Lima was where we met James, and the whole shrunken head business began. Without James, Martha never could have found the shrunken head she was so determined to acquire. Who knows why? At first, we had no idea we would have more than a casual interest in this good-looking American man when he introduced himself during after-dinner coffee in the hotel’s fashionable circular reception room. This area’s beautiful ambiance encouraged socialization among the international guests whatever the time of day, whether sipping afternoon tea or evening beverages. The Rotunda Room was as famous for its Pisco Sours, the national grape brandy drink of Peru, as it was for its exquisite stained glass, domed ceiling. Those Pisco Sours were the potent drinks that had undone an unwary me when flying over the Nasca Lines. I can’t handle doing too many famous things at one time.

In this convivial atmosphere it was easy to discover that James was an attorney/engineer from Galveston, Texas, presently living and working in Caracas, Venezuela. He was probably in his thirties with a charming, adventurous spirit. We immediately accepted his suggestion for an evening stroll around San Martin Plaza. His curiosity and ours had been piqued by the military vans still circling the square. After checking out the scene, we decided calm had been restored and we could safely turn our thoughts to tomorrow’s plans. We didn’t see James again until very late the night before our departure from Lima, and we didn’t speak to him then. He was in the Rotunda Room at the hotel, seated on one of the silk sofas, entwined with a senorita.

Next morning after we boarded our Ecuadoriana Airlines flight to Quito, Ecuador, who should get on the plane but James! He was flying to Quito, too. At the time I was being besieged by an ebullient lady who had changed to a seat across the aisle so she could tell me all about what to see and do in Ecuador. She also volunteered a ride to our hotel by her husband, who would be meeting her. Then she set her frenzied sights on James. She asked someone to swap seats with her so she could sit by him as she ordered her second Cuba Libre. I didn’t know anyone drank those rum drinks anymore. Soon, she asked James to hold her empty glass while she moved up a few rows to chat with someone else who had caught her interest. Before the one-hour and 45-minute flight was over, she had switched seats four times, but she disappeared in a flurry after the plane landed. Since she had also offered James a ride because the three of us coincidentally were staying at the same hotel in Quito, we knew we needed to hurry through Customs and try to catch up with her.

Martha directed James and me, “Go get our luggage and bring it to the exit. I’m going to get acquainted with the Customs folks.”

James had never seen an airport act like Martha’s and he was impressed. When he and I got to the counter, Customs was excitedly tending to an obviously distressed woman. Martha was feigning a heart attack.

James and I explained, “We know her. We’re traveling together. We will take her to a doctor.”

Martha never failed to surprise me with her distractions and deceptions at Customs. To their great relief, they could not wave all of us through fast enough. Outside the terminal, our new friend was nowhere to be seen, so James in fluent Spanish quickly engaged a cab, gallantly loaded our luggage, and paid the fare.

After getting settled in our new hotel room, Martha and I thought we should reciprocate his kindness by inviting James to join us in the downstairs bar for a drink. He was delighted and said, “My girlfriend is meeting me at 4:00 P.M., and I would like to bring her with me if that’s all right. I think you will enjoy knowing her.”

Since he hadn’t introduced his Lima girlfriend, we were pleased that he wanted us to meet his Quito one. And we were pleased. She was lovely 20-year-old Carmen, a university student who spoke four languages, worked at the Italian Embassy, and played on the national volleyball team. The most interesting thing to us, however, was the discovery that her father, a professor, had a shrunken head in his collection of Amazonian artifacts. After Martha explained how desperately long she had wanted a shrunken head herself, Carmen telephoned her father to ask where Martha might go to buy one. He named a shop that dealt in rare native crafts.

James was now as excited as we were to have an actual lead in this unheard-of quest and insisted, “Let’s leave right now and go find that shop.”

When we got to the shop, there was no head and no source for one any time soon. As true anthropologists would be, we were tremendously disappointed. This practice of shrinking heads supposedly had been outlawed in 1950. The Shuar tribesmen, a sub-group of the primitive Jivaro clan living deep in Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonia, were accustomed to taking the heads of their enemies, removing the bones, and boiling the heads in a big pot long enough to cause shrinkage when dry. That procedure, followed by a hot sand treatment, successfully perfected permanent trophies. Shrunken heads aren’t available in quantity today, nor is the demand too great. And the government severely prohibits any traffic in human heads.

The shop owner, recognizing Martha’s seriousness of purpose, did suggest a possible contact in the Old Town of Quito, so with Carmen as our expedition leader we continued our search among the crowded buildings and splendid Spanish Colonial churches of that fascinating area. One contact led to another. Finally, we climbed some narrow stairs to the second-floor shop belonging to an Indian man, who was wearing the typical striped serape and untypical electric-blue-lens glasses.

He said, “I think I can locate a recent (?!) one in one hour, and I will bring it to you at the hotel at seven o’clock tonight.”
We were elated! Feeling very self-satisfied, we returned to our mountaintop hotel, spectacularly situated high above the city, which now twinkled like a carpet of lights in the evening darkness. As we sat in the lobby, our eyes stayed glued to the entrance. No way could the four of us have overlooked our purveyor of heads. But after an hour’s wait, he had not appeared. To mollify our disappointment, we concluded the evening with a candlelight dinner in the penthouse restaurant, far removed in thought and time from primitive practices.

First thing the next morning, Martha and I hurried down to the lobby gift shop. We needed to get in mind the places to include on our city tour that day. The procedure we used to determine all of our tours was to examine all the postcards for sale. Any setting worthy of being pictured on a postcard was probably worth a visit by us. While we considered pictures of the tall monument on the equator, dozens of old churches, and the remarkable stature of the Virgin-standing-on-the-back-of-a-turtle-sprawled-over-the-top-of-a-concrete-world, Martha managed to drop a dozen or more cards on the floor of the tiny shop. The one other customer, who had been looking for an English newspaper, politely stooped down and helped us gather up the spilled cards. His after-shave lotion smelled of ginger, and he had on a conservatively cut tweed jacket of obvious quality. With a British accent and a genteel manner, he acknowledged our appreciation of his assistance with the slightest bow.

I think the first time Martha dropped the cards was accidental, but the second time was intentional, I’m sure. She did it with such flair. She knocked over the entire cylindrical metal rack, sailing cards everywhere. The English gentleman unhesitatingly began collecting cards from behind the counter, out of the magazine stacks, and located some in the rack of ties for sale, all the while managing to maintain his dignity. Then he laughed and introduced himself as Londoner with his doctorate in law who was here on business as a director of a Brazilian corporation.

Martha’s attention was diverted by the sight of Blue Eyes in his serape entering the lobby from the front door. It was then 9:30 in the morning. We knew South Americans moved at a leisurely pace, but more than 14 hours late! Anyway, she rushed out to meet him. He was empty-handed but told her in halting English that he had located a museum-quality head and would bring it to the hotel at 5:00 P.M. Fortuitously, James happened through the lobby right them and promised he would meet us in the lobby for the transaction.

But he said, “We must all go to my room. Negotiating in the lobby would be too public and negotiating in your room would be too dangerous. Blue Eyes will know just where to return to steal back the valuable head.”

In the meantime, the English gentleman had asked me to dinner.

  We could scarcely devote our total concentration to the novelties of the day because the evening held such exciting possibilities. Not that dinner with the Baron, as Martha called him, was one of those. I wanted to participate in the whole shrunken head scenario, but wasn’t too sure about the part with the medical examination that Martha intended to give the head. Martha assured me that she and James would determine the head’s authenticity and encouraged me to leave them to the details. I think she was trying to set me up with the Baron on purpose.

At 5:00 P.M. James joined us in the lobby to meet the headhunter. He didn’t come and didn’t come. Finally, at 6:30 he came through the doors in his blue glasses, carrying a croaker sack—that’s Southern for burlap bag—and motioned us toward the elevators. We followed and gave no indication that the direction we were going wasn’t to our room.

James turned on all his lights to provide the brightest view for Martha’s scrutiny. When I saw her pull out that leathery brown head about the size of a man’s fist with glossy black hair at least 12 inches long and begin to examine its ears, I bolted out of the room. I decided I’d call the Baron and accept his invitation.

A little later, as I was showering, Martha tore into the room so exhilarated that paroxysms of coughing overcame her. When they finally subsided, she managed to blare out, “The head is real! I’ve checked it thoroughly.”

She assured me where was no possibility of its being a monkey’s head, which was sometimes foisted off as the real thing. This one was definitely a human head! She was beside herself with joy, except she didn’t have enough money in cash and traveler’s checks to pay for it.

“Could you lend me some money?”
She knew that wasn’t likely because I always traveled with the bare minimum, but I dried off and scrounged up a hundred dollars. That still left her short, but she thought she could go back and bargain a little better.

The Baron took me to a charming restaurant in a converted Colonial home. He was extremely well traveled and thoroughly grounded in the politics of the continent. Because he was so worldly, I forced into the conversation a little snippet about my delight in having watched the International Polo Matches in Brunei when the Prince of Malaysia played.

“Which one?” he asked.

“Which one who?” I puzzled.

He informed me the king had several sons and they all played polo. Then, he added, his wife raised polo ponies somewhere in the English countryside. I didn’t interrupt his conversation again. Besides, I was eager to end the evening and get back to the room to find out what Martha had done.

She was there, after having had dinner with James, smiling and smoking. Cautiously, I looked around for the croaker sack. She said, “I bought the shrunken head, but it’s not in the room. James thought it best to put it in a big safe deposit box in the hotel’s vault.”

Of course!
Then she told me that Blue Eyes refused to come down on his price, so James had lent her $400 to pay the difference. To whom but trustworthy Martha would a stranger—practically a stranger—lend $400, knowing he’d never see her again? She had assured James she was an honorable woman and gave him a post-dated check drawn on her North Carolina bank.

James was proud to have been a vital part of this successful mission, and because of his involvement he called to seriously caution Martha about the security necessary for her extremely valuable and desirable possession. We were leaving for the Galapagos Islands the next day, and he was off to another country on business, so James strongly advised Martha not to take the head with her but to entrust its custody to Carmen’s father.

Carmen answered Martha’s telephoned request with pleasure. She said she would rush over first thing in the morning, get the head, and take it to her father’s secure office. To my great relief, we could leave for the Galapagos unencumbered by a shrunken head.

And what became of the shrunken head? The Smithsonian turned it down. No relatives wanted it, and not a single friend asked for it. Yet, to this day, continual revelations unfold about its exotic history.

Martha’s sister Betsy, as executrix of Martha’s estate, was left with the problem of proper disposal of the head. Although Betsy moves her deceased beloved cat, whom she had stuffed by a taxidermist, to its favorite places in various rooms of the house—the sofa, the hearth, the bookshelves—she did not wish to have the shrunken head inhabiting her home as well.

Appearing at the right time was the right person (synchronicity, again?) to solve her dilemma. Her pest control man professed his keen interest in heads—all kinds, stone, bone, ceramic—and he always hoped he could have a human one. Problem solved. There could be no better recipient, someone who cared and would keep her informed of any pertinent discoveries.

The pest control man’s exhaustive research of shrunken heads led him to contact an authority in California. After a thorough examination of the many photographs sent him by the current owner, the authority verified the head was human. But he pronounced the head to be Caucasian, not Indian! Traces of a mustache and reddish tints in the hair definitely proved the beheaded person was not a native of Amazonia! Well, what a story Martha could have invented about that, starting with just how and when and where Blue Eyes in Ecuador had gotten it.

The California authority speculated that the head belonged to a European or Scandinavian, probably randomly killed after shrunken heads became prized and expensive collectibles brought back to Europe by the early explorers.

The pest control man’s matter-of-fact comment was, “That guy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Now, the head has ended its journey—from Ecuador to Columbia to Panama to Chapel Hill to Birmingham—where it is respectfully and proudly protected. I don’t think it has any more tales to tell.