Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

“There was a mat,” Gideon said, puzzled by the undeniably bare, glistening rock floor. “Somebody took it away.”

“Some mad scientist, no doubt,” said Pru, who had just come along, “who’s determined to prevent you from revealing his dastardly scheme to the world.” This with a sinister wiggle of her eyebrows.

“It’s hardly a joke,” Rowley said in mild reproof. “You’re quite right, Gideon. I saw the mat myself, but it’s obviously not there now. You’d better find something non-conductive to stand on.”

Gideon, who knew next to nothing about electricity, knew enough to agree with that. A few moments’ poking around behind the rocky stage turned up Derek at a work table in a crowded little workroom – a work cranny, more properly – soldering something or other to something or other else.

“Derek?”

“ ‘Arf a mo’,” Derek said as a pungent wisp of smoke rose from his work. Satisfied, he put down the iron and looked at Gideon. “Yair?”

“There was a rubber mat behind the lectern,” Gideon said. “It’s not there now.”

“ ’Course it’s there.”

Gideon made a motion with his hand, palm up. See for yourself.

Derek did and came back shaking his head. “That’s them janitors for you. Couldn’t do a job proper like to save their lives.”

The janitorial staff, it appeared, was the bane of Derek’s existence. A gaggle of creaky old duffers who should have been superannuated years ago. Careless, slipshod, lazy, apparently they’d thought that Gideon had already given his talk, so they’d begun clearing the stage, presumably to set up for the four o’clock concert. This was grumblingly explained as Derek located the mat – a rubber pad glued to a slightly raised wooden platform – in a corner of the workroom, hauled it out onto the stage, and flopped it on the stone floor behind the lectern. Then he busied himself with checking the mike, setting the angle of the goosenecked reading lamp attached to the lectern, and tinkering with the connections.

“Can’t be too careful when you’re working ’round electricity… now what’s this?” he said disgustedly “Will you just look at this ’ere?”

He tugged at a black electrical cord, revealing a frayed spot where the wiring joined the base of the lamp, and clucked his disapproval. “Accident waiting to ’appen. Should’ve been repaired long ago.” With a complaining sigh he unplugged the lamp and unscrewed it. “Now I’ll ’ave to go and find you another one.”

“That’s all right,” Gideon said, concerned that the audience might think they were having an argument. “I don’t need one, the ambient light’s fine. I don’t have notes to look at anyway.”

“Suit yourself. Good luck, then, mate, they’re all yours.”

Gideon faced his audience. An expectant hush replaced the buzz of conversation. He took a deep breath.

“Good afternoon and thank you all for coming. I guess I’d better tell you right now that my subject isn’t quite what this morning’s paper implied, but I, uh, hope you won’t, um…”

But his anxieties were needless. The talk went beautifully. No one got up and walked out upon learning that that Piltdown Man was not to be left in the dust after all. They listened with active interest, laughed in the right places, and asked intelligent questions afterward. He was pleased.

But he was also troubled. While his archaeologist friends filed upstairs to the St. Michael’s Cave Cafe for a snack, he sought out the technician in the workroom again. “Derek,” he said, “let me ask you a question. That lamp – if I’d touched it, what would have happened? ”

“Touched it? Nothing. You’d’ve ’ad to switch it on.”

“Okay, let’s say I switched it on.”

“Well, still nothing, probably. You’d’ve been standing on the mat, wouldn’tcher?”

“But let’s say I wasn’t standing on the mat – remember, the mat wasn’t there at first.”

At this Derek showed some interest. He set down the soldering iron he’d been using. “I see whatcher getting at. Well, that’d depend on the condition of the wiring in the cord, wouldn’t it? Let’s have us a look, why don’t we?”

The lamp was on a second, smaller worktable crowded with what looked like material for the junkman – broken hand tools, rusty lengths of rebar, chunks of wallboard, a battered old electric sander. Derek brought the lamp back to examine it under the better light of the larger work table.

“Blimey,” he said quietly, probing in the cord’s innards.

“What?”

“Well, just look. There’s only the ’undred-twenty-volt wire still in one piece. The other one, and the ground wire – they’re frayed clear through.”

This told Gideon nothing. “Which means what? I would have gotten a shock?”

“Well, you’d’ve become the switch, d’you see, and the current would’ve ’ad to pass right on through you to close the circuit. Now as long as you was standing on the mat, it would just’ve gone through your ’and, not-”

“But if I wasn’t standing on the mat?” Gideon persisted. “If there was no mat? Could I have been killed?”

Derek astonished Gideon by guffawing. “ Killed! Blimey, mate, you would have been fried. To a crisp,” he added, in case Gideon had missed his drift.

Gideon was late for his lunch date with Fausto and Julie, and when he arrived he had a little trouble picking them out among the mob of diners – the Grand Princess was in port and the little town was jammed with two thousand day trippers – but Julie spotted him and waved him over to a green-umbrellaed table on the open square that served as a dining terrace for the Angry Friar. They were at the very edge of the square, only yards from the diminutive, pillared Supreme Court building and the two not-so-diminutive, shining bronze cannons that ceremonially guarded it (pointed, strangely enough, at the handsome eighteenth-century brick facing of the Governor’s Residence across the street).

“Hi, honey. How’s it going, Fausto? Sorry I’m late.” He had decided during the taxi ride down that the account of his narrowly missing getting fried to a crisp could wait until they’d gotten through a little small talk and some lunch.

“Oh, it’s been fascinating,” Julie said. “Fausto’s been telling me about the local crime scene. You wouldn’t like it here at all. No forensic work. They don’t have murders.”

“None?” Gideon asked, slipping into a chair. “Why, are they against the law or something?”

“It’s a fact, Gideon,” Fausto said. “Not a single homicide in the last two years. “Not one.”

Almost everything Fausto Sotomayor said came across as a declaration; sometimes a challenge. Although a native Gibraltarian, he carried the ghost of a Spanish accent, a Castilian lisp that his forbears had brought over from the mainland, but there was nothing lilting or musical about it. Besides, he spoke a brusque, slangy American English rather than British (he had lived in New York City with his UN-DIPLOMAT mother during his highly formative teenage years), and he spoke it in crackling, to-the-point sentences. On first meeting him, Gideon, whose ear for accent was usually sharp, had mistakenly taken him for a Puerto Rican New Yorker.

“Statistically, one killing every four, five years. I been here twelve years, only had three. Practically no violent crime at all. Not one case of rape in ten years, how about that? How many international cities you know can say that? There’s just, you know, the date rape thing once in a while.”

Julie wasn’t much of a feminist as feminists went, but this was too much for her. “Oh, just the date rape thing,” she said drily. “Nothing to be concerned about.”