Unnatural Selection

by Aaron Elkins

  Williams was an English writer who was researching a book (Movers and Shakers of the Earth) on personalities in the environmental movement. He had originally applied to be a consortium fellow himself but had been turned down by Kozlov as having no original contribution to offer. He had shown up anyway, staying at a B&B in town, and had interviewed some of the attendees for his book. Villarreal had denied his request for an interview with rather nasty condescension.

  But Williams had gotten his own back at the Methodist Hall session, pretty much commandeering the question-and-answer session. He had fired hard questions at Villarreal, at first about his sense of responsibility and regret for the deaths of the two students in the Bitterroot Wilderness Area. Villarreal had put him off with pro forma regrets—“these things happen.”

  “restoring the wilderness comes with a price.”

  “they obviously didn’t take proper precautions,” and so on. Many had been shocked at his indifference.

  Then it had turned personal. There was apparently a history of enmity between the two men, and an increasingly agitated Williams had made it clear that Villarreal was going to be “exposed” in the book he was writing.

  “Isn’t it true,” he’d demanded at one point, “that you never finished your Ph.D. at Cornell, even though you advertise yourself as Doctor Villarreal?”

  “That’s so,” Villarreal had responded, “but I do have a doctorate from Stanford.”

  “An honorary doctorate!” Williams had shrieked triumphantly. “And isn’t it true—”

  Villarreal had gotten contemptuously to his feet and outshouted him. “Isn’t it true that you’ve been playing second fiddle to me for years and just can’t stand it? Isn’t it true that you applied to this consortium and didn’t get in, while I did? Isn’t it true that you applied for the Cambridge research fellowship and didn’t get it because I did? And isn’t it true…”

  In the end, Kozlov had stepped in and asked Williams to leave, although it took a constable who was in attendance to make it happen.

  Villarreal had waited until Williams had been escorted out before getting in the last word. “And if anybody wants to know what I’m really sorry about,” he’d declared brutally, “what I really regret—it’s that they killed that bear in Montana. There was no need for that. What was the point? Human stupidity is not an excuse for murdering a rare, beautiful wild animal.”

  “A cold fish, all right,” Gideon said now.

  “It so happens I agree with him,” Joey declared, or rather blurted. “Intellectually speaking.”

  “Oh, pish-tush,” Liz said with a flap of her hand. “You do not.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Julie.

  “Yes, I do!” Joey’s voice went up half an octave, coming perilously close to a screech. “All right, sure, Edgar was no prize as a human being, but that doesn’t mean that what he said wasn’t right. I’ll trade a human life for a grizzly’s life any day of the week. There’s no difference between Edgar and me on that score.” He glared at the three of them, his tic going full blast.

  “Sure, there is,” Liz said, using her thumb to flip another chocolate-covered cookie to him, which he deftly snatched out of the air. “That sonofabitch really believed that shit. You don’t.”

  Joey started to reply, then grinned and hung his head. “Maybe not every word.”

  “Look who’s here,” Julie said glancing up. “Victor.”

  Gideon followed her gaze with a mixture of curiosity and dread. If there was one certified wacko in the group, he thought, it had to be Victor Waldo, editor of the Journal of Spiritual and Sacred Ecology and founder of the Crystal Butte Earth/Body Center, located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. (“Effortlessly absorb timeless shamanistic techniques for healing, growth, and homeostasis in our authentic Kirghiz mountain yurts.”)

  Once again, however, Gideon was surprised at what he saw. He’d half-expected a bearded dropout in a tie-dyed sweatshirt, or maybe fringed buckskin, or with a ratty Afghan thrown over his shoulders, but Victor Waldo’s long chin was clean-shaven and his lean body was neatly attired in a tweed sport coat and well-pressed trousers. With his short, steel-gray hair, his proboscis of a nose—lifted slightly as if searching for an elusive scent—his pale, cold, intelligent eyes, and an all-around dryness of manner, he could have passed with ease for a professor of microeconomics. It was very hard indeed to imagine him thumping ceremonial drums, or whatever it was they did in an authentic Kirghiz mountain yurt.

  “Hey, Victor, how you doing?” Liz yelled. “Come join us. Is Kathie with you?”

  Waldo waited until he came within normal speaking range to reply. “No, she isn’t. As a matter of fact, Kathie and I are no longer… No, she isn’t. We’ve separated.”

  That prompted a knowing, embarrassed glance between Liz and Julie, and they quickly moved on to another subject. “Pull up a chair, Victor,” Liz said. “Have you heard about Edgar?”

  He had not, and after the bear story had been told once again and Waldo had expressed the requisite astonishment and a distinctly cool minimum of sorrow at his loss, Gideon, in the interest of furthering his own knowledge, apologized for never having read the Journal, and asked if Waldo would be kind enough to give him some idea of what exactly the province of spiritual and sacred ecology comprised. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Liz wince.

  Like any expert asked to talk about his field, Waldo obliged with an enthusiasm that brought a stony glitter to his washed-out blue eyes. “Certainly. In a nutshell, it provides an alternative paradigm to the non-relational ways of being in the world that have traditionally dominated Western thought. It relies on a model that aims for a synergistic relationship with other species and ecosystems. It explores the dialectic between…”

  Good gosh, Gideon thought, he even talks like a professor of microeconomics.

  “… indigenous world views, earth-connected spirituality—”

  The disembodied voice from the loudspeakers came to the rescue by resuming its tranquil monologue: “And now, as the beautiful Isle of St. Mary’s comes into our near view, its rocks reveal the ravages of time and tide, against which—”

  Everyone took this as a signal to gather up belongings and move toward the exits. After quick handshakes all around, Julie and Gideon found themselves out on deck in the disembarkation line as the ferry slid sidewise up to the Hugh Town quay.

  “What did you think of Victor?” a smiling Julie asked.

  “Interesting. Not that I had a clue to what he was talking about.”

  “No, nobody does. But he is interesting.”

  “Why did Kozlov choose him? Is it just one more way of annoying the establishment?

  “No, I don’t think so. I think Vasily is simply a genuinely open-minded person who doesn’t write off people because they don’t happen to agree with his own views on science.” She paused for a beat. “Not like some people I know.”

  “Hey…” Gideon said, laughing.

  Julie pointed to a green promontory topped by a low, gray, undeniably Elizabethan castle that was surrounded by a walled, star-shaped keep.

  “That’s Garrison Hill,” she said, “and that’s Kozlov’s place on top of it. Star Castle.”

  “Looks nice.”

  “It is. There’ll be a van on the dock to pick up our bags for us, and we’re early, so what do you say we stretch our legs a little and walk up to the castle? I’ll give you a tour of Hugh Town on the way. It won’t take long.”

  “Love to.”

  Hugh Town was more village than town, a narrow, quarter-mile-long neck of land connecting Garrison Hill to the rest of the island, bordered by Town Beach on one side and the brilliant white sand of Porthcressa Beach on the other. Only three streets wide, it had a couple of banks, a chemist, three or four pubs and hotels, as many restaurants, a not so super “supermarket,” and a few guest houses and craft shops. All in all, a quiet, pleasant, prosperous, not overly quaint British village of
the sort that had once been typical of England but was rarely to be found now, certainly not within fifty miles of London.

  Its particular glory was in the rock gardens and in the cascading masses of flowers that were everywhere, sustained by a subtropical climate that felt more like Bermuda than Britain. Even with stopping often to admire the plantings, in less than an hour they had covered every foot of Hugh Street, the Strand, and the Parade, had walked up Garrison Hill Lane, and had entered the castle grounds through a massive stone gateway with 1593 carved deeply into the lintel.

  Seen from inside the thick walls, Star Castle was not quite as impressive as it had seemed from the dock. A squat three stories high, with little in the way of ornamentation, it had been built with fortification in mind, not high living. It had stood without apparent decline for over four hundred years now and looked good for another four hundred at least.

  Kozlov was not there to greet them. They were met in a tiny office-reception area by his secretary, a pale, soft man—like some delicate, vulnerable crustacean that had come into the light without its shell—who presented a quiet but distinctly starchy mien. (“I am Mr. Kozlov’s majordomo. My name is Mr. Moreton.”) He showed them to the guest rooms on the second floor, and opened a door on which there was a marble plaque: the duke of Hamilton room.

  Inside it was sparely but comfortably furnished: a big four-poster bed, two chairs, an ancient armoire, and a folding writing desk.

  “And who was the Duke of Hamilton?” Gideon asked. “Was he a guest here?”

  “He was a prisoner in this room in the year 1643. The rooms, you see, are named for the many notables who have been imprisoned here.”

  “Ah. And what did the duke do?”

  “I understand his loyalty to the monarchy was held in question. He was believed to be a supporter of Cromwell, although there is room for doubt on the matter.”

  “Last year,” Julie said, “I was next door in the Sir John Wildman Room. He was imprisoned for being disloyal to Cromwell and supporting the monarchy.”

  “Times change,” Gideon observed.

  Mr. Moreton’s hand swept the surroundings. “I’m told the duke found his lodgings here quite comfortable.”

  “And I know we will too,” said Julie.

  Pleased, Mr. Moreton brushed a finger along either side of an immaculately trimmed, pencil-thin mustache. “The reception is at six,” he told them. “A number of local dignitaries have been invited.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Moreton,” Gideon said.

  “Dinner will be at seven-thirty, in the dungeon. Madam. Sir.” He closed the door soundlessly behind him.

  “Now there’s a line that hasn’t been heard since The Addams Family,”“ Gideon remarked when he’d left. ”Dinner in the dungeon. What do we get, gruel?“

  “I doubt it,” Julie said, laughing. “As dungeons go, it’s pretty nice. You’ll see, you’ll be impressed.”

  “I’m already impressed. I never met a real major domo before.”

  A few minutes later, with their bags open on the beds, she paused in her arranging of the bags’ contents in the armoire. (This was a task that always fell to Julie. The alternative was chaos, bewilderment, and wrinkled clothes.)

  “Gideon?”

  “Mm?” He was wandering absently around the room, testing out the window seat that was cut into the three-foot-thick walls, running his hand over the rough-plastered walls themselves, the age-darkened wood of the eighteenth-century armoire, and the smooth round columns of the bed, and taking in the primitively carved, dark-painted beams that supported the low ceilings. “Those are real adze marks on them,” he mused, his head tipped back. He was able to reach them with his hand and feel the delicate scoring from the individual adze blows. “Probably the original sixteenth-century beams.”

  “Gideon, tonight’s reception—you will be there for that, won’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you’ll be nice to everyone?”

  He looked at her, surprised. “When am I not nice to everyone? I was nice to Joey Dillard, wasn’t I? And he was wearing buttons.”

  “Well, I was just thinking… if it’s like last time, Vasily will be making a sort of speech to set the agenda, and he does have some, uh, odd ideas about evolution and things that even I can spot. If he should say something that isn’t exactly accurate, you won’t jump all over him, will you?”

  Gideon sighed. “I can’t win, can I? Last night you were upset because I didn’t want to participate. Today all you want is for me to keep my lip buttoned.”

  “I just want… Oh, come on, you know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “Julie,” he said, as they closed the door to their room behind them, “you can count on me. I will be the very model of decorum and restraint; the perfect spouse.”

  THREE

  AND at first, he was.

  With the weather as mild as it was, the reception was held outdoors on the castle ramparts. Eighteen feet wide and bordered by sturdy, four-foot-high stone parapets, these earth-filled, star-shaped walls (with cannon ports, some empty, some with rusted seventeenth-century cannons in the points of the stars) surrounded the castle itself, creating a deep, narrow passageway that circled the building on the inside. On the outside, the ramparts overlooked a dry moat, with a wonderful view over Hugh Town harbor, the bright, blue-green sea beyond, and the low, mounded green silhouettes of the nearby islands. Kozlov or a previous owner had sodded the top of the thick walls so that there was now a rich, green lawn underfoot, with a few old picnic tables scattered about, and a well-stocked bar that had been set up for the occasion.

  Vasily Kozlov, dressed in a bright yellow T-shirt, Bermudas, and sandals, was there to greet them—and to exuberantly embrace Julie— when they arrived at the top of the stone steps that led to the ramparts. Striking in appearance, with a short, bouncing, bullet-shaped body and an amazing head of corkscrewed white hair (he looked like Pablo Picasso in a fright wig, a magazine article had once said), he pumped Gideon’s hand—an energetic, two-handed grip—and beamed up at him.

  “So, comes to my house famous Mr. Skeleton Detective! Welcome, welcome!”

  “Thanks for having me, Mr. Kozlov. I’m glad to be here.”

  “Please, please, is ‘Vasily.” You come sit in consortium, yes? Any time, any time. Talk all you want. What you say?“

  “If I do, do I get a discount on lodging costs?” It had made Julie laugh. He thought it might do the same for Kozlov.

  It did. “Harr, harr,” Kozlov rumbled, reaching up to thump Gideon on the shoulder and turning to welcome the next of his guests, still chuckling. “Is funny.”

  “Looks as if you’ll just have to resign yourself to that twenty bucks a day,” Julie said. “Come on, let me introduce you to some of the others.” She took his arm and led him toward a group milling near the bar. As they approached, a tall, gaunt man with a gold chain around his neck and overdue for a haircut, shifted his highball to his left hand and stuck out his right. “Hello, Gideon, I’d heard you were coming. It’s been a while.”

  Gideon stopped, puzzled. He freely admitted to being more generally absentminded than most, but not when it came to people. People, he remembered. But this cadaverous, round-shouldered guy with the lined face and the sour twist to his mouth, and the gold chain…

  “Uh—it’s nice to—” he began.

  Julie rescued him. “Why, hello, Rudy. How are you?” Gideon’s heart contracted. This grim, walking ghost was Rudy Walker, the friend of his youth, the man he’d been so looking forward to seeing again? Where was the easy, open-faced smile, the lively, cocky tilt of the head, the suggestion of good fun just around the corner? He recognized him now, but the changes were very great. It was as if he were looking at a faded monochrome photograph of the full-color Rudy he’d known. It had been more than twenty years, of course, and Rudy, older than Gideon, would be pushing fifty now, but still…

  “—to see you again, Rudy,” he finished, taking the proffered h
and. It was clammy, possibly from the drink he’d been holding. “How’s Fran, is she here?”

  “Fran died,” Rudy said without expression. “She got cancer.” Ah, was that it, then? They had been extravagantly, almost embarrassingly, in love, Rudy and Fran. Was it her death that had changed him so? It wasn’t so hard to imagine. Gideon too had lost his much-loved first wife some eight years ago, in an automobile accident. Nora had been the center of his life, his anchor, the reason that he drew breath, and her death had undone him. For one long, terrible year he was drowning in grief, unable to come to terms with it. But then, as more time passed, the extremity of his sorrow—of all his emotions—diminished, and he felt himself dwindling into a husk, without aims, or interests, or passions, isolated from everything and interacting with others by rote. He looked on the outside world as a sort of television set; the power was on but it was permanently tuned between channels, so that there was life in there somewhere, but it was just static and fuzz, unimportant and without meaning. He couldn’t remember—literally could not remember—how it was that one smiled, and when he tried, it hurt his face.

  And then, astonishingly, wondrously, along had come the funny, pretty park ranger Julie Tendler, and he had thawed, fallen in love once more, and come thankfully to life again. But his meeting her at all had been so random, so unlikely—she had been peripherally involved in the finding of some remains he’d been asked to examine in Olympic National Park—it would have been frighteningly easy to have missed each other. What would have happened then? Without Julie, would he have turned into Rudy?