Uneasy Relations (13 page)

“Sarcosaprophagous insects.”

“Yeah, sarco . . . yeah, them. So I knew a blowfly maggot when I saw one, and I saw a zillion on her. All between two and three millimeters long, nothing longer, nothing shorter, which meant they were two to three days old, which meant I had myself a reliable time-of -death estimate.”

“A
minimum
time-of-death estimate,” Gideon reminded him. DCI or not, Fausto was still an old student and Gideon could get away with correcting him. Indeed, as Gideon saw it, he was morally obligated to do so. “The cave-in couldn’t have occurred any
later
than two to three days before . . . but it could have happened earlier. You can’t be sure of exactly when the flies laid their eggs.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, but everything came together. Some passengers on the Morocco ferry, they saw the cave-in happen, so we knew exactly when it was. Two days before we dug her out.”

“But then you really didn’t need the estimate based on the maggots, ” Julie said. “Or am I missing something?”

“Okay, all right, you’re right,” a grudging Fausto admitted. “It was strictly corroborative. Jeez, what a purist.” He grinned. “But it was fun, you know?”

“Mmm, I bet,” Julie said. “Sure sounds like fun. Measuring maggots. ”

Their meals came. The waiter brushed away a few hovering black flies that had touched down on the food. The flies moved off but floated nearby in slow, hanging circles. They seemed to be a general nuisance on the patio. Other diners were brushing at their food and their faces.

Julie made a face. “Um . . . would those be blowflies?”

“Nope,” Gideon said. “Black flies.”

“They don’t feed on corpses?”

He shook his head and began on his ploughman’s lunch, tucking ham, relish, and cucumber into a partially sliced-through hunk of baguette to turn it into a sandwich. “They do not.”

“What do they feed on, then? No, wait, I don’t want to know.”

“A wise decision,” Gideon said, biting in. “Mmm, good.”

Fausto had tucked his napkin into the collar of his shirt — he was still a sharp dresser: mauve shirt, green tie, slick-looking olive brown suit — and was shoveling in chicken and rice, daintily but effectively. Julie was dabbing a spoon into her gazpacho, deciding whether or not she was really hungry at all.

“Fausto,” Gideon said, “this would be Sheila Chan we’ve been talking about, wouldn’t it? And the Europa Point cave.”

Fausto blinked. “Now how the hell would you know — oh, that’s right, she was one of you people. She was here for the meeting they had back then. Did you know her?”

“No, just by e-mail.” Gideon hesitated. “Was there anything suspicious about her death?”

Julie looked inquisitively at him over the rim of her glass. Fausto paused in lifting a forkful of rice to his mouth. “Why would you ask that?”

“Just some things that have been happening. Was there?”

“Anything suspicious?” He shook his head. “No. All cut and dried, everything kosher. Why?” he asked again.

“Fausto, did you ever hear of anyone getting pushed off the top of the Rock by one of the Barbary apes?”

“You mean on purpose?”

“On purpose or accidentally.”

“How could they push you off accidentally?”

“Come on, just answer—”

“No, I never heard of it. Why?” He was getting irritated. In that way he was like any cop. He preferred asking the questions.

“Gideon thinks he may have been the first,” Julie put in.

“The first to live to tell about it, anyway,” Fausto said with a snort. “That’s for sure.”

“Gideon,” Julie said, “I thought you agreed there wasn’t anything suspicious about that.”

“Well, I did, but then today at my lecture—”

“Oh, I forgot to ask,” Julie said. “How did it go?”

“Just fine, absolutely great, except for the part where I nearly got electrocuted.”

She started to laugh, but then saw he was serious. “What happened? ”

Gideon told them.

“And your conclusion?” Fausto said. He had eaten most of his dish, shoved it away, and pulled the napkin out of his collar. Gideon had eaten about half of his ploughman’s, Julie none of her gazpacho. Coffee had been ordered — tea for Fausto — and brought to the table.

“I don’t know,” Gideon said. “Everything might be explainable, taken one thing at a time — accident, carelessness — but to have been almost killed twice in less than twenty-four hours—”

“Brings to mind the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business,” Fausto said, dropping three cubes of sugar into his tea.

Gideon was surprised. “How do you know about the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business?”

“You talked about it in the seminar. Goldstein’s Theorem of Interconnected Monkey Business. Hell, it’s practically my mantra.”

Gideon’s too. It was a “law” posited only partly in jest by Gideon’s old professor and all-around mentor Abe Goldstein. When too many suspicious but seemingly unrelated things — too much monkey business — start cropping up in a short time, to the same people, in the same context, you can bet on there being some connection between them.

The three of them sat there looking somberly at each other until Julie said: “But why would anyone want to kill you?” The last time she had asked him that had been yesterday, after the incident on the Rock, when she had been trying to convince him that the idea was silly. This time, he was glad to see, it was meant as a serious question. It was her support, her backup, that he wanted, not her skepticism.

Fausto took it seriously too. “We’ll want that lamp,” he said, pulling a cell phone from his inside pocket. “I’ll have one of my—”

Gideon lifted the lumpy plastic shopping bag he’d set down beside his chair. “I figured you would. Here it is. The wires haven’t been cut, I could see that much. Not cleanly, not with a knife or a snipper. They look frayed, the same as the cord fabric, but whether they’ve been filed to look that way, or just worn through on their own, I don’t know.”

Fausto had opened the mouth of the bag, and without touching the lamp, was peering as well as he could at the torn area of the cord. “Can’t tell. Maybe filed, maybe just frayed. We’ll have to see.”

“How long will that take? Do you have a lab here?”

“Yeah, we have a lab, but I’m not sure they’ll know how to do this kind of thing. Might have to send it off to FSS — the Forensic Science Service Lab in London. If my people can handle it, I’ll have the results tomorrow. If it has to go to London . . . who knows?” He studied his buffed and manicured fingernails, letting a beat pass. “Listen, maybe I should assign you some protection,” he said casually. “Somebody to kind of keep an eye on you. Very discreet, of course. Just in case.”

“That’s a good idea,” Julie said.

Gideon shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“If you’d had somebody with you,” she said, “that thing up on the Rock would never have happened. Even if it was just a monkey.”

“No, but somebody trailing me around wouldn’t have stopped what happened in the cave. That mat was removed when I wasn’t even anywhere near it, and the lamp had been fooled with before I ever got there.”
And not by a monkey
, he said to himself. “Assuming it
was
fooled with,” he added to show he was being open-minded.

“But—”

“No, Julie, I think I just have to be careful, that’s all. Whoever’s doing it — if somebody’s really doing it — obviously wants it to look like an accident, so he’s not going to shoot me or stab me. I just have to watch my step.”

“I gotta agree,” Fausto said. “Change your mind, tell me.”

“I don’t suppose you’d consider our going back home?” Julie said doubtfully. “After all, you’ve had the testimonial for Ivan, you’ve made your public presentation, all that’s left are the meetings, and I’m sure . . . no, I didn’t think so.”

“But you know,” he said, “
you
might want to — no, I didn’t think so.”

“Whither thou goest,” Julie said with a smile.

“What made you ask about Sheila Chan?” Fausto wanted to know. “Are you saying there might be a connection there?”

“I was thinking so, yes.”

“That was two years ago. And you never even knew her. What’s the connection?”

“Just that we both worked on the Europa Point dig — well, she worked on the actual dig, I worked on the bones in the lab later on — so it just seemed to me—”

“Not much of a connection,” Fausto said.

“No, it isn’t,” Gideon agreed. It had sounded far-fetched to him even as he’d said it. He was getting carried away with the interconnectedness angle.

The phone that was still in Fausto’s hand chirped. He flicked it open and listened. “Oh, hell, where? What do the fire guys say? Okay, have Matt check it out — ah, the hell with it, I better come myself. Twenty minutes.”

He drained the last inch of his tea and stood up, holding his hand out for the bag with the lamp. “Gotta go.”

“Something serious?” Gideon asked.

“Well, a death. Some old guy apparently smoking in bed, falls asleep, burns himself to death. Some people never learn. See you later. I’ll call you soon as I know about the lamp.” He handed them cards, shook hands with the two of them, snatched the check, barely evading Gideon’s grab for it, then paused as he was leaving with the lamp tucked under his arm.

“Well, at least this is one dead body that you can’t fit into your monkey business business.”

As things would turn out, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

LEFT
by themselves, Julie and Gideon ordered more coffee and stayed on for a while.

“It’s got to be your speech,” Julie said thoughtfully, stirring cream into her mug. “Somebody read the articles and thought you were going to reveal
something
, and they didn’t want you to do it.”

Gideon smiled. “That’s what Pru said. I just laughed.”

“What did she think it was?”

“No, she was just kidding.”

“Well, what do
you
think? Could that be it?”

He shook his head. “I’m at a loss, Julie. I can’t say it hasn’t occurred to me, but what could I say that would worry somebody so much? And anyway, can you imagine anybody taking those articles seriously I mean, really imagine it?”

“Of course people would take them seriously. The newspapers took them seriously, didn’t they? Why wouldn’t the readers?”

“Okay, yes, the ordinary reader, maybe, but . . . look, the only people here who could possibly be affected by something I might ‘reveal,’ whatever the hell that might be, would be some of these archaeologists, right? What could I possibly know that they’d be that desperate to keep me from telling?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. Couldn’t it have something to do with Gibraltar Boy and the First Family? After all, that’s pretty much why we’re all here. And you’re the one who made the connection to Sheila Chan — to what happened to her.”

He nodded. “I did, yes, but that part of it seems pretty far-fetched to me now. As Fausto said, two years is a long time ago. A big stretch, even for interconnected monkey business.”

“Okay, if you say so, but that still leaves you, and the more we talk about it, the more it seems to me it all has to have something to do with the Gibraltar Boy and the Europa Point dig.”

“Maybe, but—”

“Look at it this way,” she said intently. “If somebody really snuck up behind you on the Rock, and if somebody really set you up to be electrocuted . . . assuming there aren’t
two
people trying to do away with you . . . it just about has to be somebody who’s here for the meetings, one of your good buddies — who else would have been in both those places right then? Doesn’t that imply rather strongly that it’s got something to do with the Europa Point dig, with Gibraltar Boy?”

He considered this, sipping his coffee. “Julie, don’t forget, I was never at the dig. I just did some lab work on Gibraltar Boy and I completed that almost five years ago now. I haven’t been involved before or since. And what could I possibly say about him that was so earth-shattering anyway?”

“I’ve been thinking about that too. You could say you that after much deliberation, you finally came to the conclusion that he really was just another Neanderthal, not the product of a mating between Neanderthals and humans. Wouldn’t that shake up some of these people who’ve been — forgive the expression — living off the Neanderthal-human connection ever since?”

It was something he hadn’t thought of. “Well . . . sure, but I
haven’t
come to that conclusion.”

“No, but they don’t know that.”

“And even if I had, other anthropologists think exactly the same thing and have said so, and as far as I know they’re still walking around. I’d just be one more voice in the minority. I wouldn’t have any way to prove it.”

“No, but they wouldn’t know that either. They might think you’ve come up with something new, especially on account of those articles. Besides, being the modest fellow you are, I think you underrate the impact of your opinion.”

He smiled, finished his coffee, and sighed. “Julie, what do you say we call a moratorium on the subject for a while? I need to get my head clear. We may be seeing it all wrong. Let’s be tourists for the afternoon. You’ve been out seeing the sights all morning. How about showing me around the town?”

“That’s a good idea. It’s a cute place. There’s plenty to see.”

She gave him a pale smile as they stood up. “Just make sure you look both ways when we cross the street.”

INDEED,
there was plenty to see, especially from a historical perspective. The actual sites of historic importance in the little city were few, but the very fabric of the town was an amalgam, or rather an accretion, of its own history. At first glance it was a typical English market town with its fish-and-chips places, its pubs, its Marks & Spencer store, its red “Royal Mail” mailboxes. But if you raised your eyes to the upper story (almost all the buildings lining the narrow Main Street — now a pedestrian walkway — were two stories), you were in Spain: pastel-colored stucco façades; wooden shutters painted in vivid green, red, or blue; delicately filigreed iron balconies. And looking up the side streets, you might have thought you were in Moorish Iberia: narrow, cobbled, winding alleys, overhanging, flower-filled balconies that nearly met the ones across the way, tiny Arab fruit and vegetable markets that were little more than cubbyholes.