Uneasy Relations (10 page)

At the head table, however, things were considerably more stilted. Gunderson’s resources seemed to diminish by the minute. Audrey and Adrian, on either side of him, worked at trying to engage him in conversation, but Gunderson, eating with the single-minded avidity of the aged for their remaining pleasures, was in a ravenous world of his own, devouring his food as if he’d never have another opportunity. Gideon’s heart sank further every time he looked up at him.

The only comment he was heard to make came when he had finished using a roll to mop up every last scrap of his dinner (an action that would have been unthinkable in the Ivan Gunderson of a few years ago).

“I don’t remember my mother,” Gunderson said suddenly and quite loudly, “but as I may have told you before, when my father remarried, his new wife brought her three grown daughters to live with us: Sally, Veronica, and Annie-Maude. So there I was, one impressionable young boy of eleven who’d never been around women, suddenly surrounded by a household of four of them.
Four
of them! Now that’s enough to give anyone pause.”

Everyone waited for whatever was coming next — a joke, an apocryphal story — but that was it. He reached for his wine and gazed uneasily about him, obviously wondering why everybody was looking at him.

Audrey cleared her throat. “Perhaps this would be a good time to get on with the ceremonies?”

Yes!
Gideon urged silently.

Gunderson looked up anxiously. “We haven’t had dessert yet.”

“Well, why don’t we begin our ceremonies while we await our dessert and coffee?” Adrian suggested mildly, and then, before Gunderson could reply, he said, “Rowley, why don’t you start the festivities? ”

Rowley hurriedly took his unlit pipe from his mouth, stood up, blushing, and made a warm, pleasant little speech about how much Gunderson had meant to the Territory of Gibraltar, recounting how the very first Neanderthal skeleton ever to be found anywhere, a female, had actually been discovered there in 1848, but no one had understood what it was until after a similar skeleton, a male, had turned up eight years later in the Neander Valley —
das Neander Thal
— near Dusseldorf.

“And so what might have been ‘Gibraltar Woman’ became instead ‘Neanderthal Man,’” Rowley said, “robbing Gibraltar of its rightful place in the history of archaeology. That is, until the, ah, eminent gentleman seated there to my left came along” — he smiled down at Gunderson, who smiled back — “and provided the impetus and insight that led to the wonderful discoveries at Europa Point. We now not only have Gibraltar Woman but Gibraltar Boy as well — the justly celebrated First Family — catapulting Gibraltar back into the mainstream, indeed, the forefront of prehistoric archaeology.”

He turned to face Gunderson directly. “Ivan, on behalf of the Historical Association, it is my great pleasure and honor to present you with this year’s Mons Calpe Medal in recognition of your many contributions, moral, financial, and advisory to the Gibraltar Museum of Archaeology and Geology.”

He raised the award high for all to see — a gleaming Roman coin (“Mons Calpe” was the Romans’ name for Gibraltar) — hung on a gold chain that was stitched down the center of a wide, red-and-white-striped ribbon. When Gunderson rose to accept it, head modestly bowed, Rowley placed it around his neck, draping the ribbon almost tenderly over his shoulders.

In a rattle of nervous applause, Gunderson shook hands with Rowley and faced the assembled guests. He looked genuinely touched. He also looked as if he might be back in reasonable form. All held their breath as he opened his mouth to speak.

“Thank you so much for this honor,” he said smoothly and sincerely, at which the collective, inheld breath was released, “which I must in all honesty say is completely undeserved. It is Dr. Vanderwater who did the work and brought forth the great achievement; Dr. Vanderwater and his extremely accomplished staff—”

An imperial, benevolent nod and wave from Adrian, simpers from Corbin and Pru.

“—some of whom I am extremely gratified to see here tonight. But whether I deserve it or not” — a humorous twinkle lit his eyes — “I’d just like to see anyone try and get it away from me.” He sat down smiling. “Thank you all for this wonderful, wonderful evening.” Then, as an afterthought: “You’ve made an old man very happy.”

The applause was heartfelt this time. People were moved by the occasion, and thankful and relieved that Gunderson had been able to handle it with his old flair. By now coffee and dessert had been brought, and at Audrey’s suggestion, the presentation of the V. Gordon Childe award was held off until the almond crème brûlée had been disposed of. Gunderson reverted to the same intent, glitter-eyed greed he’d shown with the main course, and only when he’d scraped the sides of the fluted cup clean and finally lain down his spoon, did she arise.

Her speech was as short as Rowley’s, if not quite as warm. She brought the award, a gold-plated trowel on an onyx base, from the floor behind her and placed it on the table in front of Gunderson. “The directorial board of the Horizon Foundation has unanimously determined that this year’s V. Gordon Childe Lifetime Achievement Award in Archaeology be awarded to Ivan Samuel Gunderson in appreciation of his many contributions to the understanding of European prehistory, and his great success in sensitively interpreting it for readers and television viewers throughout the world. Congratulations, Ivan.”

Again Gunderson stood, accepted the trophy, and shook hands. Again he faced his audience.

“Thank you so much for this honor, which I must in all honesty say is completely undeserved. It is Dr. Vanderwater who did the work and brought forth the great achievement; Dr. Vanderwater—”

The smiles on the faces of his appalled audience turned wooden. Troubled glances shot around the table.

“—and his extremely accomplished staff, some of whom I am extremely gratified to see here tonight. But whether I deserve it or not, I’d just like to see anyone try and get it away from me. Thank you all for this wonderful, wonderful evening. You’ve made an old man very happy.”

What made it especially horrible was that he said it with all the same easy verve and informal good humor, even the very same stresses and pauses, the same twinkles and smiles at all the same places. Even the identical brief hiatus before the last, “spontaneous,” throwaway sentence. He had no idea that he made the same carefully rehearsed speech only a few minutes before.

The attendees smiled and clapped, doing their best to cover their dismay, but Gunderson sensed that he’d done something wrong, although he didn’t know what.

“And I . . . I just want to add,” he began uncertainly from his seat, “that, that . . . the proudest accomplishment of my life has been the privilege, the privilege of, of having been . . . been instrumental in the discovery of, of . . .” Sweat streamed down beside his eyes in runnels as he desperately rummaged, in a disordered and inaccessible mind, for the words he wanted. “. . . the discovery of . . . Guadalcanal Woman,” he finally spat out wretchedly, “and Guadalcanal . . .” but his darting, panicked eyes showed that, while he saw from the expressions around him that he’d missed his target, he had no idea of where or how to find it. He looked anxiously, pathetically, at Rowley. “Did I misspeak? I misspoke, didn’t I?”

“Not at all, Ivan,” Adrian cut in with his warmest smile. “It was a wonderful speech, and a wonderful way to end the evening.”

“Wonderful, wonderful,” others echoed and there was yet another round of applause. Gideon joined in, but he could feel tears at the corners of his eyes.

“I’ll drive you home,” Rowley said, quick to seize on his cue. He too was on the edge of weeping. The good-byes were muted and hurried, and within a couple of minutes he was leading a shambling, confused Gunderson, clutching his prizes, out of the room. He looked fifteen years older than when he’d come in.

The remaining diners looked mutely, glumly at their coffee cups. “Guadalcanal Woman,” Pru said softly. “Where did that come from?”

“He was back in 1942,” Adrian said with a melancholy smile. “Ivan was in the Marines, you know. He spent more than a year in the South Pacific. A life-altering experience. He talked about it often.”

“
Very
often,” Audrey said drily.

“If he fought with the Marines at Guadalcanal, he had a right to talk about it,” Buck said, in a rare reprimand to Audrey. “Guadalcanal. Jesus.”

In the silence that followed, Pru let out a long, lip-flapping sigh. “Well. I don’t think this was one of his better days,” she said.

JULIE
stretched, sighed, and let her head fall back on the pillow. “Let’s be decadent this morning—”

“We’ve already been decadent this morning,” Gideon pointed out, nuzzling the ear lobe nearest him.

She laughed. “Then let’s continue in that vein, and order up a room service breakfast. We can have it out on the balcony in those lovely terry cloth robes.”

Their room’s generous balcony was two floors above the Wisteria Terrace, so the view was, if anything, even more grand than from the terrace. Through the French doors, which they’d left open during the night, they could see the winding paths and lush plantings of the public gardens just below, the bay a little farther out, and off to the left the Strait of Gibraltar and the dusky mountains of Africa, shimmering in their haze as the early morning sun found them.

“I’m for that,” Gideon said. “How about if I order up a good, greasy, thoroughly decadent full English breakfast — the Full Monty?”

“I’m for
that
,” Julie said. “I’m starving.”

Over their mammoth breakfasts — fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled tomato, mushrooms, baked beans, white toast in a rack, marmalade, butter, and a cozy-covered pot of tea — they worked out their plans for the day.

“Well, you’ve got your lecture to give at noon,” Julie said. “Where is that going to be again?”

“St. Michael’s Cave. It’s a set of natural caverns up on the Rock, and they use one of them as a lecture hall. That’ll be over by one, and then we have a late lunch date with Fausto at one thirty.”

Several years before, Gideon had lectured in an international forensics symposium for criminal justice personnel, held in St. Malo, France, and Fausto Sotomayor, then a young detective constable in the Royal Gibraltar Police, had been an attendee. Since then, he had been in intermittent touch with Gideon with one technical question or another, and they had become e-mail buddies of a sort, dropping each other a few lines now and then. They’d seen him briefly the day before, when Fausto, now much glorified — a detective chief inspector, no less — had insisted on driving them into town from the airport, and had invited them to lunch today at a downtown pub.

“What about before your talk?” Julie asked, spreading marmalade on a wedge of toast. “Are you free?”

“Mostly, but I did want to sit in on one of the paleoanthropological society papers at nine thirty. They’re holding the conference down at the Eliott Hotel.”

“What’s the topic? Maybe I’ll join you.”

“The title is . . .” He consulted the conference program he’d brought out with them. “The title is — um, no, I have a hunch you won’t be interested — ‘A Bio-Mechanical Assessment of Cranial Base Architecture in the Hominoidea.’ ”

She made a face. “Your hunch is correct. Tell you what: let’s stretch our legs and stroll down the hill into town. We’ll have an hour or so, maybe get a cup of coffee somewhere?”

He smiled. Tea was nice, very British and all that, but for both of them, a couple of cups of coffee in the morning were a necessity for comprehensive physiological functioning.

“Sounds good, Julie.”

“And then I think I’ll pick up a guidebook and just explore the sights until we meet your friend for lunch.”

“You don’t want to sit in on my presentation?”

“Would you mind very much if I didn’t? I
have
seen this one before. ”

“No, I don’t mind.”

To be honest, he preferred it that way. How could you be expected to enter fully into your exalted role as one of the world’s foremost forensic scientists when the woman who told you when to take out the garbage was sitting in the first row watching you? “I’ll see you at lunch then. The Angry Friar. Fausto says you can’t miss it. On Main Street, in the middle of town. Right across from the Governor’s Residence.”

While they spoke, he had been leafing cursorily through the conference program, and now something, a boxed item on the last page of the schedule, caught his eye. “ ’Close-of-conference reception,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘proudly sponsored by Javelin Press to celebrate the publication of
Uneasy Relations: Humans and Neanderthals at the Dawn of History: Implications for Today’s World
, by Rowley G. Boyd. 5:00-7:00 P.M., Eliottt Hotel Poolside Terrace (on top floor). Open bar and heavy hors d’oeuvres. Government and cultural dignitaries have been invited to attend.’ ” He looked at her. “What do you know, Lester really is doing his book launch here. I half thought he was kidding.”

“
Uneasy Relations: Humans and Neanderthals at the Dawn of History: Implications for Today’s World
,” Julie repeated. “Now there’s a mouthful.”

“It sure is. I bet Rowley had a heck of a time talking him out of
Making It with a Neanderthal
, or
Caveman Sex
.”

“But are these academics really going to show up for it, do you think?” Julie asked. “I mean, no offense to Rowley, but would these people be that interested in what he has to say?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Gideon said, laughing. “Free booze, free food — of
course
they’ll attend.”

Delivered with the meal was a folded copy of the
Gibraltar Chronicle
(“The Independent Daily — First Published 1801”), and now, while Gideon contentedly sipped his third cup of tea and continued with the program, Julie unfolded it to browse.

“Oh, boy,” she said the moment she looked at it.

He glanced at her. “What?”

Mutely, she handed the paper to him.

And there it was again, big and bold, and apparently tracking him around the world like a vindictive ex-spouse.