Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  “Rowley, if you hurt her, I swear to God I’ll kill you,” Buck snarled, his voice husky and trembling with rage. There was little doubt he meant it.

  “Rowley, come on, don’t you see you’re making it worse for yourself?” Fausto said reasonably. “Think about it a minute. Look, you haven’t hurt her yet. We can still sit down like reasonable people, you can call your solicitor—”

  “Shut up!” Rowley said, or rather screamed. With that, even the people at the other end of the terrace became aware of what was happening. Conversation ceased. The musicians stopped playing. Many of the women had their hands to their mouths. All eyes were on Rowley and Audrey.

  Rowley looked quickly behind him. A few people were standing between him and the double doors that led out to the elevators. “I don’t want anybody behind me,” he yelled. “Move out of the way!”

  They quickly grasped the situation and retreated toward the walls, except for one wide-shouldered man who looked as if he intended to bar the way, but Fausto motioned him aside. “Do as he says, please. I’m a police officer.”

  With reluctance, the man complied. Rowley began to move slowly backward with Audrey, keeping the fork pressed against her throat. Audrey moved with him, rigid and unresisting. The blood had begun to dribble down her neck in two streams. Gideon, along with everyone else, watched helplessly.

  “Rowley,” Fausto began. “Mr. Boyd—”

  “Shut up!” Rowley shrieked. “Just . . . shut . . . up!”

  He looked quickly behind him again to make sure the way was clear, then continued backing toward the doors some thirty feet away.

  Julie grasped Gideon’s forearm. “He doesn’t see the tub,” she whispered excitedly. “I don’t think he sees the tub!”

  “The what?” Gideon asked, but even as he said it he saw what she was talking about. Not far behind Audrey and Rowley, between them and the elevators, there was a circular, ten-foot-wide hot tub sunk into the terrace floor. It was obvious that Rowley wasn’t aware of it; he was dragging Audrey directly toward it.

  There were more whispers as the watchers pointed it out to one another. An electric ripple seemed to flow among them. They watched, transfixed, many holding their breath. Now they were eight feet away . . . now six . . . now four . . . two more steps and . . .

  With his foot almost on the rim, Rowley sensed the crowd’s restiveness and twisted around to glance nervously behind him. As he did so, the points of the fork came a few inches away from Audrey’s neck, and she responded instantaneously. A hard whack in the ribs from her right elbow, an almost simultaneous one from the left, and then a scrape down his shin with the heel of her shoe, ending in a full-bodied stomp on his instep, all of it in the space of a second.

  “Ow! Ai—!” Rowley teetering on the rim of the tub, one arm still around Audrey’s neck, flailed with the other one, struggling for balance, but a last, sharp elbow in the gut (“Whoof!”) sent the fork flying and tipped him over backward. In the two of them plunged with a huge sploosh, the barbecue fork plopping in a moment later with its own modest splish.

  AND so what might have culminated in high tragedy ended instead as low comedy, in a foofaraw of spluttering, splashing, and thrashing of arms and legs. Buck dived gallantly but unnecessarily in (the tub was only four feet deep) to “rescue” Audrey, hit his head on the sitting ledge, and wobbled dazedly to his feet, from where he had to be led unsteadily up the three steps by Audrey. Eager hands reached out to help them, but she batted them away like pesky mosquitoes. Audrey didn’t like being rescued any more than she liked being abducted.

  Rowley too hit his head, stood up, and sank dizzily back onto the ledge, from which he was unceremoniously fished out by the wrists by Gideon and Fausto. Passive and unresisting, he was then led away by Fausto and another police official who was there as a guest. Dripping, drooping, and utterly wilted, leaving a snail-like trail of moisture in his wake, he looked like an old sneaker that had been put through the wringer one time too many.

  The barbecue fork, resting quietly on the bottom of the tub, was left for the pool attendant to retrieve.

  TWENTY-SIX

  GIDEON spent the next several hours at New Mole House, getting his statement recorded and transcribed—a long, fatiguing process— and then, over coffee in the break room, sharing notes with Fausto (who had been busy interrogating Rowley). Then he was driven back to the hotel, where, hoping to go up to the room and call it a night, he was spotted by Pru as he crossed the lobby and hauled off, protesting, to the Barbary Bar. There he found everyone, including Julie, congregated and awaiting him and his explanation of the evening’s bizarre events.

  Happily Julie had already filled them in on the faking of the First Family by Ivan, and the fact that Sheila Chan had not been the victim of a natural landslide but of murder, so he was spared going through all that. She had also enlightened them on why the mere mention of Catalan Bay had precipitated the extraordinary episode that had followed. Beyond that much, of course, she was as much in the dark as they were, so the rest was up to him. He considered begging off till morning, but on reflection he decided he owed them more consideration than that. After all, he had come close—sometimes extremely close—to believing each of them, his friends and colleagues, a multiple murderer.

  He ordered a Scotch and water, settled back in his chair beneath a wall of photographs, and, under the disinterested black-and-white gazes of Michael Palin and John and Yoko, gratefully swallowed down half the drink and wearily began.

  It was a combination of things, he told them, none of them really conclusive in itself, that brought it all to its extraordinary conclusion. What had first gotten him started on the right track was Rowley’s reaction to Lester’s joking comment about the Nobel Prize. That had made him think of Rowley’s earlier response to a comment of Pru’s during the group visit to the Rock. (“Yeah, but you could have done a better job with the weather,” she had said, provoking smiles from everybody but Rowley, who had replied, in all earnestness, “But what could I possibly have done about the weather?”) And that, in turn had reminded him of how Rowley had swallowed Discover magazine’s April Fool’s story about the Neanderthal tuba, hook, line, and sinker.

  “I fail to see where you’re going with this,” Audrey said crankily. She and Buck, having returned from police headquarters themselves not long before, were still wearing the clumsy, collarless suicide-watch paper uniforms given to them by the police to replace their sopping clothes. On Audrey’s neck were two flesh-colored Band-Aids. “If there’s a point, I wish you’d get to it. I’d like to go to bed before morning.”

  “Easy, honey,” Buck gentled. “The man’s doing his best.” His big hand was steadily, gently massaging the nape of her neck.

  The point, Gideon said, was that, of all the people who might have been behind the killings, Rowley Boyd was the only one who could possibly have taken seriously the newspaper story about how Gideon’s presentation at St. Michael’s Cave was going to be “the most sensational exposé of a scientific scam in history.” And given the commemorative nature of the meetings, the fifth anniversary of the Europa Point dig, and their location, here in Gibraltar, what else could the scam in question be but the faking of Gibraltar Woman and the First Family?

  “And that’s why he tried to electrocute you?” a skeptical Adrian demanded. “To prevent your revelation of the hoax?”

  “Yes.”

  “I fail to see how that makes sense,” Corbin said bluntly. “It was Rowley who saved you from being electrocuted. I was right there. He was the one that called your attention to the absence of a rubber mat.”

  “No, it was Buck who saved me from being electrocuted.”

  “Me?” Buck exclaimed, looking pleased. “What did I do? I never even noticed it.”

  “No, but on that little tour just before, you told Rowley what I was going to be talking about—erect posture, varicose veins, birth problems—so it finally got through to him that I had no big hoax to reveal. There was
no point in killing me; it would only be another complication, another risk. So he told me about the mat—which he was perfectly aware of, since he’s the one who set the whole electrocution thing up in the first place.”

  “But you can’t know that,” Audrey said. “Or has Rowley confessed? ”

  “Not as of the time I left New Mole House. Fausto says he’s not saying anything until he sees a solicitor in the morning. And you’re right, at this point I can’t know he set it up, or that he’s the one who tried to shove me off the Rock—who did shove me off the Rock. I told you, there really isn’t any one piece of incontrovertible evidence at this point; there’s a combination of a lot of things that all point in one direction: that it was Rowley who killed Sheila, it was Rowley who killed Ivan, and it was Rowley who was trying to kill me.”

  “Now there’s another thing right there,” Adrian declared truculently, pouring some Tullamore Dew—rather more than his usual few drops—into his coffee. “If it was Ivan who perpetrated the hoax, as you claim, then why in the world would Rowley be the one going around killing anybody and everybody to keep it a secret? Are you telling us he was involved in it originally? With Ivan?”

  “Well, as far as anyone knows,” Gideon said, “Rowley didn’t even know Ivan at the time of the Guadalcanal dig, so I’m assuming—”

  “Assuming,” Adrian sniffed.

  “—assuming that he wasn’t, but at some point later on, Ivan must have told him about it, or accidentally let it slip. After all, Rowley was probably closer to him than anyone else, especially these last few years, as Ivan was declining.”

  “But then why would Rowley want to kill him?” Buck asked.

  “Because—”

  “More assumptions?” Adrian said.

  “Look, Adrian, if you—” he began heatedly, but stopped himself. As far as anger went—real, teeth-gnashing anger—Gideon had a pretty high boiling point. It was an emotion that didn’t come naturally to him; he’d felt it only once or twice in his life. But temper was another story. It wasn’t that hard to get under his skin, and the belligerent, confrontational, openly skeptical nature of the their questioning had done just that. They were acting as if the whole mess was his fault. Still, he understood their feelings and he did sympathize. Put a lid on it, Oliver, he told himself. This is all coming as an extremely unpleasant shock to them.

  “It is an assumption, yes, but a reasonable one,” he said more quietly, “one that Chief Inspector Sotomayor goes along with. It was that Guadalcanal slip at the testimonial dinner that did it for Ivan. When Rowley realized that he could make that kind of gaffe in public—and remember, he was going to give a speech at Europa Point the next day—Ivan had to go. Rowley was worried sick he might do it again and the whole scam would come tumbling down.”

  “No, no, no,” Corbin said. “If it was Ivan who perpetrated the fraud, what in the world did Rowley have to be so worried about? It simply doesn’t make sense. No.” His head rotated slowly, decisively, back and forth. “No, no, no. Sorry.”

  That did it. The hell with their feelings. “What he was so worried about is what you’re all so worried about,” he shot back. “And I don’t think I have to tell you what that is.”

  “Oh?” said Audrey coldly. “And just what would that be?”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Julie pleadingly lift her hands a few inches off the table, palms outward, as if holding him back. Take it easy, now. Nevertheless, he was about to get himself in deeper when Pru intervened, coming valiantly to his defense. “What Rowley was so worried about, and what we’re all so worried about right now—including me—is that, when it gets out that the First Family was a sham, that Gibraltar Woman was a complete, unadulterated hoax—or rather, an adulterated one—we’re all going to look like a bunch of bumbling, gullible idiots—complete chumps. And it’s scaring the socks off us.”

  “Well, now, I’d hardly say—” Corbin huffed.

  “No, you wouldn’t say it,” Pru interrupted, “but that doesn’t make it any less true. We’ve all been dining off Europa Point for five years—books, lectures, cushy appointments—and the whole thing was nothing but a hoax, right from day one.” A tinge of bitterness had put a metallic edge on her voice. “We were clueless, that’s the whole truth of it. Ivan—the great, the generous Ivan—suckered us all, and we never knew what hit us.” She folded her arms and sat back, head down, glowering at the table.

  “She’s right,” Audrey said softly into the silence that followed. “Ivan hoodwinked us. He made fools of us, and we let it happen because we wanted it to be true. And taking it out on Gideon,” she muttered, “isn’t going to help any. I think we owe him an apology.” She looked sharply around the table. “Or would you rather that he hadn’t discovered it?”

  There were embarrassed murmurs of demurral and apology, and then a thoughtful, more receptive mood seemed to take hold. The tension evaporated.

  “It has been the bane of science since time immemorial,” Adrian said sadly. “It has happened before, and it will happen again, because fidelity to truth is implicit in the scientist’s creed. And that makes us gullible, because there will always be charlatans, but in the end, archaeology, like any science, must rely on the integrity of its practitioners.”

  Gideon and Julie couldn’t help exchanging a small, private smile at that, and then Audrey said, “Please continue, Gideon. Is there more?”

  “Not much. When it turned out that Rowley had been at the right place at exactly the right time to steal the missing gelignite, Fausto had heard enough. And of course, when Rowley grabbed Audrey— and by the way, Audrey, if I haven’t said it before, you were magnificent . . .”

  “Hear, hear,” said Adrian, and Audrey modestly bowed her head while Buck grinned proudly and rubbed her neck a little harder.

  “Well, that sealed Rowley’s fate, and . . . I guess that’s it.”

  There was a round of nodding and a few dejected sighs, after which Audrey and Buck were the first to rise, their paper clothes rustling. “Thank you, Gideon,” she said civilly in leaving, and within a few minutes the rest followed suit. Gideon and Julie were left alone at the table.

  “That was tough,” Julie said. “You want another drink?”

  “No. Yes.” He signaled the bartender, who brought him another Scotch and water, and a second glass of Riesling for Julie, although she hadn’t meant to order it.

  “So I was right after all,” she mused with some satisfaction.

  “About what?”

  “About Rowley. Don’t you remember? I pointed out that he would have had the easiest time setting up the electrical stuff in the cave. But you maintained it couldn’t have been him because he was the one who warned you about it.”

  “Well, yes, that’s all true, but at that point there was no way to know . . . I mean, it was only what we found out later . . . I mean, there was no way you could have . . .”

  “Yes?” She was looking at him with her eyes wide and her chin resting on her clasped hands. “There was no way I could have . . . ?”

  “Okay,” he said, laughing. “I admit it, you were right after all. If only I’d listened.”

  Along with the drinks came the total bar tab. Gideon looked at it. “Seventy-two pounds,” he said with a wince. “Ah, well, I guess I owe it to them. I sure spoiled their day.” He took a moody sip from his glass. “I didn’t do anything for mine either.”

  “Oh, well,” Julie said, “look on the bright side.”

  “You’re sure good at that,” he said with a smile. “Looking on the bright side. So tell me, what is it?”

  “Well,” she said, her eyes twinkling, “looks to me as if you’ve gone and come up with the biggest scam since Piltdown Man after all.”

  THIS aspect was not lost on Lester Rizzo, whom they ran into at the airport snack bar the next morning, waiting for their flight to London.

  Lester wedged his ham and cheese sandwich and paper cup of coffee into one big hand so he could churn Gideon’s
with the other. “Gideon, my man—”

  “Lester, I’m really sorry I spoiled your party last night.”

  Lester stared at him. “Are you kidding me? That was the best book launch in history. Outstanding! It’ll get picked up all over the world. It’ll put Javelin on the map. I mean, we’ll have to eat his stupid book, but what the hey, that’s life.”

  “Well, you know, I do plan to put in a chapter on the whole affair in Bones to Pick, so that should—”

  “Chapter? Screw ‘chapter.’ We’re gonna do a whole book on the thing. I already came up with the title. Ready?” He cleared his throat. “Shame!—that’s shame with an exclamation point—Shame! Murder, Lies, and Skuldiggery in Gibraltar. And then under that: Bad to the Bone. Well, I’m not sure of that last part. It might be Science Gone Wrong instead. So what do you think?” He bit off a corner of the sandwich with an audible snap of his teeth and looked happily, expectantly, at them.

  Julie spoke first. “I believe that’s ‘skullduggery,’ isn’t it?”

  “It’s a pun,” Lester explained. “Dig . . . archaeology . . . see?”

  “Oh. Yes, I see.”

  Lester was not pleased. “Well, what do you think, Gideon?”

  "Umm...”

  “And I already know who’s going to write it.”

  “Oh? Who?” Gideon asked in all innocence.

  “You, of course!” Lester said with a honk of a laugh. “The only thing is, we need to come out fast with this because there’s gonna be lots of competition, so I need the manuscript in three months. That’s not gonna be a problem, is it? I mean, you know more about it than anybody. Interested?”

  “Uh, well, to tell the truth, Lester—”

  Lester circled in closer. “I was figuring on doubling your last advance, ” he said conspiratorially.