Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

“Listen,” Fausto said, “let me try to get this straight. I’m confused.”

“That makes two of us, believe me.”

“Okay, let’s start at the beginning. What we’re dealing with is two vertebrae that were, what do you call them, next to each other, one on top of the other…”

“Adjacent. Right.” Gideon had them in his hands now, probing them yet again with eyes and fingers, hunting for anything he might have missed, anything he might have gotten wrong.

“The top one is a cast, and the bottom one is a real vertebra.”

Gideon nodded.

“And they fit perfectly into each other.”

“Perfectly,” Gideon agreed.

“Which means they had to have been from the same person.”

“Right.”

“Gibraltar Woman.”

“Gibraltar Woman. I know the top one is, and therefore the bottom one – God!” He braced himself instinctively against the back of his seat as Fausto, traveling at ninety-five, happily threaded the frighteningly small opening between a heavy, smoke-belching truck with a load of asphalt shingles on the left, and a Fiat with a startled, petrified driver on the right. In a couple of seconds, truck and Fiat were left far behind, although, in the side mirror, Gideon could see the truck driver’s arm out the window vigorously giving them the finger. He closed his eyes. That had been the closest one yet. He wondered vaguely if he might be able to come up with a way to take the bus back to Gibraltar when it was time to return.

“-therefore the bottom one is too,” he finished when his breath returned.

“Okay,” Fausto said. “So they’re definitely from the same person. That’s what I thought. But he says he dug up the skeleton that the bottom one came from six years ago, up north in Seville province, and it’s been sitting in Algeciras ever since.”

“Yes, he does.”

“And you say the top one is a cast made from the skeleton of Gibraltar Woman, which was dug up five years ago, in Gibraltar.”

“Yes. I do.”

“Well, how much sense does that make?” Fausto demanded. “You can’t both be right.”

Gideon sighed. “No, it wouldn’t seem so, would it?”

“What do you mean, seem so? She couldn’t be-”

“Fausto, please,” Gideon pleaded, “keep your eyes on the road, will you? You can talk without looking at me.”

“She couldn’t have been buried in both places, could she?” Fausto persisted.

“You wouldn’t think so, no.”

“Look, no offense, Gideon, but isn’t it at least possible they’re not from the same person? I mean, look, nobody’s perfect. Admit it, you could be wrong about this, couldn’t you?”

Gideon shrugged. “Sure, I suppose I could, Fausto.”

Like hell he could.

The University of Cadiz’s Algeciras branch provided a welcome haven in the heart of a clanking, grubby, hard-working city. With its clean, white, two-story buildings, its neat lawns, and its concrete paths planted with young trees, it might have been a suburban community college campus in the United States. About the only difference, other than the signs in Spanish, were the students – clean-cut and conservatively dressed, with not a pierced nostril or a stud-transfixed tongue in sight.

To get to room 203 of the main building they walked the length of a long, gleaming corridor lined with faculty office doors and a few clusters of apprehensive-looking students waiting outside them, hatching their stories, or explanations, or excuses. Again, thought Gideon, just like home. Room 203 itself was a lecture hall smelling strongly of floor polish. There were five tiered rows of empty chairs with writing-desk armrests, and a long, laminate-topped lab table down in front for the instructor. On the table was a grocery-sized cardboard box, and in front of it, waving them in as gracefully as an orchestra conductor signaling a pianissimo passage, stood a somberly smiling Esteban de la Garza, balding a bit now, but otherwise much the same as the last time Gideon had seen him: erect and aristocratic in his usual three-button suit.

“I have them here in the carton,” he said after the introductions. “I would have laid them out for you myself, but I thought you would prefer them thus, for you to do.”

“That’s good, Esteban,” Gideon said, undoing the flaps of the carton. “Okay, let’s have a look.”

As soon as he reached in and removed the first few fragments – a partial rib, the proximal three-quarters of a left fibula, most of a sacrum – he was struck by the near certainty that they did indeed belong to the same female skeleton that he’d examined five years earlier. They were the right sex and the right age to begin with, but it was the bones themselves – their red-tinted gray-brown color, their texture, their weight, their size, and of course their various evidences of AS – ankylosing spondylitis – that all shouted “Gibraltar Woman” at him. But he wasn’t ready to say anything aloud yet. Bones shouted at him a lot, and sometimes they turned out to be flimflamming him. There were more scientific ways to go about things. Unconsciously, he rubbed his hands together, removed the rest of the bones from the carton, and went to work. Fausto and Esteban watched silently.

The first thing a well-trained anthropologist such as Gideon Oliver does in such a situation is to lay out the remains in as close to correct anatomical position as their number and condition allow. Then he carefully examines them to ensure that they are not commingled – that is, that they do not come from more than one individual. This is done by careful sexing, ageing, evaluation of general condition, etc. – but most obviously and significantly, by checking to see that there are no duplications. (Two mandibles, for example, would be a good clue to there being more than one person represented.) Then, in this particular situation, would come a mental exercise: a similar analysis in which the anthropologist compares the bones that lie before him to the absent but well-remembered remains of Gibraltar Woman. Are there duplications between the sets? Are there differences in condition, age, sex? And so on. It is all a matter of proceeding in a logical, orderly fashion, systematically narrowing the field of possible alternatives until a single plausible conclusion can be reached.

Of these steps, so often demanded of his students, Gideon performed not a one. He proceeded instead like a six-year-old set loose in a candy shop and instructed to thoughtfully, prudently consider his choices before making a selection. That is to say, he immediately grabbed the most alluring, enthralling morsel of all: in this case, a columnar section of three solidly fused-together vertebrae, the upper two complete, the lowest one broken. The middle and lowest ones still had stubs of rib fused to them, another abnormality associated with AS.

“Ah!” he couldn’t help yelling. It was better luck than he’d dared hope for. “This,” he exclaimed excitedly, “will settle it for good.”

“Settle what?” said Fausto. “What are we settling?”

“Watch,” Gideon said magisterially, “and learn.” He laid the three-part vertebral segment on the table. “What we have here are the eleventh and twelfth thoracic vertebrae, plus a chunk of the first lumbar. Now, then…”

“Okay, I’m watching,” Fausto said after a few moments of silence and immobility. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

“Where the heck is the other piece, the one we brought with us?” Gideon said irritably. “The one from Sheila’s room – the T10?” He had scanned the table without success and was now searching perplexedly through his own pockets.

“You had it,” Fausto said accusingly. “You must have left it in the car.”