A Thief of Time jlajc-8

by Tony Hillerman

  Quickly. Quickly. He'd left a note for Irene. He thought Irene would be coming back for her squash and she'd wonder where he'd gone. Pinned it on the screen door, telling her he'd be out in the barn working. It was right there in plain view. The worst kind of bad luck.

  He looked around him for a hiding place. Houk was not a man subject to panic. He could climb into the loft but there was no cover there. Behind him bales of alfalfa were stacked head-high. He could restack some of them, leave himself a cave. Would there be time? Not without luck. He began a new stack against the wall, leaving a space just wide enough to hold him, groaning as he felt the weight of the heavy bales grinding his hip socket. As he worked, he realized the futility. That would only delay things a few minutes. There was really no place to hide.

  He noticed the pitchfork then, leaning beside the door where he'd left it. He limped over, got it, limped back to the horse stall. Maybe there would be some chance to use it. Anyway, it was better than hiding and just waiting.

  He gripped the fork handle, listening. His hearing wasn't what it once had been but he could detect nothing except, now and then, the breeze blowing through the slats. The smell of the barn was in his nostrils. Dust. Dry alfalfa. The faint acid of dried horse urine. The smell of a dry autumn.

  'Mr. Houk,' the voice called. 'You in the barn?'

  Add it all together, average it out, it had been a good enough life. The first fifty years, close to wonderful, except for Brigham being sick. Even that you could live with, given the good wife he'd been blessed with. Except for the downswings of the schizophrenia, Brigham had been happy enough, most of the time. The rages came and went, but when he was out in the wild country, hunting, living alone, he seemed full of joy. Thinking back, Houk was impressed again with the memory. He'd been pretty good himself outdoors as a kid. But not like The Boy. By the time he was ten, Brigham could go up a cliff that Houk wouldn't have tried with ropes. And he knew what to eat. And how to hide. That brought back a rush of memories, and of the old, old sorrow. The Boy, the summer he was seven, missing long after suppertime. All of them hunting him. Finding him in the old coyote den under the saltbush. He'd been as terrified at being found as if he had been a rabbit dug out by a dog.

  That had been the day they no longer lied to themselves about it. But nothing the doctors tried had worked. The piano had helped for a while. He had a talent for it. And he could lose himself for hours just sitting there making his music. But the rages came back. And putting him away had been unspeakable and unthinkable.

  'Houk?' the voice said. Now it was just beyond the barn wall. 'I need to talk to you.'

  And now he could hear footsteps, the door with the draggy hinge being pulled open.

  One thing he had to do. He couldn't leave it undone. He should have handled it yesterday, as soon as he found out about it. Yesterday-- personally. It had to be taken care of. It wasn't something you went away and left--not a human life.

  He took out his billfold, found a business card from a well-drilling outfit in it, and began writing on its back, holding the card awkwardly against the billfold.

  'Houk,' the voice said. It was inside the barn now. 'I see you there, through the slats. Come out.'

  No time now. He couldn't let the note be found, except by the police. He pushed it down inside his shorts. Just as he did, he heard the stall door opening.

  Chapter Twelve

  Ť ^ ť

  IT WAS RAINING IN NEW YORK. L. G. Marcy, the director of public affairs to whom Joe Leaphorn was referred, proved to be a slender, stylish woman with gray hair, and eyes as blue as blade steel. On drier days, the expanse of glass behind her desk looked out upon the rooftops of mid-town Manhattan. She examined Leaphorn's card, turned it over to see if the back offered more information, and then glanced up at him.

  'You want to see the documentation on an artifact,' she said. 'Is that correct?' She glanced down at the open catalog Leaphorn had handed her.

  'That's all. Just this Anasazi pot,' Leaphorn said. 'We need to know the site it came from.'

  'I can assure you it was legal,' Ms. Marcy said. 'We do not deal in pots collected in violation of the Antiquities Preservation Act.'

  'I'm sure that's true,' said Leaphorn, who was equally sure no sane pot hunter would ever certify that he had taken a pot illegally. 'We presume the pot came from private land. We simply need to know which private land. Whose ranch.'

  'Unfortunately, that pot sold. All pots went in that auction. So we don't have the documentation. The documentation went to the buyer. Along with the pot,' L. G. Marcy said. She smiled, closed the catalog, handed it to Leaphorn. 'Sorry,' she said.

  'Who was the buyer?'

  'We have a problem there,' she said. 'It is Nelson's policy to cooperate with the police. It is also Nelson's policy to respect the confidence of our customers. We never tell anyone the identity of buyers unless we have their advance clearance to do so.' She leaned across the desk to return Leaphorn's card. 'That rarely happens,' she said. 'Usually, none of the parties concerned wants publicity. They value privacy. On rare occasions, the object involved is so important that publicity is inevitable. But rarely. And in this case, the object is not the sort that attracts the news media.'

  Leaphorn put the card in the pocket of his uniform shirt. The shirt was damp from the rain Leaphorn had walked through from his hotel toward this office building before ducking for shelter into a drugstore. To his surprise, the store sold umbrellas. Leaphorn had bought one, the first he'd ever owned, and continued his journey under it -- tremendously self-conscious -- thinking he would own the only umbrella in Window Rock, and perhaps the only umbrella on the reservation, if not in all of Arizona. He was conscious of it now, lying wetly across his lap, while he waited silently for L. G. Marcy to add to her statement. Leaphorn had learned early in his career that this Navajo politeness often clashed with white abhorrence for conversational silences. Sometimes the resulting uneasiness caused belagana witnesses to blurt out more than they intended to say. While he waited, he noticed the prints on the wall. All, if Leaphorn could judge, done by female artists. The same for the small abstract sculpture on the Marcy desk. The silence stretched. It wasn't going to work with this belagana.

  It didn't.

  The pause caused L. G. Marcy's smile to become slightly bent. Nothing more. She out-waited him. About his own age, Leaphorn thought, but she looked like a woman in her mid-thirties.

  Leaphorn stirred. Moved the umbrella off his lap. 'I believe the FBI notified your company that we are investigating two homicides,' he said. 'This particular pot seems to figure into it. Your client won't be embarrassed. Not in any way. We simply…'

  'I'm not sure the FBI exactly notified us of anything,' Ms. Marcy said. 'An FBI agent called from…' She examined a notebook. '… Albuquerque, New Mexico, and told us that a representative of the Navajo Tribal Police would call today about an artifact we had handled. He said our cooperation would be appreciated. The call was referred to me, and when I questioned him about what the federal government interest might be, this agent, this Mr. Sharkey, he, well…' Ms. Marcy hunted politely for a word politer than 'weaseled.'

  'He made it appear that his call was not official at all. It was intended as a sort of a personal introduction.'

  Leaphorn simply nodded. Sharkey hadn't wanted to make the call, had foreseen embarrassment, had been talked into it. Having been caught at it, Sharkey would be angry and hard to deal with. But then in a few more days, nothing like that would matter. Leaphorn would be a civilian. He nodded again.

  'There's a system for dealing with problems like this, of course,' Ms. Marcy said. 'One petitions the appropriate court for an injunction. You then serve this order on us, and we provide you with the information. The requirement that we make available evidence needed in a judicial proceeding supersedes our own need to maintain a confidential relationship with our customers.' Her expression was bland.

  After a moment, Leaphorn said, 'Of course that's a pos
sibility. We'd like to avoid it if we could.' He shrugged. 'The paperwork. We'd like to avoid all the delay.' And, he thought, the problem of persuading the court that an item circled in a Nelson's catalog has anything at all to do with anything.

  'That's understandable,' Ms. Marcy said. 'I think you can also understand our position. Our clients rely on us to keep transactions confidential. For many good reasons.' She made an inclusive gesture with small white hands. 'Burglars,' she said, 'for one example. Former wives. Business reasons. So you must understand…'

  Ms. Marcy began pushing back her chair. When she rises, Leaphorn thought, she will tell me that without a court order she cannot give me any information. He did something he almost never did. He interrupted.

  'Our problem is time,' he said. 'A woman's life may be at stake.'

  Ms. Marcy lowered herself back into the chair. That little motion brought to Leaphorn's nostrils an awareness of perfume, and powder and fine feminine things. It reminded him, with overpowering force, of Emma. He closed his eyes, and opened them.

  'A woman who was very interested in this particular pot--the woman who drew the circle around it in your catalog--she's been missing for weeks,' Leaphorn said. He took out his wallet, extracted his photograph of Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, the bride. He handed it to Ms. Marcy. 'Did she come in to see you? This autumn? Or call?'

  'Yes,' Ms. Marcy said. 'She was in.' She studied the photograph, frowning. Leaphorn waited until she looked up.

  'Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal,' he said. 'An anthropologist. Published a lot of papers in the field of ceramics--and of primitive ceramic art. We gather that Dr. Friedman-Bernal believes she has discovered an Anasazi potter whose work she can specifically identify. Did she tell you all that?'

  As he related this, Leaphorn was aware of how mundane and unimportant it must sound to a layman. In fact, it sounded trivial to him. He watched Ms. Marcy's face.

  'Some of it,' Ms. Marcy said. 'It would be fascinating if she can prove it.'

  'From what we can find out, Dr. Friedman-Bernal identified a decorative technique in the finishing of a kind of pottery called St. John Polychrome -- a kind made in the last stages of the Anasazi civilization. She found that technique was peculiar to one single specific Anasazi potter.'

  'Yes. That's what she said.'

  Leaphorn leaned forward. If his persuasion didn't work, he'd wasted two days on airplanes and a night in a New York hotel.

  'I gather that this woman, this Anasazi potter, had some special talent which the doctor spotted. Dr. Friedman-Bernal was able to trace her work backward and forward in time through scores of pots, arranging them chronologically as this talent developed. The potter worked at Chaco Canyon, and her work turned up at several of the villages there. But recently -- probably earlier this year -- Friedman-Bernal began finding pots that seemed to come from somewhere else. And they were later pots -- with the woman's style matured. Your spring auction catalog carried a photograph of one of these pots. We found the catalog in Dr. Friedman-Bernal's room, with the photograph circled.'

  Ms. Marcy was leaning forward now. 'But those pots, they were so stylized,' she said. 'So much alike. How… ?' She didn't complete the question.

  'I'm not sure,' Leaphorn said. 'I think she does it the way graphologists identify handwriting. Something like that.'

  'It makes sense,' Ms. Marcy said.

  'From what we know, from what Friedman-Bernal told other anthropologists , she seems to have believed that she could find the place to which this potter moved when the Chaco civilization collapsed,' Leaphorn said.

  'About right,' Ms. Marcy said. 'She said she thought this pot was the key. She said she had come across several shards, and one complete pot, which she was sure came from a late phase in this potter's work--an extension and refinement and maturing of her techniques. The pot she'd seen in our catalog seemed to be exactly identical to this work. So she wanted to study it. She wanted to know where she could go to see it, and she wanted to see our documentation.'

  'Did you tell her?'

  'I told her our policy.'

  'So you didn't tell her who had bought it? Or how to contact the buyer?'

  Ms. Marcy sighed, allowed her expression to show a flash of impatience.

  'I told her the same thing I am telling you. One of the reasons people have been dealing with Nelson's for more than two hundred years is because of our reputation. They know they can depend, absolutely and without a qualm of doubt, on Nelson's keeping transactions in confidence.'

  Leaphorn leaned forward.

  'Dr. Friedman-Bernal flew back to Albuquerque after she talked to you. Then she drove back to Chaco Canyon, where she lives and works. The following Friday she got up very early, put her sleeping bag into her car, and drove away. She'd told her friends she'd be gone for a day or two. We suspect that somehow she found out where this pot had come from and went to see if she could find something to prove it. Probably to see if there were other such pots, or potsherds, at the place.'

  He leaned back, folded his hands across his chest, wondering if this would work. If it didn't, he was near a dead end. There was Chee, of course. He'd asked Chee to find the Reverend Slick Nakai -- to learn from Nakai everything the man knew about where those damned pots were coming from. Chee seemed interested. Chee would do his best. But how smart was Chee? He should have waited, done it himself, not risked having it all screwed up.

  'She vanished,' Leaphorn said. 'No trace of the woman, or car, or anything. Not a word to anyone. As if Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had never existed.'

  Ms. Marcy picked up the photograph and studied it. 'Maybe she just went away,' she said, looking up at Leaphorn. 'You know. Too much work. Too much stress. Suddenly you just want to say to hell with it. Maybe that was it.' She said it as a woman who knows the feeling.

  'Possibly,' Leaphorn said. 'However, the evening before she left she spent a lot of time fixing a dinner. Marinated the meat entree, all that. The professor she had worked with was coming in from Albuquerque. She fixed this fancy dinner and put it in the refrigerator. And at dawn the next morning she put her sleeping bag and things like that in her car and drove away.'

  Ms. Marcy considered. She took the picture of Eleanor Friedman as a bride from the desk and looked at it again.

  'Let me see what I can do,' she said. She picked up the telephone. 'Will you wait outside just a moment?'

  The reception room had no view of the rain. Just walls displaying abstract prints, and a receptionist in whom Leaphorn's damp Navajo Tribal Police uniform had aroused curiosity. He sat against the wall, glancing through an Architectural Digest, aware of the woman staring at him, wishing he had worn civilian clothes. But maybe it wasn't the uniform. Maybe it was the damp Navajo inside it.

  Ms. Marcy came out in a little less than ten minutes. She handed Leaphorn a card. It bore a name, Richard DuMont, and an address on East Seventy-eighth Street.

  'He said he would see you tomorrow morning,' she said. 'At eleven.'

  Leaphorn stood. 'I appreciate this,' he said.

  'Sure,' she said. 'I hope you'll let me know. If you find her I mean.'

  Leaphorn spent the rest of the afternoon prowling through the Museum of Modern Art. He sat, finally, where he could see the patio of sculpture, the rain-stained wall behind it, and the rainy sky above. Like all dry-country people, Leaphorn enjoyed rain -- that rare, longed-for, refreshing blessing that made the desert bloom and life possible. He sat with his head full of thoughts and watched the water run down the bricks, drip from the leaves, form its cold pools on the flagstones, and give a slick shine to Picasso's goat.

  The goat was Leaphorn's favorite. When they were young and he was attending the FBI Academy, he had brought Emma to see New York. They had discovered Picasso's goat together. He had already been staring at it when Emma had laughed, and plucked at his sleeve, and said: 'Look. The mascot of the Navajo Nation.'

  He had an odd sensation as he remembered this, as if he could see them both as they ha
d been then. Very young, standing by this glass wall looking out into the autumn rain. Emma, who was even more beautiful when she laughed, was laughing.

  'Perfect for us Dineh,' she'd said. 'It's starved, gaunt, bony, ugly. But look! It's tough. It endures.' And she had hugged his arm in the delight of her discovery, her face full of the joy, and the beauty, that Leaphorn had found nowhere else. And of course, it was true. That gaunt goat would have been the perfect symbol. Something to put on a pedestal and display. Miserable and starved, true enough. But it was also pregnant and defiant--exactly right to challenge the world at the entrance of the ugly octagonal Tribal Council meeting hall at Window Rock. Leaphorn remembered their having coffee at the museum cafe and then walking out and patting the goat. The sensation came back to him now--wet, cold metal slick under his palm--utterly real. He got up and hurried out of the museum into the rain, leaving the umbrella hanging forgotten on the chair.

  Leaphorn took a cab to the Seventy-eighth Street address, got there a quarter of an hour early, and spent the time prowling the neighborhood--a territory of uniformed doormen and expensive dogs walked by persons who seemed to have been hired for the job. He rang the door chimes at eleven exactly. He waited on the steps, looking at the sky down the street. It would rain again, and soon--probably before noon. An old man, stooped and gray in a wrinkled gray suit, opened the door and stood silently, looking at him patiently.