Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  “Speeches? Mmm . . .” She thought it over. “Sounds pretty tenuous to me, frankly. Aren’t there lots of people here for the Society meetings who are giving speeches?” She shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t know, Gideon. . . .”

  “It was your idea, Julie. You were the one who suggested someone was trying to stop me from making a speech. I just applied it more generally.”

  “My idea? Oh, well, then, on sober reconsideration, I have to say I think it has a lot going for it.”

  “So do I, and the more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense. Sheila’s notes had been taken, and Ivan’s, if he had any, would have been burned up in the fire, if they weren’t also taken. Someone must have been afraid of what they might contain.”

  “One problem—nobody stole your notes.”

  “Nobody could. I didn’t have any. And consider my case a little further. In the twenty-four hours before my speech, somebody tried to kill me twice. An average of once every twelve hours. Now it’s been given, and I don’t have another one to make, and, heck, nobody’s been trying to kill me for days. Well, almost days.”

  “Knock on wood,” she said, searching for something wooden to knock on but having to settle for the glass-topped table. “But yes, I think you must be right. I hope you’re right.” She reached over to graze the back of his hand with her fingers. “It would mean you’re not in danger now.”

  “The crucial question is,” Gideon mused, “what could any of us have possibly said—what did the killer think we might have been going to say—that was so earth-shaking it was worth murder?”

  “No, the crucial question is, just who thought it was worth murder? ”

  Gideon sipped his drink and slowly nodded. “Got a point there, pardner.”

  Julie took a stab at her own question. “Well, for starters, as far-fetched as it may seem, we know it has to be one of the people staying here at the Rock; one of our own group. Except, of course, for Rowley and Pru.”

  “Why are we excluding them?”

  She turned to look at him. “We talked about this before, don’t you remember? It was Pru and Rowley who kept you from getting killed.”

  “Me, yes. But that doesn’t mean—not that I believe it, you understand—that they had nothing to do with Sheila and with Ivan.”

  She stared at him. “Hold on a minute. What happened to all those interconnected subsets? The law of interconnected monkey business—”

  “Is not infallible. It’s not a law, it’s a model, a guide. Everything doesn’t always connect that neatly.”

  “But surely you don’t—”

  “I’m just saying it’s possible, Julie, not probable. Fausto’s going to be running the investigation. I wouldn’t want to see him rule out anybody at this stage. If you remember, Pru had some pretty harsh things to say about Sheila at the testimonial dinner.”

  “But that hardly means—”

  “No, of course it doesn’t. But it’s not something that I feel I can keep from him. He has to know.”

  “Well, you’re the expert,” she said unconvinced, “but—oh, wait a minute, I just thought of something. There must be other people we’re not even thinking of, archeologist types who live here. I mean, we know Rowley because he hangs around with us, but what about other archaeologists, maybe people who work at the museum, people we don’t know about? They would have been here back when Sheila was killed too . . . oh, no, wait a minute, that doesn’t fly because they could have killed Ivan any time these last five years. Why wait till now?”

  “Because—”

  “Because he wasn’t giving a speech,” she supplied, and then promptly supplied the countering argument as well. “But surely, he must have made some presentations in five years. He was obviously a cultural bigwig here. Although—” She pursed her lips, mulling everything over. “I don’t know, what do you think?”

  “I think this is making my neck ache.” He tipped up his glass, drained the whisky, and smacked his lips. “It’s six thirty, dinnertime. Let’s go down and have a look at the cast of suspects.”

  INDEED, the entire cast was assembled and waiting, Rowley having joined them this evening. The group had been put in the main dining room tonight, a big, handsome space with buttercup yellow walls, a long row of tall, arched windows looking out on the bay, and a rousing, thirty-foot mural of Nelson’s great victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, full of smoke and cannon flashes, covering most of the rear wall. The burgundy-vested, bowtied waiters, all of whom appeared to be Spanish, couldn’t have been too crazy about looking at that every time they went back through the swinging doors to the kitchen, but if it bothered them they didn’t show it.

  When Julie and Gideon arrived, two of the waiters were just going around the table delivering appetizer and salad orders. After they’d finished, one of them took the newcomers’ orders. Julie asked for bouillabaisse and chicken piccata; Gideon went for the “Taste of Morocco” menu, ordering a roasted tomato and onion salad, followed by lamb stew.

  As they’d expected, the rambling conversation around the table was about Ivan Gunderson. Who could have killed him? Why? And how could the police even tell he’d been murdered, anyway? Weren’t his house, his body, reduced to ashes?

  This last question was directed at Gideon, the only certified, bona fide forensic practitioner in the group. Gideon looked up from his plate and chewed while coming up with a way to evade answering the question—without quite lying, if he could help it. Nobody here knew that he’d been to the morgue that morning and had himself been the one who had made the homicide determination. Nobody here knew that Sheila’s death was now reopened as a subject of investigation, let alone that he, Gideon, had also been the instrument of that. There was a lot they didn’t know, and it seemed to him an excellent idea to keep it that way.

  He swallowed the mouthful of honey-sweetened lamb, prune, and almond. “Well, you know, arson investigators are pretty good at that. They look for the starting point of the fire, the use of accelerants, and so on.”

  “Accelerants?” Rowley said. “You mean fuels? My goodness, the place was full to the brim with inflammables—glues, solvents, cleaners. It’s a wonder the whole peninsula didn’t go up in smoke.”

  “Those pots he was gluing,” Audrey said somberly. “I can’t get them out of my mind. I simply cannot make myself imagine Ivan spending his days, hour after hour, meaninglessly gluing pots together. ” A brief, somber laugh. “And then regluing them when you brought them back to him.”

  Gideon went back to eating, relieved that the subject had moved on.

  “I keep thinking of him too,” Adrian said with a rumbling sigh. “Of the man he once was; so witty, so . . . nimble—and then of how he was on that last night . . .” He shook his head. “Iwo Jima Boy, Okinawa Boy, whatever it was. So very sad.”

  He trickled a little Irish whiskey into his coffee and screwed the cap back onto the flask. It occurred to Gideon that Adrian’s flask never seemed to empty. He never had to upend it, but merely to tip it a bit. A magic flask; now, how did he do that? Did he carry a second flask to top up the first?

  “It was Guadalcanal Boy,” said Corbin sadly.

  There was only the clinking of silverware against china for a few moments, and then Buck spoke. “You want to hear something that’s really weird?” Buck was normally so quiet when he was around them that all heads turned in his direction. “He was never there. At Guadalcanal. I have a Marine buddy, a retired lieutenant colonel, who fought at Guad. He has a Web site that lists the survivors, every last one. No Gunderson. I checked with him, and he double-checked, and he says it’s so. Gunderson was in the Pacific, all right, at Tarawa—which was bad enough—but not at Guad. Now how do you figure that?”

  It was a moot question, but for Adrian there were no moot questions. “One of the prominent features of dementia senilis, you see, Buck,” he began kindly, “is a loss, sometimes only intermittent, of the ability to distinguish between—”

  He was in
terrupted by the appearance of George, one of the competent, agreeable reception desk clerks, carrying a small, neatly folded, brown paper bag. “Oh, I thought I’d find you here, Dr. Oliver. This was left for you a few minutes ago. I took the liberty of bringing it in to you rather than saving it for you at the desk. The lady said she thought it might be important.” He put the bag on the table in front of Gideon.

  “Thanks, George.” Curious, he opened it without thinking and began to take out the object inside, but the instant he saw what it was, even before it was all the way out of the bag, he caught his breath, dropped it back in, and rolled up the top; casually, he hoped.

  But not quickly enough. “What was that thing?” Audrey demanded.

  “I have no idea,” he said with a shrug. (He considered the possibility of an apathetic yawn as well, but discarded it as lacking subtlety. ) “Probably a present from an admirer—somebody who was at the lecture.”

  “It was a vertebra, wasn’t it?” Audrey persisted. “Two vertebrae. Were they human?”

  “Looked like it.”

  “People send you human vertebrae as presents?”

  “You should see the kinds of things people send him,” Julie said.

  TWENTY

  BUT no one had ever sent him anything quite like this before, and he wasn’t about to let the rest of the table in on it. His large hand now lay protectively over it. He could barely make himself sit still until he could give it a more careful going-over in private. Already he was beginning to think he must have been mistaken in what the quick glance he’d had at it had told him. But if he was right . . .

  “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering after-dinner coffee and drinks to be served in the bar this evening,” Adrian said, observing that people were beginning to stir. “I thought it would be more comfortable. Shall we go?” As they got up he gestured jocularly at the bag. “Don’t forget your bones.”

  “As a matter of fact, I think I’ll drop them off upstairs so I don’t leave them somewhere. Wouldn’t want to shock anybody who happened to pick them up.”

  Gideon’s chances of forgetting and leaving them somewhere were about as likely as his forgetting his ears and leaving them somewhere, but he didn’t like the interested looks the bag was getting. While the others shuffled slowly into the Barbary Bar, he retrieved his key from reception (room keys were attached, not to the metal or wooden tags most European hotels used, but to happy little “Barbary ape” plush dolls; another whimsical touch, like the lollipops and the rubber ducks), and punched the elevator button for the second floor,

  Alone in the elevator, he quickly had a look at the contents of the bag. Indeed, the vertebrae were just what he’d thought they were. He was sure of it now. My God, this is the most exciting, most unexpected— He caught a sidewise glimpse of himself in the elevator mirror and couldn’t help laughing. Hunched greedily, almost lasciviously, over the open bag, he looked like Silas Marner ogling his hoard of golden coins. And like Silas Marner, it occurred to him that simply leaving them in his room might not be the best idea in the world. When he got to his floor, he didn’t get out but hit the button for the lobby. Once there he went back to the reception desk and had George put the bag in the hotel safe. Then, his head spinning with speculation and conjecture, he took a couple of deep breaths and went to find the others.

  In the Barbary Bar, with its evocative, Casablanca-like ambience— rattan armchairs, soft, amber lighting, potted palms, slowly spinning ceiling fans—the talk soon devolved to nostalgic, humorous stories about Ivan. After half an hour everyone moved out through the open doors to the Wisteria Terrace and settled in again for more of the same. To wistful, indulgent laughter, Audrey did a couple of her impressions of Ivan, notorious among archaeologists for his less-than -delicate field methods. (“Oh, no need to fool with a silly trowel to dig those remains out; I’ll just hire a backhoe. Much quicker.”)

  By then Gideon was more than ready to go, but he didn’t want to seem eager to get back to the vertebrae so he stuck it out. Finally, at about ten thirty, the last of them to leave—Buck, Audrey, and Corbin— finally made their good nights and went upstairs.

  “Now,” said Julie, fixing Gideon with a razor sharp look, “what is going on? What’s so important about those bones that you’ve been on pins and needles ever since you got them?”

  His face fell. “Have I been that obvious?” He knew all too well that dissimulation wasn’t his strong suit, but he’d prided himself on having carried things off pretty well this time.

  “Maybe not that obvious, except to someone who knows you inside out the way I do, but take my advice and don’t ever go in for professional poker playing.”

  “You think they noticed?”

  “Probably not. They were too into their Ivan stories. Now tell me; what’s going on?”

  “Let’s go up. I’ll pick up the bones and show you.”

  “Oh, let’s stay out here a while longer, Gideon. It’s so lovely now that everybody’s gone. Mmm, just smell that air.”

  “Nice,” he agreed, not that he’d noticed until she mentioned it. Okay,” he said, standing up. “I’ll bring them out here. Get ready. This is going to knock your socks off.”

  A minute later he was back with the bag. He gingerly removed the vertebrae, cradling them carefully in both hands, and placed them on the table between them. It was his first chance for anything more than a hurried look, and although the soft, diffuse lighting on the terrace was anything but conducive to a close examination of skeletal remains, that’s what they were going to get. Julie, understanding, left him to it and sat back with her eyes closed, inhaling the velvety air, lush with the perfumes of the night-blooming plants from the gardens below. “Mmm,” she said again.

  “Mmm,” he echoed automatically, but for all he knew the air could have smelled like a lion house on a rainy day. All of his concentration was focused on the extraordinary object in front of him as he slowly rotated it on the tabletop.

  It was the “vase” that Rosie, the constable at New Mole House, had taken home for her daughter, constructed of two adjacent thoracic vertebrae glued together, with a circle of aluminum foil Scotch-taped to the bottom to close it up. The foil and Scotch tape were quickly removed and discarded to make the examination easier. The vertebral foramens—the central holes that, all taken together, created the long, narrow, bony tube in which the spinal cord resided— provided an opening big enough for a few flower stems or a couple of pencils. The upper of the two bones was creamy white, the usual color of biological-supply-house skeletal casts. The lower one was a more muddy and uneven gray-brown, tinged with red. It was this lower one that had so captured his attention. After a few minutes he surfaced and began to speak.

  “These are T9 and T10, the ninth and tenth thoracic vertebrae,” he said slowly. They’re located about . . .” He reached around her to touch the middle of her back. “Here. The top one—”

  When she burst out laughing he thought he’d accidentally tickled her, but it wasn’t that. “Oh, it’s cute!” she cried.

  “Cute?” He stared wonderingly at her, and then at the vertebrae. “Oh, the face. Yeah, I suppose that’s pretty clever.”

  Rosie’s ten-year-old daughter had apparently gotten a head start on her medical illustrator career by “illustrating” the upper vertebra, painting a clever little cartoon face on it. Viewed from the rear, the flat, smooth superior articular processes (where the inferior articular process of the eighth vertebra would have abutted) were now two round, googly eyes, the transverse processes (where the right and left eighth ribs would have attached) were a pair of donkey’s ears, and the long, tapering spinous process (which, with its fellows, would have constituted the knobby, spiky length of the spine) was a tapering snout, with a curlicue mustache and a goofy, big-toothed grin at the bottom.

  “Sorry,” Julie said, “I didn’t mean to spoil the big moment.” She suppressed a final giggle. “All right, you have my full and earnest attention. The top one is . . . ?�
�

  “The top one is an exact reproduction of the ninth thoracic vertebra of Gibraltar Woman, as perfect as a cast can get. It’s part of a set of First Family casts made by France Casting in Colorado, the only sets that were authorized to be made from the original bones. I bought one of them myself for the lab.”

  “Uh-huh. And it’s special because . . . ?”

  “It’s not special at all. It’s the other vertebra, the T10, that’s special. ”

  She looked at it, turned the little vase in her hands, tried to determine what was special about the T10. “Sorry,” she said with a shrug, “I don’t—”

  “It’s special for two reasons. First, because, unlike the T9, it’s not a cast at all. It’s the real, honest-to-God bone.”

  “It is?” she said, running her fingers gently over the rough, splintery surface. She was intrigued now. “This bone that I’m holding is actually from Gibraltar Woman herself?”

  “Absolutely. See here, where the end of the transverse process is broken off? That delicate, lacy, sort of filigreed-looking stuff underneath? That’s interior bone, cancellous bone; no mistaking it. You can’t get results that fine with a cast.”

  “But I thought all the actual bones went to the British Museum.”

  “They did.”

  Her eyes widened. “This was stolen from the British Museum?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said airily, “it was never in the British Museum. ”

  “But if the bones all went to—” She put the bones down with an exasperated little cluck and a cautionary glance. “Gideon, if what you’re trying to do is confuse me—”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” he said, laughing, “just trying to enhance the narrative tension—you know me. Look, the crux of it is—and this is what’s really special about it—Gibraltar Woman didn’t have a tenth thoracic vertebra.”

  “If that’s supposed to unconfuse me—”

  “The remains that were excavated at Europa Point were far from complete; you know that. They included the first, second, fourth, fifth, seventh, and ninth thoracics, and that’s about as far down as Gibraltar Woman goes, really. Below that level, there’s hardly anything left of her, just a fragmentary fifth lumbar and a bit of sacrum. Oh, and a piece of acetabular rim.”