“Are you good at it?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. I’m figuring on getting that twenty bucks back.”
“Good luck. They tell me Vasily turns into a shark when he gets behind a handful of cards.”
“So do I. Wait and see. I’ll buy you lunch tomorrow with my winnings.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” Julie said neutrally. “Oh, and here’s the last of our Fellows. Donald Pinckney, this is my husband, Gideon.”
“Happy to meet you, Donald.” Gideon stuck out his hand and smiled, but his heart sank: another guy wearing a button.
But this bright yellow one made him laugh. If we’re not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?
Donald Pinckney, he remembered, was the pro-hunting voice at the consortium, but he looked about as much like Gideon’s idea of a hunter as Joey Dillard looked like an investigative reporter. A tall, balding, bookish man in a crisp blue linen sport coat and bow tie, with mild, seemingly myopic eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, he seemed like the last person in the world who would willingly be found crouching in a cold, wet duck blind at dawn, with a shotgun to his shoulder.
“And I you, Gideon,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your books, but—”
“What? You haven’t read A Structuro-Functional Approach to Pleistocene Hominid Phylogeny} I can hardly believe what I’m hearing.”
“I need hardly say, however, that it is quite naturally on my must-read list at present,” Pinckney said without missing a beat. “But what I was going to say was that I saw you on The Learning Channel not long ago and was extremely impressed by what you’re able to deduce from a few skeletal fragments.”
“Only if they’re the right fragments,” Gideon said modestly. “Fortunately, the TV people had the right fragments. I’ve read a few of your pieces, Donald, and I have to say you make a heck of a good case for hunting as a positive conservation measure; I’m almost convinced myself.”
“I’m gratified to hear it.”
“What’s your favorite game?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I was asking what kind of animals you like to hunt—deer, ducks, um…” What else did hunters go after? “… elk, geese, um…”
“What kind of—” Pinckney blinked at him, pained. “Are you serious? Do I look to you to be the sort of man who’d go around with a gun, shooting ducks and geese? Let alone gutting them and all the rest of it?” He gave a small shudder. “No, thank you.”
“But I thought—I mean, don’t you—”
“Donald is an advocate of ethical, environmentally sensitive hunting,” Julie said, enjoying this. “It doesn’t mean that he likes doing it himself.”
“Any more than I would enjoy electrocuting people, which I wouldn’t,” Pinckney explained, “just because I support capital punishment, which I do.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Gideon said, with enough doubt in his voice that Pinckney felt it necessary to expand.
“I was an administrator with the Pennsylvania Department of Fish and Wildlife for twenty-one years, Gideon, and in that time I moderated a good many meetings with various lobbying and pressure groups. Against my own instincts, I eventually concluded that, motives aside, the pro-hunting lobby had an extremely sound approach to wildlife conservation; a good deal sounder—and considerably less shrill—than the anti-hunting groups.” He directed a disparaging flick of his head in the direction of Joey Dillard, who was busy proselytizing a small, captive audience a few yards away. “I’ve been saying so ever since, that’s all.”
He looked again toward where Joey was holding forth. “Would you mind excusing me? I feel a strong need to go and correct whatever distortions of reality our earnest young friend is inflicting on those unfortunate people. I’m very happy to know you, Gideon.” He nodded briskly at Julie. “Julene.”
There was the delicate sound of a musical triangle being rung for attention, and they turned to see the pale, stately Mr. Moreton standing in front of one of the gun ports, delicately striking it with a metal rod that he held with pinky extended. Tink. Tink. Tink.
Kozlov, who had clambered onto the two stone steps leading up to the port, waved happily to his guests, arms high, like a feisty bantamweight entering the ring. The sun, setting directly behind him, turned his wild hair into a halo of steel wool.
“Here comes the speech,” Julie said. “Remember, you promised.”
But Kozlov uttered only four words, thoroughly garbled, but full of good cheer.
“Hawkay, evwerybawdyss… lat’s itt!”
“What did the man say?” someone next to Gideon asked. “Was he speaking Russian?”
“No, English,” Gideon said. “He said, ”Okay, everybody, let’s eat.“ ” And to Julie: “And I’m certainly not going to argue with that.”
THE dungeon was indeed “pretty nice,” as dungeons went, with coves and niches that roughly corresponded to the castle’s star-shaped exterior, and a paramecium-shaped bar in the small, open central area. The rough-finished stone walls bore a clean coat of white paint and were adorned with eighteenth-century weaponry and navigational equipment. At one end of the bar, a bronze plate screwed to the top said: “African hardwood from the wreck of HMS Retort, sunk by French gunfire off the Stones in 1799.”
Because there was no single space large enough to hold all the guests at one table, people were seated in groups of three and four in the various niches. Gideon’s place was at a table also apparently made from the remains
