Nicole was still on her knees, her head resting on the bed. Her trim, athletic body warm and feeling heavy and sleepy, she had no interest in moving a muscle. But her feet and legs would fall asleep if she didn’t move, and so she forced herself to crawl onto the bed. Pulling back the covers and sliding between the sheets was beyond her capacity.
CHAPTER 20
Ur
Terah prayed to awaken from this nightmare, but he knew better. In this horrible dream that was not a dream, he felt rooted to the rocky soil. The core of his being screamed for him to lift his tunic, tug at the wool stuck to his shin wounds, and flee with the speed of a man fifty years younger. But by the time he even gathered his hem, the dogs closed in on him.
He dived toward the mouth of the cave, tumbling into cool utter darkness. That did not stop the dogs. They didn’t need to see. His scent led them, and his gasps gave him away. Terah felt for rocks to see how high he might climb. But where could he ascend that the dogs couldn’t follow? Still, he had to try. Standing still made him a human delicacy.
As the dogs reached him, he scrambled up as far as he could. Teeth bit through his tunic and sank into his backside. “Utu, god of the sun, save me!” he screeched, switching allegiances without a second thought. What good was the god of his forebearers if he had led him this far only to be devoured? As good as praying to the sun god in a cave black as pitch.
So Terah bellowed all the more, playing the madman as he felt everywhere for stones to throw. “Be gone!” he wailed and whipped three rocks toward the sounds of the pack. A high-pitched yelp told him at least one had found its mark, but when he reached for more, he found one too heavy to lift with one hand. He heard the dogs ascending again, so Terah twisted himself around and hefted the rock in both hands over his head.
It proved so weighty it nearly carried him off his roost, but this was his last hope. He had to swing the enormous stone at the first animal to draw near. But one locked its teeth into the flesh of his left shoulder, too close to hit with the rock. When another leapt onto his thighs, Terah brought the crude weapon down with all his might. Bone and tissue gave way as the animal slid off him and sounded as if it knocked other dogs down as it fell. Terah thrashed to the right, swinging into range the body of the dog attached to his shoulder. He bashed it with the rock and heard ribs break.
Dogs kept coming, and Terah knew that without a miracle, he was beat. He called on his last reserve of strength to again raise the stone above his head. He crouched, waiting till the next wave of mongrels came so close he could smell their foul breath. With a maniacal shriek he used all his might to bang the rock into the animals. His momentum launched him off his perch, and he continued to yowl as he hurtled down, the rock and his body slamming into dogs the whole way.
Terah landed with a thud, his head afire with pain, fingers raw, shoulder and one backside deeply bitten, the rest of his body scraped and torn. He knew bruises would show from head to toe in the light of day. But whatever had happened, whatever he had done, whichever deity had sent the miracle, the surviving dogs had gone, their plaintive cries filling the night.
“Glory to the gods,” he intoned, voice squeaking in the chill of the cave.
As he lay trying to gather himself, Terah prayed Belessunu would not wake to find him gone, that the dogs would not return for revenge, and that he would somehow muster the strength to get back home. “Gula, goddess of healing, lead me to the salves and ointments I need.”
Wheezing, Terah wondered how a man well past his prime could have fended off such an attack. Had the gods led him here just to test him, to see if he could survive? He had acquitted himself well, but how would he explain his wounds? And what had he gained from all this? “Help me, great gods of nature, to find the value in my ordeal.”
Terah struggled to his feet and felt for the wall, quickly realizing he had severely damaged his right ankle in the fall. That must have also accounted for the deep puncture wounds in his face.
He had been turned around, his back to the mouth of the cave. Slowly turning until the entrance appeared, he found the moon shining on the desolate landscape. “Thank you, Nanna,” he whispered.
Listening intently for the dogs, Terah waited before venturing out. He backed deeper into the cave, keeping his eye on the mouth. Soon he followed the formation behind him as it angled off, and he again lost sight of the entrance. Could this be his answer, the reasons the gods sent him out here—to discover the perfect refuge, must his family flee? This might make his torment worth all the fear and the pain. He couldn’t wait to tell his wife in the morning, assuming he could make it home. But first he would have to explain why he looked the way he did.
CHAPTER 21
Manhattan
Nicole’s mind had not really shut off all night. Everything that had happened since her father called from Paris the afternoon before dominated both her every conscious thought as well as her dreams. And it seemed every twenty minutes she roused, expecting someone to deliver her mother. As the night wore on, she kept promising herself she would call at the top of the next hour to see what had happened to the promise of moving her mother within sixty minutes of having left her in Recovery.
But each time the clock slowly rolled past the hour, Nicole told herself someone would wake her if her mother were in danger. Hopefully all this delay implied was that her mother was still sleeping—making it more likely she would awaken less hazy than she’d been right after surgery.
Awakened by the delivery of her breakfast, Nicole called Recovery, only to learn her mother was back in Intensive Care. “But not to worry, Dr. Berman. The resident assigned to her advised against putting her into a standard room until she wakes—which they expect by no later than ten.”
“But she’s all right?”
“Her vitals look good. She needed only the one dose of Zolpidem and is expected to be lucid after breakfast for her interrogation.”
After showering and changing and consuming—not really savoring—a continental breakfast, Nicole stepped into the corridor on her way to ICU. Patrolman Decker had already eaten as well and looked remarkably alert. “Don’t suppose you were allowed any sleep,” she said.
“Oh, no, ma’am. I sleep during the day. Soon as I get off I’ll hit the gym and go straight home to bed.”
“Show off,” she said. “I use any excuse to skip my workouts.”
“Daily battle,” he said, returning his chair to the front desk and following her to ICU.
Decker’s partner guarded the door, which bore a sign: No Admittance. Hospital Personnel Only.
“Surely I’m allowed in,” Nicole said.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the officer said.
“You can come in with me,” she said, “or Decker can, but I need to—”
“Detective wants to question her first. Says you can be there, but—”
“Do I need a lawyer?”
“Up to you, ma’am, if you think you’re gonna be charged with any—”
“I mean to get to see my mother!”
“No, a lawyer couldn’t help you with that.”
“Can one of you at least let her know I’m here and that I want to see her?”
“I could,” the officer said, “but she’s still sleeping.”
“I need to talk to somebody. As soon as she’s awake, my mother needs to know I’m here and that my dad will be here around noon.”
Nicole started toward the nurses’ station, but Officer Decker said, “I gotta stay with you wherever you go, and I’m already on overtime. They’ll be replacing me soon.”
She kept moving. “You’ve been most kind, but you or whoever replaces you is going to have to keep up.”
As she approached the desk, a woman at a computer monitor looked up, then past her, and smiled. “Hi, Duane!” she said.
Decker nodded and smiled. “Christi.”
Nicole raised a brow at him. “Her too? One on every floor?”
He shrugged. “Not every floor. Guess they
like the uniform.”
Christi confirmed that Nicole was not to see her mother before the police did. Nicole began to plead her case, but Christi held up a hand. “I know nothing about this except that Mrs. Berman is a VIP patient and it’s my job if I don’t follow the rules.”
“Convenient,” Nicole said.
CHAPTER 22
Ur
How Terah wished he had a torch! It might have held off the dogs, but it also would have enabled him to see the full dimensions of the cave. Just by feeling about in the inky blackness, he could tell it was huge. Small cavaties here and there opened to larger areas—so many that Terah had to be careful to retrace his steps to find his way out.
When he finally returned to the mouth of the cave, he hesitated before emerging, listening for danger and assessing his injuries in the moonlight. No part of his body had been spared. He may have broken a left toe. The tops of both feet were deeply scraped. He worried that right ankle might be broken. The wounds on his shins now had counterparts on his calves. The first dog had bit deep into his left backside, drawing blood that stuck to his tunic. Each time he pulled the material away brought a stab of pain.
Terah’s lower back ached as if it had taken the brunt of the blows on his fall to the cave floor. His arms bore nicks and tears that oozed. His shoulder had suffered the deepest bite, and a circle of blood on his garment had already grown as large as his head. Terah also felt pain in his neck, and his skull bore too many sores to count. Both cheekbones felt bruised, and he gently touched lacerations at his chin, both cheeks, and near his ears.
Terah crept out of the cave, steadying himself with a hand on the edge of the opening for as long as he could. Once free, he found himself favoring the painful ankle and knew he would not get far unless he found something to use as support. He prayed the moon god Nanna would stay free of the clouds so he could search as he labored along.
The scarce vegetation consisted largely of scrub, nothing that would yield a walking stick. Terah mince-stepped in agony, vigilant for anything he might use. If only he were closer to the river, he might find driftwood. Grateful as he was to the gods for having spared his life, he began to despair of reaching his own estate where he might receive help from his servants. At least he had diverted the marauding dogs from his own animals.
Terah’s goal became to reach home before Belessunu rose so he could use her polished copper plate to evaluate and begin repairing his face. If Gula, the goddess of healing, led him to the right concoction, he could lessen his wife’s shock at the very sight of him. He vaguely remembered that Nimrod, who suffered a face wound in an early battle, had been treated with a solution of turpentine from two types of trees, ground daisy petals, and tamarisk. The king’s physicians had pounded the ingredients into the flour of inninnu and poured the mix into beer and milk. They applied this to his cheek and wound cloth around it. When the binding was removed a few days later, no hint of his injury remained.
Belessunu herself had treated the minor wounds of their servants with a solution of honey and myrrh mixed with alcohol. Surely Terah could rustle up something while his wife slept. But who knew when he might reach home, inching along in the desolate wilderness?
About two hours into his excruciating journey, Terah reached the halfway point between the cave and his house. The small fire his servants had built outside the livestock pen came into view, and he focused on it the way he would an oasis in the desert. He couldn’t imagine enduring another two hours limping along, but neither could he consider the alternative.
A couple of hundred feet farther, Terah finally happened upon what appeared to be a post that may have once been part of a crude fence. How it got here was a mystery, but Terah chose to thank the gods. It proved too long to fit under his arm as a crutch, and he was too weary and sore to try to shorten it. Not ideal as a walking stick because of its weight, it was better than nothing. He couldn’t swing it in cadence with his steps without gripping it with both arms, and his damaged shoulder made that impossible. So Terah trudged along, using his left knee to help push the post ahead and then carefully catching up to it.
That slightly increased his speed, and exhausted as he was, he kept his eyes on the fire in the distance. Stopping even to rest would render him unable to move again.
CHAPTER 23
Manhattan
Nicole Berman learned a hard lesson that fall Saturday morning, prohibited from seeing her own mother until she could be questioned by the New York Police Department. She found herself livid not over the injustice of Officer Martinez taking at face value her mother’s comments while delirious but rather over her own passivity.
It made sense, of course, to eliminate both Nicole and her father as suspects in the attack on her mother. Anyone in the Berman family or circle of friends would find ludicrous the idea that her father or she would ever do anything to harm her mother. So, sure, let the cops recite all the clichés and mix all the metaphors they wanted, jumping through hoops, covering bases, dotting i’s and crossing t’s. It shouldn’t take long to rule out her and her dad.
But something about having to do nothing but sit and wait and pace and pray and wonder, unable to do a thing, awoke in Nicole something she knew she had inherited from her father. Ben Berman seldom allowed life to happen to him. He was anything but a reactor. He embodied the very definition of proactive.
Nicole knew down deep she shouldn’t be so hard on herself. She had rushed to Mount Sinai, micromanaged her mother’s care as much as she was able, and even fought to temper Officer Martinez’s report of Mom’s barely coherent comments. Given the legal ramifications and the realities of the investigation, Nicole could have done no more.
But now the inactivity, her powerlessness, ignited in her a resolve that would change the way she attacked life. That would be a laugh to friends and colleagues who already teased her about being an overachiever—as if something was wrong with that. They looked at her résumé or her curriculum vitae and scoffed at her interest in adding one more achievement. “Two doctorates not enough for you? All those digs you’ve been on and now you want to run your own?”
Her father had always been her biggest supporter. Nicole once heard him berate a colleague who intimated that she had accomplished so much only through nepotism. Dad had said, “She’s earned everything that’s come her way. Her education stacks up against anybody’s—including mine—and she’s not even forty yet. Degrees from Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Berlin, and she’s taught at Regent, Fuller, Brandeis, and Harvard. Okay, I gave her a leg up by taking her on digs since she was fourteen, but not every kid who does that gets licensed in Israel, Iraq, and Jordan. Some say archaeology is as much art as science. I say it’s more art than science, and that’s where Nic has it over me. She’s as intuitive as anyone I’ve ever worked with on a dig.”
As she sat fuming, Nicole tried to distract herself by imagining her father meeting Detective Wojciechowski at LaGuardia. The detective seemed a tough native New Yorker, and clearly his plan would be to poke and dig and unearth any fissures in the Berman marriage—anything pointing to a motive. Obviously her father had a perfect alibi, but Wojciechowski would look for his involvement, his masterminding the assault.
Knowing that could not be true made Nicole confident such a line of inquiry would lead nowhere. She just wished she could be a fly on the wall, or in the squad car, for the nine-mile ride into Manhattan. But even more, she was determined to take charge of situations, of everything she was after in life. Some accused her of being overbearing anyway, so they wouldn’t be disappointed—or surprised.
Constructive assertiveness, that was her goal. No more letting life happen to her. Nicole would keep pushing for the best care for her mother, for full disclosure from the NYPD, and for them to find the assailant as soon as she and her father were cleared.
And that wasn’t all. Regardless what she found in her mail from the Saudis, she would continue to force the issue, to push for her license to lead
a dig there. If that meant insisting her dad quit playing games and commit to the financing, she’d do that too. She would even start lining up her volunteers so she could vet her team in plenty of time.
Nicole was about to burst from frustration as the morning wore on and Patrolman Duane Decker and his partner were relieved. The replacements—a man and a woman in their thirties—had apparently not been fully informed of what was going on. When Nicole tried to introduce herself, they looked wary. “Our job is to keep you out of here,” the woman cop said. “So you might as well camp out somewhere else.”
“Your job is to keep any unauthorized persons out,” Nicole said, “since we don’t know who attacked my mother.”
“Not here to chat,” the man said. “You wanna sit here quietly, fine, but you’re not gettin’ in.”
Nicole was tempted to tell him she knew better, that Wojciechowski had already said she could be present when her mother was questioned. But saying nothing for now would make that small victory all the sweeter.
Nicole’s phone chirped, and she opened a text from her father.
“Flt att just told me 2 wait til all else get off. Mom OK?”
Nicole hesitated. She could at least put him at ease about that, couldn’t she?
“Mom’s stable.”
“U here?”
“No, you’re being picked up.”
“Who? Staff?”
Now Nicole had stepped in it. What was she supposed to say to that after having been warned not to tip him off?
“You don’t know him.”
“Whats going on Nic?”
“It’s all good. See you soon.”
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