Aaron Elkins: Murder In The Queen's armes

He is quick, Gideon thought; no doubt about that. By comparison, Barry’s glazed eyes showed that he’d been left far behind.

"That’s right," Gideon said, "except that it isn’t caused by evolution. Evolution isn’t the cause of anything, strictly speaking; it’s a set of responses, of adaptations-"

"Well, yes," Leon said, "that’s one way of looking at it-" He stopped, seeing that the older man had returned.

"Golly, Dr. Oliver," the man said in mournful apology, "I must have been out to lunch when you said who you were. Nate’s talked about you lots of times." His liquid eyes shone with abashed sincerity. The man really does look like a basset, Gideon thought. Even his ears were baggy.

He shook hands with Gideon, a sincere, confidential two-handed shake, the left hand gripping Gideon’s elbow. "I’m Jack Frawley, Nate’s assistant. I’m an associate prof at Gelden." He smiled weakly. "It’s a genuine pleasure to meet you."

Although he’d never met him, Gideon knew who Frawley was. At one time he’d been a promising scholar, and he’d achieved his associate professorship by the time he was twenty-five. Two decades ago, however, he had published a paper in American Antiquity in which he’d made a string of elementary statistical errors. Published responses had been scathing and brutal, after the time-honored fashion of learned societies, and Frawley had never dared to publish again, as far as Gideon knew.

In the world of academia, that had meant a dead stop to his career, and for more than twenty years he had remained an associate professor at Gelden. When old Blassie had retired two years ago as head of the department, Frawley, the senior member of the faculty, hadn’t even been considered as a replacement, and the younger Nate Marcus had been brought in from Case Western Reserve.

"Well, well, come on back," Frawley said with oily hospitality that failed to convince. "I’m sure you want to see Nate."

Gideon turned to Leon. "Sorry, I hope we can finish this another time."

"Anytime, Gideon," Leon said. "Always glad to hear your views."

Gideon?…Hear your views? What the hell kind of way was that for a grad student to talk to a professor he’d just met? But then, why shouldn’t he be sure of himself? And why should he, Gideon, be ruffled by informality from someone not much more than ten years younger? Was he already looking jealously over his shoulder at the next generation of bright young anthropologists? Now there was a tendency to be watched.

As they walked toward the corrugated-metal shed, Frawley clasped Gideon’s forearm and moved closer. There was stale pipe tobacco on his breath. "Now, Gideon," he said confidentially, "-may I call you Gideon?-I’d like to share some thoughts with you in all candor."

Gideon’s vague unease defined itself more sharply. People eager to "share" things with him put him off- particularly after a one-minute acquaintance. So did people who squeezed his arm-men, anyway-conspiratorially or otherwise, and leveled shiny-eyed, straight-shooting gazes on him. And he’d never been much of a fan of the double handshake.

"Damn!" Frawley unexpectedly exclaimed. Not looking where he was going, he had stumbled over the corner of a narrow trench not far from the shed.

"What is it?" Gideon asked. "A test pit?" With a little luck, Frawley might forget about his candid thoughts.

"A test pit, yes. Nate thought there might be a barrow here, or some buildings, with their surface features obliterated."

Gideon could see no reason to think so, but then no one had believed there was anything at the site of the main dig either, except for Nate. "You didn’t find anything?"

"Nothing. A foot and a half below the surface we hit glacial till. I mean the Riss glaciation-Middle Pleistocene. We certainly weren’t going to find anything interesting under that; it’d be two hundred thousand years old, at least."

Gideon smiled to himself. Two hundred thousand years. That was about where things began to get interesting, as far as he was concerned.

But not as far as Frawley was concerned. The older man urged him on-with a hand at his elbow-and then, as they approached the door to the shed, he squeezed Gideon’s forearm once more. Whatever it was he wanted to tell Gideon in all candor, it looked like Gideon was going to have to hear it.

"Yes?" he said.

Frawley heard the coolness in his voice. The hand fell from Gideon’s arm, and the sober face, which had been staring directly up into Gideon’s, retreated with its sour tobacco smell.

"Well, it’s only that you should know that, in all candor, Nate isn’t quite himself. He’s been very…" He pursed his lips, chewed his words. "What I mean to say is that he’s, well, terribly determined to prove he’s right about the Mycenaeans bringing the Wessex culture with them to England."

"You don’t agree with his theory?" Gideon asked.

Frawley looked aggrieved. "Do you? "

It was a fair if surprisingly direct question. "No," Gideon said. "It made a little sense in the thirties and forties, when no one realized the extent of Bronze Age commerce. But now it seems pretty simplistic to invent a three-thousand-mile sea voyage when long-term trade contracts explain things a lot better."

"Well, there you are," Frawley said, vaguely mollified. "But that isn’t my point. What I’m getting at is the idea-I think I might well say the fact-that this… obsession of his is getting in the way of his objectivity. All this defending himself, and this fighting with the Antiquarian Society… Well, I think maybe it’s affected his judgment, made him a little…well, paranoid."

The hand darted out briefly to touch Gideon’s arm again. "Now, I don’t mean to imply he’s not doing a top-notch job. No, sir, no way, not for a minute. What I’m trying to say is"-here the sincere and shining eyes were turned full on Gideon again-"that he needs help, your support. He’s made some wonderful contributions. He’s a wonderful person, a great man."

What, Gideon wondered, was this all about? A little judicious, not-so-subtle backstabbing by the loyal, passed-over senior faculty member? But why to Gideon? What did he have to do with it?

Frawley drew himself up, manfully putting the lid on his emotions. "Shall we go in now, Gideon?"

From Jack Frawley’s tone, Gideon half expected to walk into the parlor of a funeral home, and was relieved immediately at the friendly, familiar clutter and jumble of an archaeological workroom. Most of the small interior was taken up by two pushed-together old tables on which were several newly put-together pottery sections, the beads of glue still fresh on them; a few blackened, unidentifiable scraps of metal; and five or six small paper bags labeled with thick, black numbers. There was also a corroded but impressive bronze dagger, next to which lay the golden nails that had studded its hilt and the few rotten slivers of wood that were presumably all that remained of the hilt itself. Obviously, it had been a productive dig so far.

Squeezed around the table were five or six folding metal chairs, and on one of them, near an electric heater, sat Nate Marcus. Frawley’s warning notwithstanding, he looked very much like himself: small and wiry, intense and sarcastic. He was a man of extraordinary hirsuteness. Black and vigorous, his hair always seemed to be in the process of taking him over, gleaming blue-black and gritty on his spare cheeks, dipping low on his forehead in a thick, simian wedge, meeting above his eyes in a woolly, Cyclopean eyebrow that sent fuzzy feelers halfway down his nose. In the V of his open collar a glossy tuft sprouted like a nest of tangled wires.

I know just what he’s going to say, Gideon thought, and exactly how he’s going to say it. Well, look who’s here, he’ll say in that mocking, flip New York accent he’d never lost, the famous skeleton detective.