instant he saw what it was, even before it was all the way out of the bag, he caught his breath, dropped it back in, and rolled up the top; casually, he hoped.
But not quickly enough. “What was that thing?” Audrey demanded.
“I have no idea,” he said with a shrug. (He considered the possibility of an apathetic yawn as well, but discarded it as lacking subtlety.) “Probably a present from an admirer – somebody who was at the lecture.”
“It was a vertebra, wasn’t it?” Audrey persisted. “Two vertebrae. Were they human?”
“Looked like it.”
“People send you human vertebrae as presents?”
“You should see the kinds of things people send him,” Julie said.
TWENTY
But no one had ever sent him anything quite like this before, and he wasn’t about to let the rest of the table in on it. His large hand now lay protectively over it. He could barely make himself sit still until he could give it a more careful going-over in private. Already he was beginning to think he must have been mistaken in what the quick glance he’d had at it had told him. But if he was right…
“I’ve taken the liberty of ordering after-dinner coffee and drinks to be served in the bar this evening,” Adrian said, observing that people were beginning to stir. “I thought it would be more comfortable. Shall we go?” As they got up he gestured jocularly at the bag. “Don’t forget your bones.”
“As a matter of fact, I think I’ll drop them off upstairs so I don’t leave them somewhere. Wouldn’t want to shock anybody who happened to pick them up.”
Gideon’s chances of forgetting and leaving them somewhere were about as likely as his forgetting his ears and leaving them somewhere, but he didn’t like the interested looks the bag was getting. While the others shuffled slowly into the Barbary Bar, he retrieved his key from reception (room keys were attached, not to the metal or wooden tags most European hotels used, but to happy little “Barbary ape” plush dolls; another whimsical touch, like the lollipops and the rubber ducks), and punched the elevator button for the second floor,
Alone in the elevator, he quickly had a look at the contents of the bag. Indeed, the vertebrae were just what he’d thought they were. He was sure of it now. My God, this is the most exciting, most unexpected – He caught a sidewise glimpse of himself in the elevator mirror and couldn’t help laughing. Hunched greedily, almost lasciviously, over the open bag, he looked like Silas Marner ogling his hoard of golden coins. And like Silas Marner, it occurred to him that simply leaving them in his room might not be the best idea in the world. When he got to his floor, he didn’t get out but hit the button for the lobby. Once there he went back to the reception desk and had George put the bag in the hotel safe. Then, his head spinning with speculation and conjecture, he took a couple of deep breaths and went to find the others.
In the Barbary Bar, with its evocative, Casablanca -like ambience – rattan armchairs, soft, amber lighting, potted palms, slowly spinning ceiling fans – the talk soon devolved to nostalgic, humorous stories about Ivan. After half an hour everyone moved out through the open doors to the Wisteria Terrace and settled in again for more of the same. To wistful, indulgent laughter, Audrey did a couple of her impressions of Ivan, notorious among archaeologists for his less-than -delicate field methods. (“Oh, no need to fool with a silly trowel to dig those remains out; I’ll just hire a backhoe. Much quicker.”)
By then Gideon was more than ready to go, but he didn’t want to seem eager to get back to the vertebrae so he stuck it out. Finally, at about ten thirty, the last of them to leave – Buck, Audrey, and Corbin – finally made their good nights and went upstairs.
“Now,” said Julie, fixing Gideon with a razor sharp look, “what is going on? What’s so important about those bones that you’ve been on pins and needles ever since you got them?”
His face fell. “Have I been that obvious?” He knew all too well that dissimulation wasn’t his strong suit, but he’d prided himself on having carried things off pretty well this time.
“Maybe not that obvious, except to someone who knows you inside out the way I do, but take my advice and don’t ever go in for professional poker playing.”
“You think they noticed?”
“Probably not. They were too into their Ivan stories. Now tell me; what’s going on?”
“Let’s go up. I’ll pick up the bones and show you.”
“Oh, let’s stay out here a while longer, Gideon. It’s so lovely now that everybody’s gone. Mmm, just smell that air.”
“Nice,” he agreed, not that he’d noticed until she mentioned it. Okay,” he said, standing up. “I’ll bring them out here. Get ready. This is going to knock your socks off.”
A minute later he was back with the bag. He gingerly removed the vertebrae, cradling them carefully in both hands, and placed them on the table between them. It was his first chance for anything more than a hurried look, and although the soft, diffuse lighting on the terrace was anything but conducive to a close examination of skeletal remains, that’s what they were going to get. Julie, understanding, left him to it and sat back with her eyes closed, inhaling the velvety air, lush with the perfumes of the night-blooming plants from the gardens below. “Mmm,” she said again.
“Mmm,” he echoed automatically, but for all he knew the air could have smelled like a lion house on a rainy day. All of his concentration was focused on the extraordinary object in front of him as he slowly rotated it on the tabletop.
It was the “vase” that Rosie, the constable at New Mole House, had taken home for her daughter, constructed of two adjacent thoracic vertebrae glued together, with a circle of aluminum foil Scotch-taped to the bottom to close it up. The foil and Scotch tape were quickly removed and discarded to make the examination easier. The vertebral foramens – the central holes that, all taken together, created the long, narrow, bony tube in which the spinal cord resided – provided an opening big enough for a few flower stems or a couple of pencils. The upper of the two bones was creamy white, the usual color of biological-supply-house skeletal casts. The lower one was a more muddy and uneven gray-brown, tinged with red. It was this lower one that had so captured his attention. After a few minutes he surfaced and began to speak.
“These are T9 and T10, the ninth and tenth thoracic vertebrae,” he said slowly. They’re located about…” He reached around her to touch the middle of her back. “Here. The top one-”
When she burst out laughing he thought he’d accidentally tickled her, but it wasn’t that. “Oh, it’s cute!” she cried.
“Cute?” He stared wonderingly at her, and then at the vertebrae. “Oh, the face. Yeah, I suppose that’s pretty clever.”
Rosie’s ten-year-old daughter had apparently gotten a head start on her medical illustrator career by “illustrating” the upper vertebra, painting a clever little cartoon face on it. Viewed from the rear, the flat, smooth superior articular processes (where the inferior articular process of the eighth vertebra would have abutted) were now two round, googly eyes, the transverse processes (where the right and left eighth ribs would have attached) were a pair of donkey’s ears, and the long, tapering spinous process (which, with its fellows, would have constituted the knobby, spiky length of the spine) was a tapering snout, with a curlicue mustache and a goofy, big- toothed grin at the bottom.
“Sorry,” Julie said, “I didn’t mean to spoil the big moment.” She suppressed a final giggle. “All right, you have my full and earnest attention. The top one is…?”
“The top one is an exact reproduction of the ninth thoracic vertebra of Gibraltar Woman, as perfect as a cast can get. It’s part of a set of First Family casts made by France Casting in Colorado, the only sets that were authorized to be made from the original bones. I bought one of them myself for the lab.”
“Uh-huh. And it’s special because…?”
“It’s not special at all. It’s the other vertebra, the T10, that’s special. ”
She looked at it, turned the little vase in her hands, tried to determine what was special about the T10. “Sorry,” she said with a shrug, “I don’t-”
“It’s special for two reasons. First, because, unlike the T9, it’s not a cast at all. It’s the real, honest-to-God bone.”
