Bestiary cc-2

by Robert Masello

  “There you’re wrong,” Hildegard said. She was not one to kowtow. “I’d say the front cover was removed, and restitched, at least twice. When, I couldn’t say yet. But it might have been done by a jeweler or other artisan, someone who wanted to work on the ivory or reset the sapphires.”

  Al-Kalli laid the pages of catchwords on the edge of the table and went to the covers, which he touched with his fingertips the way you might gently graze a baby’s head. Hildegard flashed Beth a look that said, You know I don’t like to be interrupted, and Beth silently mouthed a Sorry.

  “What else have you had to do?” al-Kalli said, resignedly now. “Has the book required a great deal of repair?”

  Hildegard turned on her stool, her big brown skirt still hanging nearly all the way to the floor, and said, “Not as much as you might expect.” There was a warmer tone in her voice now, not only because she could see how attached al-Kalli was to his manuscript — a sentiment Hildegard could well appreciate — but because he had asked her about her field of expertise, a subject on which she could happily expatiate for hours. As Hildegard ran through the various problems the manuscript had presented, and the ways in which she was remedying them — all of which Beth already knew — Beth picked up the catchwords and began looking them over again. With the disassembled manuscript right there in front of her, she felt as though she were suddenly much closer to solving the mystery.

  One thing had always leapt out at her. It was the reference to the blue sky and the white clouds. Everything else was fairly prosaic, however intriguing — the notion that the scribe had been inveigled into an impossible task, the grumbling about feeling himself a prisoner of a powerful employer. Fairly standard stuff. But the touch of poetry, once it was coupled with the mention of the ornamented sepulcher at the end of the penultimate quire, gave Beth the feeling that she was suddenly very close to something.

  So close she could barely wait for al-Kalli to leave. Only then would she be able to test the hypothesis even now forming in her head.

  “The pigments in this book are interesting, too,” Hildegard was saying. “We’re using radiospectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence — don’t worry, they’re harmless — to get a better idea what they’re made of.”

  “What were they generally made of?” al-Kalli asked with genuine absorption.

  “Oh, that’s a big question,” Hildegard said, though it sounded as if she would be pleased to answer it at length. The only thing she liked more than her work was coming across someone who seemed to want to know all about it. “In illuminations, like these,” she said, guiding him to the illustration she’d been working on — a portrait of a snake-like creature with a blunt feline head and flicking tongue—“the coloring agents were usually vegetable, mineral, and animal extracts, though they were sometimes mixed with all sorts of things, from stale urine to honey to earwax.”

  That last item Beth had never heard about.

  “But you’ll notice that this book is rich in deep purples and blues, and that might be because of where it was made — ultramarine, which was made from lapis lazuli, was chiefly produced in Persia and Afghanistan.”

  The lesson on pigments alone went on for several more minutes, while Beth bided her time. She studied the catchwords again, then sidled over to the neighboring table where the bejeweled front and back covers lay. The sapphires, studding the slightly yellowed ivory, winked in the overhead light. Beth longed to pick the cover up, but she did not want to test her theory until al-Kalli was gone.

  Jakob, looking supremely bored, rocked on his heels, his hands folded in front of him.

  But Beth wasn’t fooled; she had the impression that Jakob was always well aware of everything that was happening around him.

  Beth pretended to be focused, too, on everything Hildegard was saying — she had moved on now to explaining why one side of a parchment page was always lighter and smoother than the other — while becoming, every second, more and more convinced that her own suspicions were right. When Hildegard finally took a breath, and al-Kalli consulted his watch — a gleaming gold Cartier from what Beth could see — she quickly thanked Hildegard for giving them so much time and guided Mr. al-Kalli and Jakob toward the door. She escorted them back up to the plaza, then took her leave. Even then, she deliberately walked away, back toward her office, for twenty paces, before turning around to make sure they were gone. Then she raced back down the line of London plane trees, back into the conservation building, and down to Hildegard’s office.

  Hildegard was already at work again and looked downright startled to see Beth.

  “I need to look at that front cover again,” Beth said, going straight to it.

  “Why?”

  “I need to look for something.” Beth picked it up carefully and angled its edge toward the overhead light.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “I’m looking for a space between the beech board and the ivory.”

  “A what?”

  “Just tell me — is there any space between these two, where something like a page of parchment could be concealed?”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Hildegard said, though her curiosity was sufficiently aroused that she quickly cleared a spot on the table in front of her. “Put it down.”

  Beth did, and Hildegard pulled the magnifying glass, which was mounted on a swivel, toward her. She studied the edge of the cover. “What makes you think we’ll find such a thing?”

  “The catchwords,” Beth said.

  “What about them?”

  “They said that the identity of the artist would be lost forever, to sleep under a blanket of blue sky and white clouds.”

  Hildegard looked at her blankly.

  “The cover of the book is made up of white ivory and blue sapphires. And together they make up a kind of ornamented sepulcher, which were the last catchwords in the book.”

  Hildegard didn’t look sold, but she didn’t look opposed to the idea, either. She took a scalpel from the drawer and probed the top of the cover.

  “Nothing here,” she said.

  “Check the inside edge, where the cover would be attached to the binding.”

  She turned the cover sideways and bent her head low. All Beth could see now was the top of her gray bun, with a couple of long pins stuck through it.

  “Well, I never,” Hildegard finally said. With one hand, she inserted the scalpel half an inch or so, as if nudging something loose. Then she reached out and grasped a pair of long-nosed tweezers, with which she ever so slowly drew something from beneath the ivory cover. Beth’s heart was beating fast as the tweezers emerged, with several faded parchment pages, fine as filament, clutched in their grip.

  Hildegard sat back on the stool and gave Beth a very approving glance. “I’m not even going to look at these,” she said. “You found them, and you should be the first person in centuries to read them.”

  Beth couldn’t agree more.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Greer grabbed a beer out of the fridge, wandered into the living room, and flopped onto the matching Barcalounger facing the TV. It was Naugahyde, and even though it got hot after you’d sat there awhile, right now it was cool and smooth and the little footstool part came up when he leaned far enough back.

  His mother was parked, as usual, in the other one, with a cat in her lap and her hand in a bag of Pirate’s Booty — another low-cal snack. Greer picked up the remote from the table between them, and was about to change the channel when she said, “I’m watching this.”

  Greer stopped and watched for a minute. It was something called The Vorhaus Report, one of those crappy cable interview shows with a two-dollar set and a moderator in a bad toupee. The guests tonight appeared to be some scientist — the chyron said CARTER COX, PALEONTOLOGIST — and an American Indian named James Running Horse. The Indian was wearing a three-piece suit, and he looked to Greer like he had maybe one-sixteenth, or less, Indian in him; Greer snorted, thinking this was just another sc
am the guy used to score some government money or affirmative action shit. Maybe even a piece of some new multimilliondollar casino in the desert. Indians had it made these days.

  He ought to tell Sadowski and his crew to look into it.

  “What the hell are you watching this for?” Greer said.

  “It’s educational.”

  “You hate educational. You watch Home Shopping Network.”

  “Not always. I’m watching this now.”

  Greer sat back and listened for another minute or two. It looked as though they were discussing something about some bones that had been dug up in those pits over on La Brea. Wasn’t that where somebody’d just died? Greer had caught something about it on the local news — another Indian had fallen in or something and drowned.

  But the show didn’t seem to be about this. It seemed to be about some really ancient bones that the Running Horse guy wanted returned, and the other guy — he was tall and in good shape, wearing khakis and an open-collared white shirt — wanted to study first. And they kept talking about something called NAGPRA.

  “The NAGPRA provisions have been in place since 1990, for just such occasions as this,” Running Horse was saying now.

  “What are they talking about?” Greer asked. “What’s NAGPRA?”

  “Native American Graves something,” his mother quickly put in. “It’s about how when you dig up their bones or their… holy things… you have to give them back to the tribe.”

  Greer took a long pull on the cold beer. “Sounds to me like a case of finders keepers.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” his mother said. “Just listen, Derek — you might learn something.”

  “But these remains predate any of the known tribes by many thousands of years,” Cox was saying now. “Even if they were to be repatriated, to whom would they be given? What tribe? Where? These early peoples migrated, often over large distances.”

  “They should be given to the tribe of which he was an honored ancestor,” Running Horse replied.

  “Fine,” Cox said. “But unless you let us study the remains, we won’t even be able to determine that much.”

  “Then perhaps you should have thought of that before you disturbed his bones.”

  “We disturbed his bones, if that’s how you want to put it, doing what we do — excavating the tar pits for the fossils of early North American animals. Mastodons, giant sloths, saber-toothed cats. We didn’t exactly break into a sacred burial ground and start turning over tombstones.”

  “We Native Americans,” Running Horse said, turning his attention to the neutral host seated between them, “have been treated like slaves, like chattel—”

  Greer wondered if he’d just mispronounced “cattle.”

  “—for centuries, ever since the genocidal invasion of the European explorers. Our most sacred places have been defiled, our most precious objects — pottery, textiles — have been plundered, and even our bodies have been removed from Mother Earth, where they were meant to rest, and put on display in glass cases in museum galleries.”

  “The La Brea Woman is not on display,” Cox shot back.

  “And she’s not in the earth, either,” Running Horse replied.

  It was getting heated — Greer liked that.

  “Where is she, in fact?” Running Horse continued. “Is she in a file drawer? A cardboard box? A safe?”

  Cox didn’t seem to know how to answer that.

  “There’s a difference, isn’t there,” the host broke in, “between repatriation and disposition? Shouldn’t we—”

  “I’ll tell you where she is,” Cox said, totally ignoring the host’s question and leaning toward Running Horse. Greer wondered if his mother was watching this because she thought this Carter Cox guy was handsome.

  “She’s in the air,” Cox said. “And in the ocean. She’s in the sky, and the clouds, and the rain. Isn’t that what you believe? That we all return to the universe, to the Great Spirit? Then that’s where she is. And her skeleton — what little we’ve got of it — is just the physical remains, the unimportant, insignificant, fossilized residue of a human life.”

  “Then why do you want it?” Running Horse countered, but even Greer could see that was a bad move.

  “Because by studying what remains, we can learn more about her. About how she lived, and how she died. We can find out where we all came from, and maybe where we’re all going. We can honor her — just as we can honor the La Brea Man now, too — in a way that simply burying their bones again will never do. We can honor them by paying attention not to their deaths — you’ve got to stop looking at these as dead souls — but to their lives. How they lived, how they survived, and how they prevailed, in a very hostile world. I can’t think of any greater tribute we can give them.”

  “Than to lay their bones under bright lights and X-ray machines?”

  Cox looked exasperated. “If that’s what it takes, yes.”

  “The federal government thinks you’re wrong,” Running Horse replied, over the moderator’s raised hand, “and I’m going to prove it.”

  “Thank you, thank you both,” Vorhaus was saying, “but we are unfortunately out of time. It’s been a very enlightening discussion, and a thank-you, too, goes out to our viewers for joining us tonight, on The Vorhaus Report.”

  The screen blipped and cut to a public service announcement a nanosecond later — guess the guy meant it, Greer thought, when he said they were out of time. “Can I change it now?” he asked.

  “See what’s on AMC.”

  Greer channel-surfed a bit — sometimes over his mother’s protestations of “Wait — that looked good” or “What was that — was that Law and Order?”—but he couldn’t find anything to watch either. At least on his computer he could get porn.

  He tossed the remote into her ample lap — the cat hissed at him — and said, “I’m going out.”

  For a change, she didn’t ask where.

  But all he could think of right now was the Blue Bayou.

  * * *

  As soon as the studio lights went down and The Vorhaus Report was officially off the air, Carter detached the microphone from the front of his shirt, shook hands with the host — he didn’t have to bother with James Running Horse, who had conspicuously turned his back and stalked out of the studio — and went out to the parking lot.

  He had deliberately parked his Jeep right below a halogen lamp, and his first thought was to check the tires. After that run-in at Temescal Canyon, he was only too aware of all the crazies loose in L.A.

  He got into the car and started for home. At least at this hour — he checked the clock on the dashboard and saw that it was after 10 P.M. — there wouldn’t be much traffic. The Santa Anas were blowing, hot dry winds off the desert, stirring up the scents of dry sage and dry mesquite and dry soil. Dry everything.

  He put on the radio, but he couldn’t really concentrate on it; instead, he kept turning over in his mind the last hour, much of it spent jousting with James Running Horse. He’d done his best to keep his temper, but he was so weary of this endless debate, this ongoing controversy between science and religion, which played out everywhere from the textbook wars over evolution to his own freedom to examine a precious and rare hominid artifact. He wished he’d said something more when Running Horse had demanded that the bones of this “honored ancestor” be returned to his tribe. Who was to say these bones were ever honored? Much of the evidence suggested that the La Brea Woman had had her skull crushed with a blunt instrument, and it was quite possible that her male counterpart had met an equally violent fate. Far from being honored, these people might have been murdered, or brutally sacrificed, and for all we knew today, their fondest wish, their dying wish, might have been to get away from their bloodthirsty fellow tribe members altogether.

  On the private drive up to Summit View, Carter saw not a soul — even the patrol car was missing, off on its rounds perhaps — and only the porch light was on at his own house. He opened the d
oor quietly, in case everyone was asleep, and crept up the stairs. The night-light was on in Joey’s bedroom and he poked his head in there first. Champ, asleep on the crocheted rug that lay beside the crib, immediately raised his head, but upon seeing Carter just thumped his tail on the floor and waited for his ears to be scratched.

  Carter looked into the crib and, just as he expected, Joey’s little gray-blue eyes were wide open and looking right back at him. “One of these days,” Carter said, leaning down to give the baby a wet smooch on his little forehead, “I’m going to catch you with your eyes closed. I’m going to come in so quietly that even you can’t hear me.”

  Joey looked at him as if to say, Highly unlikely.

  In the bedroom, Beth was propped up against the pillows with the TV on low, but she was fast asleep. Carter glanced at the screen — it was the same channel The Vorhaus Report was broadcast on, though now it was showing something about the dangers faced by illegal immigrants from Mexico. He picked up the remote, which was lying next to Beth’s hand, and flicked it off. The second he did, she stirred and opened her eyes.

  “When did you get in?” she mumbled.

  “Thirty seconds ago.”

  “You were great, much better than that other guy.”

  “He had a three-piece suit.”

  She cleared her throat and sat up higher in the bed.

  “But you’re taller.”

  He laughed and took off his shirt. His arm, where Geronimo had cut him, was healing nicely. At least it had been a clean cut.

  “Your boss’ll be pleased.”

  “Gunderson’s never pleased. He’s just sometimes less unpleasant.”

  “You hungry?”

  “Nah, I ate at the museum before going over to the show.”

  “Tell me you didn’t eat at one of the specimen tables, with all the bones and stones around you.”

  “I ate with a very interesting guy that I’ve just recently met.”