Unnatural Selection

by Aaron Elkins

  Very probably, yes. Well, without the gold chain, but he’d certainly been well on the way. Julie’s hand was still warm in the crook of his elbow. Gently, he covered it with his own.

  “I’m so sorry, Rudy, I didn’t know. She was a terrific person.”

  “Yes,” Rudy said, managing a small, pinched grimace of a smile. He shrugged and took a double-slug from his drink. “Well, you’ve certainly come a long way since Madison, Gideon. I’ve followed your career.”

  Gideon jumped at the chance to change the subject. “And I yours, Rudy,” he said, not entirely honestly. “You’ve made quite a name for yourself too.”

  The truth was he’d pretty much forgotten about Rudy Walker until Julie told him that he was one of the consortium participants. Then he’d looked him up and found an impressive string of articles and monographs that he’d contributed to ecology journals, popular magazines, and conference proceedings. Rudy had indeed made a name for himself, first as an articulate defender of America’s remaining pristine wilderness, and then, in a famous, or infamous, Atlantic magazine piece, he’d reversed course and come out in favor of opening up the wilds to roads, cars, and even—talk about anathema to environmentalists—snowmobiles.

  “If snowmobiles are the only way to see our great national parks in winter (and mostly, they are),” he’d written, “then I say let’s have the snowmobiles. Sure they’re noisy, sure they pollute, but so do cars in the summer. So do people, wherever they go. If the more extreme environmentalists had their way, human beings would be prohibited from our national parks altogether, so that no one annoyed the deer, or the bears, or the moose, or the titmice. But what’s the point of preserving a wilderness no one can see? Whose enjoyment are we preserving it for? The titmice’s? I don’t think so. In my book, people come before titmice.”

  It had turned him into a pariah overnight.

  “Quite a name is right,” he said now. “I’m the man they love to hate. The whole damn ecology crowd sees me as a traitor to the cause. Yea, I am an abomination to mine own kind. Ever since Black February.”

  “Black February?”

  “The date of the piece in the Atlantic. February 2003. Before then, they loved me, couldn’t get enough of me. But now…” He trailed off, darkly shaking his head.

  “I know the way it can be,” Gideon said. “We gentle academics can get pretty brutal when you step on our pet theories.”

  “They actually hiss me at the meetings, did you know that? Can you imagine? At what are supposed to be scholarly conferences? Sometimes they walk out on my presentations.” Rudy had a rigid, skeletal grin on his face. “They wait until I get to the lectern, then get up and leave, all together, just in case I might miss the point.”

  Gideon lifted his shoulders in sympathy. Over time, that kind of treatment alone would have been enough to sour Rudy, never mind losing Fran. “That sounds rough, Rudy. I don’t know if I agree altogether with your position, but I give you credit for sticking to it.”

  “They’re in love with the notion of biodiversity,” Rudy said bitterly, mostly to himself. “It’s thought diversity they can’t stand.”

  “Well…” Gideon said, searching for something to drop into the awkward pause, “… how’s your little girl doing?” He struggled to come up with her name. “Little Mary, although I suppose she’s not so little any more. She was only five or six the last time I saw her. I bet—”

  But Rudy, festering over his treatment in academia, was jiggling the ice in his otherwise empty glass and looking longingly toward the bar.

  “Well, look,” Gideon said, “why don’t we have a pint in town one of these days and catch up, just the two of us?”

  “Sure, that’d be good,” Rudy said absently. “Well, then…” He smiled that lame, pathetic smile again and stalked off to the bar.

  “Sad,” Gideon said. “Was he like that at the last meeting?”

  “Oh, he lightened up about once every three days, but most of the time, yes. Not easy to get to know. I learned more about him these last five minutes than I did in a whole week last time. I never knew he had any children. I never even knew he’d been married.”

  “Oh, yes, he and Fran were… well, the way you and I are. I envied them.” He shook his head and sighed. “Come on, I could use a drink myself.”

  At the bar, drinks were being poured by two young women in decorous Ye Olde Tea Shoppe uniforms—shiny, black, mid-calf-length dresses with scalloped white collars, white buttons down the front, short sleeves with pointy, turned-up white cuffs, and little white headpieces to match. Julie took a glass of red wine from the row that had already been poured. Gideon asked for a Glenlivet single-malt Scotch served neat. At twenty dollars a day, he felt entitled to splurge. As they clinked glasses, Liz came up.

  “I have to borrow your wife for a minute,” she said, drawing Julie off. “I need some advice. Girl stuff.”

  Gideon raised his glass in acquiescence and took a sip, relishing the velvety, peaty flow that warmed him from gullet to stomach. “You like poker?” a voice said into his ear, Vasily Kozlov having sidled up to his elbow.

  “Poker? Sure, sometimes.”

  “Is old tradition here. Ten o’clock, in dining hall, every night. Last hand midnight, penny-ante, ten pence limit, three raises, just for fun, you know? Mens only. Shall you come?”

  “I don’t know about every night, Vasily, but you bet, I’ll come by tonight. Thanks for asking me.”

  “Bring plenty money,” Kozlov said with a twinkling leer as he threaded off through the crowd.

  “I got invited to the poker game,” Gideon told Julie when she got back from whatever advice-giving Liz had needed.

  “Ah, I thought he’d ask you. Are you going?”

  “Tonight, anyway. I haven’t played poker in a long time; should be fun.”

  “Are you good at it?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. I’m figuring on getting that twenty bucks back.”

  “Good luck. They tell me Vasily turns into a shark when he gets behind a handful of cards.”

  “So do I. Wait and see. I’ll buy you lunch tomorrow with my winnings.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Julie said neutrally. “Oh, and here’s the last of our Fellows. Donald Pinckney, this is my husband, Gideon.”

  “Happy to meet you, Donald.” Gideon stuck out his hand and smiled, but his heart sank: another guy wearing a button.

  But this bright yellow one made him laugh. If we’re not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?

  Donald Pinckney, he remembered, was the pro-hunting voice at the consortium, but he looked about as much like Gideon’s idea of a hunter as Joey Dillard looked like an investigative reporter. A tall, balding, bookish man in a crisp blue linen sport coat and bow tie, with mild, seemingly myopic eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, he seemed like the last person in the world who would willingly be found crouching in a cold, wet duck blind at dawn, with a shotgun to his shoulder.

  “And I you, Gideon,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your books, but—”

  “What? You haven’t read A Structuro-Functional Approach to Pleistocene Hominid Phylogeny} I can hardly believe what I’m hearing.”

  “I need hardly say, however, that it is quite naturally on my must-read list at present,” Pinckney said without missing a beat. “But what I was going to say was that I saw you on The Learning Channel not long ago and was extremely impressed by what you’re able to deduce from a few skeletal fragments.”

  “Only if they’re the right fragments,” Gideon said modestly. “Fortunately, the TV people had the right fragments. I’ve read a few of your pieces, Donald, and I have to say you make a heck of a good case for hunting as a positive conservation measure; I’m almost convinced myself.”

  “I’m gratified to hear it.”

  “What’s your favorite game?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I was asking what kind of animals you like to hunt—deer, du
cks, um…” What else did hunters go after? “… elk, geese, um…”

  “What kind of—” Pinckney blinked at him, pained. “Are you serious? Do I look to you to be the sort of man who’d go around with a gun, shooting ducks and geese? Let alone gutting them and all the rest of it?” He gave a small shudder. “No, thank you.”

  “But I thought—I mean, don’t you—”

  “Donald is an advocate of ethical, environmentally sensitive hunting,” Julie said, enjoying this. “It doesn’t mean that he likes doing it himself.”

  “Any more than I would enjoy electrocuting people, which I wouldn’t,” Pinckney explained, “just because I support capital punishment, which I do.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Gideon said, with enough doubt in his voice that Pinckney felt it necessary to expand.

  “I was an administrator with the Pennsylvania Department of Fish and Wildlife for twenty-one years, Gideon, and in that time I moderated a good many meetings with various lobbying and pressure groups. Against my own instincts, I eventually concluded that, motives aside, the pro-hunting lobby had an extremely sound approach to wildlife conservation; a good deal sounder—and considerably less shrill—than the anti-hunting groups.” He directed a disparaging flick of his head in the direction of Joey Dillard, who was busy proselytizing a small, captive audience a few yards away. “I’ve been saying so ever since, that’s all.”

  He looked again toward where Joey was holding forth. “Would you mind excusing me? I feel a strong need to go and correct whatever distortions of reality our earnest young friend is inflicting on those unfortunate people. I’m very happy to know you, Gideon.” He nodded briskly at Julie. “Julene.”

  There was the delicate sound of a musical triangle being rung for attention, and they turned to see the pale, stately Mr. Moreton standing in front of one of the gun ports, delicately striking it with a metal rod that he held with pinky extended. Tink. Tink. Tink.

  Kozlov, who had clambered onto the two stone steps leading up to the port, waved happily to his guests, arms high, like a feisty bantamweight entering the ring. The sun, setting directly behind him, turned his wild hair into a halo of steel wool.

  “Here comes the speech,” Julie said. “Remember, you promised.”

  But Kozlov uttered only four words, thoroughly garbled, but full of good cheer.

  “Hawkay, evwerybawdyss… lat’s itt!”

  “What did the man say?” someone next to Gideon asked. “Was he speaking Russian?”

  “No, English,” Gideon said. “He said, ”Okay, everybody, let’s eat.“ ” And to Julie: “And I’m certainly not going to argue with that.”

  THE dungeon was indeed “pretty nice,” as dungeons went, with coves and niches that roughly corresponded to the castle’s star-shaped exterior, and a paramecium-shaped bar in the small, open central area. The rough-finished stone walls bore a clean coat of white paint and were adorned with eighteenth-century weaponry and navigational equipment. At one end of the bar, a bronze plate screwed to the top said: “African hardwood from the wreck of HMS Retort, sunk by French gunfire off the Stones in 1799.”

  Because there was no single space large enough to hold all the guests at one table, people were seated in groups of three and four in the various niches. Gideon’s place was at a table also apparently made from the remains of the unfortunate Retort, along with Rudy Walker and Madeleine Goodfellow, the director of the Isles of Scilly Museum in Hugh Town. Earlier, Madeleine had announced that on Wednesday, the consortium’s midpoint, the museum would be pleased to host a picnic-dinner for the participants on Holgate’s Green, the pleasant little park at the other end of the village. Kozlov had graciously accepted on behalf of all.

  The other person at the table, according to the place cards, was Cheryl Pinckney, Donald’s wife, to whom Gideon had been introduced at the reception. But her chair was empty.

  Madeleine, a buxom, amiable woman in her fifties who wore her glasses on a lanyard and several rounds of jangling jewelry on her wrist, and who was given to knowledgeable if somewhat disjointed prattling, made conversation easy—or rather, unnecessary—at first by talking at some length about the history of the castle while the roasted-vegetable salads were served and eaten. Star Castle had been built in 1593 by order of Queen Elizabeth, as a defensive response to the “Spanish Menace,” and had often seen action through the centuries. As for the dungeon in which they presently sat, yes, it had been used as a prison for enemy sailors and soldiers early in the seventeenth century. Later, when the Scillies had become a sort of in-country exile for aristocrats who had gotten themselves in trouble of one kind or another with the crown, Star Castle had once again served as a prison. But this time its inhabitants, being of a higher class, were usually transferred directly from the Tower of London and lodged—often with their servants in attendance—in the “apartments” in which the consortium participants were now staying. In 1646, the future Charles II, on the run from the Roundheads, had taken refuge at the castle; and in 1847 Queen Victoria had taken tea in what had then been, and still was, the lounge on the second floor. In 1921, the Prince of Wales, later to become the Duke of Windsor, had lunched…

  After a while, this subject, extensive as it was, petered out, and conversation slowed to a crawl, what with Cheryl’s being absent and Rudy as good as absent. He sat in silence, drawn in on himself like a bird in a pelting rain, moodily nursing his drink and no doubt brooding upon the vindictive consequences visited upon free thinkers who had the temerity to challenge the established orthodoxies of their field.

  “And what is your field, Gideon?” Madeleine asked with a well-bred show of interest as the salads were cleared away. She had a fluty, mezzo-soprano voice that would have gone perfectly with a lorgnette, Gideon thought with a smile, suddenly realizing who it was she reminded him of. She could have doubled in looks, and even in manner, for Margaret Dumont, that grande-dame of the silver screen whom Groucho Marx had persecuted and punctured with such relentless glee in movie after movie. (“Captain, this leaves me speechless.”

  “Well, see that you remain that way.”

  “Mr. Hammer, you must leave my room. We must have regard for certain conventions.”

  “One guy isn’t enough, she’s gotta have a convention.”)

  “I’m a physical anthropologist,” Gideon said. “I teach at the University of Washington.”

  “No!” She put down her wineglass. “Do you mean you know about bones}”

  Rudy surfaced. “Does he know about bones!” he muttered with a laugh. “Lady, you’re talking to the Skeleton Detective himself.”

  “The, er, Skeleton…”

  “I do a fair amount of forensic consulting,” Gideon explained. Not for the first time did he wish to hell the reporter who’d pasted that nickname—as impossible to peel off as a stuck-on label from a tomato—on him all those years ago. “Mostly on skeletal remains.”

  “How totally fascinating.” Her interest now was genuine enough. She pulled her chair closer to the table and closer to Gideon. He caught a strong whiff of talcum powder. “I wonder—were you planning on visiting the museum?”

  “Of course. I’m looking forward to it.”

  Julie had told him about the place. “It’s your kind of museum,” she’d said. “Small, simple but thorough, nicely done. Nothing fancy. You’d like it.”

  “Any skeletal material?” he’d asked Julie hopefully.

  The answer had been no, not that she recalled, but still there’d seemed enough of interest to occupy him for an enjoyable hour or two sometime during the week.

  Madeleine moved her wineglass over the table in coy, tentative circles. “Well, while you’re there, I wonder if you might… that is, I can’t help but wonder… Well, you see, we have some human skeletal remains in storage. There’s one set in particular that I was hoping might be of interest to you—a leftover casualty from the Civil War, one of Cromwell’s soldiers. They found it sixty years ago, all scrunched up at the bottom of
a dried-up well here on Garrison Hill, near the outer walls, costume and all. Well, the costume’s been on display ever since the museum opened, but the bones have been stored in the basement all this time.”

  “Are you asking me to look at them for you?” Gideon asked.

  “Yes, if you’d be interested.”

  Bless you, he thought. What he’d told Julie about visiting the local Bronze and Iron Age sites was certainly true—as an anthropologist specializing in prehistory he couldn’t help but be interested in them. But the Scillies had hundreds of such sites, and, frankly, one visit to a “village” consisting of a few scars in the ground and two or three hearth or grinding stones still in place went a long way. If he were down in the dirt with a brush and trowel in his hands, digging away, uncovering the past himself, that would have been one thing; but seeing them as a tourist—just wandering around pretending to make sense of the plaques—would get old pretty fast, and he’d been wondering just what it was he was really going to do with his time.

  “I’m interested, all right,” he said.

  “There isn’t much left, of course; just some arm and leg bones. Still, I’d love to exhibit them with the costume, don’t you see, but what could I say about them? I don’t know enough about them to say anything interesting—you know, how old he was, or… or whatever it is that a person like you could deduce. I asked my doctor to tell us what he could about them, but he just took one look at them and laughed. They’re probably human and probably male; that was as far as he was willing to put himself out.”

  Gideon smiled. “Pretty safe guess, considering that they were wearing a seventeenth-century soldier’s uniform.”

  “Oh, and he also said one of the bones looked diseased, but bones weren’t his specialty. You’d think doctors would know more about skeletons, wouldn’t you?”

  “They do, really. It’s just that they know more about them in living people. It’s the opposite with me. I’ll be able to tell you a lot about a bone found out in the desert somewhere, but don’t ask me to set a green-stick fracture in some kid who fell off a fence.”