Aaron Elkins: Uneasy Relations

“Damn. Lend me the key, will you?”

“No, you stay here and keep doing whatever you’re doing,” Fausto said wearily, turning toward the door. “I’ll get it.”

“Okay, thanks, Fausto. Bring them both, will you? The cast too.”

Fausto’s response, a muttered “Absent-minded professors,” hung in the air behind him as he left.

While he was gone Gideon filled in de la Garza on what had brought him: the T10 that had been discovered in Sheila Chan’s room was a previously undocumented vertebra from Gibraltar Woman. There was no question about it. The only question was, where had it possibly come from? Now it appeared that it might have “Come from these?” de la Garza supplied, indicating the bones on the table. “From AN-34? In Sevilla?” He had been startled into emitting an extraordinary three fragmentary sentences in a row. “But how can such a thing be possible?”

Gideon spread his hands. He didn’t have an answer he liked. He’d come up with a few vague possibilities that he didn’t like, but they were too convoluted, too unlikely – and too unwelcome – to think about.

When Fausto returned with the now limp and wrinkled paper sack, Gideon offered the T10 to de la Garza to examine. “Can you tell if this is the one you lent her?”

De la Garza scrutinized it with scrupulous care. Fausto, impatient as ever, went striding around the room rapping the backs of the chairs and humming tunelessly to himself. He had circled the entire room and returned by the time de la Garza had his answer ready.

No, he couldn’t be sure one way or the other, he said, handing it back. It certainly looked like the one he’d lent Sheila, yes, but, unfortunately, inasmuch as the bones were used for teaching purposes only, they had not been marked with identifying codes or abbreviations. Alas, he could not give an unqualified reply.

“Well, I think I can resolve it,” Gideon said. Indeed, he knew he could resolve it. While de la Garza had been poring over the T10, Gideon had made some visual comparisons between the bones, and they had shouted at him again, louder than before. This time he trusted the shout.

“Now then, In my left hand I am holding Gibraltar Woman’s tenth thoracic vertebrae, and in my right hand I have the segment of thoracic and lumbar spine from AN-34 – eleventh thoracic through first lumbar.”

“I think this is the watch-and-learn part again,” Fausto said dourly.

“Cheer up,” said Gideon. “It won’t take long.” He pressed the two segments gently together, and as he knew they would, they fit into each other as neatly and tightly as the T9 model had fit up against the T10 earlier. For good measure, he now put the T9 on top, forming a contiguous, reasonably firmly joined stack of five adjacent vertebrae – four thoracic, and a fragment of the uppermost of the lumbars.

De la Garza stared at the column for a few seconds before comprehending. “All are from the same individual,” he said slowly.

“That’s right,” said Gideon. “And yet the top one is a cast from Europa Point, the middle one was found in Sheila Chan’s room, and the bottom three are yours.”

De la Garza’s long, grave face grew longer and graver. “But this means,” he said slowly, “this means…”

“It means,” Gideon said, “that what you have on the table here-” He swept his hand over the bones. “-is actually part of Gibraltar Woman – the part they didn’t find at Europa Point.”

De la Garza struggled with this. Unsuccessfully. “Will I be expected to turn these over to the British Museum, then?” he asked, brightening a little, perhaps at the prospect of the renown that would come his way over it.

Gideon shook his head. “I don’t think so.” During the last few minutes, some of the unlikely possibilities that had been bouncing around his brain had resolved themselves into something a bit more likely – no less convoluted or unwelcome, but more likely; plausible, even. “My guess is that the British Museum will be turning over their material to you.”

“I do not understand,” de la Garza said. “I do not understand any of this.”

“He lost me a long time ago,” Fausto said.

“Esteban,” said Gideon, “when we were talking on the telephone, didn’t you say the Seville site had been donated to the university for teaching purposes?”

“Yes, that was my understanding. As I said, it held nothing of archaeological or anthropological worth.”

“Would you happen to know who gave it?”

“I do. It was the American, Ivan Gunderson.”

Fausto’s jaw dropped, but it was the answer Gideon had expected. .. but had hoped not to get.

He thought he knew the answer to his next question too. “And where, again, was the site located?”

“It lies in the province of Sevilla, in Andalucia, but near the border with Extremadura.”

“I mean precisely.”

“You would like geographic coordinates? I can provide them.”

“No, but was it near a town of any sort?”

“Yes, it was at the edge of a small village of a few hundred inhabitants. You would not know of it.”

“Maybe I would.” Gideon’s throat had become dry with anticipation. “What’s it called?”

De la Garza opened his mouth to speak: “-”

“No, let me guess,” Gideon said, heavy hearted. “Would it be Guadalcanal, by any chance?”

De la Garza blinked his surprise. “You know of it, then?”

Julie too blinked at the mention of the name. “There’s a Guadalcanal in Spain?”

“Sure,” Gideon said unhappily, “why wouldn’t there be? There’s a Guadalquivir, a Guadalupe, a Guadalajara… why wouldn’t there be a Guadalcanal?” He shook his head. “It should have occurred to me before.”

“And that’s where Gibraltar Woman really came from? Or I guess I should say, ‘Guadalcanal Woman.’ ”

“I guess you should. Ivan had it right that night, after all.”

They were sharing a bench on the Line Wall Promenade, a park-like esplanade atop a portion of the old fortified town wall, where the ranks of gleaming, black cannons that had once defended the colony against flotillas of seaborne invaders now protected it against the cars in the landfill parking lot just below. In the distance, the impending sunset over smoggy Algeciras across the bay looked as beautiful as ever. Gideon, slouching uncharacteristically against the seat back, his legs extended, his hands in his pockets, had just given Julie the upshot of his visit there, as far as he and Fausto had worked it out on the drive back to Gibraltar.

In a nutshell, the First Family was a fake. The dig had been “salted.” The trustworthy, decent, reliable Ivan Gunderson had pulled off the biggest anthropological scam since – well, yes, since Piltdown Man. Oh, the dig at Gibraltar Point had been honestly and efficiently administered by Adrian and Corbin, no reason to doubt that, and Gibraltar Boy was (probably) an authentic member – a Neanderthal child – of the group that had lived there. That much still held up. But the fly, the very large fly, in the ointment was Gibraltar Woman, who didn’t belong there at all. And without Gibraltar Woman, Europa Point was just one more moderately interesting Neanderthal site; the whole wonderful edifice of theory, hypothesis, and feel-goodness that had been constructed around the First Family came crumbling down.

In retrospect, it wasn’t that hard to see how Ivan had pulled it off. He had, after all, been working both the Guadalcanal and Europa Point sites at the same time, back in 2000. At that time, as he usually did, he was working with crews of local laborers, not trained archaeologists or even students (since he didn’t have any), so there was no one at either dig with the experience or knowledge – or interest – to note any funny business on his part. Apparently, he had found the remains of Gibraltar Boy at Europa Point and been struck by their somewhat ambiguous appearance, which could conceivably be taken as a mixture of human and Neanderthal traits. Prompted by whatever compulsion or momentary impulse – and no one was ever likely to know for sure what it was – he decided to give his beloved admixture theory a colossal shot in the arm. From the Guadalcanal site he took what he needed – parts of the cranium, shoulder girdle, arms, and upper vertebral column of the female remains he’d found there, brought them to his other excavation at Europa Point, carefully tucked them into the soon-to-be-famous “hanging crevice” with Gibraltar Boy, and covered them over.