Beth could hardly credit what she was reading. It read as if it were a real-life account of Theseus and the Minotaur; she struggled to remember the myth. Every nine years, the Athenians were made to pay a terrible tribute to King Minos, as part of an earlier truce; they were required to send a group of young men and women—seven of each, if she recalled correctly—to be devoured by the dreaded Minotaur, half man and half bull, who lived in a labyrinth from which there was no escape. Had the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli modeled his own maze on that legendary one? And what was the actual beast who haunted, and hunted in, his own deadly theater? A Minotaur, she knew, it was not; that was only a myth. But what was it really—a lion? A tiger? Something even more exotic—and dangerous?
The prisoner at first seeks a way out, going up one narrow path and down another, but only from on high, where the sultan sits, can the design be wholly known. And only from that perch [throne] can it be seen that there is no escape. The creature sleeps at the heart of the maze, in the shade of the towering terebinth tree.
The terebinth had been mentioned earlier, too, and Beth had done some research into it—enough to reveal that it was a massive indigenous tree, better known to botanists as the Palestine pistacia, that was known to live as long as a thousand years. Though sometimes called by other names, it was prominently featured in many scriptural passages: It was under such a tree that King Saul had been buried. It was in the mighty branches of the terebinth that Absalom, great in his own eyes, had been trapped and then murdered. And it was in the valley of Elah, thick with these always green trees, that David with his sling had brought down the Philistine champion, Goliath.
But as the prisoner approaches, the beast raises its head—it has a wondrous sense of smell, and an appetite for blood that is never appeased. The prisoner has no knowledge of the monster so close, but walks deeper and deeper into the trap, unable to see beyond the dense walls of the hawthorn bushes, with their thorny branches and bright white blossoms. As he ventures into the twisting garden, so too does the monster rouse himself from his torpor and stand on its four clawed feet. The prisoner, he searches for a way out of the green enclosure [trap], while the beast seeks out his offered prey. With my own eyes, as God is my great and eternal witness, I have seen many of the sultan’s prisoners—men like me who have served him well and done him no disloyalty—thrust into the maze, there to be hunted down and torn to pieces. It is said that when the sultan has no more use for a man, there is but one use left, and that is to sustain this accursed creature, this beast he calls his manticore.
Beth let the hand holding the translation drop to her side. It was too bizarre, too unbelievable, what she was reading. And yet she did not doubt a word. It was as if the scribe were whispering these words into her very ear. And it certainly reinforced her initial feeling about the illuminations—that they weren’t simple flights of fancy, but were drawn from living models. The artist, she felt, had faithfully reproduced the evidence of his own eyes.
Impossible as that, even now, seemed.
“There you are,” Elvis called to her as he scuffed across the gravel path in his shorts and sandals. In the bright sun, he looked so pale as to be nearly transparent. “Mrs. Cabot’s looking all over for you.”
“Why?”
Elvis adjusted his wraparound shades and glanced about, as if he had never seen daylight up close like this. “Don’t know exactly, but there’s a lot of commotion. That Arab guy—”
“Mr. al-Kalli.”
“He showed up about a half hour ago, with his bodyguard, and he wants everything back.”
“The book?”
“That, and all the translation work we’ve done so far. He’s already been down to Hildegard’s lair and come back with the book itself.”
“I can only imagine how Hildegard reacted.”
“You don’t need to—I can tell you. I had to bring him down there. She wasn’t happy. But she reattached the front cover—for some reason it was still separate—”
At Beth’s request.
“—and the minute she’d put the last stitch through the binding, he had his bodyguard—”
“Jakob.”
“Right. He had him put it back in the big box it came in—”
Beth couldn’t help reflecting that Elvis made it sound like repackaging a car stereo.
“—and then they came back upstairs and started looking for you.” Having finished his summation, he removed a pebble from his sandal. “Hot out here,” he said. “The Santa Anas must be blowing.”
Beth folded up the letter, reluctantly, as there was just a small portion to go, and knew she had no choice but to reenter the lion’s den. If al-Kalli was up in her office and he wanted all the work they had done so far, she would give it to him, gladly. The computer-driven translations of the bestiary text had been interesting, no question about it, but they had also been fairly pro forma. The animals, from chimeras to leviathans, all so naturalistically depicted in the illuminations, had been summarized and described in the accompanying text in the routine, Christian-iconographic manner of the age. The fire-breathing basilisk, for instance, had been portrayed as a symbol of lust and the Devil, and the Vulgate passage—Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis—had been duly included. (Translated into the New Revised Standard Version many centuries later, the passage read “You shall tread upon the lion and the adder: the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot,” all of which Beth recognized as a standard reference to Christ’s victory over Satan.) The griffin, because it had four clawed feet but the wings of a bird, was classed, as per Leviticus 11:13-20, among the unclean creatures. The phoenix, because its flesh was incorruptible and it rose, after three days, from its own ashes, was of course a symbol of the Resurrection. And the manticore, the lethal beast that none could withstand, “hungered after human flesh most ravenously,” and, like the Devil himself, could never be sated. What was surprising was to find such Christian tropes and allegories in a book of Middle Eastern origin, but Beth attributed that to its foreign-born author.
She waited while another tour group began the climb back up the gently sloping hill toward the main museum complex, then followed them on the meandering path. The gardens of the Getty had been laid out with an elaborate plan designed to suggest no plan at all. Wooden foot-bridges crossed running streams dotted with boulders from the Sierra foothills, all arranged to create slightly different sound effects. Seemingly random collections of flowers— deer grass, dymondia, geranium, lavender, and thyme—were all strategically grouped by color and texture. Elvis said, “You want me to print out a copy of all the files for them?”
“Yes.”
“What about the completed list of the catchwords?”
It was the list of catchwords, of course, that had led her to the discovery of the scribe’s secret letter, but what, if anything, would al-Kalli be able to make of it? He’d been unimpressed when Elvis had first blurted out something about it. And even Elvis did not know about the letter; Beth had scanned the text into their laboriously constructed database on her own, after hours. Apart from Carter, the only person who knew anything about it at all was Hildegard, and Beth was confident that she had kept mum. Hildegard thought that most of the wealthy people who owned these precious artifacts were precisely the wrong custodians—and she seldom shared with them information she felt they couldn’t appreciate. Still, Beth would call her later just to make absolutely sure.
The moment that thought occurred to her, Beth realized that she had come to a decision without really meaning to. Apparently, she had decided to hold on to the scribe’s letter after all. She was shocked in a way. It was wrong; it was unethical. And it could lead to professional disaster. How could she ever even publish her findings without disclosing her source material and revealing how she had come by it?
But if she told al-Kalli about the letter and returned it to him, there was a very good chance it would never again see the light of day. She would never be able to have an analysis done of
the paper and ink; she would never be able to display it to the world, and she would never be able to prove that its eyewitness account of the First Crusade, or the scribe’s imprisonment and death, were anything more than some frustrated scholar’s concoction. It was bad enough that The Beasts of Eden might wind up locked away from sight for another thousand years, but the idea that this rare and powerful and terrifyingly authentic letter should also vanish into oblivion was simply too much. Maybe Hildegard was right—the wrong people possessed these treasures.
As she approached her office, she saw Jakob, holding the heavy box in which she had first seen the bestiary, waiting by the door, and she could hear Mrs. Cabot inside saying, “I’m sure she’s on the premises. The garage attendant said her car is still here.”
From the nervousness in Cabot’s voice, Beth could tell things were going badly. She put on her brightest, most reassuring smile and swept past Jakob into the room.
“Mr. al-Kalli,” she said, extending her hand—he was standing at the corner of her desk, as if he’d been surreptitiously looking over the papers spread out there—“it’s a pleasure to see you.”
Mrs. Cabot looked as if she could faint from relief.
“My assistant, Elvis Wright, tells me you’d like to see the results of the work we’ve been doing.” In her heart of hearts, she was still hoping to persuade him to leave things as they were, and to let the book itself remain in the conservation wing.
He took her hand, but coldly. He was dressed immaculately, as always, in a midnight blue suit and a yellow silk tie fixed by a gold pin at the collar.
“The computer software is yielding a more thorough and accurate English version than we could ever have expected.” Keep emphasizing the progress being made. “And faster than a whole battery of scholars could do it.”
“Not fast enough, I’m afraid. I want everything you have done to date.”
“I’ve already told Elvis to prepare that for you. He’s next door compiling it all right now.” Unable to restrain herself, she glanced at Jakob, holding the box—now containing the book itself—right outside the office. “But without the actual bestiary on the premises, it will be harder to continue the work in the way we would like. By completing the graphemical catalogue, and its accompanying translation, we had hoped to make the wonders of this work readily accessible, online, to scholars everywhere.”
“Really?” said al-Kalli dryly. “That was never my hope.”
Even after dealing with al-Kalli for some time now and suspecting the worst, Beth was still taken aback by his tone. “It wasn’t?”
“What I wanted—what I needed—was to know what every word in the book said. If that’s been done, and if the book itself has been suitably restored, the work is done.”
“But you have no intention, ever, of sharing The Beasts of Eden with the world?”
Al-Kalli glanced at the door as Elvis entered, carrying a stack of multicolored cardboard folders, each one devoted to a separate quire in the book and the work that had been done on it. Elvis plopped them on the desk in front of al-Kalli.
“No,” he said to Beth as he leafed through the folders, reading the tabs that indicated what each contained. Satisfied, he looked up at Jakob, who came in, placed the folders on top of the iron box, and then walked out again.
Al-Kalli reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a slim, ivory-colored envelope. “But I don’t want you to think I am ungrateful,” he said, handing it to Beth. Then he turned on his well-polished heel, nodded to a speechless Mrs. Cabot, and left. There was a faint scent of Bay Rum in the air.
Beth stood stock-still, as did Mrs. Cabot, until Elvis shrugged and said, “It’s not like we don’t have our own copies of everything.”
That was true. But without the actual book, Beth thought, what good did it all do? It was like a wonderful review of a movie no one could see, an authoritative article on a painting never to be exhibited, an exegesis of a text no one could ever read. Worse, without a public source, or an authentic artifact, to point to, it was like an exercise in the fantastic. None of it could, or would, ever be taken seriously.
She turned the envelope over in her hand. It was closed, to her surprise, with red sealing wax, on which the initials MAK had been impressed; she hadn’t seen anything like it outside the movies, where people like Sir Thomas More got missives from the Archbishop of Canterbury. She broke the seal and removed two cashier’s checks—the first, in the amount of one million dollars, was made out to the Getty Conservation Institute. She passed it wordlessly to Mrs. Cabot. The second check, she had no idea what to do with. It was made out to her personally, in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. Elvis craned his neck to get a good look at it, then whistled.
“Whoa,” he said, “looks to me like that includes a hefty bonus for your executive assistant.”
Beth wanted to say that she couldn’t accept this, but al-Kalli was already gone. Mrs. Cabot came closer, and Beth held it out for her to see. “Should I just tear it up?” Beth said.
“It’s a cashier’s check,” Mrs. Cabot said, “it’d be like tearing up the actual money.”
“What should I do with it?”
Mrs. Cabot looked puzzled, too. She was running all the ethical standards through her mind, but it wasn’t clear exactly which one was being violated. Al-Kalli wasn’t asking Beth to lie about anything; he wasn’t enlisting her official support in a dubious claim. He wasn’t asking her to back up a suspicious provenance or declare something to be the work of an Old Master that had been previously attributed to a lowly apprentice. In fact, he was removing the object in question from all such considerations. So it clearly wasn’t a bribe—it was a gift. But the Getty did have in place a clear and strictly enforced policy that required all museum employees to report anything at all that might represent, in any way, a conflict of interest. And on those grounds alone, the check had to be declared, cleared, and only then, possibly released.
“I say cash it, quick,” Elvis whispered in Beth’s direction, then scooted out before Mrs. Cabot could admonish him.
“I’ll have to take this to the CFO’s office,” Mrs. Cabot said of the million-dollar check. “And I might as well take that one, too, for safekeeping,” she continued, snatching it out of Beth’s hand. “The museum counsel will have to decide whether or not you can accept it.”
Mrs. Cabot left, too, now, and Beth suddenly found herself bereft in her own office—alone, in the late afternoon, without The Beasts of Eden, and without the king’s ransom she had just been holding in her hand. She didn’t hold out much hope of ever seeing it again—Mrs. Cabot would find a way either to have it returned or, if al-Kalli consented, deposited instead in the museum’s coffers. Nobody ever became a museum curator for the money . . . but still, it had been nice to feel rich, even if it was only for a minute or two.
There was one thing, however, she did have left. Sliding open the bottom drawer of her desk, and lifting out a folder purposely mislabeled “Personal Correspondence,” she removed the original, eleventh-century letter that had been hidden in the bestiary. As she held its fragile pages in her hand, she felt that maybe the label wasn’t so misleading after all. It did feel as though it had been written to her, as if she were its most appropriate and appreciative audience. No one would ever have known it even existed had it not been for Beth’s sleuthing. And if it hadn’t been for her breach of professional ethics now, the letter would once again be in the possession of its rightful owner, on its way back to Bel-Air . . . and oblivion. She knew she should feel guilty about the ethical questions—her training in New York and London had always stressed the highest professional standards—but if she were perfectly honest with herself, she felt instead as if she had saved something precious from an all-consuming fire.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
EVEN THOUGH HE knew it wasn’t true, the funny thing about the al-Kalli estate was that it had been laid out as if it were designed to withstand an assault. There was only
one road that led up to it, it commanded the high ground from all sides, it was surrounded by a stone wall with only one other entrance apart from the main gate. Still, there were plenty of things Greer saw that could use improvement. For instance, there was no reason not to place some razor wire atop the back and side walls; yes, there were all kinds of codes and property restrictions for Bel-Air homeowners, but if you didn’t actually ask permission, it couldn’t be refused, right? And if you concealed the wire with some vines and shrubbery—which wasn’t hard—what was the problem? That back gate, the one where Greer had first penetrated the grounds, also needed some serious attention. It should have had a dual-focus, night-vision surveillance camera mounted above it, and the feed should go either to a control center in the main house or at least to the front gate, which was manned twenty-four hours anyway. Greer had mentioned a few of these things to al-Kalli, who’d simply said, “Do what you think is necessary,” and then kind of brushed him aside. Greer had the sense that something else was really on his mind.
He could guess what it was. It was that weird damn menagerie he kept. The place gave Greer, a guy who had seen plenty of bad shit in his time, the creeps. From the outside, you couldn’t hear or see or smell a thing; it was sealed up tighter than a drum. But at least once a day, Greer felt he ought to look in as part of his routine patrol. This morning, he’d found that paleontologist, Carter Cox, in there with Rashid. Rashid, in his usual white coat, was trying to explain something about one of the animals—the one that had spat the green crap on Greer’s neck—and Cox, Greer could tell, was just waiting for him to finish with the blather so he could tell him what was really up.
“The air,” Cox finally said, “is very pure—I understand that.”
“We have the best filters, imported from Germany,” Rashid rattled on, “they are made for nuclear facilities.”
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