Aaron Elkins: Unnatural Selection

They were in the Dolphin now, or rather outside it, at one of the wooden trestle tables in the front courtyard, overlooking the docks, where work-stained commercial fishing vessels bobbed side by side in the oily water, and rusting, mysterious machinery stood as if abandoned along the stone quay. Their meal of beef-and-mushroom pie had gone down well, and the after-dinner coffee was doing the same. Relaxed and full, getting sleepy in the slanting evening sunlight, Gideon was contentedly watching the ferry Scillonian III disgorge its load of tired foot passengers from the Isles of Scilly, forty miles off the coast. Tomorrow he and Julie would be taking the same ferry the other way, for a weeklong stay on St. Mary’s, the largest and most settled of the little-known archipelago.

Julie, in the meantime, was absently browsing in the International Herald Tribune, occasionally citing something that she thought might catch Gideon’s interest.

“Oh, look,” she said, “they found Edgar Villarreal.”

“Found him? He’s not dead after all?”

“No, he’s dead, all right,” she said, continuing to read. “I mean they finally found his remains. He-” She suddenly sat up straight. “Oh, my God, he was eaten by a grizzly bear! Can you believe that? Isn’t that bizarre?”

“Not much of a way to go.”

“No, I mean… a bear? Remember, when that couple was killed in Montana-”

“The Borbas.”

“And Edgar just… What did you say?”

“The Borbas. That was their name.”

“Amazing.” She lowered the paper. “Now why would you remember something like that? It was three years ago.”

“It’s a gift, I suppose. An infallible memory. Comes in handy in my line of work.”

“Yes, well, I wish your gift would kick in once in a while when I ask you stop for milk or veggies on your way home.”

“Well, you know, it comes and goes,” he said, smiling. “What were you saying about Villarreal?”

“Well, when those people, the Borbas, were killed, people pretty much blamed him for bringing the grizzlies back-didn’t one of the families sue him?-and he just shrugged it off.” She mimed a mock yawn. “ C’est la vie, one of those things.”

“I remember, yes. It did seem a little cold-blooded.”

“A little! Brr. And now the same thing’s happened to him. It’s almost like… fate. Just desserts.”

“I see what you mean. And some people say there’s no such thing as poetic justice.”

“But it’s not only that, it’s just that fatal grizzly bear attacks are practically nonexistent these days. They just don’t happen anymore.”

Gideon nodded. Julie was a supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park, back home in Port Angeles, Washington, and she knew whereof she spoke. “I may be wrong,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure the last people killed by grizzlies in North America-outside of Alaska, anyway-were those same two people in Bitterroot. And maybe a couple of deaths in Alaska since then, no more. And now Edgar. It’s-I don’t know, it’s almost too much of a coincidence.”

“That is weird, all right,” Gideon agreed. “How do they know that’s what happened to him?”

“Well, there isn’t much here…” She folded the paper back and read aloud:“‘The remains of the American author and activist, who had not been seen since failing to return from his remote bear-research base camp ninety miles east of Anchorage in August 2003, were discovered in a bear den less than a mile from the camp. They were identified as human by Dr. Leslie Roach, consulting police surgeon for the Alaska State Police post at Talkeetna, who determined that the fragments were approximately two to three years old and had been through the digestive system of a bear.’” She shuddered. “Can you really tell that from the bones?”

“Oh, yes,” Gideon said, “if you know what you’re doing.”

She continued reading. “‘There is little doubt that they are the remains of Mr. Villarreal,” said state police sergeant Monte Franks. “There’s no one else it could conceivably be.’”

“Hm,” Gideon said.

“Hm, what?”

“Hm, nothing, just ‘hm.’”

“No, when you say ‘hm,’ it must mean something. What is it?”

“Julie, I’m a professor. I’m supposed to go around saying ‘hm.’ It’s expected of me.”

She looked at him, her dark, pretty, close-cropped head tilted to one side. “Hmmm,” she said doubtfully.

Gideon laughed. “Anything else in the article?”

She went back to reading aloud. “‘Mr. Villarreal, a resident of Willow, Alaska, was often cited as a modern American success story, the son of Cuban migrant citrus workers in Florida. He worked alongside them from the time he was five years old. Contacted today, his agent, Marcus Stein, said: “At seventeen this guy was still picking oranges down in Dade County, barely speaking English. At forty he was one of America’s most respected and best-known environmentalists. He was one hell of a guy.” Mr. Villarreal was, however, also a controversial figure whose vigorous, blunt defense of the wilderness and of wilderness animals had embroiled him in controversy many times over the years. He leaves no immediate relatives.’”

She folded the paper. “That’s it.”

The check had come while she had been talking, and Gideon laid the amount on the table. “So,” he said. “Can I interest you in a sunset walk along the Promenade?”

“Does it come with a Cornish clotted-cream ice cream cone?”

“But of course.”

“I know it’s awful of me to say it,” she said soberly as they arose, “but this year’s meeting will be a lot more… well, civil, relaxed… without Edgar’s being there, if you know what I mean.”

“Mm,” Gideon said.

“‘Mm’? Is that different than ‘hm’?”

“A minor dialectical variant.”

The meeting of which they spoke, and the reason for their being in this remote corner of England, was the Consortium of the Scillies, the wonderfully inaptly named brainchild of American multimillionaire and noted eccentric Vasily Kozlov. Kozlov, who had come to the United States from the Soviet Union as a non-English-speaking twenty-eight-year-old, had struggled his way through evening high school and community college in only five years, and then gotten a job as a low-level laboratory technician in the research division of a soap and detergent company in New Jersey, where he’d worked for nearly five years. In his spare time, the brilliant, inquisitive Kozlov had come up with a revolutionary way of determining the surface tension of liquids by measuring the reflected variance of light intensity at different points on the surface. When he had offered to sell his method to the company, the chemists who were his superiors had laughed off the skinny guy with the wild hair, the two-year degree, the mad-Russian accent, and the grandiose ideas. Kozlov had quit his job, moved back in with his parents in Brooklyn at the age of thirty-eight, and spent the next several years refining his technique and trying to sell it to other companies and to the United States government. But he had been baffled and frustrated by bureaucratic red tape and scientific indifference.

An uncle who owned a Russian bakery chain had come to his rescue, offering to back him in return for a share of the profits, if any. Kozlov had jumped at the chance, and within a year he had turned out his first prototype. Two years after that the company he’d originally worked for came back, hat in hand, to apply for a license for its use. And in another ten years every major detergent maker and toothpaste producer in Europe and the United States was using the Kozlov method in their research and production departments. Not long after, this gifted foreigner of little formal education, working in his own laboratory, developed a new, non-petroleum-based surfactant that had the detergent-makers lining up on his doorstep all over again.