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wanted to tell Gideon in all candor, it looked like Gideon was going to have to hear it.
    "Yes?" he said.
    Frawley heard the coolness in his voice. The hand fell from Gideon’s arm, and the sober face, which had been staring directly up into Gideon’s, retreated with its sour tobacco smell.
    "Well, it’s only that you should know that, in all candor, Nate isn’t quite himself. He’s been very…" He pursed his lips, chewed his words. "What I mean to say is that he’s, well, terribly determined to prove he’s right about the Mycenaeans bringing the Wessex culture with them to England."
    "You don’t agree with his theory?" Gideon asked.
    Frawley looked aggrieved. "Do
you?
"
    It was a fair if surprisingly direct question. "No," Gideon said. "It made a little sense in the thirties and forties, when no one realized the extent of Bronze Age commerce. But now it seems pretty simplistic to invent a three-thousand-mile sea voyage when long-term trade contracts explain things a lot better."
    "Well, there you are," Frawley said, vaguely mollified. "But that isn’t my point. What I’m getting at is the idea—I think I might well say the fact—that this… obsession of his is getting in the way of his objectivity. All this defending himself, and this fighting with the Antiquarian Society….Well, I think maybe it’s affected his judgment, made him a little…well, paranoid."
    The hand darted out briefly to touch Gideon’s arm again. "Now, I don’t mean to imply he’s not doing a top-notch job. No, sir, no way, not for a minute. What I’m trying to say is"—here the sincere and shining eyes were turned full on Gideon again—"that he needs help, your support. He’s made some wonderful contributions. He’s a wonderful person, a great man."
    What, Gideon wondered, was this all about? A little judicious, not-so-subtle backstabbing by the loyal, passed-over senior faculty member? But why to Gideon? What did he have to do with it?
    Frawley drew himself up, manfully putting the lid on his emotions. "Shall we go in now, Gideon?"
     
     
     

FOUR
     
     
       FROM Jack Frawley’s tone, Gideon half expected to walk into the parlor of a funeral home, and was relieved immediately at the friendly, familiar clutter and jumble of an archaeological workroom. Most of the small interior was taken up by two pushed-together old tables on which were several newly put-together pottery sections, the beads of glue still fresh on them; a few blackened, unidentifiable scraps of metal; and five or six small paper bags labeled with thick, black numbers. There was also a corroded but impressive bronze dagger, next to which lay the golden nails that had studded its hilt and the few rotten slivers of wood that were presumably all that remained of the hilt itself. Obviously, it had been a productive dig so far.
    Squeezed around the table were five or six folding metal chairs, and on one of them, near an electric heater, sat Nate Marcus. Frawley’s warning notwithstanding, he looked very much like himself: small and wiry, intense and sarcastic. He was a man of extraordinary hirsuteness. Black and vigorous, his hair always seemed to be in the process of
    taking him over, gleaming blue-black and gritty on his spare cheeks, dipping low on his forehead in a thick, simian wedge, meeting above his eyes in a woolly, Cyclopean eyebrow that sent fuzzy feelers halfway down his nose. In the V of his open collar a glossy tuft sprouted like a nest of tangled wires.
    I know just what he’s going to say, Gideon thought, and exactly how he’s going to say it.
Well, look who’s here,
he’ll say in that mocking, flip New York accent he’d never lost,
the famous skeleton detective.
    "Look who’s here," Nate said flatly. "What a terrific surprise."
    "Hi, Nate. It’s nice to see you."
    "Sure." Nate folded his arms. "Have a seat. Have some coffee."
    "Thanks," Gideon said, unsure of himself, feeling as if he were accepting not a cup of coffee but a