NINE
Although the tip of the spear was still hidden from sight in the vodka carton, Gideon knew what it was. He had seen a pair of them in the South American collection of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. It was called a shotgun lance, used by several Indian groups in the Amazon basin. It was made by taking the barrel from a worn-out rifle or shotgun, pounding its base into a point, and then sticking a wooden shaft, honed to the diameter needed for a snug fit, into the muzzle end. It was, he knew, a man-killing spear (as opposed to the lighter ones used for hunting animals). But he thought he’d read somewhere that they had gone out of use by the 1950s, by which time new firearms had become more freely available. So how did…?
Maggie stuck her head out of the dining room. “Arden could really use a drink. Scotch.” The door popped briefly open again almost before she’d closed it, and once again her head poked out, one eyebrow raised. “For that matter, my dears, so could I.”
“I’ll get them,” Gideon said, stepping gingerly through the space where the window had been. “Looks like the bar’s open early today, anyway.”
In the dining room he found Maggie standing over Scofield and meticulously plucking bits of glass from his crew cut, which she then laid on some paper towels that had been spread out on the table. Scofield grabbed for his drink so convulsively that he spilled half of it. The other half went down his gullet in a single swallow, followed by a grateful sigh. Maggie, on the other hand, sipped primly, then went back to exploring Scofield’s scalp while Scofield, passive and docile, sat motionless. Gideon felt a highly inappropriate bubble of laughter trying to work its way up his throat. The thing was, it was like watching a pair of rhesus monkeys at grooming time.
He managed to stifle the thought, however. “Can I do anything else for you?” he asked.
“No thanks, I’m fine,” Scofield said, and indeed the Scotch seemed to have gone a long way toward restoring him. The ruddy little disks that were natural in his cheeks were coming back. He even tried a feeble little joke. “But I’m beginning to think that becoming an ethnobotanist might not have been such a great career move after all.”
Gideon smiled. “I’ll admit, you’re not having much of a day so far.”
“And it’s not even six o’clock yet,” Maggie dryly observed.
“Say, Doc?” John had opened the dining room door. “Could you come on out when you have a minute?”
His overdone nonchalance (John wasn’t much of a dissembler) made it clear that it was something important, and Gideon went out to join him. Most if not all the others were there now, gathered around the smashed bar, gabbling away and gesturing at the spear, which had been pulled from the floor and laid on one of the salon tables.
John pointed at its front end, which had formerly been hidden by the vodka carton. “Is that thing what I think it is?” he asked soberly.
Gideon bent to examine it. The others quieted down, watching. Attached to the base of the metal spear point by a length of twisted fiber was a sinister, misshapen object a little bigger than his fist.
“Ugh,” he said. “I hate these.”
Looking up at him was a distorted, monkeylike, yellowish-brown face made even creepier by the rim of beautiful, combed chestnut hair that framed it. A dangling length of string had sewn each eye shut, and three more knotted strands threaded through the grotesquely distorted lips. The nose too had been stretched to impossible proportions.
Gideon gingerly turned it to peer into the nostrils. He pressed a finger against the closed eyes. He moved the long hair aside to study the ears. Finally, he put it down.
“No,” he said.
It had been several minutes since John had asked the question and people looked confused.
Phil spoke for them. “No, what?”
“No, it’s not what John thinks it is.”
John’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s not a shrunken head?”
“It’s not a shrunken human head, which is what I presume you meant.”
“What the hell is it, then? A monkey head?” He frowned. “Do monkeys have eyebrows?”
“Not so to speak, no, but it’s not even that. It’s not a head at all. This is a tourist item. They make them from monkey skin or goatskin, and carve them and mold them to look like this, and add a little hair where they need to.”
“It’s true,” Vargas said. “You can buy such things in Iquitos.”
“You can buy them on eBay,” Gideon said.
All the same, Duayne Osterhout was intrigued. “But it looks so… Why are you so sure it isn’t human?”
“Oh, a lot of things,” Gideon said. “This is a pretty good one, as they go, but there are some things that are almost impossible to duplicate in a fake head.” He turned the head upside down. “For one thing, as you see, where’s the neck opening? But, more important – there’s no nasal hair.”
“If it was real, it would have nose hair?”
“Oh yes. I’m talking about the bristly little things in the nostrils – they act as filters – that everybody has. They stay right there even when a head has been shrunk. To fake them, you’d have to plant each one separately, which would take a long time, and even then it’d be hard to make them look authentic. But since just about nobody knows to look for them, they don’t bother with it. And then, these threads from the eyes, from the lips – they’re obviously commercial twine, the kind you can buy at the local hardware store, not the kind you get from slicing palm fronds into narrow slivers and twirling them into a cord. And the ears…” He pushed back the hair. “Human ears are very intricately shaped, very difficult to reproduce convincingly. You can see how crude these are. That’s why these things always have so much hair hiding them.”
“Yes, yes, I do see,” Duayne said, nodding.
“And then the skin itself. There are tool marks on it, see? Burn marks too, right under-”
“Okay, enough already, Doc,” John said. “Now the next time we’re in the market for a shrunken head, we’ll know if we’re getting ripped off. But what’s it supposed to mean? Is it some kind of curse or something?”
“A warning?” Tim suggested. “Are they threatening us?” His eyes slid sideways to the slowly passing shore, now a safe three miles away.
Gideon put the head down and straightened up. “Beats the hell out of me. I’m reasonably sure it’s not meant as a gesture of welcome, but I’ve never run into this custom before: tying a head to a spear. On the other hand, I’m not exactly up on South American ethnography.”
They all stood staring down at the head as if expecting it to open its sewn-together lips and provide answers on its own.
“Chato says he knows what it is,” Vargas announced into the silence. Chato, the Indian crewman who had mutely conducted Gideon, John, and Phil to their cabins earlier, had appeared a few minutes before to begin mopping up broken glass and spilled liquor. But now he was standing on tiptoe, whispering excitedly into Vargas’s ear.
“ Que quieres decir, Chato?” Vargas asked impatiently.
The Indian began to whisper again.
“Speak up so everyone can hear,” Vargas ordered.
Chato, looking uneasy at the attention, raised his voice to just barely above a whisper. Not only was he almost inaudible, but he spoke in a Spanish-English-Indian patois with which even Phil had a hard time.
“Translate, will you, Captain?” Phil said.
Vargas accommodated him, translating after every couple of phrases. “He has heard of it before, this custom… In olden days, one of the native groups used it as a – a what, Chato?… ah, a death-warning, a revenge warning, to an enemy tribe… They would use… no, they would take… no, they would shrink the head of a killer, someone who had killed one of their own people, and they would attach it to a spear… and they would, they would throw the spear into the hut, into the wall of the hut, of the family of this killer… to tell them that one of them would soon die too… for the purpose of…” He searched for the English word.