Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  “But—”

  “No, Julie, I think I just have to be careful, that’s all. Whoever’s doing it—if somebody’s really doing it—obviously wants it to look like an accident, so he’s not going to shoot me or stab me. I just have to watch my step.”

  “I gotta agree,” Fausto said. “Change your mind, tell me.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d consider our going back home?” Julie said doubtfully. “After all, you’ve had the testimonial for Ivan, you’ve made your public presentation, all that’s left are the meetings, and I’m sure . . . no, I didn’t think so.”

  “But you know,” he said, “you might want to—no, I didn’t think so.”

  “Whither thou goest,” Julie said with a smile.

  “What made you ask about Sheila Chan?” Fausto wanted to know. “Are you saying there might be a connection there?”

  “I was thinking so, yes.”

  “That was two years ago. And you never even knew her. What’s the connection?”

  “Just that we both worked on the Europa Point dig—well, she worked on the actual dig, I worked on the bones in the lab later on— so it just seemed to me—”

  “Not much of a connection,” Fausto said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Gideon agreed. It had sounded far-fetched to him even as he’d said it. He was getting carried away with the interconnectedness angle.

  The phone that was still in Fausto’s hand chirped. He flicked it open and listened. “Oh, hell, where? What do the fire guys say? Okay, have Matt check it out—ah, the hell with it, I better come myself. Twenty minutes.”

  He drained the last inch of his tea and stood up, holding his hand out for the bag with the lamp. “Gotta go.”

  “Something serious?” Gideon asked.

  “Well, a death. Some old guy apparently smoking in bed, falls asleep, burns himself to death. Some people never learn. See you later. I’ll call you soon as I know about the lamp.” He handed them cards, shook hands with the two of them, snatched the check, barely evading Gideon’s grab for it, then paused as he was leaving with the lamp tucked under his arm.

  “Well, at least this is one dead body that you can’t fit into your monkey business business.”

  As things would turn out, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

  TWELVE

  LEFT by themselves, Julie and Gideon ordered more coffee and stayed on for a while.

  “It’s got to be your speech,” Julie said thoughtfully, stirring cream into her mug. “Somebody read the articles and thought you were going to reveal something, and they didn’t want you to do it.”

  Gideon smiled. “That’s what Pru said. I just laughed.”

  “What did she think it was?”

  “No, she was just kidding.”

  “Well, what do you think? Could that be it?”

  He shook his head. “I’m at a loss, Julie. I can’t say it hasn’t occurred to me, but what could I say that would worry somebody so much? And anyway, can you imagine anybody taking those articles seriously I mean, really imagine it?”

  “Of course people would take them seriously. The newspapers took them seriously, didn’t they? Why wouldn’t the readers?”

  “Okay, yes, the ordinary reader, maybe, but . . . look, the only people here who could possibly be affected by something I might ‘reveal,’ whatever the hell that might be, would be some of these archaeologists, right? What could I possibly know that they’d be that desperate to keep me from telling?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Couldn’t it have something to do with Gibraltar Boy and the First Family? After all, that’s pretty much why we’re all here. And you’re the one who made the connection to Sheila Chan—to what happened to her.”

  He nodded. “I did, yes, but that part of it seems pretty far-fetched to me now. As Fausto said, two years is a long time ago. A big stretch, even for interconnected monkey business.”

  “Okay, if you say so, but that still leaves you, and the more we talk about it, the more it seems to me it all has to have something to do with the Gibraltar Boy and the Europa Point dig.”

  “Maybe, but—”

  “Look at it this way,” she said intently. “If somebody really snuck up behind you on the Rock, and if somebody really set you up to be electrocuted . . . assuming there aren’t two people trying to do away with you . . . it just about has to be somebody who’s here for the meetings, one of your good buddies—who else would have been in both those places right then? Doesn’t that imply rather strongly that it’s got something to do with the Europa Point dig, with Gibraltar Boy?”

  He considered this, sipping his coffee. “Julie, don’t forget, I was never at the dig. I just did some lab work on Gibraltar Boy and I completed that almost five years ago now. I haven’t been involved before or since. And what could I possibly say about him that was so earth-shattering anyway?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that too. You could say you that after much deliberation, you finally came to the conclusion that he really was just another Neanderthal, not the product of a mating between Neanderthals and humans. Wouldn’t that shake up some of these people who’ve been—forgive the expression—living off the Neanderthal-human connection ever since?”

  It was something he hadn’t thought of. “Well . . . sure, but I haven’t come to that conclusion.”

  “No, but they don’t know that.”

  “And even if I had, other anthropologists think exactly the same thing and have said so, and as far as I know they’re still walking around. I’d just be one more voice in the minority. I wouldn’t have any way to prove it.”

  “No, but they wouldn’t know that either. They might think you’ve come up with something new, especially on account of those articles. Besides, being the modest fellow you are, I think you underrate the impact of your opinion.”

  He smiled, finished his coffee, and sighed. “Julie, what do you say we call a moratorium on the subject for a while? I need to get my head clear. We may be seeing it all wrong. Let’s be tourists for the afternoon. You’ve been out seeing the sights all morning. How about showing me around the town?”

  “That’s a good idea. It’s a cute place. There’s plenty to see.”

  She gave him a pale smile as they stood up. “Just make sure you look both ways when we cross the street.”

  INDEED, there was plenty to see, especially from a historical perspective. The actual sites of historic importance in the little city were few, but the very fabric of the town was an amalgam, or rather an accretion, of its own history. At first glance it was a typical English market town with its fish-and-chips places, its pubs, its Marks & Spencer store, its red “Royal Mail” mailboxes. But if you raised your eyes to the upper story (almost all the buildings lining the narrow Main Street—now a pedestrian walkway—were two stories), you were in Spain: pastel-colored stucco façades; wooden shutters painted in vivid green, red, or blue; delicately filigreed iron balconies. And looking up the side streets, you might have thought you were in Moorish Iberia: narrow, cobbled, winding alleys, overhanging, flower-filled balconies that nearly met the ones across the way, tiny Arab fruit and vegetable markets that were little more than cubbyholes.

  There was plenty of evidence of the long British military presence too. Aside from the big eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cannons prominently displayed all over the place—in front of government buildings, in the public gardens, along Line Wall Road—the street names made it hard to forget: Bomb House Lane, Horse Barracks Lane, Victualling Office Lane. And the main library, a stately, pillared nineteenth-century building of classical design, was still known as the Garrison Library.

  And walls. Ancient, crumbling, fortified defensive walls and bastions, some British, some Moorish, a few Spanish, poked up all over the place, some lining the harbor, others snaking all the way down from the top of the Rock, and still others, along with the old city gates, appearing in bits and pieces throughout the downtown area. And looming above the town, on its own ble
ak promontory, visible from almost everywhere, was the ancient, brooding presence of the fortified square tower known as the Moorish Castle.

  “Built during the Arab occupation,” Julie told him. “Guess what it’s used for now.”

  He shook his head. “Looks like a good place for a dungeon.”

  “Actually, you’re right. It’s the prison, it’s the Gibraltar jail. It’s been the prison ever since the Brits took over in 1704.”

  “Whoa,” he said looking up at the grim, gray walls. “No wonder there’s no crime here. Who wants to risk being shut up in a place like that?”

  Still, for a man like Gideon, who happily lived most of his professional life in the past, it was all intriguing, but after a while the press of fellow gawkers—a second cruise ship had come in—began to wear on him—on both of them—and he asked Julie if she hadn’t found some quiet place unlikely to be full of noisy, excited tourists.

  “As a matter of fact, I have,” she told him. “And it’s exactly your sort of place. You’ll love it.”

  “My sort of place?” he asked curiously. “What exactly is ‘my sort of place’?”

  IT was an old burial ground, of course, and as devoid of day-trippers as Julie had promised. Trafalgar Cemetery was a small, triangular plot of land set flush against the base of the fortified, sixteenth-century Spanish wall known as the Charles V Wall. Originally laid out in 1798, Trafalgar Cemetery had at first been known as Southport Ditch Cemetery. A few yards above it, on top of the broad walls themselves, had once been another final resting place, the wonderfully redundantly titled Deadman’s Cemetery. Later, that long, narrow cemetery had been converted to a rifle range, but Southport Ditch still remained, its named changed to Trafalgar Cemetery in 1805 to commemorate the celebrated naval battle that had recently been fought off nearby Cape Trafalgar and the sailors’ remains—those that weren’t buried at sea—that were soon to grace the plot. The body of Admiral Nelson, famously preserved in a cask of brandy, had also been carried to Gibraltar after the battle, but had remained only long enough to have the brandy replaced with spirits of wine, thought to be a better preservative, before going home to England for more fitting interment in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

  These facts were read aloud by Julie from A Brief Historical, Shopping, and Dining Guide to Gibraltar as they strolled the narrow, overgrown paths among the low, crooked old headstones. There was more, but she closed the book and slipped it into her shoulder bag.

  “Gideon, I can’t help thinking about it. In all honesty, how likely do you really think it is that these things that have been happening to you are, well, just accidents, coincidences? Of your being in the wrong place at the wrong time? On a scale of one to ten.”

  “Honestly? Maybe a two.” Honestly, he thought it was zero, but no point in overworrying her.

  “Me too,” she said. “I guess we’ll know more when Fausto finds out about the lamp.”

  “That should settle it. We may as well stop conjecturing until we hear from him.”

  “That suits me.”

  They stopped to read the timeworn legend on a squat headstone with a black iron cannon ball cemented into its top.

  To the Memories of Lieutenant Thomas Worth and John Buck-land of the Royal Marine Artillery, who were Killed on the 23rd November 1810 by the same Shot while directing the Howitzer Boats in an attack on the Enemy’s Flotilla in Cadiz Bay.

  “Now that,” Gideon said, “is an example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  RATHER than walking back up to the hotel and eating with the others, they decided on dinner in the city. Julie turned to her guidebook for suggestions. Given the mood they were in after the half hour they’d spent in the cemetery, the Lord Nelson Brasserie and Bar seemed appropriate. “Located in the eighteenth-century Casemates Barracks building,” according to Julie’s guidebook, “and fitted out like the deck of a ship, with beams wrapped in sails, ceiling lights concealed in crow’s nests, a painted blue sky, and historic paintings of the Battle of Trafalgar on the two-meter-thick stone walls, it is one of Gibraltar’s most atmospheric dining places.”

  And so it was, but the boat-shaped bar and every table in the house were loaded with cruise passengers downing a last ale or stout before returning to their ships, so they sat outside on the pleasant terrace, situated at one end of the immense Grand Casemates Square (“the scene of Gibraltar’s last public hanging,” explained the ever-helpful guidebook).

  Over smooth, soothing pints of bitter, their resolve to drop the subject of Gideon’s near-death experiences melted away. “If we’re right about it being one of your cohorts,” Julie said, “then we’re down to four people.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Audrey, Adrian, Corbin, and Pru. No, make that five, with Buck. But Pru—” She jerked her head. “There’s no way it could be Pru. I mean . . .”

  “You’re right, it’s not Pru,” Gideon said. “Definitely not.”

  “Definitely?”

  “Definitely. It was Pru who hauled me up off the mountainside. If she’d pushed me over in the first place, she’d hardly have done that, would she. So, no, it’s not Pru.”

  “Yes, you’re right. That makes me feel better. So—wait a minute, we’re forgetting about Rowley.”

  “Oh, I don’t see how—”

  “No, I know he hardly seems like a killer, but think for a minute. Didn’t you tell me he’d gone up earlier to make sure things were set up for your lecture? He’d have had the perfect opportunity to get rid of the mat and all. And, and”—she was warming to her subject—“he would have been a familiar figure around there. No one would have been surprised to see him up on stage. He could easily have . . . no?” she said in response to the shaking of his head.

  “Well, yes, he could probably have gotten away with it better than the others, but he’s the one who pointed out the problem, who told me the mat was gone. He’s the only reason I didn’t get fried.” To a crisp, his mutinous mind insisted on adding.

  “Oh, you didn’t tell me that,” she said, a bit let down. “So that lets the two of them out. Pru and Rowley. So we’re left with—who? Adrian, Corbin, Audrey, and Buck. I don’t know—can you really see any of them as would-be murderers?”

  “Mmm . . . well, Audrey, maybe.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Audrey? Are you—”

  “I’m kidding,” he assured her. “Come on.”

  She smiled. “Well, I’m glad you’re able to joke about it.”

  Gideon ordered a steak-and-ale pie for dinner. Julie, whose appetite had returned with a vengeance, ordered what she always did when she was truly, deeply hungry: the biggest hamburger they had, with everything on it. In the Lord Nelson’s case, the HMS Victory Burger was a truly monstrous concoction topped with representatives from every known food group: mushrooms, bacon, egg, cheese, onions, sausage, lettuce, and tomato. It took a knife and fork to get at it, but Julie demolished every morsel, along with the French fries that came alongside.

  While they ate, they continued a generally unsatisfactory and wholly unproductive discussion of who and why, but they managed to end on a positive note.

  “Okay,” Julie said, “are you ready for the good news?”

  “There’s good news?”

  “Yes, I just thought of it. If what’s been happening is really related to those articles in the papers, then at least you can stop worrying. You’ve already given the speech and everybody now knows there was no big revelation. You can stop looking over your shoulder. That’s good news, isn’t it?”

  “Very. I hadn’t thought of it myself.”

  “Still, I imagine you’d probably like to know what it was all about.”

  “Know who’s been trying to kill me? Oh, well, yeah, I suppose I have a certain mild interest in the matter.”

  THIRTEEN

  BREAKFAST in the hotel dining room the next morning was somewhat strained, at least from Gideon’s perspective. It’s hard to relax and enjoy your kippers and eggs when you keep snea
king looks around the table wondering just which one of your merry companions has been trying to cut your life short. And—just in case it wasn’t your now-completed and demonstrably harmless lecture that had elicited the attempts—whether he (or she) would be giving it another shot today.

  The day before, while he and Julie had breakfasted on their balcony, everyone else had gone down to the dining room, pulled a couple of tables together, and eaten as a group. Apparently, this was to be the pattern for the rest of their stay, inasmuch as the pulled-together tables were waiting for them this morning, covered with tablecloths, with menus and place settings laid out, and everyone there.

  If anyone noticed that Julie’s and Gideon’s moods were subdued, it wasn’t apparent. The conversation around them mostly concerned a controversial paper presented at the conference the day before, in which the author asserted, by means of a complicated mathematical model, that, had the Neanderthals been vegetarians instead of meat-eaters, their ecological niche would have been more bountiful, and they would have survived, possibly out-competing the invading Homo sapiens and causing their extinction. Audrey and Pru thought it made sense; Adrian and Corbin asserted it was poppycock. The discussion was spirited, peppery, and somewhat dogmatic, in the usual manner of academics quarreling over the arcane details of their discipline. Julie and Gideon were allowed to eat quietly without participating.

  Midway through the meal, Rowley Boyd came in, slipped without saying anything into the vacant chair next to Adrian, and shook his head when the waiter asked if he wanted breakfast. Although the subject matter was something he’d ordinarily have jumped right in on, he sat, silent and grave, his chin in his hand, his forefinger slowly, meditatively tapping his lower lip, his downcast eyes on the table. His trusty pipe peeped unused from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. Eventually, Adrian, apparently thrown off his rhythm by the mushroom cloud of gloom that had settled in beside him, asked with an impatient sigh if something was wrong.