Uneasy Relations

TWENTY

But no one had ever sent him anything quite like this before, and he wasn’t about to let the rest of the table in on it. His large hand now lay protectively over it. He could barely make himself sit still until he could give it a more careful going-over in private. Already he was beginning to think he must have been mistaken in what the quick glance he’d had at it had told him. But if he was right…

“I’ve taken the liberty of ordering after-dinner coffee and drinks to be served in the bar this evening,” Adrian said, observing that people were beginning to stir. “I thought it would be more comfortable. Shall we go?” As they got up he gestured jocularly at the bag. “Don’t forget your bones.”

“As a matter of fact, I think I’ll drop them off upstairs so I don’t leave them somewhere. Wouldn’t want to shock anybody who happened to pick them up.”

Gideon’s chances of forgetting and leaving them somewhere were about as likely as his forgetting his ears and leaving them somewhere, but he didn’t like the interested looks the bag was getting. While the others shuffled slowly into the Barbary Bar, he retrieved his key from reception (room keys were attached, not to the metal or wooden tags most European hotels used, but to happy little “Barbary ape” plush dolls; another whimsical touch, like the lollipops and the rubber ducks), and punched the elevator button for the second floor,

Alone in the elevator, he quickly had a look at the contents of the bag. Indeed, the vertebrae were just what he’d thought they were. He was sure of it now. My God, this is the most exciting, most unexpected – He caught a sidewise glimpse of himself in the elevator mirror and couldn’t help laughing. Hunched greedily, almost lasciviously, over the open bag, he looked like Silas Marner ogling his hoard of golden coins. And like Silas Marner, it occurred to him that simply leaving them in his room might not be the best idea in the world. When he got to his floor, he didn’t get out but hit the button for the lobby. Once there he went back to the reception desk and had George put the bag in the hotel safe. Then, his head spinning with speculation and conjecture, he took a couple of deep breaths and went to find the others.

In the Barbary Bar, with its evocative, Casablanca -like ambience – rattan armchairs, soft, amber lighting, potted palms, slowly spinning ceiling fans – the talk soon devolved to nostalgic, humorous stories about Ivan. After half an hour everyone moved out through the open doors to the Wisteria Terrace and settled in again for more of the same. To wistful, indulgent laughter, Audrey did a couple of her impressions of Ivan, notorious among archaeologists for his less-than -delicate field methods. (“Oh, no need to fool with a silly trowel to dig those remains out; I’ll just hire a backhoe. Much quicker.”)

By then Gideon was more than ready to go, but he didn’t want to seem eager to get back to the vertebrae so he stuck it out. Finally, at about ten thirty, the last of them to leave – Buck, Audrey, and Corbin – finally made their good nights and went upstairs.

“Now,” said Julie, fixing Gideon with a razor sharp look, “what is going on? What’s so important about those bones that you’ve been on pins and needles ever since you got them?”

His face fell. “Have I been that obvious?” He knew all too well that dissimulation wasn’t his strong suit, but he’d prided himself on having carried things off pretty well this time.

“Maybe not that obvious, except to someone who knows you inside out the way I do, but take my advice and don’t ever go in for professional poker playing.”

“You think they noticed?”

“Probably not. They were too into their Ivan stories. Now tell me; what’s going on?”

“Let’s go up. I’ll pick up the bones and show you.”

“Oh, let’s stay out here a while longer, Gideon. It’s so lovely now that everybody’s gone. Mmm, just smell that air.”

“Nice,” he agreed, not that he’d noticed until she mentioned it. Okay,” he said, standing up. “I’ll bring them out here. Get ready. This is going to knock your socks off.”

A minute later he was back with the bag. He gingerly removed the vertebrae, cradling them carefully in both hands, and placed them on the table between them. It was his first chance for anything more than a hurried look, and although the soft, diffuse lighting on the terrace was anything but conducive to a close examination of skeletal remains, that’s what they were going to get. Julie, understanding, left him to it and sat back with her eyes closed, inhaling the velvety air, lush with the perfumes of the night-blooming plants from the gardens below. “Mmm,” she said again.

“Mmm,” he echoed automatically, but for all he knew the air could have smelled like a lion house on a rainy day. All of his concentration was focused on the extraordinary object in front of him as he slowly rotated it on the tabletop.

It was the “vase” that Rosie, the constable at New Mole House, had taken home for her daughter, constructed of two adjacent thoracic vertebrae glued together, with a circle of aluminum foil Scotch-taped to the bottom to close it up. The foil and Scotch tape were quickly removed and discarded to make the examination easier. The vertebral foramens – the central holes that, all taken together, created the long, narrow, bony tube in which the spinal cord resided – provided an opening big enough for a few flower stems or a couple of pencils. The upper of the two bones was creamy white, the usual color of biological-supply-house skeletal casts. The lower one was a more muddy and uneven gray-brown, tinged with red. It was this lower one that had so captured his attention. After a few minutes he surfaced and began to speak.

“These are T9 and T10, the ninth and tenth thoracic vertebrae,” he said slowly. They’re located about…” He reached around her to touch the middle of her back. “Here. The top one-”

When she burst out laughing he thought he’d accidentally tickled her, but it wasn’t that. “Oh, it’s cute!” she cried.

“Cute?” He stared wonderingly at her, and then at the vertebrae. “Oh, the face. Yeah, I suppose that’s pretty clever.”

Rosie’s ten-year-old daughter had apparently gotten a head start on her medical illustrator career by “illustrating” the upper vertebra, painting a clever little cartoon face on it. Viewed from the rear, the flat, smooth superior articular processes (where the inferior articular process of the eighth vertebra would have abutted) were now two round, googly eyes, the transverse processes (where the right and left eighth ribs would have attached) were a pair of donkey’s ears, and the long, tapering spinous process (which, with its fellows, would have constituted the knobby, spiky length of the spine) was a tapering snout, with a curlicue mustache and a goofy, big-toothed grin at the bottom.

“Sorry,” Julie said, “I didn’t mean to spoil the big moment.” She suppressed a final giggle. “All right, you have my full and earnest attention. The top one is…?”

“The top one is an exact reproduction of the ninth thoracic vertebra of Gibraltar Woman, as perfect as a cast can get. It’s part of a set of First Family casts made by France Casting in Colorado, the only sets that were authorized to be made from the original bones. I bought one of them myself for the lab.”

“Uh-huh. And it’s special because…?”

“It’s not special at all. It’s the other vertebra, the T10, that’s special. ”

She looked at it, turned the little vase in her hands, tried to determine what was special about the T10. “Sorry,” she said with a shrug, “I don’t-”

“It’s special for two reasons. First, because, unlike the T9, it’s not a cast at all. It’s the real, honest-to-God bone.”

“It is?” she said, running her fingers gently over the rough, splintery surface. She was intrigued now. “This bone that I’m holding is actually from Gibraltar Woman herself?”

“Absolutely. See here, where the end of the transverse process is broken off? That delicate, lacy, sort of filigreed-looking stuff underneath? That’s interior bone, cancellous bone; no mistaking it. You can’t get results that fine with a cast.”

“But I thought all the actual bones went to the British Museum.”

“They did.”

Her eyes widened. “This was stolen from the British Museum?”

“No, ma’am,” he said airily, “it was never in the British Museum. ”

“But if the bones all went to-” She put the bones down with an exasperated little cluck and a cautionary glance. “Gideon, if what you’re trying to do is confuse me-”

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said, laughing, “just trying to enhance the narrative tension – you know me. Look, the crux of it is – and this is what’s really special about it – Gibraltar Woman didn’t have a tenth thoracic vertebra.”

“If that’s supposed to unconfuse me-”

“The remains that were excavated at Europa Point were far from complete; you know that. They included the first, second, fourth, fifth, seventh, and ninth thoracics, and that’s about as far down as Gibraltar Woman goes, really. Below that level, there’s hardly anything left of her, just a fragmentary fifth lumbar and a bit of sacrum. Oh, and a piece of acetabular rim.”

“But no T10? Are you sure?”

“Am I sure? Julie, I ran the damn study, didn’t I? I worked over these things for three weeks. I know every nook and notch and foramen in her body. Well, in every bone in her body. Well, in every bone that was left. And this one wasn’t left.”

“Well, then, it has to be from someone else.” Her forehead puckered. “Doesn’t it?”

“No, it’s from her, all right. The ankylosing spondylitis makes that clear.”

She sighed. “I knew that at some point in this life I was going to have to learn what ankylosing spondylitis is. It might as well be now.”

“It’s not that complicated. Spondylos, vertebra; itis, inflammation; ankylose, to fuse, to grow together into one.” He picked them up to show her. “See here, where they’ve been glued together – this crack that runs between them?”

“Uh-huh. Where the two of them meet.”

“Yes, but normal vertebrae don’t really meet. They’re completely separate bones. In the living body they’re separated by a disk of pulpy soft tissue-”

“Umm… the intervertebral disk.”

“Right, and each intervertebral disk has a kind of tough, cartilaginous ring around it – the annulus fibrosus – that keeps the soft stuff in the middle from squirting out, like toothpaste squirting out of a tube, when you put pressure on the spine – which you do every time you stand up, and even more when you sit down. Well, sometimes the annulus fibrosus calcifies, turns to bone, so that the two vertebrae above and below it become fused together, and the result is-”

“Ankylosing spondylitis.” She took them from him. “Bony bridges that connect one vertebra to another, like these.”

“You got it.”

She made a slight flexing motion of the vertebrae. “You know, they – oh!” To her unmistakable consternation, they came apart with a little pop, so that she was left holding one in each hand. She practically flung them away from her, down onto the table, as if they’d burned her. “Oh, my God! I didn’t mean – I don’t know why I-” Even in the dim light, he could see that she’d paled. “Gideon, I’ve broken-”

“Shh,” he said with a smile, “you haven’t broken anything, sweetheart. Come on, relax that wrinkled brow.” He leaned forward to smooth her taut forehead with his hand. “You’ll wear out that sexy little musculus frontalis. “Look-” He picked the two pieces up to show her. “They just separated where Rosie glued them, that’s all. No harm done. See? They’d already been broken before.”

“Whew,” she said, melting back into her chair. “Is that ever a relief. I could already see the headlines: ‘Wife of Well-Known Anthropologist Destroys Priceless Scientific Relic.’ ”

“No, no,” he said laughing. “In fact, it makes the point I’m making even better than before. Look at how the edges match up. They hardly needed the glue.” His tongue between his teeth, he put the two segments gingerly together – they virtually clicked into place – and held them up for her to see. “The broken edges of the bridge make a perfect match, even without the glue, even though one is a cast and one is real bone. Which would never happen if they were from two different people.”

“Which is how you can be so sure that they’re both really from Gibraltar Woman?”

“Yes, it’s a real break. Under ordinary circumstances, if I had a T9 and a T10, I might be able to say for sure that they didn’t go together – different ages, different sizes – but I wouldn’t be able to say with certainty that they did go together. But in this case I can – and they do.”

Thoughtfully, she fingered the vertebrae again – very tentatively this time. “It must hurt.”

“Sure, and give you a hunched, miserably stiff back as well. And lung and heart problems go along with it. Eye problems too. Basically, it’s a kind of arthritis, really, very incapacitating when it’s as severe as this.”

“But she was only in her mid-twenties. I would have thought this was an old person’s disease.”

“Well, most kinds of arthritis are, but not this. In fact, her age is one of the things that pointed specifically to ankylosing spondylitis. It’s not wear and tear or anything like that, you see; there’s a strong genetic component to it, and it affects primarily young adults – mostly men, usually, but sometimes… well, as you see…”

“How awful… a young mother…”

He nodded his agreement. He was suddenly tired – depleted, depressed – and he could see that Julie was too. No wonder, it was going on midnight, and it had been a very long day; the session at the morgue, which seemed to have been a week ago, had been only this morning. In addition, their predinner drinks and dinner wine had caught up with them. Still, they soldiered on, raising the obvious questions: Where had that T10 come from? Well, from Europa Point, obviously, since that was where the rest of Gibraltar Woman had come from. But how had Sheila gotten it? Had she dug it up long after the dig was formally closed down, when she’d been prowling around the cave with a trowel? Had she found it before the dig was ever started and kept it a secret? Did she find it during the dig and surreptitiously make off with it? And for all of those questions – why? And why did she have it in her room at the conference? Did it have something to do with her murder? Well, they were pretty sure they knew the answer to that; it did. But what?

But they had run out of steam and weren’t getting anywhere, and they knew it. Besides, by now it was getting chilly out on the terrace. “It’s late,” he said. “Why don’t we leave this till morning, when we’re fresh? What do you say we call it a day?”

She nodded. “I’m for that. I’m exhausted.”

At the reception desk they had the young night clerk, who had come on when George left, put the bag back into the safe and asked for the key to room 205. She went sleepily to the wall of grinning plush monkeys on hooks, reached toward them, and stopped, hand in the air.

“It’s not here.” She turned back to them. “Are you sure you don’t have it?”

“No, I left it right here about seven o’clock, with George.”

The clerk – her name plate said “Kayla” – scanned the rows of monkeys. “I don’t see it. Are you positive you didn’t take it with you?”

“Believe me, I’d know about it if I had a monkey in my pocket.”

Kayla was still staring at the wall. “Did you actually see him hang it, or-”

“No, I didn’t see him hang it. Look, can we get another one until you find it? We’re pretty bushed.”

Once upstairs (inasmuch as the Rock Hotel used vintage metal room keys, not electronic cards, Kayla had to go up with them to let them in), Julie went yawning to the closet to get her nightie. Gideon, who had meanwhile brushed his teeth, came out of the bathroom to see her standing at the open closet door with a frown on her face.

“Lose something?” he asked.

Instead of answering, she said, “Gideon, have you worn your sport coat since we got here?”

“No, why?”

“You didn’t rehang it after I put it in the closet?”

“No, why are you asking?”

“It’s been hung backward on the hanger.”

He came over to stand beside her. His gray Harris tweed hung neatly from a wooden hanger. It looked fine to him. “What’s wrong with it? I didn’t know you could hang a jacket backward on a hanger.”

“Sure, you can. Look at it, it’s hung so that the wooden shoulder supports slant backward instead of forward. I would never in a million years hang a jacket like that.”

“You’re as bad as Audrey with her toilet paper,” he said, laughing. He placed his hand on his heart. “I solemnly swear that I, Gideon Paul Oliver, did not-” He suddenly understood what she was driving at. “Somebody’s been in the room – they took the jacket down and rehung it the wrong way!”

She nodded. “And that explains why the key was missing.”

A hurried search, followed by a more thorough one, found nothing gone, although a few more details seemed to prove the entry of an intruder: a pen that she was certain had been lying on top of a post-card was now beside it; the bed skirt, which had been neatly in place when they’d left for dinner, now had a couple of twisted ruffles, as if someone had lifted it to look under the bed. It was odd, but nothing new, that Gideon, who could be so wonderfully, scrupulously observant when it came to some old bone, spotted none of these homely details but had to take Julie’s word for them.

“They were after the vertebrae,” he said, flopping into an armchair.

“But they were in the safe, not here.”

“Yes, but when I left with them after dinner I was going to leave them here. I announced I was going to leave them here.”

Thoughtfully, she took the chair beside him. “So, one more time, it has to be somebody from the group who did it. They’re the only ones who would have heard you say it.”

“Of course. They’re the only ones who know about the vertebrae at all.”

“Well… George knows… at reception?”

“Sure, but he’s the guy that put them in the safe for me.”

“Right,” she said, nodding. “I didn’t really think it was George anyway. I just… I don’t know.”

“You just keep wanting whoever is doing all these things not to be one of these people – one of our friends. I feel the same way. But it’s one of them, all right. There’s no way around it anymore.” He leaned back, hands behind his head, and tried to twist the kinks out of his neck. “And now the vertebrae: How do they fit in? And where the heck did that T10 come from?”

There was a discreet tap on the door. When Gideon went to answer it he found a smiling Kayla there, holding out a plush monkey with the key to 205 dangling from it.

Gideon took it. “Thanks, where did you find it?”

“On the floor, in the Barbary Bar. It looks as if you must have dropped it there after all.”

“No, I didn’t have it there.”

“Well, then, you must-”

“Let me ask you something, Kayla. What time did you come on tonight?”

“When I always do. Ten o’clock.”

Ten o’clock. Everybody would still have been out on the Wisteria Terrace at that time.

“And were you away from reception at all?” He said it with a pleasant smile, so she wouldn’t feel threatened.

His pleasant smile failed him. Kayla immediately turned defensive. “No! I stay there the whole time.”

“You’re up here now. You came up with us a little while ago.”

“Yes, but only for a moment. It’s my job to-”

“Kayla, relax. You’re not in any trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You think someone took the key when I wasn’t looking? You think someone was in your room when you were downstairs? Has something been taken?”

“No, nothing’s been taken, but someone’s been in here. And yes, I think he did get the key when you weren’t looking. Think now. You never left the desk?”

“Well, I did go to the loo once, but other than that, I never.. . oh, there was one other time – someone telephoned to say that there was a lorry blocking the driveway, but when I went out it was already gone.”

“Ah.”

“But I couldn’t have been away for more than thirty seconds.”

Time enough to snatch a monkey, Gideon thought. “What time would that have been?”

“Oh… ten forty-five, or maybe a little after.”

Ten forty-five. Just after the session on the terrace broke up and the others were all on their own. “Okay, thanks a lot, Kayla.”

She hesitated. “Did you want me… shall I call the police?”

“No, don’t worry about it; I’ll take care of it.”

She looked much relieved; police calls at the Rock Hotel were obviously infrequent and best kept that way, especially on her watch.

“You are going to call the police, aren’t you?” Julie asked as the door closed. She had changed into her nightie and returned to the armchair.

“I don’t think so,” Gideon said, returning to sprawl in his chair again. “Not much point to it. It’s after midnight. I’ll tell Fausto about it in the morning. It can wait till then.”

“Are you sure that’s wise? Isn’t it better to check for fingerprints and things as soon as possible, before we muck them up?”

“Yes, but what good would fingerprints do, or DNA, for that matter? Everybody who could possibly have done it has already been in the room.”

“They have?”

“Yes, the first night, remember? Everybody came by and sat around for a while before the testimonial, schmoozing and knocking back their drinks.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said, barely managing to cover a yawn. “Well, I still think we ought to report it.”

“Report what? That somebody broke into our room and hung my sport coat backward?”

But she had dozed off in the chair, bare dimpled knees drawn up, chin resting on her hand, dark curls falling over her face. For a long while, he sat there and took her in.

“You’re sure pretty,” he murmured. “Too bad you’re asleep.”

“I can be awakened,” she said without opening her eyes. “If there’s a good enough reason.”