“Neil boasts to have been paid a large advance from a publisher for a book on the subject. He has a lot to lose if his assertion is refuted. The consensus is that the documentation is a bluff and/or a fraud. Nobody’s taking him seriously. The symposium hopes to clarify whether Columbus’s remains are in the cathedral, regardless of Riley Neil’s con game. Whither Columbus? That is the question.”
It wasn’t as if they were arguing something important, like the Super Bowl. I kept that insight to myself and asked Darla, “I get ’em mixed up. Cheap red wine was whose weapon of choice?”
“Riley Neil threw his on Chandler Bryce. They say Neil has an ugly temper.”
“He definitely is a party pooper.”
“Worse than that. Riley Neil has had a less than distinguished academic career and is hoping to damage those of others, besides becoming rich.”
“Less than distinguished how? He got wrote up by the principal for leaving a dirty blackboard?”
“Much worse, Brick. He’s unpublished. He’s never written a word that made it into scholarly print. A controversy this old is unlikely to be conclusive, but scholars have devoted years in research and have written pallets full of paper on the topic. This is a new wrinkle he could exploit.”
“And he’s writing a book?”
“My eyebrows lifted, too, when I heard.”
“Any of these other people hopping on the publish-or-perish bandwagon?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. If you have such plans, you play it cool so no one else gets a jump on you.”
I was drinking Spanish beer out of the bottle. The bartender was chipping ice to go into a pitcher of sangría. The symposiumites were chatting in small groups like junior high school cliques. Ah, the genteel world of the halls of ivy.
“Riley Neil is a jerk,” Darla added with a loathing that startled me. She didn’t have a nasty bone in her luscious body.
“You said they teach at rival colleges in the same town.”
“I did say. The schools constantly attempt to one-up each other in terms of academic prestige.”
“Who has the best football team?”
Darla rolled her eyes at me and said, “Chandler Bryce teaches a creative writing section, too, and has had a few short stories published in obscure literary magazines.”
“Must make Riley Neil insecure, huh?”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“I count my lucky stars I’m in the kinder and gentler world of snooping lowlife riffraff on the mean streets and at hot-sheet motels, instead of this shark pool you college profs swim around in,” I said.
In case you didn’t notice, that’s where we were treading water now. All you had to do is read the nametags. According to his, the uncongenial Riley Neil was HI. I’M RILEY NEIL, PH.D. Everybody had their sheepskin tacked on to their names. Everybody but yours truly, whose higher education is courtesy of GCIPD, the Gumshoe Correspondence Institute of Private Detection. If there was any more tweed in the room, I’d be itching.
Just for the hell of it, I grease-penciled PE by HI. I’M BRICK BATES. PE stands for Private Eye.
Darla is HI. I’M DARLA HOGAN, MA. She wouldn’t let me add LOVE OF MY LIFE. Darla teaches anthropology at a community college. She’s a little slip of a woman with big hair and bigger glasses. She has got the sweetest leer.
Some of these la-di-da Ph.D.s look down their noses at her because she only has her master’s and doesn’t teach at a four-year school. That pisses me off a lot more than it does her. Darla teaches a history section called New World Conquest 261. She’s tickled pink to be invited to Spain for this affair.
I’m one of the few significant anothers. Darla said she didn’t know much about her colleagues’ personal lives other than that some were single or divorced. She said that some were “too career oriented to nurture a relationship.” Sounds to me like they’re candidates for daytime TV talk shows.
“I looked up ‘symposium’ in the dictionary,” I told Darla. “It comes from the Latin for drinking party.”
“My, my. Scholarly curiosity.”
“That’s my middle name.”
Another lady in the group moseyed on over.
“Yuck,” Dr. Mary Beth Lambuth said, making a face at Riley Neil, who was standing at the bar by his lonesome, swigging his wine refill. “Was he raised by wolves?”
Dr. Lambuth was a tall, husky blonde. I could picture her carved in the prow of a Viking warship. Darla said she was an expert on the history of written communication and had knocked out an outline for a book that was with a New York literary agent, who’d had a nibble or two.
“He isn’t subtle,” Darla said diplomatically.
“You’ll find out how unsubtle if you get caught in a dark hallway with him.”
Darla didn’t answer, but her grip on her wineglass got so white-knuckled, I thought it was gonna pop like a light bulb. Another member of our merry band swung by before we could expand on that theme.
Dr. Edwin Dobbs said, “I caught the drift. The man surely could use some manners.”
Darla said that after years in Romance Languages, teaching Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, Dobbs now lectured on European history. She says he’s a polymath, whatever that is. Dobbs looks like Burl Ives. Darla said he made his bones, pun intended, on the life of Columbus. Even had a book out on Chris, with this catchy title: Columbus: A Critical Study on His Origins, Path of Discovery, and Final Years. Darla said it was published by the University of Northeast Nevada A&M Press or some such and made no bestseller lists. Scuttlebutt had it that Dr. Dobbs just completed a whirlwind romance, marriage, and divorce to his second wife, a freckle-faced young teaching assistant, and was hurting big-time for bucks. He was the symposium’s numero-uno Columbus authority and was slated to conduct panels and workshops.
Mary Beth Lambuth said, “Riley Neil is an intellectual bully.”
No argument there. Dobbs gave a sourpuss nod of agreement and went to the bar. That seemed like a stellar idea. We did the same. By then Riley Neil had skedaddled. We had us a nice, dull cocktail party. Thanks to severe jet lag and nothing else to gossip about, the shindig broke up early as I was gazing at and then grazing on the tapas they’d laid out.
“Tapa” is Spanish for appetizer, part of Spain’s cultural heritage, and appetizing they were. Tapas bars are all over Spain, so says our guidebook. I was making a cultural tour of sausage chunks and slivers of ham and meatballs and olives and the omelet slices they call tortillas and prawns and other critters and toast wedges and — when Darla dragged me off. Before I burst, she said.
Up in our room, looking out at buildings older than El Cid, I asked Darla, “How fast did you say this rolling rocket we’re taking to Seville goes?”
“Bricklin Bates, stop asking me that same question.”
“Bullet train. I don’t even like the word.”
“Bullet?”
“Train. You know how often they jump the tracks at a safe and sane speed, let alone at Mach Three?”
“Bullet train is a generic term for a high-speed train,” Darla patiently explained. “This is the AVE, pronounced ah-veigh. Alta Velocidad Española or Spanish High Velocity. Two hundred and eighty kilometers per hour.”
“How fast is that in plain English?”