Matt looked out the window and saw the lights of a good-sized city, ending abruptly along one edge where it met the sea. They were nearing the ground. The landing was smooth, but as they taxied to the gate, Matt began to worry about the shots again. Tuni picked up on it at once.
“Don’t worry, Matthew. We’ll make sure they’re disposable.”
After a short walk from the tarmac, they entered the air-conditioned terminal through automatic sliding doors. Matt had expected a third world airport with chickens and goats and naked, screaming children running around, but now he felt a little guilty about his assumption. Everyone was dressed, no farm animals in sight, and from what he could hear on the way to customs, they all spoke English!
“Inoculations, please,” said a woman in uniform at the first counter they reached.
“Yes, I guess that’s what we’re here for,” Matt replied, checking with Tuni, who nodded.
“You have no doctor papers?” the woman asked.
“No, we thought we were coming here to get the shots—and, I guess, papers.”
“Very well, please step over there. Next time, you get your shots before you come to Ghana, okay?”
“Absolutely,” he replied, as if he planned to visit often. She had directed them to a door with an opaque white window centered with a red cross.
They waited in line for about twenty minutes before their turn.
Tuni whispered in his ear, “What about the chair, if they make you sit?”
“It’s fine, I’m covered. Thanks.”
Looking around the large room, Tuni wondered what else might be hiding these stories that only Matthew could see. “What about a metal table like that?”
“Doesn’t matter what it’s made out of. Just can’t be a living thing. I’ll give you all the ‘rules’, I guess, later. My father keeps this book about it. All sorts of weird details no one would ever think about.”
“You have a manual. That’s funny.”
They reached the front of the line and Tuni held him back, clearly meaning to go first. He didn’t protest. She sat down in the chair and laid her arm on the cold stainless steel table. A large woman in the standard starched white button-down shirt sat on a rolling stool beside the chair.
Tuni tried to see the area through Matthew’s eyes. One good thing: the woman wore latex gloves, though some of the fingertips bore yellow stains—they had probably seen a few patients. Another white-shirted woman slid a terry cloth towel to the nurse; on it laid five identical plastic syringes. Tuni looked around the nurse’s bulk to see the other woman tearing open more of the same syringes from protective packages and laying them on another white towel.
“Are these syringes reused?” she asked as the woman cleaned her arm with an iodine pad.
“No, missy,” she replied with a bit of attitude and little accent. “That is not sanitary. There is an HIV epidemic in Africa, don’t you know?”
“Of course. I don’t mean to be a bother, but would you mind changing your gloves?”
The nurse lowered her chin and looked at Tuni through her eyebrows. “Gloves are changed every tenth patient—sooner if contaminated. Good enough for you?”
Tuni peered over her shoulder at Matt, who was watching intently from behind the privacy barrier.
“And what number am I?”
“Okay, fussy one. I will change gloves for your pretty arm.” She snapped the old gloves off, dropped them in the trash, and slid on a new pair from a package on the table. As the shots proceeded, Tuni looked back at Matt and pointed at the table. He nodded in reply, pulling a pile of napkins out of his pocket to show her. They were the drink coasters from the plane. Tuni suddenly realized that he was probably accustomed to preparing for the unexpected. When she was done, she stood and waited a few feet away as Matt took the seat.
“Do you mind if I put these napkins under my elbow?” He asked the nurse. “I have severe skin allergies.”
The nurse looked at him sweetly. “No problem, love. Are you allergic to iodine or alcohol?”
“Nope.”
“Any other medications?” She began to clean the injection areas.
“Just penicillin.”
“Then we are all good, dear.”
The shots had no “complications,” and after paperwork and payment, Tuni and Matt were on their way back to the Gulfstream. As they stepped back onto the tarmac, Matt stopped Tuni and turned her to look at her face.
“Thank you. Seriously.”
“It is no problem, Matthew,” she replied matter-of-factly. “I will take care of you.”
She resumed walking to the plane as Matt took a deep breath. He liked this one.
He reboarded the jet, and they were off to Nairobi.
Matt watched a movie on his iPad to kill time. Tuni watched with little interest for the first half hour but had trouble staying with it—she kept mulling over how Matt’s father had exploited his son’s ability. She couldn’t ask, of course, but hoped Matt would volunteer it when he felt comfortable. Her eyes closed, and she listened to Matt softly laughing.
10
DR. RHEESE HAD REQUESTED ONLY A quarter of the crew for the site cleanup. Enzi had driven ten men back from the base camp, including Kanu, who would likely need to be interviewed by the arriving expert. Rheese wanted the entire southern half of the pit refilled and the jagged walls smoothed on all sides. Enzi hadn’t asked about it—he understood the motivation. It was also why the jackhammers were to be returned to the base camp, and the precision tools—trowels, brushes, screens, and dental picks—brought to the site. Rheese wanted to legitimize the dig.
Enzi was operating one of the backhoes, pushing dirt from the dump pile back into the hole with the front bucket. He had a few men disassembling the lift and winch by the equipment trailer while the rest worked in the pit, dressing the walls with mud and chipping away at jagged ends. Enzi could see that no one wanted to work near the elephant carcass, still present three days after the visit from the officials. He had phoned the office several times and always received the same reply: “Your incident is next in line behind a cleanup near Narok.” To which Enzi replied each time: “We are the cleanup near Narok!” The call would end after the dissatisfying assertion: “Then the crew should be there shortly.”
It seemed that insects and birds from miles around had hit the motherlode, and the stench had reached an unbearable point. The only relief came when it rained, though, of course, this wreaked havoc on the elephant’s remains.
As Enzi reversed the backhoe up the new mud slope he had created in the pit, Rheese stuck his bald head out of the motor home and waved him inside. Enzi whistled for another man to take his place on the backhoe and walked up to the RV.
“Our visitor is arriving in forty-five minutes,” said Rheese. He apparently just boarded a chopper in Nairobi. I haven’t the foggiest where they plan to land. Are there any clearings between here and base camp?”
Enzi frowned and sucked his lower lip. An idea struck him, and he looked around the site.
“We move your motor home to the road there and they have space to land. We done with the backhoe here and park back by the equipment trailer.”
“Good idea,” Rheese acknowledged. “I’ll need to clean up a bit more inside so nothing comes crashing down when we move. How much longer over there?”
“We pretty much done, Professor.”
“What about the rotting animal?”
“I call again, but they say same bull to me. They on the way, of course.”
Rheese swore softly and shook his head. “I’d just as soon bury the thing if they aren’t going to show. Hell, fifteen meters under? I challenge any gravedigger to make a more appropriate resting place for such a behemoth.”
Enzi nodded. “Perhaps in a thousand years, people come dig here, find bones and think it millions of years old.”
Rheese chuckled. Enzi hadn’t been known for his sense of humor thus far. Rheese leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on
his knees, and looked up into Enzi’s eyes. Enzi’s smile disappeared as he realized at that moment just how rarely the professor made eye contact with him.
“Enzi,” Rheese said softly.
“Yes, Professor?”
“What are we looking for in this site?”
Enzi’s brow crinkled in bewilderment. “We look for dinosaur bones and other fossils.”
“Yes, yes, but what are we really looking for?”
Was this a trap, a test?
“That is all we look for, Professor. What else to find out in jungle?”
“Good bloody answer, Enzi. Don’t you forget that.”
“No, sah. That is all.”
“Bloody right it is. Don’t think for a second that I would choose your existence over my objectives. It would take very little money for you to simply vanish—much easier than burying an elephant.”
Enzi lowered his head level with Rheese’s gaze. His jaw clenched, and his eyelids dropped to half-moons. “That not necessary to say, Professor,” he replied with a subtle growl, containing his rage.
Rheese leaned back and smiled, looking off in the distance once again. “Of course not, my friend! We’re all in this together, are we not?” He chuckled heartily and clasped his hands behind his head.
Enzi stood there for a moment, glaring at him. He had judged the mkundu aright in the beginning. The man had a steel trap of greed in place of a heart. Enzi fantasized about what he could do to the professor with the shovel leaning against the equipment trailer behind him.
“Well, don’t just stand there, lad,” said Rheese cheerily. “Back to work, then!”
Enzi cleared the images from his head and returned to the men.
Rheese wondered, had he taken it a notch too far? It was important to keep Enzi on his toes. What if he was asked a question that caught him off guard and his natural honesty took the upper hand? There was something in his foreman that Rheese admired: whatever that was that had made him go straight to the broken elephant and lay it to rest. But then, that same impulse might one day turn into a liability, and he suspected that Enzi did not know there was a time and place for doing the right thing.
His teapot whistled him back into the motor home for elevenses. He might have waited for the museum’s expert to join him for cakes and tea, but it would likely be some pencil-necked thirty-something, interested only in getting the artifact into his hot little uncallused hands.
Tuni’s forehead pressed against the window as she watched the land below them change from tree-dotted savanna to forested hill country. The plastic earmuffs did little more than mute the whine of the turbine engine and the beat of the rotor to a bearable level. She glanced over at Matt, who sat upright in the seat, clearly uncomfortable, with his gloved fingers in his ears. He turned to her when he realized she was looking at him.
“No one said anything about a helicopter, either,” he mouthed. She shrugged and spoke an inaudible “Sorry! Fastest way!”
Thirty minutes later, one of their Kenyan pilots pointed ahead, and the other began pressing buttons and flipping switches. In a moment, the helicopter turned and circled a clearing in the woods. Matt and Tuni looked out his window to see a clearing in the middle of the jungle. The majority of the space was taken up by a large pit with a ramp leading up one side from the middle of the floor. The pilots discussed something as the chopper hovered over a flat spot marked only by a pair of muddy tire tracks.
The helicopter descended, rotating slowly. Matt could see some men closing the back of a white trailer while others stood at the walls of the pit, shielding their eyes as they gazed upward.
“Is that a dead elephant?” Matt asked.
Tuni’s face twisted and she leaned over to his side and craned her neck to look down through his window.
“Good God! I think it bloody well is!”
Matt got another good whiff of her perfume before she settled back into her seat.
One skid and then the other touched down, and the pilots began flicking more switches before one of them removed his headset and exited through his hatch. He came around and slid open the door on Matt’s side. Tuni removed her earmuffs, unfastened her harness, and reached behind the seats to fetch their bags.
As he swung his backpack over his shoulder and climbed down onto the footstep, Matt spotted an older white man in khakis and a pith helmet. The man was walking toward them and waving.
Tuni’s lips hovered at Matt’s ear. “That must be Dr. Rheese,” she said. “Go greet him and I’ll grab your other bag.”
Matt complied and walked, hunched over, away from the chopper. With the distance between them closing, he saw the man’s smile freeze as he gazed past Matt, then back at his face.
“Hi, Matthew Turner,” Matt yelled over the helicopter noise. “You must be Dr. Rheese.”
Rheese shook the gloved hand halfheartedly.
“Is one of you the potassium-argon expert?”
Matt replied with an extended “Uh-h…” as Tuni and a pilot arrived at his side with the suitcase and duffel bag.
“Dr. Rheese, I am Tuni St. James, with the New York Metropolitan Museum.”
He shook her hand, appearing no more pleased to make her acquaintance than Matt’s.
“A pleasure. Which one of you is the expert I’ve awaited all this time?”
The helicopter grew louder as it lifted off and flew away.
Tuni deadpanned and made a theatric gesture toward Matt.
“You must be bloody joking,” he muttered, and walked away.
Tuni and Matt looked at each other doubtfully, as a Kenyan man approached them from out of the big ditch and greeted them warmly.
“Hello, hello, friends. I am Enzi Wata, the site foreman. Welcome to Narok… sort of.” He gave a slight bow and held out his hand to Tuni.
She shook it, and he dipped his head a little deeper in respect.
“I’m Tuni, and this is the expert you have been waiting for, Matthew Turner.”
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Turner,” he said, pumping the younger man’s hand while subtly wondering about the gloves and watch cap on such a warm tropical day.
“Thanks,” Matt replied. “So can you take us to the artifact?”
Enzi peered past Matt’s shoulder to the motor home and listened for a moment to Dr. Rheese, shouting at someone on the satellite phone.
“Perhaps you like to rest for a bit? We have fresh water and chips at the food tent, if you like—”
Matt interrupted. “Look, I don’t really need a snack. I was actually hoping to get to examine this thing and have the helicopter back before dark.”
Tuni touched his arm as if to say, “Easy…”
“You will not be sleeping the night?” Enzi asked, confused.
“Well, we can, sure, but the sooner we get this done, the better.”
Obviously relieved, Enzi said, “Good, because helicopter not return today.”
“What?”
“They do not fly here at night.”
“So, Mr. Wata… ,” Tuni interjected before Matt could speak.
“Enzi, please, Miss.”
“Enzi,” she said, “I think I would like to sit down and have a small snack. Matthew, would you like to join me?”
“Sure.”
In his RV, Rheese hung up on the “cheeky little tart” at the other end—Maggie something. Why she wouldn’t tell him where Sharma had gotten to, he couldn’t say. Clearly, those folks at the museum were not really interested in determining the fabric’s age. He sat down at the breakfast table and sighed. He had wasted how much time cleaning the little swatch so that a respectable scientist could take a look at it?
Perhaps if he simply humored the young man and that towering amazon of a woman, they’d leave quickly and he could move to the next site on his map. Bingo! That was it: he would apologize for his earlier behavior and welcome them wholeheartedly into his mobile laboratory. That was the ticket—get it done and get them gone. He stopped at the sink on hi
s way out and splashed water on his face.
“So,” Matt said to Enzi, “did you know you have a dead elephant in that hole over there?”
“Here he comes,” Tuni warned.
Enzi stood, and Matt turned around. Dr. Rheese had put on his best smile and was shaking his head foolishly as if to say, “I’m just a silly old man!” as he walked to the food tent.
“Apologies, apologies, my fellow slaves to science… er, no offense.” He directed this last to Tuni, who blinked as if she had received a slap. Her eyes met Enzi’s, which, by their expression, again appeared to be apologizing for the doctor. “I’m terrible with names—what were they again?”
“I’m Matt Turner, and this is Tuni.”
“Of course, Matt and Tuni. Very well, if you’d like to gather your equipment, we can adjourn to our research vehicle and get down to matters of consequence.”
Matt grabbed his duffel and followed Rheese to the motor home, where he held the door open for Tuni. On entering, they both looked around the interior.
“If you need to use the loo, it’s right there—no need to join the workers in the bushes.”
“Lovely,” Tuni said drily.
Opening a cabinet, Rheese pulled out a transparent case the size of a shoe box and placed it on the breakfast table. Inside it, several cobble-size rocks sat atop a mix of gravel and dirt. Matt slid onto one of the bench seats and shoved his duffel to the corner, where he opened it and dug for his armband timer. Rheese donned latex gloves, took the largest chunk from the box, and placed it on a white tray in front of Matt. Matt frowned at it and peered into the box and then at Tuni and Rheese.
“Where is your equipment?” asked Dr. Rheese, trying to see into the dark recesses of the duffel.
“Where is the object?” Matt returned.
“This is the sediment in which the object was embedded.” Rheese tried to remain pleasant but felt his face beginning to heat. “There, see the pattern, son?”
Matt turned the rock over in his hands and could indeed see the imprint.
The Dig Page 7