Vigil (14 page)

Carter put his hand gently on Russo’s shoulder and said, “Come on, Joe.”

Russo didn’t respond.

“Let’s go back to bed now.”

Carter steered him by his shoulder, and together they went back toward the living room. Carter guided Russo down the hall, around the edge of the coffee table and chairs, and then over to the side of the sofa, where the sheet and blanket trailed onto the floor. Under Carter’s gentle pressure, Russo subsided onto the sofa, still mumbling something, agitatedly now, about
la pietra
.

Carter thought it was best not to leave him in the midst of this nightmare—if for no other reason than that he might start wandering around the apartment again—but he wasn’t sure how to go about waking him.

“Joe,” he said again, looking straight into his empty eyes, “you’re having a bad dream,” and he shook his shoulder several times. “You’re just having a bad dream, Joe.”

Slowly, he saw a flicker of consciousness return to Russo’s gaze.

“That’s it,” Carter said, “that’s my boy. Wake up now, Joe.”

Russo’s eyes seemed to focus and gradually take in Carter, kneeling directly in front of him. “Bones?”

“That’s me.”

“What are you doing?”

“Waking you up. You’ve been sleepwalking.”

First, there was comprehension, then surprise, followed almost immediately by embarrassment. “Oh, no, no, no . . .” Russo muttered. “Oh, Bones, did I . . .”

“No harm done,” Carter assured him. “You might have taken a few years off my life, but I’ll get over it. Wait here.”

Carter went back to the bedroom to check on Beth.

“Is he all right?” she said, still huddled in the bed with the light on now.

“Yeah, he’ll be okay,” he said, grabbing a pair of jeans from a chair and pulling them on. “How about you?”

She shrugged. “Nothing a new lock on the bedroom door won’t cure.”

Carter went into the kitchen, got a bottle of ginger ale out of the fridge, and brought it into Russo, who now at least looked fully awake.

“Thought you might like this,” Carter said, handing him the ginger ale. “Maybe it was all that wining and dining we did.”

Russo took the little bottle gratefully, twisted off the cap, and downed nearly the whole thing.

“Feel better?” Carter asked.

Russo nodded his big head, but still looked troubled. “Did I do anything? Did I talk?”

“Not much. You did say something, in Italian, about the rock, and I’m assuming you meant the fossil. You worried about it?”

Russo nodded again. “I have been worried for much time now,” he said. He swigged the last of the ginger ale. “Bones, I have not been fair to you.”

“You mean not telling me you’re a sleepwalker?” Carter said, with a smile. “I’ll just tie you to the sofa from now on.”

Russo shook his head. “Ever since the day I saw it, and touched it inside that cave, I have not been right, here,” he said, tapping a finger against his skull.

“You’ve been crazy?” Carter said.

“No, not that.” Russo searched for the words. “I have not been comfortable in my head. I have had trouble in my thoughts, I have had the bad dreams—like tonight.”

“What about, exactly?”

Russo grimaced and turned his face toward the pale glow of the streetlamps coming in through the windows. Carter could see now just how deeply troubled he was.

“I wish, sometimes, that we had not ever found it,” he finally said, in a low voice.

“But it could turn out to be a stupendous find,” Carter assured him.

Russo appeared unmoved. “I do not want what has happened to me to happen to you. I should not have made you involved.”

Carter slapped him playfully on the shoulder and said, “No getting out of it now. The fossil arrives tomorrow, and by next month we’ll both be on the front page of the
New York Times.
”

Russo looked up at him balefully, as if he could believe that—but not for any reason Carter had in mind.

“Get some rest,” Carter said, lifting the blanket back onto the sofa. As he did, he noticed that one of the Audubon bird prints was now off the wall above the sofa and lying on the little table they’d set up by the bed. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

Russo lay back and Carter draped the blanket across him.

“I am sorry, Bones,” Russo said, and Carter wasn’t entirely sure what he was referring to.

“Don’t sweat it—everything’s fine.” But before he left the room, he glanced up at the wall where the print had been, and saw that Russo had replaced it with something else. It took him a second in the dim light to make it out, and then another second to reconcile it with what he knew of his friend, a man of science if ever there was one. But right above the end of the sofa where he laid his head, Russo had used the nail from the print to hang a gnarled old wooden crucifix.

The third time Carter called the number on the international
transport license, he finally got through. But when he asked if the Italian military plane carrying the specimen had arrived at Kennedy Airport yet, a harried operator said “Hold on,” and then left him hanging once again.

“What do they say?” Russo asked nervously as he stood by Carter’s chair.

“I don’t know; I’m on hold while she’s checking on it.”

“It should have arrived hours ago,” Russo said, tamping another Nazionali out of the nearly empty pack in his pocket. “What is the problem now?”

Carter, of course, had no more idea than Russo did. And though he knew Beth wasn’t crazy about Russo sneaking the occasional smoke in the apartment, this didn’t seem like a very good time to ask the man to quit.

“The plane has been delayed,” the operator said, abruptly coming back on the line. “It’s now due in later this afternoon. Around four.”

“What delayed it?”

“Weather. Unusually strong head winds, from the east.”

“I thought I once heard that head winds usually blew from the west.”

“You heard right. But that’s why weathermen are always wrong.”

When Carter hung up and broke the news to Russo, Joe went to the window and blew out a cloud of smoke. In perfect keeping with his mood, it was shaping up to be a gray and gloomy day outside. And when Joe thought about what had gone on the night before, he wanted to crawl under a rock and die. On his very first night in New York, he had humiliated himself in front of Carter and Beth—how much so, he still wasn’t sure. Carter hadn’t elaborated on his sleepwalking performance, and Russo had been too embarrassed to ask. He only hoped that Carter hadn’t spotted the crucifix above the sofa. He’d intended to take it down in the morning, before anyone saw it, and before he felt like he had to offer some explanation for his sudden conversion to the Holy Roman faith. It was stashed now, in the bottom of his suitcase.

“So what do we do until then?” Russo said.

Carter wondered about that, too. Beth was off with Abbie, helping her pick out curtains and wallpaper for the country place she and Ben had bought upstate; in fact, as Beth had informed him that morning, they were scheduled to go up and see the place for themselves on the coming Halloween weekend. As for today, Carter had planned on using most of the day to get the fossil delivered and installed.

“We could go over to the biology building,” he suggested, “and I could give you a preliminary tour of the lab where we’ll be working on the fossil.”

“Yes, that is a good idea,” Russo said, jumping at the chance. “I would like very much to see the lab first.”

Before leaving the apartment, Carter gave Russo an umbrella and took another one for himself; it looked like they might need them any moment. Outside, a cold wind was blowing, and the trees in the park, their boughs bending in the wind, were shedding their last gold and orange leaves. Just the regulars were out; the homeless couple who lived on a bench near the Arch, a chess hustler in a Mets jacket who played against himself when nobody else would give him a game, the would-be comedian who stood on a fruit crate braying through a megaphone under the nonfunctioning fountain.

As they approached the biology building, Carter said, “Let me show you the main lab first, where I do the day-today stuff.”

Inside, the place was deserted and empty, and only one panel of overhead fluorescent lights had been left on in the hallway, for the die-hards who wanted to work even on a Sunday. Carter took Russo downstairs, and to his surprise—though, now that he considered it, why should he be surprised?—he could hear the distant strains of Eminem or some other rapper (he never could tell them apart) issuing from the main faculty lab.

“You’re about to meet a guy named Bill Mitchell,” Carter confided to Russo, “an associate professor in the department.”

The door was ajar and Mitchell was at his usual spot in back, his boombox on the counter, his lank, black hair falling down around his glasses.

“Hey, Bill,” Carter said loudly, to be heard over the music.

Mitchell looked up, squinting. He had a brush in one hand and what appeared to be a black rock—though it was probably a coprolite—in the other.

“I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Giuseppe Russo. He’s on the faculty at the University of Rome.”

The word
faculty
was enough to get Mitchell to slap off the boombox and bound up from his stool with his hand extended. “I’m Bill Mitchell. Really glad to meet you. You in paleontology?”

Carter could almost hear Mitchell’s mind clicking over the questions—
What kind of openings might they have in Italy? How hard would it be to adapt? What’s the current exchange rate?

“Yes, I am,” Russo said. “Carter and I worked together years ago in Sicily.”

Mitchell was turning it over quickly. “You were part of the team that turned up the Well of the Bones?”

Russo smiled; even scientists were flattered when their reputation preceded them. “Yes, I was.”

“That was great work, groundbreaking work,” Mitchell enthused. Then he paused and a cloud crossed his face. Carter could guess why. “You just visiting Carter, or are you looking at a position here at NYU?” With one more full professor on the ladder above him, Mitchell’s chances of advancement would be that much slimmer.

“No, no. I am here just for a short time, to work on something with my old friend.”

Mitchell’s ears pricked up, something that Carter was sorry to see.

“Really? What?” Mitchell asked, pushing his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose.

“Just something that needs a little technological analysis,” Carter intervened. “Nothing special.”

At hearing this, Russo glanced over at him, and instantly understood. “Sometimes, in Italy,” he chimed in for Mitchell’s benefit, “we do not have the machines we need. That is all.”

But Mitchell had picked up the scent of something, and Carter could see that he wasn’t about to lose it just yet. “You going to be doing the work in this lab?” Mitchell asked.“’Cause I’d be glad to help out.”

“No, that’s okay,” Carter said. “We’ve got a separate area set aside.” Carter was sorry he’d ever gotten into this; he wanted the project to remain as private as possible, and he certainly didn’t want to be torturing poor Mitchell with the idea that some earthshaking discovery—the kind of discovery that got you tenure overnight—was being done virtually under his nose.

Then he noticed the orange and black envelope taped to his own lab stool.

“What’s that?” Carter said, and before he could open it, Mitchell blurted out, “It’s a party invite.”

Carter slid the invitation, a black cat with its paw extended, out of the envelope. But he didn’t need to read the fine print.

“It’s for the night before Halloween,” Mitchell said. “We figured we’d get more people to come that way.”

“I’m afraid Beth and I are going out of town that weekend.” He glanced at Russo, who appeared unperturbed by the news. “Sorry, I meant to tell you.”

“Sorry you can’t make it,” Mitchell said, but then, turning to Russo, he added, “But maybe you can? The more, the scarier!”

Carter handed the invitation to Russo. “Why don’t you?” It would actually take a load off his mind if he knew that Russo was having some fun while he was off in the country.

“We live pretty near here,” Mitchell went on, “and my wife makes a terrific brownie pie.”

“Thank you,” Russo said, nodding and sticking the invitation into his shirt pocket. “I will be happy to arrive.”

“We’ll see you around then,” Carter said, ushering Russo toward the door. “Don’t let us interrupt your work any longer.”

“No problem,” Mitchell replied, standing in place like a kid being ditched. “And remember, if you need any help, just say the word.”

As Carter and Russo left, Carter closed the door behind him and motioned for Russo to follow him. They moved quietly down the hall and around the corner before Carter said, “The guy’s okay, but he’s kind of a snoop.”

Russo nodded. “Very . . . eager.”

“And we’re probably better off if he doesn’t know what’s being done through here.” With that, Carter opened a metal door, flicked on the light, and led Russo through a series of cement-floored storage areas lined with boxes, crates, and discarded equipment. At the opposite end was another fireproof door, and to get this one open Carter had to lift a metal arm from the inside and then give the door a good shove with his shoulder, its bottom screeching on the cement.

“Welcome to your home away from home,” Carter said, bowing and waving Russo inside.

Although they were already at the basement level, a corrugated metal ramp led another ten feet down. Russo lumbered down it, holding to the iron rail, and Carter followed. At the bottom they were in a large, raw space with a stained concrete floor, walls lined with stacked crates, and a pair of huge, heavily padlocked doors that opened to the loading dock on the street outside. Off at the far corner, Hank the custodian was sitting at an old beaten-up gray desk. He had a newspaper, a phone, and a portable TV on the desk, and he was watching what sounded like a nature show; Carter could hear something about the “swift and clear waters of the running stream.” Hank looked up as they came in, and said, “Hey, Dr. Cox. I’ve been here all day and nobody’s showed up with anything.”