Maybe, after dinner, he’d hit the hospital one more time, just to say good night.
He picked up a copy of New York Magazine from the floor beside the sofa and was just starting to flip through it—maybe there’d be a review of some downtown restaurant that he and Beth could try tonight, someplace crowded and noisy—when he heard someone outside the door to the apartment. He stopped flipping the pages and waited. It was a little early for Beth to be getting home; Raleigh usually liked to extract his full pound of flesh. As he started to get up from the couch, the door swung open, and he saw Beth holding her leather valise in one hand, and a bulging plastic bag, which smelled suspiciously like Chinese food, in the other.
“Here, let me get that,” he said, hurrying over to take the Chinese food before the plastic bag, already stretching at the top, burst.
“Thanks,” Beth said, kicking the door closed behind her. Then she turned the lock and threw the bolt on the door. And glanced through the peephole.
“You’re being especially cautious tonight,” Carter said, putting the bag on the kitchen counter.
“Yeah, well, I had kind of a scare downstairs.”
Carter left the bag where he’d put it and went to Beth.
“What happened?”
“Nothing, really. I just wasn’t paying attention when I came into the building.”
Carter waited.
“I was carrying all this stuff, and I was already in the foyer before I realized that somebody was in there. I’m usually more alert than that.”
“Who was it?” Carter was remembering the feeling he’d had, of being followed home.
“I don’t know, I didn’t get a very good look at him.” She pulled off her overcoat and hung it on the wooden rack by the door. “I think he didn’t want me to. He was tall, blond I think, with sunglasses on, and he turned around and went out almost as soon as I got into the foyer. I was going to get the mail.”
“I already got it,” Carter said numbly.
“Good, because I didn’t. He was standing right in the way; in fact, I could swear he was running his finger around our names on the box.”
Carter felt a chill, and instinctively put his arms tightly around Beth.
“I’m okay,” she said, with a nervous laugh, “really I am. As soon as I put my key in the lobby door, he went back outside and down the steps.”
“Did you see where he went?” Carter asked.
“He looked like he was going to go across the street to the park, but I didn’t wait around to find out.”
Carter let go of Beth and ran to the front windows that looked out over the park. The streetlamps hadn’t gone on yet, and in the dusk it was hard to make out much. A couple of in-line skaters were still cutting around the footpaths, a teenage girl was walking a dog, and off in the distance, a figure, tall, wearing a red coat, was just leaving the other side of the park.
Carter grabbed his leather jacket off the coat rack and yanked the bolt back on the door.
“Where are you going?” Beth said, alarmed. “You’re not going to go looking for the guy, are you?”
“I saw him,” Carter said, unlocking the door, and running out.
“But I told you,” Beth declared, though she could already hear him tearing down the stairs, “he didn’t actually do anything.”
She heard Carter’s feet thump onto the landing, then race down the next flight. She hurried to the door, and shouted, “Carter! Just forget about it!”
She heard the foyer door open and slam shut.
“Don’t start anything, Carter!” she shouted, to the empty air. She stood in the open doorway of their apartment and thought What now. She was sorry she’d said anything at all.
She closed the door, and rested her head against the back of it. Why is Carter getting so exercised over this? It crossed her mind that what was going on here was a little displacement. Maybe he still hadn’t processed the bad news from that morning’s appointment at the fertility clinic, and now all that frustration and energy was going off in all sorts of inappropriate directions . . . like this.
She threw all the locks but the deadbolt and went into the kitchen to put the Chinese food away. At least, she thought, she hadn’t told him the creepiest thing of all. She could swear, while the tall guy was behind her in the foyer, that she’d heard him sniff the air around her, like a dog sampling a new scent.
By the time Carter got into the park, his quarry was gone. He ran to the far side of the park, dodged some cars, and went on in the direction the guy had seemed to be going. And way ahead, maybe two blocks, he thought he saw a spot of red, just before a bus momentarily blocked his view.
He picked up his pace, but by the time the bus moved away, the spot was gone. The guy could have turned left or right, but Carter didn’t see anything in either direction that looked like him. He ran straight, and again he thought he saw it, the red coat, just as it was passing around the corner of a deli fruit stand on the opposite corner. But the light was against him, and by the time the traffic let up and he could cross, the guy was missing in action once more. But at least he knew which direction he was going. Carter’s breath was getting ragged, and he wished he were running in something other than the worn loafers he had on, but he kept moving, ducking and weaving around the other people on the street. Before long, he found himself on a painfully familiar corner—right across the broad avenue from the brightly lighted entrance to St. Vincent’s Hospital.
With no sight of the guy in the red coat, anywhere.
Leaning with one hand against a street sign, he stood, looking around, catching his breath.
This was the same corner where Ezra Metzger had dropped him off after the funeral—the future site, as the billboard proclaimed, of the Villager Co-ops. Maybe that’s what it would one day be, Carter thought, but for now, it was a dark and dirty spot, with a twisted chain-link fence surrounding a vast, abandoned old building of dingy brown brick. He looked up at the crumbling steps, the broken windows covered with plywood, the ornate but grim turn-of-the-century façade. Above the main doors, crisscrossed with heavy planks and a warning sign to KEEP OUT, a rusted metal sign hung by one end: although it was covered with graffiti, Carter could just make out the words SURGICAL SUPPLIES. What was more interesting were the words behind the fallen sign, words which had been chiseled in stone into the original façade. THE NEW YO K SANATOR M FOR CONSUM ION AND INFECTI S DISE SE. You didn’t have to be on Wheel of Fortune to complete the clue: The New York Sanatorium for Consumption and Infectious Disease. Below the chipped letters it said, FOUNDED 1899.
To Carter, the building looked like something out of a Dickens novel, and he wondered how long it had managed to remain in service—the Surgical Supplies incarnation looked like it, too, had been out of business for quite some time—before falling into complete wrack and ruin. There weren’t many buildings left in Manhattan that still dated from the nineteenth century, and now this one, too, was finally about to bite the dust. Normally, Carter was sorry to see these old buildings go, to see the history of the city eradicated and replaced by soulless glass skyscrapers and yuppie apartment towers. But he had to admit that there was something about this particular building he doubted anyone would miss. Even if he hadn’t known what its original use had been, he would have found it bleak and dispiriting. Sinister, if he was completely honest.
But there was no sign, here or anywhere, of the man in the red coat. Either Carter had lost him, or the guy had deliberately given him the slip.
A cold wind whipped down the avenue, and Carter shivered. An ambulance, lights flashing, rounded the far corner and headed for the emergency entrance.
He crossed the street—that Chinese food Beth had brought home sounded awfully good right now—but then he stopped one more time to look back at the abandoned building, at its massive, brooding walls and barricaded windows. And he got the inexplicable feeling that the building itself, derelict, untenanted, falling down at the seams, was looking back at him. Crazy, he kn
ew, but there it was. He turned and walked away, with a line—was it from Nietzsche?—ricocheting around in his head. What was it, exactly? Stare into the abyss long enough, and the abyss stares back?
Close enough.
TWENTY-THREE
“And Enoch saw, ranged among the angels, those that were known as the Watchers. Their hair was like beaten gold, their garments———. Their eyes, which never closed, were deep as wells in the desert. They watched over the———of men, and taught them many things.”
Ezra was pleased with how the pieces of the scroll were coming together. It was painstaking work, but he had just found another tattered scrap that seemed to fit neatly into the text, at precisely the right spot, when he heard a knock in the next room, on his bedroom door.
Damn. Now was not the time to be disturbed.
He ignored the knock, but then it came again, and this time he faintly heard Gertrude’s voice, in the hallway. “Ezra—you’ve got a phone call.”
A phone call? Ezra didn’t even have his own phone number—who could be calling him? And as for friends . . . Then it dawned on him who it might be, and without even taking off his latex gloves he jumped up from his drafting table, ran into the next room, and threw open the door.
“It’s someone named Carter?” she said, holding out the portable phone.
“This is Ezra,” he said, shooing the curious Gertrude away. “Carter Cox?”
“Yes.”
He hadn’t said it happily. Even in that one-word reply, Ezra could sense that Carter had made this call reluctantly.
“I was hoping you would call,” Ezra said, to encourage him further.
“And I was hoping I wouldn’t have to.”
“But you have, and that’s all that matters. You’ve given some thought to what I said in the car—that’s good. That’s a start.”
Carter cleared his throat on the line, and said, “Yes. Well, maybe.”
“When do you want to get together? To talk.”
“I’m free for lunch today,” Carter said, “and if you’d like to come downtown to the faculty club at NYU, you could be my guest.”
No, Ezra thought, that sounded dreadful. And he also knew that, since Kimberly was planning to get Uncle Maury to drive her on a shopping expedition today, he’d be stuck taking a taxi. Would that be violating the terms of his court-ordered supervision, he wondered?
“What about this,” Ezra said, suddenly inspired, “you could come here. I could have a lunch prepared and we could talk in absolute privacy, with no interruptions at all.”
There was a pause, and then Carter said, “Okay—thanks. Where are you?”
Ezra gave him the address, hung up, and then stood stock still, thinking. What, he had to wonder, had finally prompted Carter to call the number he’d scrawled on that slip of paper? He had just about given up hope. And now, what do you know—the call had come, and things—possibly things that were greater than even he, Ezra, could imagine—had once again been set in motion. If there was some higher plan, perhaps he had just caught a glimpse of it.
In honor of the occasion, Ezra showered, shaved, and put on a fresh black turtleneck. And when Carter arrived an hour later, he was there to greet him in the foyer. Carter, he could tell, was momentarily caught off guard by the grandeur of the place—the Rodin sculptures, the vaulted ceilings, the penthouse views. Ezra, of course, was inured.
“Thanks for coming,” Ezra said, taking his leather jacket and handing it off to Gertrude, who was hovering like a mother bird. “Follow me,” he said, leading the way across the polished marble floor, “we’ll eat in the dining room. We’ll be left completely alone in there.” But then he stopped at the sound of a voice, Kimberly’s voice, coming toward them. Wasn’t she supposed to be out shopping by now?
“I’m stopping in at some galleries today,” she was saying, “but I’ll be done by the late afternoon. Pencil me in for five-thirty.”
A moment later, she strode into view, snapping the cell phone shut. When she saw Ezra with Carter, she looked from one to the other as if trying to figure out what was wrong with this picture. Diamond earrings glistened discreetly under her chestnut hair.
“You’re having a friend over?” she said to Ezra, with barely concealed surprise. “I’m Kimberly Metzger,” she said to Carter, extending a well-manicured hand.
“Carter Cox.”
“You’re not,” she said, lowering her voice, “part of his rehabilitation team, are you?”
Much as he hated her, Ezra was impressed. She was making him look bad with record speed.
“From the court?” she went on, before Carter could summon a reply. “Or Dr. Neumann’s office?”
“No, nothing like that,” Carter said, somewhat bewildered. “I teach at NYU. Ezra and I had some things to discuss. About his . . . research.”
She nodded, and said, “Oh, his research,” as she slipped the phone into a black Chanel handbag. “That ought to be useful.” She pressed the foyer button for the elevator, and paid no more attention to them at all.
Though Ezra didn’t say another word as he led Carter through several immense and lavishly decorated rooms—Carter saw a Flemish portrait he could swear had once hung in the Raleigh Gallery—Carter could tell he was seething. Since there was no way that someone as young and beautiful as that was his mom, she could only be his stepmother. His evil stepmother, judging from the way they’d behaved toward each other.
In the dining room were two place settings—folded linen napkins, crystal goblets, gleaming silver—on a table that could easily have seated twenty. And two plates of artfully arranged poached salmon on beds of wild rice, with apricot salads on the side. He and Ezra were seated at one end of the table, with Ezra at the head and Carter to his immediate right, allowing Carter to look out through a row of French doors toward a wide veranda planted with small trees and shrubs.
Carter was hungry, and the food was as well prepared as it was presented. But Ezra, he noticed, only picked at his plate. It was if he was just biding his time until his guest got to the point of their meeting. Once or twice, Carter spotted the housekeeper poking her head out the kitchen door, then popping it right back in again, as if she wanted to be sure the two boys were getting along all right.
After some desultory conversation about the possibility of a coming public transportation strike, Carter asked Ezra if that building site, across from St. Vincent’s, was in fact his father’s project.
“They all are,” Ezra said, dismissively.
Okay, Carter thought. Another hot button he’d just pressed. Now he didn’t dare ask what the stepmother was referring to when she’d asked if he was part of Ezra’s rehabilitation team. Who was this guy, anyway? Some kind of criminal?
“So when are you going to tell me why you called?” Ezra said, no longer able to restrain himself. “Was it your own idea, or did someone put you up to it? Your Italian friend, for instance?”
Carter was impressed; the guy might be strange, but his instincts were almost always right on the money. “Yes. It was Russo, in the hospital this morning.”
“What did he say?”
Carter hated even to have to think about it. But when he’d gone to see him, and mentioned that he had met a man who believed, just as Russo had said, that the fossil had come to life, Russo had grabbed the Magic Marker and scrawled TALK TO HIM! on the little board. “He wanted me to talk to you, to find out what you knew.”
“That’s all?” Ezra said.
“He can’t speak yet; his lungs and vocal cords were damaged in the fire. He can only communicate a few words at a time.”
“I’ll want to talk to him myself, just as soon as he’s able. Will you let me know when that is?”
Carter nodded, though he still thought Ezra might be the last person he’d tell such a thing.
“One day I’ll need to sit down and discuss some of my theories with him, at length.”
“Theories? About what?”
Ezra toyed with a few
grains of rice on his plate, as if debating how best to approach what he had to say. “Your friend’s mind has been opened by a terrible experience. But I’m not really sure about yours yet. You are what I might call a man of science,” he said, still not looking up, “and in my experience, that generally means you have a closed mind.”
Carter took umbrage. “That’s certainly not true in my experience. Scientists, if you ask me, are some of the most open-minded, inquisitive people in the world.”
“That’s only true as long as their questions lead them to the answers they were expecting to get all along,” Ezra replied. “Only as long as they can find what they were looking for, and expecting, in all the usual places.”
Not wanting to appear overly defensive, Carter gave that rejoinder some thought . . . and he could indeed see some truth in it. Weren’t his discoveries at the Well of the Bones initially discounted by most of his peers? Hadn’t he and others encountered heated opposition to the idea that modern-day birds were the direct descendants of the dinosaurs? Wasn’t the theory of geochronology, to which he subscribed, still fighting an uphill battle for acceptance? “Okay,” he conceded, “I know what you’re getting at, and I’ll admit that I’ve experienced some of that resistance to new ideas myself.”
Ezra snorted, unimpressed.
“But any good scientist,” Carter went on, “whether he’s an astronomer or a paleontologist, really wants to know the truth. He wants to know what the evidence shows, or what the empirically gathered data reveal. He’s not interested in making a case for any one theory or another, until he looks at what he’s got and sees a pattern or an idea that makes sense of it all.”
“But that assumes that he knows where to look, that he knows what data to gather and how to connect it.”
“Well, sure,” Carter said, wondering how else it could be done. “A scientist who didn’t know what material was relevant to his work would never get anywhere.”
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