Vigil (29 page)

And he had swiftly done the same.

Now his coat was black—sleek and warm and long enough almost to graze his ankles—and his shoes were black, too, gleaming and pointed. He wore a suit, a dark blue the color of the sky just before the sun crested the horizon, and a white shirt of soft, white silk, with an open collar that wrapped like a band around his throat. And although he had long since discarded the purse (another sign of unnatural artifice) and the dark glasses—the
sun
glasses—that he had found inside it, he had replaced them with a differently tinted pair; round, with gold frames and amber-colored lenses. He knew that his eyes, otherwise, could prove unsettling—they were no one color, but could change with his mood and his surroundings. In them, he knew, people could see the light that coursed like blood through his body. His eyes could shine like a sunlit waterfall, flash like a river of golden coins, or boil like a flood of molten lava.

It was best, all things considered, that he keep the glasses on.

Every so often he stopped, deliberately, and breathed in the air. Even though the car was nowhere in view, the car carrying the woman who smelled of hyacinth, he could track her. He could follow her scent. He could feel the twitch upon the fragile thread of his invisible web—and he could follow it.

It led him away from the river and into the heart of the city. Soon he found himself on a wide and busy street, outside a building with a long red awning and heavy doors of polished brass. She had gone in there.

A man in a uniform held the door for him as he entered, and welcomed him to something called the Raleigh Gallery of Fine Arts.

“Thank you,” Arius replied, always pleased to hear his words, and his voice, gain such easy acceptance.

Inside, he sensed another happy confluence—not only was the hyacinth woman standing not far off, studying a painting, but the woman showing it to her was the one who lived with Carter.
Elizabeth
was the name he’d seen on the box.

His web had just grown that much stronger.

As he observed them—and yes, they had the same underlying scent—a small man came up to him, very eager, very friendly, with his hand extended.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” the man said, “but I’m Richard Raleigh, the owner of the gallery.”

Arius extended his hand and nodded.

“And you are?” Raleigh persisted.

“My name is Arius.”

“I detect an accent,” Raleigh said, smiling broadly, “and I’m usually very good at pinning them down. But I can’t for the life of me guess where this one might originate. Would you mind my asking where you’re from?”

“Far away,” Arius replied.

Raleigh nodded sagely, and knew enough not to pursue it. He had dealt all his life with monied, and even titled, foreigners, and he knew when to back off. Some of them liked to try to pass as ordinary folk, but Raleigh could pick them out of a crowd at a hundred paces. This fellow was, admittedly, more unusual than most. Maybe six foot two, with shades he apparently had no plans to take off, and dressed in expensively understated clothes, he carried himself like a royal potentate, his head back, his shoulders squared, his fashionably long hair rippling just over his shirt collar. Raleigh found it hard to take his eyes off him.

“Allow me to tell you a little bit about our gallery. In this room, you will see most of the oil and watercolor works that we presently have for sale. But we also have an upstairs gallery for private showings of certain works—most of them Old Master prints and drawings.”

Arius didn’t say anything, but stepped closer to one of the paintings—a sixteenth-century annunciation scene, displaying the elongated forms and skewed perspective common to the Mannerist style.

“Yes, that’s a particularly fine work,” Raleigh said, “which only recently came onto the market. It’s been in the collection of the same Austrian family since the late fifteen hundreds, and it’s attributed to Fra Bartolommeo. Are you familiar with him?”

Arius cocked his head at the painting, as if trying to compensate for the altered perspectival lines. “No, I am not.”

“Not many people are,” Raleigh rushed in, always eager to assure potential customers that whatever they didn’t know was strictly the province of the experts. “But if you would like to know anything more about it, our resident art historian—who oversees everything in our collection—just happens to be right here.” He gestured toward Elizabeth, who looked over in Arius’s direction.

She was quite beautiful, Arius thought. Even more beautiful than the hyacinth woman.

“Beth is with another client right now,” Raleigh said, “but I’ll introduce you to her as soon as she’s free.” Raleigh knew that Beth had a way with new clients, effortlessly winning their trust . . . and with the exception of Bradley Hoyt, that young dot-com mogul, their business.

“I would like to meet her now,” Arius said.

Now? Raleigh didn’t know quite what to do; Beth was with Kimberly Metzger, one of his most prized customers—just last month he’d sold her a Flemish portrait for close to half a million dollars—and he couldn’t very well interrupt them. But when he glanced their way, he noted that Kimberly was already paying more attention to the mysterious stranger than she was to whatever Beth was saying.

“Do I have a rival for this painting?” Kimberly said, teasingly.

“No, no, not at all,” Raleigh interjected, “but if I may, I would like to intrude for just a moment.”

He didn’t have to go any further; Kimberly stepped forward, offered her hand to Arius, and introduced herself. “I know everyone in New York who knows anything about art,” she said, “but I’m sure that I don’t know you.”

“Mr. Arius is just visiting the city,” Raleigh said, glancing up at him to see if this seemed correct. He got no objection.

“Is that true, Mr. Arius?” she asked. “Are you new in town?”

“Yes.”

“How long do you think you’ll be staying?”

“I cannot say yet,” he replied.

Raleigh, who didn’t want the conversation to stray too far from commerce, quickly pulled Beth forward. “And this is Beth Cox, who knows everything there is to know about our collection.”

“Nice to meet you,” Beth said.

“And you.”

“Do you happen to have a card?” Kimberly said to Arius, virtually stepping on Beth’s toe. “My husband and I—Sam Metzger?—often entertain at our place in the city, and we’re always on the lookout for new blood.”

“No, I don’t have . . . a card,” Arius said.
One more custom to practice
.

“Oh. Then maybe I’d just better invite you right now. You see, we’re having a little get-together tomorrow night, seven-thirty, for the mayor’s re-election campaign. At One Sutton Place. Can you remember all that?”

Arius smiled. “Yes, I can. Thank you.”

“So you’ll be there?” she said, playfully.

He nodded, his eyes still concealed behind their shaded glasses.

Beth and Raleigh exchanged a look, as if to say
Can you believe this?
Although she’d already heard plenty of rumors about Kimberly Metzger’s private life, Beth thought she’d never seen such a flagrant pickup. Of course, in this
particular
instance, she could almost understand: Arius was a very striking figure indeed. He was about Carter’s height, but his hair was so blond it was almost white, and it shone in the overhead gallery lights. His skin, too, was almost flawless—no, make that
perfectly
flawless—and his features were chiseled as if from a block of unblemished marble. With his eyes hidden behind the tinted glasses—and how much of an art lover could he be, she wondered, if he kept the glasses on when looking at a painting?—the only hint of color in his face came from his lips, which were a deep pink, pulsing with life, and as full as a woman’s. Voluptuous and vulpine, she thought, at the same time.

“The Van Eyck that Beth was just showing me,” Kimberly was saying to Raleigh, “I do like—”

“Van Dyck,” Beth corrected, in a soft voice.

“Yes, of course,” Kimberly remarked, “isn’t that what I said?

“I must have misheard,” Beth apologized. Raleigh shot her a glance that could kill.

“I’m thinking of it for our new place, the one we’re building in the Virginia hunt country. It might work in the library, but I’m just not sure.”

“It’s always hard to know,” Raleigh comforted her, “until you see it actually hanging in place. Why don’t you tell us when you’re ready, and we’ll ship it out so you can see for yourself?”

“Thanks, Richard,” she said, pecking him on the cheek, “you’re a peach. And you,” she said, coquettishly, to Arius, “I’ll see tomorrow night. Don’t forget!”

As she left the gallery, Arius’s head turned. What was it, Beth wondered, that made him seem so . . . singular? So attractive and, at the same time, so . . . discomfiting? He made you want to look at him, and look away, all at once.

“Now, Beth,” Raleigh said, “have you got a few minutes to show Mr. Arius some of the pieces we’re holding upstairs? I’m thinking, in particular, of some of the Courbets and Corots.”

She should have seen that coming; there was no way Raleigh was going to let this new fish slip out of his net—not without a fight, at least. But the thought of taking him upstairs for a private consultation sent an involuntary tingle down her spine. There was something way too strange—and even strangely familiar—about this man. Though it was impossible that she could have forgotten him, she still had the odd sensation that she had seen him somewhere before.

“I’m so sorry,” she blurted out, “but I have an appointment I have to keep.”

Raleigh shot her a second dirty look.

“A doctor appointment,” she threw in, knowing that was the one thing Raleigh wouldn’t interfere with; he knew about the family-planning problems that she and Carter were having.

“You’re sure?” he tried.

“I’m sure,” she said, contritely, glancing at her watch. “In fact, I’ve really got to run.”

“In that case, then,” Raleigh said, giving up and turning to Arius himself, “I would be more than happy to show you a few things on my own. Do you have some time right now?”

Since she was, in fact, just meeting Abbie for a cup of coffee around the corner, Beth didn’t even bother to go upstairs for her coat. She hoped Raleigh wouldn’t notice. All she wanted to do right now was make her escape, to get out of the gallery as swiftly as possible—and away from this strange creature whose eyes she felt, even now, as she moved away, were studying her behind those amber lenses. Part of her wished that she could just reach out and pull those glasses off his face and see who he really was . . . and part of her sensed that if she did, she would regret it the rest of her days.

“Look, I wish I could give you nothing but good news,”
Dr. Permut said, leaning back in his chair with a file folder in his hand, “but there must have been something wrong with the sample you gave us.”

“I took the sample myself, right from the end of one of the talons,” Carter said. “Are you saying it was contaminated?”

Dr. Permut rubbed his jaw, doubtfully. “I don’t know what was wrong with it, but no, I don’t think contamination was the problem.”

“So what was? What did you find out?”

“See for yourself,” Permut said, handing the file to Carter.

As Carter flipped through some of the pages, Permut provided a running commentary.

“Those pages on top, they’re the report on the dating analyses. As you can see, the results are so far off the charts as to be useless.”

“What do you mean, off the charts?”

“I mean, nothing remotely hominid, saurian, or avian—all the options you mentioned—could possibly be that old. In fact, you’d probably get a closer match with a sample of the moon rock brought back by
Apollo 12
.”

Carter wasn’t pleased, but he wasn’t all that surprised either. After all, these were the same sorts of results Russo had gotten in Rome.

“But what about the biological tests? The molecular and cell studies?” And then the million-dollar question. “Could you find anything at all in the way of DNA evidence?”

Dr. Permut tilted his chair back and took a roll of Tums out of the pocket of his white lab coat. “Want one?”

“No thanks.”

“I take them for the calcium. But you work with bones, you know all about that.”

“But I don’t normally work with DNA,” Carter said, to get him back on point. “Could you locate anything viable?”

Permut nodded his head. “Believe it or not,” he said, sucking on the Tums, “we were able to find and extract an inert fragment. It was smaller than virtually anything anybody’s ever tested before.” He looked around proudly at the NYU biomed research lab. “But you came to the right place.”

Carter was encouraged, but he kept it in check.

“We had to use a computer model to fill in some of the gaps,” Permut went on, “and then we extrapolated some of the rest at the tail end.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means that what we’ve got, in a way, is what I’d call theoretical DNA.”

To Carter, that didn’t sound so good. “Well, is it, or isn’t it?”

Permut wagged his head. “It’s a little of both. We’ve got a solid chromosomal foundation for everything in our profile, but again, given the infinitesimal sample, plus its age and its condition, we did have to do some guessing.”

Carter was getting more and more frustrated; this, he knew, was why ordinary people hated science, and scientists. “Then just tell me,” he said, evenly, “what your best guess is. Based on the available DNA evidence, can you tell me what we’ve got here?”

Permut blew out some air, and Carter felt himself bathed in Tums fumes. “I can tell you what we
don’t
have,” he said.

“Fine. I’ll start there.”

“We don’t have a
Homo sapiens.
”

Okay, Carter thought, at least they were making progress.