by Aaron Elkins
"You told me before. But cheer up, you get under his skin too."
"Yeah, that's something, I guess.” He took in a deep breath and blew out his cheeks. “Doc, what the hell do we do now?"
"Go get some lunch, would be my suggestion."
John responded with an abstracted nod. Inside his head he was obviously still arguing with Bertaud.
"Any suggestions as to where?” Gideon asked.
"What? No, we always stay out in Papara with Nick when we come over. We eat at his place. I don't know any restaurants. Where'd you eat yesterday?"
"I just grazed the stands at the market, but I remember a place on Pomare that used to be pretty good. Maybe it's still there."
"Fine, whatever,” John said listlessly.
The Acajou was still there, much as Gideon remembered it, a pleasant, tile-floored place with a shaded dining veranda separated by a line of potted shrubs from the clamor and bustle of the street. They ordered Hinanos and sat beside the plants. The menu was much the same as it had been three years earlier, and John cheered up as soon as he saw it, as Gideon had hoped he might.
"Hamburger?” John said. “I never knew you could get hamburgers in Tahiti. What do you know about that?"
It was more than he'd said on the entire four-block walk to the restaurant. John was a complex man in some ways, but not so complex that the likelihood of a decent hamburger couldn't be counted on to set him to rights.
The waitress, clad in a flowered pareu that highlighted firm, silky shoulders, came smiling to take their orders. Like so many Tahitian women she might have stepped out of a Gauguin painting: effortlessly graceful, strikingly handsome, skin like beaten copper, a giant hibiscus blossom in her black hair (was there anyplace but the South Pacific where a huge red flower tucked behind one ear looked perfectly natural?), and exuding a lazy, good-natured sexuality as artlessly as the hibiscus released its heavy scent.
Gideon asked for the omelette espagnole.
"Hamburger,” said John.
She looked up from her pad, frowning charmingly. "Pardon?"
"Hamburger,” John said again, "s'il vous plait."
The s'il vous plait didn't help. She shook her head.
Gideon took a hand. “Ahmboorgaire,” he explained.
"Ah, ahmboorgaire,” she said with a smile. "Avec le ketchup?"
"Ketchup!” John exclaimed, brightening even more. “Sure. You bet. Mais oui!"
The hamburger came on sliced French bread with an elegant dab of creamy sauce on it—Bearnaise, Gideon thought— and with a separate plate of fries. With barely a glance at the sauce, John scraped it off with a knife, poured on ketchup from the Del Monte bottle that the waitress had brought, and got happily to work. Gideon's Spanish omelet was more like a stir-fry mixed into some scrambled eggs, with tomato sauce on top, but there was a French flair to it and it tasted good, and it was a few minutes before the subject that was on both their minds came to the fore again.
"Doc, where do we go from here?” John said.
"Where is there to go? Look, I think Bertaud is wrong. But I could be wrong too."
John peered at him. “Where did this come from? You seemed pretty sure of yourself yesterday."
"I'm pretty sure today too. I think those maggots mean Brian was attacked with a knife. But I wouldn't swear to it, I wouldn't bet my life on it. All we saw were a few fuzzy photographs. We're dealing with probabilities here, John, not absolutes. To me, it seemed as if the probability of foul play was high enough to justify an exhumation; to Bertaud it didn't. I think he's wrong, but I can't really blame him.” He speared a piece of cooked celery and popped it into his mouth, “And this being French Polynesia, Bertaud gets the last word. Unless you think Nick could be swung around—"
John shook his head.
"—I don't see that we have any options."
"Mm,” John said and thoughtfully munched another couple of ketchup-logged fries. Gideon thought that was the end of it, but a moment later John spoke.
"We could always dig the body up ourselves,” he said offhandedly.
Gideon's celery nearly went down the wrong pipe. He managed to get it rerouted without choking, then stared at John. “You couldn't have said what I thought you said."
"I said we could always dig the body up ourselves."
"You can't be serious! What, in the dead of night? With hooded lanterns, and cloaks pulled over our faces? What the hell kind of thing is that to suggest? Christ, from an FBI agent yet!"
'Well, I don't hear anything better coming from you.” Gideon couldn't argue with that.
"Anyway,” John said, “it wouldn't be the dead of night.” He raised his eyebrows and looked quizzically at Gideon; a why-don't-we-just-talk-about-this-a-little-more kind of look.
Gideon started to say something, then thought better of it and took a slow, steadying sip of the coffee they'd ordered after their meal. The thing to do was simply to stare coldly at John, as he was now doing, making it clear from his stony expression that it was out of the question. To discuss it at all would be to suggest that it was within the realm of possibility, and that would be a mistake. He had done some damnfool things in his life, a rather high percentage of them at John's instigation, and he was sincerely afraid of getting himself talked into another. He more than understood his friend's point of view, after all—somebody had almost certainly murdered Brian Scott and was going to get clean away with it, and that galled Gideon too, who hadn't even known Brian. But, good God, he certainly wasn't going to go around digging up corpses on his own, particularly in the face of Bertaud's repeated warnings to mind their own business. It was crazy even to think about it, let alone talk about it.
He sighed. “What do you mean, not the dead of night?"
John smiled at him. “I mean—"
"And you can wipe that grin off your face. I'm just asking a question. I didn't say I'm going along with this. I'm not going along with this."
"Naturally, of course not, we're just talking theoretically,” John said, smiling some more, so that the skin around his eyes crinkled up. “What I mean is that the cemetery Brian's buried in is this old native graveyard in a back corner of the plantation. It's just this little place, maybe a quarter of an acre. Nobody goes near it from one year to the next. It's where they used to bury the copra workers in the old days. They don't even use it anymore; I think Brian's the first person to be buried there in ten years. And we can take a back road to it that doesn't go anywhere near the working part of the plantation. I'm telling you, even in the middle of the day there wouldn't be anybody to see us."
"Theoretically speaking,” Gideon said.
"Theoretically speaking,” agreed John. “So what do you say?"
"I say you're out of your mind. Aside from breaking the law—"
"That's not a problem. Look, we dig up the body, you have a look at it right there, check out that hand, see if it's what you think—"
"What do you mean, right there? At the grave?"
"At the grave, yes. If you don't find anything that means anything, we just cover him back up and leave quietly. But if you do, then we bring the police in on it. Bertaud would have to do something about it then. He wouldn't have any choice. You've got a reputation—"
"Yes, I know,” Gideon said. “The Skeleton Detective. I'm real famous in America. I remember how deeply it impressed him last time."
"Look, Doc, Brian's an American citizen; we could make an international incident out of it if they didn't do anything. And, believe me, Bertaud may be a jerk but if we can really convince him it's murder, he'll follow up. And he's not going to make a fuss about us breaking some health department regulation by digging up a grave.” He gulped down some coffee. “Theoretically."
"John,” Gideon said, “you're not seeing the whole picture. You're imagining we go get a couple of shovels, dig down six feet—"
"Not even six feet, probably."
"—and there he is in a box and all we have to do is pry the lid off. We
ll, they don't bury people that way anymore, not even here. The plain old hole in the ground went out with ‘Alas, poor Yorick.’ Those holes are lined with cement nowadays, or maybe cinder block, and they usually have a concrete cap on top. You need heavy equipment to get it off—a crane, a backhoe—"
John was shaking his head. “Not this grave, Doc. No concrete, no cinder block, not even a coffin. Not even a headstone. Brian was kind of a nut about Tahiti. He really fell in love with it, with the history. He always said he wanted to be buried in the old native cemetery, and he wanted his body treated the old native way. And that's just the way Therese handled it."
"I doubt that,” Gideon murmured, mostly to himself.
"What do you mean, you doubt it? I'm telling you."
"Well, the old Tahitian way was—you don't want to know."
"Sure, I want to know. What do you mean?"
"Well, what they used to do here, and in the Marquesas and the Tuamotus too, was to puncture the skin to let out the fluids, take out the brain, use a hook to remove the viscera by way of the anus, then mummify—"
John looked horrified. “Pikes! No! That's disgusting! I only meant there's no coffin, no concrete. And he's buried in sand, not dirt, just a few feet down. Therese hired an old Tahitian priest to do the burial. Nick took me up there yesterday; I saw for myself. It'd be a snap, Doc. Twenty minutes’ work."
Gideon shifted uneasily. “John, I'd like to help, you know that, but it just doesn't—"
John leaned earnestly across the table. “Look, I'd do it by myself, you know that, but what would I do with the body when I got it up?” He looked at the tabletop. “I need you. Brian needs you. I know you, Doc, you're like me; you can't just let something like this pass. It's not right."
Gideon sighed deeply and drained his cooling coffee. Brian needs you. How was it that Doug Ubelaker, the anthropologist at the Smithsonian, put it? We are the final chance for the voice of the victim to be heard. The Hippocratic oath of the forensic anthropologist.
He sighed again, even deeper this time, and rose. “I saw a quincaillerie on the way over here. On rue La Garde."
John looked at him, puzzled. “A...?"
"Hardware store,” Gideon said. “We can pick up a couple of shovels and whatever else we need."
John let loose a sigh of his own, then grinned and flopped back in his chair. “Whoo, I tell you, you had me worried there for a while."
"Sure, I'll just bet I did,” Gideon said with a faint smile. “Come on, let's go. We better get it over with before I return to my right mind."
[Back to Table of Contents]
Chapter 20
* * * *
With Gideon at the wheel of the Renault and John navigating, they drove south on the coast road half a mile past the Centre Apatea mini-mall, then turned left onto a rutted, one-lane dirt road and began to climb the flanks of Mt. Iviroa, quickly leaving behind the coconut groves and rangeland of the coast and tunneling into the fragrant, gorgeous forest of the interior: frangipani, wild ginger, flame trees, gardenia trees, pandanus, wild orchid, everything prodigiously and brilliantly in bloom. A jungle of flowers. Overhead, the feathery leaves of acacias and eucalyptus filtered the sun; they seemed to be driving through a rolling net of shadows.
"Doc, we're doing the right thing,” John said, slouched in the passenger seat, one knee up against the dashboard. “In the great scheme of things."
"I know that, John. I'm not too worried about the great scheme of things."
"I know. You're worried about waking up tomorrow morning in the Papeete jail."
"Yes. Charged with grave-robbing.” Not, he admitted to himself, that such a prospect lacked a certain poetic aptness. John folded his arms and looked soberly out the window.
"Me too. You know, Doc, you really should have talked me out of this."
This afternoon mists that clung to the mountain suddenly enveloped them. One second they were in bright sunlight and sharp shadow, the next in a silvery fog that turned everything, even the air, a gauzy, spooky gray-green. The vegetation, profuse to begin with, became even more extravagant. Mosses hanging from the tree branches drooped like great, hairy swaths of drapery. Giant ferns ten feet tall pressed in on every side. And they began to catch glimpses of exotic birds—scarlet, blue, peacock-green—flitting through the foliage, and to hear strange calls.
"Welcome to Jurassic Park,” John said.. “Don't hit any pterodactyls."
They crested a ridge and swung downward into a broad valley after that, and, as suddenly as they had entered it they were out of the fog and back in the sun. A few minutes later the road, barely a road by this time, ended at an old, tin-roofed, falling-down greenhouse on a square plot of land that had long ago been hacked out of the jungle. Once upon a time it had been landscaped into a semiformal garden, but the plants hadn't been cared for in many years. In Tahiti that didn't mean they died, it meant they took over the place. Bougainvillea, poinsettia, and shrub acacia thrived, choking the yard and patio and clutching at windows, awnings, and porches.
"This is where the minister lived in the old days,” John said, then pointed directly across the road. “And that's the cemetery."
It was, as he'd said, tiny; a grassy plot perhaps a hundred feet square, with a slowly collapsing white picket fence around it. Unlike the lot across the road it wasn't totally abandoned, but it wasn't well cared for either. The grass had been mowed sometime in the last few weeks, the fence painted sometime in the last few years. The afternoon sunlight was harsh, the air still and hot—hotter by far than on the coast below—and the immediate scene stark and unwelcoming.
Gideon turned off the ignition and sat, squinting into the glare without moving, listening to the steady rasp of insects from the bush.
John, halfway out his door, glanced at him sharply. “You're not gonna get cold feet on me, are you?"
Gideon shook his head. “How can I? I already have cold feet.” But of course this was mostly to make John feel guilty, to let him know that if anything went wrong they both damn well knew whose fault it was.
They put on straw hats they'd gotten at the hardware store, took from the truck a plastic sack with digging equipment and a couple of liter bottles of Vittel mineral water, and stepped through the cemetery's open, leaning gate. There were about fifteen graves in all, scattered in no particular arrangement. A few were French burials with simple, straightforward headstones ("Ici repose Pierre Leblanc"). The rest were in the traditional Polynesian style; rectangular beds of white sand protected by low, lean-to roofs of corrugated metal and rimmed with a border of whitewashed stones. Some of the Tahitian graves had long-dead potted flowers on them, the pots overturned, the dry stems scattered. None had names or headstones.
John led Gideon to a grave along the far fence. “This is him."
"We think."
"Hey. Don't start that again."
Clearly, the grave was new. The lean-to roof had no stains of rust. The flowers were fresh; nine pots filled with gardenia and jasmine were set out in three equally spaced rows. A small, white wooden cross at what Gideon took to be the head distinguished it from the other Tahitian burials.
"Well, I guess we should start,” John said with noticeably less than his usual resoluteness.
So, Gideon thought, notwithstanding the oven-like heat it appeared they had four cold feet between them, not two. He finally took pity on his friend, knelt down decisively, and began to remove the potted plants and set them aside. “Come on, John, we'll see what we see.” He took two spade-shaped hand shovels from the sack. “We'll start at the center and work toward the ends. Just take it down about an inch at a time. Skimming motion. I don't think this is going to be very hard."
But it was. Although the sand was easy enough to get through, they had to dig on their knees because of the low roof. And while the layer of metal just above their heads shielded them from the direct rays of the sun, it focused the heat downward and kept it there. In less than five minutes they took off their s
hirts and then had to remove their sunglasses because the lenses were greasy with perspiration. Sweat ran down the hollows of their backs, gleamed on their forearms, dripped from the ends of their noses.
The sand turned out to be only a top-dressing. At about eighteen inches it gave way to a dark, moist, loamy soil.
"Bad sign,” said Gideon, breathing hard.
"No problem,” said John, also huffing. “It's easy to dig.” He tossed a shovelful onto the growing pile beside the plot.
Gideon sat back on his haunches to unkink his spine and to gulp from one of the blue plastic bottles. “That's not what worries me. When you put an unprotected corpse in ground like this it can bond with the soil as it decomposes. It can take days to get it free."
"That could be a problem,” John agreed. He took the bottle from Gideon, drank deeply, worked his shoulders, and picked up his shovel again. They returned to the first-Gideon-then-John-then-Gideon pattern they had fallen naturally into and dug, rhythmically and silently, for twenty minutes. They had gotten down to about two feet below the surface, kneeling face-to-face in a trench about three feet by five, when Gideon spoke abruptly.
"Stop."
John stopped instantly, looking at the lumpy, earth-colored protuberance that the last sweep of his spade had exposed.
"What is it?"
"The left knee, I think. Slightly flexed.” With his hands Gideon brushed the dirt away.
They were looking directly down into the open joint. Gideon could see the knucklelike distal end of the femur, the smooth concavities of the tibial condyles into which it fit, the small, pointed eminence of the fibula's styloid process. There were still some shreds of ligament and meniscus—the slippery, round pad of fibrocartilage that kept the bones from grinding on one another—but all in all a relatively clean joint. This was good news; it suggested that the defleshing process had advanced since the time the photos had been taken. The fibrous ligaments and capsular membranes of the knee were among the toughest tissues in the body. If they were gone, then maybe there wouldn't be much left on the bones anywhere else, and that would make his job easier and faster, not to mention a great deal less unpleasant.