Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  “You had it,” Fausto said accusingly. “You must have left it in the car.”

  “Damn. Lend me the key, will you?”

  “No, you stay here and keep doing whatever you’re doing,” Fausto said wearily, turning toward the door. “I’ll get it.”

  “Okay, thanks, Fausto. Bring them both, will you? The cast too.”

  Fausto’s response, a muttered “Absent-minded professors,” hung in the air behind him as he left.

  While he was gone Gideon filled in de la Garza on what had brought him: the T10 that had been discovered in Sheila Chan’s room was a previously undocumented vertebra from Gibraltar Woman. There was no question about it. The only question was, where had it possibly come from? Now it appeared that it might have—

  “Come from these?” de la Garza supplied, indicating the bones on the table. “From AN-34? In Sevilla?” He had been startled into emitting an extraordinary three fragmentary sentences in a row. “But how can such a thing be possible?”

  Gideon spread his hands. He didn’t have an answer he liked. He’d come up with a few vague possibilities that he didn’t like, but they were too convoluted, too unlikely—and too unwelcome—to think about.

  When Fausto returned with the now limp and wrinkled paper sack, Gideon offered the T10 to de la Garza to examine. “Can you tell if this is the one you lent her?”

  De la Garza scrutinized it with scrupulous care. Fausto, impatient as ever, went striding around the room rapping the backs of the chairs and humming tunelessly to himself. He had circled the entire room and returned by the time de la Garza had his answer ready.

  No, he couldn’t be sure one way or the other, he said, handing it back. It certainly looked like the one he’d lent Sheila, yes, but, unfortunately, inasmuch as the bones were used for teaching purposes only, they had not been marked with identifying codes or abbreviations. Alas, he could not give an unqualified reply.

  “Well, I think I can resolve it,” Gideon said. Indeed, he knew he could resolve it. While de la Garza had been poring over the T10, Gideon had made some visual comparisons between the bones, and they had shouted at him again, louder than before. This time he trusted the shout.

  “Now then, In my left hand I am holding Gibraltar Woman’s tenth thoracic vertebrae, and in my right hand I have the segment of thoracic and lumbar spine from AN-34—eleventh thoracic through first lumbar.”

  “I think this is the watch-and-learn part again,” Fausto said dourly.

  “Cheer up,” said Gideon. “It won’t take long.” He pressed the two segments gently together, and as he knew they would, they fit into each other as neatly and tightly as the T9 model had fit up against the T10 earlier. For good measure, he now put the T9 on top, forming a contiguous, reasonably firmly joined stack of five adjacent vertebrae— four thoracic, and a fragment of the uppermost of the lumbars.

  De la Garza stared at the column for a few seconds before comprehending. “All are from the same individual,” he said slowly.

  “That’s right,” said Gideon. “And yet the top one is a cast from Europa Point, the middle one was found in Sheila Chan’s room, and the bottom three are yours.”

  De la Garza’s long, grave face grew longer and graver. “But this means,” he said slowly, “this means . . .”

  “It means,” Gideon said, “that what you have on the table here—” He swept his hand over the bones. “—is actually part of Gibraltar Woman—the part they didn’t find at Europa Point.”

  De la Garza struggled with this. Unsuccessfully. “Will I be expected to turn these over to the British Museum, then?” he asked, brightening a little, perhaps at the prospect of the renown that would come his way over it.

  Gideon shook his head. “I don’t think so.” During the last few minutes, some of the unlikely possibilities that had been bouncing around his brain had resolved themselves into something a bit more likely—no less convoluted or unwelcome, but more likely; plausible, even. “My guess is that the British Museum will be turning over their material to you.”

  “I do not understand,” de la Garza said. “I do not understand any of this.”

  “He lost me a long time ago,” Fausto said.

  “Estéban,” said Gideon, “when we were talking on the telephone, didn’t you say the Seville site had been donated to the university for teaching purposes?”

  “Yes, that was my understanding. As I said, it held nothing of archaeological or anthropological worth.”

  “Would you happen to know who gave it?”

  “I do. It was the American, Ivan Gunderson.”

  Fausto’s jaw dropped, but it was the answer Gideon had expected . . . but had hoped not to get.

  He thought he knew the answer to his next question too. “And where, again, was the site located?”

  “It lies in the province of Sevilla, in Andalucía, but near the border with Extremadura.”

  “I mean precisely.”

  “You would like geographic coordinates? I can provide them.”

  “No, but was it near a town of any sort?”

  “Yes, it was at the edge of a small village of a few hundred inhabitants. You would not know of it.”

  “Maybe I would.” Gideon’s throat had become dry with anticipation. “What’s it called?”

  De la Garza opened his mouth to speak: “—”

  “No, let me guess,” Gideon said, heavy hearted. “Would it be Guadalcanal, by any chance?”

  De la Garza blinked his surprise. “You know of it, then?”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  JULIE too blinked at the mention of the name. “There’s a Guadalcanal in Spain?”

  “Sure,” Gideon said unhappily, “why wouldn’t there be? There’s a Guadalquivir, a Guadalupe, a Guadalajara . . . why wouldn’t there be a Guadalcanal?” He shook his head. “It should have occurred to me before.”

  “And that’s where Gibraltar Woman really came from? Or I guess I should say, ‘Guadalcanal Woman.’ ”

  “I guess you should. Ivan had it right that night, after all.”

  They were sharing a bench on the Line Wall Promenade, a park-like esplanade atop a portion of the old fortified town wall, where the ranks of gleaming, black cannons that had once defended the colony against flotillas of seaborne invaders now protected it against the cars in the landfill parking lot just below. In the distance, the impending sunset over smoggy Algeciras across the bay looked as beautiful as ever. Gideon, slouching uncharacteristically against the seat back, his legs extended, his hands in his pockets, had just given Julie the upshot of his visit there, as far as he and Fausto had worked it out on the drive back to Gibraltar.

  In a nutshell, the First Family was a fake. The dig had been “salted.” The trustworthy, decent, reliable Ivan Gunderson had pulled off the biggest anthropological scam since—well, yes, since Piltdown Man. Oh, the dig at Gibraltar Point had been honestly and efficiently administered by Adrian and Corbin, no reason to doubt that, and Gibraltar Boy was (probably) an authentic member—a Neanderthal child—of the group that had lived there. That much still held up. But the fly, the very large fly, in the ointment was Gibraltar Woman, who didn’t belong there at all. And without Gibraltar Woman, Europa Point was just one more moderately interesting Neanderthal site; the whole wonderful edifice of theory, hypothesis, and feel-goodness that had been constructed around the First Family came crumbling down.

  In retrospect, it wasn’t that hard to see how Ivan had pulled it off. He had, after all, been working both the Guadalcanal and Europa Point sites at the same time, back in 2000. At that time, as he usually did, he was working with crews of local laborers, not trained archaeologists or even students (since he didn’t have any), so there was no one at either dig with the experience or knowledge—or interest—to note any funny business on his part. Apparently, he had found the remains of Gibraltar Boy at Europa Point and been struck by their somewhat ambiguous appearance, which could conceivably be taken as a mixture of human and Neanderthal traits. Prompte
d by whatever compulsion or momentary impulse—and no one was ever likely to know for sure what it was—he decided to give his beloved admixture theory a colossal shot in the arm. From the Guadalcanal site he took what he needed—parts of the cranium, shoulder girdle, arms, and upper vertebral column of the female remains he’d found there, brought them to his other excavation at Europa Point, carefully tucked them into the soon-to-be-famous “hanging crevice” with Gibraltar Boy, and covered them over.

  “But why would he have left any of her up at Guadalcanal?” Julie asked. “Wouldn’t it have been better—safer—to take the whole skeleton? ”

  Gideon shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe people already knew that there was a partial skeleton there, so he couldn’t take it all. Or perhaps someone came along and interrupted him. Or, most likely, it’s simply that the upper part was all he needed for the hoax. So that’s what he took, along with a few fragments of the lower body so it didn’t look too remarkable. Why risk fooling around trying to find and dig up the rest?”

  Whatever the reason, once that was accomplished, Gunderson donated the Guadalcanal dig to the University of Cádiz, and the Gibraltar Point site to the Horizon Foundation. After that, it was merely a matter of sitting back and waiting for the world-shaking discovery of the First Family. It must have been a long, devilishly impatient wait, because, bureaucracy being what it is, it wasn’t until March 2002, two years later, that the Horizon Foundation got through the usual red tape and legalese and began excavation. And then another six months, now under Adrian’s methodical direction, before they got to the hanging crevice and news of the First Family burst upon the world. In the meantime, up in Guadalcanal, where the red tape was pretty loose, to say the least, the lower portion of the female’s remains had long ago been excavated by de la Garza’s students and had gone onto their unheralded postmortem career as teaching tools in the polytechnic institute in Algeciras.

  “I’m having a hard time with that part of it,” Julie said with a frown. “These people—Adrian, Corbin, Pru—they’re all professionals, they know what they’re doing, isn’t that true?”

  “Sure, pretty much. Pru maybe isn’t quite as experienced in field-work as the others, but what’s your point?”

  “My point is: How could they all have been fooled? How could Ivan have gotten away with it? Aren’t there signs when a dig had been messed with like that? Doesn’t it disturb the sediments, or strata, or whatever you call them? Can’t a competent archaeologist recognize a, a . . . what do you call it, an inserted burial?”

  “An intrusive burial. And yes, sure there are signs, because when you do what Ivan did—insert bones or anything else at a level they don’t belong, you necessarily disturb the beds—the layers—of sediment above it. It’s not that hard to spot.”

  “Well, that’s my question. Why didn’t they spot it?”

  “They did spot it, as a matter of fact. On the way back, I stopped by the conference downtown to ask Pru about it, and she said right out that there was no question about it. The burial itself was in bed IV, down at the bottom, so ordinarily, you’d expect the more recent layers—beds I, II, and III—to be intact above it.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But when a farmer with his bulldozer has been there before you, doing his damndest to turn the place into a mushroom farm, all bets are off.”

  “Okay, I see that,” she said, nodding, “but I would have thought there were some kind of geological tests that could confirm it, one way or the other.”

  “There are: soil tests, skeletal tests, tests on associated flora and fauna. And I have no doubt they are now going to be performed. But they’re expensive and they take time. You don’t do them unless you have some specific reason.”

  “And the possibility of a hoax wasn’t a good enough reason?”

  “Julie, the possibility never arose! Gunderson wasn’t the greatest excavator in the world, but he was—we thought he was—a reputable archaeologist. Of long standing. The possibility of, of—” He could hardly bring himself to say it. “—of fraud would never have crossed anybody’s mind.”

  “Uh-huh. Because the science of archaeology relies on the integrity of its practitioners.”

  He sighed. “That’s about it,” he said miserably. “Let’s get a bite. I forgot all about lunch.”

  They walked the few blocks to Main Street more or less mentally chewing their cuds and found a palm-shaded patio table at Latino’s Classic American Diner, which, despite its name, featured an eclectic menu of European, Chinese, Tex-Mex, and Moroccan foods. Another cruise ship was in port and the streets were again mobbed, but, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the restaurant was relatively uncrowded. Julie, who wasn’t hungry, asked for an iced tea. Gideon ordered a chicken BLT on ciabatta bread and a Coke.

  “So,” Julie said, “why was Ivan killed? Why was anybody killed? Why were you attacked?”

  “Well, there, all we’ve got is surmise, but the most probable scenario is—”

  “—That someone else besides Ivan knew the find was faked, and was desperate to keep anyone else from finding out.”

  “Yes, that’s the way I see it. If you start with the first person killed, Sheila, the fact that she had those two matching vertebrae from the two different sites makes it clear that she’d found out about it. And she was going to expose it at the conference. I mean, why would she have brought them with her to Gibraltar except to use them as Exhibit A?”

  “But if that’s the case, why wouldn’t the killer have gotten rid of them? Apparently he got rid of the paper she was going to present and any notes she might have had. Why leave the vertebrae? They were her proof positive. Wouldn’t he have taken them too?”

  Gideon spread his hands. “My guess is that he didn’t know about them. Remember, Sheila played things pretty close to the vest, according to everyone. She was probably saving them to make a big splash at her talk. Which they would have; a huge splash.”

  “But obviously she told someone, or she’d still be alive.”

  “Well, yes; told, or implied, or insinuated—anyway, enough to scare him into killing her.”

  “Or her,” Julie amended. “So the question is, who would Sheila have told?”

  “For which I don’t have an answer, do you?”

  “No, it could have been any of them.” She paused while the waiter set down their orders. “And what about what happened to you? Was that on account of that newspaper article? Someone was afraid you’d found out too? That you really had something that was going to leave Piltdown in the dust?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Which it would have, I gather.”

  “And still will, when it gets out.”

  “And poor Ivan himself was murdered because he was going to give a speech the next day.”

  “Uh-huh,” Gideon managed around a heavenly mouthful of bread, chicken, bacon, tomato, and mayonnaise.

  She paused to sugar her iced tea and have a first sip. “But wait a minute,” she said thoughtfully, “we talked about this before. Ivan must have given plenty of other speeches over the years. Why would someone think he would choose to reveal it now?”

  “I doubt if anyone thought he would choose to reveal it, but now—”

  She finished the sentence for him. “Now someone was afraid he was might reveal it inadvertently—because of that Guadalcanal slip.”

  “I think so.” He put down the sandwich. “If only I’d realized what it was about at the time, I might have been able to prevent—”

  “No, you couldn’t have. There was no conceivable way you could have known what that ‘Guadalcanal’ meant. How could anyone?”

  “You’re right, I know,” he said with a sigh. “Still, I can’t help thinking that if I’d been a little quicker on the uptake—”

  “Now you stop that right now,” she said firmly. “Eat your sandwich. Don’t be so hard on yourself. If somebody had told you then— what was it, four days ago?—what you’ve just finished telling me, woul
d you have believed it?”

  “Not in a million years.”

  “You know,” she said, while he returned to chewing away, “this pretty much settles it. It has to be one of our people, someone who was right there in the dining room that night—someone who heard Ivan get confused over Gibraltar and Guadalcanal.”

  “That’s right. Rowley, Audrey, Buck, Adrian, Corbin, Pru—the very same people, by the way, who were around last night, when George brought those two vertebrae to the table. One of them obviously recognized what they were, what they represented, and rifled our room hunting for it. Which,” he added with a smile, “we still wouldn’t know about if old eagle-eye here hadn’t spotted a jacket hung backward.”

  “Rowley, Audrey, Buck, Adrian, Corbin, Pru,” she recited. “So who had the motive? Which of them would benefit most from keeping the fake a secret?”

  “Hey, you’re thinking like a cop now—that’s exactly what Fausto asked me.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said it was a pretty good motive for all of them, every last one.” He dabbed mayonnaise from the corner of his mouth and explained.

  For each of them, the fact that there was no Gibraltar Woman, no First Family, would be a hideous blow to their reputations and even to their livelihoods. Adrian and Corbin probably had the most to lose. They had written the standard academic books on the First Family, and they had supervised the dig itself; there was no way they could come out of this without looking like bunglers and—worse than bunglers in the minds of fellow scientists—dupes. Or maybe it was Rowley that had the most to lose; he hadn’t been involved in the dig per se, but his precious museum was founded on its supposed findings, and his new book, the book he’d been working on for three years, was now worse than meaningless. Audrey—

  “That does look good,” she said, indicating his sandwich. “How about cutting me off some?”

  “It is good. Want one of your own?”

  “No, I’d rather have a piece of yours.”

  He sliced off a quarter for her and went back to his rundown.

  Audrey, heretofore esteemed for her expertise and acumen, would be ridiculed as another dupe, and, considering her long record of caustic remarks about others, there were plenty of colleagues just waiting for the chance to do it. Buck had had nothing whatever to do with Gibraltar Point, but his devotion to Audrey couldn’t be missed, and who knew what lengths he might go to in order to protect her? Pru probably had the least to worry about. True, she was the person who had actually dug up the remains, but in her case there were extenuating factors; namely, the depredations of a rampant bulldozer before she ever got there. On the other hand, extenuating factors were probably not going to entirely get her off the hook. There was no getting around the fact that she had personally excavated the sham “First Family” and had never had a clue that there was anything wrong. She would go down as one more dupe. Maybe not a world-class dupe like the others, but a dupe all the same.