And it’s getting cold.”
“Oh, now, Aud,” said her burly husband, Buck, standing beside her, “it’s not as bad as all that.” As he spoke, he swept off his jacket – he wore only a polo shirt underneath – and offered it to her.
Gideon, knowing Audrey (but not Buck), expected her to swat it irritably aside. Instead, he watched in amazement as she practically melted, allowing Buck to place it tenderly around her shoulders, from which it hung down to her knees. And all the while she looked up at him – he was a good foot taller than she was – the way a besotted teenager gazes at her lover.
Astounding. But it lasted no more than a few seconds. As soon as the jacket was settled comfortably around her, she was her old self again, assailing Rowley. “In any case, I’m ready to eat. It’s almost noon. Where do we get this lunch you promised? It better be indoors.”
Rowley chuckled. “Why, of course it’s indoors. There’s a charming little restaurant right in the cable car terminal building. I’ve booked the whole place for us. And yes, I suppose it would be best to straggle off to it before it gets any worse. It’s just up the path, no more than a five-minute walk.”
And off they straggled in twos and threes. They’d all had dinner together at the hotel the previous evening, renewing old acquaintances and making new ones. Among the old acquaintances for Gideon and Julie was Pru McGinnis, she of the short, flyaway red hair, the muscular washerwoman forearms, the thick, chapped, red wrists, and the overall build of a VW bus, big, square, and sturdy. Now a fellow at the august Franco-American Institut de Prehistoire in Les Eyzies, France, she’d been a student of Gideon’s in the very first graduate course he’d ever taught, although she was only a few years his junior. A jolly, animated, resourceful New York-born woman approaching forty, she’d gotten an MA in physical anthropology under Gideon, then – to Gideon’s disappointment – had switched to theoretical archaeology for her doctorate. He had been on her doctoral committee and had had to sit in on the defense of her dissertation: Post-processual, Structural, and Contextual Paradigms in Archaeology, Considered from an Epistemological Perspective. He hadn’t understood a word.
Before moving on to the Institut, she’d taught for a few years at the University of Missouri, where she’d picked up a Western accent, soon gone, and a penchant for Western garb, which had stayed with her. Today she was in a tailored plum-colored cowboy shirt, a flouncy denim-and-gingham square-dancing skirt (sans crinoline), and worn, lizard-skin boots.
As a student, she had been criticized by one of Gideon’s fellow instructors as being “insufficiently reverent,” but Gideon had found her to be a breath of fresh air in an otherwise hidebound department. He had liked her as a pupil, been proud of her as a protegee, and now considered her a friend, as did Julie.
Like most first-time visitors to the Rock, the Olivers were fascinated by the Barbary apes that scrambled around them or sat hunched and glowering along the edges of the path, grooming each other or moodily eating handouts given them by the mostly British tourists despite the prominent signs warning of a five-hundred-pound penalty for doing so. And the snacks they fed the animals were as bad as the snacks they fed themselves: sweets, sweets, and more sweets – candy bars, muffins, sugared biscuits, and packaged cakes, with the occasional bag of flavored crisps to break the monotony.
“Cute li’l buggers, aren’t they?” said Pru, who had been to Gibraltar before, having been one of the team on the Europa Point dig. When the dig had started, the professional team had been composed of nothing but archaeologists – experts in stones, but not in bones. But once they had unearthed their first evidence of human skeletal material, however – the proximal end of an ulna protruding from a crevice in the cave wall – Pru had been called in to perform the delicate exhumation. Gideon had been a little surprised at that, inasmuch as she had only that MA in physical anthropology, and, really, not much to recommend her in the way of experience as a “dirt archaeologist. ” But Les Eyzies, where she was working, had been relatively nearby, and Corbin Hobgood, Europa Point’s assistant director, had been an old friend, and so he had brought her on. As a result, it had been Pru herself who had excavated the bones of the First Family. And a fine, careful job she had done, as far as Gideon could tell.
One of the monkeys ambled up to him with its shambling, quadrupedal gait, and, without bothering to look up at him, stuck out a demanding hand for a handout. When Gideon didn’t oblige, the heavy-browed, cinnamon-colored creature tugged impatiently on his pant leg, almost sending him tumbling; like most nonhuman primates, they were strong for their size.
“Beat it, you bum,” Gideon muttered, snatching the fabric out of its grasp.
Julie was shocked. “Gideon, that’s not like you at all.”
“Well, I hate monkeys,” he mumbled, a little ashamed of himself.
Now both women stared at him, astonished.
“You hate monkeys?” Julie exclaimed. “I never knew that.”
“Oh, I don’t mean I hate them,” Gideon said, chastened, “but I don’t like them. Now, apes I like. Thoughtful, intelligent, adaptive. How can you not like a chimp – bright, eager to please, always ready to play? And how can anyone’s heart not go out to a gorilla sitting in the corner of a zoo cage somewhere, all pensive and melancholy? But monkeys, no. Look at them – greedy, spiteful, malicious, contemptuous-”
“Contemptuous?” Julie said, laughing. “Pensive? Somebody’s getting a wee bit anthropomorphic here.”
“Okay, I plead guilty to that. Got carried away there for a minute. But look at them. Unlike apes, they-”
“But these are apes,” said Pru, gesturing with the sunglasses she carried in her hand. “Barbary apes. The sign says so. ‘Please do not feed the Barbary apes.’” She clapped her other hand to her heart. “My God, somebody keep me from falling down. Did I just catch Professor Oliver in an error – about primates, yet?”
“The sign may say so, but the sign is in error,” Gideon replied calmly.
“I could have told you,” a laughing Julie said to Pru.
“The uninformed – for example, those with mere master’s degrees in physical anthropology – may call them apes,” Gideon went on windily, “and it’s true that they’re big for monkeys, they lack tails, they look a bit like baboons, and they have a baboonlike gait, but in fact they are monkeys, macaques, Macaca sylvanus, and they are among the nastier, crabbier, least amenable of their kind.”
“With a diet like that, I’m not surprised,” Pru said. She stopped walking to lean close to a couple of males, each in the process of sullenly, but extremely competently, opening up a package he’d been given. “ ‘Cadbury Curly Wurlies,’ ” she read aloud from one label, “and ’Mr. P’s Pork Scratchings.’ No wonder they’re crabby,” she said, straightening up. You’d be crabby too if you lived on a diet of – hey! ”
A skinny, hairy forearm had snaked up just as she turned away, and long, spidery fingers had expertly plucked the sunglasses out of her hand.
“Come back here, you creep!” she cried as the animal scampered up onto a rocky ledge, its Curly Wurlies in one hand and Pru’s sunglasses in the other.
“Those cost me $34.95, you… you little shit!”
Whereupon the monkey, staring contemptuously – Yes, contemptuously , Gideon thought – at her all the time, slipped the glasses more or less over its eyes and just sat there wearing them, safely out of reach.
The nearby tourists laughed and reached for their cameras.
“On second thought, I guess the little guys are pretty amusing at that,” Gideon said.
The tiny Top of the Rock Bar and Restaurant, hidden one floor below the big tourist cafeteria, was a cozy, olde English sort of place with open-beam ceilings, a gleaming mahogany bar, and an inviting fire glowing in a small stone fireplace and casting feathery, flickering, orange reflections on the walls. On the front door was a sign stating Reserved for Private Party. There were only two small tables, and three or four stools at the bar, just about enough room for Rowley’s group. Places had been attractively set for eight: three at the larger table, two at the smaller, and three at the bar. Everything looked wonderfully appealing to the chilled troupe looking yearningly in through the glass door.
There was only one problem. They couldn’t get in. The door was locked, there was no response to their knocking, and the preordered lunch wasn’t going to be ready until one, almost an hour away.
“That gives you all an opportunity to do a number of things in the interim,” said Rowley, looking on the bright side. “If you just want to warm up over a cup of coffee or cocoa, the cafeteria upstairs is open, and there’s a souvenir shop up there too, with some excellent books on the area. But if you want to brave the elements, you’d have time to go on down to the Apes’ Den area, if that appeals to you. It’ll be less windy there, and that’s where you’ll find the largest assemblage of them.”
“Oh, goody, let’s do that,” Pru said sourly to Gideon.
