Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

All the same, he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. If he squeezed his eyes shut he could feel… he could almost feel… he could imagine he could feel… that quick, firm shove at his hip…

“Well?” Pru pressed when nothing was forthcoming from him.

He came back to the present. “He wouldn’t have had to be hiding while I was inside the hut,” he said. “All the openings – the doorway, the little windows – looked out in the other direction, over the Med. He could have walked right up and stood there waiting for me to come out, and I’d never have known it.”

“Even so -,” she began impatiently.

“I know, I know. It’s pretty unlikely.”

“It’s damn unlikely.”

The waitress came and collected their plates. “What’ll it be for pud?” she asked. “Choice of jam roly-poly, apple crumble, or gateau.”

“Jam roly-poly for me,” Pru said with enthusiasm. “And coffee.”

“What’ll it be for what?” asked Julie.

“Pud,” Gideon said. “Pudding. Dessert. We’re in the UK now.”

“Oh. I’ll pass. Just coffee, please. I’m still too keyed up for dessert.”

Not Gideon. He had wolfed down the chicken and chips, but he was still ravenous. “I’ll have the apple crumble. And coffee for me too.”

“Okay, here’s another possibility,” Pru said as the waitress moved off. “Couldn’t it have been the wind?”

“I doubt it.”

“What about something blown by the wind?” suggested Julie. She was trying to give him a graceful, reasonable out, a way of having fallen off the Rock of Gibraltar that wasn’t his own dumb fault. “I don’t know, a piece of cardboard, an empty carton? You said you didn’t have your feet planted very firmly. Something like a cardboard carton might have been enough to-”

“Uh-uh. I thought about that for a minute too, but it was blowing the other way.” He tipped his head in the direction of Adrian Vanderwater. “A levanter, remember? Not a poniente.”

“All right, then, isn’t it possible that when a gust hit you, you kind of leaned against it – you know, overcompensated – and then when it suddenly stopped, over you went in the other direction?”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “I guess that is possible. I just think.. .” He shook his head, not sure what he had just thought. Who knows, maybe it had been the wind.

Their coffee and desserts were brought and placed before them. Julie grimaced at the pale, glistening mass on Pru’s plate. “What is that, exactly?”

“Something you don’t see in the States anymore.” Pru said, scrutinizing it with obvious relish. “A roly-poly. It’s a suet pudding. They flatten it and roll it up around a jam filling. Have you ever had suet pudding? Want a bite?”

“Um… no, I don’t think so.”

“Weenie,” Pru said, getting ready to attack her dessert with the soup spoon that had been provided.

“You know what they called jam roly-polys in the eighteen hundreds? ” Gideon asked. “Dead man’s arm. Because they used to steam it – and serve it – in an old shirt sleeve.”

“If that’s meant to affect my appetite, dream on,” Pru said, digging in.

Gideon was feeling pretty mellow by now. Not ordinarily a lunchtime drinker, he’d thirstily consumed two glasses of the cold Montilla, and the pungent, strong wine, more like a rough sherry than a dinner wine, had given him a pleasant glow. With alcohol coursing through a nervous system that had already been given a roller-coaster of an adrenaline ride only an hour earlier, he was seeing the world in a different light now. They were probably right. He’d lost his balance, that was all. And if they were willing to believe that the wind had a part in it, so was he.

It was perfectly credible. Why dream up some complex theory of who and why and how? What had happened to his adherence to Occam’s razor, the principle of parsimony that he was always prating about to his classes, the idea that if you have a simple theory that satisfactorily explains the facts, you don’t go around “unnecessarily multiplying uncertainties,” that is, dreaming up more complex ones? He’d taken a heck of a tumble, he’d very naturally panicked, and the result had been a bout of rather absurd paranoia.

“You’re both right,” he said, methodically working away at his apple crumble, a palatable British version of apple crisp. “I overreacted. ”

“Well, it’s no wonder,” Julie said kindly, patently glad to see him returning to his logical, reasonable self.

“Hold it, I just had another thought,” Pru said, scooping up the last of the puddled custard on which her demolished roly-poly had lain. “What have you got in that pocket, Gideon? I heard something crackle in there.”

“I don’t know.” He reached in and pulled out the opened bag of peanuts. “These. Why?”

“And you said there were monkeys around?”

“Yes. In fact, I offered them to one of them, but – wait a minute, you think a monkey -”

“Why not? Grabbing for the bag and accidentally pushing you off balance? They’re strong, you know that. And they could easily reach your hip. And if you offered the bag to one before, then he probably saw where it came from,” she said. “It makes more sense than anything else, Gideon.”

Another graceful out, this one provided by Pru.

He smiled gratefully at her. “It certainly does.” And now that he thought about it, it did. It would account for the one thing the wind didn’t account for: the touch on his hip that he thought – imagined? – he’d felt. It made sense. It explained things more simply and logically than having to construct a villain or even a cantankerous wind. He liked it. Thomas of Occam would have liked it too. He relaxed a little more.

“In fact, now that monkeys are in the picture,” Julie put in brightly, “maybe it wasn’t so innocent. I wonder if he didn’t do it on purpose. Maybe you shouldn’t have said all those nasty things about monkeys. They have feelings too, you know.”

“I tried to apologize to the big guy on the top step,” Gideon said, willingly going along with the change in mood. “The peanuts were supposed to be a peace offering. He wasn’t buying it.”

“Hey,” Pru said, “maybe it was a desperado-type monkey, one of those bad-to-the-bone monkeys, a homicidal monkey. A sociopath monkey.” Pensively, she put a forefinger to her pursed lips.

“Tell me, was he wearing sunglasses, by any chance?”

Tink-tink. Tink-tink-tink.

The tapping of Adrian Vanderwater’s fingernail on his glass had its intended effect. His fellow diners in the Top of the Rock Bar and Restaurant ceased their several conversations and turned amiably toward him.

With Adrian at the smaller of the two tables was his one-time student Corbin Hobgood, now an associate professor at Stanford and the man who had been Adrian’s assistant director on the Europa Point dig. On the three bar stools were Rowley Boyd, Audrey Godwin-Pope, and Audrey’s husband, Buck.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Adrian was saying, “I think we all owe a debt of thanks to Rowley and the Museum of Archaeology and Geology for their generosity in arranging this delightful outing and the superb lunch we’ve just enjoyed.”

Wine and water glasses were lifted in Rowley’s direction. “Hear, hear,” came from someone.

“Yeah, but you could have done a better job with the weather,” Pru said to general laughter.

“But what could I possibly have done about the weather?” Rowley asked earnestly, going off into a long, serious explanation of how, because of the conference programming, this was the only day that he could confidently assume that everyone would be free for an outing to the Rock. If it had been possible to arrange for a day with better weather, he would have done so, and so on. And on.