Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  “But wait a minute, Gideon,” Julie said, her brow wrinkling. “The Zapotecs wouldn’t have known how to wire broken jaws, would they?”

  “I doubt it. As far as I know, that’s a nineteenth-century invention.”

  “That’s what I thought. So if they saw wires in this skeleton’s jaw, wouldn’t they have known right away that it couldn’t be ancient?”

  “Not necessarily. The Aztecs, Mixtecs, Mayans, and the rest of them may not have known how to work with a living skull, but they sure knew how to work with a dead one. There are mosaicked skulls, and turquoise-decorated skulls, and skulls ornamented with loads of silver or polished pyrite . . . and skulls that actually have the mandible reattached. It’s possible that that’s what they assumed this was.” He shrugged. “I figure it’s worth a look anyway.”

  “Okay, yeah, I can see all that,” Tony said, “but even so, even if it is him, where does it get you? The cops can’t do anything, can they? It’s over fourteen years.” He shook his head. “Stupid law.”

  “You’re right,” Gideon said. “They can’t.”

  “So what’s the point?”

  Julie finished the last of her coffee and put down the cup. “The point,” she said, “is that Gideon has never met a skeleton he didn’t want to know better.”

  Tony laughed his gravel-on-a-tin-drum laugh. “Well, what the hell, chacun à son goût,” he said surprisingly: French for each to his own.

  NINETEEN

  YAGUL.

  Contrary to what he’d said to Tony, he wasn’t here simply because it was the closest site. He had been a twenty-year-old junior at UCLA when he’d first come across its name in a Mesoamerican prehistory survey course, and it had been one of the factors that had turned him into an anthropology major. “An intermittently occupied Mixtec-Zapotec site of limited archaeological significance,” his textbook had called it, “located in the eastern Valley of Oaxaca, a remote area of central southern Mexico, and thought to be concurrent with Mitla (of which it is sometimes considered an inferior imitation) and Monte Albán, more important settlements to the north. Its most notable feature is a ball court with fretted stone mosaics of a conventional style, believed to be second in size only to the far more impressive court at Chichén Itzá.”

  This decidedly lukewarm description notwithstanding, the deliciously exotic sound of it, Yah-goohl, had stirred his youthful and adventurous soul. It was the kind of word you might expect to hear from the first Venusian to visit Earth when he stepped from his flying saucer and held up a two-fingered, vaguely hand-like appendage in greeting: “Yah-goohl, Earthlings.”

  A little something of its magic was lost when he learned that it was Zapotecan for dry stick, but it had remained a symbol of the strange, prehistoric, fascinating places that a career in anthropology might take him. I will stand among the ancient stones of Yah-goohl someday, he had told himself, and with such travels in mind he had started out in the sub-discipline of archaeology. But within a year it had been evolution, bones, and physical anthropology that had snared him for good, so that, until Julie had brought up the idea of coming to Oaxaca a few weeks ago, it had been more than two decades since the site had even crossed his mind.

  And now here he was, taking it all in from a rise at the edge of the otherwise empty parking area at the end of a rough, two-mile-long dirt road, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by scrubland and dry river beds; not a sign of modern humanity in sight, other than a ramshackle booth at the entrance with a hand-painted wooden sign: ENTRADA 10 PESOS. But no one was in the booth to collect the fees, and it looked as if no one had been in it for a long time. Obviously, Yagul didn’t get enough visitors to make it worthwhile. That was equally clear from the potsherds that littered the ground, just sitting there for the picking; you didn’t find those at Monte Albán or Teotihuacan.

  He’d Googled the site earlier to refresh his memory and located plenty of material (what was there that didn’t have plenty of material on Google?), so he’d known what he would find, but still, it was bigger and more interesting than he’d expected. There were three main areas. In the center was the famous ball court, as well as the imaginatively named “Palace of the Six Patios,” originally probably civic/ religious offices, but now a roofless, moldering warren of stuccoed stone-and-clay walls and foundations. From this central area, stone steps led up a sizeable hill to the walled “fortress,” which probably had been a defensive compound. And in an area east of the ball court was a group of sunken tombs.

  The best thing about it, he thought with selfish pleasure, was that he had it all to himself. No iron-lunged tour guides with yellow umbrellas, shouting commands at their obedient, beaten-down herds; no yelling kids scrambling over the stones and crying when they skinned their knees; nothing noisier than the sound of his shoes on the stony pathways, and an occasional whisper of breeze sighing through one of the runty trees that had sprouted here and there around the ruin. But it was still early, barely nine o’clock, so it was likely that other people would be showing up as the day wore on. He decided to hit the tombs first, before that happened. They were a labyrinth of semi-subterranean chambers that were bound to be small and cramped, best seen without company.

  They were as dank and stuffy and constricted as he’d imagined, but every bit as interesting too, made all the more atmospheric by the sparse shafts of daylight, filled with slowly swirling dust motes, that provided all the illumination there was. He spent a blissful half hour prowling from chamber to chamber—mostly on his knees; the openings were only about three feet high—examining and touching the geometric stone mosaics and the strange, Olmec-style heads carved in bas-relief on the walls, and in general happily communing with the spirits of people long, long gone.

  When he crawled blinking into the sunlight, he practically bumped into a pair of hairy, bowling-ball-calved legs topped by green walking shorts.

  “Hey, here you are!” came from two feet above the shorts. “I was looking for you.”

  “Tony!” Gideon got to his feet. “I thought you couldn’t make it.”

  “I figured, what the hell, the wiring waited this long,” Tony said. “And Preciosa isn’t gonna be conscious until eleven anyway, and if she has to get breakfast herself, no big deal, she can handle it. So what’s in there, the tombs?”

  “Yes, want to have a look?”

  “Do I have to crawl around on my hands and knees like you were?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “I’ll give it a skip, then. What else is there to see? What’s this ball court you were talking about?”

  “I was just going to head for it. It’s right over there.”

  “Okay if I go with you? Maybe I’ll learn something.”

  “Sure, come on,” he said affably, but the truth was he’d have preferred to be alone. For once in his life he wasn’t in the mood to lecture. He wasn’t really there as an anthropologist, he was there delivering on a promise he’d made to himself a long time ago. Anthropologist to the core he might be, but there was an almost mystical side to him that surfaced every once in a while—a long while—and this was one of those times. He didn’t want to talk or to think with any rigor about the archaeology of the place, he wanted simply to bask in its antiquity and foreignness, to walk paths that had been trodden by the sandaled feet of the Mixtecs and Zapotecs before him, to take pleasure in passing his hand over stones that had been laid in place well before the birth of Christ, by people who, despite the best efforts of science, would remain forever mysterious and unknowable. Still, if Tony was making the effort to learn, Gideon could be counted on to make the effort to instruct.

  The ball court at Yagul consisted of an open, flat, rectangular field of play about two hundred feet long. Second in size to the one at Chichén Itzá it might be, but it was a distant second. The court at Chichén was a good three times longer, or as the guidebooks never tired of saying, “as long as two football fields.” Still, it was an impressive structure, bordered on both sides by mas
onry walls that were nearly vertical to about hip height, where there was a narrow horizontal “bench,” and then sloped back and up from the playing field, to be topped by flat stone platforms about thirty feet above the playing surface. At one end of these walls, as usual, there was a flight of stone steps up to a landing, where they turned ninety degrees and continued to the platform at the top. Also as usual, the steps varied wildly in height, from eight or nine inches to a foot and a half. Tony had trouble with his balance negotiating some of them—had he had something to drink between breakfast and now?—and Gideon had to give him a steadying hand, but eventually they made it to the top with Tony breathing heavily.

  Once they got there, they stood at the corner of the platform, looking down on the playing field, while Gideon told Tony as much as he remembered about the ancient game. Which wasn’t much.

  It had been enormously widespread in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, he explained. Well over a thousand courts had been found so far, wasn’t that amazing? Different cultures had varying versions, and nobody today could say for sure what the rules were, but judging from reliefs and from a modern variant of the game, it was something like a combination of volleyball and soccer, with the object being to keep the ball in play, but using only the hips, although in some later versions the forearms were used, or even rackets—

  “Didn’t they, like, used to sacrifice the losers?” Tony asked. “Cut their heads off right in front of the crowd?”

  “Not down here, no. That was only in the Mayan and Veracruz cultures.”

  “Oh.” He was disappointed.

  “But it was a brutal game all the same,” Gideon said to cheer him up. “The ball wasn’t like a volleyball or a soccer ball. That is, it was about the same size, but it was hard, solid rubber, weighing a good five or six pounds. Imagine getting hit in the face with that when you weren’t expecting it. Players would get really beaten up by them. According to one of the Spanish chroniclers, some of them were killed when the ball hit them in the head or the chest.”

  “No kidding,” Tony said. “That’s interesting.” But it seemed to Gideon that his interest was wandering. He was restless. Enough lectures for one morning.

  “Why don’t we head up to the fortress?” Gideon suggested. “Supposed to be a terrific view from up there.”

  “Yeah, later, but the ball court’s cool. Tell me some more stuff.”

  Gideon shrugged. “I don’t know that much more. There’s some evidence that the game was sometimes used as a proxy for war. For example, one of the missionaries claims he saw a game between the Toltec king and three of his rivals, with the winner becoming the ruler of the whole empire.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Tony said. “The whole empire?” But it was increasingly clear that his interested had wandered. He was preoccupied with something. He was oddly animated too: jumpy, on the edge of something. Gideon had the strong impression that he was getting up his nerve to say something, to ask Gideon something.

  “Tony, is there something on your mind? Anything wrong?”

  “Wrong? No, I got a lot on my mind, that’s all. Business stuff. But this is interesting. So who won the game? Did the Aztec king win?”

  “Toltec, not Aztec,” Gideon couldn’t help pointing out, as if Tony gave a damn. “But I’m afraid I don’t know who won.”

  “Shame,” Tony said distractedly, and then, half to himself: “Toltec, not Aztec. Got it.” His eyes darted haphazardly over the site. Gideon had the extraordinary impression that he might be on the verge of tears. What was going on here? “That round stone in the middle down there,” Tony blurted. “What’s that for? A goal or something?”

  Whatever was bothering Tony, that old stone wasn’t it. But Gideon wasn’t much of a psychotherapist; he was supremely uncomfortable, and not very good, at digging into the reluctant psyches of other people. If Tony had something to say, it was going to be up to him to say it.

  Gideon turned to look down at the stone, a crudely carved disk about a foot thick and two feet across. “No, that was probably a marker dividing the two sides. The way they—”

  He heard something halfway between a sob and a grunt. Surprised and concerned, he turned. What happened next was so astounding, so utterly unexpected, that his reaction was completely instinctive. Tony, face contorted, was rushing toward him with his arms outstretched. Gideon batted with his right arm at Tony’s extended arms, catching him heavily in the shoulder. The blow sent Tony off to one side, but his momentum carried him one, two lurching, twisting steps onward to the edge, where he teetered briefly, then, arms windmilling, making chimp-like hooting noises, his feet went out from under him and over the edge he went. The last Gideon saw of him were his eyes, wild and rolling and furious.

  The whole thing had taken less than two seconds.

  TWENTY

  TONY fell, not toward the playing field, but to the side, where the stone staircase came up, his body flumping heavily onto the landing where the steps turned. It was a drop of no more than nine or ten feet, but a violent contortion—almost as if he intentionally wrenched himself off the landing and into the air—sent him over the edge of that as well, and he plummeted another twenty feet to the stony ground. There he landed on his back, and this time he lay still.

  For a moment Gideon was frozen, so utterly thunderstruck that he couldn’t move. What just happened? When he’d first seen Tony barreling into him, he’d thought for a millisecond that Tony had burst into tears, that this was an anguished embrace, a plea for help.

  But only for a millisecond. If Gideon hadn’t been turning at the time, Tony would have smashed into his unprotected back and it would have been Gideon who had been launched into space and would now be lying there thirty feet below. But what on earth had made . . .

  He jerked his head to shake the cobwebs loose and started quickly down the steps. Tony was moving a little now, he could see: a gentle, circular motion of his left forearm, fingers slightly curled, like an orchestra conductor calling forth a slow, pianissimo passage. He had drawn up his knees too. He didn’t seem to be in pain. There were no obviously broken limbs, and Gideon could see no blood. He knew better than to think there were no grave injuries, however; nobody could fall ten feet onto a stone platform, and then an additional twenty feet onto hard, stony ground—flat on his back both times, which meant he had to have struck his head as well—and then walk away as if nothing had happened.

  When he reached Tony, he saw that he was right. Tony’s eyes were open and they followed Gideon, but the rims of both eyes had brown residue on them, a sure sign of intracranial hemorrhaging. He had taken out his cell phone on the way down, but he didn’t know Mexico’s equivalent of 911. Instead, he dialed the Hacienda. Annie picked up on the first ring.

  “Good morning,” she sang, “buenos días—”

  “Annie, this is Gideon. I’m at Yagul. Tony’s had an accident, a fall—serious—”

  He caught the shocked intake of breath. “serious? What do you mean, serious? He’s not—?”

  “He’s alive, but I think he’s suffered a brain injury. Can you get an ambulance here?”

  “Yes, of course. Is he—never mind! I’ll call right away. My God—” She clicked off.

  Gideon knelt beside him. Tony’s eyes continued to follow. There was a glob of blood in one nostril, and a thin trickle from his right ear. The nasal blood might be nothing, but the bleeding from the ear—that was another bad sign.

  “Tony,” he said softly. “What was that about?”

  Tony looked at him with an expression of mild curiosity. He made no attempt to speak. His arm was still making its slow circles. Gently, Gideon took hold of his wrist and laid it on his chest. It stayed there.

  “Tony, can you hear me?”

  No reply. Tony was watching Gideon’s lips. The pupil of his left eye was a pinpoint; the other seemed normal. Another indicator of an injured brain. There wasn’t much doubt about it now.

  Tony was mostly on his back, but his head and hips
were twisted to opposite sides. The position looked unpleasant, but Tony didn’t look uncomfortable. Gideon knew better than to try to straighten him out.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Creo que sí.” I think so. Gideon waited for a name, but none came.

  “Do you know who you are?” he asked quietly.

  “Quién sabe?” he said, sounding too weary to care. Who knows? Then his eyes rolled up and his eyelids fluttered a few times and closed.

  “Tony?”

  No reply. Gideon put a hand on his chest to make sure he was still breathing. He was, but raggedly. The trickle of blood from his ear now ran all the way to the back of his head and dripped slowly onto the ground. The blood at his eyes and nose was about the same as before.

  Gideon settled down on the ground to wait with him, his mind whirling. What the hell just happened? Several groups of visitors had arrived by now and although everyone else kept well clear of the two men, a Mexican tour guide came up to ask if there was anything he could do.

  “Not unless you’re a doctor,” Gideon said.

  The man had seen the entire terrible incident, however—how the other man had tried to push him off the platform—and he offered his name and telephone number if a witness were needed. Gideon, realizing for the first time that a witness might indeed be a very good thing to have, gratefully accepted his business card: Vicente Abelardo: Tours Arqueológicos, City Tours, Bike Rides y Otros.

  The ambulance, a brand spanking new orange-and-white van from the hospital in Tlacolula, came bouncing up to them, right onto the edge of the playing field, spraying dust and gravel. At almost the same time another one of the Hacienda vans pulled up, with Annie at the wheel and Julie in the passenger seat.

  The two ambulance attendants were professional and quick. A few brief questions that he was able to understand and answer in Spanish: How long has he been unconscious? Was he conscious at all after the fall? Has he vomited? Convulsed? Shown evidence of pain? Shown any movement below the neck? Gideon answered them all and added his observation about the difference in pupil size.