Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 09 - Talking God

by Talking God(lit)

  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 Yucat n 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 a
nd 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 th
e 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."