“You mean on purpose?”
“On purpose or accidentally.”
“How could they push you off accidentally?”
“Come on, just answer-”
“No, I never heard of it. Why?” He was getting irritated. In that way he was like any cop. He preferred asking the questions.
“Gideon thinks he may have been the first,” Julie put in.
“The first to live to tell about it, anyway,” Fausto said with a snort. “That’s for sure.”
“Gideon,” Julie said, “I thought you agreed there wasn’t anything suspicious about that.”
“Well, I did, but then today at my lecture-”
“Oh, I forgot to ask,” Julie said. “How did it go?”
“Just fine, absolutely great, except for the part where I nearly got electrocuted.”
She started to laugh, but then saw he was serious. “What happened? ”
Gideon told them.
“And your conclusion?” Fausto said. He had eaten most of his dish, shoved it away, and pulled the napkin out of his collar. Gideon had eaten about half of his ploughman’s, Julie none of her gazpacho. Coffee had been ordered – tea for Fausto – and brought to the table.
“I don’t know,” Gideon said. “Everything might be explainable, taken one thing at a time – accident, carelessness – but to have been almost killed twice in less than twenty-four hours-”
“Brings to mind the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business,” Fausto said, dropping three cubes of sugar into his tea.
Gideon was surprised. “How do you know about the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business?”
“You talked about it in the seminar. Goldstein’s Theorem of Interconnected Monkey Business. Hell, it’s practically my mantra.”
Gideon’s too. It was a “law” posited only partly in jest by Gideon’s old professor and all-around mentor Abe Goldstein. When too many suspicious but seemingly unrelated things – too much monkey business – start cropping up in a short time, to the same people, in the same context, you can bet on there being some connection between them.
The three of them sat there looking somberly at each other until Julie said: “But why would anyone want to kill you?” The last time she had asked him that had been yesterday, after the incident on the Rock, when she had been trying to convince him that the idea was silly. This time, he was glad to see, it was meant as a serious question. It was her support, her backup, that he wanted, not her skepticism.
Fausto took it seriously too. “We’ll want that lamp,” he said, pulling a cell phone from his inside pocket. “I’ll have one of my-”
Gideon lifted the lumpy plastic shopping bag he’d set down beside his chair. “I figured you would. Here it is. The wires haven’t been cut, I could see that much. Not cleanly, not with a knife or a snipper. They look frayed, the same as the cord fabric, but whether they’ve been filed to look that way, or just worn through on their own, I don’t know.”
Fausto had opened the mouth of the bag, and without touching the lamp, was peering as well as he could at the torn area of the cord. “Can’t tell. Maybe filed, maybe just frayed. We’ll have to see.”
“How long will that take? Do you have a lab here?”
“Yeah, we have a lab, but I’m not sure they’ll know how to do this kind of thing. Might have to send it off to FSS – the Forensic Science Service Lab in London. If my people can handle it, I’ll have the results tomorrow. If it has to go to London… who knows?” He studied his buffed and manicured fingernails, letting a beat pass. “Listen, maybe I should assign you some protection,” he said casually. “Somebody to kind of keep an eye on you. Very discreet, of course. Just in case.”
“That’s a good idea,” Julie said.
Gideon shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“If you’d had somebody with you,” she said, “that thing up on the Rock would never have happened. Even if it was just a monkey.”
“No, but somebody trailing me around wouldn’t have stopped what happened in the cave. That mat was removed when I wasn’t even anywhere near it, and the lamp had been fooled with before I ever got there.” And not by a monkey, he said to himself. “Assuming it was fooled with,” he added to show he was being open-minded.
“But-”
“No, Julie, I think I just have to be careful, that’s all. Whoever’s doing it – if somebody’s really doing it – obviously wants it to look like an accident, so he’s not going to shoot me or stab me. I just have to watch my step.”
“I gotta agree,” Fausto said. “Change your mind, tell me.”
“I don’t suppose you’d consider our going back home?” Julie said doubtfully. “After all, you’ve had the testimonial for Ivan, you’ve made your public presentation, all that’s left are the meetings, and I’m sure… no, I didn’t think so.”
“But you know,” he said, “ you might want to – no, I didn’t think so.”
“Whither thou goest,” Julie said with a smile.
“What made you ask about Sheila Chan?” Fausto wanted to know. “Are you saying there might be a connection there?”
“I was thinking so, yes.”
“That was two years ago. And you never even knew her. What’s the connection?”
“Just that we both worked on the Europa Point dig – well, she worked on the actual dig, I worked on the bones in the lab later on – so it just seemed to me-”
“Not much of a connection,” Fausto said.
“No, it isn’t,” Gideon agreed. It had sounded far-fetched to him even as he’d said it. He was getting carried away with the interconnectedness angle.
The phone that was still in Fausto’s hand chirped. He flicked it open and listened. “Oh, hell, where? What do the fire guys say? Okay, have Matt check it out – ah, the hell with it, I better come myself. Twenty minutes.”
He drained the last inch of his tea and stood up, holding his hand out for the bag with the lamp. “Gotta go.”
“Something serious?” Gideon asked.
“Well, a death. Some old guy apparently smoking in bed, falls asleep, burns himself to death. Some people never learn. See you later. I’ll call you soon as I know about the lamp.” He handed them cards, shook hands with the two of them, snatched the check, barely evading Gideon’s grab for it, then paused as he was leaving with the lamp tucked under his arm.
“Well, at least this is one dead body that you can’t fit into your monkey business business.”
As things would turn out, he couldn’t have been more wrong.
TWELVE
Left by themselves, Julie and Gideon ordered more coffee and stayed on for a while.
“It’s got to be your speech,” Julie said thoughtfully, stirring cream into her mug. “Somebody read the articles and thought you were going to reveal something, and they didn’t want you to do it.”
Gideon smiled. “That’s what Pru said. I just laughed.”
“What did she think it was?”
“No, she was just kidding.”
“Well, what do you think? Could that be it?”
He shook his head. “I’m at a loss, Julie. I can’t say it hasn’t occurred to me, but what could I say that would worry somebody so much? And anyway, can you imagine anybody taking those articles seriously I mean, really imagine it?”
“Of course people would take them seriously. The newspapers took them seriously, didn’t they? Why wouldn’t
