Bestiary cc-2

by Robert Masello

  “And how did you make this selection, for your current exhibition?”

  Beth had the uncomfortable feeling that he hadn’t heard a word she’d said, that he was just asking these questions to keep her there and occupied. But if the alternative was to return to Mrs. Cabot and the Critchleys, she would stay.

  “I had noticed some interesting things about these particular manuscripts. Although they had been owned by different monasteries, sometimes in quite different parts of the country, they all had a distinctive writing style and decoration. These books, as I’m sure you know”—it never hurt to flatter your interlocutor—“were generally unsigned, written anonymously by monks in open cloisters and drafty scriptoria. But the books in this exhibition all displayed, to my mind, a common creator.”

  “How? The text was always pretty much the same, wasn’t it? Bibles, patristic commentaries, Gospels?”

  So he was paying some attention, after all.

  “Yes, that’s true, though even in that respect there was greater latitude than is generally accepted. There’s a lot of room between the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry. Room for Livy’s History of Rome and Aristotle’s Ethics, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Adventures of Marco Polo. In fact, King Charles V of France was such a Marco Polo fan that he had five copies of the book, one of them bound in gold cloth.”

  “But those books span centuries.”

  “That’s correct, but the monk, or scribe, to whom I’m attributing the works collected in this exhibition, lived in the mid to late eleventh century, and he wrote, whatever his subject, with a distinctively sloping script, tilted slightly to the left. He might have been left-handed, or he might have had a problem with his vision. His illustrations are remarkable — they have a rare psychological acuity to them.” Where most such figures were stiffly drawn and without expression, Beth felt that this unknown scribe had found a way to convey feeling and nuance to his work.

  “Hold on,” Van Nostrand said. “I bow, of course, to your superior wisdom in these matters, but weren’t the scribes, who did the text, and the illuminators, who did the artwork, two different people?”

  “Yes,” Beth said. “Generally they were. But something tells me that this one man — the Michelangelo of the illuminated world — did both. When I called this exhibition ‘The Genius of the Cloister,’ I meant the phrase to be taken in two ways: as a tribute to the talents of the monks in general and as a nod to the one man I believe surpassed them all.”

  Van Nostrand still looked dubious, so Beth decided to give him something more tangible to hang on to. “And this man, this artist, was proud of his achievement. Even though the work was generally done anonymously, he always managed to insert something of himself, somewhere, into the written text.”

  “Surely not into the Bible?”

  “Oh no,” Beth said, “he wouldn’t have done that. That would have cost him his job, or his place in the religious order. No, he had a more unusual way of making himself known.”

  “And that was…?” The crumb, hanging off his lip, finally relinquished its hold and drifted off on the evening breeze.

  “He cursed.”

  “He what?”

  “He laid a curse on anyone who stole or defaced his work.”

  Van Nostrand laughed, and Beth did, too. It was the very thing that had made her first connect the various books now in the exhibition. On the top of a Reading Abbey manuscript roughly a thousand years old, it said, Liber sancte Marie Radying[ensis] quem qui alienaverit anathema sit. Or, in other words, ‘Cursed be he who tampers with this book.’ On other manuscripts, drawn from all over the British Isles, there were similar curses, some of them even more colorful and elaborate. In fact, though it was difficult to date all the manuscripts exactly, it seemed to Beth that the unknown monk had grown more obstreperous all the time, until at some point he abruptly vanished from the scene — as did his work. Had his health failed? Had he died? Was he no longer commissioned to do such work? And who, finally, was he?

  This exhibition was Beth’s first concerted attempt to find him.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Carter said, slipping up behind her, then extending a hand to Van Nostrand. “Carter Cox.”

  “Alexander Van Nostrand. Art News.”

  Beth turned to her husband — no red bow tie here, just an open-collared blue Oxford-cloth shirt, a navy blue blazer, and khaki pants. She used to kid him that he simply bought his outfits off the Brooks Brothers mannequins.

  “Ah, so you are the lucky husband?”

  Carter smiled and said, “I hear that a lot.”

  Even now, after several years of marriage, Beth always enjoyed looking at her husband — at the way his brown hair flopped over his forehead, the way his dark eyes focused so intently on whatever, or whomever, he was looking at, the way he carried his tall and rangy frame. He was to her mind the perfect combination, with something of the professor and something of the cowboy in him.

  “I’m sure you do,” Van Nostrand said. “Because she’s as erudite as she is beautiful.” Van Nostrand took her hand in a mock courtly fashion and said, “Unfortunately, LACMA calls. But I would love to talk to you some more about your exhibition. I’ll call later in the week, if that’s alright.”

  Beth assured him that it was, then, slipping her arm through Carter’s, turned back toward the other party guests. The gold damask tablecloths were rippling softly in the evening breeze.

  “Where’s the ogre?” Carter asked.

  “Watch what you say,” Beth murmured. “She’s right over there, under the trellis, with a couple of museum patrons.”

  In fact, at spotting Beth, she began to wave wildly, and then started stumping across the lawn in their direction.

  “Did you do something wrong?” Carter asked in low tones. “Am I not on the guest list?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Taking the bull by the horns, Carter stepped forward and said, “Good evening, Mrs. Cabot. It’s a pleasure to see you.”

  “None of that,” she said, dismissing his comments with a wave of the hand, “it’s Beth I need.”

  “I just finished talking to the Art News writer, and—”

  “Mr. al-Kalli is coming; he’ll be here any minute.”

  “Mr. al-Kalli?” Beth asked. “I don’t believe I know him.”

  “The Beasts of Eden,” she said, peremptorily, “the bestiary. I messengered the photos to you.”

  “I’m still not following.”

  “Mr. al-Kalli is the owner of the book! The man who is asking us to study and restore it.”

  “Oh,” Beth said, at last making the connection. But the cover letter from Mrs. Cabot had never named the owner of The Beasts of Eden, and she wondered now if she should bring that up in her own defense.

  When Carter did. “Oh yes, honey, don’t you remember that you told me there was an exciting new project for you, but that the owner of the work had chosen to remain anonymous?” He turned to Mrs. Cabot. “Beth was very pleased”—he knew enough not to divulge to Mrs. Cabot that his wife might have shared any details with him—“but I thought she was purposely concealing the owner. Now I guess she wasn’t.”

  Mrs. Cabot was momentarily stymied. “Oh yes, that’s right,” she conceded, “he had asked to remain anonymous.” Then, quickly picking up the cudgels again, “But I’ve just been told that he has decided to come here, quite unexpectedly, tonight. He expressly wants to meet you, Beth, as you will be the person in charge of the project.”

  Beth wished that she’d been given more notice — it might have been nice to prepare some thoughts and a few remarks about how she planned to proceed — but she was pleased, too. The few photos she’d been given of the mythical creatures depicted in the manuscript had been striking, beautiful, and even, in a way, haunting. The fact that the book was of Middle Eastern origin — the information so far provided to her had been fairly sketchy — made it all the more intriguing. Not many manuscripts from that region had
survived so well, and for so long.

  “In fact,” Mrs. Cabot said, glancing up at the top of the stairs leading to the garden, “that’s Mr. al-Kalli now.”

  Beth and Carter followed her gaze. A bald man, somewhere in his fifties perhaps, wearing an impeccably cut black suit, was standing with military rectitude on the top step, surveying the party as a general might survey a battlefield. He was flanked on one side by a surly teenage boy — Carter could see his scowl even from here — and on the other by a stocky man, clearly a bodyguard, who hung one deferential step back.

  Mrs. Cabot raised a hand to signal their whereabouts, and the guard, spotting her, leaned toward his employer.

  As Mr. al-Kalli approached, he took off his sunglasses and slipped them into the inside pocket of his suit coat; the waning sunlight glinted off his eyes, reminding Carter of the glittering obsidian on the beaches of Hawaii. His skin was a burnished gold, and the perfect dome of his head looked as if it had been buffed to a high sheen with a chamois cloth.

  He introduced himself and his son, Mehdi — who shrugged and looked away — but said nothing of the guard, who now stood several feet back, his head turning slowly from side to side, taking in everything and everyone, in close proximity to his boss. Mrs. Cabot seemed flustered — odd, Carter thought, for someone whose job brought her into such close contact with the high and mighty all the time — but Beth remained poised and collected. One of the countless things Carter admired about her.

  “I know quite a lot about you, Ms. Elizabeth Cox,” Mr. al-Kalli said with a slight smile.

  “You do?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. His voice was very smooth, and he spoke with an upper-crust English accent. “And all of it, I may say, is good.”

  Beth put the back of her hand to her brow, as if in relief.

  “It’s why I came tonight. I wanted to meet the woman who is going to take charge, as it were, of my family’s most precious possession.”

  “From what I’ve seen of it,” Beth said, “it’s a beautiful piece of work.”

  “Oh, it’s more than that,” al-Kalli said. “It’s the legacy of my family, it’s the source, some would say, of our… enduring.”

  Beth didn’t know quite what to make of this, but she said, “We’ll take every precaution to make sure no harm comes to it.”

  “I know you will,” he said. “I have had a thorough study of your career done — you graduated with highest honors from Barnard College, you did exceptional work in London, you have dealt, scrupulously, with some of the finest Old Master works in the world—”

  He had done his homework, Beth thought, though his recitation was starting to give her the chills.

  “—and your previous monographs on medieval manuscripts have been both accessible and intelligent.” He glanced over at Carter, “And I don’t need to tell you how inaccessible, to the layman, many of these scholarly works tend to be.”

  Now Carter found himself in the spotlight — and he didn’t know why.

  “You, too, I know something about.” He listed several of Carter’s accomplishments — from the discovery of the Well of the Bones to his appointment to the Kingsley Chair at NYU, and on to his recent post at the Page Museum — before adding, “I do my homework, you see.”

  His lips curled in a tiny, self-satisfied smile, as if he’d just performed a popular parlor trick. Carter sensed that he liked to do this, to gain the upper hand.

  “You forgot to mention the fact that I won the American Legion Good Citizenship medal in my senior year of high school.”

  “At Evanston Township High School,” al-Kalli replied. “You were also the valedictorian,” he added, and now Carter really was nonplussed. “But may I borrow Beth for a few moments?” he continued. “There are just a few things I want to go over with her.” To his son, he said, “Have something to eat, and Jakob”—to the guard—“make sure he does not drink anything but soda.”

  Beth felt herself taken by the elbow and steered toward the less-tenanted portion of the garden. The Getty Center was built high atop a hill on the west side of Los Angeles, and from here it commanded a panoramic view of the city below. Sometimes, when Beth had been closeted all day in the galleries or the conservation lab, she would come out here just to breathe the air and look out into the far distance; she felt like she was exercising her eyes, giving them a chance, after hours of intensive work, to range freely over a great distance, all the way to the soothing blue of the Pacific Ocean beyond. Tonight, with the sun going down, the view was especially magnificent.

  But her focus right now had to remain on al-Kalli, who was busy telling her what methods he wanted employed to restore the manuscript, what methods he definitely did not, and what information he hoped to glean from her study of the manuscript. She also had the distinct impression that he just wanted to spend a bit more time in her company, making sure of his decision, getting a feel for her. Everything he was telling her could just as easily have been written in a cover letter or introductory document — indeed, she was sure it had — but al-Kalli seemed to want something more than that. He was like a climber who wanted to make sure of his partner before a difficult ascent. Can I rely on you? Are you trustworthy? Although she knew he wasn’t actually putting his life in her hands, she sensed that he wanted her to feel that way.

  When he had finished, Beth said in her most reassuring tones, “It’s an extraordinary manuscript, and there’s no better place than the Getty to have this work done.” She felt like a summer camp director taking responsibility for someone’s child.

  He studied her face, as if reading it for any further clues. And then, apparently satisfied, he put his sunglasses back on and clasped his hands behind his back. Turning his gaze to the fading gold of the horizon, he said, “I will have it delivered to you.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The car, a Mercedes-Benz limousine, looked like any other of its kind — long and black, gleaming and powerful. But this one had a secret: It was built to withstand almost any attack. Its entire chassis — posts, columns, door frames, roof — had been buttressed with high-hardened steel, reinforced fiberglass, and ballistic nylon; under the burgundy-carpeted floor lay a bomb-suppressor blanket. The tires were equipped with “run flat inserts”; the front and rear compartments housed satellite global phones, klaxons, and loudspeakers (to call for help, or to negotiate with terrorists if necessary); the windows had been transparently armored with a layer of dense ballistic glass, laminated to a sturdy inner spall shield of resilient polycarbonate. Overall, the car maintained a B-7 armor level, enough to survive even a concerted assault.

  Mohammed al-Kalli always wanted only the best — especially after what had happened to his family in Iraq.

  Even Saddam Hussein had thought twice about taking on the al-Kalli dynasty. Not only because of their inestimable wealth and influence, but also for a reason less rational, less plain. Saddam, like all Iraqis, had grown up hearing the stories, listening to the legends of the al-Kallis’ strange powers and even stranger possessions. As a youngster, he had listened no doubt to the warnings about what happened to bad children (the al-Kallis got them!), and to the tales of what befell anyone who crossed the family in any way. There were rumors of dungeons and torture chambers, of terrible rituals, deadly sacrifice, and, finally… of creatures beyond imagining.

  For years, Saddam had bided his time, and he had even done a bit of business with the al-Kallis now and then. But eventually his avarice and his ego had gotten the better of him. Whether it was at Saddam’s express order or not, al-Kalli never knew. It could have been a lower-level functionary who sought to curry favor by perpetrating what his leader had only wished. But either way, a plan was put into action. A celebration was to be held at one of Saddam’s many palaces, and the al-Kallis were all invited. Mohammed had no desire to go, nor did his wife, his brothers, his children, but the invitation was more of an order than a request. So, in the interest of keeping the peace and observing the political realities, Mohamme
d had acceded.

  The celebration was in honor of some trumped-up event in the grand and mythical history of Saddam’s family — as Mohammed recalled it, Saddam had traced his lineage back to Nebuchadnezzar, or maybe it was the Prophet himself — and the al-Kallis had dutifully come from their own various palaces and compounds. The event was expectedly lavish, sprawling over a dozen acres, with more than a thousand guests. There was a Western orchestra playing Beethoven and Wagner under one immense, air-conditioned tent, while in another Middle Eastern music, and a bevy of belly dancers (reputedly handpicked by Saddam’s son Uday) held sway.

  At first, all went well. Mohammed, who’d been suffering from a stomach flu, had simply sipped club sodas, while his family, assembled on a special dais reserved for honored guests, had dined. But even then, something had struck Mohammed — the waiters who were serving at their table were not very efficient. They did not seem used to this kind of work; in fact, they looked more like soldiers. But then, he thought, perhaps all of Saddam’s staff looked like this.

  It was only when his wife began to look pale, and dropped her soup spoon on the table, that Mohammed began to grasp what was happening. His younger brother had also stopped eating. His daughter suddenly gasped and groped for her water glass. The waiters stood, with napkins badly folded over their arms, around the rim of the tent. Mohammed stood up, took his son, Mehdi, who was sitting next to him, by the hand; fortunately, Mehdi never ate soup. One of the waiters stepped into his path, but when Mohammed said, “My son must use the bathroom,” the man stood aside. Mohammed saw him flash a look at one of his superiors, undoubtedly wondering what to do, but Mohammed was able to walk slowly, as if he had not a care in the world, out of the tent.

  Once outside, he lifted his son, then just a child, into his arms and raced for the limousine that had brought them. The driver was smoking a cigarette and lounging in the shade, but when he saw them, he instinctively knew what to do. He leapt into the car, started the engine, and drove right over a potted palm to get onto the driveway again with the car pointed toward the main gates. Several people had to jump out of the way. The car jolted to a stop and al-Kalli and his son threw themselves into the backseat. They slammed the door, and the car hurtled off in a cloud of dust.