Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

Gideon couldn’t help smiling. He knew Rowley from having run into him at various meetings, and he had come to know him as a charming, cheerful, almost cherubic man. But he was also just about the most literal-minded person he had ever met. Irony was totally lost on him. In its April 1997 issue, Discover magazine had run a playful article about some Neanderthal musical instruments that had supposedly been newly discovered in Germany’s Neander Valley, including a tuba (made from a mastodon tusk), a bagpipe (made from the bladder of a woolly rhinoceros), and a collection of hollowed-out bones that was dubbed a xylobone. The alleged discoverer of these instruments, “Adrian Todkopf,” went so far as to theorize that the Neanderthals’ fondness for music might well have accounted for their extinction: “Maybe their music scared away all the game. They would have produced an awful racket oompah-pahing all over the place.”

To Gideon’s knowledge, no one other than a handful of creationists took it as anything but the joke it was – except for Rowley Boyd. Shortly after the article came out, Gideon had sat, one of a half-dozen mortified fellow anthropologists, as Rowley heatedly (for him) and at length attacked the article as preposterous… because, among other things, “the true woolly rhinoceros – Coelodonta antiquitatis – has never been associated with the Neander Valley!” When it was gently explained to him that the article was an April Fool’s gag, his response was a stricken, incredulous question: “Why would anyone joke about something like that?”

“… but now,” Adrian continued, as always serenely oblivious to the prattling of others, “inasmuch as all of us who are going to take part in this evening’s festivities are here together, it might be a good time to finalize the program plans. Corbin, my boy, perhaps you’d care to address the details.” There weren’t many people who could call a Stanford professor “my boy” and get away with it, but Adrian was one of them.

“Certainly, Dr. Vanderwater,” Corbin said soberly, having cleared his throat first. The minutely but heavily written-upon four-by-six card in front of him showed that he had already given the matter considerable thought. “As our first order of business, I suggest we agree upon a moderator for the event, someone to run things and keep us to a schedule.”

“Can’t you do that, Corbin?” someone suggested.

“I suppose so… yes,” Corbin replied as guardedly as if he’d been asked to facilitate the next session of the UN Commission on Disarmament, “but I think it would be more appropriate to have someone of greater stature. Dr. Vanderwater, would you be willing to take that on?”

“Well, I don’t know about ‘running things’,” Adrian said jovially, tipping a few drops of Tullamore Dew into his coffee from his leather-covered flask, “but I’ll be glad to apply the hook if people run on too long. That is, if the others would like me to.”

This was met with generally mild acclamation and a little indifferent hand-clapping. Nobody gave much of a damn, it appeared. Except Audrey Godwin-Pope, Gideon observed. Audrey’s head snapped up and her eyes glinted with something like indignation, but only for a moment, after which she’d joined in the tepid applause.

How like the three of them, a now thoroughly relaxed Gideon thought with amusement. For fat, rosy-cheeked Adrian, affable and avuncular, the limelight was his natural habitat, and wherever he was, in whatever group, he gravitated naturally to it. The idea that anyone might object would have come as a crushing blow to him. Corbin, on the other hand, was just the man you’d want in charge of the behind-the -scenes details; the more trivial they were, the harder he’d work. And Audrey – so capable and accomplished in her own right, and yet so sensitive to slights, real or fancied, so vigilant in protecting her status against all comers.

In a very real way, Adrian’s happy association with the Europa Point dig was due to Audrey. As the Horizon Foundation’s director of field archaeology, she’d been the one who had invited him to direct the dig when Ivan Gunderson had offered the site to them. It was no secret, however, that at first she’d been far from satisfied with what she considered to be Adrian’s extravagantly expensive running of it. She had maintained close administrative oversight and they had quarreled several times over costs. Adrian had grumbled publicly about Horizon’s penny-pinching approach to staffing and equipment, but Audrey, in control of the purse strings, had won every time, which must have infuriated Adrian. As soon as the First Family was unearthed and the news hit the media, however, hostilities were suspended, the coffers were opened wide, and everything turned rosy, but Audrey, who could hold a grudge for a long time, must have been hell to work for all the same.

Thankfully, Gideon had never been in that position, but he’d seen her in action in other situations. At a conference in Boston once, when she had made the arrangements for a dinner party of eight, including Gideon, at a Thai restaurant, the hostess had called for the “Garwin Poe” party.”

“It’s Godwin,” Audrey had told her. “And Pope, not Poe.”

“Madam, that is what I said.”

“No, you said Gar win. It’s God win. Godwin-Pope.”

“Gardwin?”

“No, Godwin. G-o-d-w…”

And on and on, to the embarrassment of the dinner party and the consternation of the Thai hostess until the poor woman got it right. And this was a place Audrey had never been to before and was unlikely ever to go to again. So what was the point? But that was Audrey.

Along the same lines, a mutual acquaintance named Victoria Tarr had confided to him that, for a time, Audrey had stopped by Vicky’s house for coffee once or twice a week. Whenever Vicky went in afterward to tidy up the guest bathroom in the event that Audrey had used it, she found that the toilet paper roll had unfailingly been reversed so that the new sheets unrolled from the top, instead of the less standard way that Vicky preferred it, with the new sheets coming from the bottom.

Once again, that was Audrey. Things had to be right.

Dry-stick appearance and prickly manner notwithstanding, however, Gideon had always liked her, in small doses at any rate, partly because of the wry, pithy sense of humor that would sometimes come peeking through the arid exterior. She had a pet parakeet, for example, which she had named Onan. Why Onan? “Because,” she had replied drily, “he casts his seeds upon the ground.”

She was also a surprisingly good mimic, even of men’s voices, once she had a couple of glasses of wine inside her. “Who is this?” she would ask, looking suddenly up from her Chardonnay, and then proceed to skewer some colleague with wit and wicked accuracy. Gideon had once come in for a skewering himself. (“Greetings, sir, I am the Skeleton Wizard. If you will kindly show me your left multangulum majus, I will be glad to tell you who you are.”) Gideon had laughed as appreciatively as everyone else.

In any case, she was someone to be reckoned with; a brilliant archaeologist, a more-than-competent administrator, and the author of over a hundred wide-ranging monographs. She was also a founding member and two-time president of Sisters in Time, the feminist caucus of the International Archaeological Society. Forthright and free-spoken, she was in Gideon’s opinion not well suited to her present position with Horizon, inasmuch as an important part of it involved getting money out of people, which necessarily involved tact and diplomacy, not her strongest points. Still, she’d been there for years now and seemed to be doing fine, so apparently he was wrong. Maybe it was the moderating influence of big, solid, benevolent Buck.