Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 781 & 782, September/October 2006

Whither Columbus by Gary Alexander

A native of Washington state, Gary Alexander has the kind of imagination that takes him all over the world. Having spent a year in Viet Nam, he decided to invent a Pacific rim country for a series of novels featuring a police superintendent, the inimitable Bamsan Kiet. Like this new story set at a conference in Spain, the Kiet books are full of humor.

I had a hunch that the Christopher Columbus Symposium wasn’t getting off to a real nifty start when one Ph.D. splashed a glass of perfectly good wine in the face of another Ph.D.

“Did you see that?” I asked Darla.

She shrugged, as ho-hum blasé as everybody else at this cocktail party. They’d also seen the two eggheads square off, voices rising, then tsk-tsked after the wine toss and went back to their gossip. This was normal college-professor behavior? Jeez, you’d think we were at a hockey game.

Where we were was the banquet room of our Madrid hotel. This get-together was the kickoff of the symposium. Yours truly and my Darla and a dozen others are gonna hop an ultra-high-speed train to Seville in the morning, to investigate whether ol’ Chris’s bones actually are at their big cathedral. The rest of the symposiumites are joining us down there.

Get this. Darla and the gang are attending on grants. Free cash money. Yeah, no kidding. They’re being paid to hang out for a week, then go home and write long-winded papers saying, well, uh, er, maybe they’re his bones, maybe they ain’t.

“Do you have a problem with that?” she’d asked me.

Since I was able to tag along on cut-rate airfare, and my grub and booze was on the house, my answer had been a resounding, “Hell no, I don’t. Research has gotta go forward in order to make the world a sweller place.”

Darla said, “A confrontation at some level between Chandler Bryce and Riley Neil was inevitable. Bryce is adamant that Columbus’s bones are at the Catedral de Sevilla and Neil is equally convinced they aren’t. They’re fanatical on the issue and there isn’t an ounce of compromise in either man.”

Riley Neil and Chandler Bryce, wine slinger and wine slingee. Two overeducated pointy-heads with last names for first names and first names for last names. That’s some heavyweight baggage to begin with. They were in their forties and had wire-rim glasses. They wore beards and those pants with the pockets up and down the sides. They could’ve been twins, except that the guy who tossed the wine was thin and short. The one with red stains was pear-shaped and a head taller. He’d gone stomping off out of the room, while the smaller guy took his empty glass to the bar for a refill, a little smirk on his face.

“Which one’s been shooting off his mouth that he has these rare — whatchamacallit — documentationals?” I asked.

“Riley Neil. He claims to have conclusive proof that Columbus’s bones are no longer in the Seville cathedral. He’s going to present his evidence at the symposium. He claims that Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator, gave the bones to Benito Mussolini during World War Two. Christopher Columbus was Genoese. He was born in Genoa in 1451. Mussolini wanted his bones home. Franco was rewarding Il Duce for his support in the Spanish Civil War and for fending off Hitler’s efforts to make Franco side with the Axis in World War Two.

“Neil boasts to have been paid a large advance from a publisher for a book on the subject. He has a lot to lose if his assertion is refuted. The consensus is that the documentation is a bluff and/or a fraud. Nobody’s taking him seriously. The symposium hopes to clarify whether Columbus’s remains are in the cathedral, regardless of Riley Neil’s con game. Whither Columbus? That is the question.”

It wasn’t as if they were arguing something important, like the Super Bowl. I kept that insight to myself and asked Darla, “I get ’em mixed up. Cheap red wine was whose weapon of choice?”

“Riley Neil threw his on Chandler Bryce. They say Neil has an ugly temper.”

“He definitely is a party pooper.”

“Worse than that. Riley Neil has had a less than distinguished academic career and is hoping to damage those of others, besides becoming rich.”

“Less than distinguished how? He got wrote up by the principal for leaving a dirty blackboard?”

“Much worse, Brick. He’s unpublished. He’s never written a word that made it into scholarly print. A controversy this old is unlikely to be conclusive, but scholars have devoted years in research and have written pallets full of paper on the topic. This is a new wrinkle he could exploit.”

“And he’s writing a book?”

“My eyebrows lifted, too, when I heard.”

“Any of these other people hopping on the publish-or-perish bandwagon?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. If you have such plans, you play it cool so no one else gets a jump on you.”

I was drinking Spanish beer out of the bottle. The bartender was chipping ice to go into a pitcher of sangría. The symposiumites were chatting in small groups like junior high school cliques. Ah, the genteel world of the halls of ivy.

“Riley Neil is a jerk,” Darla added with a loathing that startled me. She didn’t have a nasty bone in her luscious body.

“You said they teach at rival colleges in the same town.”

“I did say. The schools constantly attempt to one-up each other in terms of academic prestige.”

“Who has the best football team?”

Darla rolled her eyes at me and said, “Chandler Bryce teaches a creative writing section, too, and has had a few short stories published in obscure literary magazines.”

“Must make Riley Neil insecure, huh?”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“I count my lucky stars I’m in the kinder and gentler world of snooping lowlife riffraff on the mean streets and at hot-sheet motels, instead of this shark pool you college profs swim around in,” I said.

In case you didn’t notice, that’s where we were treading water now. All you had to do is read the nametags. According to his, the uncongenial Riley Neil was HI. I’M RILEY NEIL, PH.D. Everybody had their sheepskin tacked on to their names. Everybody but yours truly, whose higher education is courtesy of GCIPD, the Gumshoe Correspondence Institute of Private Detection. If there was any more tweed in the room, I’d be itching.

Just for the hell of it, I grease-penciled PE by HI. I’M BRICK BATES. PE stands for Private Eye.

Darla is HI. I’M DARLA HOGAN, MA. She wouldn’t let me add LOVE OF MY LIFE. Darla teaches anthropology at a community college. She’s a little slip of a woman with big hair and bigger glasses. She has got the sweetest leer.

Some of these la-di-da Ph.D.s look down their noses at her because she only has her master’s and doesn’t teach at a four-year school. That pisses me off a lot more than it does her. Darla teaches a history section called New World Conquest 261. She’s tickled pink to be invited to Spain for this affair.

I’m one of the few significant anothers. Darla said she didn’t know much about her colleagues’ personal lives other than that some were single or divorced. She said that some were “too career oriented to nurture a relationship.” Sounds to me like they’re candidates for daytime TV talk shows.

“I looked up ‘symposium’ in the dictionary,” I told Darla. “It comes from the Latin for drinking party.”

“My, my. Scholarly curiosity.”

“That’s my middle name.”

Another lady in the group moseyed on over.

“Yuck,” Dr. Mary Beth Lambuth said, making a face at Riley Neil, who was standing at the bar by his lonesome, swigging his wine refill. “Was he raised by wolves?”

Dr. Lambuth was a tall, husky blonde. I could picture her carved in the prow of a Viking warship. Darla said she was an expert on the history of written communication and had knocked out an outline for a book that was with a New York literary agent, who’d had a nibble or two.

“He isn’t subtle,” Darla said diplomatically.

“You’ll find out how unsubtle if you get caught in a dark hallway with him.”

Darla didn’t answer, but her grip on her wineglass got so white-knuckled, I thought it was gonna pop like a light bulb. Another member of our merry band swung by before we could expand on that theme.

Dr. Edwin Dobbs said, “I caught the drift. The man surely could use some manners.”

Darla said that after years in Romance Languages, teaching Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, Dobbs now lectured on European history. She says he’s a polymath, whatever that is. Dobbs looks like Burl Ives. Darla said he made his bones, pun intended, on the life of Columbus. Even had a book out on Chris, with this catchy title: Columbus: A Critical Study on His Origins, Path of Discovery, and Final Years. Darla said it was published by the University of Northeast Nevada A&M Press or some such and made no bestseller lists. Scuttlebutt had it that Dr. Dobbs just completed a whirlwind romance, marriage, and divorce to his second wife, a freckle-faced young teaching assistant, and was hurting big-time for bucks. He was the symposium’s numero-uno Columbus authority and was slated to conduct panels and workshops.

Mary Beth Lambuth said, “Riley Neil is an intellectual bully.”

No argument there. Dobbs gave a sourpuss nod of agreement and went to the bar. That seemed like a stellar idea. We did the same. By then Riley Neil had skedaddled. We had us a nice, dull cocktail party. Thanks to severe jet lag and nothing else to gossip about, the shindig broke up early as I was gazing at and then grazing on the tapas they’d laid out.

“Tapa” is Spanish for appetizer, part of Spain’s cultural heritage, and appetizing they were. Tapas bars are all over Spain, so says our guidebook. I was making a cultural tour of sausage chunks and slivers of ham and meatballs and olives and the omelet slices they call tortillas and prawns and other critters and toast wedges and — when Darla dragged me off. Before I burst, she said.

Up in our room, looking out at buildings older than El Cid, I asked Darla, “How fast did you say this rolling rocket we’re taking to Seville goes?”

“Bricklin Bates, stop asking me that same question.”

“Bullet train. I don’t even like the word.”

“Bullet?”

“Train. You know how often they jump the tracks at a safe and sane speed, let alone at Mach Three?”

“Bullet train is a generic term for a high-speed train,” Darla patiently explained. “This is the AVE, pronounced ah-veigh. Alta Velocidad Española or Spanish High Velocity. Two hundred and eighty kilometers per hour.”

“How fast is that in plain English?”

She hooked her arm to mine. “One hundred and seventy-four miles per hour. There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of.”

Darla Hogan had thought I was fearless. Until now. Must be crushingly disillusioning to her.

She’d been stalked by her ex-boyfriend. The restraining order wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, so she let her fingers do the walking and hired me. My esteemed competition was listed as Security Consultants and Professional Investigators, wimpy crapola like that. I was the only dick listed under Private Eye. That’s how we met.

She wanted me to track the sicko and dig up dirt that would land him in the pokey. Trouble was, he was squeaky clean. He lived with his mother, taught Sunday school, and was secretary-treasurer of the local orchid society. He didn’t do diddly except follow Darla around like a demented puppy and call her at all hours. I knew the type. One fine day, he’d go berserk. Then he’d be a model prisoner on death row.

I flipped for Darla, and took her and her case deep inside my heart. I stalked the freakoid as he stalked her. One night, while he was parked across the street from her apartment, I decided enough already.

I snuck up on him and took the law into my own hands, as well as various bodily parts that I used as handles to immobilize him with. I never told Darla what I did to him afterward, and I ain’t spilling the beans to you, either, other than that our boy lives with a maiden aunt on the opposite coast and is eligible to try out for the Vienna Boys’ Choir.

“Says you. It’s perfectly normal to be afraid of flying, especially if you’re not leaving the ground.”

“Darla, didn’t you tell me that nobody knows what Christopher Columbus looks like?”

I dropped Chris’s name to keep my mind off the planet blurring by outside. It wasn’t hard to get Darla going on Columbus.

This AVE bullet car we were in was preferente class, which is like first class on a plane. We’ve got ample hip- and legroom, one row of seats on one side of the aisle, two on the other, and cute young stews serving snacks. They even wheeled a duty-free shopping cart through and are showing an in-flight movie. As if I needed all these reminders that we’re moving like a bat outta hell.

Edwin Dobbs and Mary Beth Lambuth shared a table on the two-seat side, sitting across from each other. The antagonists were in opposite corners, Riley Neil behind us by the luggage racks, Chandler Bryce up front.

What really set my teeth on edge were the trains passing the other direction inches from us. Our train shuddered and so did I. If there was a derailment, we’d be locking antlers at three hundred and fifty mph.

“That’s correct, Brick. Christopher Columbus never had his portrait painted and written descriptions run the gamut. Many perceive him as blue-eyed, red-haired, and tall.”

“I hope he used sunscreen. I guess that rules out those clay build-ups of the skull the forensics teams do. Hey, how about DNA?”

Darla ignored my helpful hint. “You can debate absolutely every aspect of his life and death.”

I said, “All I know is, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

“Christopher Columbus got around almost as much in death as in life,” she said. “He died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506 at the age of fifty-four. In 1507 he was moved to Seville. In 1537, he was moved again to Santo Domingo. People in the Dominican Republic insist his bones are still there, but in 1795, off he went to the Cathedral of Havana. Then in 1899, he sailed back to Spain, eventually to his final resting spot in 1902. Considering the timespan and the shifting of his remains, it’s problematic whether any or all of the bones are his.”

She had my pinhead spinning. “So I’m fuzzy on what you guys plan to accomplish at your symposium.”

“We’ll have a look at the litter serving as his tomb. That will be exciting in itself. We’ll share information and research and, who knows, it’s a long shot, but there may be a stone left unturned. Some of us speak Spanish and one person knows Latin. Hopefully there are accessible archives. You being a detective, Brick, doesn’t that stimulate your curiosity?”

“We’re talking a trail that went cold a hundred years ago. And who pays my hourly fee? Refresh me on the sordid details of Riley Neil’s allegedly alleged transfer of the alleged old bones.”

“Hitler was pressuring Franco to declare war against the Allies. He wanted access to Gibraltar. Franco argued that Spain was an economic basket case because of the Spanish Civil War that had recently ended. This was true. Franco gave the Germans an impossibly extravagant shopping list before he’d go to war. Hitler figured it was a means of dodging participation.

“Hitler asked Mussolini to intercede. Franco and Mussolini met in February 1941 at Bordighera on the Italian Riviera. Franco supposedly brought Columbus’s bones. Franco continued vacillating on entering the war and Spain remained neutral, as she did throughout. Mussolini, for his part, reported to Hitler that Spain was too impoverished to be a military asset and recommended dropping the idea altogether.”

“I like the bribery and payoff possibilities. They speak to me. But Riley Neil’s saying that the bones changed hands. Hogwash, huh?”

Darla nodded. “Neil claims that Franco ingratiated himself with Il Duce with the gift. Mussolini had imperial delusions that he was leading the Second Roman Empire. Anything that lent splendor to the trappings was fair game. Riley theorizes that Mussolini was going to display Columbus’s remains in the Genoa Cathedral after the Axis won the war.”

“No bones?”

“I don’t believe it could have happened.”

“Why?”

“Franco and the Archbishop of Sevilla had a mutual enmity. The cathedral was the only one in Spain that didn’t have Falangist graffiti and displays commemorating the soldiers who fought in the Spanish Civil War for the Nationalists, Franco’s side. The archbishop would have raised a fuss.”

“What if he didn’t know? What if they were slipped out a window in the dead of night or a switcheroo was done, money under the table?”

Darla didn’t have an answer. These college profs, I tell ya, they need a more cynical edge to get to the bottom of things.

“My priceless documents! They’re gone!”

We turned around to see Riley Neil rummaging through bags on the rack, flinging them every which way, tearing through one of his suitcases.

“Who stole them?” he yelled. “I demand their immediate return!”

The washrooms were across from the luggage racks. I was about to tell Neil to throw some cold water on his face and simmer down, that we needed to go step by step, but he was steaming by me, shaking a fist, raving, “You pusillanimous sneak. You ersatz academician!”

Chandler Bryce rose clumsily to his feet, bug-eyed, looking like a punching bag waiting to happen.

Bryce countered with, “How dare you, you pseudointellectual, self-aggrandizing hypocrite!”

This was how these people cussed when their noses were outta joint? I waded in, a step ahead of Dobbs, Lambuth, and a couple of Spaniards whose movie the boys were interrupting.

“Break it up,” I snarled, lunging between them.

“I was seated before you came aboard, Neil, and I have not moved,” Bryce said. “I didn’t touch your luggage or this chimerical document of yours.”

“We shall see, Bryce,” Neil said, wagging a finger. “This crime shall come to light.”

“Ding, ding,” I said firmly, hands extended to their chests. “Go to your neutral corners.”

Though I don’t think the boys caught my prizefighting metaphor, Bryce took his seat and Neil headed back to his. It was almost too easy to keep the pointy-heads separated, but I was relieved. I had to wonder too why the hell, if this documentation was so priceless, Neil had it in a bag, unlocked, to his rear.

I followed him, saying, “Neil, you better clue us in as to what this package looks like so we can conduct a search. I mean, is it bigger than a breadbox?”

“Doctor Neil, to you.”

“Spare me the attitude, pal. You already got a serious problem.”

Darla had me by the arm before I could do something rash, like escort him to the outdoor observation deck this bullet train didn’t have. Mary Beth Lambuth was right behind Darla, saying, “He’s right, Riley. You need to be a bit less cryptic if you expect assistance recovering your property.”

Neil scowled and said, “Very well. It is a manilla envelope a quarter of an inch thick. It contains coded Teletype messages between Madrid and Rome, which I have had decoded at no small expense. The bulk of the material is correspondence between Franco’s and Mussolini’s foreign ministers, respectively Ramón Serrano Súñer and Count Galeazzo Ciano. Serrano Súñer was Franco’s brother-in-law and Ciano was Mussolini’s son-in-law, so confidentiality was presumed. In addition, there is a subsequent, albeit vague, thank-you note from Mussolini to Franco, expressing ‘gratitude for the righting of a historic anomaly.’”

Well, it would be hard to mistake the contents of that manilla envelope for anything else. We went through the bags in the car one by one, with the owners present, even the Spaniards. We looked in the overhead racks and the washroom, too. Nada. Zilch.

Everybody sat back down. Our train had pulled out of Madrid at eight A.M. sharp. We were due in at Seville at ten-twenty. I glanced at my watch: nine-forty. “You didn’t notice Bryce go by us in the aisle earlier?” I asked Darla.

“I didn’t.”

“We’ve gone through some tunnels.”

“Brick, the lights didn’t go out and even if they had, we were through those tunnels in seconds.”

I twitched, reminded again of our terminal velocity. “I know, I know, I know. I was testing you.”

“Riley Neil was convincing,” Darla said.

“The whys and wherefores of his documentation? Yeah, but if you rehearse any story long enough, it rings genuine even if it’s pure, unadulterated guano.”

“Someone from the next car could have stolen the papers. Someone could have torn the paper into small pieces and flushed them.”

“You’re buying his bill of goods, kiddo,” I said sadly.

“Brick, you are such a cynic.”

“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve said to me all day.”

Finally, at long, long last, half an hour later, the train began slowing. We were coming in for a landing at Seville’s Santa Justa station. The conductors opened the doors and I exhaled a deep breath. Then, suddenly, our car was swarming with cops. They had a word with the conductor and let the Spaniards go. They detained us symposium types.

This outfit was the policía nacional, the national police. They wore dark and formal uniforms with white shirts and ties. They were polite, but highly perturbed. I thought they were just being anti-American, a popular sport worldwide. Dobbs talked to them, Darla and her so-so Spanish listening in.

“What’s going on?” I asked her. My Spanish was limited to Otra cerveza, por favor.

“The Seville cathedral received a telephone call this morning stating that Columbus’s bones had been stolen last night. A ten-million-euro ransom was demanded,” Darla said. “The receptacle containing the bones, the litter, didn’t appear to have been disturbed.”

“Have they opened it up?”

“Apparently not yet. There is a dispute among officialdom about disturbing the bones, as it may well be a hoax. They surmise that if the crime occurred, it was an inside job, cleaning people during the night or guards paid to ignore the activity. Every employee on duty yesterday is being interviewed. So far they have no solid information and have made no arrests.”

“What do they know of the caller?”

“He spoke in Spanish, but they think he’s a foreigner, possibly an American.”

An old saying of mine: Nature abhors a coincidence. Our symposium arriving just after this alleged crime happened, to research the allegedly purloined bones. You couldn’t blame the law for being a tad suspicious. They took our statements with a translator.

They went through our luggage again and found no missing bones, and no missing documents.

At the hotel, Darla said, “You have your credentials, don’t you, Brick? In case anybody asks.”

Besides my certificate from the Gumshoe Correspondence Institute of Private Detection, I received a snazzy silver badge. It was a five-pointed star like lawmen wore in the old Westerns. Those points caused me no end of grief at airport security and Darla, once in a rare snide mood, had said it looked like it came out of a cereal box.

“Never leave home without them,” I said. “Why would anybody ask?”

“Well, it has been suggested that we in the symposium conduct a parallel investigation and that you are eminently qualified. We wish to have our names cleared, individually and as a group. Not everyone was enthusiastic, but nobody raised an objection. In fact, Ed Dobbs, who first proposed the investigation, asked me to ask you if you would take on the job for an honorarium.”

My eyes widened as I rubbed thumb against forefingers. “Is an honorarium like a grant?”

“Kind of a mini-grant, an amount to be negotiated.”

“And if I find a member of your symposium under a rock?”

“Let the chips fall where they may.”

I raised my right hand, deputizing myself, threw my left around Darla, kissed her, and said, “Let’s start at the scene of the crime. I’m ready for some heavy-duty culturalizing.”

The Christopher Columbus Symposium had grown to thirty and lurched forward on schedule. The plainclothes police were damn near living with us, one casually looking the other way or at his newspaper whenever you turned around, but nobody was taken downtown or otherwise detained.

I knew zip about this city in advance, except the old Bugs Bunny cartoon where he sang “The Barber of Seville.” This cathedral they have got, though, if you’re ever in town, don’t miss it. The Seville cathedral is old and gingerbread-ornate and bigger than a domed stadium. You wear off a half-mile of shoe leather walking the perimeter. It’s got eighty-one stained-glass windows, seventy domes, and twenty-five chapels. What’s up above you is supported by thirty-two columns, some one hundred and eighty feet tall.

Oh yeah, it sports a three-hundred-foot-high bell tower and an enclosed patio that has an orchard’s worth of producing orange trees.

There’s plenty of room for Chris’s bones and there they allegedly are, soon after you enter. These four bronze and alabaster guys in frilly outfits that make you wonder a little about them, they’re holding up a litter that looks like a breadbox made of dark wood and leather. What made the monument strangely modern was the yellow crime-scene tape and the armed and uniformed cops on guard, up-close and personal.

“What’s the point? The horse is long gone from the corral,” I told Darla.

“Perhaps,” she said.

While the gang went off to their Columbus Symposium lectures and panels and workshops, I took the grand tour of the Seville cathedral again. I hung out at Chris’s exhibit so long that I was attracting attention, so I just wandered, thinking how hard it’d be to snatch anything in the cathedral, day or night, and sneak it out.

When the eggheading was done for the day, I cut Darla from the herd and we went to dinner.

Over the first course, she said, “The cathedral received another call, repeating the ransom demand, warning that he’d turn the bone into ash unless the ransom money was raised immediately.”

I slurped my gazpacho, which is Spanish for vegetable soup they forgot to warm up. “I’ll bet that hasn’t happened.”

She nodded. “There’s a debate in progress as to whether to open the coffin and how to do it without disturbing the remains that may or may not be inside.”

“Looked to me like all anybody’s done lately is dust it. You’d need to pay a bunch of people to go temporarily blind.”

“A highly unlikely caper,” Darla agreed.

“Okay, to do my job, I need a process of elimination.”

“To prove one of us didn’t do it or collaborate, if indeed it was done at all?”

“Yeah. Maybe killing the two birds with one lucky rock. Of course, we have got one prime suspect, Riley Neil. What do you think, Darla?”

“I’m coming around to your dark thinking pattern. I wouldn’t be surprised if Neil planned to withdraw his quote-unquote documentation at the last minute, saying it deserved a bigger and better forum. The alternative of its mysterious disappearance is very convenient. Not to mention the distraction at the cathedral.”

“Who hates Riley Neil more than anybody?”

“It’s a long list, but sure, Chandler Bryce.”

“I’m gonna play a little good cop-bad cop,” I said. “The roast suckling pig we ordered, it’ll be heated up, won’t it?”

In the morning, I intercepted Dr. Chandler Bryce on his way to breakfast. I asked him to stroll around the block with me, promising to keep it brief, as he struck me as the type to get grouchy if he missed a meal.

“What’s Dr. Neil’s shtick, Dr. Bryce?”

He chuckled. “Shtick. I find that word mildly offensive, even when applied to that unseemly individual.”

Excuuuuuse me. “You and Dr. Neil teach in the same town at different schools. How’d you get along before the wine drenching? You guys weren’t competing for a different job, a big step up, department head at his college or yours, or whatever?”

“We got along coolly yet cordially. And he was no competition in any regard before his stunt with the illusory document. He has lost any scintilla of credibility.”

“I’m with you, Doc, and between you and me and the gatepost, I think he’s behind this missing-bones business, too.”

Bryce chuckled again. “He’s ambitious, certainly, but he lacks the audaciousness to be a criminal. Riley tends to play devil’s advocate about virtually everything, in the ugliest, most gleeful sense of the phrase. If you can challenge another’s scholarship, you need not persevere yourself. Neil is a fraud and a revisionist historian.”

“Pretty tough words, Doc, not that I blame you, from what I’ve seen of him. Mind telling me what your professional interests are?”

“I am an historian and an educator.”

“This book deal Neil has, is that out the window now that the alleged documents have been allegedly snatched?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Bates.”

We were stopped at a light. How they drive in Spain, it’s best you wait for the green. “Is Neil a pretty good writer? I mean, good enough to write an entire book?”

Dr. Chandler Bryce snorted. “He couldn’t write a grocery list.”

“I’m getting confused signals synapsing in my brain like pinballs,” I told Darla in our room after breakfast as she loaded her briefcase for the day’s eggheading.

“I don’t believe ‘synapse’ has a verb form, Brick.”

“It does now.”

“What about your interview with Chandler Bryce bothers you so much?”

“He’s not pissed off enough. He doesn’t hate Neil enough.”

“Brick, not everybody resolves disputes and resentments with fists and bloodshed.”

“Maybe we oughta. If you have a fat lip, you’re more inclined to listen to reason.”

Darla sighed.

I said, “The situation doesn’t mesh. It’s haywire.”

“Brick, stop pacing.”

“I’m a detective, Darla. My brain and feet have a direct link.”

“I don’t know what that means, but if you’re thinking of interviewing Riley Neil, that’s not going to happen. I couldn’t tell you earlier, but Ed Dobbs took me aside and said he’s refusing to cooperate further with anyone who isn’t official.”

“That may mean he’s hiding something or he isn’t or he wants us to think he is.”

Darla kissed me and said, “It’s going to be a long day and I already have a headache.”

It was gonna be a long day for me, too. I had nary a glimmer of what my next step would be. Seville’s a spiffy old town full of churches, museums, and narrow winding streets. I set a course westward for their big river, the mighty Guadalquivir, and eventually made it. I walked along the downtown side and went to a café.

It was nice and sunny, so I sat outside. I had me a tapas feast, some of the goodies I had in Madrid, and also sampled artichoke hearts and mushrooms sautéed in olive oil. As I washed the tapas down with cold suds, I whipped out our guidebook. I almost fell outta my chair when I came to a page that had a blurb on El Rinconcillo. It was only three blocks from our hotel!

What’s El Rinconcillo, you ask? Only the birthplace of the tapa, is all. El Rinconcillo’s said to date to 1670 and while the guidebook’s sceptical that the tapa was invented there, hey, like Columbus’s bones, either you got faith or you don’t. I had faith. I had a carload of faith. I was a true believer.

I’m pretty good at reading maps, even if I get myself slightly misplaced afterward. This town, the street layout’s like a bowl of spaghetti. I began back, to pilgrimage on over to El Rinconcillo, a holy and sacred site. When I saw the river for the third time, I gave up and caught a taxi.

El Rinconcillo was an ordinary Spanish saloon, not new, but not that medieval-looking, either. The guys behind the bar were friendly and served ice-cold beer on tap. I’d worked up an appetite getting misplaced. The tapas were mostly in the saturated-fat family: Serrano ham, chorizo sausage, cheese. Yum.

I had my Bryce-Neil itch to scratch and it was getting itchier by the minute. El Rinconcillo was my inspiration. It was the ideal, perfect venue.

Darla was none too thrilled by my request, but she agreed to slip a note under Riley Neil’s door, asking him to meet her at eight-thirty at El Rinconcillo. I did the same with Chandler Bryce. I saw Mary Beth Lambuth in the hall and a plot aspect thickened in my head. I asked her, “Any good news from your agent?”

“We’re hopeful.”

“How’d you like to make a status check with her, among other things, and join us for a party tonight?”

I arrived at El Rinconcillo fifteen minutes early and positioned myself in a back corner, outfitted with sunglasses and a Real Madrid baseball cap. They’re this famous soccer team and my shades were wraparounds. You’d never guess I was on surveillance. Euro tourists of some flavor were guzzling wine at the bar and the joint was filling up with locals. The dinner hour comes late in this country, getting into full swing when at home I’d be rooting around in the fridge for a bedtime snack.

In bopped Riley Neil. He stood at the end of the bar, head on a swivel, an eager beaver. Not two minutes later, Chandler Bryce appeared. Their eyeballs met. They were flabbergasted, flummoxed, but recovered fast. I could tell by their slippery body language that no fur was gonna fly. That was my case in a nutshell!

They’d smelled a rat and decided to scram, but I popped up and beat them to the door.

“Mr. Bates,” Chandler Bryce said.

I removed my cap and shades. “Don’t go away mad or thirsty, gents. I’m buying the drinks.”

“No, thank you,” Bryce said.

“I saved us a table,” I said.

“We have no comment,” Riley Neil said.

“That’s the first thing you’ve said to me lately, Neil,” I said, gesturing to my table. “It’s a start and this ain’t a request. C’mon!”

I ordered a fresh brew for me and, knowing their libational preferences, red wine for them. I let them stew till our drinks arrived.

“What tipped off my subconscious was that stunt on that AVE bullet rocket train,” I said, getting right to the nitty-gritty. “Neil, you just happened to open your luggage and howl like a banshee, and Bryce, like on orchestral cue, you said you hadn’t touched his luggage. I doubt if you’d even turned your head around. How’d you know where he kept this phony-baloney document, and why would he keep it out of his sight, with easy access, if it was so valuable?”

Before they could answer, which they weren’t gonna anyhow, I wrote on a napkin: C+C=C.

“Know what that means?”

“Faulty algebra,” Neil said, his irritating smirk plastered on his puss like a decal.

“Conspiracy plus Controversy equals Crime. We devoted a whole lesson to that fact of life in my GCIPD studies.”

“Is that a grad-school program?” Bryce asked. “I’m not familiar with the institution.”

“The University of Hard Knocks, you might say. You boys were just too easy to separate during your altercation, too. And, hats off, the wine-tossing at the party was damn clever. You had me fooled.

“Professor Doctor Neil, you have got a big-time book deal going. You’re unpublished. Professor Bryce, he is, sort of. By the way, Neil, Bryce says you can’t write a grocery list, his words. But you go and get a big fat advance from a book publisher. Bryce, that must be a tough pill to swallow. And Neil, who’s gonna write this book of yours for you?”

I paused. I’d provoked these pointy-headed brainiacs five ways to Sunday. They were giving me the stinkeye and looking sidelongingly at each other.

“Now, let’s make something perfectly clear,” I snarled. “If anybody’s thinking of wine as a projectile and me as the primary target, he’s gonna be staring up at the ceiling, counting the constellations in the Milky Way.”

Riley Neil sipped his wine and squinted his weasel eyes at me. Chandler Bryce was tense, rigid as a statue, playing it not nearly so cool. I concentrated on him. “This bogus documentation of Neil’s, it can’t help but hype book sales. Some people will always believe in it. It oughta be easy for a veteran fiction writer-teacher to whip out a manuscript. If there’re objections to the facts, hey, the proof, Neil’s papers, they were ripped off on the train, not his fault.”

“Conjecture,” Bryce said.

“You’re postulating that if a nonexistent document was perceived to be purloined, therefore it exists. How quasi-empirical of you, Mr. Bates.”

“Riley,” Chandler Bryce said.

Neil raised his hand to Bryce’s objection. “Merely enjoying a spot of rhetoric, Chandler.”

I said, “Kinda like if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound if nobody hears it?”

“Precisely,” Neil said.

“So what you’re doing is playing a con game to make a few bucks. No harm, no foul. You could even do point-counterpoint in the book. Did Mussolini or didn’t he cut a deal with Franco? Were the bones Chris’s in the first place? And what’s in the litter in the cathedral? Or did the bones stay back in the Dominican Republic? A triple and quadruple whammy. It’d keep the readers off balance, turning pages.”

Bryce had relaxed enough to smile and wipe the sweat off his forehead.

Neil raised his glass in toast. “An intriguing series of speculative and cabalistic projections.”

“You boys’ve stirred up a helluva hornet’s nest over the disappeared bones. You’ve mobilized Spain. Chris Columbus is a national treasure.”

“You’re accusing us of telephoning the ransom demands?”

I shrugged. “Nature abhors a coincidence.”

“I’m fluent in French,” Neil said.

“That figures,” I said, working up a smirk of my own.

“And I have a workable knowledge of German,” Bryce said.

“I don’t speak fifty words of Spanish,” Neil said, smirk straightening into a grin.

“Nor I,” Bryce said. “You can check, Mr. Detective.”

Mary Beth Lambuth and Darla entered El Rinconcillo right on cue. I waved them over, moved two chairs to our table, and said, “Gee, ladies, what a pleasant surprise.”

“How transparent of you, Bates,” Riley Neil said.

Mary Beth was giving him such an evil eye, he had to avert his.

“What did you find out?” I asked her.

“Much. My literary agent made an inquiry and learned that there are two author signatures on Riley’s book proposal. His and Chandler’s.”

“A partnership that is none of your concern,” Chandler Bryce said.

“Say no more, Chandler,” Riley Neil said.

“Chandler the friendly ghost writer,” I said.

“There’s more,” Darla said.

“Riley,” Mary Beth said. “You stated on the train that the majority of your documentation was Teletype messages between Spain’s and Italy’s foreign ministers. Spain’s infrastructure was in ruins after their civil war. They didn’t have Teletype service in operation in early 1941.”

Without a word of rebutment, Riley Neil marched out, trailed like a big shaggy dog by Chandler Bryce. The gals ordered brewskis too and we toasted our scam.

“I have a confession,” Mary Beth Lambuth said. “My performance was a half-truth. The call to my agent was not a fabrication. They are collaborators on the book. The Teletype story was merely that.”

“Spain had Teletype service then?”

Mary Beth shrugged wide silky shoulders. “I haven’t the foggiest. It wasn’t part of my research, but I imagine they did. The first mechanical Teletype was employed in 1867. It was not a new technology.”

In our room, Darla confirmed that Bryce and Neil were telling the truth about their knowledge of foreign languages. “The academic achievements of the symposium members are on record.”

It was my turn to have a headache. Pacing, I said, “Maybe they took a crash course, you know, those tapes you listen to in the car.”

“Brick.”

“Maybe they hired a bilingual Spanish lowlife to make the calls. Slipped him fifty euros to speak Spanish in a fake American accent.”

“Brick.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a reach. What frustrates the hell out of me, they’re in cahoots on the book, but I can’t prove the missing papers are fake. And the extortion phone calls, I don’t doubt for a minute they masterminded them. This is a big-time criminal beef that could stop them in their tracks, and I can’t prove a damn thing there, neither.”

Darla said, “We can only hope that their book contract will be canceled when word spreads of their deception.”

She was red in the face. I knew she was wishfully thinking. I put my arms around her and patted her back. “Take it easy, Darla. That’s all well and good, but I flopped. I solved a piddly little flimflam I can’t prove. Meanwhile, Chris’s bones are on the loose or they ain’t. So whodunit?”

“Anybody. Terrorists, generic criminals, telephone pranksters.”

“Until I nail the creeps or prove your symposiumonians are non-creeps, I’m not earning my honorarium, as generous as it may be.”

“The spirit of your assignment is to eliminate symposium members as suspects,” Darla said. “Or not.”

“Who else’ve you come across who might be suspicious?”

“Nobody. We are a serious and scholarly group who spend our days poring over papers and debating their meanings and merits.”

Yawn, I thought. “Darla, how about Professor Dobbs? Your polyglot or polygon or polynomial. You said this little cookie he was married to took him to the cleaner’s. He’s hurting for bucks, isn’t he?”

“Polymath. Oh, Brick, Ed’s a teddy bear and what motive could he have? None of us earn a fortune, so we could all be suspected for mercenary reasons. And don’t forget, Ed Dobbs proposed securing your services and supported me in the effort.”

“Doc Dobbs has got no other motive that I know of, but my detective instincts say I oughta go snoop for one.”

The next day, the symposium met in this old stucco-and-red-tile house a ten-minute taxi ride from the hotel. It’d been converted into a private library and our group was given permission to pore over some moldy papers. There was a tapas bar directly across from it. I saw that as an omen that my luck was gonna do a one-eighty.

Our plan was for Darla to invite Dr. Edwin Dobbs on over for morning coffee. I waited, enjoying a savory selection of tapas of the cholesterol persuasion with my java. There was no law saying I had to have a blueberry muffin.

They came in and Darla said, “Ed’s panel, The Elemental Columbus: Businessman and Explorer, was wonderful.”

“Cool,” I said.

“Darla tells me you have a progress report,” Dobbs said to me as they sat.

“I’ve been working closely with the policía. We may be near a breakthrough,” I lied.

“Excellent,” Dobbs said, munching a pastry. “May I ask what?”

“Kind of like Nixon and the White House tapes, they just learned that the Seville cathedral automatically records all phone calls. The cops are bragging that their voiceprint setup is second to none.”

“Voiceprint?” Dobbs said. “The technology that matches a person to a voice?”

“There you go. It’s on the same principle as fingerprints. They detect X number of points and it’s gotcha.”

I raised my voice for “gotcha,” and if my eyes weren’t tricking me, Dr. Edwin Dobbs flinched.

I whipped out this cheesy little tape recorder I’d bought on my way there and said, “Darla, you go first.”

Dobbs laughed. “Wasn’t the caller male?”

I looked at him.

“Was that ever made clear?” I asked, aware that it was. He didn’t answer or hold my gaze. “A voice can be big-time disguised. Darla, please.”

“And say what, Brick?”

“Don’t matter as long as you talk for forty to sixty seconds,” I said, winging it and checking my watch. “That’s what the computer software says you gotta do.”

Darla recited one of those love poems by what’s-her-name, that Dickinson or Dickerson gal. She liked to rattle them off to me at night when we were snuggling. Don’t know what they mean, but they sure are pretty.

“Thanks, Darla. Professor Dobbs,” I said, aiming the machine at him. “You’re up.”

Dobbs slapped a plump paw on my recorder. “No, not yet. I approve of your initiative and will cooperate fully. The testing will be counterproductive, however, unless done under controlled conditions with the proper law-enforcement authorities present.”

“Well, okay, yeah. Hey, I was just trying to get a jump on the situation. The cops are taking the slant that Bryce and Neil paid somebody in the symposium to make the calls, to hype book sales. I’m meeting with detectives this afternoon. They indicated they’d like to get the show on the road, preferably tonight at the hotel,” I bluffed.

“For that I would be quite amenable,” Dobbs said. “I shall be at the head of the line to exonerate myself.”

But you know what? Darla said that Dobbs didn’t come back to his panel from lunch. There was a note to us at the hotel desk saying that he’d been called home for a family emergency. Don’t know if the cops had voiceprints in mind for us or anyone else, but the prospect thereof sure lit a fire under that boy. One thing’s for sure, though. There were no more extorting phone calls made.

Darla and I were still puzzling out the Columbus mess and Dr. Edwin Dobbs the day before we were to fly on home.

The police had used a portable X-ray machine on Columbus’s burial receptacle. There were bones in it and their configuration jibed with the records. Whosever bones they were. Nothing had been settled.

We were at an Irish pub across the street from the cathedral, unwinding after they’d wrapped up the last symposium biz. Darla had a salad and I’d scarfed down Irish sausage tapas and French fries like there was no tomorrow. We were holding hands in our booth and drinking dark Irish beer.

“Despite being in denial, Brick, I must accept your hypothesis that Ed Dobbs probably made the phone calls. The timing of his hasty departure is more than suspicious and he has the language skills.”

“Money’s thicker than water.”

“What on earth does that mean, Mr. Cryptic?”

“Beats me, but Dobbs’s book bombed. It stunk up the bookstore shelves and sold, like, twenty-five copies,” I reminded her. “He had to resent this book contract of Bryce and Neil’s, built on a foundation of guano. But those boys made Dobbs an offer he couldn’t refuse. Do this small favor and make enough money to get out of the hole. Hell, Dobbs may even have approached them.”

“Conjecture, Brick.”

“We made Dobbs paranoid and paranoia don’t lie. He restored my lack of faith in humanity.”

“Columbus: A Critical Study on His Origins, Path of Discovery, and Final Years is the standard by which all Columbus books should be judged. Ed Dobbs should be rightfully proud of it.”

“What’s quality got to do with bookstore customers lining up at the cash register?”

“Brick,” Darla said in all seriousness as she stroked my arm. “Not every writer is motivated by the urge to be a bestseller.”

All I could do is shake my head at the naiveness of that remark. “Irregardless, the cops like Dobbs for the phone calls, but good luck with extradition. He must’ve thought I was a dunce. Lobbying me to dig into the situation — he thought I’d make a fiasco of the case.”

Darla kissed my cheek. “As we speak, Ed Dobbs is regretting underestimating you. Whether he’s guilty or innocent, by running away he’s sent his academic career into shambles.”

“Well?” I said.

“Well what?”

“You know what. Is it Chris in the box or isn’t it? Was it ever him? Did Franco dump some bones in there to replace Chris’s bones he gave to Mussolini?”

“We raised some intriguing questions that will be explored. We’re very excited about the possibilities.”

“Between you, me, and the gatepost, this symposium is a boondoggling joyride.”

“No, Brick, it is a scholarly venture.”

I groaned. “Since Dobbs got me assigned to the case, I guess my honorarium’s out the window, huh?”

“Not exactly. I’ve been waiting for the ideal moment to tell you. You’re invited gratis again to our next symposium, should there be one.”

“No cash money?”

“Sorry.”

“Conspiracies give me a headache and we’ve got a barrel full of rotten apples here. I’m used to dealing with one sleazoid at a crack,” I muttered. “Everybody’s off scot-free. There is no justice.”

“There, there,” Darla said, holding my beer to my lips, as if calming a squalling kid. “I haven’t told you this, Brick, but Mary Beth and I have recruited symposium members who are also outraged. We’re drafting a letter to present to Neil and Bryce’s publishers. With any luck, they will withdraw their contract and demand their advance back.”

With any luck, I thought. Good luck with that.

We sat quietly, enjoying each other’s company. Darla finally said, “I have two confessions to make.”

“Give me the easiest one first. I’ll let you know if I wanna hear the other.”

“You were correct about ‘synapse.’ It has a verb form.”

I fisted the air. “All right!”

“I had a close encounter with Riley Neil similar to Mary Beth’s.”

I should’ve known. The signs were there. He’d gone into El Rinconcillo hot to trot to rendezvous with her. “Where, when?”

“Brick, please keep your voice down. It was inappropriate touching. I put an end to it in a hurry. I slapped him.”

“He groped you? Copped a feel?”

“If you choose to use that terminology.”

I remade that fist and pounded it into a palm. “If I’d known, I’d’ve dismantled the bastard.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you. No harm was done.”

Back at the hotel as we headed for our room, Riley Neil came crashing down the hall, backwards on his heels, backpedaling by us.

Mary Beth Lambuth was in hot pursuit, yelling, “You creep, I warned you what would happen if you tried that again!”

She landed a terrific left hook, flooring him. Darla clapped, starting a round of applause that lasted and lasted.

Like a referee, I stood over Neil, counting him out. There is some justice.

Copyright © 2006 Gary Alexander