Little Tiny Teeth (27 page)

“That’s all right, Vargas. It doesn’t matter.”

Vargas licked his lips. “ Senor, you are only too welcome to come and take it, to take it all. I regret extremely that I allowed myself to be used in this way, that I caused offense to you. I only want to go home and forget I was ever so stupid. It would be an act of kindness to me to take it away. Please-”

“What, and have the Cali people find out I have their paste? No thank you. I have no interest in taking any of it from you at all.”

If wheels turning in one’s mind made a sound, the room would have been filled with grindings and squeakings from Vargas’s quick brain. His eyes darted right, then left, then right, as he assessed the rapidly changing situation. Guapo had practically said he would be allowed to live. Was he going to get to keep the paste – all of the paste – as well? Surely it was worth many thousands – hundreds of thousands – of soles. It would change his life, he could go away from Iquitos, leave all this behind him, start fresh in the south with a fishing franchise, down by Pucusana Guapo could read Vargas’s thoughts as readily as Gideon could, and he laughed; a voiceless rumble that changed his expression not at all. “You are not going to keep any of it either, Vargas.”

Vargas blinked. “Ah… no?”

“No. You are going to throw it overboard. Into the river.”

“Into the-? But, sir, as I told you, I do not know which bags it’s in.”

“That doesn’t matter because you are going to throw all the coffee bags into the river. My Indian friends will take you back and will watch you do it. And my sincere advice is not to try and trick them. And never, never let me hear of you in this province again. Do you understand?”

“I understand, Guapo, but all the coffee? I have no insurance, I will have to pay for it myself-”

“Are you arguing with me? Negotiating with me, goddamn you? You should be thanking me for not burning your lousy boat and you with it,” Guapo said, looking as if it was still a distinct possibility.

“No, no, Guapo, of course not, Guapo,” Vargas mumbled. “Whatever you say. Thank you for your understanding. I can promise you-”

“And in case you’re wondering whether the Arimaguas have a number for ‘forty-eight’ (which was exactly what Gideon was wondering), I should tell you that they will have a bag with forty-eight pebbles in it. Each time a coffee sack goes in the river, a pebble is removed from the bag. When you have finished, you’d better hope that there are no pebbles left in the bag.”

“Of course, Guapo,” Vargas said glumly.

“And you,” Guapo said, turning to Gideon. “Now what are we to do with you?”

“I have some good ideas,” said a grinning Fox-face. The burning cigarette stuck to his lower lip couldn’t have been more than a half inch long.

“No, no, an American professor,” Guapo said, “I don’t think we want that kind of trouble. I’ll tell you what, Professor. You give me those pretty American dollars you have in that wallet of yours – you can keep the lousy soles – and I will send you back to the ship with your good friend the captain to go on with your life. You’ll have a good story to tell. What do you say?”

Gideon looked at Guapo, at the big knife, at the leering Fox-face, at the other armed men, and sighed.

“Sounds fair to me,” he said.

Showered, changed, his cuts and bug bites attended to, Gideon felt like a human being again. The hike back to the ship hadn’t been as bad as the one from it (the fire-ant mound was given plenty of room this time), and a glorious pint of carambola juice – looking like orange juice but tasting like cool, thinned-down papaya juice – that he had poured down his throat had brought him back to life. They had been gone a mere three hours, he was shocked to learn. It had seemed like ten.

He had told his story to a fascinated, half-incredulous John and Phil and answered their hundred questions. Now they were lounging at the grassy edge of the thirty-foot bank overlooking the Adelita, having just watched a gray-faced Vargas, who looked like death on two legs, supervise the dumping of four-dozen sixty-kilo sacks of coffee – and presumably a fortune in coca-paste balls – into the Javaro River. The other passengers had watched from the deck, subdued, shocked – and no doubt thrilled – with the knowledge that Arden Scofield had been up to his eyeballs in drug-trafficking. The Arimaguas had disappeared back into the jungle, leaving their forty-eight pebbles behind in six neat rows, and the three-man crew that had dumped the sacks – Chato, Porge, and the cook, Meneo – were sitting on some logs along the muddy riverside a few yards downstream, taking a cigarillo break.

“I knew that Scofield was a blowhard,” John was saying, “but a drug-trafficker?” He shook his head. “What a piece of crap. What did I tell you, Doc? Did I say it was all about drugs, or didn’t I?”

“That you did,” Gideon said. “You were right, and I was wrong.”

John’s hands flew up. “Phil, did he just say what I think he said? Write it down, nobody’s gonna believe it!”

They sat companionably for a little longer and then Phil said: “Oh, there were some developments while you and Vargas were on your little junket.”

“Oh?”

“The guy that was shot with the nail gun? We found out who he was.”

Gideon sat up. “You did? Who?”

“Well, not exactly who,” said John. “We know what he was doing here, and why he got shot. And who shot him.” A ghost of a smile. “‘Nailed him,’ I guess we should say.”

Phil took up the narrative from there. Two Indians, who said they were members of a peaceable, fairly well-assimilated Yagua settlement a day’s canoe journey upstream, had appeared at the warehouse site not long before to collect what they said were their belongings – hammocks, cups and utensils, a few articles of clothing – from the platform house near the warehouse. Phil had gone to chat with them. They were frightened and shy and in a hurry to leave again, but Phil had wormed a surprising amount of information out of them with the aid of a couple of bottles of Inca Kola, a little rum, and two cigars. They had been the property’s caretakers and had been engaged for the past week in the construction work necessary to strengthen and enlarge the warehouse.

“Who were they working for?” Gideon asked. “Who was paying them?”

“I didn’t think to ask,” Phil said, and then after a moment, with some irritation: “Why would I ask that? Jeez. Anyway, they told me they’d been fishing for dorado from the bank about five o’clock yesterday afternoon when they smelled smoke. And when they climbed back up to the warehouse, they found this guy in the doorway, right in the act of setting a match to a pile of newspapers and scrap wood. A couple of other piles were already burning inside, on the wooden floor.”

“Ah, that would have been Guapo’s man,” Gideon said. “One of the Arimaguas, I bet. He was an Indian, right?”

“I have no idea.”

“You didn’t ask what he looked like?”

“No.”

“You’re kidding me. You don’t know if he had a bone in his nose, or was wearing a loincloth, or had shoes, or, or-”

Phil sighed and looked at John. “What do you think, does he really want to hear the rest of this or not?”

“Sorry,” Gideon said. “I’ll be quiet.”

They had yelled at the man, who had turned, screamed something unintelligible back at them, and begun to fling burning pieces of wood at them. One of them – they wouldn’t say which – had threatened him with the nail gun, meaning to scare him off, but when a flaming chunk of plywood hit him in the shoulder the gun had gone off, and the man had been shot through the head and very, very obviously killed. Terrified, they had fled into the jungle. Today, they had come back for their things, unaware that the Adelita was moored below.

“I scared them half to death by showing up, apparently out of nowhere,” Phil said, “but I got them to open up with my celebrated friendly, open, and unthreatening manner.”

“And Inca Kolas spiked with rum,” Gideon said. “Am I permitted to ask a question yet?”

Phil responded with a gracious wave. “Speak.”

“Did you happen to inquire as to what happened to the body?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Phil said. “They said he staggered away, fell over the edge into the river, and disappeared.”

“No, that part never happened. When your brain is blown apart, you don’t do any staggering. You drop where you are.”

“Yeah, you already told us that. So my guess is they just picked him up and dumped him in the river themselves. Either way-”

“-he’s in the river,” said John.

Any further thoughts were interrupted by an excited clamor from the crew members on their break down below at the riverfront. They were jabbering in pidgin Spanish, pointing down into the water, and calling, apparently, to Gideon. He was able to understand a few words: “ Oiga, esqueletero! Aqui le tengo unos huesos!” Hey, skeleton man, I have some bones for you!

He jumped up. “They’ve found some bones.”

“ More bones?” John said, getting up too. “What is it about you, Doc? Do you bring this on yourself?”

“That’s what Julie thinks,” Gideon said, laughing, as they made their way down the bank. “And remember your weird friend Hedwig, in Hawaii? She thinks it’s because of my aura.”

The three Indians were on a narrow, muddy, log-littered beach, and one of them, in the act of tossing a cigarillo into the water, had spotted what he was sure was a human skull, caught by an eddy and lodged in a pool formed by a tangle of downed tree branches.

“It’s him!” Phil exclaimed the moment he saw it, gazing placidly back up at him from empty eye sockets, through twelve inches of brownish water. “The nail-gun guy.”

“Looks like it,” Gideon said. It was a human skull, all right. There was the expected round hole in the forehead, just right of center – no radiating or spiral cracks, just a clean hole – and a jagged-edged empty space where the back of the head should have been. No mandible was visible. “Should be easy enough to confirm, though.”

He leaned down, and grasping a branch for support, dipped into the water with his other hand and brought up the broken skull. The Indians, whom he half expected to quietly back away and leave, sat down and watched avidly. The perforated disk of bone from the warehouse door was still in his fanny pack. He took it out, wrinkling his nose a little – the fanny pack would have to go; it was getting nasty in there, what with the heat and humidity making the still-fresh bone fragment reek – and fitted it to the circular hole in the skull, which had to be done from the inside because the beveling of both the hole and the disk made it impossible to do from the front. This was no problem, however, what with the fist-sized hole in the back of the skull. He adjusted the disk until he had its irregularities matched to those of the hole and gently pressed it in. It slipped in with a solid little click, and held. A perfect fit.

“Consider it confirmed,” he said. For a while he held the skull up to his face, turning it this way and that. “Amazing,” he murmured.

“What is?” John asked, after it became clear that further elucidation wasn’t on its way.

“Well, look at it,” Gideon said. “This guy was killed yesterday afternoon, not even twenty-four hours ago, and look at this thing! It’s perfectly clean… okay, a little crud clinging to the inside of the brain case and the nasal aperture, and in the orbits, and so on – back of the palate, auditory meatuses, hard-to-reach places – but no muscles, no ligaments, and just a few shreds of tendon. In the lab, it’d take a colony of Dermestid beetles weeks to get it this clean.”

“Piranhas?” said John.

“ Si, piranhas,” the three crewmen agreed in sober unison.

Gideon nodded. “I really didn’t believe they were as fast as this, though. And all these tiny scratches over every square millimeter of it… as if it’s been… well, scoured with a pad of heavy-duty steel wool.” He shook his head. “Amazing,” he said again. “If you look closely, you can see that most of the scratches are really nicks, kind of triangular in cross section.”

“Little… tiny… teeth,” John said.

“Little tiny pointy teeth,” Gideon amended.

“Gideon, did I just hear you say you used beetles to clean your skeletons?” Phil asked.

“Uh-huh,” he said abstractedly. “Dermestids. You get them from biological supply houses. There’s nothing like them for corpses. They love to eat dead flesh.”

“Big deal, so do I,” John said.

“Mmm,” said Gideon. He had sat down on a log with the skull and was slowly turning it in his hands again, studying it from various angles, running his fingers over eminences and concavities, gently inserting them into the nasal aperture, stroking the teeth.

“I always thought you boiled the bodies or used some kind of caustic or something. You just put them in a tank with a bunch of beetles?” Phil persisted. He was fascinated with the idea. “Gideon? Are you there? I think we’ve lost him again,” he said to John.

“He’ll be back,” John said. “You just have to be patient.” They seated themselves on a log to await his return.

It took him another minute to surface again. “Well,” he murmured, “it’s a male, all right; not much doubt about that. The rugged muscle-attachment sites, and these rounded orbital margins, and the bilobate mental eminences-”

“That means he’s got a square chin,” John said for Phil’s benefit. Over the years of his association with Gideon, he had picked up the occasional bit of forensic jargon. “That’s just the way these people talk, you see. It’s to make sure no one else can understand them.”

“I know, I’m very familiar with the language myself.”

“-all those things yell ‘male.’” Gideon continued, more or less talking to himself. “And he’s a grown man, in his thirties at least, and probably not more than, oh, fifty or so. All we have to go on there are the cranial and palatine sutures. None of them are still anywhere near open, but none of them have been obliterated yet either, inside or out. Now, as to race…”