“ Maybe someone took them. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That’s one of your mottoes, isn’t it?” He was thumbing restlessly, abstractedly, through the rest of file, not really looking at it.
“Fausto, look at the facts. One-” He ticked the point off on his thumb. “-Sheila Chan’s all set to give a big paper, but before she can do it she gets killed and all her notes disappear. Two-” This one on his index finger. “- I’m scheduled to give a big speech, and somebody does his best to kill me… and comes a lot closer than I like. Three-” The middle finger. “-Gunderson’s scheduled to make some kind of speech at the Europa Point ceremony, but somebody kills him before he can do it and burns his house down to boot. Are you telling me you don’t see a pattern here?”
“I don’t know… yeah, maybe, okay.” Fausto nodded his reluctant agreement, then unexpectedly produced his bark of a laugh. “Hoo boy. Talk about interconnected monkey doodoo. Little did I know that archaeology was such a dangerous profession. Thank Christ these meetings are only once every four or five years. Otherwise we’d be up to our eyeballs in homicides.”
“You probably are up to your eyeballs in homicides,” Gideon said a little grumpily. “You just don’t know it because you don’t have an obliging expert like me around to help you out.”
“Yeah, that must be it,” Fausto said, thinking. The file was still open on his desk. He was drumming his fingers on the topmost form. “Look, I think the place to start with Chan-” He snapped his fingers with a sharp clack that Gideon, an ineffective fingersnapper, envied. “Hey, I just remembered – I think I might know – come on.”
In a flash he was out of his chair, through the door, and hustling down the corridor with his quick, short, decisive steps, heels clicking on the linoleum tiles. Gideon followed, his longer legs allowing him to keep up with a more moderate stride. They went to the booking room, where Gideon had been fingerprinted. The woman who had rolled his prints was sitting at a metal desk, still humming while she used a metal ruler to pencil lines onto a flow chart. As they came in, she stopped humming and sat up straight. “Can I help you, Chief Inspector?”
Fausto’s eyes were hunting around the room, searching for something, not finding it. “Rosie,” he said after a moment, “you used to have a kind of little vase in here. You made it out of a couple of plaster vertebrae that were part of the property inventory from the cave-in out at Europa Point. I don’t see them.”
Rosie swallowed. “Inspector Pullen said it was okay to take them, sir,” she said nervously. “I did ask. I mean, I know that’s not according to the books, but they were just going into the dustbin anyway, and I thought they’d be cute for, you know, a single rose or something, so I just glued them together-”
“I know, I know,” Fausto said in what was as close as he ever came to a soothing tone. “There’s no problem. I just wanted to know where it is. Professor Oliver here wants to have a look at them.”
“It’s not here anymore.”
Damn, Gideon said to himself.
“It’s at home.”
Ah, Gideon said to himself.
“My ten-year-old – she’s interested in bones. She wants to be a medical illustrator – she has it on her desk now. She uses it to hold her favorite pen.” She was half out of her chair. “Do you need it right now, sir? Shall I run home and collect it?”
Fausto looked at Gideon. “Gideon?”
“No, not this minute,” Gideon said. “If you bring it in with you tomorrow, I’ll come by at some point and have a look at it.”
“So how come they decompose?” Fausto asked as they walked back to his office.
“What?”
“How come they decompose?” Fausto asked again. “Bodies that get buried where the flies can’t lay their eggs on them? Why don’t they just shrivel up or something? What, the worms get into them? Is that what does it?”
“As a matter of fact, no. That’s a bum rap that worms have had to live with for centuries. When people first saw maggots wriggling away on corpses they thought they were worms, and it seems to have stuck. But worms don’t eat dead bodies.”
“But bodies still decompose, no matter how deep they’re buried. What makes that happen? What’s the cause, technically? Why don’t they just turn into mummies? Is it the moisture, or…?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. No, you already have all the enzymes and bacteria needed to do the job crawling around inside you – well, enzymes don’t crawl – right now. When you’re alive they help you digest and assimilate foreign substances – food, primarily. When you’re dead they help digest and assimilate you.”
“Sort of like recycling.”
“Exactly like recycling,” Gideon agreed after a moment’s thought.
NINETEEN
“You know,” Gideon said, with his feet up on the railing of the balcony, his hands comfortably clasped at his belt buckle, and a tumbler of Scotch and water on the table beside him, “this interconnected monkey business thing – well, the term is meant to be funny, of course, but it’s not as obvious or as simple – as simplistic – as it sounds. When Abe would get to talking about it, he very quickly got over my head in mathematics, but basically, what he was describing, as much as I could understand of it, was an application of set theory. The sets of people involved in the events, or the events themselves, or the places they happen, or the circumstances they happen in, are all subsets – A, B, C, and so on, of a larger set of people, or events, or whatever: S. And what you’re searching for when you’re trying to make sense of what’s going on is whatever it is that the particular subsets involved have in common; that is, the intersection that they all share; that is, the set of all things that are members of A, B, and C. At the same time, of course, you want to exclude intersections that…”
He frowned, paused, and sighed. “Julie, I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. I got lost about two sentences ago. Is this making any sense at all?”
“Well, let’s just say I still understood it pretty well ten minutes ago, but the more you talk, the fuzzier it gets.”
“Ah, well, math never was my strong point, was it?”
“Don’t feel bad about it. It makes you more human. If you were perfect, you’d really be hell to live with.”
He raised a lazy eyebrow in her direction. “I don’t know that I appreciate the emphasis on that really.”
It was a little before dusk. They were on the balcony of their room at the Rock, looking down on the green palm fronds and winding paths of the Alameda Gardens just below, and farther out, across the Bay of Gibraltar, at the hazy, amber-tinted coast of Spain. Another glorious sunset over Algeciras was on the way. As before, the preprandial miniature twin decanters of sherry and Scotch had been waiting for them when they’d come in, golden and beckoning in the slanting, late afternoon light, along with a pair of stemmed glasses and another of small highball glasses. Although they’d passed on them the previous two days, today they flung open the French doors and took them out onto the balcony to unwind before dinner.
There was plenty of unwinding to be done, what with the latest twists and turns in the matter of Sheila Chan’s demise. They had split the contents of the decanters, each starting with a small glass of sherry and then moving on to the Scotch, and Gideon was halfway through his Scotch by the time he’d finished telling Julie what had developed.
“Anyway,” she said now, “if what we’re looking for is what all these bizarre things have in common – Sheila’s murder, Ivan’s murder, the attacks on you – it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? The Europa Point dig – Gibraltar Boy, the First Family, and all that.”
“Yes, that’s true enough, but everything that’s happening here right now has that in common. Every archaeologist in town – and there must be a hundred of them – is here for the meetings, and the meetings are in commemoration of Europa Point. So it doesn’t tell us anything. See, you want to exclude those intersections that every subset shares simply by virtue of being part of the larger set, S-”
She gave him a warning look.
“What we’re looking for,” he said, “is something that applies more specifically to Sheila, Ivan, and me.”
She sipped her Scotch and gazed across the bay. “I can’t think what that would be.”
