by Aaron Elkins
Undeterred, Malani went on, meticulously referring to the neat, columnar notes—she wrote in tiny uppercase letters—that she had made on a note pad. “The Cessna’s cruising speed is about two hundred miles an hour, so to be on the safe side they’re allowing a total of five hours for the eight-hundred-mile round trip, plus an hour for landings and takeoffs, and five hours for the work itself. Eleven hours altogether.”
At this point, the grilled steaks, brought in by a perspiring, aproned cook, drew everyone’s attention. There were no inquiries as to rare, medium, or well-done; the perfectly charred, two-inch-thick tenderloins were simply plopped onto the plates (all except Hedwig’s) with a simple accompaniment of spinach and baked potato that was served in bowls, family style. No steak sauce, ketchup, or mustard; the only condiments on the table were salt and pepper. Gideon was surprised to see that the steaks were all medium-well-done, a barely pink-tinged brown at the center, and said as much to Axel.
“Oh, yeah,” Axel said. “You won’t find too many ranchers who like their steaks rare.” He wrinkled his nose. “Smells too much like cow.”
“You don’t suppose,” said Hedwig, digging into the plate of couscous, kohlrabi, and gingered squash that the cook had plopped in front of her with undisguised contempt, “that might be because it is cow? And am I the only one able to see that the very fact that you try to hide it from yourselves proves my point? You prefer to avoid dealing with your own innate self-knowledge of the ethical consequences, to say nothing of the karmic consequences, of eating our brothers and cousins; things with faces, things with mothers. I know I’ve probably said it before—”
“‘Probably’?” Dagmar said loudly. “Don’t make me laugh.”
“—but it’s impossible to reach any kind of higher consciousness—”
“Oh, put a cork in it, Hedwig,” Felix shouted amiably, his jaws grinding audibly away on flesh and fat.
“Cannibals,” sighed Hedwig. “Surrounded on all sides by ravening carnivores.”
“You can thank ravening carnivores for everything you have,” Dagmar said, chewing.
“Actually, I’d have thought Marti would get along pretty well with Hedwig,” Gideon whispered to John.
“Actually, she does.”
Over coffee and a dessert of baked apples and cream, Malani gave them the rest of the details: Ocean Quest’s plane was loaded with equipment and ready to go, but it was currently hangared at the Honolulu airport, where it had just gotten a new paint job. In the morning they would put two of their salvage divers, who would double as the Cessna pilot and co-pilot, on the first Aloha inter-island flight from Kona to Honolulu, where they would pick up the Cessna and take off for Maravovo, hoping to touch down in the lagoon by nine or ten A.M. They would expect to finish up by two in the afternoon at the latest and be back in Honolulu with the remains in time for one of the commercial evening flights to Kona. The estimated fee would be $16,000. “They think that’s a maximum. It’ll probably be less.”
Keoni pretended to choke on a chunk of baked apple. “Sixteen thousand dollars for one day’s work? And I thought Felix was the expert on screwing his clients.”
“Damn it, Keoni,” Felix said, “if that’s supposed to be humorous—”
“The largest single cost is the plane,” Malani cut in. “Nine hundred dollars an hour flight time and three hundred dollars an hour wait time. Add that to the divers’ hourly rate of five hundred dollars, the air fare to and from Honolulu—”
“Still—” Keoni said.
“I don’t want to argue about it,” Dagmar said. “I’m sure they’re not overcharging us. You go ahead and tell them to do it, my dear.”
“Don’t forget about getting permission from the Kiribati government,” John said.
“They say they’ll take care of all that,” Malani said. “They’ve dealt with the Kiribatis before.”
“They’ll need to file a flight plan,” Axel said. “They’ll have to—”
“They know all about that; they’ll get started as soon as I call back.” She paused, chewing on her lip for a moment. “Oh, there is one other thing. They’ve never recovered human bones before, and they’re nervous about how they’re supposed to handle them, and even how to recognize them. So you can imagine how excited they got when I told them that we had the world-famous Skeleton Detective himself staying with us”—she turned a brilliant smile on Gideon and actually batted her eyelashes—“and he just might be willing to . . .” With a teacherly motion of her hand she encouraged him to finish the sentence for her.
“Go with them?” Gideon said. “I’d . . . be happy to help out any way I can.” He’d been on the narrow edge of exclaiming “I’d love to!”, which would hardly have been appropriate in the circumstances, but the fact was that he’d been hoping they’d ask him ever since John had told him about the find.
What he had told Axel about being interested in cattle-ranching was true enough, but when it came to real, gut-level interest, cows didn’t hold a candle to bones. For Gideon, as for every other forensic anthropologist he knew, the skeleton was a source of inexhaustible fascination, and to sit down with the bony remains of some anonymous, long-dead human being was to accept a challenge: What could be told from them about the person’s life, the person’s death? About who and what the person had been, had looked like? The skeletal system, the part of us that was left after everything else had rotted away, retained, for the knowing eye, an exhaustive and indelible record of the habits, diet, health, injuries, and activities of an individual’s life.
What could be determined, of course, depended on how much skeletal material was left, which bones they happened to be, what their condition was, and a host of other things. But there was always something to be learned, some connection to be made with a human being no longer living, a being whose future was gone, but whose past could still be brought back, at least a little. The forensic anthropologist, one of Gideon’s teachers had liked to say, was the last one to speak for the dead.
“Oh, I’m sure Gideon has other things to do than—” Hedwig began.
“No, I’d like to,” he quickly interrupted.
“Well, that’s just great, Gideon,” Felix said. “Thank you. We’ll pay your usual fee, of course. That goes without—”
“I’ll pay his usual fee,” Dagmar said.
Gideon waved them off. “No, no, no. Thank you, but it’s a pleasure to repay you all for your hospitality.” He hesitated. “There is something you need to know, though.” He wasn’t eager to throw a monkey wrench into the closure machinery, but in good conscience he couldn’t let it pass. “At this point, unless I missed something, you don’t really have any way of knowing for sure whose bones are in that plane. You’re assuming it crashed the night he left and that it’s been there ever since, but for all anybody knows it might have gone down months or years later. The plane’s ownership might have changed hands.”
“Uh-uh,” Inge said. “According to the police, the plane was never registered to anyone else. Hoaloha Ranch is still the last recorded owner.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean a lot,” said John. “Trust me, planes can change hands without paperwork. Doc’s right, it’s most probably him, but it could be anybody.”
That made for a few wrinkled brows, until John spoke again. “Doc, couldn’t you tell from the bones whether it was him or not?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that,” Gideon said, addressing everyone. “But depending on what there is, I could probably narrow it down some. With a little luck, I might be able to determine the sex, age, race, and maybe the approximate height. That’d help.” With a little luck—and the right bones—he could very likely come up with a lot more than that, but he didn’t like to promise more than he could deliver.
“But you have to remember, exclusion is a lot easier than positive identification,” he went on. “That is, say the bones are those of an elderly white male of such and such a height—”
“My brother
was not ‘elderly,’” Dagmar said crossly. “He was an extremely vigorous man, not yet out of his seventies.”
“—a white male in his seventies of such and such a height,” he amended, “then we’d know that they could be Magnus’s, and we could reasonably conclude they probably are, given that it’s the ranch airplane and no one’s seen it or him since he flew off in it. But if we were to find the bones of a female, say, then we’d know with a hundred percent certainty that it couldn’t be him.”
“Well, of course not,” Dagmar said. “I could have told you that.”
Axel had found an atlas somewhere and brought it, open, to the table. It took him a while to locate Maravovo Atoll. “This place is absolutely in the middle of nowhere. Where the heck were they trying to get to?”
“‘They’?” Gideon said. “He wasn’t alone?”
“No, there was a pilot,” said Inge. “Magnus didn’t know how to fly.”
“Lydia What’s-Her-Name,” Dagmar said.
“No,” Inge said, frowning. “It wasn’t ‘Lydia’ . . .”
“Could they have been trying to get to Tarabao Island?” Malani asked. She had gotten up to lean over her husband so she could see the map. “Or Beckman Atoll? Maravovo is between them.”
Axel studied the map and fingered his chin. “Maybe, but it’s an awfully long way from either one.”
“They were a long way from anything,” said Malani. “Wherever they were headed, they must have gotten good and lost.”
“Well, frankly, I can’t say I’m bowled over,” Hedwig said. “Lydia wasn’t really much of a pilot.”
“Wasn’t much of anything,” Dagmar grumbled. “Should never have hired her.”
“Claudia, that was her name,” said Inge. “Claudia Albert. Oh, she wasn’t really a bad person, Auntie Dagmar. She’d had it hard growing up—”
“And how do you think I had it?” Dagmar said heatedly.
“Or Magnus, or Torkel, or your father? But we didn’t turn to drugs, we didn’t get in trouble with the police, we just worked for a better life, not like that big lummox of a Claudia-Lydia. And we got it, we got a better life for ourselves, and now you have it. We didn’t have to run off to the psychologist because we had some imaginary eating disorder . . . anorexia—”
“Actually, it was bulimia, and it’s not really imaginary,” Hedwig said, “although there is a psycho-spiritual component. No that I ever thought mainstream psychologists would do her any good. Remember, I offered her a place free of charge in the Self-Evolvement Wellness Seminar, but she—”
“It wasn’t free,” Dagmar pointed out. “Torkel was going to pay for it.” She relit her dead cigarillo, making a show of it.
“Well, yes, technically,” Hedwig mumbled, “but only to cover the cost of food and refresh—”
“Gideon, let me ask you something,” Inge said. “Or maybe this is a question for you, John. Isn’t it possible that there might be some identifiable personal belongings still in the plane, even after all this time? A watch, a ring, maybe even a driver’s license or something? Wouldn’t that settle the question of who it is?”
“I would think so,” said Gideon. “Paper wouldn’t last, but plastic might. Metal would.”
“Doc, how about I go along with you, if that’s okay?” John said. “Maybe I could help.”
“Sure,” Gideon said, pleased. “I’d appreciate the company.”
“Listen, you two,” said Felix, “you’ll be bushed by the time you get back to Honolulu from there. I don’t think you should have to get on another plane to come here. Let me put you both up for the night in Waikiki. Someplace nice. You can have a good dinner, get a good night’s sleep, catch a plane back to Kona the next day.”
“I appreciate that, Felix,” Gideon said, “but it’s not necessary, we can—”
“Hey, speak for yourself, Doc,” John cut in. “It’d be nice—”
Felix talked—shouted—right on through them. “My condo doesn’t have a guest room, unfortunately, but I can book you a room at the Royal Hawaiian. It’s just a few blocks from where I live. You like the Royal Hawaiian, don’t you? Of course you do, who wouldn’t?”
“Yes, sure,” Gideon said, “but my wife is coming here to the Big Island the next day—”
“Not till one-fifteen,” John said. We’ll be back in Kona ourselves before that, and we can meet her plane. Better yet, we can catch her at the airport in Honolulu and fly the last leg in with her.”
“Well—” Gideon began.
“Oh, let him do it for you, for God’s sake,” Auntie Dagmar said. “He can afford it.”
Felix whacked the table with a paw-like hand. “It’s settled then. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll look forward to dinner with the two of you in Waikiki tomorrow night.”
“Fabulous,” said John.
“Thanks, Felix,” Gideon said, having run out of arguments. “It’s nice of you.”
“And now,” commanded Felix, “I think we ought to let these two fellows get some rest. They’ll have to be up early tomorrow. First flight is five-fifteen.”
“Five-fifteen!” whispered John, horrified. He was not an early riser.
“That’s right,” Inge said. “Sad but true. If you two want to get through security and make the plane, you’d better be on your way to the airport by four A.M. At the latest.”
“Four . . . A.M.!” John could barely get the words out, but he stuck gamely, stalwartly, to his guns.
His chin came up.
He’d said he would go, and he would go.
SIX
SEEN from an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, Maravovo Atoll lay at one end of a curving archipelago of tiny islands, the first land they’d seen since leaving Hawaii. Maravovo itself was the largest, or at least the longest, of them—an elongated, C-shaped island, its spine thickly covered with vegetation, and perhaps a mile from end to end and no more than a hundred yards wide at its broadest point. The inside rim of the “C” was a narrow sliver of white sand bordering a lagoon of the brightest, greenest aquamarine imaginable, strikingly different from the deep blue of the sea that surrounded it. The only signs that man had ever set foot on the atoll were a floating pier and a couple of small, new-looking structures on one horn of the “C,” at the mouth of the lagoon, built by the cruise line for their picnicking day-trippers.
On the ocean side of the low coral reef that formed the outer border of the lagoon two brown-skinned, loinclothclad men paddling an outrigger canoe waved as the plane passed over them.
“I thought the island was uninhabited,” Gideon said.
“It is,” said Lyle Shertz, one of the two salvage divers, who was in the co-pilot’s seat. “But according to the CIA Factbook, there are some people living on a couple of nearby islands, and they come here to fish along the reef. Hey, what do you know, there’s the Grumman. Up ahead, about one o’clock, right in close to shore. Boy, that didn’t take long!”
“Well, you were right; we’re sure not gonna need the sonar,” the pilot, Harvey Shertz, said to him. “That’d be pretty hard to miss.”
The two men were brothers; identical twins in their thirties, with husky, well-padded frames. Although they dressed similarly—tank tops, baggy khaki shorts, and flip-flops—they had resorted to different techniques for disguising their receding hairlines. Lyle’s head was shaved, although he was overdue for the razor, so that his rippled, globular skull was coated with black stubble. Harvey wore his equally black hair long enough to comb it forward over his forehead, where he cut it straight across. From Gideon’s point of view, it gave them a worrisome resemblance to two-thirds of the Three Stooges.
Sitting in the seats behind them, John and Gideon peered around them and through the front windows. “But it’s plain as day,” John said. “Even if the tail wasn’t sticking up out of the water. How could it take ten years for anybody to find it?”
Harvey answered. “It took ten years because we’re a hundred and fifty miles from any commercial air
line route and four hundred miles from the nearest land. No one flies over it. No one sails to it; not on purpose, anyway.”
“What about those natives down there? They must have seen it,” Lyle said.
“Sure they did, dumb ass,” his brother answered. “So what were they supposed to do, call 911? Even if they had cell phones, which they don’t, there aren’t any communication satellites down here to tap into. Oops, sorry about that,” he said as the floats hit the water more heavily than they might have and the four men were jounced in their seats. “I haven’t landed this baby very much.”
“I’m the regular pilot,” Lyle volunteered.
“Now they tell us,” John said.
Two more long, slow, glancing skips, much softer, and the Cessna settled onto the surface of the lagoon, turned, gunned its engines, taxied to within a few yards of the wrecked plane, and let out its “lunch hook,” a small anchor that immediately snagged in the sandy floor of the lagoon. With the water as clear as glass and the cabin roof of the downed plane only a few feet below them, it was perfectly visible: a smaller craft than Gideon had anticipated, white with dark blue trim, lying right-side up but tipped forward onto its nose cone and listing to the left, the collapsed strut of its nose wheel twisted to the side and both ends of the propeller blade bent straight back. A few unidentifiable chunks of metal and plastic lay scattered on the bottom nearby.
Gideon had been expecting a rusting hulk thickly encrusted with sea life, but in fact, other than a heavy layer of dull green algae on those windows that were intact, the encrustations were minimal and the oxidation was pretty much limited to the damaged areas, to seams in the metal, and to the regions around the rivets. (The corrupters of metal, it occurred to him, operated on the same principle as the putrefiers of flesh: go for the weak spots first; the weak spots and the natural openings.) The fuselage number, N7943U, painted on the horizontal blue stripe, seemed as bright as the day it had been put there. The tail, which was in the open air, seemed to have weathered a bit more than the submerged part.