Vigil (30 page)

“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 pursed 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?”

“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.

Sam was off in one corner of the main salon, huddled with two or three of the other power players in the real estate game, no doubt hammering out the plans for another office tower, shopping center, or New Jersey mall. She waved three fingers at him as she passed by, but he didn’t even seem to notice her.

Other men, she was pleased to see, still did.

She was wearing a scarlet chiffon, off-the-shoulder Thierry Mugler, bare in the back, slit up the side, with her hair drawn up in a tight chignon offset by a diamond-and-ruby clasp shaped like a rainbow. The mayor himself had lingered longer than necessary when kissing her hello, and Kimberly had seen a wary look cross his “campaign treasurer’s” face.
Don’t worry,
Kimberly thought,
I’ve got bigger fish than this to fry tonight
.

The next time she checked, he was standing in the foyer, handing his long black cashmere coat to the attendant. He was wearing a dark suit again, and his eyes were again concealed behind the round glasses, with amber-colored lenses. He turned his head, with his chin raised, like a blind man trying to sense his surroundings, as Kimberly went to greet him.

“I’m
so
glad you could make it, Mr. Arius,” she said, offering her hand and cheek.

“Thank you. For inviting me,” he said, taking her hand, but remaining otherwise aloof. “I am happy to be here.”

What
was
it, she thought, that was so strange, and so strangely alluring, about this man? The way he spoke, in those odd cadences, as if English were something he’d only learned in school; the way he kept his eyes concealed; the way his hand felt—as cool and as smooth as glass—when taking her own? (And had she noticed something odd about one of his fingers?) He even had his own faint aroma, unlike any aftershave or cologne she could identify; it seemed instead to be somehow organic, something that emanated from his very skin, and hair, and breath.

“Let’s go inside,” she said, “and I’ll introduce you to some of the other guests.” She slipped her arm through his and led him into the next room, feeling as if she were escorting a movie star. The other guests reacted as if she were, too, parting to make way for them, stopping midconversation, wondering out loud, “Who is that man Kimberly’s with?” Arius himself seemed unaffected by it all. If introduced to someone, he was polite; if not, he was silent. Either way, he said very little. His answers were courteous but brief, and always somewhat vague or evasive. After listening to him field half a dozen inquiries, Kimberly felt that she knew no more about where he was from, what he did for a living, or where he was staying in New York than she had when he arrived. Even Sam couldn’t get more than a few words out of him, and Kimberly knew perfectly well what his take would be on him. Longish white-blond hair, arty glasses, the fact that he’d been first introduced to his wife by the flamboyant Richard Raleigh? Sam would lump him in with her hairdresser, her decorator, her antiques advisor, and all her other gay friends. And as far as Kimberly was concerned, that couldn’t be better.

Unless, heaven forbid, it turned out to be true.

As for that little shit Ezra, he’d made his obligatory appearance, and even, so far as Kimberly knew, thanked the mayor for his help in getting him out of jail after that UN park fiasco. He was nowhere to be seen now, and unless Kimberly missed her bet, he was back in his room pursuing whatever pointless exercise he called his “research.”

The caterers seemed to have everything else under control—the drinks were flowing, trays of canapés and appetizers were being passed everywhere, a lavish buffet had been spread out in the dining room, and every time she passed the foyer the elevator doors were opening and admitting another half a dozen guests. She’d even bagged Katie Couric for about a half hour—and that, she was sure, was bound to get the party some media attention the next day.

The only person who didn’t appear to be having a very good time was her mysterious Mr. Arius. Reluctant as she was to let go of him at all, she did have duties to perform, so she’d had no choice but to set him adrift. Whenever she spotted him, he was off by himself, holding a champagne glass that seemed always to remain full, strolling alone on the terraces, or coming inside to study a painting or sculpture with deep interest. Maybe he really
was
some kind of serious art collector with a vast château in the south of France, filled from floor to ceiling with famous paintings and beautiful statues. On a sudden impulse, seeing him inspect a nothing-much little oil that Sam’s first wife had bought, she glided over to him and said, “You really are the art connoisseur, aren’t you?”