At Ease with the Dead (6 page)

She smiled at me, and I wished I were fifteen years younger. “Mr. Croft?”

“Yes.”

“Hi. I'm Lisa Wright. Alice's granddaughter. I talked to you earlier. Come on in.”

She stood aside to let me enter, pushed shut the door, and smiled again. “This way.”

I followed her, and it took nerves of steel to avoid watching the swing and sway of that taut trim backside. I don't have nerves of steel.

To the left, a wide archway opened onto the living room—a glimpse of gray carpeting, white walls, tan furniture, a brightly colored painting over the sofa—but we forged ahead, came to a hallway, and turned right. At the first door on the left, she stopped and turned, smiled once more, and gestured for me to go in. I did. “Alice,” she said behind me, “this is Mr. Croft.”

Like her granddaughter, Alice Wright would be a difficult woman to ignore.

She sat in a wingback black leather chair in the corner of the room, arms along the arms of the chair, spine as upright as the chair's back, holding herself with the poised languid angularity of an exiled queen. I could see that she was tall, almost as tall as her granddaughter, and that very likely she'd once been as beautiful. Even now, in her seventies, she was a striking woman, proof that large gray eyes and strong cheekbones will see you through the long haul. Her white hair was swirled back and held at the back of her head, Japanese style, with a pair of ivory chopsticks angled in a V. She wore a gray silk pantsuit, a white blouse opened at the collar to show a narrow chain of gold, and a pair of low-heeled gray pumps.

On the shelves around her, standing at attention like courtiers, were her books. Two walls were lined with them, ceiling to floor, perhaps half of them bound in leather and looking older and wiser than I'll ever be. More of them stood on shelves to the left of the door, above a dark roll-top desk.

Another black wingback chair sat opposite hers, and between them a window looked out onto a rock garden, an expanse of patterned sand, small gray boulders rising from its surface like mysterious islands. Below the window stood two round teakwood tables, each holding a framed photograph. On the floor was a faded Persian carpet of rose and black; in the air, a faint fragrance of lavender.

“How do you do, Mr. Croft,” said Alice Wright, and held out her hand.

I took her hand. Her grip was as firm as mine.

She nodded, smiling, to the other chair. “Please, have a seat. Would you like some sherry? It's an Amontillado and quite good, I think. Or perhaps some tea? We've a nice Darjeeling.”

“The tea would be fine,” I said, sitting down.

She turned to her granddaughter. “Would you mind, Lisa? I'll have the sherry. And bring something for yourself, dear, if you like. Mr. Croft and I shall restrict ourselves to pleasantries until you return.” She turned to me. “You don't mind, do you, Mr. Croft, if Lisa joins us?”

I didn't, and said so; but even if I had minded, I didn't see how I could have said anything. I had been, very graciously, boxed in.

As Lisa left, Alice Wright cocked her head and said. to me, “You know, I don't think I've ever met a private detective before.”

I smiled. “I don't run into too many anthropologists, either.”

“Just as well,” she said, smiling. “Quite mad, all of them.” She cocked her head slightly. “But let's cut the crap, shall we?”

Neatly done; my jaw nearly dropped.

She said, “You're not licensed by the state of Texas. I took the liberty of calling a friend of mine, in law enforcement, and he enquired for me.”

I'd just been put on notice that there could easily be a SWAT team lurking in the garage, bazookas primed and ready.

“It's a New Mexico license,” I told her. “It's got a nifty picture of me. Care to see it?”

She smiled again. “May I?”

I hauled out my wallet, opened it, handed her the ticket. As she examined it, I studied the photograph on the teakwood table. Eight by ten, once black-and-white but yellowed now, it showed a much younger and very beautiful Alice Wright standing before a gray backdrop of jungle. She wore a white flat-brimmed western hat, a khaki blouse, and khaki slacks stuffed into the tops of heavy black boots. On either side of her stood an Indian wearing a kilt-like wrapper that fell from waist to shin. Both men were squat and muscular, both carried long and lethal-looking blowguns, and both looked extremely glum—bored or homicidal or maybe both. Alice Wright was grinning with a good deal more merriment than I would've shown under the circumstances.

She handed back my ID. “Thank you.” She smiled. “A helpless old woman can't be too careful.”

Old, maybe; but beneath that easy aristocratic graciousness she was as helpless as a drill sergeant.

I nodded to the photograph. “South America?”

She nodded. “Ecuador. The Montana. I did my fieldwork among the Jivaro.”

The woman would not stop surprising me. “The Jivaro,” I said. “They were the headhunters.”

She smiled. “And still are, I expect, what's left of them.” She crossed her legs in a gesture that was at once feminine and professorial. “An interesting people. Do you know they were never conquered? Not by the Incas, not by the Spaniards. In Fifteen ninety-nine, there was a Spanish governor nominally in charge of their province. When he demanded a tribute in gold from the Jivaro, they attacked and destroyed his town, killing everyone in it, perhaps fifteen thousand people. And mutilating most of them into the bargain, quite horribly.” She smiled. This was apparently one of the pleasantries she'd mentioned earlier.

“They captured the governor,” she said, “trussed him up, and then they gave him his gold. They melted it, pried open his mouth, and poured it down his throat.”

I nodded. “I guess that put kind of a damper on the tribute thing.”

She surprised me once again—startled me—by laughing. A good hearty laugh, up from the stomach, like a stevedore's. “A damper indeed,” she said, and laughed some more. She cocked her head again. “But you know, curiously, the Jivaro themselves found the entire incident so insignificant that it never became a part of their folklore. Their stories contain only the vaguest recollection of the conquistadors. I've always rather admired that.”

I nodded. “And how're they doing these days?”

“Ah,” she said. “Well. When I was with them, they had perhaps the most sophisticated pharmacopoeia in the Amazon basin. In the world, perhaps. They used literally thousands of medicinal herbs. And hundreds of psychotropic drugs.”

She frowned. “Not too long ago I read an article written by an ethno-botanist who visited the Jivaro in Nineteen eighty-five looking for native medicines. He found one shaman whose most prized possession was a jar of Vick's VapoRub.” She pursed her lips, shook her head sadly. “The rain forests all around them are being burned away. The oil companies are drilling nearby. The Jivaro that I knew, their culture, their way of life, they're all gone now. Forever.”

I shrugged. “Maybe they like Vick's VapoRub.”

Another laugh. “Oh, I'm sure they do. And I'm sure they'll like television as well. And microwave pizzas. And polyester jumpsuits.” She frowned suddenly, shook her head, and then smiled. “Do forgive me, Mr. Croft. An occupational hazard. Anthropologists tend to become proprietary about the people with whom they've done their work.” She turned toward the door. “Ah, Lisa. Just in time. I was beginning to get silly.”

“Not you, Granny,” said Lisa Wright. “Never silly.” She set a silver tray on the roll-top desk and lifted from it a small glass of sherry and a cup and saucer. She handed the glass to her grandmother, the cup and saucer to me. We both thanked her. She returned to the desk, slid out the swivel chair and turned it around, took the other glass of sherry from the tray and then sat down, facing us. With her right forefinger she brushed a strand of hair away from her left eye. She smiled at me. I smiled back. I was beginning to wish I were ten years younger.

Alice Wright, back now in a world of sherry and afternoon tea, said, “So, Mr. Croft. You told Lisa you wanted to learn something about my father. What exactly did you mean?”

Once again I related the story that Daniel Begay had told me. From time to time I sipped at my tea, from time to time the two of them sipped at their sherry.

“These dreams the woman is having,” said Alice Wright when I finished. “Do they contain any details that might indicate where the remains are located?”

She had asked the question with perfect seriousness. Maybe she'd learned a thing or two from the Jivaro. I told her what Daniel Begay had said about the smell of flowers.

She nodded as though she were filing it mentally away.

I said, “Do you remember, Dr. Wright, your father bringing back the remains?”

“Please,” she said. “Doctors are people who play with tonsils. My name is Alice. And yes, of course I remember. He brought them back for me. The body of this man—Ganado, you said? It was my birthday present. I had just turned eleven.”

I sipped at my tea. “I see.” I didn't, of course. The guy couldn't afford a pair of roller skates? A bicycle?

Alice smiled. “My father was an unusual man, Joshua. Do you mind if I call you Joshua?”

“Please do.”

Another smile. “An unusual man, as I say. He encouraged me in whatever I did, in whatever I was interested. That summer, before he left for Arizona, I was interested in archaeology.”

I nodded. “So he brought you back a body.”

She cocked her head, smiling. “It really was rather a dreadful thing to do, wasn't it? Not from my perspective, not at the time, because naturally I was delighted. Absolutely thrilled. But from the Navajo perspective. In their eyes, of course, what he did was grave robbing.”

She sipped at her sherry. “You have to understand something, Joshua, by way of explanation. Not excuse, but explanation. Back then, even to most professional archaeologists, the remains they disinterred were simply puzzle pieces, with no more moral or spiritual content than the nuts and bolts of an Erector Set. If you backed one of these chaps into a corner, pointed out that the bones had once been a human being, he'd likely get very huffy and start prattling about Knowledge and The Search for Truth. You can't make an omelette, he might tell you, without breaking eggs. Well, then make something else, you might say, and quite reasonably, too. But the acquisition of knowledge is invariably a destructive process. The question is, finally, what value do we assign to the knowledge acquired, and what value to the thing destroyed?”

She looked at me as though she actually expected me to provide an answer.

“Beats me,” I said.

She laughed again. “And beats me, too. But the question itself would never have occurred to my father, for all his many merits. To him, it was self-evident that if the remains of this Indian furthered knowledge in general, and his daughter's in particular, then let's by all means cart it off to El Paso.”

She smiled. “To be fair to the man, he didn't really plan to keep the remains. He wanted me to see them, and to understand how he'd found them. He intended to return them to David Bedford, the man in charge of the dig at Canyon de Chelly.”

“But according to Daniel Begay,” I said, “Bedford and your father had an argument about your father taking the remains. Why would that be, if your father planned to bring them back?”

“Well, never having met David Bedford, I wouldn't know for certain. But I suspect there's a very simple explanation. Bedford was an archaeologist, and a good one, I gather. No archaeologist wants to see his puzzle piece get hauled away, off somewhere where he can't keep an eye on it. It might be damaged. Lost. Destroyed.” She sipped at her sherry. “And in fact the remains were lost.”

“Stolen when your father was killed.”

“Yes.”

“I know it's probably painful,” I said, “but do you think you can remember anything about his death?”

She shook her head. “There's no pain. Not now. Not for a long while. There was at the time, yes. It was I who found the body.”

I sipped at my tea. “Do you remember anything about that day? What the circumstances were?”

“Of course,” she said. “It was a Saturday morning. September the eighth, Nineteen twenty-five.” She pursed her lips slightly. “You know, I think I'd enjoy a cigarette. Lisa?”

Lisa frowned. “The doctor said no.”

“The doctor is forever saying no. He sounds like the virgin in a melodrama. A cigarette, dear.”

Lisa reached into the pocket of her vest, slipped out a packet of Marlboros and a Bic lighter. She crossed the room, handed them to her grandmother, then put her hands, arms akimbo, on her hips. “You know they're no good for you in the long run.”

Alice said, “In the long run, as Mr. Keynes once pointed out, we're all dead.” She took a cigarette from the pack, put it in her mouth, snapped the lighter aflame, lighted the cigarette. She sucked in the smoke, held it for a moment, blew it slowly out. She smiled up at Lisa, then handed her the pack and the Bic.

“You're an evil old woman,” Lisa said.

“Thank you, dear.” She turned to me. “September the eighth, Nineteen twenty-five.”

“Right.” I watched Lisa Wright walk back to her chair, and I began to wish that I were five years younger.

“I woke up at seven o'clock,” said Alice. Drily, dispassionately, taking an occasional puff from her Marlboro, she recounted the events of that day.

Coming out into the hallway she had seen that the door to her mother's room was still closed. The door to her father's room was open—her parents slept separately—and she came downstairs thinking she'd find him at breakfast, in the kitchen.

He wasn't and the house was silent. She wandered back into his study and it was there she found him, sprawled face down across the floor, wearing the clothes he had worn the night before.