Unnatural Selection (3 page)

“You might go into lecture mode, you mean.”

“Exactly, the dreaded lecture mode. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’d bore the hell out of everybody. And this isn’t my show, Julie. Nobody’s there to hear me.”

There was more to it than that, but he wasn’t about to give voice to it. Simply put, this was one of Julie’s rare chances to shine outside the world of the National Park Service. She had put a lot of time and a lot of work into her paper, and he wasn’t about to take even a remote chance of upstaging her.

She gave it some thought. “You know, I’m beginning to see the wisdom of your position,” she said.

“Good, I’m glad that’s settled.”

For a few minutes they walked along amicably enough, hand in hand, and then Julie suddenly stopped and turned to face him.

“Wait a minute, all I have is an M.A. Therefore I can’t be taken seriously?”

“Well, in your case-”

She held up a warning finger. “Consider your reply carefully.”

“In your case,” he continued smoothly, “you’re not pretending to be an authority on biodiversity. You’re here as a wildfire management expert-which you certainly are.”

“Uh-huh, and what about my paper? Is it full of ‘misapprehensions’ and ‘misconceptions’?”

“I think,” he said, unblinking, “that your paper is absolutely brilliant.”

Their eyes remained locked for a second more. “Good answer,” she said as they began walking again.

“Whew,” he said softly.

“From this vantage point,” intoned the sonorous voice from the loudspeakers, “we look back at the whole of Land’s End, the rugged promontory that marks the southeasternmost point of the mainland of England. And we are lulled by our first sense of the gentle Atlantic swell, which has traveled three thousand miles, only to impotently expend its energy against these stark and ancient cliffs.”

“Gentle swells!” somebody called out. “Try lookin’ out the bloody window, mate!”

The ripple of laughter that greeted this was a trifle apprehensive, but after a few anxious minutes during which people’s eyes roamed in search of a quick exit to the open air of the deck, should one become necessary, the surge grew calm and the ferry settled into a slow heave that most of the passengers found more relaxing than discomforting. The minority who felt otherwise gratefully followed the posted directions to the windowless lowest deck, where ranks of permanently set-up cots were waiting.

The soothing narrative continued: “And now, in the far distance we can see the Isles of Scilly themselves, the fabled Fortunate Islands, thought by many to be the mountain peaks of the sunken, lost land of Lyonesse. There are five inhabited islands, forty uninhabited ones, and a hundred-and-fifty-”

“Am I wrong,” Gideon asked Julie, “or is that Liz Petra in the snack bar line?” He pointed at a small, plump figure in a shawl, a flowing peasant skirt, and sandals.

Julie turned to look. “It sure is. Liz! Over here!”

The pixie-faced blonde’s eyes lit up. “Julene! Hello! Be there in a sec.” She went back to paying for the bag of Cad-bury’s Chocolate Fingers she was buying.

Gideon looked at Julie, eyebrows raised. “ ‘Julene’?”

Julie mumbled something.

“What?”

“Oh, heck, it just seemed more professional,” she muttered.

“Ah. Well, I suppose it is, at that.” He was happier than ever with his decision not to horn in on the meetings.

“Well, hi there, Julene!” Liz chirped as Julie jumped up to embrace her. “My favorite fellow Fellow! And I see you’ve brought the famous, or should I say infamous, Skeleton Detective along with you.” She stuck out her hand. “Long time no see, prof.”

It had been more than five years since she’d sat in on his nonhuman primate social behavior seminar as a graduate student in archaeology, but she seemed to have changed not a bit: still the same soft, dimply, unfailingly jolly dumpling of a person she was back then, grandmotherly (despite her pretty face) and chuckling, nurturing even at the age of thirty-five, and still apparently favoring the same vintage-clothing-store wardrobe, which had been passe even then. Only now she was a figure of note in the unlikely but burgeoning discipline of refuse archaeology.

“It’s great to see you again, Liz,” he said, grasping her hand and moving over to make room for her in their booth. “What’s new in the world of garbage?”

“Things have been pretty trashy, actually,” she said, plopping down. “So how’s the bone business?”

“Oh, kind of dry, to tell the truth.”

Julie rolled her eyes at this show of what passed for academic humor. “Liz, they found Edgar’s remains, did you hear? He was eaten by a bear!”

Liz’s clear blue eyes sparkled even more. “Yes, Joey just told me. Is that creepy, or what?”

“Joey Dillard? Is he on this ferry too?”

“Well, he was a minute ago. Back there near the Coke machine.”

Julie looked over Liz’s shoulder and waved. “Joey! Come join us!”

Joey Dillard, if Gideon remembered correctly, had been an investigative reporter for a paper somewhere in the Midwest-Gary, or Des Moines. He had been assigned to do a series on a new meat-packing operation and had come away so revolted that he became a vegetarian on the spot. He then joined PETA-People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals-and several lesser-known groups, had since become an officer in some of them, and was now a fairly well-known writer for various animal-rights, vegetarian, and ecology magazines and Web publications.

Knowing his background, Gideon had anticipated an investigative reporter-type: assertive, belligerent, and pushy. Instead, a toothy, bespectacled, generally alarmed-looking young man with fine, pale, almost colorless hair trimmed in a crew-cut acknowledged Liz’s wave and made his way toward them. A faint tic jumped below his right eye. He earnestly clasped a couple of dog-eared magazines to his narrow chest and wore two large, worded buttons on his shirt.

“Oh, Lord” Gideon muttered, “save me from people who walk around with buttons.”

Julie smiled. “Oh, Joey’s not so bad-”

“As long as you don’t take him too seriously,” Liz said kindly. “He means well.”

“I know,” Julie said. “He’s sweet, really.”

Dillard made his hellos, shook hands with Gideon (a cold, damp palm), and sat down next to Julie. The button below his left collar-point said People who abuse animals rarely stop there. The bigger one on his right, less ominous but more comprehensible, said Animals are not fabric. Wear your own damn skin.

Dillard saw Gideon reading them and nervously drew himself up a little straighter, ready to do battle, the tic beneath his eye speeding up. But Gideon, determined not to make waves, simply said, “Glad to meet you, Joey. We were just talking about Edgar Villarreal.”

Joey immediately lowered his guns, reset the safeties, and relaxed. “You mean the bear? God, that was just so terrible. I’m really going to miss his contributions this year.” As far as Gideon could tell, Joey meant it, but he noted that Liz and Julie declined to commiserate.

Joey noticed too. “I mean, sure, he may have had a few problems personalitywise,” he mumbled, “but he really added something valuable, you have to give him that.” When no one seemed willing to give him that, Joey turned it up a notch. “Personally, I liked the guy.”

Another long beat passed before Liz finally responded, the corners of her mouth turned down. “Well, it’s not as if he would have been here anyway. He did quit, you know.”

“He did?” said Julie.

“He did?” said Joey.

“Didn’t you know? I heard it from Vasily months ago.”

“But why?” Joey asked.

“Well”-she offered the bag of milk-chocolate-covered biscuits around. Joey was the only taker-“remember when he gave that talk in town and, what was his name, Pete Williams got all over his case?”

“Who’s Pete Williams?” Gideon asked, but they were too absorbed to hear him.

“How could I forget?” Joey asked. “It was awful. Edgar was really, really upset. We all went over to the Bishop and Wolf for a drink afterward, and he was muttering in his beer, remember?”

Liz nodded and put on an overblown version of Villarreal’s mild Spanish accent. “‘I keel ’im, dat bastar’, dat leedle peepsqueak.’ Anyway, apparently it was enough to make him never want to come back. That and a few million other reasons, but that had to be the last straw. Anyway, when he got back to the States he faxed Vasily a letter resigning from the consortium. I don’t think Vasily was too upset to hear it. Frankly, I wasn’t too upset myself.”

“I guess he didn’t need the fifty thousand,” Joey said. “I sure wish I could say that.” He removed a thin, tar-black cellophane-wrapped cigar from a shirt pocket and held it up. “Do you mind?”

“Yes,” said Liz.

“Yes,” said Julie.

“Oh,” Joey said meekly and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”

“You can save it for the catwalk,” Liz said, and then explained to Gideon: “There’s a kind of catwalk around the roof of the castle. He prowls it after dark, like the Phantom of the Opera, smoking his foul weed.”

“It’s the only place they let me,” Joey said with a sigh.

“What do you mean, ‘they’? Those are Kozlov’s house rules. Don’t blame us. Not that I’m objecting to them.”

“I didn’t go to that talk of Edgar’s,” Julie said. “It was the final night, and I suppose I’d had more than enough of Edgar Villarreal by then. I heard it didn’t go well, but what exactly happened?”

Between them, Liz and Joey explained. Villarreal, as the best-known of the consortium fellows, had been approached by the local tourist office and asked to make a public presentation in Hugh Town, St. Mary’s main village. He had agreed, and on their final night on St. Mary’s, he had given a talk at Methodist Hall. Not many had come: two dozen curious locals; six or eight tourists who’d happened to be on St. Mary’s and were starved for something-anything-to do in the evening; all of the consortium attendees other than Julie; and three reporters, one from as far away as Plymouth-plus Pete Williams, who had been hanging around all week, having come all the way from London.

Williams was an English writer who was researching a book (Movers and Shakers of the Earth) on personalities in the environmental movement. He had originally applied to be a consortium fellow himself but had been turned down by Kozlov as having no original contribution to offer. He had shown up anyway, staying at a B amp;B in town, and had interviewed some of the attendees for his book. Villarreal had denied his request for an interview with rather nasty condescension.

But Williams had gotten his own back at the Methodist Hall session, pretty much commandeering the question-and-answer session. He had fired hard questions at Villarreal, at first about his sense of responsibility and regret for the deaths of the two students in the Bitterroot Wilderness Area. Villarreal had put him off with pro forma regrets-“these things happen,” “restoring the wilderness comes with a price,” “they obviously didn’t take proper precautions,” and so on. Many had been shocked at his indifference.

Then it had turned personal. There was apparently a history of enmity between the two men, and an increasingly agitated Williams had made it clear that Villarreal was going to be “exposed” in the book he was writing.

“Isn’t it true,” he’d demanded at one point, “that you never finished your Ph. D. at Cornell, even though you advertise yourself as Doctor Villarreal?”

“That’s so,” Villarreal had responded, “but I do have a doctorate from Stanford.”

“An honorary doctorate!” Williams had shrieked triumphantly. “And isn’t it true-”

Villarreal had gotten contemptuously to his feet and outshouted him. “Isn’t it true that you’ve been playing second fiddle to me for years and just can’t stand it? Isn’t it true that you applied to this consortium and didn’t get in, while I did? Isn’t it true that you applied for the Cambridge research fellowship and didn’t get it because I did? And isn’t it true…”

In the end, Kozlov had stepped in and asked Williams to leave, although it took a constable who was in attendance to make it happen.

Villarreal had waited until Williams had been escorted out before getting in the last word. “And if anybody wants to know what I’m really sorry about,” he’d declared brutally, “what I really regret-it’s that they killed that bear in Montana. There was no need for that. What was the point? Human stupidity is not an excuse for murdering a rare, beautiful wild animal.”

“A cold fish, all right,” Gideon said now.

“It so happens I agree with him,” Joey declared, or rather blurted. “Intellectually speaking.”

“Oh, pish-tush,” Liz said with a flap of her hand. “You do not.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t,” said Julie.

“Yes, I do!” Joey’s voice went up half an octave, coming perilously close to a screech. “All right, sure, Edgar was no prize as a human being, but that doesn’t mean that what he said wasn’t right. I’ll trade a human life for a grizzly’s life any day of the week. There’s no difference between Edgar and me on that score.” He glared at the three of them, his tic going full blast.

“Sure, there is,” Liz said, using her thumb to flip another chocolate-covered cookie to him, which he deftly snatched out of the air. “That sonofabitch really believed that shit. You don’t.”

Joey started to reply, then grinned and hung his head. “Maybe not every word.”

“Look who’s here,” Julie said glancing up. “Victor.”

Gideon followed her gaze with a mixture of curiosity and dread. If there was one certified wacko in the group, he thought, it had to be Victor Waldo, editor of the Journal of Spiritual and Sacred Ecology and founder of the Crystal Butte Earth/Body Center, located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. (“Effortlessly absorb timeless shamanistic techniques for healing, growth, and homeostasis in our authentic Kirghiz mountain yurts.”)

Once again, however, Gideon was surprised at what he saw. He’d half-expected a bearded dropout in a tie-dyed sweatshirt, or maybe fringed buckskin, or with a ratty Afghan thrown over his shoulders, but Victor Waldo’s long chin was clean-shaven and his lean body was neatly attired in a tweed sport coat and well-pressed trousers. With his short, steel-gray hair, his proboscis of a nose-lifted slightly as if searching for an elusive scent-his pale, cold, intelligent eyes, and an all-around dryness of manner, he could have passed with ease for a professor of microeconomics. It was very hard indeed to imagine him thumping ceremonial drums, or whatever it was they did in an authentic Kirghiz mountain yurt.