Phantoms (22 page)

At the Churchill Hotel in Portman Square, rain beat against the windows and streamed down the glass, distorting the view from the dining room. Occasionally, brilliant flashes of lightning, passing through the water-beaded windowpanes, briefly cast shadowy images of raindrops onto the clean white tablecloths.

Burt Sandier, in London on business from New York, sat at one of the window tables, wondering how in God’s name he was going to justify the size of this breakfast bill on his expense account. His guest had begun by ordering a bottle of good champagne: Mumm’s Extra Dry, which didn’t come cheap. With the champagne, his guest wanted caviar—champagne and caviar for breakfast!—and two kinds of fresh fruit. And the old fellow clearly was not finished ordering.

Across the table, Dr. Timothy Flyte, the object of Sandler’s amazement, studied the menu with childlike delight. To the waiter, he said, “And I should like an order of your croissants.”

“Yes, sir,” the waiter said.

“Are they very flaky?”

“Yes, sir. Very.”

“Oh, good. And eggs,” Flyte said. “Two lovely eggs, of course, rather soft, with buttered toast.”

“Toast?” the waiter asked. “Is that in addition to the two croissants, sir?”

“Yes, yes,” Flyte said, fingering the slightly frayed collar of his white shirt. “And a rasher of bacon with the eggs.”

The waiter blinked. “Yes, sir.”

At last Flyte looked up at Burt Sandler. “What’s breakfast without bacon? Am I right?”

“I’m an eggs-and-bacon man myself,” Burt Sandler agreed, forcing a smile.

“Wise of you,” Flyte said sagely. His wire-rimmed spectacles had slipped down his nose and were now perched on the round, red tip of it. With a long, thin finger, he pushed them back into place.

Sandler noticed that the bridge of the eyeglasses had been broken and soldered. The repair job was so distinctly amateurish that he suspected Flyte had soldered the frames himself, to save money.

“Do you have good pork sausages?” Flyte asked the waiter. “Be truthful with me. I’ll send them back straightaway if they aren’t of the highest quality.”

“We’ve quite good sausages,” the waiter assured him. “I’m partial to them myself.”

“Sausages, then.”

“Is that in place of the bacon, sir?”

“No, no, no. In addition,” Flyte said, as if the waiter’s question was not only curious but a sign of thick-headedness.

Flyte was fifty-eight but looked at least a decade older. His bristly white hair curled thinly across the top of his head and thrust out around his large ears as if crackling with static electricity. His neck was scrawny and wrinkled; his shoulders were slight; his body favored bone and cartilage over flesh. There was some legitimate doubt whether he could actually eat all that he had ordered.

“Potatoes,” Flyte said.

“Very well, sir,” the waiter said, scribbling it down on his order pad, on which he had very nearly run out of room to write.

“Do you have suitable pastries?” Flyte inquired.

The waiter, a model of deportment under the circumstances, having made not the slightest allusion to Flyte’s amazing gluttony, looked at Burt Sandler as if to say:
Is your grandfather hopelessly senile, sir, or is he, at his age, a marathon runner who needs the calories?

Sandler merely smiled.

To Flyte, the waiter said, “Yes, sir, we have several pastries. There’s a delicious—”

“Bring an assortment,” Flyte said. “At the end of the meal, of course.”

“Leave it to me, sir.”

“Good. Very good. Excellent!” Flyte said, beaming. Finally, with a trace of reluctance, he relinquished his menu.

Sandler almost sighed with relief. He asked for orange juice, eggs, bacon, and toast, while Professor Flyte adjusted the day-old carnation pinned to the lapel of his somewhat shiny blue suit.

As Sandler finished ordering, Flyte leaned toward him conspiratorially. “Will you be having some of the champagne, Mr. Sandler?”

“I believe I might have a glass or two,” Sandler said, hoping the bubbly would liberate his mind and help him formulate a believable explanation for this extravagance, a likely tale that would convince even the parsimonious clerks in accounting who would be poring over this bill with an electron microscope.

Flyte looked at the waiter. “Then perhaps you’d better bring
two
bottles.”

Sandler, who was sipping ice-water, nearly choked.

The waiter left, and Flyte looked out through the rain-streaked window beside their table. “Nasty weather. Is it like this in New York in autumn?”

“We have our share of rainy days. But autumn can be beautiful in New York.”

“Here, too,” Flyte said. “Though I rather imagine we have more days like this than you. London’s reputation for soggy weather isn’t entirely undeserved.”

The professor insisted on small talk until the champagne and caviar were served, as if he feared that, once business had been discussed, Sandler would quickly cancel the rest of the breakfast order.

He’s a character out of Dickens, Sandler thought.

As soon as they had proposed a toast, wishing each other good fortune, and had sipped the Mumm’s, Flyte said, “So you’ve come all the way from New York to see me, have you?” His eyes were merry.

“To see a number of writers, actually,” Sandler said. “I make the trip once a year. I scout out books in progress. British authors are popular in the States, especially thriller writers.”

“MacLean, Follett, Forsythe, Bagley, that crowd?”

“Yes, very popular, some of them.

The caviar was superb. At the professor’s urging, Sandler tried some of it with chopped onions. Flyte piled gobs on small wedges of dry toast and ate it without benefit of condiments.

“But I’m not only scouting for thrillers,” Sandler said. “I’m after a variety of books. Unknown authors, too. And I suggest projects on occasion, when I have a subject for a particular author.”

“Apparently, you have something in mind for me.”

“First, let me say I read
The Ancient Enemy
when it was first published, and I found it fascinating.”

“A number of people found it fascinating,” Flyte said. “But most found it infuriating.”

“I hear the book created problems for you.”

“Virtually nothing
but
problems.”

“Such as?”

“I lost my university position fifteen years ago, at the age of forty-three, when most academics are achieving job security.”

“You lost your position because of
The Ancient Enemy
?”

“They didn’t put it quite that bluntly,” Flyte said, popping a morsel of caviar into his mouth. “That would have made them seem too closeminded. The administrators of my college, the head of my department, and most of my distinguished colleagues chose to attack indirectly. My dear Mr. Sandler, the competiton among power-mad politicians and the Machiavellian backstabbing of junior executives in a major corporation are as nothing, in terms of ruthlessness and spitefulness, when compared to the behavior of academic types who suddenly see an opportunity to climb the university ladder at the expense of one of their own. They spread rumors without foundation, scandalous tripe about my sexual preferences, suggestions of intimate fraternization with my female students. And with my male students, for that matter. None of those slanders was openly discussed in a forum where I could refute them. Just rumors. Whispered behind the back. Poisonous. More openly, they made polite suggestions of incompetence, overwork, mental fatigue. I was eased out, you see; that’s how they thought of it, though there was nothing easy about it from my point of view. Eighteen months after the publication of
The Ancient Enemy,
I was gone. And no other university would have me, ostensibly because of my unsavory reputation. The true reason, of course, was that my theories were too bizarre for academic tastes. I stood accused of attempting to make a fortune by pandering to the common man’s taste for pseudoscience and sensationalism, of selling my credibility.”

Flyte paused to take some champagne, savoring it.

Sandler was genuinely appalled by what Flyte had told him. “But that’s outrageous! Your book was a scholarly treatise. It was never aimed at the best-seller lists. The common man would’ve had enormous difficulty wading through
The Ancient Enemy
. Making a fortune from that kind of work is virtually impossible.”

“A fact to which my royalty statements can attest,” Flyte said. He finished the last of the caviar.

“You were a respected archaeologist,” Sandler said.

“Oh, well, never really all
that
respected,” Flyte said self-deprecatingly. “Though I was certainly never an embarrassment to my profession, as was so often suggested later on. If my colleagues’ conduct seems incredible to you, Mr. Sandler, that’s because you don’t understand the nature of the animal. I mean, the scientist animal. Scientists are educated to believe that all new knowledge comes in tiny increments, grains of sand piled one on another. Indeed, that
is
how most knowledge is gained. Therefore, they are never prepared for those visionaries who arrive at new insights which, overnight, utterly transform an entire field of inquiry. Copernicus was ridiculed by his contemporaries for believing that the planets revolved around the sun. Of course, Copernicus was proved right. There are countless examples in the history of science.” Flyte blushed and drank some more champagne. “Not that I compare myself to Copernicus or any of those other great men. I’m simply trying to explain why my colleagues were conditioned to turn against me. I should have seen it coming.”

The waiter came to take away the caviar dish. He also served Sandler’s orange juice and, Flyte’s fresh fruit.

When he was alone with Flyte again, Sandler said, “Do you still believe your theory had validity?”

“Absolutely!” Flyte said. “I
am
right; or at least there’s an awfuliy good chance I am. History is filled with mysterious mass disappearances for which historians and archaeologists can provide no viable explanation.”

The professor’s rheumy eyes became sharp and probing beneath his bushy white eyebrows. He leaned over the table, fixing Burt Sandler with a hypnotic stare.

“On December 10, 1939,” Flyte said, “outside the hills of Nanking, an army of three thousand Chinese soldiers, on its way to the front lines to fight the Japanese, simply vanished without a trace before it got anywhere near the battle. Not a single body was ever found. Not one grave. Not one witness. The Japanese military historians have never found any record of having dealt with that particular Chinese force. In the countryside through which the missing soldiers passed, no peasants heard gunfire or other indications of conflict. An
army
evaporated into thin air. And in 1711, during the Spanish War of Succession, four thousand troops set out on an expedition into the Pyrenees. Every last man disappeared on familiar and friendly ground, before the first night’s camp was established!”

Flyte was still as gripped by his subject as he had been when he had written the book, seventeen years ago. His fruit and champagne were forgotten. He stared at Sandler as if daring him to challenge the infamous Flyte theories.

“On a grander scale,” the professor continued, “consider the great Mayan cities of Copán, Piedras Negras, Palenque, Menché, Seibal, and several others which were abandoned overnight. Tens of thousands,
hundreds
of thousands of Mayans left their homes, approximately in A.D. 610, perhaps within a single week, even within one
day
. Some appear to have fled northward, to establish new cities, but there is evidence that countless thousands just disappeared. All within a shockingly brief span of time. They didn’t bother to take many of their pots, tools, cooking utensils . . . My learned colleagues say the land around those Mayan cities became infertile, thus making it essential that the people move north, where the land would be more productive. But if this great exodus was planned, why were belongings left behind? Why was precious seed corn left behind? Why didn’t a single survivor ever return to loot those cities of their abandoned treasures?” Flyte softly struck the table with one fist. “It’s irrational! Emigrants don’t set out on long, arduous journeys without preparation, without taking every tool that might assist them. Besides, in some of the homes in Piedras Negras and Seibal, there is evidence that families departed after preparing elaborate dinners—
but before eating them
. This would surely seem to indicate that their leaving was sudden. No current theories adequately answer these questions—except mine, bizarre as it is, odd as it is,
impossible
as it is.”

“Frightening as it is,” Sandler added.

“Exactly,” Flyte said.

The professor sank back in his chair, breathless. He noticed his champagne glass, seized it, emptied it, and licked his lips.

The waiter appeared and refilled their glasses.

Flyte quickly consumed his fruit, as if afraid the waiter might spirit it away while the hothouse strawberries remained untouched.

Sandler felt sorry for the old bird. Evidently, it had been quite some time since the professor had been treated to an expensive meal served in an elegant atmosphere.

“I was accused of trying to explain
every
mysterious disappearance from the Mayans to Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart, all with a single theory. That was most unfair. I never mentioned the judge or the luckless aviatrix. I am interested only in unexplained
mass
disappearances of both humankind and animals, of which there have been literally hundreds throughout history.”

The waiter brought croissants.

Outside, lightning stepped quickly down the somber sky and put its spiked foot to the earth in another part of the city; its blazing descent was accompanied by a terrible crash and roar that echoed across the entire firmament.