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“That’s the first thing you’ve said to me lately, Neil,” I said, gesturing to my table. “It’s a start and this ain’t a request. C’mon!”

I ordered a fresh brew for me and, knowing their libational preferences, red wine for them. I let them stew till our drinks arrived.

“What tipped off my subconscious was that stunt on that AVE bullet rocket train,” I said, getting right to the nitty-gritty. “Neil, you just happened to open your luggage and howl like a banshee, and Bryce, like on orchestral cue, you said you hadn’t touched his luggage. I doubt if you’d even turned your head around. How’d you know where he kept this phony-baloney document, and why would he keep it out of his sight, with easy access, if it was so valuable?”

Before they could answer, which they weren’t gonna anyhow, I wrote on a napkin: C+C=C.

“Know what that means?”

“Faulty algebra,” Neil said, his irritating smirk plastered on his puss like a decal.

“Conspiracy plus Controversy equals Crime. We devoted a whole lesson to that fact of life in my GCIPD studies.”

“Is that a grad-school program?” Bryce asked. “I’m not familiar with the institution.”

“The University of Hard Knocks, you might say. You boys were just too easy to separate during your altercation, too. And, hats off, the wine-tossing at the party was damn clever. You had me fooled.

“Professor Doctor Neil, you have got a big-time book deal going. You’re unpublished. Professor Bryce, he is, sort of. By the way, Neil, Bryce says you can’t write a grocery list, his words. But you go and get a big fat advance from a book publisher. Bryce, that must be a tough pill to swallow. And Neil, who’s gonna write this book of yours for you?”

I paused. I’d provoked these pointy-headed brainiacs five ways to Sunday. They were giving me the stinkeye and looking sidelongingly at each other.

“Now, let’s make something perfectly clear,” I snarled. “If anybody’s thinking of wine as a projectile and me as the primary target, he’s gonna be staring up at the ceiling, counting the constellations in the Milky Way.”

Riley Neil sipped his wine and squinted his weasel eyes at me. Chandler Bryce was tense, rigid as a statue, playing it not nearly so cool. I concentrated on him. “This bogus documentation of Neil’s, it can’t help but hype book sales. Some people will always believe in it. It oughta be easy for a veteran fiction writer-teacher to whip out a manuscript. If there’re objections to the facts, hey, the proof, Neil’s papers, they were ripped off on the train, not his fault.”

“Conjecture,” Bryce said.

“You’re postulating that if a nonexistent document was perceived to be purloined, therefore it exists. How quasi-empirical of you, Mr. Bates.”

“Riley,” Chandler Bryce said.

Neil raised his hand to Bryce’s objection. “Merely enjoying a spot of rhetoric, Chandler.”

I said, “Kinda like if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound if nobody hears it?”

“Precisely,” Neil said.

“So what you’re doing is playing a con game to make a few bucks. No harm, no foul. You could even do point-counterpoint in the book. Did Mussolini or didn’t he cut a deal with Franco? Were the bones Chris’s in the first place? And what’s in the litter in the cathedral? Or did the bones stay back in the Dominican Republic? A triple and quadruple whammy. It’d keep the readers off balance, turning pages.”

Bryce had relaxed enough to smile and wipe the sweat off his forehead.

Neil raised his glass in toast. “An intriguing series of speculative and cabalistic projections.”

“You boys’ve stirred up a helluva hornet’s nest over the disappeared bones. You’ve mobilized Spain. Chris Columbus is a national treasure.”

“You’re accusing us of telephoning the ransom demands?”

I shrugged. “Nature abhors a coincidence.”

“I’m fluent in French,” Neil said.

“That figures,” I said, working up a smirk of my own.

“And I have a workable knowledge of German,” Bryce said.

“I don’t speak fifty words of Spanish,” Neil said, smirk straightening into a grin.

“Nor I,” Bryce said. “You can check, Mr. Detective.”

Mary Beth Lambuth and Darla entered El Rinconcillo right on cue. I waved them over, moved two chairs to our table, and said, “Gee, ladies, what a pleasant surprise.”

“How transparent of you, Bates,” Riley Neil said.

Mary Beth was giving him such an evil eye, he had to avert his.

“What did you find out?” I asked her.

“Much. My literary agent made an inquiry and learned that there are two author signatures on Riley’s book proposal. His and Chandler’s.”

“A partnership that is none of your concern,” Chandler Bryce said.

“Say no more, Chandler,” Riley Neil said.

“Chandler the friendly ghost writer,” I said.

“There’s more,” Darla said.

“Riley,” Mary Beth said. “You stated on the train that the majority of your documentation was Teletype messages between Spain’s and Italy’s foreign ministers. Spain’s infrastructure was in ruins after their civil war. They didn’t have Teletype service in operation in early 1941.”

Without a word of rebutment, Riley Neil marched out, trailed like a big shaggy dog by Chandler Bryce. The gals ordered brewskis too and we toasted our scam.

“I have a confession,” Mary Beth Lambuth said. “My performance was a half-truth. The call to my agent was not a fabrication. They are collaborators on the book. The Teletype story was merely that.”

“Spain had Teletype service then?”

Mary Beth shrugged wide silky shoulders. “I haven’t the foggiest. It wasn’t part of my research, but I imagine they did. The first mechanical Teletype was employed in 1867. It was not a new technology.”

In our room, Darla confirmed that Bryce and Neil were telling the truth about their knowledge of foreign languages. “The academic achievements of the symposium members are on record.”

It was my turn to have a headache. Pacing, I said, “Maybe they took a crash course, you know, those tapes you listen to in the car.”

“Brick.”

“Maybe they hired a bilingual Spanish lowlife to make the calls. Slipped him fifty euros to speak Spanish in a fake American accent.”

“Brick.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a reach. What frustrates the hell out of me, they’re in cahoots on the book, but I can’t prove the missing papers are fake. And the extortion phone calls, I don’t doubt for a minute they masterminded them. This is a big-time criminal beef that could stop them in their tracks, and I can’t prove a damn thing there, neither.”

Darla said, “We can only hope that their book contract will be canceled when word spreads of their deception.”

She was red in the face. I knew she was wishfully thinking. I put my arms around her and patted her back. “Take it easy, Darla. That’s all well and good, but I flopped. I solved a piddly little flimflam I can’t prove. Meanwhile, Chris’s bones are on the loose or they ain’t. So whodunit?”

“Anybody. Terrorists, generic criminals, telephone pranksters.”

“Until I nail the creeps or prove your symposiumonians are non-creeps, I’m not earning my honorarium, as generous as it may be.”

“The spirit of your assignment is to eliminate symposium members as suspects,” Darla said. “Or not.”

“Who else’ve you come across who might be suspicious?”

“Nobody. We are a serious and scholarly group who spend our days poring over papers and debating their meanings and merits.”

Yawn, I thought. “Darla, how about Professor Dobbs? Your polyglot or polygon or polynomial. You said this little cookie he was married to took him to the cleaner’s. He’s hurting for bucks, isn’t he?”