Uneasy Relations by Aaron Elkins Page A

looked anxiously, pathetically, at Rowley. “Did I misspeak? I misspoke, didn’t I?”
    “Not at all, Ivan,” Adrian cut in with his warmest smile. “It was a wonderful speech, and a wonderful way to end the evening.”
    “Wonderful, wonderful,” others echoed and there was yet another round of applause. Gideon joined in, but he could feel tears at the corners of his eyes.
    “I’ll drive you home,” Rowley said, quick to seize on his cue. He too was on the edge of weeping. The good-byes were muted and hurried, and within a couple of minutes he was leading a shambling, confused Gunderson, clutching his prizes, out of the room. He looked fifteen years older than when he’d come in.
    The remaining diners looked mutely, glumly at their coffee cups. “Guadalcanal Woman,” Pru said softly. “Where did that come from?”
    “He was back in 1942,” Adrian said with a melancholy smile. “Ivan was in the Marines, you know. He spent more than a year in the South Pacific. A life-altering experience. He talked about it often.”
    “
Very
often,” Audrey said drily.
    “If he fought with the Marines at Guadalcanal, he had a right to talk about it,” Buck said, in a rare reprimand to Audrey. “Guadalcanal. Jesus.”
    In the silence that followed, Pru let out a long, lip-flapping sigh. “Well. I don’t think this was one of his better days,” she said.
     
NINE
     
    JULIE stretched, sighed, and let her head fall back on the pillow. “Let’s be decadent this morning—”
    “We’ve already been decadent this morning,” Gideon pointed out, nuzzling the ear lobe nearest him.
    She laughed. “Then let’s continue in that vein, and order up a room service breakfast. We can have it out on the balcony in those lovely terry cloth robes.”
    Their room’s generous balcony was two floors above the Wisteria Terrace, so the view was, if anything, even more grand than from the terrace. Through the French doors, which they’d left open during the night, they could see the winding paths and lush plantings of the public gardens just below, the bay a little farther out, and off to the left the Strait of Gibraltar and the dusky mountains of Africa, shimmering in their haze as the early morning sun found them.
    “I’m for that,” Gideon said. “How about if I order up a good, greasy, thoroughly decadent full English breakfast — the Full Monty?”
    “I’m for
that
,” Julie said. “I’m starving.”
    Over their mammoth breakfasts — fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled tomato, mushrooms, baked beans, white toast in a rack, marmalade, butter, and a cozy-covered pot of tea — they worked out their plans for the day.
    “Well, you’ve got your lecture to give at noon,” Julie said. “Where is that going to be again?”
    “St. Michael’s Cave. It’s a set of natural caverns up on the Rock, and they use one of them as a lecture hall. That’ll be over by one, and then we have a late lunch date with Fausto at one thirty.”
    Several years before, Gideon had lectured in an international forensics symposium for criminal justice personnel, held in St. Malo, France, and Fausto Sotomayor, then a young detective constable in the Royal Gibraltar Police, had been an attendee. Since then, he had been in intermittent touch with Gideon with one technical question or another, and they had become e-mail buddies of a sort, dropping each other a few lines now and then. They’d seen him briefly the day before, when Fausto, now much glorified — a detective chief inspector, no less — had insisted on driving them into town from the airport, and had invited them to lunch today at a downtown pub.
    “What about before your talk?” Julie asked, spreading marmalade on a wedge of toast. “Are you free?”
    “Mostly, but I did want to sit in on one of the paleoanthropological society papers at nine thirty. They’re holding the conference down at the Eliott Hotel.”
    “What’s the topic? Maybe I’ll join you.”
    “The title is . .