“Castle?”
“The original ugly old building with the towers and battlements and all,” Highhawk explained. “It sort of looks like a castle and that’s where the top brass has offices.” The thought of this wiped away Highhawk’s good humor. “They get paid big money to come up with reasons why the museum needs eighteen thousand stolen skeletons. And this—” He tapped the fetish. “—this stolen sacred object.”
He handed it to Chee.
It was heavier than he’d expected. Perhaps the root was from some tree harder than the cotton-wood. It looked old. How old? he asked himself. Three hundred years? Three thousand? Or maybe thirty. He knew no way to judge. But certainly nothing about it looked raw or new.
Highhawk was glancing at his watch. Chee handed him the fetish. “Interesting,” he said. “There’s a couple of things I want to ask you about.”
“Tell you what,” Highhawk said. “I have a thing I have to do. We’ll go back by my office and you wait there and I’ll be right back. This is going to take—” He thought. “—maybe ten, fifteen minutes.”
Chee glanced at his own watch when Highhawk dropped him at the office. It was nine twenty-five. He sat beside Highhawk’s desk, heels on the wastebasket, relaxing. He was tired and he hadn’t realized it. A long day, full of walking, full of disappointments. What would he be able to tell Janet Pete that Janet Pete didn’t already know? He could tell her of Highhawk’s coyness about the fetish. Obviously it was Highhawk who had brought the War God up to the conservancy lab to work on it. Obviously he’d known exactly where to find it. Obviously he didn’t want Chee to know of his interest in the thing.
Chee yawned, and stretched, and rose stiffly from his chair to prowl the office. A framed certificate on the wall declared that his host had successfully completed studies in anthropological conservation and restoration at the London Institute of Archaeology. Another certified his completion with honors of a materials conservation graduate program at George Washington University. Still another recognized his contribution to a seminar on “Conservation Implications of the Structure, Reactivity, Deterioration, and Modification of Proteinaceous Artifact Material” for the American Institute of Archaeology
Chee was looking for something to read and thinking that Highhawk’s few minutes had stretched a bit when he heard the sounds—a sharp report, a clatter of miscellaneous noises with what might have been a yell mixed in. It was an unpleasant noise and it stopped Chee cold. He caught his breath, listening. Whatever it was ended as abruptly as it had started. He walked to the door and looked up and down the hallway, listening. The immense sixth floor of the Museum of Natural History was as silent as a cave. The noise had come from his right. Chee walked down the hallway in that direction, slowly, soundlessly. He stopped at a closed door, gripped the knob, tested it. Locked. He put his ear to the panel and heard nothing but the sound his own blood made moving through his arteries. He moved down the hallway, conscious of the rows of wooden bins through which he walked, of the smells, of dust, of old things decaying. Then he stopped again and stood absolutely still, listening. He heard nothing but ringing silence and, after a moment, what might have been an elevator descending in another part of the building.
Then steps. Rapid steps. From ahead and to the left. Chee hurried to the corridor corner ahead, looked around it. It was empty. Simply another narrow pathway between deep stacks of numbered bins. He listened again. Where had the hurrier gone? What had caused those odd noises? Chee had no idea which way to look. He simply stood, leaning against a bin, and listened. Silence rang in his ears. Whoever, whatever, had made the noise had gone away.
He walked back to Highhawk’s office, suppressing an urge to look back, controlling an urge to hurry. And when he reached it, he closed the door firmly behind him and moved his chair against the wall so that it faced the door. When he sat in it he suddenly felt very foolish. The noise would have some perfectly normal explanation. Something had fallen. Someone had dropped something heavy.
He resumed his explorations of the documents on Highhawk’s untidy desk, looking for something interesting. They tended toward administrative documents and technical material. He selected a photocopy of a report entitled
ETHICAL AND PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN CONSERVING ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM OBJECTS
and settled down to read it.
It was surprisingly interesting—some twenty-five pages full of information and ideas mostly new to Chee. He read it carefully and slowly, stopping now and then to listen. Finally he put it back on the desk, put his heels back on the wastebasket, and thought about Mary Landon, and then about Janet Pete, and then about Highhawk. He glanced at his watch. After ten. Highhawk had been gone more than thirty minutes. He walked to the door and looked up and down the corridor. Total emptiness. Total silence. He sat again in the chair, feet on the floor, remembering exactly what Highhawk had said. He’d said wait here a few minutes. Ten or fifteen.
Chee got his hat and went out into the corridor, turning off the light and closing the door behind him. He found his way through the labyrinth of corridors to the elevator. He pushed the button and heard it laboring its way upward. Highhawk obviously had not returned by this route. On the ground floor he found his way to the Twelfth Street exit. There had been a security guard there when he came in, a woman who had spoken to Highhawk. She would know if he’d left the building. But the woman wasn’t there. No one was guarding the exit door.
Chee felt a sudden irrational urge to get out of this building and under the sky. He pushed the door open and hurried down the steps. The cold, misty air felt wonderful on his face. But where was Highhawk? He remembered the last words Highhawk had said as he left him at Highhawk’s office:
“I’ll be right back.”
Chapter Fifteen
« ^ »
Leaphorn called Kennedy from his hotel room and caught him at home.
“I’ve got him,” Leaphorn said. “His name is Elogio Santillanes. But I need you to get a fingerprint check made and see if the Bureau has anything on him.”
“Who?” Kennedy said. He sounded sleepy. “What are you talking about?”
“The man beside the tracks. Remember? The one you got me out into the weather to take a look at.”
“Oh,” Kennedy said. “Yeah. Santillanes, you say. A local Hispano then, after all. How’d you get a make on him?”
Leaphorn explained it all, from St. Germain to Perez to the prescription number, including the little red-haired man who might (or might not) be watching the Santillanes apartment.
“Nice to be lucky,” Kennedy said. “Where the hell you calling from? You in Washington now?”
Leaphorn gave him the name of his hotel. “I’m going to stay here—or at least I’ll be here for message purposes. Are you going to call Washington?”
“Why not?” Kennedy said.
“Would you ask ’em to let me know what they find out? And since they probably won’t do it, would you call me as soon as they call you back?”
“Why not?” Kennedy said. “You going to stick around there until we know something?”
“Why not?” Leaphorn said. “It shouldn’t take long with the name. Either they have prints on him or they don’t.”
It didn’t take long. Leaphorn watched the late news. He went out for a walk in what had now transformed itself into a fine, damp, cold mist. He bought an edition of tomorrow’s Washington Post and read it in bed. He woke late, had breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, and found his telephone ringing when he got back to the room.
It was Kennedy.
“Bingo,” Kennedy said. “I am sort of a hero with the Bureau this morning—which will last until about sundown. Your Elogio Santillanes was in the Bureau print files. He was one of the relatively few surviving leaders of the substantially less than loyal left-wing opposition to the Pinochet regime in Chile.”