Uneasy Relations (26 page)

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.

“Estéban,” 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 Andalucía, 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?”

JULIE
too blinked at the mention of the name. “There’s a Guadalcanal in Spain?”

“Sure,” Gideon said unhappily, “why wouldn’t there be? There’s a Guadalquivir, a Guadalupe, a Guadalajara . . . why wouldn’t there be a Guadalcanal?” He shook his head. “It should have occurred to me before.”

“And that’s where Gibraltar Woman really came from? Or I guess I should say, ‘Guadalcanal Woman.’ ”

“I guess you should. Ivan had it right that night, after all.”

They were sharing a bench on the Line Wall Promenade, a park-like esplanade atop a portion of the old fortified town wall, where the ranks of gleaming, black cannons that had once defended the colony against flotillas of seaborne invaders now protected it against the cars in the landfill parking lot just below. In the distance, the impending sunset over smoggy Algeciras across the bay looked as beautiful as ever. Gideon, slouching uncharacteristically against the seat back, his legs extended, his hands in his pockets, had just given Julie the upshot of his visit there, as far as he and Fausto had worked it out on the drive back to Gibraltar.

In a nutshell, the First Family was a fake. The dig had been “salted.” The trustworthy, decent, reliable Ivan Gunderson had pulled off the biggest anthropological scam since — well, yes, since Piltdown Man. Oh, the dig at Gibraltar Point had been honestly and efficiently administered by Adrian and Corbin, no reason to doubt that, and Gibraltar Boy was (probably) an authentic member — a Neanderthal child — of the group that had lived there. That much still held up. But the fly, the very large fly, in the ointment was Gibraltar Woman, who didn’t belong there at all. And without Gibraltar Woman, Europa Point was just one more moderately interesting Neanderthal site; the whole wonderful edifice of theory, hypothesis, and feel-goodness that had been constructed around the First Family came crumbling down.

In retrospect, it wasn’t that hard to see how Ivan had pulled it off. He had, after all, been working both the Guadalcanal and Europa Point sites at the same time, back in 2000. At that time, as he usually did, he was working with crews of local laborers, not trained archaeologists or even students (since he didn’t have any), so there was no one at either dig with the experience or knowledge — or interest — to note any funny business on his part. Apparently, he had found the remains of Gibraltar Boy at Europa Point and been struck by their somewhat ambiguous appearance, which could conceivably be taken as a mixture of human and Neanderthal traits. Prompted by whatever compulsion or momentary impulse — and no one was ever likely to know for sure what it was — he decided to give his beloved admixture theory a colossal shot in the arm. From the Guadalcanal site he took what he needed — parts of the cranium, shoulder girdle, arms, and upper vertebral column of the female remains he’d found there, brought them to his other excavation at Europa Point, carefully tucked them into the soon-to-be-famous “hanging crevice” with Gibraltar Boy, and covered them over.

“But why would he have left
any
of her up at Guadalcanal?” Julie asked. “Wouldn’t it have been better — safer — to take the whole skeleton? ”

Gideon shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe people already knew that there was a partial skeleton there, so he couldn’t take it all. Or perhaps someone came along and interrupted him. Or, most likely, it’s simply that the upper part was all he needed for the hoax. So that’s what he took, along with a few fragments of the lower body so it didn’t look too remarkable. Why risk fooling around trying to find and dig up the rest?”

Whatever the reason, once that was accomplished, Gunderson donated the Guadalcanal dig to the University of Cádiz, and the Gibraltar Point site to the Horizon Foundation. After that, it was merely a matter of sitting back and waiting for the world-shaking discovery of the First Family. It must have been a long, devilishly impatient wait, because, bureaucracy being what it is, it wasn’t until March 2002, two years later, that the Horizon Foundation got through the usual red tape and legalese and began excavation. And then another six months, now under Adrian’s methodical direction, before they got to the hanging crevice and news of the First Family burst upon the world. In the meantime, up in Guadalcanal, where the red tape was pretty loose, to say the least, the lower portion of the female’s remains had long ago been excavated by de la Garza’s students and had gone onto their unheralded postmortem career as teaching tools in the polytechnic institute in Algeciras.

“I’m having a hard time with that part of it,” Julie said with a frown. “These people — Adrian, Corbin, Pru — they’re all professionals, they know what they’re doing, isn’t that true?”

“Sure, pretty much. Pru maybe isn’t quite as experienced in field-work as the others, but what’s your point?”

“My point is: How could they all have been fooled? How could Ivan have gotten away with it? Aren’t there signs when a dig had been messed with like that? Doesn’t it disturb the sediments, or strata, or whatever you call them? Can’t a competent archaeologist recognize a, a . . . what do you call it, an inserted burial?”

“An intrusive burial. And yes, sure there are signs, because when you do what Ivan did — insert bones or anything else at a level they don’t belong, you necessarily disturb the beds — the layers — of sediment above it. It’s not that hard to spot.”

“Well, that’s my question. Why didn’t they spot it?”

“They did spot it, as a matter of fact. On the way back, I stopped by the conference downtown to ask Pru about it, and she said right out that there was no question about it. The burial itself was in bed IV, down at the bottom, so ordinarily, you’d expect the more recent layers — beds I, II, and III — to be intact above it.”

“But . . . ?”

“But when a farmer with his bulldozer has been there before you, doing his damndest to turn the place into a mushroom farm, all bets are off.”

“Okay, I see that,” she said, nodding, “but I would have thought there were some kind of geological tests that could confirm it, one way or the other.”

“There are: soil tests, skeletal tests, tests on associated flora and fauna. And I have no doubt they are now going to be performed. But they’re expensive and they take time. You don’t do them unless you have some specific reason.”

“And the possibility of a hoax wasn’t a good enough reason?”