Bestiary

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“What do you mean, it won’t eat?” al-Kalli said in a cold fury.

Rashid, the keeper of the animals, visibly shook in his boots.

“I saw the man killed myself,” al-Kalli said, rising from his chair behind the ornate desk in his library. “I saw him pulled down from the tree. I saw his body dragged into the lair.”

Rashid, in a spotless white lab coat, nodded vigorously in agreement. “Yes, I am sure that is true. I am sure that is what happened.” Rashid, who had been barred from the bestiary that night, had no exact knowledge of what had transpired. But knowing his master, he had a fairly good idea. And he had seen the remains inside the cave.

The largely uneaten remains.

“But the beast has not changed his habits… not since…” He did not know how to complete the sentence, nor did he have to. Not since the beast lost its mate. Rashid did not like even to advert to that sad fact, for fear it would rekindle al-Kalli’s anger. He knew perfectly well who was considered at fault for that.

“And the other animals?”

Rashid swallowed hard and lied. “Admirable. They are all doing admirable,” he said, using one of the favorite English words he had learned during his training at the American school in Cairo. In reality, several of the beasts were showing strange signs and behaviors. The bird was shedding long feathers with brittle quills, the larger beasts were exhibiting signs of labored breathing and had a lackluster look in their eyes. The sudden expulsion from the compound in Iraq, the long journey to America, the new and unfamiliar quarters — in Rashid’s view the creatures had never fully recovered. No matter what he did, no matter what new and innovative measures he tried — from changing their diets to altering the air temperature and composition inside the facility — he could not find the means to restore them to their former health and glory.

On many a dark night, he anticipated becoming a meal for the beasts himself. Al-Kalli, he knew, was not above it.

“I will be down to see the situation for myself later this afternoon. Go and tell Jakob to bring the car around.”

“Yes, sir. Right away.” Rashid backed out of the room all but bowing, and before he pulled the double doors closed, he could hear al-Kalli shout, “Admirably! Admirably!”

Al-Kalli would have liked to throw him to the beasts, but it wasn’t that simple — Rashid and his ancestors had been caring for the creatures forever, and even though al-Kalli had his doubts about Rashid’s intelligence and abilities, the man still knew more about them than anyone else could ever know.

And how, given the nature of his menagerie, could al-Kalli recruit anyone more knowledgeable, or trustworthy?

He picked up the phone to make a quick call to the Getty to tell them he was coming over to see how the work was progressing, but then put the phone back down. No, why alert them? Why not catch them unaware, and discover in that way how diligently they were pursuing the project he had entrusted to them?

The armored limousine was waiting outside in the porte cochere, and Jakob opened the passenger door as soon as al-Kalli stepped out of the house. “The museum” was all al-Kalli had to say.

On the drive over, al-Kalli gazed out the tinted rear window at the hot, sunny day. It wasn’t really so different from the Middle East. Without all this constant irrigation, even in the teeth of a drought, all of Los Angeles would retreat to what it naturally wanted to be — a desert. All but the palm trees would die, the lawns would turn sere and brown and blow away, the roses would wither and the bougainvillea would die on the vine.

And the people? The people would disperse to other, more hospitable climes.

A dog-walker with half a dozen different dogs on a tangle of leashes was walking along the opposite side of the street. The dogs’ tongues were hanging out, and a couple of them stopped to lap at something on the ground.

So why, al-Kalli wondered, could his animals not thrive in this foreign, but not so very different, environment? He had saved all of them that he could, given the danger and the constraints at the time. He had spared no expense, he had done all that he could do to provide them with a safe and secluded and comfortable home. He had, in the larger sense, done everything he could to preserve the legacy of his ancient family, and to maintain its mysterious power… for he believed that all of these things were tied, in some ineffable way, to the beasts themselves.

And now the beasts were in jeopardy.

He knew, for instance, that Rashid had lied to him in the library. He wasn’t blind. He could see that the other creatures were languishing, too. Their cries were not so loud, their eyes were not so bright, their fur was not so thick or their hides so tough. Something was happening, and he had to find a way to stop it.

At the Getty, his car was automatically waved through to a reserved area for distinguished visitors and guests. The plaza of the museum was crowded today with tourists clutching maps and cold drinks and their children’s sticky hands. But as with most such people, they knew to make way for al-Kalli. There was something about him — his impeccable clothes, his regal bearing, his aura, he liked to think — that caused them to stand back and pause as he strode past. That Jakob, clearly his bodyguard, followed two steps behind was probably not lost on them, either.

When he entered the Research Institute, where Beth Cox worked, there was a flurry of interest and attention as he strode down the hall, past all the other offices and cubicles. Her door was open, and she was sitting next to a very pale boy who looked not much older than al-Kalli’s son, Mehdi.

“Mr. al-Kalli,” Beth said, startled. “I didn’t know you were coming.” She stood up, smoothing her skirt, while the boy continued to click away at the computer keyboard. “Elvis,” she said, nudging him on the shoulder, “this is the owner of The Beasts of Eden.”

Elvis ran off a quick trill on the keys, then looked up and said, “Hi. It’s an extremely cool book.” Then he went back to studying the screen.

Al-Kalli looked at the cluttered surface of the desk, but saw no sign of the book itself. What he did see were Latin dictionaries, rafts of printouts, and colored photocopies of various, random pages that he recognized from The Beasts of Eden.

It wasn’t hard for Beth to read his mind. “The book is with the conservators right now,” she said. “It’s just one building away.”

“What are you doing with these?” al-Kalli said, gesturing at the photocopies.

Beth hadn’t really wanted to get into this so fast; she always liked to complete her research and come to some firm conclusions before sharing her discoveries with the world. Or, more to the point, with Mohammed al-Kalli. He was not a man you wanted to offer partial accounts to, or whose questions you wished to duck.

But he was already turning the photocopies around on her desk, and trying to ascertain why these particular pages were being worked on. Had he noticed that these were all the pages on which the quires had ended and the catchwords, pointing to the next quire, had been entered? Beth didn’t really know how much al-Kalli knew about his treasure. He had never said very much, apart from conveying his obvious attachment to the book and his fear that, during the restoration process, it might suffer some injury. For all Beth knew, he was a scholar of eleventh-century manuscripts and was just waiting for her to make some small misstatement before pouncing.

“We’re collecting the catchwords and putting them together,” Elvis suddenly volunteered. “It’s amazing how they’re coming together into a kind of sentence.”

Beth could have killed him.

“The catchwords?” al-Kalli said, in his dry, upper-crust English accent.

“The little words that run at the bottom of each section — Beth figured out that they were all connected.” Clearly, he thought he was doing her a service. “It’s like a treasure map or something.”

Al-Kalli’s eye brightened, and he fixed his gaze on Beth. “Is this true? You have found something in the book that no one else has ever discovered?”

Beth blushed and said, “It’s possible.” With one hand that was out of al-Kalli’s sight, she pinched Elvis, hard, between the shoulder blades. He squirmed, but had the sense to say nothing more.

“What does it say so far? What have you learned?”

Elvis pretended to be absorbed in the computer screen, while Beth, reluctantly, drew out the stapled sheets on which the catchwords had been assembled. “It’s not entirely complete, there are some words we might have misread or mistranslated, and I have not yet had a chance to—”

But al-Kalli had already snatched the pages from her grasp and was studying them. She glimpsed Jakob, the ever-present Jakob, loitering in the hall outside.

“These words connect, you say?” The catchwords, their rough English equivalents, and Beth’s interpolated queries, were highlighted in yellow, and he began to put them together and read them aloud as he flipped the pages. “Brought here [question of volition] / to this land / an honored guest / now a prisoner / laboring in obscurity / my name to sleep [vanish?] / beneath a cloth [blanket?] / blue sky and white clouds / pity the [too faint to decipher at present] / beasts [demons?] / in our Lord [Christian god? temporal employer] / for eternity / ivory grave [sepulcher?].” Al-Kalli flipped the last page again, looking for more, then raised his eyes to Beth. “I’m not sure I understand. What is this?”

Beth quickly explained the use of catchwords — so he wasn’t secretly an expert in these matters, after all — and then added that these were possibly, or even apparently, a message encoded by the scribe, to be read—“possibly, again, we can’t really say for sure yet”—by other scribes who later came into possession of the book.

“But who was he?” al-Kalli said, his enthusiasm visibly waning. “And why did he claim to have been a prisoner of my family?”

Funny, Beth thought, he spoke of his family — some distant ancestors from a thousand years in the past and half a world away — as anyone else might speak of his own parents or kids. He was indignant at the scribe’s imputation.

“Is he implying that we forced him to create The Beasts of Eden? That he was ill used?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Beth replied. “It was common practice for scribes and illuminators to complain about their patrons.”

But al-Kalli’s feathers still looked ruffled, and he appeared disappointed at what he had just read. What, Beth wondered, had he been hoping to read or find? A clue to some other treasure? From what she could surmise, the man was already as rich as Croesus. “I want to see the book,” he said.

“Of course,” Beth said. “I’ll take you right over there.” She was just as glad to get him away from Elvis, who might unwittingly start some other trouble. “Elvis,” she said, before leaving, “would you call Hildegard and tell her we’re coming over?” She didn’t want what had happened to her — a surprise visit — to befall her favorite conservator.

The walk to the East Building, where the conservation work was done, was a short one, along a pathway shaded by a row of perfectly aligned London plane trees; if you looked directly at the one on the end, all the other slender trunks disappeared behind it. Al-Kalli, Beth noticed, was still clutching the sheaf of catchwords. Beth slipped her ID card into the slot at the door, and the electronic locks released. She escorted al-Kalli and the silent Jakob into the elevator, then down to the conservation workshop where the formidable Hildegard — a large woman in her sixties, who favored shapeless dresses in what could charitably be called earth tones — was laboring at a wide, stainless steel table, with filtered tensor lamps attached to its rim.

Beth knew she didn’t like to be interrupted at her work, but she had not been about to deny al-Kalli a glimpse of his treasure.

Hildegard brushed a wisp of gray hair away from her eyes and greeted al-Kalli politely, if not warmly. The book lay on the table in front of her, and to Beth’s horror — and she could only imagine how al-Kalli was reacting — its precious covers had been entirely removed and lay on a separate table behind her.

“How’s it coming?” Beth jumped in, to forestall any explosion.

“Slowly. The boards are beech, which is unusual, but surprisingly solid and uncompromised. The inside of the spine shows sign of dry rot, and the thongs are as brittle as twigs, but in a manuscript this old it would be a shock not to find such damage.”

“What have you done?” al-Kalli finally said, surveying his dismembered treasure. “You have torn the covers from the book? They have never been separated from the book, ever, in over a thousand years.”

“There you’re wrong,” Hildegard said. She was not one to kowtow. “I’d say the front cover was removed, and restitched, at least twice. When, I couldn’t say yet. But it might have been done by a jeweler or other artisan, someone who wanted to work on the ivory or reset the sapphires.”

Al-Kalli laid the pages of catchwords on the edge of the table and went to the covers, which he touched with his fingertips the way you might gently graze a baby’s head. Hildegard flashed Beth a look that said, You know I don’t like to be interrupted, and Beth silently mouthed a Sorry.

“What else have you had to do?” al-Kalli said, resignedly now. “Has the book required a great deal of repair?”

Hildegard turned on her stool, her big brown skirt still hanging nearly all the way to the floor, and said, “Not as much as you might expect.” There was a warmer tone in her voice now, not only because she could see how attached al-Kalli was to his manuscript — a sentiment Hildegard could well appreciate — but because he had asked her about her field of expertise, a subject on which she could happily expatiate for hours. As Hildegard ran through the various problems the manuscript had presented, and the ways in which she was remedying them — all of which Beth already knew — Beth picked up the catchwords and began looking them over again. With the disassembled manuscript right there in front of her, she felt as though she were suddenly much closer to solving the mystery.

One thing had always leapt out at her. It was the reference to the blue sky and the white clouds. Everything else was fairly prosaic, however intriguing — the notion that the scribe had been inveigled into an impossible task, the grumbling about feeling himself a prisoner of a powerful employer. Fairly standard stuff. But the touch of poetry, once it was coupled with the mention of the ornamented sepulcher at the end of the penultimate quire, gave Beth the feeling that she was suddenly very close to something.

So close she could barely wait for al-Kalli to leave. Only then would she be able to test the hypothesis even now forming in her head.

“The pigments in this book are interesting, too,” Hildegard was saying. “We’re using radiospectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence — don’t worry, they’re harmless — to get a better idea what they’re made of.”

“What were they generally made of?” al-Kalli asked with genuine absorption.

“Oh, that’s a big question,” Hildegard said, though it sounded as if she would be pleased to answer it at length. The only thing she liked more than her work was coming across someone who seemed to want to know all about it. “In illuminations, like these,” she said, guiding him to the illustration she’d been working on — a portrait of a snake-like creature with a blunt feline head and flicking tongue—“the coloring agents were usually vegetable, mineral, and animal extracts, though they were sometimes mixed with all sorts of things, from stale urine to honey to earwax.”

That last item Beth had never heard about.

“But you’ll notice that this book is rich in deep purples and blues, and that might be because of where it was made — ultramarine, which was made from lapis lazuli, was chiefly produced in Persia and Afghanistan.”

The lesson on pigments alone went on for several more minutes, while Beth bided her time. She studied the catchwords again, then sidled over to the neighboring table where the bejeweled front and back covers lay. The sapphires, studding the slightly yellowed ivory, winked in the overhead light. Beth longed to pick the cover up, but she did not want to test her theory until al-Kalli was gone.

Jakob, looking supremely bored, rocked on his heels, his hands folded in front of him.

But Beth wasn’t fooled; she had the impression that Jakob was always well aware of everything that was happening around him.

Beth pretended to be focused, too, on everything Hildegard was saying — she had moved on now to explaining why one side of a parchment page was always lighter and smoother than the other — while becoming, every second, more and more convinced that her own suspicions were right. When Hildegard finally took a breath, and al-Kalli consulted his watch — a gleaming gold Cartier from what Beth could see — she quickly thanked Hildegard for giving them so much time and guided Mr. al-Kalli and Jakob toward the door. She escorted them back up to the plaza, then took her leave. Even then, she deliberately walked away, back toward her office, for twenty paces, before turning around to make sure they were gone. Then she raced back down the line of London plane trees, back into the conservation building, and down to Hildegard’s office.

Hildegard was already at work again and looked downright startled to see Beth.

“I need to look at that front cover again,” Beth said, going straight to it.

“Why?”

“I need to look for something.” Beth picked it up carefully and angled its edge toward the overhead light.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“I’m looking for a space between the beech board and the ivory.”

“A what?”

“Just tell me — is there any space between these two, where something like a page of parchment could be concealed?”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Hildegard said, though her curiosity was sufficiently aroused that she quickly cleared a spot on the table in front of her. “Put it down.”

Beth did, and Hildegard pulled the magnifying glass, which was mounted on a swivel, toward her. She studied the edge of the cover. “What makes you think we’ll find such a thing?”

“The catchwords,” Beth said.

“What about them?”

“They said that the identity of the artist would be lost forever, to sleep under a blanket of blue sky and white clouds.”

Hildegard looked at her blankly.

“The cover of the book is made up of white ivory and blue sapphires. And together they make up a kind of ornamented sepulcher, which were the last catchwords in the book.”

Hildegard didn’t look sold, but she didn’t look opposed to the idea, either. She took a scalpel from the drawer and probed the top of the cover.

“Nothing here,” she said.

“Check the inside edge, where the cover would be attached to the binding.”

She turned the cover sideways and bent her head low. All Beth could see now was the top of her gray bun, with a couple of long pins stuck through it.

“Well, I never,” Hildegard finally said. With one hand, she inserted the scalpel half an inch or so, as if nudging something loose. Then she reached out and grasped a pair of long-nosed tweezers, with which she ever so slowly drew something from beneath the ivory cover. Beth’s heart was beating fast as the tweezers emerged, with several faded parchment pages, fine as filament, clutched in their grip.

Hildegard sat back on the stool and gave Beth a very approving glance. “I’m not even going to look at these,” she said. “You found them, and you should be the first person in centuries to read them.”

Beth couldn’t agree more.