Aaron Elkins: Uneasy Relations

“Cute li’l buggers, aren’t they?” said Pru, who had been to Gibraltar before, having been one of the team on the Europa Point dig. When the dig had started, the professional team had been composed of nothing but archaeologists – experts in stones, but not in bones. But once they had unearthed their first evidence of human skeletal material, however – the proximal end of an ulna protruding from a crevice in the cave wall – Pru had been called in to perform the delicate exhumation. Gideon had been a little surprised at that, inasmuch as she had only that MA in physical anthropology, and, really, not much to recommend her in the way of experience as a “dirt archaeologist. ” But Les Eyzies, where she was working, had been relatively nearby, and Corbin Hobgood, Europa Point’s assistant director, had been an old friend, and so he had brought her on. As a result, it had been Pru herself who had excavated the bones of the First Family. And a fine, careful job she had done, as far as Gideon could tell.

One of the monkeys ambled up to him with its shambling, quadrupedal gait, and, without bothering to look up at him, stuck out a demanding hand for a handout. When Gideon didn’t oblige, the heavy-browed, cinnamon-colored creature tugged impatiently on his pant leg, almost sending him tumbling; like most nonhuman primates, they were strong for their size.

“Beat it, you bum,” Gideon muttered, snatching the fabric out of its grasp.

Julie was shocked. “Gideon, that’s not like you at all.”

“Well, I hate monkeys,” he mumbled, a little ashamed of himself.

Now both women stared at him, astonished.

“You hate monkeys?” Julie exclaimed. “I never knew that.”

“Oh, I don’t mean I hate them,” Gideon said, chastened, “but I don’t like them. Now, apes I like. Thoughtful, intelligent, adaptive. How can you not like a chimp – bright, eager to please, always ready to play? And how can anyone’s heart not go out to a gorilla sitting in the corner of a zoo cage somewhere, all pensive and melancholy? But monkeys, no. Look at them – greedy, spiteful, malicious, contemptuous-”

“Contemptuous?” Julie said, laughing. “Pensive? Somebody’s getting a wee bit anthropomorphic here.”

“Okay, I plead guilty to that. Got carried away there for a minute. But look at them. Unlike apes, they-”

“But these are apes,” said Pru, gesturing with the sunglasses she carried in her hand. “Barbary apes. The sign says so. ‘Please do not feed the Barbary apes.’” She clapped her other hand to her heart. “My God, somebody keep me from falling down. Did I just catch Professor Oliver in an error – about primates, yet?”

“The sign may say so, but the sign is in error,” Gideon replied calmly.

“I could have told you,” a laughing Julie said to Pru.

“The uninformed – for example, those with mere master’s degrees in physical anthropology – may call them apes,” Gideon went on windily, “and it’s true that they’re big for monkeys, they lack tails, they look a bit like baboons, and they have a baboonlike gait, but in fact they are monkeys, macaques, Macaca sylvanus, and they are among the nastier, crabbier, least amenable of their kind.”

“With a diet like that, I’m not surprised,” Pru said. She stopped walking to lean close to a couple of males, each in the process of sullenly, but extremely competently, opening up a package he’d been given. “ ‘Cadbury Curly Wurlies,’ ” she read aloud from one label, “and ’Mr. P’s Pork Scratchings.’ No wonder they’re crabby,” she said, straightening up. You’d be crabby too if you lived on a diet of – hey! ”

A skinny, hairy forearm had snaked up just as she turned away, and long, spidery fingers had expertly plucked the sunglasses out of her hand.

“Come back here, you creep!” she cried as the animal scampered up onto a rocky ledge, its Curly Wurlies in one hand and Pru’s sunglasses in the other.

“Those cost me $34.95, you… you little shit!”

Whereupon the monkey, staring contemptuously – Yes, contemptuously , Gideon thought – at her all the time, slipped the glasses more or less over its eyes and just sat there wearing them, safely out of reach.

The nearby tourists laughed and reached for their cameras.

“On second thought, I guess the little guys are pretty amusing at that,” Gideon said.

The tiny Top of the Rock Bar and Restaurant, hidden one floor below the big tourist cafeteria, was a cozy, olde English sort of place with open-beam ceilings, a gleaming mahogany bar, and an inviting fire glowing in a small stone fireplace and casting feathery, flickering, orange reflections on the walls. On the front door was a sign stating Reserved for Private Party. There were only two small tables, and three or four stools at the bar, just about enough room for Rowley’s group. Places had been attractively set for eight: three at the larger table, two at the smaller, and three at the bar. Everything looked wonderfully appealing to the chilled troupe looking yearningly in through the glass door.

There was only one problem. They couldn’t get in. The door was locked, there was no response to their knocking, and the preordered lunch wasn’t going to be ready until one, almost an hour away.

“That gives you all an opportunity to do a number of things in the interim,” said Rowley, looking on the bright side. “If you just want to warm up over a cup of coffee or cocoa, the cafeteria upstairs is open, and there’s a souvenir shop up there too, with some excellent books on the area. But if you want to brave the elements, you’d have time to go on down to the Apes’ Den area, if that appeals to you. It’ll be less windy there, and that’s where you’ll find the largest assemblage of them.”

“Oh, goody, let’s do that,” Pru said sourly to Gideon.

“Good idea. Maybe you’ll find the one that has your glasses.”

“Or you could simply wander down the paths a ways,” Rowley continued. “I’m afraid you won’t have time to get to the Great Siege Tunnels or St. Michael’s Cave, but there are some wonderful views. Oh, and there’s an old Moorish sentry post still standing, not very far down the path to my left. Dates from the twelfth century. Not much to it, really, but you might find it interesting, or, er… well, that’s about it, I suppose, given our time constraints.”

“Buck and I will go up to the cafeteria,” Audrey proclaimed. “Come, Buck.” Without waiting for his concurrence, she headed for the steps.

Buck shrugged his brawny shoulders. “Yes, ma’am,” he said with his tolerant, aw-shucks smile, and obeyed, shambling after her like a good-natured trained bear.

“That’s Audrey’s husband?” Julie murmured, shaking her head. “I can’t get over it.”

Gideon had been no less surprised at meeting Craig “Buck” Pope the evening before. To call it a marriage of opposites was to put it mildly. Audrey – whom Gideon knew fairly well, having worked with her several times, both on committees and in the field – was virtually unchanged in the ten years that he had known her. A tiny, bird-boned woman in her sixties, wiry and closed-faced, with long-out-of-date harlequin glasses resting on a blue-tinged, bladelike nose, and iron gray hair forced into an untidy bun, usually with a couple of pencils sticking out of it, she was everybody’s image of a turn-of-the-century – the twentieth century – spinster schoolmarm, the kind that lived in somebody’s rented attic and smelled of chalk dust. All she needed was a high-necked, frilled collar and a cameo brooch.

Buck, on the other hand, was a retired Army master sergeant from Oklahoma, twice Audrey’s size, with a voice like a gravel spreader but a gentle manner. His formal schooling had stopped with a community college degree, but he was now an instructor in infantry field tactics at a military institute outside of Chicago. Outgoing, friendly, and a live-and -let-live type, where Audrey was severe, demanding, and inclined by nature to be censorious, he seemed utterly unsuited to her. But they had been married for at least twenty years – a late first marriage for both – and as far as Gideon could see, they got along splendidly. Buck treated her with a solicitous, old-fashioned courtesy, gentling her as he would a cantankerous horse, obeying her frequently imperious commands with what seemed like an indulgent if slightly amused affection, and in general, speaking only when spoken to.