Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  “Good, you talk to him, then.” He held out the telephone.

  “Me? What do you want me to say?”

  “You know, see if he knows what Sheila Chan was calling about. He’ll be more open with you. Besides, it might get too technical for me. I’ll listen in. Go ahead,” he said impatiently, shaking the phone in front of Gideon’s face when he hesitated. “Come on, come on.”

  Gideon shrugged and took it. Fausto punched the button. He kept a second cordless receiver to his ear.

  “Estéban?” Gideon said.

  Estéban’s deep, sober voice sounded in his ear. "Sí, señor, dígame.” Cautious, wary. But then, he was returning a totally unexpected call from police headquarters; why wouldn’t he be?

  “Estéban, this is Gideon Oliver. It’s nice to talk to you.”

  This took a few seconds to sink in. More than a few seconds. De la Garza’s quickness of mind did not quite match his impressive gravitas. Then at last: “You are in Gibraltar?”

  “Right, I’m here for the Paleo Society meetings.”

  “Yes, but . . . is this not . . . I was under the impression that I was calling the police station.”

  “You are. I’m sitting here with Detective Chief Inspector Sotomayor—he’s on the line too—and we’re trying to get some information on a woman named Sheila Chan.”

  “Sheila Chan.” He considered. “This is the young woman who was working on a dissertation about bone disease in early modern Homo sapiens, is it not?

  “Yes, you do know her, then?”

  “I do. For some time I have not heard from her. Is she all right? Is there something wrong?”

  “Well, yes. She’s dead. She’s been dead since 2005.”

  “Aahh, that would explain why I have not heard from her.”

  From anyone else it would have been a somewhat lame attempt at humor, but from de la Garza, who knew?

  “On the other side of the table, Fausto rolled his eyes and mouthed a single syllable: Duh.

  “Yes, she was killed in a landslide here in Gibraltar—”

  “I regret extremely to hear it.”

  “—but there are some questions about her death.”

  “Questions? Do you mean in the sense that there are suspicious circumstances? This is why the police are involved?”

  “That’s right. She may have been murdered.”

  Estéban digested this. “How can that be? Did you not say she died in a landslide?”

  “Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out. One of the questions has to do with a couple of phone calls she placed from her hotel the day she died. Apparently they were to you.”

  “To me? Two calls? Are you certain of this?”

  “Well, to your office. She called twice, an hour or so apart. This would have been in 2005.”

  “Ah, wait, yes, I remember that, but it was only once that we spoke. I was not in the office when first she called. Thus, she left a message with my secretary.”

  Fausto nodded at Gideon across the table. That sounded right. The first call had lasted only one minute. The second was eleven minutes long.

  “Those were probably the last two calls she ever made, Estéban, so you can see why they’d be of interest.”

  “Oh, yes, certainly, I do see. And the police inspector would like to know the nature of her call.”

  “Exactly.”

  De la Garza meditated for a while. “Well, my friend, the fact is that I cannot tell you in honesty that I recollect the content, but I would have to assume it had to do with some assistance I was providing on her dissertation. I can think of no other reason. We had no other, er, relationship.”

  So de la Garza had been helping her too. That seemed strange. Sheila had been researching skeletal disease among late Pleistocene humans. It had made sense that she would turn to Gideon, a physical anthropologist, for help, but why would she have gone to an archaeologist?

  “How exactly were you helping her, Estéban?” He held his breath. He had an inkling of what the answer was going to be.

  “In only the most minor way. I had earlier let her borrow a late Pleistocene bone that exhibited one of the diseases that were the subject of her investigations.”

  Ah, he was right! In one of Sheila’s e-mails to Gideon, she had mentioned coming across such a find in Spain. This, the mysterious T10, had to be it! His fingers found the vertebra, which he’d brought to Fausto’s office and now lay on the desk. “And did you ever get it back?”

  “Back? Why, I believe not, now that you mention it.”

  “Was it a vertebra by any chance?”

  “Why, yes, it was. Why do you ask? How do you know this?”

  “Because I’m pretty sure I have it in my hand right now. Estéban, this vertebra—where was it from?”

  “It was part of our teaching collection here in Algeciras. We retain a small collection of bones and artifacts for didactic purposes. They come from some of the sites—the ones of little significance— that our department has excavated over the years. This particular vertebra . . . Gideon, may I be permitted to know why this is of concern to the police? I do not understand the connection to Sheila’s death.”

  “Bear with me a little longer, Estéban. Do you remember where it came from originally? I mean, where it was found?”

  “It was from a site in the province of Sevilla, about two hundred kilometers north of us. AN-34. It is known by no other name. A small excavation, of no significance, that I conducted as a summer field exercise for my students. The land was given to the university for that purpose expressly. You would not be familiar with it. There was little reason to include it in the archaeological literature.”

  He was sounding a little defensive now. “I understand,” Gideon said. “The literature is plenty cluttered up as it is. Go ahead, please. Can you tell me anything else?”

  “There is little more to tell. AN-34 was not even a ‘site’ in the usual sense. That is, it was not a habitation, or campsite, or burial site, although of course at first we had hopes that it might be. But no, it was merely a place where a woman, a lone woman, had once died, nothing more. A few pitiful bones, mostly fragmentary, embedded in the wall of an arroyo. Our work consisted of little more than digging them out and gathering them up. They had been water-disturbed, you see, and somewhat scattered by animals, and there had been some earlier, rather amateurish attempts at excavation, so that more sophisticated advanced archaeological techniques would have been—”

  “Estéban, when did you do this dig?”

  “Hmm . . . I believe it would have been in the summer of . . . 2001. Yes, 2001. I remember because it took but one month, so I was able to spend half of July in Croatia, at a most interesting consortium. . . .”

  Fausto was looking at Gideon with a questioning, perplexed frown, but Gideon was as baffled as he was. How could de la Garza have excavated part of Gibraltar Woman’s skeleton in Spain in 2001, a full year before she was uncovered at the Europa Point excavation in Gibraltar?

  “Estéban, let me ask you: were you right there when those bones—this bone—was excavated? I mean, did you yourself see it come out of the dirt?”

  “I did, indeed. The vertebrae, being more fragile than the long bones, were excavated under my direct supervision. But why do you ask me this question? These questions?” Understandably, he was becoming perturbed.

  “Hold on a second, Estéban. Give me a minute.”

  Gideon put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Fausto, I have to see those bones. Algeciras is that town right across the bay, isn’t it? How long would it take me to get there?”

  “An hour or so if there’s no holdup at the border. Hell, you want to go? I’ll drive you myself. That’ll take care of any border hassle.”

  “Great.” Gideon put the telephone back to his ear.

  “Estéban, I would really love to see the rest of those bones—the woman they came from. If I showed up there in an hour, could you show them to me?”

  “Today, do you me
an? I would be delighted, of course, but I fear it would be somewhat awkward. I’m scheduled to confer with—”

  Fausto cut in. “Professor de la Garza? This is Detective Chief Inspector Sotomayor. This is a murder investigation. We’d appreciate your cooperation.”

  They heard him swallow. “Certainly, Chief Inspector,” he said with his usual dignity after few seconds. “One hour. Are you familiar with the location of the Escuela Politécnica Superior?”

  “We’ll find it,” Fausto said.

  “Come to the main building. I shall be in room 203.”

  “With the bones,” Gideon said.

  “With the bones,” Estéban agreed. “Of course.”

  AS Fausto had promised, their progress through the border crossing was smooth. His known face earned them a wave-through to the express lane, along with a few extra-poisonous stares at the Lamborghini from the less fortunate, stalled in a quarter-mile-long line that extended all the way back to the airport runway.

  “The Spanish love to screw with us coming through,” he said without rancor as they picked up speed on the A-7, the Spanish highway that would take them around the Bay of Gibraltar (officially the Bahia de Algeciras, now that they had crossed the border) and into the city. “We do the same to them coming the other way. Been like that ever since Franco.”

  “Tradition,” Gideon said. “I love it.”

  They drove for a while in silence, through flat, dry countryside punctuated by occasional riverine marshes, small industrial complexes, and nondescript little working-class villages. As they rounded the bay and drew closer to the sizable industrial port city of Algeciras itself, Gideon realized that the richly colored sunsets they’d seen over it from their hotel terrace had been the result of the tons of smog particles hanging in the air above it—like the glorious, smog-generated sunsets over Los Angeles. But in the daytime, Algeciras, like L.A., was shrouded in heavy brown haze; a depressing place into which to be headed.

  As anticipated, Fausto drove like the sports car nut he was, at anywhere between ninety and a hundred-and-ten miles an hour, depending on what the traffic would allow. It took a while, but eventually Gideon stopped grinding his teeth and propping his arms against the dashboard every time they began to overtake another car. If they hadn’t crashed or spun off the road yet, he figured, maybe Fausto knew what he was doing and they’d both get out of this alive.

  “Listen,” Fausto said, “let me try to get this straight. I’m confused.”

  “That makes two of us, believe me.”

  “Okay, let’s start at the beginning. What we’re dealing with is two vertebrae that were, what do you call them, next to each other, one on top of the other . . .”

  “Adjacent. Right.” Gideon had them in his hands now, probing them yet again with eyes and fingers, hunting for anything he might have missed, anything he might have gotten wrong.

  “The top one is a cast, and the bottom one is a real vertebra.”

  Gideon nodded.

  “And they fit perfectly into each other.”

  “Perfectly,” Gideon agreed.

  “Which means they had to have been from the same person.”

  “Right.”

  “Gibraltar Woman.”

  “Gibraltar Woman. I know the top one is, and therefore the bottom one—God!” He braced himself instinctively against the back of his seat as Fausto, traveling at ninety-five, happily threaded the frighteningly small opening between a heavy, smoke-belching truck with a load of asphalt shingles on the left, and a Fiat with a startled, petrified driver on the right. In a couple of seconds, truck and Fiat were left far behind, although, in the side mirror, Gideon could see the truck driver’s arm out the window vigorously giving them the finger. He closed his eyes. That had been the closest one yet. He wondered vaguely if he might be able to come up with a way to take the bus back to Gibraltar when it was time to return.

  “—therefore the bottom one is too,” he finished when his breath returned.

  “Okay,” Fausto said. “So they’re definitely from the same person. That’s what I thought. But he says he dug up the skeleton that the bottom one came from six years ago, up north in Seville province, and it’s been sitting in Algeciras ever since.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “And you say the top one is a cast made from the skeleton of Gibraltar Woman, which was dug up five years ago, in Gibraltar.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Well, how much sense does that make?” Fausto demanded. “You can’t both be right.”

  Gideon sighed. “No, it wouldn’t seem so, would it?”

  “What do you mean, seem so? She couldn’t be—”

  “Fausto, please,” Gideon pleaded, “keep your eyes on the road, will you? You can talk without looking at me.”

  “She couldn’t have been buried in both places, could she?” Fausto persisted.

  “You wouldn’t think so, no.”

  “Look, no offense, Gideon, but isn’t it at least possible they’re not from the same person? I mean, look, nobody’s perfect. Admit it, you could be wrong about this, couldn’t you?”

  Gideon shrugged. “Sure, I suppose I could, Fausto.”

  Like hell he could.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE University of Cádiz’s Algeciras branch provided a welcome haven in the heart of a clanking, grubby, hard-working city. With its clean, white, two-story buildings, its neat lawns, and its concrete paths planted with young trees, it might have been a suburban community college campus in the United States. About the only difference, other than the signs in Spanish, were the students—clean-cut and conservatively dressed, with not a pierced nostril or a stud-transfixed tongue in sight.

  To get to room 203 of the main building they walked the length of a long, gleaming corridor lined with faculty office doors and a few clusters of apprehensive-looking students waiting outside them, hatching their stories, or explanations, or excuses. Again, thought Gideon, just like home. Room 203 itself was a lecture hall smelling strongly of floor polish. There were five tiered rows of empty chairs with writing-desk armrests, and a long, laminate-topped lab table down in front for the instructor. On the table was a grocery-sized cardboard box, and in front of it, waving them in as gracefully as an orchestra conductor signaling a pianissimo passage, stood a somberly smiling Estéban de la Garza, balding a bit now, but otherwise much the same as the last time Gideon had seen him: erect and aristocratic in his usual three-button suit.

  “I have them here in the carton,” he said after the introductions. “I would have laid them out for you myself, but I thought you would prefer them thus, for you to do.”

  “That’s good, Estéban,” Gideon said, undoing the flaps of the carton. “Okay, let’s have a look.”

  As soon as he reached in and removed the first few fragments—a partial rib, the proximal three-quarters of a left fibula, most of a sacrum—he was struck by the near certainty that they did indeed belong to the same female skeleton that he’d examined five years earlier. They were the right sex and the right age to begin with, but it was the bones themselves—their red-tinted gray-brown color, their texture, their weight, their size, and of course their various evidences of AS— ankylosing spondylitis—that all shouted “Gibraltar Woman” at him. But he wasn’t ready to say anything aloud yet. Bones shouted at him a lot, and sometimes they turned out to be flimflamming him. There were more scientific ways to go about things. Unconsciously, he rubbed his hands together, removed the rest of the bones from the carton, and went to work. Fausto and Estéban watched silently.

  The first thing a well-trained anthropologist such as Gideon Oliver does in such a situation is to lay out the remains in as close to correct anatomical position as their number and condition allow. Then he carefully examines them to ensure that they are not commingled—that is, that they do not come from more than one individual. This is done by careful sexing, ageing, evaluation of general condition, etc.—but most obviously and significantly, by checking to
see that there are no duplications. (Two mandibles, for example, would be a good clue to there being more than one person represented.) Then, in this particular situation, would come a mental exercise: a similar analysis in which the anthropologist compares the bones that lie before him to the absent but well-remembered remains of Gibraltar Woman. Are there duplications between the sets? Are there differences in condition, age, sex? And so on. It is all a matter of proceeding in a logical, orderly fashion, systematically narrowing the field of possible alternatives until a single plausible conclusion can be reached.

  Of these steps, so often demanded of his students, Gideon performed not a one. He proceeded instead like a six-year-old set loose in a candy shop and instructed to thoughtfully, prudently consider his choices before making a selection. That is to say, he immediately grabbed the most alluring, enthralling morsel of all: in this case, a columnar section of three solidly fused-together vertebrae, the upper two complete, the lowest one broken. The middle and lowest ones still had stubs of rib fused to them, another abnormality associated with AS.

  “Ah!” he couldn’t help yelling. It was better luck than he’d dared hope for. “This,” he exclaimed excitedly, “will settle it for good.”

  “Settle what?” said Fausto. “What are we settling?”

  “Watch,” Gideon said magisterially, “and learn.” He laid the three-part vertebral segment on the table. “What we have here are the eleventh and twelfth thoracic vertebrae, plus a chunk of the first lumbar. Now, then . . .”

  “Okay, I’m watching,” Fausto said after a few moments of silence and immobility. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

  “Where the heck is the other piece, the one we brought with us?” Gideon said irritably. “The one from Sheila’s room—the T10?” He had scanned the table without success and was now searching perplexedly through his own pockets.