at the little sack Fleck was carrying, looking suspicious, as if it was some sort of dope. Actually it was red licorice. Mama liked the stuff and Fleck always brought her a supply. The receptionist was some kind of Hispanic—probably Puerto Rican, Fleck guessed. And she looked nervous as well as suspicious while she talked to him. That made Fleck nervous. Maybe she would call the police. Maybe she had heard something the last time he was here when he told the Fat Man he would kill him if he didn’t hold on to Mama until he could find her another place. But he hadn’t seen her that day, and he’d kept his voice low when he explained things to the fat bastard. Maybe she was around somewhere listening. Maybe she wasn’t. There was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t have any options left.

“I’ll just go on back there to the parlor and visit with Mama until he gets back,” Fleck said.

“Oh, she’s not there anymore,” the receptionist said. “She fights with the other ladies all the time. And she hurt poor old Mrs. Endicott again. Twisted her arm.”

Fleck didn’t want to hear any more of that kind of talk. He hurried down the hallway to Mama’s room.

Mama was sitting in her wheelchair looking at the little TV Fleck had bought for her, watching some soap opera which Fleck thought might be “The Young and the Restless.” They had her tied in the chair, as they did all the old people, and it touched Fleck to see her that way. She was so helpless now. Mama had never been helpless until she’d had those strokes. Mama had always been in charge before then. It made Fleck unhappy when he came to see her. It filled him with a kind of dreary sorrow and made him wish he could get far enough ahead so that he could afford a place somewhere and take care of her himself. And he always started trying to think again how he could do it. But there was simply no way. The way Mama was, he would have to be with her all the time. He couldn’t just go off and leave her tied in that chair. And that wouldn’t leave him with any way to make a living for them.

Mama glanced at him when he came through the door. Then she looked back at her television program. She didn’t say anything.

“Hello,” Fleck said. “How are you feeling today?”

Mama didn’t look up.

“I brought you some licorice, Mama,” Fleck said. He held out the sack.

“Put it down on the bed there,” Mama said. Sometimes Mama spoke normally, but sometimes it took her a while to form the words—a matter of pitting indomitable will against a recalcitrant, stroke-damaged nervous system. Fleck waited, remembering. He remembered the way Mama used to talk. He remembered the way Mama used to be. Then she would have made short work of the Fat Man.

“You doing all right today, Mama?” he asked. “Anything I can do for you?”

Mama still didn’t look at him. She stared at the set, where a woman was shouting at a well-dressed man in poorly feigned anger. “I was,” Mama said, finally. “People keep coming in and bothering me.”

“I guess I could put a stop to that,” Fleck said.

Mama turned then and looked at him, her eyes absolutely without expression. It occurred to him that maybe it was him she meant. He studied her, wondering if she recognized him. If she did, there was no sign of it. She rarely did in recent years. Well, he would stay and visit anyway. Just keep her company. All her life, as far back as Fleck could remember into his childhood, Mama had had pitifully little of that.

“That girl there’s got on a pretty dress,” Fleck said. “I mean the one on TV.”

Mama ignored him. Poor woman, Fleck thought. Poor, pathetic old woman. He stood beside the open door, examining her profile. She had been a good-sized woman once—maybe 140 pounds or so. Strong and quick and smart as they come. Now she was skinny as a rail and stuck in that wheelchair. She couldn’t hardly talk and her mind was not working well.

“How about me giving you a push?” Fleck asked. “Would you like to go for a ride? It’s raining outside but I could push you around inside the building. Give you a little change.”

Mama still stared at the TV. The angry woman on “The Young and the Restless” had left, slamming the door behind her. Now the man was talking on the telephone. Mama hitched herself forward in the chair. “I had a boy once who had a four-door Buick,” she said in a clear voice that sounded surprisingly young. “Dark blue and that velvety upholstery on the seats. He took me to Memphis in that.”

“That would have been Delmar’s car,” Fleck said. “It was a nice one.” Mama had talked of it before but Fleck had never seen it. Delmar must have bought it while Fleck was doing his time in Joliet.

“Delmar is his name, all right,” Mama said. “The Arabs got him hostage in Jerusalem or someplace. Otherwise he’d come to see me, Delmar would. He’d take care of me right. He was all man, that one was.”

“I know he would,” Fleck said. “Delmar is a good man.”

“Delmar was all man,” Mama said, still staring at the TV set. “He wouldn’t let nobody treat him like a nigger. Do Delmar and he’d get you right back. He’d make you respect him. You can count on that. That’s one thing you always got to do, is get even. If you don’t do that they treat you like a goddamn animal. Step right on your neck. Delmar wouldn’t let anybody not treat him right.“

“No, Mama, he wouldn’t,” Fleck said. Actually, as he remembered it, Delmar wasn’t much for fighting. He was for keeping out of the way of trouble.

Mama looked at him, eyes hostile. “You talk like you know Delmar.”

“Yes, Mama. I do. I’m Leroy. I’m Delmar’s brother.”

Mama snorted. “No you ain’t. Delmar only had one brother. He ended up a damn jailbird.”

The room smelled stale to Leroy. He smelled something that might have been spoiled food, and dust and the acidic odor of dried urine. Poor old lady, he thought. He blinked, rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes.

“I think it would be nice for you to get out in the halls at least. Get out of this room a little bit. See something different just for a change.”

“I wouldn’t be in here at all if the Arabs hadn’t got to Delmar. He’d have me someplace nice.”

“I know he would,” Fleck said. “I know he’d come to visit you if he could.”

“I had two boys, actually,” Mama said. “But the other one he turned out jailbird. Never amounted to shit.”

It was just then that Leroy Fleck heard the cop. He couldn’t make out the words but he recognized the tone. He strained to listen.

But Mama was still talking. “They said that one turned fairy up there in the prison. He let them use him like a girl.”

Leroy Fleck leaned out into the hallway, partly to see if the voice which sounded like a cop really was a cop. It was. He was standing beside the receptionist and she was pointing down the hall. She was pointing right at Leroy Fleck.

Elkins had always told him he was naturally fast. He could think fast and he could move like lightning. “It’s partly in your mind, and it’s partly in your reflexes,” Elkins had told him. “We can get your muscles built up, build up your strength, by pumping iron. But anybody can do that. That quickness, that’s something you gotta be born with. That’s where you got the edge if you know how to use it.”

He used it now. He knew instantly that he could not let himself be arrested. Absolutely not. Maybe he’d come clear on the Santillanes affair. Probably not. Why else were those two Indian-looking cops dogging him? But even if they didn’t make him on that one, as soon as they matched his prints, they’d make him on something else. He’d worked for Elkins on too many jobs, and been on the prowl in too many airports and nightclubs, to ever let himself be arrested. He’d survived only by being careful not to be. But now the Fat Man, that fat bastard, had put an end to that. He’d have to get even with the Fat Man. But there was no time to think of that now. Within what was left of the same second, Fleck had decided how he would talk his way out of this. It would help that the Fat Man wasn’t here to press his case. The receptionist apparently had orders to call the law anytime he showed up, but she was minimum-wage help. She wouldn’t care what happened next.

Fleck moved back into the room and sat on the bed. “Mama,” he said softly, “you’re going to have some more company in just a minute. It’s a policeman. I want to ask you to just keep calm and be polite.”

“Policeman,” Mama said. She spit on the floor by the television set.

“It’s important to me, Mama,” Fleck said. “It’s awful important.”

And then the policeman was at the door, looking in.

“You Dick Pfaff?”

It took Fleck the blink of an eye to remember that was the name he’d used when he’d checked Mama in here.

Fleck stood. “Yes sir,” he said. “And this here is my Mama.”

The policeman was young. He had smooth, pale skin and a close-cropped blond mustache. He nodded to Mama. She stared at him. Where was his partner? Fleck wondered. He would be the old hand on this team. If Fleck was lucky, the partner would be resting out in the patrol car, letting the rookie handle this pissant, nothing little complaint. If they thought there was any risk at all of it being serious they would both be in here. In fact, Fleck suspected the police rules probably required it. Somebody was goofing off.

“We have a complaint that you caused a disturbance here,” the policeman said. “We have a statement that you threatened to kill the manager.”

Fleck produced a self -deprecatory laugh. “I’m ashamed of that. That’s the main reason I came today—to apologize for the way I behaved.” As he said it, Fleck became aware that Mama was no longer watching the television set. Mama was watching him.

“That’s a pretty serious offense,” the officer said. “Telling a man you’re going to kill him.”

“I doubt if I really quite said that,” Fleck said. “But you notice how it smells in here? My Mama here, she hadn’t been properly cleaned up. She had bedsores and all that and I just lost my temper. I had told him about it before.”

Clearly the policeman was aware of the smell. Fleck could tell from his face that he’d switched from cautiously hostile to slightly sympathetic.

“If he’s got back yet, I’ll go out there and apologize to him. I’m sorry for whatever I said. Just got sore about the way they was treating Mama here.”

The policeman nodded. “I don’t think he’s here anyway,” he said. “That woman said he was off somewhere. I’ll just check you for weapons.” He grinned at Fleck. “If you didn’t come in here armed, I’d say it’s a pretty good argument on your side since he’s about four times your size.”

“Yes sir,” Fleck said. He resisted the prison-learned instinct to spread his legs and raise his arms. The cop would never find his shank, which was in the slot he’d made for it inside his boot, but getting into the shakedown stance would tip off even this rookie that he was dealing with an ex-con.

“What do you want me to do?” Fleck asked.

“Just turn around. And then lock your hands over the back of your neck,” the policeman said.

“Get down—” Mama began. Then it broke off into a sort of incoherent stammer. But she kept trying to talk and Fleck looked away from the policeman and looked at her instead. Her face was filled with an expression of such fierce contempt that it took Leroy Fleck back to his childhood.

“—and lick his goddamn shoes,” Mama said.

He had made his decision even before she forced it out. “Now, Mama,” he said, and bending down, he slid the blade out of his boot into his palm. He gripped it flat-side horizontal and as he stepped toward the policeman he was saying: “Mama had a stroke—” and with the word “stroke” the blade was driving through the uniform shirt.

It sank between the policeman’s ribs with the full force of Fleck’s weightlifter muscles behind it. And there, in that terribly vulnerable territory Elkins had called “behind the bone,” Fleck’s weightlifter’s wrist flicked it, and flicked it and flicked it. Cutting artery. Cutting heart. The officer’s mouth opened, showing white, even teeth below the yellow mustache. He made a kind of a sound, but not very loud because the shock was already killing him. It was hardly audible above the shouting that was going on in “The Young and the Restless.”

Fleck released the knife handle, grabbed the policeman’s shoulders, and lowered him to his knees. He removed the knife and wiped it on the uniform shirt. (If you do it all properly, Elkins would say, the bleeding is mostly inside. No blood all over you.) Then Fleck let the body slide to the floor. Face down. He put the knife back in his boot and turned toward Mama. He intended to say something but he didn’t know what. His mind wasn’t working right.

Mama was looking at the policeman, then she looked up at him. Her mouth was partly open, working as if she was trying to say something. Nothing came out but a sort of an odd sound. A squeaking sound. It occurred to him that Mama was afraid. Afraid of him.

“Mama,” Leroy Fleck said. “I got even. Did you see that? I didn’t let him step on me. I didn’t kiss any boot.”

He waited. Not long but more time than he could afford under the circumstances, waiting for Mama to win her struggle to form words. But no words came and Fleck could read absolutely nothing in her eyes except fear. He walked out the door without a glance toward the reception desk, and down the narrow hallway toward the rear exit, and out into the cold, gray rain.

Chapter Nineteen

« ^ »

Museum Security had located Dr. Hartman, and Dr. Hartman had located possible sources of the fish trap. It was a matter of deciding in what part of the world the trap had originated (obviously in a place which produced both bamboo and good-sized fish) and then knowing how to retrieve data from the museum’s computerized inventory system. The computer gave them thirty-seven possible bamboo fish traps of appropriate antiquity. Dr. Hartman knew almost nothing about fish and almost everything about primitive construction methods and quite a bit about botany. Thus she was able to organize the hunt.

She pushed her chair back from the computer terminal, and her hair back from her forehead.

“I’m going to say this Palawan Island tribe is the best bet, and then we should check, I’d say, this coastal Borneo collection, and then probably Java. If none of those collections is missing a fish trap, then it’s back to the drawing board. That must be a Smithsonian fish trap and if it is then we can find out where it was stored.”

She led them down the hallway, a party of five now with the addition of a tired-looking museum security man. With Hartman and Rodney leading the way, they hurried past what seemed to Leaphorn a wilderness of branch corridors all lined with an infinity of locked containers stacked high above head level. They turned right and left and left again and stopped, while Hartman unlocked a door. Above his head, Leaphorn noticed what looked like, but surely wasn’t, one of those carved stone caskets in which ancient Egyptians interred their very important corpses. It was covered with a sheet of heavy plastic, once transparent but now rendered translucent with years of dust.

“I have a thing with locks,” Dr. Hartman was saying. “They never want to open for me.”

Leaphorn considered whether it would be bad manners to lift the plastic for a peek. He noticed Chee was looking too.

“Looks like one of those Egyptian mummy cases,” Leaphorn said. “What do you call ’em? But they wouldn’t have a mummy here.”

“I think it is,” Chee said, and lifted the sheet.

“Yeah, a mummy coffin.” His expression registered distaste. “I can’t think of the name either.”

Dr. Hartman had solved the lock. “In here,” she said, and ushered them into a huge, gloomy room occupied by row after row of floor-to-ceiling metal shelving racks. As far as Leaphorn could see in every direction every foot of shelf space seemed occupied by something—mostly by what appeared to be locked canisters.

Dr. Hartman examined her list of possible fish trap locations, then walked briskly down the central corridor, checking row numbers.

“Row eleven,” she said, and did an abrupt left turn. She stopped a third of the way down and checked bin numbers.

“Okay, here we are,” she said, and inserted her key in the lock.

“I think I had better handle that,” Rodney said, holding his hand out for the key. “And this is the time to remind everyone that we may be interested in fingerprints in here. So don’t be touching things.”

Rodney unlocked the container. He pulled open the door. It was jammed with odds and ends, the biggest of which was a bamboo device even larger than the fish trap found by the janitor. It occupied most of the bin, with the remaining space filled with what seemed to be a seining nets and other such paraphernalia.

“No luck here,” Rodney said. He closed and locked the door. “On to, where was it? Borneo?”

“I’m having trouble with making this seem real,” Dr. Hartman said. “Do you really think someone killed Henry and left his body in here?”

“No,” Rodney said. “Not really. But he’s missing. And a guard’s been killed. And a fish trap was located out of place. So it’s prudent to look. Especially since we don’t know where else to look.”

The Borneo fisherman’s bin, Dr. Hartman’s second choice, happened to be only two aisles away.

Rodney unlocked it, pulled open the door.

They looked at the top of a human head.

Leaphorn heard Dr. Hartman gasp and Jim Chee suck in his breath. Rodney leaned forward, felt the man’s neck, stepped aside to give Chee a better view. “Is this Highhawk?”

Chee leaned forward. “That’s him.”

Some of the homicide forensic crew was still out at the Twelfth Street entrance and got there fast. So did the homicide sergeant who’d been working the Alice Yoakum affair. Rodney gave him the victim’s identification. He explained about the fish trap and how they had found the body. Dr. Hartman left, looking pale and shaken. Chee and Leaphorn remained. They stood back, away from the activity, trying to keep out of the way. Photographs were taken. Measurements were made. The rigid body of Henry Highhawk was lifted out of the bin and onto a stretcher.

Leaphorn noticed the long hair tied into a Navajo-style bun, he noticed the narrow face, sensitive even in the distortion of death. He noticed the dark mark above the eye which must be a bullet hole and the smear of blood which had emerged from it. He noticed the metal brace supporting the leg, and the shoe lift lengthening it. Here was the man whose name was scrawled on a note in a terrorist’s pocket. The man who had drawn a second terrorist all the way to Arizona, if Leaphorn was guessing correctly, to a curing ceremonial at the Agnes Tsosie place. Here was a white man who wanted to be an Indian—specifically to be a Navajo. A man who dug up the bones of whites to protest whites digging up Indian bones. A man important enough to be killed at what certainly must have been a terrible risk to the man who killed him. Leaphorn looked into Highhawk’s upturned face as it went past him on the police stretcher. What made you so important? Leaphorn wondered. What made Mr. Santillanes polish his pointed shoes and pack his bags and come west to New Mexico looking for you?

What were you planning that drew someone with a pistol into this dusty place to execute you? And if you could hear my questions, if you could speak, would you even know the answer yourself? The body was past now, disappearing down the corridor. Leaphorn glanced at Chee. Chee looked stricken.

Chee had found himself’simultaneously watching what had been Henry Highhawk emerge from the container and watching his own reaction to what he was seeing. He had been a policeman long enough to have conditioned himself to death. He had handled an old woman frozen in her hogan, a teenaged boy who had hanged himself in the restroom at his boarding school, a child backed over by a pickup truck driven by her mother. He had been investigating officer of so many victims of alcohol that he no longer tried to keep them sorted out in his memory. But he had never been involved with the death of someone he’d known personally, someone who interested him, someone he’d been talking to only a matter of minutes before he died. He had rationalized his Navajo conditioning to avoid the dead, but he hadn’t eliminated the ingrained knowledge that while the body died, the chindi lingered to cause ghost sickness and evil dreams. Highhawk’s chindi would now haunt this museum’s corridors. It would haunt Jim Chee as well.

Rodney had been inspecting the items removed from the container where Highhawk’s body had rested. He held up a flat, black box with something round connected to it by wires. “This looks a little modern for a Borneo fishing village,” he said, showing the box to all of them. The box was a miniature Panasonic cassette tape recorder.

“I think it’s Highhawk’s tape recorder,” Chee said. “He had one just like that when he was at Agnes Tsosie’s place. And I saw it again in the office at his place.” Chee could see now that tape recorder was wired to one of those small, battery-operated watches. It was much like the nine-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent model he was wearing except it used hands instead of digital numbers.

“I think it’s wired to turn on the recorder,” Leaphorn said. “Possibly that’s what Highhawk was talking about on that telephone call. Getting that thing fixed.”

Rodney inspected it carefully. He laughed. “If it was, it wasn’t fixed very well,” he said. “If Highhawk did this he doesn’t know any more about electricity than my wife. And she thinks it leaks out of the telephone.” He unwound the wires and removed the watch. Holding it care fully by the edges, he opened the recorder and popped out the miniature tape. He weighed it in his hand, examined it, and put it back in the machine. “Let’s see what we have on this,” he said. “But first, let’s see what else we have in this container.”

Rodney sorted gingerly among the fish nets, bamboo fish spears, canoe paddles, clothing, and assorted items that Chee couldn’t identify. Pressed against the side of the bin, partly obscured by folded twine of fish netting, was something white. It looked like leather. In fact, to Chee it looked like it might be a yei mask.

“I guess that’s it,” Rodney said. “Except your team will come along and do a proper search and find the murder weapon in there, and the killer’s photograph, fingerprints, and maybe his business card.”

“We’ll catch that later,” the sergeant said. “We’ll get somebody from the museum who knows what’s supposed to be in there and what isn’t.”

“This is the mask Highhawk had been working on,” Chee said. “Or one of them.”

The sergeant retrieved it, turned it over in his hands, examined it. “What’d you say it was?” he asked Chee, and handed it to him.

“It’s the Yeibichai mask. A Navajo religious mask. Highhawk was working on this one, or one just like it, for that mask display downstairs.”

“Oh,” the sergeant said, his curiosity satisfied and his interest exhausted. “Let’s get this over with.”

They followed Highhawk’s body into the bright fluorescent lighting of the conservancy laboratory. When the sergeant finished whatever he wanted to do with him, Henry Highhawk would go from there to the morgue. Now the cause of death seemed apparent. The blackened round mark of what must be a bullet hole was apparent above the left eye. From it a streak of dried blood discolored the side of Highhawk’s face.

The sergeant went through Highhawk’s pockets, spreading the contents on a laboratory table. Wallet, pocketknife, a half-used roll of Tums, three quarters, two dimes, a penny, a key ring bearing six keys, a crumpled handkerchief, a business card from a plumbing company, a small frog fetish carved out of a basaltic rock.

“What the hell is this?” the sergeant said, pushing the frog with his finger.

“It’s a frog fetish,” Leaphorn said.

The sergeant had not been happy to have two strangers and Rodney standing around while he worked. The sergeant had the responsibility, but obviously Rodney had the rank.

“What the hell is a frog fetish?” the sergeant asked.

“It’s connected with the Navajo religion,” Leaphorn said. “Highhawk was part Navajo. He had a Navajo grandmother. He was interested in the culture.”

The sergeant nodded. He looked slightly less hostile.

“No bin key?” Chee asked.

The sergeant looked at him. “Bin key?”

“When he left his office last night, he took the key that unlocks all these bins off a hook beside his door and put it in his pocket,” Chee said. “It was on a little plain steel ring.” The killer probably had taken Highhawk’s key to open the bin and to relock it. Unless of course the killer was another museum employee with his (or her) own key.

“You saw him put the key in his pocket?”

Chee nodded. “He took it off the hook. He put it in his right front pants pocket.”

“No such key in his pocket,” the sergeant said. “What you see here is everything he had on him. From the car keys he was carrying, it looks like he was driving a Ford. You know about that? You know the license number?“

“There was a Ford Mustang parked in the driveway by his house. I’d say about five or six years old. I didn’t notice the license. And I don’t know if it was his,” Chee said.

“We’ll get it from Motor Vehicles Division. It’s probably parked somewhere close to here.”

Rodney put the tape recorder beside Highhawk’s possessions on the laboratory table. “I unwired the recorder from the watch. Just in case,” he said. “You want to hear it?”

He removed a pencil from his inside coat pocket, held it over the PLAY key, and glanced up at the sergeant, awaiting a response.

The sergeant nodded. “Sure.”

The first sounds Chee heard sent him back into boyhood, into the winter hogan of Frank Sam Nakai on the west slope of the Chuska Mountains. Bitter cold outside, the cast-iron wood stove under the smoke hole glowing with heat. Frank Sam Nakai, brother of his mother, teaching the children how the Holy People saved the Holy Boy and his sister from the lightning sickness. His uncle sitting on the sheepskin, legs crossed, head back against the blanket hung against the log wall, eyes closed, singing. At first, the voice so low that Cousin Emmett and little Shirley and Chee would have to lean forward to hear them: came the voices of Water Sprinkler, and the male yeis, forming sounds which—being the sounds gods make—would not produce any meaning mere humans could understand.

Chee noticed that both Rodney and the sergeant were looking at him, awaiting an explanation.

“It’s chanting from the Yeibichai,” Chee said. ’The Night Chant.“ That, obviously, explained nothing. ”Highhawk was at this ceremonial the night I arrested him,“ Chee said. ”He was recording it.“

As he said it, the sound of the chanting was replaced by the voice of Henry Highhawk.

There was silence. Chee glanced up. Rodney said: “Well, now—” and then Highhawk’s voice resumed: come to look at this display of masks to look around you in this exhibition, and throughout this museum. Do you see a display of the masks of the gods of the Christian, or of the Jew, or of Islam, or of any other culture strong enough to defend its faith and to punish such a desecration? Where is the representation of the Great God Jehovah who led the Jews out of their bondage in Egypt, or the Mask of Michael the Archangel, or the Mother of the Christian God we call Jesus Christ, or a personification of Jesus himself? You do not see them here. You have here in a storage room of this museum the Tano Pueblo’s representation of one of its holy Twin War Gods. But where is a consecrated Sacred Host from the Roman Catholic cathedral? You will not find it here. Here you see the gods of conquered people displayed like exotic animals in the public zoo. Only the overthrown and captured gods are here. Here you see the sacred things torn from the temples of Inca worshippers, stolen from the holy kivas of the Pueblo people, sacred icons looted from burned tepee villages on the buffalo plains.“

Highhawk’s voice had become higher, almost shrill. It was interrupted by the sound of a great intake of breath. Then a moment of silence. The ambulance crew picked up Highhawk’s stretcher and moved out—leaving only his voice behind. The forensic crew sorted his possessions into evidence bags.

“Do you doubt what I say?” Highhawk’s voice resumed. “Do you doubt that your privileged race, which claims such gentility, such humanity, would do this? Above your head, lining the halls and corridors of this very building, are thousands of cases and bins and boxes. In them you find the bones of more than eighteen thousand of your fellow humans. You will find the skeletons of children, of mothers, of grandfathers. They have been dug out of the burials where their mourning relatives placed them, reuniting them with their Great Mother Earth. They remain in great piles and stacks, respected no more than the bones of apes and…”

Rodney hit the OFF button and looked around him in the resulting silence.

“What do you think? He was going to broadcast this somehow with that mask display he was working on? Was that the plan?”

“Probably,” Chee said. “He seems to be speaking to the audience at the exhibition. Let’s hear the rest of it.”

“Why not?” Rodney said. “But let’s get out of here. Down to Highhawk’s office where I can use the telephone.”

The items from Highhawk’s pockets were in evidence bags now, except for the recorder.

“I’ve got to get moving,” the sergeant said. “I still have some work to do on the Alice Yoakum thing.”

“I’ll bring in the recorder,” Rodney said. “I’ll clean up here.”

“I’ll need to talk to—” The sergeant hesitated, searching for the name. “To Mr. Chee here, and Mr. Leaphorn. I’ll need to get their statements on the record.”

“Whenever you say,” Leaphorn said.

“I’ll bring them in,” Rodney said.

In Highhawk’s office, Rodney put the recorder on the desk top and pushed the PLAY button. Rodney, too, was anxious to hear the rest of it.

“—antelopes. Their children have asked that these bones be returned so that they can again be reunited with their Mother Earth with respect and dignity. What does the museum tell us? It tells us that its anthropologists need our ancestral bones for scientific studies. Why doesn’t it need the ancestral bones of white Americans for these studies? Why doesn’t it dig up your graves? Think of it! Eighteen thousand human skeletons! Eighteen thousand! Ladies and gentlemen, what would you say if the museum looted your cemeteries, if it dug up the consecrated ground of your graveyards in Indianapolis and Topeka and White Plains and hauled the skeletons of your loved ones here to molder in boxes and bins in the hallways? Think about this! Think about the graves of your grandmothers. Help us recover the bones of our own ancestors so that they may again be reunited with their Mother Earth.”

Silence. The tape ran its brief miniature-recorder course and clicked off. Rodney pushed the REWIND button. He looked at Chee. “Quite an argument.”

Chee nodded. “Of course there’s another side to it. An earlier generation of anthropologists dug up most of those bones. And the museum has given a few of them back. I think it sent sixteen skeletons to the Blackfoot Tribe awhile ago, and it says it will return bones if they were stolen from regular cemeteries or if you can prove a family connection.”

Rodney laughed. “Get those skeletons in the lineup,” he said. “Get the kinfolks in and see if they can pick their grannie out from somebody’s auntie.” About a millisecond before he ended that jest, Rodney’s expression shifted from amused to abashed. In the present company, maybe this was no laughing matter. “Sorry,” Rodney said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Now Chee looked amused. “We Navajos aren’t into this corpse fetish business,” he said. “Our metaphysics turns on life, the living. The dead we put behind us. We avoid old bones. You won’t find Navajos asking for the return of their stolen skeletons.”

It was now Leaphorn’s turn to look amused. “As a matter of fact, we are. The Navajo Tribe is asking the museum to send us our skeletons, if the museum has any of them. I think somebody in the tribal bureaucracy decided it was a chance to make a political point. A little one-upmanship on Washington.”

“Any reason to hear this again?” Rodney asked. He slipped the recorder into an evidence bag, sealed it, leaned heavily against the edge of the table, and sighed. He looked tired, Chee thought, and unhappy.

“I don’t enjoy being involved in things I don’t understand,” Rodney said. “I don’t have the slightest goddamn idea why somebody killed this Highhawk bird, or whether it ties in with that guard being killed, or whether this tape has a damned thing to do with anything. That tape sounds like the Smithsonian Museum might have a motive to knock him off.” Rodney rubbed the back of a hand across his forehead and made a wry face. “But I gather that museums tend to wait until you’re dead and then go after your skeleton. So I’d guess that tape doesn’t have much to do with this. And—”

“I’d guess it does,” Chee said.

Leaphorn studied him. He nodded, agreeing. “How?”

“I haven’t thought it through,” Chee said. “But think about it a minute. Highhawk goes to a lot of trouble to get to that Yeibichai to make this tape.” He glanced at Leaphorn. “He wrote to Old Lady Tsosie, didn’t he? He’d have to find a way to run down her address.”

“She was in that big Navajo Reservation article National Geographic ran,” Leaphorn said. “That’s where he got her name.”

“Then he goes all the way out there from Washington, and finds out how to find Lower Greasewood, and the Tsosie place, dreams up that bullshit story about wanting to be a Navajo, and—”

“Maybe not bullshit,” Leaphorn said. “From what you told me about him.”

“No,” Chee said, thoughtfully, “I think maybe not. I think now that might have been part of the genuine Highhawk package. But anyway, it involved a lot of trouble. He must have written that oration he gave we just heard, and then got it dubbed in on the tape. Now why? What's he going to do with it? I think it's obvious he was planting it in that mask exhibit, in his Talking God exhibit. The tape practically says that. And Highhawk has a track record of knowing how to get publicity. The kind to put the heat on the Smithsonian. That tape was sure well designed to do that. Zany enough to make the front page.”

“Did he have it with him when he left you in his office?” Leaphorn asked.

“He had a cardboard box. About three times the size of a shoebox. Anyway, it was big enough for the mask and all. He picked it up just as he was leaving.”

“And that tells us what?” Rodney asked. He shook his head, thinking about it.

Silence in the room. Rodney now slouched in Highhawk’s swivel chair; Chee leaning against the wall in the practiced slouch of a man who had done a lot of leaning against things, a lot of waiting for his age; Joe Leaphorn sitting on the edge of the desk, looking uncomfortable in his three-piece suit, his gray, burr-cut head bowed slightly forward, his expression that of a man who is listening to sounds inside his own head. The quiet air around them smelled of dust and, faintly, of decay.

“Officer Chee here, he and I, we have a problem,” Leaphorn said—half to Rodney and half to the desk. “We are like two dogs who followed two different sets of tracks to the same brush pile. One dog thinks there’s a rabbit under the brush, the other thinks it’s a bobcat. Same brush pile, different information.” He glanced at Chee. “Right?”

Chee nodded.

“As for my end of it, I see the body of a worn-out, toothless man who keeps his old shoes polished. His body is under a chamisa bush in New Mexico. And in the shirt pocket is a note mentioning Agnes Tsosie’s Yeibichai ceremony. When I get out to Agnes Tsosie’s place, I run into the name of Henry Highhawk. He’s coming out. I follow those pointed shoes back to Washington and I find a little den of Chilean terrorists—or, maybe more accurately, the victims of Chilean terror. And right in the next apartment to this den is a little man with red hair and freckles and the torso of a weightlifter who just happens to fit the description of the guy who probably killed Pointed Shoes with his knife. But I’ve come to a dead end. Good idea who killed my man, now. I think that surely the man’s widow, his family, they’ll tell me why. No such luck. Instead of that, they act like they never heard of him.”

Leaphorn sighed, tapped his fingers on the desk top, and continued without a glance at either of his listeners. “I get a make on Mr. Pointed Shoes’ identity from the FBI. It turns out he’s one of the big ones in one of the factions that’s sort of at war with the right-wing government in Chile. Turns out the ins have already killed one of his bunch earlier. So now the mystery is solved. I know who Pointed Shoes is. His name is Santillanes. I know who killed him—or I think I do—and I think I know why. But now I’ve got a new problem. Why were Santillanes’ kinfolks acting that way? It looked like they didn’t want anyone to know the man had been killed.”

Leaphorn’s droning voice stopped for several seconds. “Now why in the world would that be?” he said. He was frowning. He shook his head, looked at Rodney and Chee. “Either one of you want to break in here?”

Neither one did.

“So,” Leaphorn said. “So, I’m almost to the brush pile. Now my question is what the hell is going on here? And for some reason I can’t get Highhawk out of my head. He doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. I think I know how Santillanes found out he should go to the Navajo Reservation to find Highhawk. But I don’t understand why.”

Leaphorn paused again, looked at Chee. “Do you know about this? Right after Highhawk pulled that business of digging up the graves and mailing the bones to the museum, he got the big splash of publicity he wanted. But before anybody could serve a warrant on him, he had dropped out of sight. All his friends and his neighbors could tell anybody looking for him that he was going to Arizona to attend a Yeibichai ceremonial for some relative named Agnes Tsosie. I think Santillanes probably read about his exploits in the paper and went looking for him about the same time the police did. Santillanes got the word that Henry was heading west for the Yeibichai. But he didn’t know it was a month in the future.”

Leaphorn stopped again, inhaled hugely, exhaled, drummed his fingers against the desk top, thinking. Rodney made a sentence-opening sound but cut it off without actually saying anything. But he looked at his watch.

“Why would Chilean politicians want to meet with Henry Highhawk?” Leaphorn asked himself the question. “They had to want to contact him badly enough to send someone three thousand miles, and get him killed, and then send somebody else to complete the mission. And post his bail.” He glanced up at Chee. “That’s right, isn’t it? And Highhawk called that guy with the missing fingers his friend, didn’t he? Any idea how long they’d known each other?”

“They didn’t,” Chee said. “Highhawk was lying. They hadn’t met until the Yeibichai.”

“You sure?” Leaphorn asked.

“I watched them meet,” Chee said. “I’m sure.”

Rodney held up a hand. “Friends, I’ve got to go and do some things. Two or three in fact. I was going to be back at the office about an hour ago. Stick around. I’ll be back.” He slipped off the desk and disappeared into the hallway.

“Every effect has its cause,” Leaphorn said to Chee. “Once in a while, maybe, a star just falls at random. But I don’t believe in random. The Santillanes bunch had a hell of a good reason to chase after Highhawk. What was it?”

“I don’t know,” Chee said. “All I know about the Santillanes bunch is from seeing Bad Hands a couple of times. I got here by a totally different route. And I’ve got a different question under your brush pile.” He sat on the desk about where Rodney had been leaning, thinking, deciding how to explain this premonition, this hunch that had been making him uneasy.

“I keep remembering Highhawk at the Yeibichai,” Chee said. “I was curious about him so I was watching him, standing just a little off to the side where I could see his face. He was cold—” He laughed, glanced at Leaphorn. “Of course he was cold. Everybody’s cold at a Night Chant, but he was colder than most of us because, you know, if you come from the East you think desert country is supposed to be hot, so he wasn’t dressed like us. Just had on a leather jacket. Anyway, he was shivering.” Chee stopped. Why was he telling Leaphorn all this? Highhawk standing, shaking with cold, hugging himself, the wind blowing dust across the dance ground around his ankles, the wavering light from the bonfires turning his face red. His expression had been rapt, and Chee had noticed his lips were moving. Highhawk was singing to himself. Agnes Tsosie had been standing on a blanket spread on the packed earth in front of the medicine hogan attended by the hataalii. Talking God, Humpback God, and Water Sprinkler had been making their slow, stately approach. Chee had edged closer, close enough to hear what Highhawk was chanting. “He stirs. He stirs. He stirs. He stirs,“ Highhawk had been singing. “Now in old age wandering, he stirs.” It had been words from the “Song of Waking” which the hataalii would have sung on the first midnight of the ceremonial, summoning the spirit in the mask from its cosmic sleep to take its part in the ritual. He remembered noticing as Highhawk sang that while some of the words were wrong, the man's expression was deeply reverent.

Now he noticed that Leaphorn’s expression was puzzled. “He was cold,” Leaphorn said. “Yes, but you haven’t made your point.”

“He was a believer,” Chee said. “You know what I mean. Some people come to a ceremonial out of family duty, and some come out of curiosity, or to meet friends. But to some it is a spiritual experience. You can tell by their faces.”

Leaphorn’s expression was still puzzled. “And he was one of those? He believed?”

Yes, Chee thought, Highhawk was one of those. You’re not one, lieutenant. You don’t believe. You see the Navajo Way as a harmless cultural custom. You would be one of those who go only as a family duty. But this crazy white man believed. Truly believed.

Leaphorn waited for that to be explained.

“Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think so. I don’t think Highhawk would use the yei mask like that. I don’t think he would put it on the head of a manikin in a public display. I don’t think the museum would approve of that either. Despite what Highhawk said. For example, they brought in a hataalii, a man named Sandoval, brought him in to check out the exhibit and make sure Henry wasn’t doing anything sacrilegious. So—” Chee paused, thinking about it.

“Go on,” Leaphorn said.

“So Highhawk was making a duplicate mask. A replica of the genuine Yeibichai mask in the museum’s collection. A copy. He must have had both of them here last night.” Chee picked up the yei mask by its fur collar ruff and held it up, facing Leaphorn.

“This mask we have here, it’s not the genuine Yeibichai mask,” Chee said. “It’s just about an exact replica. Highhawk made it because he wouldn’t use the real one in a public display, and he certainly wouldn’t have rigged up his tape player inside of it.”

“It looks old as the mountains to me,” Leaphorn said. “Cracked and worn.”

“He’s good at that,” Chee said. “But take a look at it. Up close. Look for pollen stains, along the cheeks where the medicine man puts it when he feeds the mask, and on the end of the mouthpiece. And down into the leather tube that forms the mouth. It’s not there. No stains. He dried the buckskin somehow, or got an old piece, and dried out the paint, but why bother with the pollen stains? Nobody would notice it.”

“No,” Leaphorn said slowly. “Nobody would. So the mask on exhibit downstairs is the genuine Yeibichai mask.”

“So who put it there?” Leaphorn mused. “Whoever killed Highhawk must have put it there, wouldn’t you say? But—” Leaphorn stopped, midsentence. “Where is that Yeibichai display?”

“It’s sort of off to one side, to the left of the center of the mask exhibition. Right across from it is an exhibition of Andean stuff, Incan and so forth. The high point is a gold and emerald mask which some Chilean general is trying—” Now it was Chee’s turn to halt, midthought. “My God!” he said. “Dr. Hartman said this Chilean general—I think he’s the head of their political police—was supposed to come in today to look at the thing.”

He moved toward the door while he was still asking the question, amazingly fast for a man of his age in a three-piece suit. And Jim Chee was right behind him.

Chapter Twenty

« ^ »

Leroy Fleck walked the block and a half to where he’d parked the old Chevy sedan. He walked briskly, but without breaking into a trot, without any sign of urgency that anyone who saw him might remember. The important point was to keep any connection from being made between the crime and the car. If that happened he was a goner. If it didn’t, then he had time to do the things he had to do.

He drove just at the speed limit, careful at the lights, careful changing lanes, and as he drove he listened to the police scanner on the seat beside him. Nothing much exciting except for a multivehicle, multi-injury accident on the Interstate 66 exit ramp at the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. He was almost downtown before the call came. A slight strain showed in the laconic voice of the dispatcher and Fleck recognized the address of the nursing home and the code. It meant officer down. It meant nothing else would matter much for a while in D.C. law enforcement. A policeman had been killed. Within fifteen minutes, probably less, Fleck’s description would be broadcast to every police car in the district. The noon newscasts would carry it big. But nobody had his picture and he still had time.

His first stop was at Western Union. The message he sent to Delmar was short: TAKE CARE OF MAMA. TELL HER I LOVE HER. AM SENDING MONEY ORDER.

He gave the girl at the desk the message and then opened the plastic purse and counted out $2,033. He thought for a moment. He had almost half a tank of gasoline but he might need to make a telephone call, or pay an admission fee somewhere. He saved the three ones, stuffed them in his shirt pocket. He asked the girl to subtract the transmission fees and make out a money order for the rest. Then he drove to the Chilean embassy.

He parked down the street at a place where he could watch the entrance gate. Then he walked through the drizzle to the pay booth, dialed the embassy, and gave the woman who answered the word that The Client had given him for emergencies.

“I need Stone,” he said. He always wondered why the man used that for a code name. Why not something in Spanish?

“Ah,” the woman said. “One little moment, please.”

Then he waited. He waited a long time. The rain was mixed with snow now, big wet flakes which stuck to the glass of the booth for a second and then slid down the pane. Fleck went over his plan, but there was nothing much to go over. He would try to lure The Client out where he could reach him. If The Client wouldn’t come out, he would wait. He would get him eventually. He would get as many as he could. He would get ones as important as possible. It was all he could do. He knew The Client wasn’t his own man. He was taking his orders from somebody up the ladder. But it didn’t matter to Fleck. Like Mama said, they were all the same.

“Yes,” the voice said. It was not The Client’s voice.

“I got to talk to Stone,” Fleck said.

“He is not available. Not now.”

“When then?” Fleck asked.

“Later today.”

Perhaps, Fleck thought, he could get someone else. Someone more important. That would be as good. Even better.

“Let me talk to his superior then.”

“Just a moment.” Fleck could hear a distant-sounding voice, asking questions.

“They are getting ready to go,” the man said. “They have no time now.”

“I have to talk to somebody. It’s an emergency.”

“No time now. You call back. This evening.”

The line went dead.

Fleck looked at it. Hung it up gently. Walked back to his car. It made no difference at all really. He could wait.

He had waited less than five minutes when the iron driveway gate creaked open and the limousine emerged. After it came another, equally black. They turned downtown, toward Capitol Hill.

Leroy Fleck trailed them in his rusty Chevy.

The limos did left turns on Constitution Avenue, rolled past the National Gallery of Art, and pulled to a stop at the Tenth Street entrance to the Museum of Natural History. Fleck pulled his Chevy into a No Parking zone, turned off the ignition, and watched.

Seven men emerged from the two limos. Fleck recognized The Client. Of the others, one carried cameras and a camera bag, and two more were burdened by a movie camera, tripods, and what Fleck guessed must be sound recording equipment. The remaining three were a short, plump man in a fur-collared coat; a tall, elegantly dressed man with a mustache; and a burly, hard-looking weightlifter type with a crooked nose. The driver from the front limo held a black umbrella over Mustache, protecting him from the wet snowflakes until the entourage reached the shelter of the museum entrance. Fleck sat a moment, sorting them out in his mind. The plump man would probably be the ambassador himself, or at least someone high on the power ladder. The elegant man would be a visiting Very Important Person, the one he’d read about in the Post. Judging from who got the umbrella, the visitor outranked the ambassador and rated the personal attention of The Client. The weightlifter type would be the VIP’s personal muscle. As for The Client, Fleck had pegged him long ago as the man in charge of security at the embassy. In all they made a formidable bunch.

Fleck climbed out of the Chevy without bothering to take the key out of the ignition or to lock the door. He was finished with the Chevy now. No more need for it. He trotted up the museum steps and into the entrance foyer. The last two cameramen from the limo delegation were disappearing through a doorway into the central hall. They hurried into a side hallway to his right, under a banner which read THE MASKED GODS OF THE AMERICAS. Fleck followed.

There were perhaps fifty or sixty people in the exhibit of masks. Two-thirds of them looked to Fleck like a mixture of standard tourists. The rest were reporters and television cameramen and museum functionaries who must have been here waiting for Big Shot and his followers to appear. Now they were clustered around the elegant man. The Client stood a little aside from the central knot. He was doing his job. He was watching, his eyes checking everyone. They rested a moment on Fleck, then dismissed him and moved on.

The Client would have to be first, Fleck decided. He was the professional. Then he would go for the VIP. Fleck was conscious that he held two advantages. None of them had ever seen him and they wouldn’t be expecting an attack. He would have total surprise on the first one he hit, and maybe a little surprise left on number two if there was enough confusion. He would need more luck than he could expect to take out the third one, but it was worth a try.

A cameraman’s strobe flash lit the scene. Then another one. They were setting up some sort of filming apparently, with the VIP over by the display of South American stuff. Beside Fleck was an exhibit of masked dancers, big as life. Apparently some sort of American Indians. Fleck stooped, slipped the shank out of his boot, and held it in his palm, the honed blade hidden by his sleeve. Then he waited. He wanted the crowd to be exactly big enough. He wanted the time to be exactly right.

Chapter Twenty-One

« ^ »

This Miguel Santero, was that his name? This guy with the mutilated hands, did you see any sign of him around here last night?“

Leaphorn was standing exactly in front of the vertical line formed by the junction of the elevator doors, staring at the crack as he asked the question. It seemed to Chee that the elevator was barely moving. Why hadn’t they looked for the stairs? Six flights. They could have run down six flights while this incredibly slow elevator was dropping one.

“I didn’t see him,” Chee said. “I just had a feeling that it was Santero on the telephone.”

“I wish we knew for sure how he connects,” Leaphorn said, without relaxing his stare at the elevator door. “Three slim threads is all we have—or maybe four—tying him to the Santillanes bunch. The FBI connects him, but the FBI has a bad habit of buying bad information. Second, after Santillanes was killed going to find Highhawk, Santero went out and found him. Maybe that was just a coincidence. Third, the little red-headed man who killed Santillanes seems to have been following Santero too.“

The elevator’s floor indicator passed three and sank toward two. Leaphorn watched it. He got Chee to explain how the displays were arranged. He told Chee what he’d seen in the Post about General Huerta Cardona demanding return of the Incan mask. If he felt any of the anxiety which was causing Chee to chew relentlessly on his lower lip, he didn’t allow it to show.

“What’s the fourth?” Chee said.

Leaphorn’s mind had left this part of the puzzle to explore something else. “Fourth?”

“You said maybe four thin threads.”

“Oh. The fourth. Santero’s mangled hands and Santillanes’ teeth. They were broken out, I think. The pathologist said there was nothing wrong with the man’s gums.” He looked at Chee. “I think that’s what decides me. Santero is one of the Santillanes people. The FBI had this one right. Describe him to me again.”

Chee described Bad Hands in detail.

“What do you think we’re dealing with here?”

“I’d guess a bomb,” Chee said.

Leaphorn nodded. “Probably,” he said. “Plastic explosive in the mask, and someone there to detonate it when the general is in exactly the right place.”

The elevator creaked to a halt at the ground floor.

“I’ll get the mask,” Chee said. “You look for Santero.”

Finding Santero proved to be no problem.

They rushed out of the elevator, through the door into the museum’s main-floor public display halls and down the corridor toward the MASKED GODS OF THE AMERICAS banner—Chee leading, Leaphorn puffing along behind. Chee stopped.

“There he is,” he said.

Santero had his back to them. He was standing beside an exhibit of Toltec masks, watching the crowd, which was watching television crews at another exhibit. Bright lights flashed on—a television crew preparing for action.

Chee turned his hurried walk into a run, dodging through the spectators, staggering a teenaged girl who backed into his path, being staggered in turn by a hefty woman whose shoulder grazed him as he passed. The Yeibichai itself had drawn only a few lookers. Curiosity about the television crews and the celebrity at the Incan display was the magnet but Chee had to push his way through the overflow to reach the exhibit. He was forcing himself not to think two terrible, unthinkable thoughts. He would reach the mask and there would be a bomb under it and Bad Hands would detonate it in his face. He would reach the mask and tear it off and there would be nothing under it. Only the molded plastic head of the manikin. In the first thought he would be instantly dead. In the second he would be hideously, unspeakably, terminally humiliated—living out his life as a public joke.

“Hey!” he heard behind him. “Get away from that. What the hell are you doing!” A security guard was climbing over the railing.

Chee jerked at the mask, tilting the manikin against him. He jerked again. The mask, the head, all of it came off in his arms. The headless manikin toppled with a crash. “Hey!” the guard shouted.

Leroy Fleck had several terrible weaknesses and several terrible strengths. One of his strengths was in stalking his prey, attaining the exact place, the exact time, the exact position, for using his shank exactly as Eddy Elkins—and his own subsequent experience—had taught him to use it. The secret of Leroy Fleck’s survival had been finding a way to make his kill instant and silent. And Fleck had managed to survive seventeen years since his release from prison.

He was stalking now. While he watched the crowd and waited for the moment, he slipped the shank out of his sleeve and an envelope out of his pocket. He put the shank in the envelope, and carried it in his right hand, deep in his right coat pocket where it would be ready. The envelope had been Elkins’ idea. “If witnesses see an envelope, they react like they’re seeing somebody handing somebody a letter. Same with the victim. But if people see a knife coming, it’s a totally different reaction.” That had been proved true. And the paper didn’t get in the way at all, or slow things down. With the handle of the shank ready between his thumb and forefinger, he watched The Client carefully, and the VIP, and the VIP’s muscleman, and the ambassador, and the rest of them. He concluded from the way the man moved, and the way he watched, that the still photographer was also the ambassador’s bodyguard. Partially on the basis of that he had changed his strategy. The VIP would go first. The Client second. The VIP was the one that mattered, the one who would best demonstrate that Leroy Fleck was a man, and not a dog that could be spit on without retribution.

He could do it right now, he thought, but the situation was improving. It became clear to Fleck what was happening. The VIP had called some sort of press conference here at the Incan display. That brought in the television cameras, and TV crews attracted the curious. The bigger the crowd got, the better the odds for Fleck. It would multiply the confusion, improve his chances of getting two, and maybe even three.

Then he saw Santero—the man who always wore gloves. It was clear to Fleck almost immediately that Santero was also stalking. Fleck watched. Santero seemed to have two objectives. He was keeping out of the line of vision of The Client, and he was keeping the VIP in sight. Fleck considered this. It didn’t seem to matter. Santero was no longer the enemy. The man had probably come here to try something. But if he did, it could only be helpful to Fleck. He could see no problem in that.

Just as he had decided that, he saw the two Indian cops. They hurried into the exhibit hall together. Then the tall one broke into a run toward him, and the older one headed for Santero. Here Fleck could definitely see a problem. Both of these men had seen him, the older one clearly and in good light. No more time to wait for a bigger crowd. Fleck pushed his way past a man in a raincoat, past a television light technician, toward the VIP. The VIP was standing with a well-dressed fat man wearing bifocal glasses. They were studying a sheet of paper, discussing it. Probably, Fleck thought, they were looking at notes for the statement he intended to make. If he could handle it, Fleck decided he would take the VIP from the back. He slipped his right hand from his pocket, crumpling one end of the envelope as he gripped the shank handle. Then he moved, Fleck fashion, like lightning.

Leaphorn always thought things through, always planned, always minimized the opportunity for error. It was a lifelong habit, it was the source of his reputation as the man to handle impossible cases. Now he had only a few seconds to think and no time at all to plan. He would have to presume that there was a bomb, that Santero held the detonator, that Santero was working alone because only one person would be needed. Santero’s presence, lurking where he could watch the general, seemed to reinforce some of that thinking. The man was waiting until the general moved up to the position closest to the bomb. And the detonator? Probably something like the gadget that turned his television on and changed the channels. Grabbing him wouldn’t work. He’d be too strong and agile for Leaphorn to handle, even with surprise. He’d simply point the thing and push the button. Leaphorn would try confusion.

Santero heard him rushing up and whirled to face him. His right hand was in his coat pocket, the arm rigid.

“Señor Santero,” Leaphorn said, in a loud, hoarse, breathless whisper. “Venga conmigo! Venga! Pronto! Pronto! Venga!”

Santero’s face was shocked, bloodless. The face of a man interrupted at the moment of mass murder.

“Come with you?” he stammered. “Who are you?”

“Los Santillanes sent me,” Leaphorn said. “Come. Hurry.”

“But what—” Santero became aware that Leaphorn had gripped his right arm. He jerked it away, pulled out his right hand. He wore a black glove on it, and in the glove he held a small, flat plastic box. “Get away from me,” Santero said, voice fierce.

There was a clamor of voices from the crowd. Someone was shouting: “Hey! You! Get out of there.” Santero turned from Leaphorn, backing away, starting at the sound of a second shout: “Hey! Get away from that.”

Santero took another step backward. He raised the box.

“Santero,” Leaphorn shouted. “El hombre ahí no esta el general. No esta El General Huerta Cardona. Es un—” Leaphorn’s Arizona-New Mexico Spanish included no Castilian noun for “stand-in” or even “substitute.”

“Es un impostor,” he concluded.

“Impostor?” Santero said. He lowered the box a little. “Speak English. I can’t understand your Spanish.”

“I was sent to tell you they were using a stand-in,” Leaphorn said. “They heard about the plot. They sent someone made up to look like the general.”

Santero’s expression shifted from doubtful to grim. “I think you’re lying,” he said. “Stop trying to get between me and—”

From the crowd at the display came the sound of a woman screaming.

“What the devil—?” Santero began. And then there were shouts, another scream, and a man’s voice shouting: “He’s fainted! Get a doctor!”

Leaphorn’s move was pure reflex, without time to think. His only advantages were that Santero was a little confused, a little uncertain. And the hand in which Santero held the control box had only two fingers left inside that glove. Leaphorn struck at the hand.

Leroy Fleck said, “Excuse me. Excuse me, please,” and pushed past the woman he had been using as a screen and went for the general’s back. But he did it just as the general was turning. Fleck saw the general staring at him, and the general’s bodyguard making a quick-reflex move to block him. His instincts told him this was not going well.

“A letter—” he said, striking at the general’s chest. He felt the paper of the envelope crumple against his fist as the steel razor of the shank slit through the general’s vest, and shirt, and the thin muscle of the chest, and sank between the ribs.

“—from an admirer,” Fleck said, as he slashed back and forth, back and forth, and heard the general gasp, and felt the general sag against him. “He’s fainted!” Fleck shouted. “Get a doctor!”

The Muscle had grabbed him by the shoulder just as he shouted it, and struck him a terrible blow over the kidneys. But Fleck hugged the general’s sagging body, and shouted again, “Help me!”

It caused confusion, exactly as Fleck had hoped. The Muscle released Fleck’s arm and tried to catch the general. The Client was there now beside them, bending over the slumping body. “What?” he shouted. “What happened? General!”

Fleck withdrew the shank, letting the crumpled envelope fall. He stabbed The Client in the side. Stabbed him again. And again.

The bodyguard was no longer confused. He shot Fleck twice. The exhibit echoed with the boom of the pistol, and the screams of panicking spectators.

Chee was only dimly aware of the shouts, the screams, the general pandemonium around him. He was numb. He turned the mask in his hands and looked into it, with no idea what to expect. He saw two dangling wires, one red, one white, a confusing array of copper-colored connections, a small square gray box, and a heavy compact mass of blue-gray dough.

The security officer clutched his arm. “Come on!” he shouted. “Get out of here!” The security officer was a plump young black man with heavy jowls. The screams were distracting him. “Look,” Chee said, turning the open end of the mask toward him. “It’s a bomb.” While he was saying it, Chee was tearing at the wires. He dropped them to the floor, and sat on the back of the fallen manikin, and began carefully peeling the Yeibichai mask from the mass of blue-gray plastic which had been pressed into it.

“A bomb,” the guard said. He looked at Chee, at the mask, and at the struggle at the adjoining Incan exhibit. “A bomb?” he said again, and climbed the railing and charged into the Incan melee. “Break it up,” he shouted. “We have a bomb in here.”

And just then General Huerta Cardona’s bodyguard shot Leroy Fleck.

Joe Leaphorn’s hand knocked the control box out of Santero’s grip. It clattered to the marble floor between them. Santero reached for it.

Leaphorn kicked it. It went skittering down the corridor, spinning past the feet of running people. Santero pursued it, running into the crowd stampeding out of the exhibition hall. Leaphorn followed.

A man with a camera collided with him. “He killed the general,” the photographer shouted to someone ahead of him. “He killed the general.” On the floor near the wall Leaphorn saw fragments of black plastic and an AA-size battery. Someone had trampled the detonator. He stopped, backed out of the stampede. Santero had disappeared. Leaphorn leaned against the wall, gasping. His chest hurt. His hip hurt where the heavy camera had slammed into it. He would go and see about Jim Chee. But first he would collect himself. He was getting too damned old for this business.

Chapter Twenty-Two

« ^

Jim Chee sat on his bed, leaned back on his suitcase, and tried to cope with his headache by not thinking about it. He was wearing the best shirt and the well-pressed trousers he had hung carefully in the closet when he unpacked to save in the event he needed to look good. No need now to save them. He would wear them on the plane. It was a bitch of a headache. He had slept poorly—partly because of the strange and lumpy hotel mattress (Chee being accustomed to the hard, thin padding on the built-in bed of his trailer home), and partly because he had been too tense to sleep. His mind had been too full of horrors and terrors. He would doze, then jerk awake to sit on the edge of the mattress, shaking with the aftereffects of shallow, grotesque dreams in which Talking God danced before him. Finally, about a half-hour before the alarm was scheduled to rescue him from the night, he had given up. He had taken a shower, packed his stuff, and checked again with the front desk to see if he had any messages. There was one from Leaphorn, which simply informed him that Leaphorn had returned to Window Rock. That surprised Chee. It was a sort of courtly thing for the tough old bastard to have done. There was a message from Janet Pete, asking for a call back. He tried and got no answer. By then the headache was flowering and he had time to kill. Downstairs he drank two cups of coffee—which usually helped but didn’t this morning. He left the toast he’d ordered on the plate and went for a walk.

The mild early-winter storm which had been bringing Washington rain mixed with snow yesterday had drifted out over the Atlantic and left behind a grim gray overcast with a forecast for high broken clouds and clearing by late afternoon. Now it was cold and still. Chee found that even in this strange place, even under these circumstances, he could catch himself up in the rhythm of the fast, hard motion, of heart and lungs hard at work. The nightmares faded a little, coming to seem like abstract memories of something he might have merely dreamed. Highhawk had never really existed. There were not really eighteen thousand ancestors in boxes lining hallways in an old museum. No one had actually tried to commit mass murder with the mask of Talking God. He walked briskly down Pennsylvania Avenue, and veered northward on Twelfth Street, and strode briskly westward again on H Street, and collapsed finally on a bench in what he thought, judging from a sign he'd noticed without really attending, might be Lafayette Square. Through the trees he could see the White House and, on the other side, an impressive hotel. Chee caught his breath, considered the note from Leaphorn, and decided it was a sort of subtle gesture. (You and I, kid. Two Dineh among the Strangers.) But maybe not. And it wasn't the sort of thing he would ever ask the lieutenant about.

A dove-gray limousine pulled up under the hotel’s entryway roof, and after it a red sports car which Chee couldn’t identify. Maybe a Ferrari, he thought. Next was a long black Mercedes which looked like it might have been custom built. Chee was no longer breathing hard. The damp low-country cold seeped up his sleeves and around his socks and under his collar. He got up, inspired half by cold and half by curiosity, and headed for the hotel.

It was warm inside, and luxurious. Chee sank into a sofa, removed his hat, warmed his ears with his hands, and observed what his sociology teacher had called “the privileged class.” The professor admitted a prejudice against this class but Chee found them interesting to observe. He spent almost forty-five minutes watching women in fur coats and men in suits which, while they tended to look almost identical to Chee’s untrained eye, were obviously custom made. He saw someone who looked exactly like Senator Teddy Kennedy, and someone who looked like Sam Donaldson, and a man who was probably Ralph Nader, and three others who must have been celebrities of some sort, but whose names eluded him.

He left the hotel warm but still with the headache. The material splendors, the fur and polished leather of the hotel’s guests, had replaced his nightmares with a depression. He hurried through the damp cold back to his own hotel room.

The telephone was ringing. It was Janet Pete.

“I tried to call you last night,” she said. “How are you? Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Chee said. “We had trouble down at the museum. The FBI got involved and—”

“I know. I know,” Janet said. “I saw it on television. The paper is full of it. There’s a picture of you, with the statue.”

“Oh,” Chee said. The final humiliation. He could see it in the Farmington Times: Officer Jim Chee of Shiprock, New Mexico, seen above wrestling with a representation of Talking God, from which he has removed the head, in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.

“On television, too. On the ABC morning news. They had some footage of you with the mask. But I’m not sure people who didn’t know how you were dressed would know it was you.”

Chee could think of nothing to say. His head still ached. He wished with a fervent longing to be back in New Mexico. In his trailer under the cottonwood on the bank above the San Juan River. He would take two aspirin and sprawl out on his comfortable, narrow bed and finish reading A Yellow Raft on Blue Water. He’d left it opened to page 158. A hard place to stop.

“They said Henry Highhawk was dead,” Janet Pete said in a small voice.

“Yes. The police think Santero killed him,” Chee said. “It seems fairly obvious that it must have been Santero.”

“Henry was a sweet man,” Janet said. “He was a kind man.” She paused. “He was, wasn’t he, Jim? But if he was, how did they talk him into being a part of this—of this horrible bomb thing?”

“I don’t think they did,” Chee said. “We’ll never know for sure, I guess. But I think they conned him, and used him. Probably they saw the story in the Post about Highhawk digging up the skeletons. They needed a way to kill the general and they had a way of knowing their target would be visiting the Smithsonian, so they went out and made friends with Henry.”

“But that doesn’t explain why he would help them.”

“I think Highhawk thought Santero was sympathetic to what Henry was trying to do. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that planting the tape recorded message in the mask was dreamed up by the Santillanes bunch. Maybe they knew he’d need technical help with the timer on the tape recorder and all that.”

“I’d like to think you’re right,” Janet said. “I’d like to think I wasn’t a complete fool. Wanting to help him when he was helping to murder a lot of innocent people.” But her tone was full of doubt.

“If I wasn’t right—If you weren’t they wouldn’t have had to kill him,” Chee said. “But they did kill him. Maybe he noticed something and caught on. Maybe they just couldn’t leave him around to tell all to the police.”

“Sure,” Janet said. “I didn’t think of that. I feel better. I guess I needed to keep believing Henry just wanted to do good.”

“I think that’s right,” Chee said. “It took me a while, but I’ve decided that, too.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I have a flight this afternoon back to Albuquerque. Then I catch the Mesa Airlines flight to Farmington, and pick up my car and drive back to Shiprock,” Chee said.