Talking God jlajc-9

by Tony Hillerman

  “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 comi
ng 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.