by Aaron Elkins
"See? I can always tell when it’s coming. So, if he’s not Russian, what is he?"
"Swedish, or maybe from the Norwegian uplands, or even northern Germany or England. But definitely not Russian."
"What would he look like if he was Russian?"
"If he were Russian, he might be one of several anthropomorphic types, or a composite. First, he—"
"I’m already sorry I asked," muttered John.
"—could be an East Baltic brachycephal, or he might be a Dinaric acrocephalic brachycephal, or an Armenoid—" Gideon couldn’t help bursting into laughter at John’s disgusted expression. "You’re not doubting me, are you?"
"Doc, I never know whether you’re kidding when you do that. Jesus Christ, acrybrachyphallic…"
Gideon finished his beer and wiped his lips with the cloth napkin; he was feeling much better. "Anyway," he said, "I’d still bet that guy’s a Scandinavian."
"But—"
"What’s the difference, anyway? You don’t have to be a Russian to be a Russian spy. And he could come from Scandinavian parents but be a Russian himself. No way to tell that from cranial conformation. But how can you be thinking about spies on a day like this in a place like this?" "That isn’t the point. You just finished telling me—"
"In any event, it’s moot." Gideon gestured with his head, and they both watched the tall young man walking away from them toward El Retiro Park, his head still buried in the guidebook.
John sighed in mock exasperation. "You know, you’re the only guy in the whole world I never win any arguments with."
"That’s because I am a Ph.D. and therefore know all kinds of smart stuff."
John nodded soberly and sighed again, like a man resigned to his fate. "I think I’m ready for the Prado now."
JOHN was a good sport about it, but it was obvious that the endless galleries severely tested his endurance. He expressed considerably more appreciation for several of the women visitors than for any of the works of art, and was always a few steps ahead of Gideon, pulling him on to the next painting, the next room. Gideon quickly gave up on John’s art education and concentrated on enjoying the paintings himself.
After three hours in the museum, he had had enough. Promising the long-suffering John no more than a ten-minute detour, he led them back to the Velazquez rooms for one more look at Las Meninas. At the entrance to the Great Rotunda, Gideon stopped.
"Now there you are," he said, pointing at a hulking man with shaggy, dark hair who stood in front of a portrait of Philip IV mounted uneasily upon a horse. "That is an absolutely classic Armenoid composite. Acrocephalic, mesorrhine, cephalic index of at least eighty-five, everted lower lip—"
"Are you saying he’s Russian?"
"Maybe. More like Balkan—Rumanian, Yugoslavian, Bulgarian…."
John looked keenly at the man, watching him move slowly to a second portrait of the ungainly Philip and bend close to examine the ornate frame.
"Don’t get excited, John. What would an agent be doing here?"
"It’s not that. I just think you’re wrong. I say he’s English."
"English! That guy doesn’t have an English gene in his entire body. He’s pure Balkan."
"A famous professor once told me there’s no pure anything."
"So much for famous professors," Gideon said.
"How much do you want to bet?"
A disapproving guard approached with outstretched palms and frowning brow. "Senores…por favor…" They apologized and moved out of the entrance way.
"I’ll bet you dinner at the Zum Ritter when we get back to Heidelberg," Gideon said in a whisper.
"You’re on," John said. "I say he’s English; you say he’s Rumanian or something. What if he’s neither, or both?"
"If he’s not eastern European, or his family isn’t, I’ll buy. But how are we supposed to find out?"
"Let’s go ask him."
Gideon, shy with strangers, quailed slightly. "You can’t just walk up to him and ask him where he’s from."
"Why not? How about if we just say ‘good afternoon’ to him in English and see how he answers? I think that will settle it right there."
As they started forward, Gideon touched John’s arm. "But what the heck makes you so sure he’s an Englishman?"
John smiled broadly and tapped his temple with a forefinger. "Who else would carry a big black umbrella on a day like this?"
GIDEON saw the craziness in his eyes as soon as the man turned toward them. John didn’t.
"Good afternoon," John said jauntily. "Lovely paintings, aren’t—"
With a cry that was part shriek, part snarl, the man flailed at John with the umbrella. Catching him off balance as he ducked, the blows struck him on the shoulder with surprisingly solid thuds, sending him reeling backwards and finally depositing him on the floor in a sitting position. A quick look at his face told Gideon he was more surprised than hurt. The man lifted the umbrella again.
The room seemed to explode away from the upraised umbrella. People ran for the exits or fell back against the walls. Several women screamed, and some of the men dropped to the floor. Gideon, emerging from the momentary paralysis into which he had been shocked, jumped for the umbrella, concerned almost as much for The Surrender at Breda, which hung inches from the waving metal ferrule, as for John. He managed to get his hand around the shaft and drag it sharply downwards, away from the canvas. The man, twisting as his arm was wrenched, stepped forward just as the umbrella came down, so that the point struck him on his left foot. Gideon heard a distinct, sharp click, and assumed that blow must have cracked a metatarsal.
The effect on the man was extraordinary. With a shuddering gasp, he sprang back a step and clasped the umbrella tightly to his body. His eyes, panicky and crazed an instant before, pierced Gideon with a look so laden with despair that Gideon instinctively stepped forward to help. For a second the big man stood there, his eyes rolling ceilingward, like the nearby St. Sebastian of Zurbaran come suddenly to life, embracing an umbrella instead of a cross in his twentieth-century Passion.
Gideon’s hesitant touch galvanized him, and with a choked cry the man brushed him aside and ran for the exit, scattering the people in his way. John, in the act of rising from the floor, launched himself at the rushing figure but couldn’t reach him, so that he hung outstretched and suspended for a long moment, like a stop-action frame of a diver, before he fell to the floor with a crash.
At the exit, the guard who had earlier asked them to be quiet made a half-hearted attempt to block the doorway, but then dropped back against the wall, ashen-faced, before the charging man’s onslaught. The man disappeared toward the exit at a full run.
As the room’s shocked stillness gave way to a sudden babble, Gideon went to John and helped him up.
"Are you all right?" Gideon asked.
"Except for my pride."
"There wasn’t anything you could do. It happened too fast. I was just standing there with my mouth open through most of it, myself."
"And all I did was keep falling on my face."
"Not always your face," Gideon said. "John, do you have any idea what that was about?"
John shrugged and winced as he rubbed his shoulder. "Damn heavy umbrella. No, I don’t know what it was about. We just picked a crazy Englishman to talk to, I guess."
"I suppose so," Gideon said, smiling. He paused while they looked each other in the eye. "Do you really believe that? That it was just another coincidence?"
"Of course not. What do you make of it?"
They walked from the Great Rotunda under the awestruck scrutiny of the crowd, quiet again as they watched them go. The guard at the door, still pale, hesitantly moved toward them as if he were about to speak, but thought better of it and let them pass unmolested.
"I really don’t know," Gideon said. "It’s one more crazy event that doesn’t seem to connect with anything else, but it must. Whatever it was, something about you scared that guy witless."
"Or something abo
ut you."
BY the time they had turned off he highway at Torrejon, they had exhausted all the theories that were even remotely plausible, and Gideon was musing and abstracted as they walked through the base terminal toward John’s plane. "Did you see what happened when the umbrella punched him on the foot?" he said. "It was as if he was a big inflated doll and the point of the umbrella punctured him and let all the air out. Or that his big toe was his Achilles’ heel"— Gideon grimaced at his metaphor, but John didn’t notice— "and that hitting him there meant his end, and he knew it."
"Doc," John said gravely at the gate to his flight, "you’re trying to make sense of a lot of puzzling things that nobody’s been able to figure out, so I can’t blame you for wanting to fit them together. But you only know a little part of the espionage picture, and I don’t know much more. Don’t lead yourself into thinking that you’re the center of everything that’s going on, or that everyone’s after you, or that you can save the world."
Gideon grinned wryly. "You’ve just given a textbook description of the classic paranoiac psychosis: delusions of persecution, delusions of grandeur, and the construction of an elaborate, internally logical system to account for everything." He paused. "You could be right."
FIFTEEN
THE three old men sat side by side on the ancient wrought-iron bench, looking like octogenarian triplets identically dressed and posed by a doting centenarian mother with a turn for the grotesque. On each head a shapeless black beret sat squarely, pulled down to the ears. The patched frock coats of rusty black, equally shapeless, might have been cut from a single bolt of cloth. And each gray, sparsely whiskered chin was propped upon a knobby pair of hands clasped over the handle of a wooden cane as scuffed and scarred as the men themselves. Their eyes followed the group of strangers—foreigners, city people—who had left their cars along the roadside just outside the little village and now approached the dusty plaza, self-conscious and out of place.
"Is that your professor and his students, Ignacio?" asked one of the three without turning his head. "They are grown-ups, not children. I can’t tell which is the professor. Do you think it’s them?"
"How should I know?" said the one on the left, with appropriate unconcern. Actually, he knew that they were, and he knew the others knew. Who else could they be? Not tourists, certainly. There weren’t any tourists in Torralba.
When the authorities had built the ugly little museo in the hills outside the village, they had said there would be hordes of tourists coming to see the elephant bones that had been dug up, and that they would stop at the village to buy food and soda pop and hats to wear in the sun. But Ignacio Montes hadn’t believed them, of course, and neither had anyone else. And naturally there weren’t any hordes of tourists.
For one thing, why would anyone travel all the way from Madrid or Zaragoza just to see some old bones? Now, if they had some old saint’s little-finger bone, that would be different. But these were just elephants’ bones, or so they said.
Only Ignacio knew there weren’t any elephant bones there, no matter what the authorities said. If those things were elephant bones, what had they been doing under the ground? Who could bury an elephant in that soil? He had been in that little building a thousand times, and he should know. Once he had borrowed Joaquin’s hammer to chip off a piece, and had satisfied himself that it was made of stone.
Besides that, everyone knew there weren’t any elephants around Torralba, and there never had been any. Elephants came from China. Even he, who couldn’t read and had never been to school, knew that. And even if there had been elephants, and even if those stones were bones, why would anyone want to see them when they could see real, live elephants—from China—in the zoo in Barcelona, only a few hours down the road? Last year, the schoolchildren had gone to Barcelona on a big bus, and they had gone to the zoo and seen living elephants tied with chains on their legs.
And as for those rocks the authorities said were cavemen’s tools, that was the most foolish of all. Was every chipped rock you could hold in your hand a tool? Then the authorities were welcome to come and dig all they wanted out of the wheat fields every year. That would make everyone happy.
Still, when he had been mayor four years ago and they had offered him the "honor" of being custodian of the museo, he had accepted, and he had quietly kept the post, although he was no longer the mayor. Putting aside the tremendous glory of it, if they were crazy enough to give him 500 pesetas a month for sweeping out the dust once a week (more or less) and for opening it up to the crazy professors who came to see it, why should he object? And then, of course, there were the propinas—the tips. If Rafael or Joaquin knew about those, they’d be fighting for the job.
Already today he had gotten a propina of 500 pesetas— a month’s salary—from the ugly man with the fierce eyes. He hadn’t liked the man, hadn’t liked his looks—a small, angry man with the body of a monkey and the cunning face of a weasel. And the eyes! Brr, a bad man. But he had paid good money, and all he had wanted was the key to the museo and Ignacio’s promise to let no one else in that day, even this professor and his students. And on top of it all, Ignacio had been promised another 500 pesetas afterwards. He doubted that he would really get it, but who knew? In any case, he would certainly follow his instructions. The weasel-faced man was not one he would care to make angry.
But the professor was going to be angry. He had already sent Ignacio a telegram two days ago—to receive his first telegram, he had had to live for eighty-two years—saying he was coming with his students to see the site. Well, let him be angry. Ignacio would claim he never received it. How was the professor to know?
Across the square, one of them spoke hesitantly to old Vicente, who pointed toward Ignacio. The man thanked old Vicente courteously and began to come across the square, followed by the others. So that was the professor. A big man, but with a soft smile. Better to make him angry than the other one.
Ignacio would have no trouble pulling the wool over his eyes. In his mind, he rehearsed what he would say: Telegram, senor? To me? Surely not, never in my life. And I am extremely sorry, but the museo is closed on Thursdays. Perhaps tomorrow? For a small deposit I can reserve it entirely for you…
BEING denied admission to the little museum had been a severe disappointment for Gideon, so much so that he had angrily accused the old man of lying. At once ashamed of himself—although he was sure he was right—he had tipped him ten pesetas and then walked with the class up to the site to see if the day could be salvaged.
He found that it could indeed. For Gideon, it was enough just to be there, standing on the very site itself, delivering the lecture of a lifetime, the lecture of an anthropology professor’s dreams.
They stood in the middle of a flat depression a few hundred feet in diameter, at the foot of an arid, steep hill. In the distance, small, parched wheat fields ran irregularly up a broad, sloping hillside. Aside from those, the only sign of man was the squat little concrete-block museum at the edge of the depression. Five hundred feet away, a line of delicate trees marked the all-but-dry bed of the Ambrona River and provided the only relief in a scorched, shimmering landscape of dun, beige, and ochre. The sky was covered by a thin, gray-white cloud-sheet that muted the sun’s brilliance but offered no protection against its heat.
Around him was a semicircle of fifteen rapt students, so enthralled that note-taking was forgotten.
Professor Gideon Oliver was giving it his all: "It was on the spot on which we stand, then, that Homo erectus ceased to be a scavenging animal that moved in straggling, starving bands. It was here that man was born. It was here that mankind began, here that the first seeds of civilization were sown… three hundred thousand years ago…ten thousand generations."
The rich words, describing an unimaginable expanse of time, thrilled him as much as they did the students, and his voice vibrated and soared with emotion.
"It would have been this time of year, during the fall migration to the lowlands. Thirty of
them—Elephas antiquus, the huge straight-tusked elephant—would have come screaming and trumpeting over this hill from the northwest." Fifteen heads swiveled to follow his pointing finger; fifteen pairs of eyes peered anxiously up the parched hillside, as if the long-extinct monsters were about to come pounding down upon them.
"Where we are now was a bog; this barren hillside was covered with trees and long grasses. Driving the elephants was a gigantic grass fire. The wind was blowing toward the southeast, and the elephants were swept down the hillside into the bog. Over there"—he pointed again, this time toward the trickling river—"other fires had been set to prevent them from crossing to solid ground."
Gideon paused and took a deep breath, savoring the struggle that was as alive as the twentieth century for him. "And so here they stayed," he said in a deeper, quieter voice, "panicked and stumbling in the deep mud; giant males, females…infants. At the edge of the bog stood the hunters, the fire-setters. They had only to wait—and they were patient—for the mired elephants to become helpless. Then, one by one, they were killed with stones and wooden spears. The next day they were butchered. It was the earliest known evidence of such an enterprise in the entire history of the world."
Gideon breathed deeply again. He was tired. The site held deep meaning for his conception of man, and he had tried his best to convey it for thirty minutes. From the glazed, worn looks of the students, he had been successful.
"To sum it up then," he said a little wearily, "what makes Torralba epochal in the history of mankind is that here, for the first time, a project was undertaken that required two, or maybe even three family groups of twenty or thirty individuals to cooperate—to trust each other, to take risks. It was the beginning of everything—language, mathematics, laws. Here we took that first tentative step from caring only for blood kin toward being members of a society of man."