Vigil (9 page)

He was about to leave when something made him stop and turn back.

He bent his head closer to the surface of the stone, like a doctor listening to a patient’s heartbeat. The rock was cold and wet against his cheek.

“Break the stone.”

His head instinctively jerked back, his heart pounding. This time the voice had been unmistakable. In the dim light of the courtyard, he could see the bony talons now, and they were no longer fused to the stone—they flexed—and, as he watched in horror, the crown of something’s head—round and wet and smooth—also pressed itself outward, as if it were being born. He tried to step back, but it was too late—his sleeve was caught in the creature’s claw, and he was being drawn toward the glistening rock. Toward the head that was now emerging and turning its stony eyes upon him. He groaned in terror and heard, as if from miles away, a ringing sound.

The red velvet curtains stirred.

And the ringing came again.

Rain slashed against the casement windows.

He stared out, his eyes wide, as lightning flashed white above the Palatine Hill.

The phone, on his desk, rang a third time.

He’d been asleep. His hand fumbled for the receiver.
“Pronto.”

“
Professor Russo?”

He could still hear that voice—sepulchral, persuasive—from inside the stone.

“Joe? You there?” It was Carter. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Bones. I can hear you.”

“Well, you might sound a little more enthusiastic about it.”

Russo shook himself free of the dream and sat up in the creaking chair.

“Especially since I’ve just spent half the night going over your lab reports and photos.”

“You have?” Russo said. He tried to light another cigarette, but his hands were shaking too much.

“Yes. And it looks like you might really have an amazing find on your hands.”

“That is what I think, too.”

“But there’s a lot I don’t understand. For one thing, it looks like you’ve done everything by the book—all the tests, on the fossil, the rock itself—”

“We have.”

“—but none of your results make any sense at all.”

In a way, Russo was relieved to hear someone else say it.

“And I don’t need to tell you,” Carter continued, “there might be a lot of trapped gas inside that specimen. You’re going to need a good mineralogist to help you figure out how to get that fossil free.”

“You said in your letter that you’re not equipped to do accelerated mass spectrometry there?”

“No, we are not.” This was just the opening Russo had been looking for. “But at the New York University, you do have this equipment?”

“Oh yeah.”

“And magnetic resonance imaging—in an open environment. You have that, too?”

“It could be arranged.”

“And what of lasers? Argon-based?”

Carter paused. “They could be had on loan. Why?”

Russo hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Because, my friend, then I will come to you.”

“What do you mean? Without the actual fossil, here in New York—”

“I will come to you
with
the fossil. Just as it is, inside the stone. And we will find a way to free it.”

“They’ll let you do that?” There was surprise in his voice, and the tiniest hint of excitement. “A discovery of this magnitude?”

“I have explained that you are the only man in the world who can do this work, and who can tell us what we have found.”

There was a stunned silence on the other end of the line, and Russo could only imagine all the thoughts swirling through Carter’s head. Finally, he said, “Joe, this is unbelievable.”

Russo chuckled. “What is it you say—just like the old times?”

“Close enough,” Carter replied.

For the next half hour, they discussed logistical matters, scheduling, and lab requirements, and by the time Russo dropped the receiver back into its cradle, it was completely dark outside, and the storm had settled into a steady downpour.

But he had what he wanted.

Now he just wanted to go home, take a hot shower, and have something to eat.

He took his old raincoat from the hook on the back of the door, locked up, and started down the stairs. Odd, how much it felt like he’d just gone down them. But that had been a dream . . . a nightmare. He ought to be used to that by now.

In the vestibule, he stopped to put up his collar and take his umbrella from the stand by the door; it was the only one left there. He could hear the rain gurgling through the gutters of the Via del Corso outside. There was a light on now in the receptionist’s office, and a moment later Augusto came out carrying a wastebasket over to a large bin in the hall.

“Oh, there you are,” Russo said to the old man. “Did you hear a clanging sound earlier, from the courtyard?”

“Yes, professor. It was one of the cables outside. I put it back in the ground.”

How had his dream, Russo wondered, been so accurate? “Good. Thank you. If it happens again—”

“No,” Augusto replied, shaking his head. “I am not going out there again.”

“But you already did.”

“No,” he said, dumping the wastebasket and looking away, “I am not going out there again.” He set his jaw and went back into the receptionist’s office.

This was so unlike Augusto—usually so deferential and polite—but after thinking it over, Russo decided not to question him further. He opened the door to the dark and narrow street outside and unfurled his umbrella. No, it was better just to let it go. The wind caught his umbrella and nearly tore it from his hand. Besides, he thought, he might not want to hear what Augusto had to tell him.

The next week was a hectic one for Carter. Russo, it
turned out, was moving forward with uncharacteristic speed, and Carter had to scramble to keep up.

First, Russo had procured a temporary export permit from L’Accademia di Scienza, and then, with this permission in hand, he’d enlisted the help of the Italian military, which was going to use one of its own cargo planes to ferry the fossil from an air force base in Frascati, just southeast of Rome, to New York’s Kennedy Airport. In a country where the red tape was legendary, Russo had not only managed to cut right through it, but he’d done it in record time. What, Carter had to wonder, was actually the big hurry? Russo was acting as if he couldn’t wait to get this specimen to New York.

On Carter’s end, there was still a lot of lobbying and a lot of legwork to do at NYU. First thing Monday morning, Carter sent the photos and the appendices to the department chairman, Dr. Stanley Mackie, and that afternoon, he stopped in at his office. Mackie was as famous for his bushy white eyebrows, which had apparently been growing untended for half a century, as he was for his finds in the Olduvai Gorge in the late 1960s. When Carter briefly outlined Russo’s plans to send his specimen to NYU, Mackie’s eyebrows soared even higher.

“He wants to share something that he believes might be this remarkable? Why on earth would he want to do that?”

“We’ve worked together before, in Sicily—”

“Where you discovered the Well of the Bones.”

“Yes. And Professor Russo was a great help.”

“Still,” Mackie said, “in all my years in this profession, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times a paleontologist, anthropologist, or archaeologist has ever
voluntarily
shared the credit for anything. In my experience, it’s always been a matter of
stealing
credit wherever possible, not dividing it up.”

Carter didn’t know how to answer that; the chairman was right. Anyone who thought the academic establishment was any less cutthroat than the corporate world was sadly mistaken, as Carter had learned the hard way early on. Twice he’d had to share credit on scientific papers with professors who’d nominally headed up the field missions he’d been on, even though the finds and the conclusions drawn in the papers had been entirely his own.

Dr. Mackie didn’t wait for him to reply. “Of course, it’s always
possible
that this Russo is simply an honest man and a diligent seeker after truth.” He said it as if he were suggesting there might be something, after all, to all this talk of the tooth fairy. “But from what I’ve read in these lab reports, and what I can see in the photos, he’s also quite possibly the victim of a hoax.”

A hoax? Is that what Mackie had been getting at? Carter was stunned.

“Giuseppe Russo is one of the most dependable and brilliant scientists I’ve ever worked with,” Carter said.

“Brilliant men have been fooled before.”

“And everything in this folder indicates he’s proceeded exactly the way he should have.”

“But look at his results. You’ve admitted it yourself, they don’t make any sense.”

“With the right technological assistance—an AMS analysis, for instance—maybe they will.”

“So is that what you’re asking for? My okay to do mass spectrometry, laser analysis, the whole works?”

“Yes. Among other things.”

Mackie leaned back in his chair. He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no, but when he finally said, “And what else are you asking for?” Carter took it as a tacit okay.

“A work space.”

“What’s wrong with the biological sciences lab? You’ve got full privileges there.”

“Yes, but I need absolute security and privacy to do this work right.” For one thing, though he didn’t want to say so, he needed to be sure Bill Mitchell wouldn’t go poking around in it, the way he’d done with the recently donated samples. “And for another, I’m going to need space—lots of it—for the specimen, and for the machinery I’m going to need to perform the tests on it.”

Mackie nodded his head, grudgingly. “Something tells me you’ve already got somewhere in mind.”

“I do. Right now it’s a storage area right off the loading dock in the back of the bio building. It’s easily accessible and it’s on the first floor, so bringing in the slab and the machines will be relatively easy. It’s also got double-padlocked steel doors to the street outside.”

“I doubt anyone’s going to try to make off with a slab of rock that weighs over three thousand pounds.”

“This
is
New York.”

Even Mackie had to smile. “I don’t want to hear that this little hobby of yours has detracted in any way from your teaching duties.”

“It won’t.”

“And I don’t want this whole thing to blow up in our faces.”

If only he knew what he was saying, Carter thought; the one thing he’d studiously avoided going into was the volatility of the gases trapped in the rock, and Mackie apparently hadn’t studied the materials closely enough to figure it out for himself.

“I’m still of the opinion,” Mackie concluded, “that this so-called fossil is not what it seems. If you ask me, we’re looking at Italy’s answer to the Cardiff giant.”

Or, Carter thought, the missing link between the dinosaurs and modern birds. Those talons could turn out to be hugely important.

“And if that’s indeed what it turns out to be,” Mackie said, “I don’t want it to leave any blot on the escutcheon of this university.”

“Your escutcheon’s safe with me.”

Mackie looked at him from under his Olympian brow, and with no trace of levity in his voice said, “It had better be, Professor Cox.”

 
With Dr. Mackie’s grudging approval of the project,
along with a small grant from the department’s discretionary funds at his disposal, Carter was off and running. At the bio building, he went looking for Hank, the head custodian, and found him in his “office”—a converted supply closet in the basement. Hank, his head bent over some close task, looked up when Carter poked his head in.

“What are you working on?” Carter said.

“Making a fishing lure,” Hank said. “Going upstate this weekend.”

“That’s great,” Carter said, “but I hope you’ll be able to find a little time during the week to do something for me.”

“Depends.”

“You know that storage area on the first floor, near the loading dock?”

Carter could see from Hank’s expression that this was already a no-sale.

“We’ve got a large specimen coming in, from overseas, and we’re going to have to convert that space into a kind of makeshift lab.”

Hank didn’t say anything, but it was clear he didn’t like what he’d heard so far.

“If you could get most of the junk in there cleared out—I don’t care where,” Carter persevered, “I could get you, say, an extra three hundred bucks.”

Now Hank put the fishing lure down, and seemed to be considering it. “How about four?” he said.

Carter was expecting that. “If you can also rig up some extra lighting, I’ll make it four. But it’s got to be done before you go away.”

Hank turned back to the lure. “Okay.”

The way he was clearing these hurdles, Carter felt like an Olympic athlete. But in some ways, his next stop was going to be the hardest of them all. With Russo due to arrive in only a matter of days, there wasn’t time to put it off. He had to bring Beth up to speed and fill her in on what he considered some of the trickier details.

Since it was only eleven-twenty and his first class wasn’t until three, as soon as he left the bio building he hopped the subway uptown. Sitting beside him was a heavyset girl in a hooded sweatshirt studying the horoscope page in the back of a glossy magazine. From the intensity with which she was reading it, you’d have thought her life depended in some way on the predictions printed there. Carter ran into this sort of thing all the time, even among his own students, and it drove him crazy: the fascination with pseudoscience in all its many forms, from the zodiac to the Kabbalah, from feng shui to psychics, pyramid power to past-life regression. He’d actually had one student—of course she was from L.A.—who’d told him she was sure that they’d been lovers in a previous life. Fortunately, she’d dropped the course before trying to relive the past.