Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

“Yes, that’s right,” Corbin said. “I’d forgotten, but as a matter of fact, now that I think of it, she told me how kind you’d been to her.”

  Julie had grown impatient. “But what was it that happened to her?”

  “She died,” said Corbin. He returned to his salad, apparently considering his contribution done.

  “I know, but—”

  “It was a couple of years after the dig ended,” Pru said. “We were all back here—well, not here—most of us were at some of the cheap hotels downtown; Horizon wasn’t picking up the tab then, and we were on our own nickel. It was called Europa Point: A Retrospective— a kind of miniconference bringing things up to date on Gibraltar Boy and the First Family two years later; maybe fifteen contributors all together—people who had had some part in it—hey, come to think of it, why weren’t you here, Gideon?”

  “I remember being invited. Couldn’t make it, I forget why. But I did see the proceedings, of course. Excellent papers; a lot of good scholarship, well presented.”

  “Why, thank you, prof,” said Pru, beaming. “I was program chair.”

  “Is somebody going to get around to what happened to Sheila Chan?” Julie pleaded through clenched teeth.

  “She was killed in a cave-in,” Pru said. “It was really bizarre. It was two days before they dug her out.”

  “That’s awful,” Julie said, “but why is it bizarre?”

  “Because it was the Europa Point Cave itself where it happened. The whole hillside came down on her. It was like, you know, woohoo, the Curse of Europa Point.”

  “She wasn’t supposed to be there at all, that was the sad part,” Corbin said with a reproachful look at Pru. In his opinion, flippancy was out of place at any time, let alone when discussing a colleague’s death. “It’d been rainy the year before, and the soil had loosened, and they had the site roped off because they thought there might be a landslide. After all, when you think about it, there had obviously been other landslides in the past, or we wouldn’t have had to dig it out in the first place. But no, she paid no attention. She kept going there anyway.”

  “Actually, that wasn’t the sad part,” Pru said more pensively. “The sad part was that she had no relatives, nobody interested in having her body returned to them. She was cremated right here in Gibraltar, when they didn’t know what else to do with her.”

  “That is sad,” Julie said.

  “Ivan paid for it,” Corbin added. “He had her ashes scattered in the Strait.”

  “But why was she hanging around the site?” Gideon asked. “Wasn’t the dig completed and closed down by then?”

  “It was,” Pru said. “That was the funny thing. But you know, I suppose there’s always something that might have been missed. And she was painstaking, boy, I’ll say that for her. Heck, she made Mr. Meticulous here”—a nod in Corbin’s direction—“look positively slipshod. Hey, Rowley—”

  Rowley started. He had gone back to watching Gunderson. “I’m sorry—what?”

  “Did she ever tell you what she was after, fooling around in the cave? Apparently, you got along with her better than anyone else.”

  “But that was during the original dig. I don’t think I said two words to her at the meetings the following year. I wasn’t around very much.”

  “Of course you were around. You picked us up at the airport.”

  “Yes, I was around, but I spent almost all the time on a site survey on the west side, remember?”

  “Oh, yes, so you did,” Pru said.

  “Another Neanderthal site?” Gideon asked.

  “No, they were considering building a hotel, or perhaps it was a condominium, and the law requires that they get an archaeological evaluation before they do any digging. That’s part of my job here. You never know what you might find. I’ve turned up two Neanderthal campsites that way in the past, and of course I was hoping for another, more permanent habitation.”

  “And did you find one?” Julie asked.

  “Alas, no,” said Rowley, turning apprehensive eyes on Gunderson again. “How does Ivan seem to you?”

  THE salad plates were cleared and the main dish, grenadine of pork glazed with port wine and served with prune confit, was quickly brought. (The staff had been asked to be “brisk.”) Over this aromatic dish, Corbin and Pru entertained the Olivers with the usual war stories about the personality conflicts and typical contretemps at the Europa Point dig. By then, Gideon had unbent and had a glass of white wine, and the conversation was animated and entertaining.

  At the head table, however, things were considerably more stilted. Gunderson’s resources seemed to diminish by the minute. Audrey and Adrian, on either side of him, worked at trying to engage him in conversation, but Gunderson, eating with the single-minded avidity of the aged for their remaining pleasures, was in a ravenous world of his own, devouring his food as if he’d never have another opportunity. Gideon’s heart sank further every time he looked up at him.

  The only comment he was heard to make came when he had finished using a roll to mop up every last scrap of his dinner (an action that would have been unthinkable in the Ivan Gunderson of a few years ago).

  “I don’t remember my mother,” Gunderson said suddenly and quite loudly, “but as I may have told you before, when my father remarried, his new wife brought her three grown daughters to live with us: Sally, Veronica, and Annie-Maude. So there I was, one impressionable young boy of eleven who’d never been around women, suddenly surrounded by a household of four of them. Four of them! Now that’s enough to give anyone pause.”

  Everyone waited for whatever was coming next—a joke, an apocryphal story—but that was it. He reached for his wine and gazed uneasily about him, obviously wondering why everybody was looking at him.

  Audrey cleared her throat. “Perhaps this would be a good time to get on with the ceremonies?”

  Yes! Gideon urged silently.

  Gunderson looked up anxiously. “We haven’t had dessert yet.”

  “Well, why don’t we begin our ceremonies while we await our dessert and coffee?” Adrian suggested mildly, and then, before Gunderson could reply, he said, “Rowley, why don’t you start the festivities? ”

  Rowley hurriedly took his unlit pipe from his mouth, stood up, blushing, and made a warm, pleasant little speech about how much Gunderson had meant to the Territory of Gibraltar, recounting how the very first Neanderthal skeleton ever to be found anywhere, a female, had actually been discovered there in 1848, but no one had understood what it was until after a similar skeleton, a male, had turned up eight years later in the Neander Valley—das Neander Thal—near Dusseldorf.

  “And so what might have been ‘Gibraltar Woman’ became instead ‘Neanderthal Man,’” Rowley said, “robbing Gibraltar of its rightful place in the history of archaeology. That is, until the, ah, eminent gentleman seated there to my left came along”—he smiled down at Gunderson, who smiled back—“and provided the impetus and insight that led to the wonderful discoveries at Europa Point. We now not only have Gibraltar Woman but Gibraltar Boy as well—the justly celebrated First Family—catapulting Gibraltar back into the mainstream, indeed, the forefront of prehistoric archaeology.”

  He turned to face Gunderson directly. “Ivan, on behalf of the Historical Association, it is my great pleasure and honor to present you with this year’s Mons Calpe Medal in recognition of your many contributions, moral, financial, and advisory to the Gibraltar Museum of Archaeology and Geology.”

  He raised the award high for all to see—a gleaming Roman coin (“Mons Calpe” was the Romans’ name for Gibraltar)—hung on a gold chain that was stitched down the center of a wide, red-and-white-striped ribbon. When Gunderson rose to accept it, head modestly bowed, Rowley placed it around his neck, draping the ribbon almost tenderly over his shoulders.

  In a rattle of nervous applause, Gunderson shook hands with Rowley and faced the assembled guests. He looked genuinely touched. He also looked as if he might be back in reasonable form. All held
their breath as he opened his mouth to speak.

  “Thank you so much for this honor,” he said smoothly and sincerely, at which the collective, inheld breath was released, “which I must in all honesty say is completely undeserved. It is Dr. Vanderwater who did the work and brought forth the great achievement; Dr. Vanderwater and his extremely accomplished staff—”

  An imperial, benevolent nod and wave from Adrian, simpers from Corbin and Pru.

  “—some of whom I am extremely gratified to see here tonight. But whether I deserve it or not”—a humorous twinkle lit his eyes— “I’d just like to see anyone try and get it away from me.” He sat down smiling. “Thank you all for this wonderful, wonderful evening.” Then, as an afterthought: “You’ve made an old man very happy.”

  The applause was heartfelt this time. People were moved by the occasion, and thankful and relieved that Gunderson had been able to handle it with his old flair. By now coffee and dessert had been brought, and at Audrey’s suggestion, the presentation of the V. Gordon Childe award was held off until the almond crème brûlée had been disposed of. Gunderson reverted to the same intent, glitter-eyed greed he’d shown with the main course, and only when he’d scraped the sides of the fluted cup clean and finally lain down his spoon, did she arise.

  Her speech was as short as Rowley’s, if not quite as warm. She brought the award, a gold-plated trowel on an onyx base, from the floor behind her and placed it on the table in front of Gunderson. “The directorial board of the Horizon Foundation has unanimously determined that this year’s V. Gordon Childe Lifetime Achievement Award in Archaeology be awarded to Ivan Samuel Gunderson in appreciation of his many contributions to the understanding of European prehistory, and his great success in sensitively interpreting it for readers and television viewers throughout the world. Congratulations, Ivan.”

  Again Gunderson stood, accepted the trophy, and shook hands. Again he faced his audience.

  “Thank you so much for this honor, which I must in all honesty say is completely undeserved. It is Dr. Vanderwater who did the work and brought forth the great achievement; Dr. Vanderwater—”

  The smiles on the faces of his appalled audience turned wooden. Troubled glances shot around the table.

  “—and his extremely accomplished staff, some of whom I am extremely gratified to see here tonight. But whether I deserve it or not, I’d just like to see anyone try and get it away from me. Thank you all for this wonderful, wonderful evening. You’ve made an old man very happy.”

  What made it especially horrible was that he said it with all the same easy verve and informal good humor, even the very same stresses and pauses, the same twinkles and smiles at all the same places. Even the identical brief hiatus before the last, “spontaneous,” throwaway sentence. He had no idea that he made the same carefully rehearsed speech only a few minutes before.

  The attendees smiled and clapped, doing their best to cover their dismay, but Gunderson sensed that he’d done something wrong, although he didn’t know what.

  “And I . . . I just want to add,” he began uncertainly from his seat, “that, that . . . the proudest accomplishment of my life has been the privilege, the privilege of, of having been . . . been instrumental in the discovery of, of . . .” Sweat streamed down beside his eyes in runnels as he desperately rummaged, in a disordered and inaccessible mind, for the words he wanted. “. . . the discovery of . . . Guadalcanal Woman,” he finally spat out wretchedly, “and Guadalcanal . . .” but his darting, panicked eyes showed that, while he saw from the expressions around him that he’d missed his target, he had no idea of where or how to find it. He looked anxiously, pathetically, at Rowley. “Did I misspeak? I misspoke, didn’t I?”

  “Not at all, Ivan,” Adrian cut in with his warmest smile. “It was a wonderful speech, and a wonderful way to end the evening.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” others echoed and there was yet another round of applause. Gideon joined in, but he could feel tears at the corners of his eyes.

  “I’ll drive you home,” Rowley said, quick to seize on his cue. He too was on the edge of weeping. The good-byes were muted and hurried, and within a couple of minutes he was leading a shambling, confused Gunderson, clutching his prizes, out of the room. He looked fifteen years older than when he’d come in.

  The remaining diners looked mutely, glumly at their coffee cups. “Guadalcanal Woman,” Pru said softly. “Where did that come from?”

  “He was back in 1942,” Adrian said with a melancholy smile. “Ivan was in the Marines, you know. He spent more than a year in the South Pacific. A life-altering experience. He talked about it often.”

  “Very often,” Audrey said drily.

  “If he fought with the Marines at Guadalcanal, he had a right to talk about it,” Buck said, in a rare reprimand to Audrey. “Guadalcanal. Jesus.”

  In the silence that followed, Pru let out a long, lip-flapping sigh. “Well. I don’t think this was one of his better days,” she said.

  NINE

  JULIE stretched, sighed, and let her head fall back on the pillow. “Let’s be decadent this morning—”

  “We’ve already been decadent this morning,” Gideon pointed out, nuzzling the ear lobe nearest him.

  She laughed. “Then let’s continue in that vein, and order up a room service breakfast. We can have it out on the balcony in those lovely terry cloth robes.”

  Their room’s generous balcony was two floors above the Wisteria Terrace, so the view was, if anything, even more grand than from the terrace. Through the French doors, which they’d left open during the night, they could see the winding paths and lush plantings of the public gardens just below, the bay a little farther out, and off to the left the Strait of Gibraltar and the dusky mountains of Africa, shimmering in their haze as the early morning sun found them.

  “I’m for that,” Gideon said. “How about if I order up a good, greasy, thoroughly decadent full English breakfast—the Full Monty?”

  “I’m for that,” Julie said. “I’m starving.”

  Over their mammoth breakfasts—fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled tomato, mushrooms, baked beans, white toast in a rack, marmalade, butter, and a cozy-covered pot of tea—they worked out their plans for the day.

  “Well, you’ve got your lecture to give at noon,” Julie said. “Where is that going to be again?”

  “St. Michael’s Cave. It’s a set of natural caverns up on the Rock, and they use one of them as a lecture hall. That’ll be over by one, and then we have a late lunch date with Fausto at one thirty.”

  Several years before, Gideon had lectured in an international forensics symposium for criminal justice personnel, held in St. Malo, France, and Fausto Sotomayor, then a young detective constable in the Royal Gibraltar Police, had been an attendee. Since then, he had been in intermittent touch with Gideon with one technical question or another, and they had become e-mail buddies of a sort, dropping each other a few lines now and then. They’d seen him briefly the day before, when Fausto, now much glorified—a detective chief inspector, no less—had insisted on driving them into town from the airport, and had invited them to lunch today at a downtown pub.

  “What about before your talk?” Julie asked, spreading marmalade on a wedge of toast. “Are you free?”

  “Mostly, but I did want to sit in on one of the paleoanthropological society papers at nine thirty. They’re holding the conference down at the Eliott Hotel.”

  “What’s the topic? Maybe I’ll join you.”

  “The title is . . .” He consulted the conference program he’d brought out with them. “The title is—um, no, I have a hunch you won’t be interested—‘A Bio-Mechanical Assessment of Cranial Base Architecture in the Hominoidea.’ ”

  She made a face. “Your hunch is correct. Tell you what: let’s stretch our legs and stroll down the hill into town. We’ll have an hour or so, maybe get a cup of coffee somewhere?”

  He smiled. Tea was nice, very British and all that, but for both of them
, a couple of cups of coffee in the morning were a necessity for comprehensive physiological functioning.

  “Sounds good, Julie.”

  “And then I think I’ll pick up a guidebook and just explore the sights until we meet your friend for lunch.”

  “You don’t want to sit in on my presentation?”

  “Would you mind very much if I didn’t? I have seen this one before. ”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  To be honest, he preferred it that way. How could you be expected to enter fully into your exalted role as one of the world’s foremost forensic scientists when the woman who told you when to take out the garbage was sitting in the first row watching you? “I’ll see you at lunch then. The Angry Friar. Fausto says you can’t miss it. On Main Street, in the middle of town. Right across from the Governor’s Residence.”

  While they spoke, he had been leafing cursorily through the conference program, and now something, a boxed item on the last page of the schedule, caught his eye. " ’Close-of-conference reception,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘proudly sponsored by Javelin Press to celebrate the publication of Uneasy Relations: Humans and Neanderthals at the Dawn of History: Implications for Today’s World, by Rowley G. Boyd. 5:00-7:00 P.M., Eliottt Hotel Poolside Terrace (on top floor). Open bar and heavy hors d’oeuvres. Government and cultural dignitaries have been invited to attend.’ ” He looked at her. “What do you know, Lester really is doing his book launch here. I half thought he was kidding.”

  “Uneasy Relations: Humans and Neanderthals at the Dawn of History: Implications for Today’s World,” Julie repeated. “Now there’s a mouthful.”

  “It sure is. I bet Rowley had a heck of a time talking him out of Making It with a Neanderthal, or Caveman Sex.”

  “But are these academics really going to show up for it, do you think?” Julie asked. “I mean, no offense to Rowley, but would these people be that interested in what he has to say?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Gideon said, laughing. “Free booze, free food—of course they’ll attend.”