Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  “There was a rubber mat behind the lectern,” Gideon said. “It’s not there now.”

  “ ’Course it’s there.”

  Gideon made a motion with his hand, palm up. See for yourself.

  Derek did and came back shaking his head. “That’s them janitors for you. Couldn’t do a job proper like to save their lives.”

  The janitorial staff, it appeared, was the bane of Derek’s existence. A gaggle of creaky old duffers who should have been superannuated years ago. Careless, slipshod, lazy, apparently they’d thought that Gideon had already given his talk, so they’d begun clearing the stage, presumably to set up for the four o’clock concert. This was grumblingly explained as Derek located the mat—a rubber pad glued to a slightly raised wooden platform—in a corner of the workroom, hauled it out onto the stage, and flopped it on the stone floor behind the lectern. Then he busied himself with checking the mike, setting the angle of the goosenecked reading lamp attached to the lectern, and tinkering with the connections.

  “Can’t be too careful when you’re working ’round electricity . . . now what’s this?” he said disgustedly “Will you just look at this ’ere?”

  He tugged at a black electrical cord, revealing a frayed spot where the wiring joined the base of the lamp, and clucked his disapproval. “Accident waiting to ’appen. Should’ve been repaired long ago.” With a complaining sigh he unplugged the lamp and unscrewed it. “Now I’ll ’ave to go and find you another one.”

  “That’s all right,” Gideon said, concerned that the audience might think they were having an argument. “I don’t need one, the ambient light’s fine. I don’t have notes to look at anyway.”

  “Suit yourself. Good luck, then, mate, they’re all yours.”

  Gideon faced his audience. An expectant hush replaced the buzz of conversation. He took a deep breath.

  “Good afternoon and thank you all for coming. I guess I’d better tell you right now that my subject isn’t quite what this morning’s paper implied, but I, uh, hope you won’t, um . . .”

  But his anxieties were needless. The talk went beautifully. No one got up and walked out upon learning that that Piltdown Man was not to be left in the dust after all. They listened with active interest, laughed in the right places, and asked intelligent questions afterward. He was pleased.

  But he was also troubled. While his archaeologist friends filed upstairs to the St. Michael’s Cave Café for a snack, he sought out the technician in the workroom again. “Derek,” he said, “let me ask you a question. That lamp—if I’d touched it, what would have happened? ”

  “Touched it? Nothing. You’d’ve ’ad to switch it on.”

  “Okay, let’s say I switched it on.”

  “Well, still nothing, probably. You’d’ve been standing on the mat, wouldn’tcher?”

  “But let’s say I wasn’t standing on the mat—remember, the mat wasn’t there at first.”

  At this Derek showed some interest. He set down the soldering iron he’d been using. “I see whatcher getting at. Well, that’d depend on the condition of the wiring in the cord, wouldn’t it? Let’s have us a look, why don’t we?”

  The lamp was on a second, smaller worktable crowded with what looked like material for the junkman—broken hand tools, rusty lengths of rebar, chunks of wallboard, a battered old electric sander. Derek brought the lamp back to examine it under the better light of the larger work table.

  “Blimey,” he said quietly, probing in the cord’s innards.

  “What?”

  “Well, just look. There’s only the ’undred-twenty-volt wire still in one piece. The other one, and the ground wire—they’re frayed clear through.”

  This told Gideon nothing. “Which means what? I would have gotten a shock?”

  “Well, you’d’ve become the switch, d’you see, and the current would’ve ’ad to pass right on through you to close the circuit. Now as long as you was standing on the mat, it would just’ve gone through your ’and, not—”

  “But if I wasn’t standing on the mat?” Gideon persisted. “If there was no mat? Could I have been killed?”

  Derek astonished Gideon by guffawing. “Killed! Blimey, mate, you would have been fried. To a crisp,” he added, in case Gideon had missed his drift.

  ELEVEN

  GIDEON was late for his lunch date with Fausto and Julie, and when he arrived he had a little trouble picking them out among the mob of diners—the Grand Princess was in port and the little town was jammed with two thousand day trippers—but Julie spotted him and waved him over to a green-umbrellaed table on the open square that served as a dining terrace for the Angry Friar. They were at the very edge of the square, only yards from the diminutive, pillared Supreme Court building and the two not-so-diminutive, shining bronze cannons that ceremonially guarded it (pointed, strangely enough, at the handsome eighteenth-century brick facing of the Governor’s Residence across the street).

  “Hi, honey. How’s it going, Fausto? Sorry I’m late.” He had decided during the taxi ride down that the account of his narrowly missing getting fried to a crisp could wait until they’d gotten through a little small talk and some lunch.

  “Oh, it’s been fascinating,” Julie said. “Fausto’s been telling me about the local crime scene. You wouldn’t like it here at all. No forensic work. They don’t have murders.”

  “None?” Gideon asked, slipping into a chair. “Why, are they against the law or something?”

  “It’s a fact, Gideon,” Fausto said. “Not a single homicide in the last two years. “Not one.”

  Almost everything Fausto Sotomayor said came across as a declaration; sometimes a challenge. Although a native Gibraltarian, he carried the ghost of a Spanish accent, a Castilian lisp that his forbears had brought over from the mainland, but there was nothing lilting or musical about it. Besides, he spoke a brusque, slangy American English rather than British (he had lived in New York City with his UN-DIPLOMAT mother during his highly formative teenage years), and he spoke it in crackling, to-the-point sentences. On first meeting him, Gideon, whose ear for accent was usually sharp, had mistakenly taken him for a Puerto Rican New Yorker.

  “Statistically, one killing every four, five years. I been here twelve years, only had three. Practically no violent crime at all. Not one case of rape in ten years, how about that? How many international cities you know can say that? There’s just, you know, the date rape thing once in a while.”

  Julie wasn’t much of a feminist as feminists went, but this was too much for her. “Oh, just the date rape thing,” she said drily. “Nothing to be concerned about.”

  “Come on, you know what I mean. Kids. Alcohol-related. But there aren’t any sleazeballs lurking in the alleys waiting for the sound of high heels. No stranger rape. Women can walk around anywhere, any time of night. Now admit it, that’s damn amazing, considering that thirty thousand people live here. All mixed races and cultures— jeez, we got Arabs, Jews, Catholics, we got Spanish, English, Indians, Italians . . . and we got maybe five thousand transients coming through a day. And still . . . no place safer.” He rapped his knuckles on the wooden table.

  “Amazing. You must do a heck of a job of prevention,” Gideon said honestly.

  Fausto jerked his chin in agreement. “You better believe it.”

  Fausto Sotomayor had been a newly promoted detective sergeant when he had been sent to the eighth annual International Conference in Science and Detection some years earlier in St. Malo, France, at which Gideon had conducted the forensic anthropology sessions. One of twenty law enforcement people in the class, he had seemed to Gideon on first glance among the least likely to make it as a cop. Independently wealthy, no more than five feet five, quick-moving and quick-talking, rail-thin, with small (even for his size) hands (fingernails buffed and manicured) and feet (toenails buffed and pedicured? ), he dressed in silk shirts and trim, expensive, perfectly tailored suits, and exuded a lithe, oddly graceful cockiness—Jimmy Cagney with a Latin accent—that c
learly set the teeth of his bigger, slower, less fashion-conscious colleagues on edge.

  After a few days, though, his more appealing side came through, at least to Gideon. He was intelligent and straight-talking—in-your-face might be closer to it—and on knowing him a bit better, the bantam rooster cockiness seemed less a reflection of a truly bellicose personality than a matter of comportment, of style, that he’d picked up somewhere along the way. It was, after all, hardly unusual in small men, particularly among those in the “manly” occupations. But underneath it, once you got to know him, Fausto was in fact fun to be around. The trouble was, not many of his fellow attendees had gone to the trouble (and really, why should they have?) of cracking through the flashy, gangsterish style and combative façade to see what was underneath. For that reason alone, Gideon had not predicted much of a future for him in the upper ranks of law enforcement.

  And yet here he was, Detective Chief Inspector Sotomayor, a full-fledged DCI, so others had obviously seen something in him too.

  They hadn’t ordered their lunches yet, so a couple of minutes were spent perusing the outsized, plastic-coated menus. Fausto ordered curried chicken and rice, Julie, whose appetite hadn’t fully recovered from their huge breakfast, ordered a bowl of gazpacho, and Gideon asked for a ploughman’s lunch and a half pint of ale to go along with the beers the other two already had in front of them.

  “So you’ve never had a chance to use any of the forensic material from the course?” he asked when the harried, sweating young waiter had taken their orders and run back to the kitchen.

  “No. Well, just once. There was this case, oh, let me see, three, four years ago. There was this girl who’d been missing for a couple of days, and we finally found her, killed in a cave-in down at the south end. It wasn’t my case—I was just an inspector then, but I was helping the DCI who was running it, so I was out there when they dug her out. A mess; all mashed up, bones broken, internal organs exploded, maggots coming out of her—sorry, Julie, hell of a thing to be talking about at lunch.”

  Julie laughed. “Are you kidding? Who do you think I’m married to? Go right ahead, don’t give it a thought. Maggots, exploding organs . . . everyday mealtime conversation at the Olivers.”

  Fausto shrugged. “Yeah, used to be the same way at my house. Hey, could that be why I’m divorced? Anyway, she had plenty of ID on her, and enough face left so people could identify her, so no need for forensic anthro on that score. But you know what came in handy? Remember that Finnish guy who was there? The bug expert who you couldn’t understand anything he was saying?”

  “Professor Wuoronin,” Gideon supplied. “A good entomologist. Knew what he was talking about.”

  “Yeah, him. Gave out a ton of material on bugs that feed on corpses, you know, the sacro . . . the scaro . . .”

  “Sarcosaprophagous insects.”

  “Yeah, sarco . . . yeah, them. So I knew a blowfly maggot when I saw one, and I saw a zillion on her. All between two and three millimeters long, nothing longer, nothing shorter, which meant they were two to three days old, which meant I had myself a reliable time-of -death estimate.”

  “A minimum time-of-death estimate,” Gideon reminded him. DCI or not, Fausto was still an old student and Gideon could get away with correcting him. Indeed, as Gideon saw it, he was morally obligated to do so. “The cave-in couldn’t have occurred any later than two to three days before . . . but it could have happened earlier. You can’t be sure of exactly when the flies laid their eggs.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, but everything came together. Some passengers on the Morocco ferry, they saw the cave-in happen, so we knew exactly when it was. Two days before we dug her out.”

  “But then you really didn’t need the estimate based on the maggots, ” Julie said. “Or am I missing something?”

  “Okay, all right, you’re right,” a grudging Fausto admitted. “It was strictly corroborative. Jeez, what a purist.” He grinned. “But it was fun, you know?”

  “Mmm, I bet,” Julie said. “Sure sounds like fun. Measuring maggots. ”

  Their meals came. The waiter brushed away a few hovering black flies that had touched down on the food. The flies moved off but floated nearby in slow, hanging circles. They seemed to be a general nuisance on the patio. Other diners were brushing at their food and their faces.

  Julie made a face. “Um . . . would those be blowflies?”

  “Nope,” Gideon said. “Black flies.”

  “They don’t feed on corpses?”

  He shook his head and began on his ploughman’s lunch, tucking ham, relish, and cucumber into a partially sliced-through hunk of baguette to turn it into a sandwich. “They do not.”

  “What do they feed on, then? No, wait, I don’t want to know.”

  “A wise decision,” Gideon said, biting in. “Mmm, good.”

  Fausto had tucked his napkin into the collar of his shirt—he was still a sharp dresser: mauve shirt, green tie, slick-looking olive brown suit—and was shoveling in chicken and rice, daintily but effectively. Julie was dabbing a spoon into her gazpacho, deciding whether or not she was really hungry at all.

  “Fausto,” Gideon said, “this would be Sheila Chan we’ve been talking about, wouldn’t it? And the Europa Point cave.”

  Fausto blinked. “Now how the hell would you know—oh, that’s right, she was one of you people. She was here for the meeting they had back then. Did you know her?”

  “No, just by e-mail.” Gideon hesitated. “Was there anything suspicious about her death?”

  Julie looked inquisitively at him over the rim of her glass. Fausto paused in lifting a forkful of rice to his mouth. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Just some things that have been happening. Was there?”

  “Anything suspicious?” He shook his head. “No. All cut and dried, everything kosher. Why?” he asked again.

  “Fausto, did you ever hear of anyone getting pushed off the top of the Rock by one of the Barbary apes?”

  “You mean on purpose?”

  “On purpose or accidentally.”

  “How could they push you off accidentally?”

  “Come on, just answer—”

  “No, I never heard of it. Why?” He was getting irritated. In that way he was like any cop. He preferred asking the questions.

  “Gideon thinks he may have been the first,” Julie put in.

  “The first to live to tell about it, anyway,” Fausto said with a snort. “That’s for sure.”

  “Gideon,” Julie said, “I thought you agreed there wasn’t anything suspicious about that.”

  “Well, I did, but then today at my lecture—”

  “Oh, I forgot to ask,” Julie said. “How did it go?”

  “Just fine, absolutely great, except for the part where I nearly got electrocuted.”

  She started to laugh, but then saw he was serious. “What happened? ”

  Gideon told them.

  “And your conclusion?” Fausto said. He had eaten most of his dish, shoved it away, and pulled the napkin out of his collar. Gideon had eaten about half of his ploughman’s, Julie none of her gazpacho. Coffee had been ordered—tea for Fausto—and brought to the table.

  “I don’t know,” Gideon said. “Everything might be explainable, taken one thing at a time—accident, carelessness—but to have been almost killed twice in less than twenty-four hours—”

  “Brings to mind the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business,” Fausto said, dropping three cubes of sugar into his tea.

  Gideon was surprised. “How do you know about the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business?”

  “You talked about it in the seminar. Goldstein’s Theorem of Interconnected Monkey Business. Hell, it’s practically my mantra.”

  Gideon’s too. It was a “law” posited only partly in jest by Gideon’s old professor and all-around mentor Abe Goldstein. When too many suspicious but seemingly unrelated things—too much monkey business—start cropping up in a short time, to th
e same people, in the same context, you can bet on there being some connection between them.

  The three of them sat there looking somberly at each other until Julie said: “But why would anyone want to kill you?” The last time she had asked him that had been yesterday, after the incident on the Rock, when she had been trying to convince him that the idea was silly. This time, he was glad to see, it was meant as a serious question. It was her support, her backup, that he wanted, not her skepticism.

  Fausto took it seriously too. “We’ll want that lamp,” he said, pulling a cell phone from his inside pocket. “I’ll have one of my—”

  Gideon lifted the lumpy plastic shopping bag he’d set down beside his chair. “I figured you would. Here it is. The wires haven’t been cut, I could see that much. Not cleanly, not with a knife or a snipper. They look frayed, the same as the cord fabric, but whether they’ve been filed to look that way, or just worn through on their own, I don’t know.”

  Fausto had opened the mouth of the bag, and without touching the lamp, was peering as well as he could at the torn area of the cord. “Can’t tell. Maybe filed, maybe just frayed. We’ll have to see.”

  “How long will that take? Do you have a lab here?”

  “Yeah, we have a lab, but I’m not sure they’ll know how to do this kind of thing. Might have to send it off to FSS—the Forensic Science Service Lab in London. If my people can handle it, I’ll have the results tomorrow. If it has to go to London . . . who knows?” He studied his buffed and manicured fingernails, letting a beat pass. “Listen, maybe I should assign you some protection,” he said casually. “Somebody to kind of keep an eye on you. Very discreet, of course. Just in case.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Julie said.

  Gideon shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “If you’d had somebody with you,” she said, “that thing up on the Rock would never have happened. Even if it was just a monkey.”

  “No, but somebody trailing me around wouldn’t have stopped what happened in the cave. That mat was removed when I wasn’t even anywhere near it, and the lamp had been fooled with before I ever got there.” And not by a monkey, he said to himself. “Assuming it was fooled with,” he added to show he was being open-minded.