Uneasy Relations

TWENTY-THREE

The University of Cadiz’s Algeciras branch provided a welcome haven in the heart of a clanking, grubby, hard-working city. With its clean, white, two-story buildings, its neat lawns, and its concrete paths planted with young trees, it might have been a suburban community college campus in the United States. About the only difference, other than the signs in Spanish, were the students – clean-cut and conservatively dressed, with not a pierced nostril or a stud-transfixed tongue in sight.

To get to room 203 of the main building they walked the length of a long, gleaming corridor lined with faculty office doors and a few clusters of apprehensive-looking students waiting outside them, hatching their stories, or explanations, or excuses. Again, thought Gideon, just like home. Room 203 itself was a lecture hall smelling strongly of floor polish. There were five tiered rows of empty chairs with writing-desk armrests, and a long, laminate-topped lab table down in front for the instructor. On the table was a grocery-sized cardboard box, and in front of it, waving them in as gracefully as an orchestra conductor signaling a pianissimo passage, stood a somberly smiling Esteban de la Garza, balding a bit now, but otherwise much the same as the last time Gideon had seen him: erect and aristocratic in his usual three-button suit.

“I have them here in the carton,” he said after the introductions. “I would have laid them out for you myself, but I thought you would prefer them thus, for you to do.”

“That’s good, Esteban,” Gideon said, undoing the flaps of the carton. “Okay, let’s have a look.”

As soon as he reached in and removed the first few fragments – a partial rib, the proximal three-quarters of a left fibula, most of a sacrum – he was struck by the near certainty that they did indeed belong to the same female skeleton that he’d examined five years earlier. They were the right sex and the right age to begin with, but it was the bones themselves – their red-tinted gray-brown color, their texture, their weight, their size, and of course their various evidences of AS – ankylosing spondylitis – that all shouted “Gibraltar Woman” at him. But he wasn’t ready to say anything aloud yet. Bones shouted at him a lot, and sometimes they turned out to be flimflamming him. There were more scientific ways to go about things. Unconsciously, he rubbed his hands together, removed the rest of the bones from the carton, and went to work. Fausto and Esteban watched silently.

The first thing a well-trained anthropologist such as Gideon Oliver does in such a situation is to lay out the remains in as close to correct anatomical position as their number and condition allow. Then he carefully examines them to ensure that they are not commingled – that is, that they do not come from more than one individual. This is done by careful sexing, ageing, evaluation of general condition, etc. – but most obviously and significantly, by checking to see that there are no duplications. (Two mandibles, for example, would be a good clue to there being more than one person represented.) Then, in this particular situation, would come a mental exercise: a similar analysis in which the anthropologist compares the bones that lie before him to the absent but well-remembered remains of Gibraltar Woman. Are there duplications between the sets? Are there differences in condition, age, sex? And so on. It is all a matter of proceeding in a logical, orderly fashion, systematically narrowing the field of possible alternatives until a single plausible conclusion can be reached.

Of these steps, so often demanded of his students, Gideon performed not a one. He proceeded instead like a six-year-old set loose in a candy shop and instructed to thoughtfully, prudently consider his choices before making a selection. That is to say, he immediately grabbed the most alluring, enthralling morsel of all: in this case, a columnar section of three solidly fused-together vertebrae, the upper two complete, the lowest one broken. The middle and lowest ones still had stubs of rib fused to them, another abnormality associated with AS.

“Ah!” he couldn’t help yelling. It was better luck than he’d dared hope for. “This,” he exclaimed excitedly, “will settle it for good.”

“Settle what?” said Fausto. “What are we settling?”

“Watch,” Gideon said magisterially, “and learn.” He laid the three-part vertebral segment on the table. “What we have here are the eleventh and twelfth thoracic vertebrae, plus a chunk of the first lumbar. Now, then…”

“Okay, I’m watching,” Fausto said after a few moments of silence and immobility. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

“Where the heck is the other piece, the one we brought with us?” Gideon said irritably. “The one from Sheila’s room – the T10?” He had scanned the table without success and was now searching perplexedly through his own pockets.

“You had it,” Fausto said accusingly. “You must have left it in the car.”

“Damn. Lend me the key, will you?”

“No, you stay here and keep doing whatever you’re doing,” Fausto said wearily, turning toward the door. “I’ll get it.”

“Okay, thanks, Fausto. Bring them both, will you? The cast too.”

Fausto’s response, a muttered “Absent-minded professors,” hung in the air behind him as he left.

While he was gone Gideon filled in de la Garza on what had brought him: the T10 that had been discovered in Sheila Chan’s room was a previously undocumented vertebra from Gibraltar Woman. There was no question about it. The only question was, where had it possibly come from? Now it appeared that it might have “Come from these?” de la Garza supplied, indicating the bones on the table. “From AN-34? In Sevilla?” He had been startled into emitting an extraordinary three fragmentary sentences in a row. “But how can such a thing be possible?”

Gideon spread his hands. He didn’t have an answer he liked. He’d come up with a few vague possibilities that he didn’t like, but they were too convoluted, too unlikely – and too unwelcome – to think about.

When Fausto returned with the now limp and wrinkled paper sack, Gideon offered the T10 to de la Garza to examine. “Can you tell if this is the one you lent her?”

De la Garza scrutinized it with scrupulous care. Fausto, impatient as ever, went striding around the room rapping the backs of the chairs and humming tunelessly to himself. He had circled the entire room and returned by the time de la Garza had his answer ready.

No, he couldn’t be sure one way or the other, he said, handing it back. It certainly looked like the one he’d lent Sheila, yes, but, unfortunately, inasmuch as the bones were used for teaching purposes only, they had not been marked with identifying codes or abbreviations. Alas, he could not give an unqualified reply.

“Well, I think I can resolve it,” Gideon said. Indeed, he knew he could resolve it. While de la Garza had been poring over the T10, Gideon had made some visual comparisons between the bones, and they had shouted at him again, louder than before. This time he trusted the shout.

“Now then, In my left hand I am holding Gibraltar Woman’s tenth thoracic vertebrae, and in my right hand I have the segment of thoracic and lumbar spine from AN-34 – eleventh thoracic through first lumbar.”

“I think this is the watch-and-learn part again,” Fausto said dourly.

“Cheer up,” said Gideon. “It won’t take long.” He pressed the two segments gently together, and as he knew they would, they fit into each other as neatly and tightly as the T9 model had fit up against the T10 earlier. For good measure, he now put the T9 on top, forming a contiguous, reasonably firmly joined stack of five adjacent vertebrae – four thoracic, and a fragment of the uppermost of the lumbars.

De la Garza stared at the column for a few seconds before comprehending. “All are from the same individual,” he said slowly.

“That’s right,” said Gideon. “And yet the top one is a cast from Europa Point, the middle one was found in Sheila Chan’s room, and the bottom three are yours.”

De la Garza’s long, grave face grew longer and graver. “But this means,” he said slowly, “this means…”

“It means,” Gideon said, “that what you have on the table here-” He swept his hand over the bones. “-is actually part of Gibraltar Woman – the part they didn’t find at Europa Point.”

De la Garza struggled with this. Unsuccessfully. “Will I be expected to turn these over to the British Museum, then?” he asked, brightening a little, perhaps at the prospect of the renown that would come his way over it.

Gideon shook his head. “I don’t think so.” During the last few minutes, some of the unlikely possibilities that had been bouncing around his brain had resolved themselves into something a bit more likely – no less convoluted or unwelcome, but more likely; plausible, even. “My guess is that the British Museum will be turning over their material to you.”

“I do not understand,” de la Garza said. “I do not understand any of this.”

“He lost me a long time ago,” Fausto said.

“Esteban,” said Gideon, “when we were talking on the telephone, didn’t you say the Seville site had been donated to the university for teaching purposes?”

“Yes, that was my understanding. As I said, it held nothing of archaeological or anthropological worth.”

“Would you happen to know who gave it?”

“I do. It was the American, Ivan Gunderson.”

Fausto’s jaw dropped, but it was the answer Gideon had expected. .. but had hoped not to get.

He thought he knew the answer to his next question too. “And where, again, was the site located?”

“It lies in the province of Sevilla, in Andalucia, but near the border with Extremadura.”

“I mean precisely.”

“You would like geographic coordinates? I can provide them.”

“No, but was it near a town of any sort?”

“Yes, it was at the edge of a small village of a few hundred inhabitants. You would not know of it.”

“Maybe I would.” Gideon’s throat had become dry with anticipation. “What’s it called?”

De la Garza opened his mouth to speak: “-”

“No, let me guess,” Gideon said, heavy hearted. “Would it be Guadalcanal, by any chance?”

De la Garza blinked his surprise. “You know of it, then?”