Uneasy Relations

SIX

“So I look down and what do I see?”

Pru was zestfully regaling an enthralled, aghast Julie. “It was awe-inspiring, positively cosmic, as if I was watching the very dawn of mankind re-created before me. There he was, this primitive, hulking creature crouched in his tree, grunting, at the very moment of the invention of tool-making. You could see the intense concentration on his face as he crudely hammered his rocks together, in preparation for coming down from his arboreal abode and standing erect upon the earth on his own two legs.”

A subdued Gideon offered a modest correction. “Coming up from my arboreal abode, actually.”

Which was the first time Julie relaxed enough to laugh. “But you are okay?” she asked for the third or fourth time.

“I’m fine, honey. A few dings, a few scuffs, but all in all, in pretty good shape for a guy who fell off the Rock of Gibraltar.”

And now the laughter turned to relieved giggles. “ ‘I appreciate your wifely concern,’ ” she mimicked, dropping her voice an octave and adding a supercilious, mock-English accent, “ ‘but don’t worry, I have no intention whatever of falling off the Rock of Gibraltar.’ ”

“I did not say ’whatever,’” Gideon muttered, but then ruefully laughed along with her. “Next time I’ll pay more attention.”

They were in the tiny bar-restaurant, midway through the simple, satisfying luncheon of roast chicken, chips, and salad, along with bottles of cold white Montilla wine from across the border. Julie, Gideon, and Pru were at the larger of the two tables, speaking quietly, preferring to keep their conversation private.

Between the two of them, Gideon and Pru had described how she had found him. She had been walking on the trail without anything in particular in mind when she heard a clack-clack-clack sound, “as if someone was banging two stones together.” Curious, she had climbed up to the sentry post, looked down, and found Gideon doing exactly that. She had hurried back to the cable car terminal and located an employee who was able to get hold of a stout, twenty-five-foot electrical extension cord. The two of them had then run back and used the cord to “walk” Gideon up the cliff face.

“It was really exciting,” Pru declared. “It was fun!”

“It was exciting, all right,” Gideon admitted. “I don’t know about fun. Maybe five years from now it might seem as if it was fun.”

“And you still really think you might have been pushed?” Julie asked.

He shrugged. As time had passed, a conviction that he had indeed been pushed had first grown, then shrunk. On the one hand, it seemed impossible that he could have fallen off the Rock on his own, but wasn’t that just what he’d done on those log bridges? No one had pushed him then; he’d managed to fall off without any help. Maybe the same thing had happened here. There was that nasty wind, after all. “I don’t know. I think I felt something… a push.” He touched his right hip, just above the hip pocket. “Here.” Another shrug. “I think.”

“You don’t sound very positive.”

“I’m not. But I just can’t believe I did it all by myself. I mean, did you ever hear of anybody accidentally falling off the Rock of Gibraltar? ”

“Most people who fell off the Rock wouldn’t be able to talk about it afterward,” Pru pointed out. “You had a little luck on your side.” She and Julie were both clearly disinclined to believe anyone had pushed him.

Julie gently touched the back of his hand. “No offense, sweetheart, but you’re… how do I put this? You’re really not very good with heights.”

“Tell me about it,” he said with a sigh. “All the same-”

“Gideon, listen. Let’s assume for a minute that somebody really did push you. If that were true, it would pretty much have to be someone right here in this room, wouldn’t it? Who else would have any idea where you were? Who else that you know would be in Gibraltar? Why would anyone else want to… well, kill you?”

“Why would anyone in this room want to kill me?”

“That’s what I was wondering.”

He nodded. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I guess.”

A few moments of meditative silence followed, until Pru, having wrested the last shred of white meat from her half chicken, jerked her head and gestured decisively with her fork. “Okay, I’ve thought it through, and I simply can’t see anyone having pushed you. It doesn’t hold water.” She shoved her plate away and moved her wineglass nearer.

“Look,” she whispered, leaning closer in. “Do you really believe someone here – one of these people – harmless, fusty, certified academics right down to their sensible shoes – not only wanted to murder you… well, on second thought, that part I can believe-”

“Thank you so much.”

“-but went so far as to actually try to do it? No, that’s straining credulity. Think about it. Aside from the guts it would take, he would have had to follow you down the trail, carefully keeping out of sight, then follow you up the steps, then-”

“That’s not necessarily true. He could have heard me say I was going to go up there, and then gotten there before me and waited.”

“Even so, he would have had to hide behind a rock or something until you went into the hut, then skulk up and crouch behind it, waiting for you to come out, then shove you over at exactly the right moment, when you were right on the edge – all without being seen, I might add – and then run back here before anyone noticed. And act as if nothing happened.” She sat back. “That, if you’ll permit me to say so, is a pretty bizarre hypothesis.”

Yes, it was, but that hadn’t stopped him from entertaining it. When he’d walked in with Pru only a few minutes late for lunch, after getting his bloodied knuckles washed and sprayed with an antibiotic, he couldn’t help scanning the room, searching for a guilty face, or more likely, one that looked astonished at seeing him alive. He didn’t find any. They all looked exactly like their everyday selves, with no special interest in him. And none of them did have any special interest in him, that was a major sticking point. Except for Pru, he knew none of them very well, and most hardly at all. His only connection to most of them was his lab work on the First Family and the subsequent paper that came out of it, and there had been nothing in those to provoke their antagonism. On the contrary, his phrase describing Gibraltar Boy – “a seeming phenotypical mosaic of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens traits” – had helped catapult almost everyone associated with the dig to vastly increased prominence. (When they quoted it, which they often did, the “seeming” usually fell by the wayside.)

All the same, he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. If he squeezed his eyes shut he could feel… he could almost feel… he could imagine he could feel… that quick, firm shove at his hip…

“Well?” Pru pressed when nothing was forthcoming from him.

He came back to the present. “He wouldn’t have had to be hiding while I was inside the hut,” he said. “All the openings – the doorway, the little windows – looked out in the other direction, over the Med. He could have walked right up and stood there waiting for me to come out, and I’d never have known it.”

“Even so -,” she began impatiently.

“I know, I know. It’s pretty unlikely.”

“It’s damn unlikely.”

The waitress came and collected their plates. “What’ll it be for pud?” she asked. “Choice of jam roly-poly, apple crumble, or gateau.”

“Jam roly-poly for me,” Pru said with enthusiasm. “And coffee.”

“What’ll it be for what?” asked Julie.

“Pud,” Gideon said. “Pudding. Dessert. We’re in the UK now.”

“Oh. I’ll pass. Just coffee, please. I’m still too keyed up for dessert.”

Not Gideon. He had wolfed down the chicken and chips, but he was still ravenous. “I’ll have the apple crumble. And coffee for me too.”

“Okay, here’s another possibility,” Pru said as the waitress moved off. “Couldn’t it have been the wind?”

“I doubt it.”

“What about something blown by the wind?” suggested Julie. She was trying to give him a graceful, reasonable out, a way of having fallen off the Rock of Gibraltar that wasn’t his own dumb fault. “I don’t know, a piece of cardboard, an empty carton? You said you didn’t have your feet planted very firmly. Something like a cardboard carton might have been enough to-”

“Uh-uh. I thought about that for a minute too, but it was blowing the other way.” He tipped his head in the direction of Adrian Vanderwater. “A levanter, remember? Not a poniente.”

“All right, then, isn’t it possible that when a gust hit you, you kind of leaned against it – you know, overcompensated – and then when it suddenly stopped, over you went in the other direction?”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “I guess that is possible. I just think.. .” He shook his head, not sure what he had just thought. Who knows, maybe it had been the wind.

Their coffee and desserts were brought and placed before them. Julie grimaced at the pale, glistening mass on Pru’s plate. “What is that, exactly?”

“Something you don’t see in the States anymore.” Pru said, scrutinizing it with obvious relish. “A roly-poly. It’s a suet pudding. They flatten it and roll it up around a jam filling. Have you ever had suet pudding? Want a bite?”

“Um… no, I don’t think so.”

“Weenie,” Pru said, getting ready to attack her dessert with the soup spoon that had been provided.

“You know what they called jam roly-polys in the eighteen hundreds? ” Gideon asked. “Dead man’s arm. Because they used to steam it – and serve it – in an old shirt sleeve.”

“If that’s meant to affect my appetite, dream on,” Pru said, digging in.

Gideon was feeling pretty mellow by now. Not ordinarily a lunchtime drinker, he’d thirstily consumed two glasses of the cold Montilla, and the pungent, strong wine, more like a rough sherry than a dinner wine, had given him a pleasant glow. With alcohol coursing through a nervous system that had already been given a roller-coaster of an adrenaline ride only an hour earlier, he was seeing the world in a different light now. They were probably right. He’d lost his balance, that was all. And if they were willing to believe that the wind had a part in it, so was he.

It was perfectly credible. Why dream up some complex theory of who and why and how? What had happened to his adherence to Occam’s razor, the principle of parsimony that he was always prating about to his classes, the idea that if you have a simple theory that satisfactorily explains the facts, you don’t go around “unnecessarily multiplying uncertainties,” that is, dreaming up more complex ones? He’d taken a heck of a tumble, he’d very naturally panicked, and the result had been a bout of rather absurd paranoia.

“You’re both right,” he said, methodically working away at his apple crumble, a palatable British version of apple crisp. “I overreacted. ”

“Well, it’s no wonder,” Julie said kindly, patently glad to see him returning to his logical, reasonable self.

“Hold it, I just had another thought,” Pru said, scooping up the last of the puddled custard on which her demolished roly-poly had lain. “What have you got in that pocket, Gideon? I heard something crackle in there.”

“I don’t know.” He reached in and pulled out the opened bag of peanuts. “These. Why?”

“And you said there were monkeys around?”

“Yes. In fact, I offered them to one of them, but – wait a minute, you think a monkey -”

“Why not? Grabbing for the bag and accidentally pushing you off balance? They’re strong, you know that. And they could easily reach your hip. And if you offered the bag to one before, then he probably saw where it came from,” she said. “It makes more sense than anything else, Gideon.”

Another graceful out, this one provided by Pru.

He smiled gratefully at her. “It certainly does.” And now that he thought about it, it did. It would account for the one thing the wind didn’t account for: the touch on his hip that he thought – imagined? – he’d felt. It made sense. It explained things more simply and logically than having to construct a villain or even a cantankerous wind. He liked it. Thomas of Occam would have liked it too. He relaxed a little more.

“In fact, now that monkeys are in the picture,” Julie put in brightly, “maybe it wasn’t so innocent. I wonder if he didn’t do it on purpose. Maybe you shouldn’t have said all those nasty things about monkeys. They have feelings too, you know.”

“I tried to apologize to the big guy on the top step,” Gideon said, willingly going along with the change in mood. “The peanuts were supposed to be a peace offering. He wasn’t buying it.”

“Hey,” Pru said, “maybe it was a desperado-type monkey, one of those bad-to-the-bone monkeys, a homicidal monkey. A sociopath monkey.” Pensively, she put a forefinger to her pursed lips.

“Tell me, was he wearing sunglasses, by any chance?”