Unnatural Selection

TWO

Penzance, Cornwall, England Three Years Later: June 10, 2005

You’d have to go a long way to find another town with the historical appeal of Penzance. Not that there’s much to see that’s over a couple of hundred years old, but most of what there is, is to be found in its charming and atmospheric old inns and pubs. Julie and Gideon Oliver, being eager students of history and keen trenchermen as well, had spent a large and enjoyable portion of their day immersed in historical-culinary research. Fish-and-chips lunch at the tiny, crooked Turk’s Head on Chapel Street (“the oldest building in Penzance, circa 1231”); pre-dinner pints at the Union Hotel up the block (“Here was news of Admiral Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar, and of his tragic death, first received in England”); and dinner down at the waterfront, at the salty old Dolphin Inn (“Where tobacco was smoked in England for the first time”).

They were in the Dolphin now, or rather outside it, at one of the wooden trestle tables in the front courtyard, overlooking the docks, where work-stained commercial fishing vessels bobbed side by side in the oily water, and rusting, mysterious machinery stood as if abandoned along the stone quay. Their meal of beef-and-mushroom pie had gone down well, and the after-dinner coffee was doing the same. Relaxed and full, getting sleepy in the slanting evening sunlight, Gideon was contentedly watching the ferry Scillonian III disgorge its load of tired foot passengers from the Isles of Scilly, forty miles off the coast. Tomorrow he and Julie would be taking the same ferry the other way, for a weeklong stay on St. Mary’s, the largest and most settled of the little-known archipelago.

Julie, in the meantime, was absently browsing in the International Herald Tribune, occasionally citing something that she thought might catch Gideon’s interest.

“Oh, look,” she said, “they found Edgar Villarreal.”

“Found him? He’s not dead after all?”

“No, he’s dead, all right,” she said, continuing to read. “I mean they finally found his remains. He-” She suddenly sat up straight. “Oh, my God, he was eaten by a grizzly bear! Can you believe that? Isn’t that bizarre?”

“Not much of a way to go.”

“No, I mean… a bear? Remember, when that couple was killed in Montana-”

“The Borbas.”

“And Edgar just… What did you say?”

“The Borbas. That was their name.”

“Amazing.” She lowered the paper. “Now why would you remember something like that? It was three years ago.”

“It’s a gift, I suppose. An infallible memory. Comes in handy in my line of work.”

“Yes, well, I wish your gift would kick in once in a while when I ask you stop for milk or veggies on your way home.”

“Well, you know, it comes and goes,” he said, smiling. “What were you saying about Villarreal?”

“Well, when those people, the Borbas, were killed, people pretty much blamed him for bringing the grizzlies back-didn’t one of the families sue him?-and he just shrugged it off.” She mimed a mock yawn. “ C’est la vie, one of those things.”

“I remember, yes. It did seem a little cold-blooded.”

“A little! Brr. And now the same thing’s happened to him. It’s almost like… fate. Just desserts.”

“I see what you mean. And some people say there’s no such thing as poetic justice.”

“But it’s not only that, it’s just that fatal grizzly bear attacks are practically nonexistent these days. They just don’t happen anymore.”

Gideon nodded. Julie was a supervising park ranger at Olympic National Park, back home in Port Angeles, Washington, and she knew whereof she spoke. “I may be wrong,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure the last people killed by grizzlies in North America-outside of Alaska, anyway-were those same two people in Bitterroot. And maybe a couple of deaths in Alaska since then, no more. And now Edgar. It’s-I don’t know, it’s almost too much of a coincidence.”

“That is weird, all right,” Gideon agreed. “How do they know that’s what happened to him?”

“Well, there isn’t much here…” She folded the paper back and read aloud:“‘The remains of the American author and activist, who had not been seen since failing to return from his remote bear-research base camp ninety miles east of Anchorage in August 2003, were discovered in a bear den less than a mile from the camp. They were identified as human by Dr. Leslie Roach, consulting police surgeon for the Alaska State Police post at Talkeetna, who determined that the fragments were approximately two to three years old and had been through the digestive system of a bear.’” She shuddered. “Can you really tell that from the bones?”

“Oh, yes,” Gideon said, “if you know what you’re doing.”

She continued reading. “‘There is little doubt that they are the remains of Mr. Villarreal,” said state police sergeant Monte Franks. “There’s no one else it could conceivably be.’”

“Hm,” Gideon said.

“Hm, what?”

“Hm, nothing, just ‘hm.’”

“No, when you say ‘hm,’ it must mean something. What is it?”

“Julie, I’m a professor. I’m supposed to go around saying ‘hm.’ It’s expected of me.”

She looked at him, her dark, pretty, close-cropped head tilted to one side. “Hmmm,” she said doubtfully.

Gideon laughed. “Anything else in the article?”

She went back to reading aloud. “‘Mr. Villarreal, a resident of Willow, Alaska, was often cited as a modern American success story, the son of Cuban migrant citrus workers in Florida. He worked alongside them from the time he was five years old. Contacted today, his agent, Marcus Stein, said: “At seventeen this guy was still picking oranges down in Dade County, barely speaking English. At forty he was one of America’s most respected and best-known environmentalists. He was one hell of a guy.” Mr. Villarreal was, however, also a controversial figure whose vigorous, blunt defense of the wilderness and of wilderness animals had embroiled him in controversy many times over the years. He leaves no immediate relatives.’”

She folded the paper. “That’s it.”

The check had come while she had been talking, and Gideon laid the amount on the table. “So,” he said. “Can I interest you in a sunset walk along the Promenade?”

“Does it come with a Cornish clotted-cream ice cream cone?”

“But of course.”

“I know it’s awful of me to say it,” she said soberly as they arose, “but this year’s meeting will be a lot more… well, civil, relaxed… without Edgar’s being there, if you know what I mean.”

“Mm,” Gideon said.

“‘Mm’? Is that different than ‘hm’?”

“A minor dialectical variant.”

The meeting of which they spoke, and the reason for their being in this remote corner of England, was the Consortium of the Scillies, the wonderfully inaptly named brainchild of American multimillionaire and noted eccentric Vasily Kozlov. Kozlov, who had come to the United States from the Soviet Union as a non-English-speaking twenty-eight-year-old, had struggled his way through evening high school and community college in only five years, and then gotten a job as a low-level laboratory technician in the research division of a soap and detergent company in New Jersey, where he’d worked for nearly five years. In his spare time, the brilliant, inquisitive Kozlov had come up with a revolutionary way of determining the surface tension of liquids by measuring the reflected variance of light intensity at different points on the surface. When he had offered to sell his method to the company, the chemists who were his superiors had laughed off the skinny guy with the wild hair, the two-year degree, the mad-Russian accent, and the grandiose ideas. Kozlov had quit his job, moved back in with his parents in Brooklyn at the age of thirty-eight, and spent the next several years refining his technique and trying to sell it to other companies and to the United States government. But he had been baffled and frustrated by bureaucratic red tape and scientific indifference.

An uncle who owned a Russian bakery chain had come to his rescue, offering to back him in return for a share of the profits, if any. Kozlov had jumped at the chance, and within a year he had turned out his first prototype. Two years after that the company he’d originally worked for came back, hat in hand, to apply for a license for its use. And in another ten years every major detergent maker and toothpaste producer in Europe and the United States was using the Kozlov method in their research and production departments. Not long after, this gifted foreigner of little formal education, working in his own laboratory, developed a new, non-petroleum-based surfactant that had the detergent-makers lining up on his doorstep all over again.

By the age of fifty-five, Kozlov was an extremely rich man. He was also a confirmed iconoclast, with a ferocious disdain for the scientific and bureaucratic establishments. A three-time divorce, but still a romantic through and through, he sold out to his uncle, bought a dry-moated, sixteenth-century castle high on a hill on St. Mary’s Island, and retired to live out his days in brooding, baronial splendor. This lasted the restless and intellectually curious Kozlov all of two months, by which time he had developed an interest in natural history, devoting himself with typical Kozlovian intensity to the particular study of the abundant mosses and liverworts to be found in the unusually temperate climate of the Scillies.

In a year he’d learned all there was to know, or all he wanted to know, about the habits of Telaranea murphyae and Lophocolea bispinosa and their kind. Restless and bored, feeling himself getting old before his time, he cast about for a way to marry his newly awakened interest in the natural environment and his old anger at and contempt for bureaucracy and academia. What he came up with was the funding of an ongoing forum for the practical, realistic consideration of conservation and biodiversity issues-something that would be completely outside the obstructiveness and foot-dragging of government and academic scientists. Thus was born the Consortium of the Scillies. (When his attorney had delicately suggested that the name was perhaps not all it might be, Kozlov had scratched his head and replied in his mangled English: “Is better-Scilly Consortium?” The attorney had let it go.)

The consortium was to consist of five to seven Fellows, personally chosen by Kozlov from applications submitted to him, with a decided preference toward people that he recognized as blood-brothers: mavericks, firebrands, and, most important, “self-made” men and women. They would also be expected to be capable of “civilized discourse with those who might disagree with them.” (He had made it clear that he meant this at the very first convocation in 1995, when two Fellows got into a shouting match over the role that cow flatulence played or didn’t play in global warming. The disgusted Kozlov had thrown them both out.)

Participants would meet twice, two years apart. The first weeklong meeting would be to review current issues and refine subjects for subsequent monographs by individual members. Two years later, they would formally present their papers, with discussion following. The papers, along with the discussions, would then be published as the Transactions of the Consortium of the Scillies. A new group of Fellows would be chosen for the following two-year cycle, and so on.

The sessions would be at Kozlov’s castle on St. Mary’s, where participants would also live and dine. All expenses would be covered, and there would be a $50,000 stipend out of Kozlov’s own pocket, to be presented when their papers were delivered and accepted at the second meeting. With stipulations like these, there was no shortage of applicants. Right from the start, the biannual Transactions, with their offbeat, unorthodox views and conclusions, had created a stir in the media that gladdened Kozlov’s heart, despite their being received with amused derision in mainstream conservation circles.

Having begun in 1995, the consortium was now in its fourth incarnation, and had changed little, except that Kozlov, responding reluctantly to mainstream criticism, now included one or two token “establishment” participants in the mix. The current consortium had two such members. One was Liz Petra, an archaeologist with the State of New York, who had years ago taken a couple of courses with Gideon and whose specialty was “garbology,” the study of populations through analysis of their waste products and refuse. The other, amazingly enough, was Julie. She had sent in her application mostly as a lark-it was understood that her $50,000 stipend would go to the National Park Service in any case-but the paper she proposed to research and write, an assessment of changing wildfire management policies, had caught Kozlov’s interest. And so here she was, with Gideon along for the ride.

The first of the two meetings, two years earlier, had come during finals week at the University of Washington, making it impossible for him to come with her. This time the quarter was over, and so here he was too, proud of his wife and quite content to be playing the unaccustomed role of accompanying spouse.

The Penzance Promenade is actually the top of the nineteenth-century, block-cut-stone seawall, with a wide shingle beach on one side and the old town sloping up away from it on the other. They had walked its length, from Battery Rocks, past the Victorian-era Jubilee Swimming Pool and the public gardens, and down the long row of seaside hotels, guest houses, and restaurants, to the curve in Mount’s Bay, where town, seawall, and promenade all peter out. It’s a nice walk at sunset, when the massive granite blocks underfoot look golden and the air itself has a burnished, Victorian feel to it, and it tends to make walkers reflective.

“It’s not that Edgar didn’t have something valuable to add,” Julie mused as they sat on the last of the benches, finishing their ice cream cones, “but, well, he was one of those people who just sucked the oxygen out of the room. I remember, at dinner sometimes, when he’d leave early, it was as if this glowering black cloud had lifted.”

“I know. I’ve seen him on TV panels once or twice,” Gideon said. “Kind of a bully, I thought.”

“I’d say most people who had anything to do with him would agree with that.”

“Also very taken with himself-the handsome, brooding defender of the wilds.”

“That, too. Definitely.”

“Come on, let’s head back,” Gideon said.

Strolling eastward on the promenade brings with it the famous view of St. Michael’s Mount, the great, castle-topped medieval stone pile sitting in isolated glory far out in Mount’s Bay, and for a few minutes they walked toward it in silence, watching it turn from amber, to pale straw, to flaming orange as dusk settled in.

“Gideon,” Julie said after a while, “are you going to sit in on any of the sessions? Vasily would love for you to participate. He told me so in the last e-mail. He really respects you.”

“If I sit in, would he stop charging me twenty bucks a day?”

They both laughed, but it was a fact. Kozlov, generous as he might be in some respects, was a penny-pincher in others. Fellows were welcome to bring partners to the meetings, but additional food and lodging charges of twenty dollars a day (“to pay for extra work-staff peoples”) would be applied.

“He just might,” Julie said.

“Even so, I think I’ll pass. I have some work with me, and I also want to get over to the outer islands to see the Bronze and Iron Age sites, and then-”

“No, really, why won’t you?”

Gideon hesitated and shrugged. “I just don’t think I’d be comfortable getting involved. It doesn’t sound like my kind of thing.” He was treading carefully. Julie was naturally delighted to be a Fellow, and Gideon was delighted for her; the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to rain on her parade.

“I don’t understand why not. ‘Issues in Biodiversity and Conservation Biology.’ I’d think it would be just your cup of tea.”

“Well, the thing is… you know, I looked at the participants’ bios, and frankly, I wasn’t exactly bowled over by them.”

“These are pretty capable people, Gideon. Vasily’s a little eccentric, yes, but he’s a certified genius, and he didn’t pick a bunch of wackos.”

“I know that. But except for Liz, there’s not a single Ph. D. in the crowd, and her degree’s in archaeology, with a specialty in garbage.”

“What about Rudy Walker, your old buddy from the University of Wisconsin? You said he was smart.”

Rudy Walker was the one other member of the consortium that Gideon knew personally, although it had been many years since they’d been in touch. The two of them had been research assistants at Wisconsin when they were working on their doctorates. Rudy was seven or eight years the elder-he had gotten a medical discharge from the Army after shattering both wrists during the invasion of Grenada, and he’d had a wife and a five-year-old daughter. He had taken the younger, greener Gideon under his wing. They had worked together, with Rudy as the senior assistant, on an important but grisly project for their major professor: injecting dyes into the soft, developing bones of aborted fetuses of varying known ages to determine the exact progression of skeletal formation. Despite the morbid hours in the lab (windowless and underground, to avoid offending the sensitive or the delicate-stomached), Gideon remembered his years at Wisconsin as a happy time of much laughter and much learning. This was thanks largely to Rudy. There had been so many late-night pizzas at the Student Union, so many pitchers of beer, so many abstruse, hilarious, academic arguments with Rudy and his equally vibrant young wife Fran, another anthropology grad student. A great time, looked back upon with pleasure.

And yes, Rudy was smart, all right.

“He got his Master’s-with honors-but never did get his doctorate,” Gideon maintained. “I went on to Arizona for mine, and Rudy went to Penn State, but he quit before he finished-never took his comps, never did a dissertation-to take a job with some private college up in Toronto, and there he stayed. Apparently never finished up. No Ph. D. on his bio.”

“Oho, now we’re getting down to brass tacks. Only Ph. D.’s meet your high standards of discourse, is that it?”

“If the subject is as complex as biodiversity and the people talking about it expect to be taken seriously-yes.”

“Gideon, has anyone ever told you you’re an intellectual snob?”

He laughed. “Not since last Friday. Look, let me put it this way. As smart as some of these people might be-and I grant you, Kozlov himself is a bona fide genius-they don’t have the advantage of a thorough, rigorous, scientific education. Okay, they know a lot, but, like anybody who’s ‘self-made, ’ they’re also bound to have gaps-misapprehensions, misconceptions-that they don’t even know they have because they’ve never been tested, they’ve never been required to learn material they don’t feel like learning, and they’ve never had to put together a dissertation to the satisfaction of a highly critical committee.”

“So?”

“So you know me; if I’m sitting there and I hear some typical misunderstandings, say about the mechanics of evolution or natural selection, getting thrown around as if they were good science, I’m not sure I could control myself.”

“You might go into lecture mode, you mean.”

“Exactly, the dreaded lecture mode. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’d bore the hell out of everybody. And this isn’t my show, Julie. Nobody’s there to hear me.”

There was more to it than that, but he wasn’t about to give voice to it. Simply put, this was one of Julie’s rare chances to shine outside the world of the National Park Service. She had put a lot of time and a lot of work into her paper, and he wasn’t about to take even a remote chance of upstaging her.

She gave it some thought. “You know, I’m beginning to see the wisdom of your position,” she said.

“Good, I’m glad that’s settled.”

For a few minutes they walked along amicably enough, hand in hand, and then Julie suddenly stopped and turned to face him.

“Wait a minute, all I have is an M.A. Therefore I can’t be taken seriously?”

“Well, in your case-”

She held up a warning finger. “Consider your reply carefully.”

“In your case,” he continued smoothly, “you’re not pretending to be an authority on biodiversity. You’re here as a wildfire management expert-which you certainly are.”

“Uh-huh, and what about my paper? Is it full of ‘misapprehensions’ and ‘misconceptions’?”

“I think,” he said, unblinking, “that your paper is absolutely brilliant.”

Their eyes remained locked for a second more. “Good answer,” she said as they began walking again.

“Whew,” he said softly.

“From this vantage point,” intoned the sonorous voice from the loudspeakers, “we look back at the whole of Land’s End, the rugged promontory that marks the southeasternmost point of the mainland of England. And we are lulled by our first sense of the gentle Atlantic swell, which has traveled three thousand miles, only to impotently expend its energy against these stark and ancient cliffs.”

“Gentle swells!” somebody called out. “Try lookin’ out the bloody window, mate!”

The ripple of laughter that greeted this was a trifle apprehensive, but after a few anxious minutes during which people’s eyes roamed in search of a quick exit to the open air of the deck, should one become necessary, the surge grew calm and the ferry settled into a slow heave that most of the passengers found more relaxing than discomforting. The minority who felt otherwise gratefully followed the posted directions to the windowless lowest deck, where ranks of permanently set-up cots were waiting.

The soothing narrative continued: “And now, in the far distance we can see the Isles of Scilly themselves, the fabled Fortunate Islands, thought by many to be the mountain peaks of the sunken, lost land of Lyonesse. There are five inhabited islands, forty uninhabited ones, and a hundred-and-fifty-”

“Am I wrong,” Gideon asked Julie, “or is that Liz Petra in the snack bar line?” He pointed at a small, plump figure in a shawl, a flowing peasant skirt, and sandals.

Julie turned to look. “It sure is. Liz! Over here!”

The pixie-faced blonde’s eyes lit up. “Julene! Hello! Be there in a sec.” She went back to paying for the bag of Cad-bury’s Chocolate Fingers she was buying.

Gideon looked at Julie, eyebrows raised. “ ‘Julene’?”

Julie mumbled something.

“What?”

“Oh, heck, it just seemed more professional,” she muttered.

“Ah. Well, I suppose it is, at that.” He was happier than ever with his decision not to horn in on the meetings.

“Well, hi there, Julene!” Liz chirped as Julie jumped up to embrace her. “My favorite fellow Fellow! And I see you’ve brought the famous, or should I say infamous, Skeleton Detective along with you.” She stuck out her hand. “Long time no see, prof.”

It had been more than five years since she’d sat in on his nonhuman primate social behavior seminar as a graduate student in archaeology, but she seemed to have changed not a bit: still the same soft, dimply, unfailingly jolly dumpling of a person she was back then, grandmotherly (despite her pretty face) and chuckling, nurturing even at the age of thirty-five, and still apparently favoring the same vintage-clothing-store wardrobe, which had been passe even then. Only now she was a figure of note in the unlikely but burgeoning discipline of refuse archaeology.

“It’s great to see you again, Liz,” he said, grasping her hand and moving over to make room for her in their booth. “What’s new in the world of garbage?”

“Things have been pretty trashy, actually,” she said, plopping down. “So how’s the bone business?”

“Oh, kind of dry, to tell the truth.”

Julie rolled her eyes at this show of what passed for academic humor. “Liz, they found Edgar’s remains, did you hear? He was eaten by a bear!”

Liz’s clear blue eyes sparkled even more. “Yes, Joey just told me. Is that creepy, or what?”

“Joey Dillard? Is he on this ferry too?”

“Well, he was a minute ago. Back there near the Coke machine.”

Julie looked over Liz’s shoulder and waved. “Joey! Come join us!”

Joey Dillard, if Gideon remembered correctly, had been an investigative reporter for a paper somewhere in the Midwest-Gary, or Des Moines. He had been assigned to do a series on a new meat-packing operation and had come away so revolted that he became a vegetarian on the spot. He then joined PETA-People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals-and several lesser-known groups, had since become an officer in some of them, and was now a fairly well-known writer for various animal-rights, vegetarian, and ecology magazines and Web publications.

Knowing his background, Gideon had anticipated an investigative reporter-type: assertive, belligerent, and pushy. Instead, a toothy, bespectacled, generally alarmed-looking young man with fine, pale, almost colorless hair trimmed in a crew-cut acknowledged Liz’s wave and made his way toward them. A faint tic jumped below his right eye. He earnestly clasped a couple of dog-eared magazines to his narrow chest and wore two large, worded buttons on his shirt.

“Oh, Lord” Gideon muttered, “save me from people who walk around with buttons.”

Julie smiled. “Oh, Joey’s not so bad-”

“As long as you don’t take him too seriously,” Liz said kindly. “He means well.”

“I know,” Julie said. “He’s sweet, really.”

Dillard made his hellos, shook hands with Gideon (a cold, damp palm), and sat down next to Julie. The button below his left collar-point said People who abuse animals rarely stop there. The bigger one on his right, less ominous but more comprehensible, said Animals are not fabric. Wear your own damn skin.

Dillard saw Gideon reading them and nervously drew himself up a little straighter, ready to do battle, the tic beneath his eye speeding up. But Gideon, determined not to make waves, simply said, “Glad to meet you, Joey. We were just talking about Edgar Villarreal.”

Joey immediately lowered his guns, reset the safeties, and relaxed. “You mean the bear? God, that was just so terrible. I’m really going to miss his contributions this year.” As far as Gideon could tell, Joey meant it, but he noted that Liz and Julie declined to commiserate.

Joey noticed too. “I mean, sure, he may have had a few problems personalitywise,” he mumbled, “but he really added something valuable, you have to give him that.” When no one seemed willing to give him that, Joey turned it up a notch. “Personally, I liked the guy.”

Another long beat passed before Liz finally responded, the corners of her mouth turned down. “Well, it’s not as if he would have been here anyway. He did quit, you know.”

“He did?” said Julie.

“He did?” said Joey.

“Didn’t you know? I heard it from Vasily months ago.”

“But why?” Joey asked.

“Well”-she offered the bag of milk-chocolate-covered biscuits around. Joey was the only taker-“remember when he gave that talk in town and, what was his name, Pete Williams got all over his case?”

“Who’s Pete Williams?” Gideon asked, but they were too absorbed to hear him.

“How could I forget?” Joey asked. “It was awful. Edgar was really, really upset. We all went over to the Bishop and Wolf for a drink afterward, and he was muttering in his beer, remember?”

Liz nodded and put on an overblown version of Villarreal’s mild Spanish accent. “‘I keel ’im, dat bastar’, dat leedle peepsqueak.’ Anyway, apparently it was enough to make him never want to come back. That and a few million other reasons, but that had to be the last straw. Anyway, when he got back to the States he faxed Vasily a letter resigning from the consortium. I don’t think Vasily was too upset to hear it. Frankly, I wasn’t too upset myself.”

“I guess he didn’t need the fifty thousand,” Joey said. “I sure wish I could say that.” He removed a thin, tar-black cellophane-wrapped cigar from a shirt pocket and held it up. “Do you mind?”

“Yes,” said Liz.

“Yes,” said Julie.

“Oh,” Joey said meekly and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”

“You can save it for the catwalk,” Liz said, and then explained to Gideon: “There’s a kind of catwalk around the roof of the castle. He prowls it after dark, like the Phantom of the Opera, smoking his foul weed.”

“It’s the only place they let me,” Joey said with a sigh.

“What do you mean, ‘they’? Those are Kozlov’s house rules. Don’t blame us. Not that I’m objecting to them.”

“I didn’t go to that talk of Edgar’s,” Julie said. “It was the final night, and I suppose I’d had more than enough of Edgar Villarreal by then. I heard it didn’t go well, but what exactly happened?”

Between them, Liz and Joey explained. Villarreal, as the best-known of the consortium fellows, had been approached by the local tourist office and asked to make a public presentation in Hugh Town, St. Mary’s main village. He had agreed, and on their final night on St. Mary’s, he had given a talk at Methodist Hall. Not many had come: two dozen curious locals; six or eight tourists who’d happened to be on St. Mary’s and were starved for something-anything-to do in the evening; all of the consortium attendees other than Julie; and three reporters, one from as far away as Plymouth-plus Pete Williams, who had been hanging around all week, having come all the way from London.

Williams was an English writer who was researching a book (Movers and Shakers of the Earth) on personalities in the environmental movement. He had originally applied to be a consortium fellow himself but had been turned down by Kozlov as having no original contribution to offer. He had shown up anyway, staying at a B amp;B in town, and had interviewed some of the attendees for his book. Villarreal had denied his request for an interview with rather nasty condescension.

But Williams had gotten his own back at the Methodist Hall session, pretty much commandeering the question-and-answer session. He had fired hard questions at Villarreal, at first about his sense of responsibility and regret for the deaths of the two students in the Bitterroot Wilderness Area. Villarreal had put him off with pro forma regrets-“these things happen,” “restoring the wilderness comes with a price,” “they obviously didn’t take proper precautions,” and so on. Many had been shocked at his indifference.

Then it had turned personal. There was apparently a history of enmity between the two men, and an increasingly agitated Williams had made it clear that Villarreal was going to be “exposed” in the book he was writing.

“Isn’t it true,” he’d demanded at one point, “that you never finished your Ph. D. at Cornell, even though you advertise yourself as Doctor Villarreal?”

“That’s so,” Villarreal had responded, “but I do have a doctorate from Stanford.”

“An honorary doctorate!” Williams had shrieked triumphantly. “And isn’t it true-”

Villarreal had gotten contemptuously to his feet and outshouted him. “Isn’t it true that you’ve been playing second fiddle to me for years and just can’t stand it? Isn’t it true that you applied to this consortium and didn’t get in, while I did? Isn’t it true that you applied for the Cambridge research fellowship and didn’t get it because I did? And isn’t it true…”

In the end, Kozlov had stepped in and asked Williams to leave, although it took a constable who was in attendance to make it happen.

Villarreal had waited until Williams had been escorted out before getting in the last word. “And if anybody wants to know what I’m really sorry about,” he’d declared brutally, “what I really regret-it’s that they killed that bear in Montana. There was no need for that. What was the point? Human stupidity is not an excuse for murdering a rare, beautiful wild animal.”

“A cold fish, all right,” Gideon said now.

“It so happens I agree with him,” Joey declared, or rather blurted. “Intellectually speaking.”

“Oh, pish-tush,” Liz said with a flap of her hand. “You do not.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t,” said Julie.

“Yes, I do!” Joey’s voice went up half an octave, coming perilously close to a screech. “All right, sure, Edgar was no prize as a human being, but that doesn’t mean that what he said wasn’t right. I’ll trade a human life for a grizzly’s life any day of the week. There’s no difference between Edgar and me on that score.” He glared at the three of them, his tic going full blast.

“Sure, there is,” Liz said, using her thumb to flip another chocolate-covered cookie to him, which he deftly snatched out of the air. “That sonofabitch really believed that shit. You don’t.”

Joey started to reply, then grinned and hung his head. “Maybe not every word.”

“Look who’s here,” Julie said glancing up. “Victor.”

Gideon followed her gaze with a mixture of curiosity and dread. If there was one certified wacko in the group, he thought, it had to be Victor Waldo, editor of the Journal of Spiritual and Sacred Ecology and founder of the Crystal Butte Earth/Body Center, located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. (“Effortlessly absorb timeless shamanistic techniques for healing, growth, and homeostasis in our authentic Kirghiz mountain yurts.”)

Once again, however, Gideon was surprised at what he saw. He’d half-expected a bearded dropout in a tie-dyed sweatshirt, or maybe fringed buckskin, or with a ratty Afghan thrown over his shoulders, but Victor Waldo’s long chin was clean-shaven and his lean body was neatly attired in a tweed sport coat and well-pressed trousers. With his short, steel-gray hair, his proboscis of a nose-lifted slightly as if searching for an elusive scent-his pale, cold, intelligent eyes, and an all-around dryness of manner, he could have passed with ease for a professor of microeconomics. It was very hard indeed to imagine him thumping ceremonial drums, or whatever it was they did in an authentic Kirghiz mountain yurt.

“Hey, Victor, how you doing?” Liz yelled. “Come join us. Is Kathie with you?”

Waldo waited until he came within normal speaking range to reply. “No, she isn’t. As a matter of fact, Kathie and I are no longer… No, she isn’t. We’ve separated.”

That prompted a knowing, embarrassed glance between Liz and Julie, and they quickly moved on to another subject. “Pull up a chair, Victor,” Liz said. “Have you heard about Edgar?”

He had not, and after the bear story had been told once again and Waldo had expressed the requisite astonishment and a distinctly cool minimum of sorrow at his loss, Gideon, in the interest of furthering his own knowledge, apologized for never having read the Journal, and asked if Waldo would be kind enough to give him some idea of what exactly the province of spiritual and sacred ecology comprised. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Liz wince.

Like any expert asked to talk about his field, Waldo obliged with an enthusiasm that brought a stony glitter to his washed-out blue eyes. “Certainly. In a nutshell, it provides an alternative paradigm to the non-relational ways of being in the world that have traditionally dominated Western thought. It relies on a model that aims for a synergistic relationship with other species and ecosystems. It explores the dialectic between…”

Good gosh, Gideon thought, he even talks like a professor of microeconomics.

“… indigenous world views, earth-connected spirituality-”

The disembodied voice from the loudspeakers came to the rescue by resuming its tranquil monologue: “And now, as the beautiful Isle of St. Mary’s comes into our near view, its rocks reveal the ravages of time and tide, against which-”

Everyone took this as a signal to gather up belongings and move toward the exits. After quick handshakes all around, Julie and Gideon found themselves out on deck in the disembarkation line as the ferry slid sidewise up to the Hugh Town quay.

“What did you think of Victor?” a smiling Julie asked.

“Interesting. Not that I had a clue to what he was talking about.”

“No, nobody does. But he is interesting.”

“Why did Kozlov choose him? Is it just one more way of annoying the establishment?

“No, I don’t think so. I think Vasily is simply a genuinely open-minded person who doesn’t write off people because they don’t happen to agree with his own views on science.” She paused for a beat. “Not like some people I know.”

“Hey…” Gideon said, laughing.

Julie pointed to a green promontory topped by a low, gray, undeniably Elizabethan castle that was surrounded by a walled, star-shaped keep.

“That’s Garrison Hill,” she said, “and that’s Kozlov’s place on top of it. Star Castle.”

“Looks nice.”

“It is. There’ll be a van on the dock to pick up our bags for us, and we’re early, so what do you say we stretch our legs a little and walk up to the castle? I’ll give you a tour of Hugh Town on the way. It won’t take long.”

“Love to.”

Hugh Town was more village than town, a narrow, quarter-mile-long neck of land connecting Garrison Hill to the rest of the island, bordered by Town Beach on one side and the brilliant white sand of Porthcressa Beach on the other. Only three streets wide, it had a couple of banks, a chemist, three or four pubs and hotels, as many restaurants, a not so super “supermarket,” and a few guest houses and craft shops. All in all, a quiet, pleasant, prosperous, not overly quaint British village of the sort that had once been typical of England but was rarely to be found now, certainly not within fifty miles of London.

Its particular glory was in the rock gardens and in the cascading masses of flowers that were everywhere, sustained by a subtropical climate that felt more like Bermuda than Britain. Even with stopping often to admire the plantings, in less than an hour they had covered every foot of Hugh Street, the Strand, and the Parade, had walked up Garrison Hill Lane, and had entered the castle grounds through a massive stone gateway with ER 1593 carved deeply into the lintel.

Seen from inside the thick walls, Star Castle was not quite as impressive as it had seemed from the dock. A squat three stories high, with little in the way of ornamentation, it had been built with fortification in mind, not high living. It had stood without apparent decline for over four hundred years now and looked good for another four hundred at least.

Kozlov was not there to greet them. They were met in a tiny office-reception area by his secretary, a pale, soft man-like some delicate, vulnerable crustacean that had come into the light without its shell-who presented a quiet but distinctly starchy mien. (“I am Mr. Kozlov’s majordomo. My name is Mr. Moreton.”) He showed them to the guest rooms on the second floor, and opened a door on which there was a marble plaque: THE DUKE OF HAMILTON ROOM. Inside it was sparely but comfortably furnished: a big four-poster bed, two chairs, an ancient armoire, and a folding writing desk.

“And who was the Duke of Hamilton?” Gideon asked. “Was he a guest here?”

“He was a prisoner in this room in the year 1643. The rooms, you see, are named for the many notables who have been imprisoned here.”

“Ah. And what did the duke do?”

“I understand his loyalty to the monarchy was held in question. He was believed to be a supporter of Cromwell, although there is room for doubt on the matter.”

“Last year,” Julie said, “I was next door in the Sir John Wildman Room. He was imprisoned for being disloyal to Cromwell and supporting the monarchy.”

“Times change,” Gideon observed.

Mr. Moreton’s hand swept the surroundings. “I’m told the duke found his lodgings here quite comfortable.”

“And I know we will too,” said Julie.

Pleased, Mr. Moreton brushed a finger along either side of an immaculately trimmed, pencil-thin mustache. “The reception is at six,” he told them. “A number of local dignitaries have been invited.”

“Thank you, Mr. Moreton,” Gideon said.

“Dinner will be at seven-thirty, in the dungeon. Madam. Sir.” He closed the door soundlessly behind him.

“Now there’s a line that hasn’t been heard since The Addams Family ,” Gideon remarked when he’d left. “Dinner in the dungeon. What do we get, gruel?”

“I doubt it,” Julie said, laughing. “As dungeons go, it’s pretty nice. You’ll see, you’ll be impressed.”

“I’m already impressed. I never met a real majordomo before.”

A few minutes later, with their bags open on the beds, she paused in her arranging of the bags’ contents in the armoire. (This was a task that always fell to Julie. The alternative was chaos, bewilderment, and wrinkled clothes.)

“Gideon?”

“Mm?” He was wandering absently around the room, testing out the window seat that was cut into the three-foot-thick walls, running his hand over the rough-plastered walls themselves, the age-darkened wood of the eighteenth-century armoire, and the smooth round columns of the bed, and taking in the primitively carved, dark-painted beams that supported the low ceilings. “Those are real adze marks on them,” he mused, his head tipped back. He was able to reach them with his hand and feel the delicate scoring from the individual adze blows. “Probably the original sixteenth-century beams.”

“Gideon, tonight’s reception-you will be there for that, won’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you’ll be nice to everyone?”

He looked at her, surprised. “When am I not nice to everyone? I was nice to Joey Dillard, wasn’t I? And he was wearing buttons.”

“Well, I was just thinking… if it’s like last time, Vasily will be making a sort of speech to set the agenda, and he does have some, uh, odd ideas about evolution and things that even I can spot. If he should say something that isn’t exactly accurate, you won’t jump all over him, will you?”

Gideon sighed. “I can’t win, can I? Last night you were upset because I didn’t want to participate. Today all you want is for me to keep my lip buttoned.”

“I just want… Oh, come on, you know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Julie,” he said, as they closed the door to their room behind them, “you can count on me. I will be the very model of decorum and restraint; the perfect spouse.”