Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

“There’s an old story, supposedly about Noah Webster, the dictionary guy, in which Webster’s wife catches him in some hankypanky with the maid. ‘Mr. Webster, I am surprised!’ she says. ‘No, my dear,’ says Webster, ‘ I am surprised. You are astonished.’ However, I’ve also seen it attributed to Samuel Johnson, and even Winston Churchill, so the provenance is dubious, to say the least.”

“See?” she said, laughing. “You’re in no danger of losing your Trivial Pursuit title belt.” She turned serious. “But I know what you mean: maybe it doesn’t surprise you, but you still find it hard to believe. ”

“Exactly.”

“Yes, me too.” She reflected for a moment and stood up with a sigh. “Anyway, Fausto wants you to come in and get fingerprinted so they can start working out whose prints are on the lamp. I told him I’d drop you off at the police station on the way back to the hotel.”

“Do you know where the police station is?”

“I saw it yesterday while I was wandering around on my own. A great old red-brick building with Gothic arches, very Victorian… easy to imagine Inspector Lestrade coming out of it on his way to meet with Sherlock Holmes.”

She waited a few seconds for him to get up as well, but he was lost in his thoughts, frowning, staring at nothing.

“Gideon? Are you there? Shall we go?”

He finally stood up. “Definitely. I wanted to talk to Fausto too. There’s something funny about that landslide.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head slowly back and forth. “But something.”

The Victorian building downtown turned out to be merely a substation with a sergeant in charge. DCI Sotomayor was to be found at police headquarters, which were situated on Rosia Road, about a mile north of town. Following the instructions they were given, Julie located Rosia Road, which angled away from Main Street and ran down toward the waterfront. “I think it’s that building over there,” she said, pulling to a stop.

“You mean the one with the all the police cars out front and that big sign over the entrance that says ‘Royal Gibraltar Police Headquarters? ’ Hmm, you just might have something there.”

“Very funny. Don’t be tedious.”

Laughing, he leaned over to kiss her. “We can’t be more than half a mile from the hotel. I’ll walk back. Think about where you want to have dinner.”

“Let’s just have it in the hotel with the others,” Julie said. “I think it would be good to know what’s going on. Also,” she added with a smile, “I’m more comfortable when we have them all in sight.”

“Okay, see you back there in an hour or less.”

Getting out of the car, he found himself in an area of old buildings, mostly housing salty-sounding businesses: ship chandleries, nautical charts, marine hardware and coatings. The rusted street sign on the wall beside him told him that the alley at whose head he was standing was called South Dockyard Approach, and it led down behind him, predictably enough, to a sprawling dry-dock operation. The two-story police headquarters building in front of him, like others nearby, was made of big, gray, rough-cut stone blocks. Above the Royal Gibraltar Police Department sign was an older one that said New Mole House, which suggested that the building had originally had something to do with the docks; possibly, he thought, it had been the customs house. He guessed it dated from the early 1800s. (Later he was to learn that he was a century off. It had been built in 1904 as an office of the Ministry of Defense.)

The front entrance had been constructed as a porte cochere, an arched opening big enough to admit a large horse-drawn vehicle. A handsome gate of metal grillwork closed off the inner courtyard, a tranquil Spanish-style patio with ornamental cactuses and palms, enclosed by four white-stuccoed, balconied walls. Within the entry-way vestibule, what had been the old gatekeeper’s stall was now a little office with a desk, behind which sat a sat a smiling, crisply dressed young policeman, his starched white shirt and blue tie immaculate, his blue tunic draped with perfect symmetry over the back of his chair.

“How may I be of service, sir?”

“My name is Gideon Oliver,” Gideon told him through the grated window. “Chief Inspector Sotomayor-”

“Oh, yes, sir, you’re to be fingerprinted and then escorted to the chief inspector’s office.” He made a brief telephone call, then produced a visitors badge, which was given to Gideon to be hung around his neck. No more than twenty seconds after he’d replaced the phone, another constable appeared at the gate, unlatched it, and took Gideon to a booking room where he had his fingerprints rolled by a female constable, also white-shirted and blue-tied, who absentmindedly hummed throughout the task. It took him a moment to recognize the tune: “It’s a Small World, After All.”

“I understand you’re some sort of scientific detective,” she said, finishing up.

“Yes, you could say that.”

“What do you detect?”

He pursed his lips, put his thumb and middle finger to his forehead, and put on a detecting expression. “Tell me, been to Walt Disney World lately?”

Her jaw dropped. “That’s amazing. Disneyland, actually. In Paris. Just last week. But how did you know?”

“Ah, we’re not permitted to divulge our techniques.”

His fingertips cleansed with a waterless cleaner, he was taken down a corridor to Fausto’s office, which was on the ground floor, overlooking the courtyard. He was expecting something expensively furnished – carpeting, framed prints and posters, modern sculpture – to go along with Fausto’s flashy, expensive taste in cars and clothes, but instead he found the Universal Cop’s Office: linoleum flooring; scarred, unmatched furniture, most of it metal; walls completely bare of decoration unless you counted charts, bulletin boards covered with overlapping notes and memos, and maps with pins stuck in them; shelves filled with codes and procedure manuals; desk neat and almost bare. And no sculpture at all, modern or otherwise.

“Pull up a chair,” Fausto said. He too was in shirtsleeves (in his case, silver-gray silk, shot through with pale gold stripes), the French cuffs of which had been turned back in two meticulous, clean-lined folds. His tie, diagonally striped in soft pastels, was, as always a perfect match.

“Fausto, where do you get your clothes, anyway?”

“Shirts from Prada, suits from Armani, ties Ferragamo. Why, you want to dress like me?”

“Are you kidding? I couldn’t afford it.”

“Sure, you could. I get them over the Internet. Doesn’t cost as much as you think.”

“Even so, I’m a professor; I’d never get away with looking like a Mafia drug lord.”

“You’re right,” Fausto agreed, preening a little. “It takes a cop to do that.”

Gideon took the offered chair. “So tell me about the lamp.”

“Not much to tell. They found the cord fabric and the wiring had both definitely been filed down-”

“To make it look as if they’d just frayed.”

“Unless you can come up with a better reason. They were even able to tell me what he used.” He glanced at an open writing pad on his desk. “A steel bastard-cut half-round file, probably the eight- or ten-inch variety.”

“Oh? Is that any help? I mean, is that an unusual kind of file?”

“I was hoping the same thing, but nope, it’s just a file; find ’em in any DIY outfit.”

“So where do you go from here?”

“First order of business is to try and match the prints on the lamp. We got four sets, okay? We already identified three of them, guys who had a legitimate reason for handling it – that guy Derek, and two of his crew. That leaves one unidentified set. If yours match it, then we got pretty much bupkis. If they don’t – well, I’m not sure what we have, but it’s a place to start. Get prints from some of your pals, to begin with.”