by Newton, Nero
Amy thought about the odor that had assaulted her in the truck cab, right after something grabbed her shoulder through the window. And there had been a very fleeting whiff of something nasty when she was looking over the pile of bushmeat a day and a half later.
Stephen said, “Another source says it’s somewhere between rotten flesh and an unwashed man.”
“That’s right. I hadn’t mentioned the smell to anyone.” She took a long breath. “So, Steve, how are these animals connected with Mexico?”
“It looks as though a small group of colonial clergy had quite a bit to do with the creatures for a while. Long before that – before the discovery of the New World – people had been raising them in Europe. The pieces in this collection date from about the thirteenth to the eighteenth century.”
“How can you tell?”
“Language usage and lettering style sometimes make it easy to date written material. I was a history major, focusing on the Spanish Conquest, and I also had to know a lot about the centuries leading up to the Conquest, so I’ve got pretty fair knowledge of certain parts of the Middle Ages. Plus I took a shine to paleography, which is a fancy way to say reading very old writing.”
“You said someone had been raising these animals,” she said. “Were they domesticated?”
“I don’t know about domesticated, but they were kept. They were cared for and bred by people specially trained for the task. They maintained painstaking records of each animal’s pedigree. It looks like bloodlines were very important to anyone who bought or sold them.”
“But how did all that medieval material end up in Mexico along with the colonial stuff?”
“As a matter of fact, I believe I’ve just worked that out.” Steve sounded rather proud of himself. “I think the colonial and the earlier pieces were all kept in the same archive somewhere in Europe. Someone stole it all and was threatening to use it to fan anti-colonial sentiment in New Spain. There’s a note that looks like a kind of cover letter for the whole package, written in the late 1700s. I don’t have it in front of me, but it goes something like: ‘Brother, here is what you asked for. My rather poor copies of its contents have been sent where you wished. I trust you know what to do with these if the presentation of my copy fails to forestall the deportation.’ The mention of a deportation must have referred to the Jesuits – they got kicked out of all Catholic countries for several decades, and they were also kicked out of all of those countries’ colonies. The southern part of Baja was the last place in the New World they were expelled from when their order was suppressed.”
The guy was practically hyperventilating with excitement, and Amy had to ask him to slow down. This was far more information than she’d ever expected to get in response to Caroline Yi’s inquiries, and of a very different sort.
“I think I’m missing something here,” she said. “How would exposing something about these animals have helped the Jesuits prevent this action against them?”
“That’s part of what I don’t know yet. But they apparently believed that exposure would embarrass either the Church, or the Spanish Crown, or both. Mexico was only a few decades from independence at the time, and if the colony had broken from Spain earlier, the Jesuits might have had a sanctuary in the New World. Maybe their plans involved hooking up with someone involved in the incipient independence movement; I don’t know yet. And I haven’t figured out just what it was about our mystery animals that they thought would be so earth-shaking. But whatever they had in mind, it never panned out. The expulsion went ahead, right on schedule, and these drawings and letters were never retrieved from their hiding place in Baja.”
Amy looked at the image on her screen again. The animal looked even more like the creature she’d seen than her own sketch did. The artist absolutely must have seen the same kind of animal.
“What about the pictures with the dressed-up animals?” she asked. “How old are those?”
“Various ages. There’s one with a caption explaining that the animals were clothed as part of a celebration. Someone important was finally becoming a grandfather, and his friends threw him a party. The furry creatures were part of the entertainment.”
“So they were, what, show animals?”
She heard a series of clinks like a spoon on a cup, then tiny beeps, then crackly interference.
“I guess so, in the sense that people kept them just because they were exotic. Having them showed you were wealthy.”
There were five more beeps, the sound of a microwave oven announcing that its task was finished. She heard the guy sipping something hot, then thought about the time difference. It was about three in the morning in California.
He said, “The Latin documents call the animal ‘mus sanguinis,’ and the Spanish ones call it ‘rata de sangre.’ Both phrases are ambiguous, like saying ‘blood rat’ in English. It might mean they’re reddish in color, or it might mean they’re vicious …. The Latin expression could even refer to a familial relationship.”
“But these ‘blood rats’ can’t possibly be rodents.”
“Of course not. I’m inclined to say they’re primates.” Another sip. “But definitely lower primates – prosimians, as you suggested on PrimateWeb. I did physical anthro for a couple of years before I changed my major.” A long slurp. “I’ve read enough about the fossil record to know that prosimians have never been any bigger than a Chihuahua. So I guess the main problem with their being prosimians is size. They’re about twenty times too big.”
“And their backs,” Amy said. “That’s completely weird. The change from front to back was really abrupt.” She looked at the images on her screen and said, “But in your medieval pictures here, the back of the animal looks more…shaggy. Like long, thick bison fur.”
He asked her if the animal on the logging truck had had a wet nose like a dog or cat, but she wasn’t sure because she hadn’t touched the face at all. She’d been too hurried, and too afraid of contact with it, especially with those globs of loose flesh. There had been the mystery fever to consider. Steve pointed out that the medieval drawings also showed the animals’ faces with those same rubbery-looking excrescences, so that feature was probably natural.
He said, “There’s one drawing with the animals dressed up in a style that normally means the wearer is royalty. I wondered if it might be political satire, comparing the king to an animal.”
Amy looked at the creatures’ petite ears, the babyish pug noses over barely visible mouths. The eyes were huge orbs, nearly all pupil, and seemed to stare at nothing.
“If that royal-robes drawing is like the ones you sent me,” she said, “then I don’t think it’s satire. I think the artist was looking at actual wild animals and drawing realistic pictures of them.”
“They look that much like what you saw on the truck?”
“They do,” she said. “But that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about how there’s no human personality drawn into them. I think that if the artist were using animal images to make fun of a human subject, then the faces would have some kind of human expression. They’d look mean or goofy or crazy or something.”
“And these don’t. Good point.”
“When I was a kid,” Amy said, “we used to take in squirrels and raccoons and things that were injured or orphaned. And the first time ever, it was this baby opossum. I remember I got really upset for a while because it wouldn’t respond to me. It would never react to my voice or make eye contact, the way dogs and cats do. Your medieval artist captured that same effect perfectly.”
Amy heard him yawn a few times and decided to take the hint. The conversation ended with Steve promising to send her more information soon.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hugh Sanderson remembered hearing things at the age of seventeen that he had not been meant to hear, words between his father and his big brother. William, twenty-two years old at that time, had just been preparing to take his seat among the company’s junior management, while Hugh had yet to decide betwee
n Yale and NYU.
* * *
When William and Dad walked out to the pool patio one warm evening, young Hugh had been napping in the darkness of a guest bedroom, and the sliding glass door that faced the patio stood open a crack.
The first words Hugh could hear were spoken by his father: “Sometimes you have to do these things.” He guessed right away that they were discussing what they called the “Filbert situation.”
Sanderson Tropical Timber had acquired a non-tropical subsidiary that harvested in California. Victor Filbert was a California state senator spearheading a bill that would have put new limitations on logging in old-growth forests. The senator had convinced his committee to turn to the courts to stop the Sanderson subsidiary’s activities near the central coast.
“People attack you through the courts to take what you’ve earned,” his father said. “They use the press to smear you, and then they pay a judge to rob you while you’re weak.”
Hugh could see William nodding nervously.
“You get some prick of a state senator who decides to defend the raccoons so he can get the nature boys’ vote. And he probably gets kickbacks from other loggers who are just going to sneak in with their own saws later, when the tree fairies aren’t watching. He gets free advertising from eco-freaks who mention him in their books. He gets all this momentum in his campaign over some forest he doesn’t even give a goddamn about, and all of a sudden there’s a ruling that says you can’t harvest any more trees out in the middle of Bumfuck. You might even have to pay a big fine for the ones you’ve already cut. You see where I’m going with this?”
“I think so,” William replied.
“Good. Because when it’s time to fight your way out of this kind of thing, you need a friend like Lou Burr. You met him in Detroit when we drove around the Great Lakes, that year I was introducing you around to everybody.”
“The office on the docks, right?”
“I’m glad to hear you remember him. You made an impression on him, too. He asked about you the other day when I called him up. And you’re going to make sure he keeps on remembering you, so that you can count on him someday like I’m counting on him right now, right as we speak. Chances are you’ll need to. That’s why we send him gifts at Christmas, and why we’ll send gifts to his kids when they graduate, and when they get married and when they make him a grandfather. You’ll need to keep in touch with those kids, too, for when one of them takes over.”
“I understand,” William said.
“He’s not cheap. And sometimes all you get is a referral to someone more specialized, and that other service won’t be cheap, either. But keeping in touch with Lou and his family is like major medical insurance; you hope you never need it, but you damn well better have it. It’s worth every penny and every ounce of time we put into maintaining that relationship.”
The heavy talk impressed the eavesdropping, seventeen-year-old Hugh, but did not shock him. He would not even be shocked the next morning when he read that State Senator Filbert’s teenage son had been taken to the hospital with three broken limbs after being knocked off his bicycle by a hit-and-run driver. Nor would it shake his world to learn less than forty-eight hours later that, with no public explanation, Filbert had abandoned his feverish protection of old-growth redwood stands.
Hugh might even have forgotten that conversation on the patio, had it not been for what his father said next:
“Hugh doesn’t need to know about any of this.”
“I understand. He’s young yet.”
“It’s not just that, Will. Huey’s head’s in the clouds. Your mother’s got him filled with fantasies about living the life of a socialite, going off to the ivy league and meeting all the right people. She’s got him thinking those are the connections that count. When I try to talk him down to earth, it’s like he doesn’t even hear me. And if he does go off and have the kind of experience your mother thinks is so goddamned important, he’s going to come back when he’s your age without a clue about anything in the real world.”
There were other matters from which Will and Dad studiously excluded Hugh. There were the details of a buyout in Central America, and a multiple injured-worker lawsuit in an Indonesian court. But Lou Burr stood as a symbol of all the kinds of knowledge that William and Dad thought Hugh could not handle.
At home he had listened for news of the Burrs and copied information from his father’s address books. He’d even gone to the Detroit docks and driven past the small-cargo service that Burr owned as a front. He’d gotten Dad’s secretary to give him birthday information for the Burr kids, and had begun sending them cards and gift certificates signed with only his own name.
Some day he would say to William, “Yes, I knew about it all those years ago. During the Filbert situation. Dad thought I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, but I never said a word to anyone, and you never even realized that I knew. If you don’t believe me, ask Lou’s daughter Jenn if she hasn’t been getting cards and magazine gift subscriptions from me since she was ten years old.”
* * *
That day had not come yet. Another had.
Sitting in his office in the French colonial mansion outside Prospérité, Hugh made his first ever phone call to Lou Burr’s people.
CHAPTER NINE
Several pieces written in an early Hungarian script called rovás inspired Stephen Stokes to cook up a simple but effective lie.
Anything in the Baja bundle that wasn’t in Latin, Spanish, or Italian would require help from other specialists, and the thorny problem of explaining where he’d gotten the material had seemed impossible to solve. But his contact with Amy was driving him to innovate.
The solution was fantastically simple. He had photographed everything from the bundle that wasn’t in absolute tatters, and was now in the process of printing it all, enlarging, highlighting, cropping. And there was no law against possessing a printed piece of paper.
I found this Xerox folded into a library book and have no idea where it came from. My curiosity is making me crazy. You think you can translate for me?
How hard was that, for God’s sake?
The old Hungarian writing was often referred to as “Hungarian runes,” because of a superficial resemblance to the runic writing of Scandinavia, although the two scripts were entirely unrelated. Very few people were familiar with the rovás characters.
Half a day of searching brought Stephen into contact with a young woman who had just become an assistant professor of East European studies at Berkeley. She was especially excited to hear from him. Documents written in rovás were rare, and the expert had thought she was aware of all the extant pieces. Like Stephen, she would have crawled over shards of glass to get her hands on something in her field that she hadn’t known about before.
The specialist called Stephen the next day and said that the content of the Hungarian texts was so absurd that they had to be part of a hoax, and a very bizarre one at that. She guessed that some committed hobbyist, fascinated with the old script, must have gotten bored with the lack of material and decided to add a little excitement to the small community of rovás enthusiasts. She was surprised that the fakes hadn’t yet appeared on one of the websites dedicated to the study of that lost writing system.
* * *
Amy received Stephen’s next message just before heading for the airport to catch her flight from Dakar to L.A.
The attachment was a scan of a handwritten document in a script that made her think of Vikings, or maybe Middle Earth. She waited for a picture to appear below the text, but none came. In the body of the email, Stephen had written:
This writing system was banned by one of eastern Europe’s first Christian kings around 1000 A.D., but our “blood rat” keepers apparently kept using it. This document is a certificate of pedigree that accompanied the sale of an animal, and I don’t think it was a prize hunting dog or a thoroughbred horse. Get this: the seller guarantees that the animal has suffered no damage to its eyes, having ne
ver been exposed to the sun or even to bright firelight. ---Steve
CHAPTER TEN
Heading toward Prospérité on the main highway, Hugh Sanderson was thinking of nothing but business.
A new Minister of the Interior had been appointed, and had summoned Sanderson into the city for their first meeting. The minister probably wanted to suggest that the company pay bigger unofficial “fees” in return for continued granting of logging concessions.
Those were Hugh’s thoughts as he rounded one of the few acute bends in Equateur’s great north-south highway, just seconds before his eyes locked on the little trail that began at a barely visible opening in the wall of greenery to his right. Before he could consider his actions, he pulled over and cut the engine.
The road had nothing to do with Sanderson Tropical Timber or with the stink monkeys; he understood that from the outset. But there was something inherently important about the form, the structure, of the small green path, and about its juxtaposition to the main road. The relationship among those elements was complex, his understanding of it so organically intuitive that it was almost mystical.
He got out of his Land Rover and followed the path into the forest on foot, not precisely knowing why, but at the same time feeling absolutely purposeful about it. There was meaning in the air here, and it was immense. The smell, the texture of the surfaces, and the sounds: rustling, fluttering, chirps, caws – and his own footfalls somehow louder than all else. He scuffed his Italian shoes and his pant legs brushed against green shoots bursting with sap.
