Free Uneasy Relations by Aaron Elkins Page A

about Horizon’s penny-pinching approach to staffing and equipment, but Audrey, in control of the purse strings, had won every time, which must have infuriated Adrian. As soon as the First Family was unearthed and the news hit the media, however, hostilities were suspended, the coffers were opened wide, and everything turned rosy, but Audrey, who could hold a grudge for a long time, must have been hell to work for all the same.
    Thankfully, Gideon had never been in that position, but he’d seen her in action in other situations. At a conference in Boston once, when she had made the arrangements for a dinner party of eight, including Gideon, at a Thai restaurant, the hostess had called for the “Garwin Poe” party.”
    “It’s Godwin,” Audrey had told her. “And Pope, not Poe.”
    “Madam, that is what I said.”
    “No, you said
Gar
win. It’s
God
win. Godwin-Pope.”
    “Gardwin?”
    “No,
Godwin
. G-o-d-w . . .”
    And on and on, to the embarrassment of the dinner party and the consternation of the Thai hostess until the poor woman got it right. And this was a place Audrey had never been to before and was unlikely ever to go to again. So what was the point? But that was Audrey.
    Along the same lines, a mutual acquaintance named Victoria Tarr had confided to him that, for a time, Audrey had stopped by Vicky’s house for coffee once or twice a week. Whenever Vicky went in afterward to tidy up the guest bathroom in the event that Audrey had used it, she found that the toilet paper roll had unfailingly been reversed so that the new sheets unrolled from the top, instead of the less standard way that Vicky preferred it, with the new sheets coming from the bottom.
    Once again, that was Audrey. Things had to be right.
    Dry-stick appearance and prickly manner notwithstanding, however, Gideon had always liked her, in small doses at any rate, partly because of the wry, pithy sense of humor that would sometimes come peeking through the arid exterior. She had a pet parakeet, for example, which she had named Onan. Why Onan? “Because,” she had replied drily, “he casts his seeds upon the ground.”
    She was also a surprisingly good mimic, even of men’s voices, once she had a couple of glasses of wine inside her. “Who is this?” she would ask, looking suddenly up from her Chardonnay, and then proceed to skewer some colleague with wit and wicked accuracy. Gideon had once come in for a skewering himself. (“Greetings, sir, I am the Skeleton Wizard. If you will kindly show me your left
multangulum majus
, I will be glad to tell you who you are.”) Gideon had laughed as appreciatively as everyone else.
    In any case, she was someone to be reckoned with; a brilliant archaeologist, a more-than-competent administrator, and the author of over a hundred wide-ranging monographs. She was also a founding member and two-time president of Sisters in Time, the feminist caucus of the International Archaeological Society. Forthright and free-spoken, she was in Gideon’s opinion not well suited to her present position with Horizon, inasmuch as an important part of it involved getting money out of people, which necessarily involved tact and diplomacy, not her strongest points. Still, she’d been there for years now and seemed to be doing fine, so apparently he was wrong. Maybe it was the moderating influence of big, solid, benevolent Buck.
    Corbin Hobgood he knew from having run into him at conferences and having served with him on a student-research grant program for AAA, the American Anthropological Association. In his late thirties, with pallid, shiny skin (in the field, no matter how steamy the location, he wore a broad-brimmed hat, long sleeves, and long pants to protect his melanin-challenged complexion), he had thick, black eyebrows that met in the middle and a jaw that was always shadowed, although he often shaved twice a day. He was, by all accounts — and Gideon’s observations supported them — meticulous and