“Yes,” she called out over her shoulder. “Everything’s okay.”
When she went back inside, the two teenage girls, coating themselves with lotion, followed her with blank expressions.
“If I’d known you wanted to meet him that bad, I’d have asked him for his card.”
“I just thought I recognized him for a second.”
“Not the kind of guy you’d forget,” Del replied, flopping back in the chair with a magazine on his lap. “But he could go a little easier on the aftershave.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ARTER GOT LOST three times on the way to al-Kalli’s estate. He was in too much of a hurry, he knew that, and he’d barely slept all night. And the road to the top of Bel-Air was a winding one.
At the gatehouse, he’d had to explain himself twice to the guard, who’d then called the main house, and after a minute or two, waved him through. Even then, he’d had to wait while one imperious peacock had strutted slowly across the driveway.
Jakob had opened the front door, smirking, and ushered him through the vast entry hall and then out again to the back. They’d walked across the flagstoned terrace, then to the side of the swimming pool. Al-Kalli was doing laps, methodically. Carter was shown to a seat at a glass-topped table, Jakob departed, and a servant appeared out of nowhere to offer him coffee. Carter accepted, gratefully.
The morning sun slanted across the green expanse of the lawn, the shimmering blue of the pool, the purple blossoms of the jacaranda trees nearby. Birds twittered in the branches overhead, a light breeze stirred the leaves—it was idyllic, it was paradise, and Carter thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be rich.
Then he thought how strange it was that such a perfect setting should conceal such an astonishing thing as the bestiary.
Al-Kalli did one more lap, then drew himself up out of the pool in a swift, fluid motion. To Carter’s surprise, he was naked, and his body, the color of beaten copper, was as hairless as his head. He was also trim and muscular. He scrubbed himself vigorously from head to foot with a striped towel that was folded on the end of the diving board, then pulled on a white robe and came toward Carter as he fastened the belt.
“Even I didn’t expect you quite this soon,” he said, sitting down at the table. He raised his chin and the servant reappeared, this time with a large silver tray. On it were two crystal bowls of sliced fruit, a basket of muffins and breads, a frosted pitcher of what looked to Carter like guava juice. While everything was placed in front of them, al-Kalli asked, “What else would you like? Eggs, sausages?”
“No, this is plenty,” Carter said.
“When I was at school in England, I never could understand their passion for bangers and kippers and such stuff, especially first thing in the morning.” He poured some cream into his coffee, sipped it. A drop of water hung from his sapphire ring, then dropped onto the table. “English taste, in many things, eludes me.”
Carter had no strong opinion on the subject.
“But at least I don’t have to ask what brings you here,” al-Kalli resumed with a sly smile. “Did you sleep at all last night?”
“Not really.”
“I’m happy to hear it. It means you were as impressed as I’d hoped you’d be.”
“Impressed is not the word.”
“Perhaps not. But there really aren’t any good words, are there, to adequately describe the bestiary?”
“No, there aren’t,” Carter agreed. But he’d come here with some important things to say, and he didn’t want to hold off any longer. “I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what you said.”
“And?”
“And I can’t go along with everything you want. I can’t agree to keep this discovery secret. What you have here is one of the greatest and most miraculous . . . zoos”—he still hadn’t figured out what to call it and “bestiary” seemed strange—“in the history of the world. Do you even know what these animals are?”
“We know what my family has called them, for time immemorial.”
“I’ve spent the whole night researching them, and though I’ll need more time to study and confirm my initial take, I think I can tell you some things already. Would you like to hear?”
“Nothing would please me more.”
“Your basilisk?” Carter said, raring to go. “It’s probably what paleontologists would call a saichania. It means ‘beautiful one’ in Mongolian. It’s from the family of ankylosaurs, armor-plated, plant-eating dinosaurs that lived in the Late Cretaceous.”
Al-Kalli looked intrigued, and while spooning a piece of fruit from his bowl, said, “Interesting—go on.”
“Your griffin? Your griffin is—and again, I’m going to need a lot more time to make sure I’m right—your griffin is what we’d call a homotherium. A kind of cat, a close cousin of the saber-toothed cat, extinct since the end of the last ice age, about fourteen thousand years ago.”
“Or so you thought.”
“Or so we thought.” Carter had to laugh, too, though it came out sounding a little crazier than he’d expected. He had to key down; he had to get some sleep.
“And the phoenix?”
“Best guess? Argentavis magnificens. A full skeleton has never been found. It had a wingspan twice as wide as any living bird. It’s in the vulture family, and it dates from the Late Miocene.”
“It’s a great deal more beautiful than any vulture I have ever seen,” al-Kalli replied. He sounded slightly offended at the very suggestion.
“It is,” Carter said. “It is. But how could we have known that? No one has ever seen one before.” He was also talking too fast. He had to slow down; he had to calm himself.
“Have a muffin,” al-Kalli said, tilting the basket toward him. “The cook makes them fresh every morning.”
Carter took one, broke it in half, and began eating mechanically, without paying any attention. He hadn’t even mentioned the most amazing discovery of them all. “And then there’s the manticore, as you call it,” he said.
“Ah yes, the pride of the bestiary.”
Carter washed the muffin down, barely having tasted it, with half a glass of juice. “It’s a therapsid, a kind of reptile that was a direct ancestor of the mammals.”
“Are you saying it’s a dinosaur?”
“No, no, this animal was something else, something earlier. We don’t know much about it—its bones are extremely difficult to find, and the best place to look for them has been the Karoo Desert in South Africa, which is one of the least hospitable places on earth.”
Al-Kalli poured some more coffee into Carter’s cup, before refilling his own. “Then think how much easier it will be to study the manticore—”
“The gorgon,” Carter corrected him. “Gorgonopsian.”
Al-Kalli nodded, conceding the point for now. “Think how much easier it will be to study this gorgon in the flesh, and in the comforts of Bel-Air. Isn’t that precisely the sort of opportunity a man like you would prize?”
And it was. Carter could never have imagined such a thing—no one could have. The whole scenario, from start to finish, was quite literally impossible. How could creatures like this have survived? Anywhere? How could they have been brought together, and preserved, by one family, however wealthy, however powerful, inhabiting a palace in a desert waste? How could they have been brought, of all places, to Los Angeles, California? To the movie-star precincts of upper Bel-Air? None of it made any sense. Beth had told him some of the stories about the rich and mysterious al-Kalli clan—the sinister rumors of their barbarity, their occult powers, their lineage so old it was lost in the mists of time—but he had chalked it all up to superstition and hearsay.
Mohammed al-Kalli, he’d told her, was just a man—a man with a lot of money, there was no disputing that—but just a man. He wasn’t a wizard, he wasn’t Prospero, he wasn’t Merlin.
Or—and this was a thought he’d been entertaining for hours—was he?
“I can give you everything your work her
e could possibly require,” al-Kalli said. “Just name it and it’s yours.”
“Right now, I can’t even answer that question. What I need, I guess, most of all, is simply a chance to go back to the bestiary and see the animals for myself. Again.”
“You doubt what you saw last night?” al-Kalli said sympathetically. “That’s quite understandable. But I’m not running a tourist attraction here. You appreciate, I hope, that no one outside of my family, and a few loyal retainers, has ever even seen the bestiary.” True, al-Kalli thought, he had allowed that lowlife Captain Greer to see the place, but then, Greer was expendable—and soon. “If I’m going to permit this, I will need to know that you are prepared to accept my offer.” He sat back in his chair, the sapphire ring catching the sunlight and glistening like ice. “I need to know that you’re going to help me save the animals.”
How could Carter refuse such a challenge? But how, he wondered, could he accept it? “I’m a paleontologist,” he said, “not a veterinarian.”
“I have a veterinarian—Rashid—you saw him. He has had the finest training available. But he no longer knows what to do. The animals are ailing; they are dying. And he does not know how to stop it.”
“Then you need to find someone else, someone better, more knowledgeable.”
“I can hardly bring these animals to the attention of your average vet. Even if I could, what would he know about them? Nothing. He wouldn’t even know what he was looking at.”
“I’m not sure I do, either.”
“I have great faith in you,” al-Kalli said, “perhaps more than you do. These are the last of the menagerie. When I left Iraq, I had to leave nearly everything I owned behind; God knows what Saddam and his troops did to the rest. Even the book, the book your wife is restoring for me now, I did not have time to recover; I had to make special arrangements, later, to have it brought out of the country.” He put his coffee cup back in its delicate Limoges saucer, then leaned forward in his chair. “You, better than anyone else alive, know what these creatures are; you know how they lived, how they bred. Help me save them,” he said, “and then, when that has been done, when the immediate danger is past, we can reveal our secret to the world.”
Carter had listened carefully to every word, but still wasn’t sure he believed it. Was al-Kalli playing him? Did he mean it when he said that he’d eventually share the bestiary with the world? Or was that just another ploy to ensure Carter’s cooperation?
“I’m simply not ready yet to part with my creatures,” al-Kalli said reassuringly. “Once the word is out, it will be difficult—probably impossible—to maintain any control over them. But give me some time, give me your help, and I will be.”
His black eyes were bright with sincerity; his expression was sober but hopeful. Carter wanted to believe him—or maybe, somewhere deep down, he too wanted to hold on to the secret, just for a little while longer. Something of this magnitude, once it came to light, would indeed spiral out of control quickly. The animals would be spirited off to some state-of-the-art facility, God knew where, and scientists from all over the world would flock to study them. Would Carter continue to have access to them? Or would his role be summarily forgotten? The science he knew he could cut, but when it came to politics and bureaucracy and all the cut-throat stuff that professional advancement seemed increasingly to demand, he was hopelessly at sea.
“You will, while the animals are here, give me unfettered access to them?” Carter asked.
“Of course,” al-Kalli said, leaning back and spreading his hands. He knew he had just won. “As far as I’m concerned, you can move into my house.”
“And whatever I recommend, even if it does mean ultimately moving them or calling in some other expert, you will do?”
“Yes,” al-Kalli replied, with well-feigned enthusiasm.
Carter didn’t know how, under these circumstances, he could possibly refuse. Nor, frankly, did he want to. “Then let’s get to work,” he said, rising from his chair.
Al-Kalli smiled up at him. “Splendid,” he said, clapping his hands for Jakob. “I’m so pleased.” He knew that he’d won this battle the moment Carter had appeared that morning, but it was good to have it formally concluded. People, al-Kalli thought, could always be made to do what you wanted them to—and then, just as easily, they could be gotten rid of.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“I DON’T BELIEVE you.”
That was just like his mother. Anytime he gave her good news—which, Greer had to admit, hadn’t been all that often—she thought he was lying.
“Show me your pay stub,” she said.
“They pay me in cash.”
She put a cup of tea on the tray, right next to her toast and jam, and waddled back into the living room with it. “Hold this,” she said, and Greer did, as she settled herself back into her chair. “Now, you can rest the tray across the arms.”
He wished he had something to prove it to her—a company ID, a contract, a uniform. “Remember that guy from the army who called here the other day?”
“Yes,” she said, spreading the jam and paying more attention to The People’s Court than to him.
“The one I told you wanted me to complete a survey?”
“You were lying about that, too, I think.”
Damn, her radar was really pretty good. “I was, a little. He wanted to know what I was doing now as a civilian, and I had to tell him I was having some trouble finding work.”
That she heard. “Of course you couldn’t find any—you didn’t look.”
Why did he bother? What had made him think he should even tell her anything? But he was going to plow ahead. He was going to get this out. “He told me about a guy—a very rich guy, up in Bel-Air—who needed someone to run his entire security operation. He put me up for the job, and I got it.”
He was standing to one side of her chair, and she was looking at the TV, and the whole setup reminded him uncomfortably of the time he came home to tell her he’d been made captain of the baseball team and she’d been watching something on the TV—the big old one that still had an actual aerial on top—and instead of saying anything like “That’s great!” or “Good for you!” she’d said, “Your father’s run off again, and this time I think it’s for good.”
“When do you start this so-called job?”
“I already have. I told you.”
She bit off a hunk of the toast—more jam than bread at this point—and shrugged. “Does that mean you’ll be getting your own place?”
He couldn’t tell how she meant that—whether she was hoping he would or hoping he wouldn’t. She hadn’t exactly welcomed him home when he’d returned from Iraq, but seeing as he’d been wounded and all, she could hardly turn him away. And then she’d gotten used to the extra cash his disability payments had brought in, for groceries and rent and utilities and stuff. If he’d had to guess, he’d have said she was kind of torn.
“Maybe,” he said, letting her twist a little. “I’ll see how far the salary goes.” He liked the word “salary”; made it sound more authentic than the wad of bills Jakob had tossed him.
“If you’ve got a job,” she said, having had a minute or two to think about it, “why aren’t you there now?”
“It’s not that kind of a job, where you punch in and out. It’s an executive position.”
She looked dubious.
“And I’m going there now, in fact.” What was the use? He turned and headed for the door. He grabbed his windbreaker off the hook, and just before he closed the door, he heard her turn up the volume on the TV.
But she was right, whether she knew it or not—it was time he got a place of his own. This shit was definitely not worth it.
On the way to the VA hospital, where he’d been heading all along, he listened to a tape of Grand Funk Railroad—the old stuff was still the best—at full volume. His life, he thought, was coming together, but in a very weird way. What had started out as a blackmail plot—never a very good one, as he
could never figure out exactly where the leverage was—had turned into a regular gig. He’d asked al-Kalli if his title was “Head of Security Operations,” and al-Kalli had said that was fine with him. Now here he was, a decorated Iraq vet, working for an Arab billionaire, in L.A. yet, and guarding a bunch of . . . dinosaurs, for all he knew. That guy he’d seen on TV—Carter Cox—was a paleontologist, and that must have been why al-Kalli had let him in. The only other guy Greer had seen let into the bestiary had never made it out again.
And al-Kalli must actually think of him as more than just a security officer; why else would he have invited him to that fancy party? Although—Christ—that food had been some of the worst he’d had since his deployment.
At the hospital, he parked in his usual spot—a patch of shade off at the far end, just around the corner from the door—checked in at the front desk, and was halfway down the hall when the guard said, “Hold it, Captain!”
What, had he signed in on the wrong line? The army could find more ways to bust your balls . . .
“Got an advisory here,” the guard said. “You’re to report to the supervisor’s office.”
“I’ve got an appointment first,” Greer said. Through the glass wall of the therapy room, he could see Indira tending to Mariani in his wheelchair. He wanted to talk to her—he needed to talk to her. Things had been bad for a while, but now that he was straightening out his life, he wanted to tell her that. He wanted to tell someone who would care.
“No, you don’t,” the guard barked, coming out from behind the semicircular counter he sat behind. “You’re making an immediate left, and reporting to the supervisor. Last door at the end of the hall . . . Captain.”
These pricks really killed Greer; the guy was in uniform, but Greer was damned if he could see any combat patches on him. Greer glanced into the therapy room again, and saw that Indira was looking out at him. He raised one finger and mouthed “Right back,” then moved off down the hall.
The supervisor, Dr. Frank Foster, looked like he was in worse shape than some of the patients. He was a scrawny, walleyed guy with a glistening sheen of sweat on his pale face—even though the office air-conditioning was working fine—and the rabbity look of a smoker wondering where, and when, he could safely light up. Greer, gambling on his hunch, took out his pack of cigarettes and offered him one.
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