“I cannot say yet,” he replied.
Raleigh, who didn’t want the conversation to stray too far from commerce, quickly pulled Beth forward. “And this is Beth Cox, who knows everything there is to know about our collection.”
“Nice to meet you,” Beth said.
“And you.”
“Do you happen to have a card?” Kimberly said to Arius, virtually stepping on Beth’s toe. “My husband and I—Sam Metzger?—often entertain at our place in the city, and we’re always on the lookout for new blood.”
“No, I don’t have . . . a card,” Arius said. One more custom to practice.
“Oh. Then maybe I’d just better invite you right now. You see, we’re having a little get-together tomorrow night, seven-thirty, for the mayor’s re-election campaign. At One Sutton Place. Can you remember all that?”
Arius smiled. “Yes, I can. Thank you.”
“So you’ll be there?” she said, playfully.
He nodded, his eyes still concealed behind their shaded glasses.
Beth and Raleigh exchanged a look, as if to say Can you believe this? Although she’d already heard plenty of rumors about Kimberly Metzger’s private life, Beth thought she’d never seen such a flagrant pickup. Of course, in this particular instance, she could almost understand: Arius was a very striking figure indeed. He was about Carter’s height, but his hair was so blond it was almost white, and it shone in the overhead gallery lights. His skin, too, was almost flawless—no, make that perfectly flawless—and his features were chiseled as if from a block of unblemished marble. With his eyes hidden behind the tinted glasses—and how much of an art lover could he be, she wondered, if he kept the glasses on when looking at a painting?—the only hint of color in his face came from his lips, which were a deep pink, pulsing with life, and as full as a woman’s. Voluptuous and vulpine, she thought, at the same time.
“The Van Eyck that Beth was just showing me,” Kimberly was saying to Raleigh, “I do like—”
“Van Dyck,” Beth corrected, in a soft voice.
“Yes, of course,” Kimberly remarked, “isn’t that what I said?
“I must have misheard,” Beth apologized. Raleigh shot her a glance that could kill.
“I’m thinking of it for our new place, the one we’re building in the Virginia hunt country. It might work in the library, but I’m just not sure.”
“It’s always hard to know,” Raleigh comforted her, “until you see it actually hanging in place. Why don’t you tell us when you’re ready, and we’ll ship it out so you can see for yourself?”
“Thanks, Richard,” she said, pecking him on the cheek, “you’re a peach. And you,” she said, coquettishly, to Arius, “I’ll see tomorrow night. Don’t forget!”
As she left the gallery, Arius’s head turned. What was it, Beth wondered, that made him seem so . . . singular? So attractive and, at the same time, so . . . discomfiting? He made you want to look at him, and look away, all at once.
“Now, Beth,” Raleigh said, “have you got a few minutes to show Mr. Arius some of the pieces we’re holding upstairs? I’m thinking, in particular, of some of the Courbets and Corots.”
She should have seen that coming; there was no way Raleigh was going to let this new fish slip out of his net—not without a fight, at least. But the thought of taking him upstairs for a private consultation sent an involuntary tingle down her spine. There was something way too strange—and even strangely familiar—about this man. Though it was impossible that she could have forgotten him, she still had the odd sensation that she had seen him somewhere before.
“I’m so sorry,” she blurted out, “but I have an appointment I have to keep.”
Raleigh shot her a second dirty look.
“A doctor appointment,” she threw in, knowing that was the one thing Raleigh wouldn’t interfere with; he knew about the family-planning problems that she and Carter were having.
“You’re sure?” he tried.
“I’m sure,” she said, contritely, glancing at her watch. “In fact, I’ve really got to run.”
“In that case, then,” Raleigh said, giving up and turning to Arius himself, “I would be more than happy to show you a few things on my own. Do you have some time right now?”
Since she was, in fact, just meeting Abbie for a cup of coffee around the corner, Beth didn’t even bother to go upstairs for her coat. She hoped Raleigh wouldn’t notice. All she wanted to do right now was make her escape, to get out of the gallery as swiftly as possible—and away from this strange creature whose eyes she felt, even now, as she moved away, were studying her behind those amber lenses. Part of her wished that she could just reach out and pull those glasses off his face and see who he really was . . . and part of her sensed that if she did, she would regret it the rest of her days.
TWENTY-FIVE
“Look, I wish I could give you nothing but good news,” Dr. Permut said, leaning back in his chair with a file folder in his hand, “but there must have been something wrong with the sample you gave us.”
“I took the sample myself, right from the end of one of the talons,” Carter said. “Are you saying it was contaminated?”
Dr. Permut rubbed his jaw, doubtfully. “I don’t know what was wrong with it, but no, I don’t think contamination was the problem.”
“So what was? What did you find out?”
“See for yourself,” Permut said, handing the file to Carter.
As Carter flipped through some of the pages, Permut provided a running commentary.
“Those pages on top, they’re the report on the dating analyses. As you can see, the results are so far off the charts as to be useless.”
“What do you mean, off the charts?”
“I mean, nothing remotely hominid, saurian, or avian—all the options you mentioned—could possibly be that old. In fact, you’d probably get a closer match with a sample of the moon rock brought back by Apollo 12.”
Carter wasn’t pleased, but he wasn’t all that surprised either. After all, these were the same sorts of results Russo had gotten in Rome.
“But what about the biological tests? The molecular and cell studies?” And then the million-dollar question. “Could you find anything at all in the way of DNA evidence?”
Dr. Permut tilted his chair back and took a roll of Tums out of the pocket of his white lab coat. “Want one?”
“No thanks.”
“I take them for the calcium. But you work with bones, you know all about that.”
“But I don’t normally work with DNA,” Carter said, to get him back on point. “Could you locate anything viable?”
Permut nodded his head. “Believe it or not,” he said, sucking on the Tums, “we were able to find and extract an inert fragment. It was smaller than virtually anything anybody’s ever tested before.” He looked around proudly at the NYU biomed research lab. “But you came to the right place.”
Carter was encouraged, but he kept it in check.
“We had to use a computer model to fill in some of the gaps,” Permut went on, “and then we extrapolated some of the rest at the tail end.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means that what we’ve got, in a way, is what I’d call theoretical DNA.”
To Carter, that didn’t sound so good. “Well, is it, or isn’t it?”
Permut wagged his head. “It’s a little of both. We’ve got a solid chromosomal foundation for everything in our profile, but again, given the infinitesimal sample, plus its age and its condition, we did have to do some guessing.”
Carter was getting more and more frustrated; this, he knew, was why ordinary people hated science, and scientists. “Then just tell me,” he said, evenly, “what your best guess is. Based on the available DNA evidence, can you tell me what we’ve got here?”
Permut blew out some air, and Carter felt himself bathed in Tums fumes. “I can tell you what we don’t have,” he said.
“Fine. I’ll start there.”
> “We don’t have a Homo sapiens.”
Okay, Carter thought, at least they were making progress.
“And we don’t have any other known member of the animal kingdom.”
Permut reached across the table and flipped to some pages that looked, to Carter, like a mad scramble of numbers and four letters—C, G, T, and A—repeated over and over, in no particular order, and coursing across the page in row after row. The numbers were a mystery, but the letters, Carter knew, represented the four nucleotides cytosine, guanine, thymine, and adenine. “When I look at these readouts,” Permut said, “I see a pattern.”
“I’m glad someone does.”
“And at first even I thought it was a human pattern. Then I looked again, more closely, and I thought, well, maybe not—maybe it’s a mammal, but that’s about all we can tell. Then I looked at it even harder, and I could see that it wasn’t exactly one thing, and it wasn’t exactly any other.”
Carter waited for him to finish.
“You’re the paleontologist,” Permut said, “and you can call it whatever you want, but around here we’ve made up our own name for it.”
“What?”
“The missing link.”
The missing link. “Thanks a lot,” Carter said, dryly. “That’s a big help.”
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” Permut protested. “And I’m only half-joking about that, by the way. It has an almost ninety-nine percent match with Homo sapiens DNA—of course, all the difference is in that last percent or two.”
“Like with the chimpanzees?” Carter said.
“This is even closer—as close as you can get, I’d say, without actually getting a match.”
Carter took a deep breath. What had he had in that rock? With each thing he learned now, the loss of the fossil became just that much more painful.
“Sorry,” Permut said, intuiting Carter’s grief. “If there’s anything else I can do for you, I’d still be glad to help out.”
“As a matter of fact,” Carter said, wearily fishing for the plastic baggie that Ezra had given him, “there is.” He took it out of his pocket and laid it on the table.
“What’s this,” Permut said, “another brainteaser?”
“Sort of.”
Permut picked up the baggie and held it up toward the light to look at the small scrap of the scroll inside. “At least it’s not a bone this time.”
“It’s a piece of an ancient document,” Carter said carefully, so as not to suggest any of his own assumptions or surmises. “I need to know how old it is, what it’s made of, and what the ink is.”
“I was afraid you were going to ask me what that squiggle on it actually said.”
“No, somebody else is taking care of that.”
Permut gave him a long look. “Is that somebody else also going to pay for the lab charges? On this last job, we had a signed authorization from your department chair, Stanley Mackie. Who’s going to sign for this one? The lab costs could easily run a couple of grand.”
“They’ll be covered.”
Permut looked impressed. “Remind me to ask you the source of your funding sometime.” Baggie in hand, he swiveled away in his chair, ready to get started, then swiveled back toward Carter. “Say, am I going to wind up in the annals of science for this?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Carter said. “Just get me the results as soon as you can.”
On the way to St. Vincent’s, Carter stopped to pick up some Italian magazines at an international newsstand. Even though he knew Russo’s tastes ran more to Scientific American than GQ, he had to make do with what he could get.
At the ICU, he got a momentary scare when a nurse told him Russo was no longer there.
“He’s been moved,” she added. “He’s in the burn unit, one floor up.”
“So does that mean he’s improving?”
She raised her eyes from the desk. “It’s the burn unit,” she said.
Carter took her point.
But when he went up there, he did find that the place at least was a small improvement. The atmosphere was a little less frosty and forbidding. There was Muzak playing, softly, on overhead speakers, and a couple of vending machines for visitors. He spotted Dr. Baptiste coming out of a room at the end of the hall and asked her if that was where Russo had been transferred.
“Yes, we moved him this morning. He’s stabilized now, and soon we’ll be able to start the grafting procedures.”
Carter winced at the thought.
“You’re right—it’s not going to be any picnic for him. If his family would like to come and see him, now would be a very good time.”
“The only one living is his mother,” Carter said, “and she’s too ill herself to leave Italy.”
Dr. Baptiste shook her head. “Then he’s very lucky to have you for a friend.”
If only she knew, Carter thought—if only she knew. “Can I go in for a visit? I’ve got some magazines to give him.”
She looked at the titles and frowned. “Don’t look much like his cup of tea,” she said, “but go right on in.”
Inside, he found Russo propped up in the bed, the only one in the room; a trolley littered with empty plates and aluminum lids had been pushed to one side.
“This,” Carter said, taking in the new room, “is a big improvement.” And it was. There were actually some flowers in a vase, a Van Gogh wheat field on the wall, and best of all, a wide window, with the blinds still raised.
Unfortunately, Russo himself didn’t look a whole lot better. Wherever the bandages weren’t covering his skin, it was a horrible patchwork, parts of it black, others bright red. At least the plastic tent, which usually covered his head, was thrown back now.
“Brought you some reading matter,” Carter said, gently laying the magazines on the bed beside Russo’s blistered hand. He didn’t touch him, for fear that physical contact was still off limits.
“Thanks,” Russo said, in a voice somewhere between a whisper and a croak.
Carter glanced out the window; it was a good view, with cars moving past the main entrance right below, and a mostly unobstructed vista south. The only thing standing partly in the way was that old sanatorium across the street, its windows boarded over and its fire escapes—the ones still attached at all—barely clinging to the crumbling façade. If the wrecking ball didn’t get to it first, it looked like a strong wind could reduce the whole building to rubble.
“Did you . . . see him?” Russo asked.
Ezra. “Yes. I did.” Where should he start? “I was right about one thing—he’s from a very wealthy family.”
“But what . . . did he say?”
“He said that he believed you, when you described the fossil coming to life.” Carter could still hardly believe he was repeating this. “He said that most scientists had closed minds, but that yours had been opened by what you’d seen.”
Russo grunted, in sad agreement. “What else . . . does he . . . know?”
That was a tough one. Even Carter wasn’t sure of that. But he did know what Ezra believed—that there were forces at play, powerful and important, that had yet to be understood. But how could he explain any of this to Russo, especially as he himself grasped—accepted?—so little of it himself. “He turns out to be what you might call a freelance biblical scholar.”
Russo looked puzzled.
“I know. I don’t quite understand it myself. But unless I’m nuts, the guy has genuine specimens of the Dead Sea Scrolls in his apartment, and he’s been piecing them together. He wanted my help to get some of them analyzed.” He went on to describe Ezra’s workroom, what he had seen there, and what Ezra had said about the church bells ringing right after the lab explosion. The more he talked, the crazier it sounded, even to himself, but Russo’s expression didn’t change. If anything, he seemed to be drinking it all in, questioning nothing, trying to fit the disparate jumble of information into some logical shape on his own. When Carter eventually paused to take a breath, Russo p
ursed what was left of his lips—two blackened strips of skin—and said, “Bene.”
“Bene?” Carter said. “Why? What’s good about this?”
“If I am crazy,” Russo croaked, “then it is good to have company.”
So he knew, Carter thought, that he’d remained a skeptic.
“One more . . . favor?”
“Sure,” Carter said, “as long as it’s not a cigarette. You know that’s not allowed in here.”
“Bring him here.”
“Ezra Metzger?” he said, though he knew perfectly well. Would that be a good idea? Introducing his terribly injured friend to a possible lunatic?
Russo nodded.
“I’ll call him,” Carter conceded.
“Good. And now,” he said, painfully raising the fingers of one mutilated hand, “that cigarette?”
TWENTY-SIX
“I see empty champagne glasses,” Kimberly warned one of the waiters, “and at my parties, I don’t like to see empty glasses.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, “right away,” and flew off to the kitchen to replenish his supply of Cristal.
Aside from tiny glitches like these, Kimberly felt that the party was going very well indeed. The mayor, his wife, and his mistress—also known as his campaign treasurer—were all there, holding court in various quarters, and she’d also snagged several big-time editors and journalists, a bunch of high-powered bankers and lawyers, and even a couple of Broadway stars. There was no way this party wouldn’t make it onto Page Six, or maybe even into Liz Smith’s column. If it also happened to raise some funds for the mayor’s re-election campaign, its ostensible purpose, well, that was okay, too.
As she drifted from room to room, greeting her guests, making sure everyone made the connections they had come there for, she kept one eye out for the arrival of her mystery guest, the one she had tried, and dismally failed, to keep out of her thoughts since meeting him the day before. Mr. Arius. She’d never seen a man who looked quite like him, or one who had made such an indelible and immediate impression on her. The night was still young, but she was already starting to worry that he might not show up at all.
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