Prophet of Bones (28 page)

“I know,” she said. “Just tell me this: is it important?”

“Yeah,” Paul said.

“How important?”

“I’ll put it this way. I’m not going back to my job after this.”

“I’ll do it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I wouldn’t say I was sure, but I’ll still do it. I can get it done in an afternoon. Besides, this cloak-and-dagger stuff is way more interesting than my usual day-job bullshit.”

“What’s your usual day-job bullshit?”

“Working with specimens. Paperwork. Dealing with interoffice headaches.”

“Sounds nice.”

“It’s not.”

“Is that angst I detect?”

“Angst is psychological lupus,” she said. “It’s the mind’s immune system turning on itself.”

“You’ve thought that out.”

She smiled. “Angst is what’s wrong when there is nothing wrong.”

“I thought that was depression?”

“No, most people who are depressed are depressed because their lives suck. Don’t look at me like that—it’s true. My sister was depressed. She was doing a job she hated, in a relationship with a guy she hated. Voilà, depression. She quit her job and now she’s a broke, happy lesbian. Depression is the mind’s way of telling you that you’re not doing what you should be doing. Can I see the sample?” She held out her hand.

Paul gave her the baggie. It held a small disk of bone, wrapped in plastic. “So this is enough to test?”

She weighed the baggie in her hand and made a quick inspection of the contents. “Yeah, this should be enough.”

The waitress came with Paul’s beer. “Thanks,” he said.

“Do they know you took it?” Lilli asked once the waitress had left.

“Not yet. How soon before you’ll have your results?”

“Depends when I can get lab time. A few days, probably.”

Paul took a long pull of his beer. Behind him, the restaurant noise rose in pitch, a rowdy group entering the room. Drunken college kids fresh from a bar and now looking for food before resuming their bar crawl. He’d never been them. That carefree. He lowered his eyes back to his beer, noting the bubbles rising in the amber liquid.

“You’re not going to get in trouble for this at work?” Paul asked.

“No, it’s a small thing,” she said. “Nobody will notice. I practically run that part of the lab.”

“I don’t want to cause you any problems.”

“I work in a lab where nothing happens. My life didn’t turn out exactly how I’d wanted it to. This is as adventurous as I get.”

“Your life turned out pretty well, I think.”

“So what about you?”

“What about me?”

“How’d your life turn out? Other than theft, or illicit dealings in ancient remains, or whatever this is.”

“Three-quarters of a master’s degree, then on to Westing. Four years in the field, then back and forth to the lab.”

“You like it?”

“I did.”

“But not now?”

“No, not now. Now I wish I’d stuck with mice. Your turn.”

“Ah, me.” She sipped her drink. “Graduate studies, then Sri Lanka for a year. A disastrous marriage. A divorce. Teaching. Then lab work.”

“Marriage?”

“We wanted different things.”

“What did he want?”

“A virgin.”

Paul choked on his beer.

“Well,” she said, “among other things.”

Despite himself, Paul smiled. Back in college, he’d made the mistake of asking if her name meant anything in particular in her native language. For the next year she’d given different answers according to her mood, warning him once, during a mock wrestling match, that her name meant “great vengeance.” Another time, during a study session, she’d declared him the beneficiary of a study partner whose name derived from a word that meant “supernatural patience toward fools.” And once, after a particularly coquettish display of feminine flexibility in her dorm room, she’d offered “virginal” as the literal translation of Lillivati.

“Ah,” he’d told her. “Like when a bald guy is named Harry.”

She’d tackled him for that one.

A few months after they’d broken up, he’d looked her name up on Google. It meant “free will of God.”

“I’m sorry things didn’t work out for you and your husband,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“You said what he wanted. What was it that you wanted?”

“Never what I thought I wanted, it turned out.”

Paul nodded softly. He understood the feeling.

“So what’s next?” she asked.

“For me? Unemployment, probably. At best.”

She raised her glass. “To unemployment.”

“To discovery,” Paul said. They clinked glasses and drank.

Paul finished his beer in three long gulps. “You never asked about my eye.”

“I was waiting to see how important it was to you.”

“I haven’t decided.”

She looked at him quizzically. “It suits you,” she said finally. “Like the weight.”

“What does that mean?”

“You were too Abercrombie before. Too pretty, back in college.”

“You never told me that then.”

“Well, of course not.” She drained the last of her drink and slapped the glass down on the table perhaps a bit too hard. “Are you ready?”

Paul dug his keys out of his pants pocket. “Ready if you are.”

He laid cash down on the table, and they stood and made their way out of the restaurant.

When they were outside in the chilly night air, she asked him, “Feel like sightseeing?”

“Sure.”

“You drive,” she said. She walked around to the other side of his car and climbed in. They pulled out of the lot.

“Take a left here,” she said. She guided him to the museum.

They parked in the employee lot. They climbed out of the car and she led him around the side of the building.

“We’re not going in?” Paul asked.

“Even better. I’m in the mood for a walk.” They passed beneath a steel brachiosaur, and she took his hand in hers.

It was a ten-minute walk to Millennium Park. Skyscrapers served as backdrop, glass spires stretching upward into the darkness all around.

The sculpture, if you could call it that, was impossible not to like. You approached it from a distance, waiting to see yourself in it, a mirrored heaven.

“Cloud Gate,”
he said, reading the sign.

“Locals call it the Bean.”

“Some bean.”

The whole of the Chicago city skyline was reflected in its silvery curvature. A story and a half of oblong, polished steel.

They followed the shoreline back to the museum, and once there she didn’t lead him to the car. She took him around to the side entrance near the parking lot and let them into the building. A girl of keys, still. They took the elevator to the third floor, to the maze of lab suites and research offices. A place that was off-limits.

Wood paneling lined the halls, a deep reddish brown.

He followed her down the narrow corridor. It was an old place of wood and books—and down one sleek, wooden hall, near the research library, behind a locked door, there was the bone room.

“Do you want to see?” she asked.

*   *   *

An hour later, at her apartment, they were careful about it. Touching slowly first, with their hands. Then the rest of themselves. They started in the front room, on the couch, knocking cushions to the floor.

Her apartment was tiny, colorful. The dining room table sat a few feet from the front door. Beyond that, the kitchen cubicle—and beyond that, the hall. She led him by the hand, pulling him toward the bedroom.

The bed angled out from the far corner—white blankets, neatly made, and, against the wall, shelves of books.

The sounds of the street below filtered through the windows. A distant car horn, sporadic traffic. She pulled his shirt over his head.

“Now you,” he said, unbuttoning her blouse. She shrugged out from beneath it, her golden brown shoulders suddenly exposed.

She sat on the bed, fumbling with his belt.

His pants thumped to the floor, and then she stood, kissing him again, slipping out of her slacks.

When they were naked, she slid backward onto the pillows, pulling him toward her.

It was what he remembered, and a little more.

*   *   *

Afterward, in the darkness, she slipped her hand into his.

She reached up to touch his eye patch. “Does it ever hurt?”

“Sometimes. You’re sure it doesn’t bother you?”

“No.” She smiled. “Honestly, you could be way less good-looking and I still would have dragged you into bed.”

“You should write Hallmark cards.”

“I should. I can see it now: Happy Valentine’s Day. You could be twenty-five percent less sexy and I’d still want to sleep with you.”

“Better than the alternative, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“I could be barely hot enough. One wrinkle away.”

She laughed. “Who are you?”

“Just me. The same.”

“No, not the same. Everyone is always two people at the same time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Who we are, and who we’re becoming. People change.”

“Do you always think this much?”

“It always happens the same way,” she said.

“What?”

“What comes next.”

“And what’s that?”

“Not this week, or next week. But eventually.”

“What?” he coaxed.

She touched his arm, sliding a finger along his bare skin. Her face grew sad in the half-light spilling in through the window. “I get bored,” she said.

Paul was silent for a long time. “Is that what happened last time?”

“With you? No. I learn everything I can, like there’s this hunger inside, but then something happens to it.”

He squeezed her hand, running a finger along her narrow forearm.

“It happens every time,” she continued. “Once I learn everything there is to learn.”

“You lose interest.”

“Yes. But you were always different.”

“How?”

“I never thought I learned everything. Sometimes it felt like I barely knew you at all.”

33

Paul stayed in Chicago over the weekend, sleeping at Lilli’s apartment for another two nights.

She gave him a mug of coffee for his drive, and he left for home the same time she left for work.

When he got back to town, eleven hours later, he slowed at his apartment complex. Two men stood outside, smoking. They were the same two men he’d seen in the hall the previous week. Only this time they weren’t coming or going. They were waiting. It didn’t take a great leap of deductive reasoning to figure out who they were waiting for. Paul slunk down in his seat and drove past without slowing. The men didn’t see him, but there was no question that something had changed. The noose around his neck was tightening.

The computer guy picked up on the third ring.

“Hello.”

“Alan, it’s Paul.”

“Hey.”

“Did you finish the analysis?”

“The report is almost done, but I wanted to double-check some of the fine-grain analysis.”

“How fine-grain?”

“Just eliminating confounds.”

“Do you have a result?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good enough. Whatever is done, I need to pick it up.”

“I can have the rest of the report done by morning.”

“That’s too late.”

There was a pause. “I don’t really like you changing the game plan on me.”

“It can’t be helped.”

“You in some kind of trouble, man?”

“No, no trouble.”

“Then what’s the hurry?”

“I just need to square things away.”

“Whatever the fuck
that
means.”

“Yeah, whatever the fuck. I’ve got the money. Full price.”

“Your money, man.” There was silence. Then: “Come by and pick it up anytime.”

“I’m on my way.”

“You mean now?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I’ll save the report to the same drive you gave me, and you can have your data back.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“And after this … don’t call me again. You make me nervous.”

“That’s a deal.”

Paul hung up and sat considering his phone for a while. He texted Lilli:
When can you have the tests done?

Her reply came a minute later:
Should be able to test in a few days.

He texted back:
The sooner the better.

*   *   *

A half hour later, Paul pulled onto Alan’s block. He drove past the apartment twice.

He didn’t see anyone waiting. No men in suits. Nothing suspicious. But still, things didn’t feel right.

He opened his phone and punched the numbers.

“Hello.”

“You need to meet me,” Paul said.

There was a pause on Alan’s end. “I thought you were coming here?”

“No, it’s better we meet somewhere else. You bring the drive and I’ll bring the money.”

“You’re acting real sketchy, man,” he said.

“It’ll be fine.”

“I don’t like this.”

“You don’t have to like it.”

“Maybe I just smash this drive with a hammer and forget I ever met you.”

“You’d be doing us both a favor.”

“Then maybe I will.”

“Do what you have to.”

There was silence on the line. The crackle of static.

“Where do you want to meet?”

“The bridge two blocks over.”

“My jacket is already on.”

Paul watched the front steps. He was parked a block and a half away, but he had a clear line of sight to the front of Alan’s building.

He opened the text feature on his phone and typed in Alan’s number. Then he typed the words
STOP, GO BACK.

His finger hovered over the Send button but did not press it. He waited.

Although Alan had said his jacket was on, it still took three minutes for a man to exit Alan’s building—small and slight, wearing Alan’s leather jacket, a baseball cap pulled down over a head of dark hair. If it wasn’t Alan, it was a guy who looked just like him.

Paul scanned the street carefully. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. No one followed. No one stepped from the shadows. Alan looked both ways, then turned and moved up the sidewalk, disappearing around the corner. Paul waited a full minute before closing his phone. He climbed out of his car and walked one block over, heading for the bridge. The streets were quiet this time of the night. The traffic was light. Few pedestrians on the sidewalks. Around the corner, the bridge loomed into view. The structure itself was an old, iron monstrosity, about 150 yards long, an intermittently lit suspension of two-lane road. A pedestrian walkway crowded one edge of the traffic lanes. The bridge crossed a sloping landscape of trees and brush that dropped into a low, dark river in the center of the span. Up ahead, Alan stopped against the handrail under a streetlight, about a third of the way across. His collar was turned up, the cap still hiding his face.