Aaron Elkins: Uneasy Relations

Gideon’s story took them through their main course – they both had had the smoked salmon fettuccine – at the Bella Italia on Front Street, and Julie nodded as he finished.

“Okay, thanks. I think I get the picture now.”

“You managed to stay awake the whole time?”

“Oh, there may have been a teeny-weeny lapse or two, right around the mitochondrial DNA part, but I managed to get most of it.”

Their waiter, Bruce, finished clearing away their dinner plates and offered them a dessert menu.

“Just a latte for me,” Julie said, fending it off.

“And I’ll have an espresso,” said Gideon.

Bruce feigned shock. “No postre? But our chef della pasticceria will be grossly offended. I fear to tell him.” Bruce had served them many a fine meal and had earned the right to talk with them like this.

“Oh, in that case…,” said Julie, snatching back the menu and poring over it. “Gideon, will we be able to get zabaglione in Gibraltar?”

“I doubt it. It’s pretty British there, from what I hear. Pasties, gateaux, trifle, yes. Probably Spanish and Moroccan food too, I’d guess. Zabaglione? Don’t count on it.”

“Well, then, you’d better have it here,” Bruce said reasonably.

Gideon handed back the dessert menu. “Makes sense to me.”

“It’s so tiny,” Julie said disappointedly, her face pressed to the window of seat 17A.

As indeed it was. They were nearing the end of their three-hour flight from London, and from the air Gibraltar was a bit of a let-down, an insignificant little worm of a peninsula – shaped remarkably like a human vermiform appendix, Gideon thought – sticking improbably out into the Mediterranean from the vast, flat mainland of Andalusian Spain. They could easily see the whole of it from their seats over the wing as the Boeing 747 banked out over the Strait: the humped mass of the famed Rock itself, surrounded by its skirt of flat, coastal plain, with almost all of its population of thirty thousand crowded into the narrow, dense warren of streets at the base of its western flank.

“It is, isn’t it?” Gideon agreed. “I imagine it’ll look more impressive when we’re down there looking up at it.”

“Oh, it will, it will, I can assure you of that.” The affable, self-possessed voice, borne on a faint waft of Irish whiskey, came from 18B in the row behind them. “And more impressive still when you’re standing on top of the Rock looking down over the edge.”

The voice was that of Professor Emeritus Adrian Vanderwater, who had leaned forward to make himself heard, unconcerned with not having been invited, and unapologetic for having been eavesdropping. Vanderwater, the renowned archaeologist who had directed the Europa Point dig five years earlier, was of the opinion that such niceties were neither here nor there, at least inasmuch as they applied to him. He was, after all, Adrian Vanderwater. Who could be other than pleased to have him participate in a conversation?

As a brilliant young graduate student at the University of Michigan forty years before, he had been anointed the next generation’s great paleoarchaeologist, and many scholars in the field – like anyone else, he had his detractors – would have agreed that the prediction had come to pass. For the last several decades he had been one of the two or three most eminent men in the discipline, an admirably exacting field-worker, and teacher of half the current crop of European Neolithic archaeologists.

The whiskey breath that hung about him – and it was still well before noon – came as no surprise. It was as inextricably attached to him as his voice. In a leather-clad, stainless-steel flask in his attache case, Gideon knew, was a pint of Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey, the day’s (but not the evening’s) supply. Gideon had never seen him drunk, nor heard tales of binges from others (and academics are eager tale-tellers), but he’d never seen him wholly sober either. He drank from the time he got up – Gideon had been at a seven A.M. conference breakfast with him once, and the flask was already in use, spicing up his coffee – until he went to bed. But he did it only a very little at a time, just a few drops, so that there was always alcohol in his system, but never enough to make him even close to tipsy. Whether his typical good humor was whiskey-induced there was no way of knowing, since he was never without the flask.

Round, soft, and rosy, he was built more like an infant than a man of seventy. His head was large for his body, his arms and legs stubby, and his hands small and fat, with puffy, dimpled wrists. A belly like an overinflated beach ball; a globular forehead; pink, smooth, bulgy cheeks; a gurgling, throaty sort of chuckle always at the ready. One of Gideon’s associates (not a fan of Vanderwater’s) referred to him as Big Baby. “Did you know Big Baby’s getting the Childe award this year?” “Did you hear Big Baby’s coming out with another damn book?”

“But you’re correct,” Big Baby went on cheerfully enough. “It is astonishingly small, considering its history. A mere two and a half square miles, but what a two and a half square miles! In classical times, you know, the Rock was one of the Twin Pillars of Hercules. The Phoenicians knew it as Calpe. The Carthaginians came here, and the Romans. The Vandals swept ruthlessly into it on their southward rampage through the Roman Empire, and then the Visigoths.”

Gideon couldn’t help smiling. Retired for two years from his position at the University of California, Vanderwater couldn’t stop being a professor. He could – and did – slip into a full-scale, seemingly well-prepared lecture at the drop of a hat. For a man recognized as one of the great figures of archaeology, recipient of almost every award and honor the field had to give, he had an inextinguishable need to demonstrate that he knew more about anything than anyone else, whatever the subject might happen to be. He did it engagingly enough, and with genuine erudition, but after a while it could get on one’s nerves, not least because he was just about always right.

“From the other direction,” Vanderwater continued, “it was at the southernmost tip of Gibraltar – right down there, Europa Point, in fact – can you see where that lighthouse is? – that Tarik ibn Zeyad set foot in 711 to begin the long Moorish domination of Iberia. Yes, right there.”

He was close to purring as his plummy voice caressed the words Europa Point, and with good reason. His appointment five years earlier as director of the Europa Point dig, and the subsequent discovery, under his supervision, of the First Family, had provided the brightest jewel in the crown of his reputation. Late in his career, on the verge of retirement and an inevitable drift into relative inconsequence, he had suddenly become, in the eyes of his peers, the acknowledged authority on the most sensational find of the decade. (Outside the narrow, arcane circle of academe, of course, in the less-demanding world of popular culture, it was Ivan Gunderson who enjoyed that position.) Since the find, Vanderwater had been the sole or senior author of a dozen monographs and two well-received scholarly books, all dealing with the social and cultural implications of the First Family and Gibraltar Boy, and their many ramifications. Even now, he was rumored to be working on a third.

“The name Gibraltar, as you may know, is a corruption of the Arabic Jebel Tarik, or ‘Jebel’s Mountain.’ And Jebel’s Mountain it remained until 1462, when the Arabs were driven out by Spain, which held the land for more than two centuries, until Britain took it in 1704.”

“Yes,” Gideon said. “They-”

“This they accomplished, during the War of Spanish Succession, by means of an Anglo-Dutch fleet under the command of Admiral George Rooke, and the British have held it ever since, the much-fortified Rock proving an impregnable military outpost of Empire – ‘safe as the Rock of Gibraltar’ has been a catch phrase since the nineteenth century, you know – through the long years of the Great Siege, the Napoleonic Wars, and the terrible world conflicts of the twentieth century.”