Bestiary

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Even though it was the Fourth of July, it was business as usual around the Cox household, Beth reflected. Carter had run off to the Page Museum to catch up on some urgent paperwork — or so he claimed — and Beth had managed to prevail upon Robin to come to the house for just a few hours to watch Joey, so she, too, could go to work. With the museum closed for the day, and the staff all off at backyard barbecues and pool parties, Beth thought she’d never find a better time to run in, enter the last few paragraphs of the scribe’s secret letter into the computer database, get the translation… and find out, at last, how the drama had come to an end.

Traffic was heavy — it was another hot, dry day, and everybody in L.A. seemed to be heading for the beach — but fortunately Summit View wasn’t far from the Getty. And of course there were no cars, other than those belonging to a few of the usual security personnel, in the garage. Beth had an assigned spot, but it wasn’t as close to the elevators as some of the others, so she took one of those. The parking garage was at the foot of the hill, and the tram, which took visitors all the way up to the museum complex, had no one else on board. As the sleek, air-conditioned car made its way up the curving track, Beth looked out over the 405 freeway — the cars inching along, bumper to bumper — and toward the neighboring hills of Bel-Air. Way up at the top, though well hidden from view, was the al-Kalli estate… and on that estate was the book Beth considered one of the most remarkable in the world. A book that might now remain unknown, and unseen, forever.

The very thought still pained her.

Stepping out into the wide, travertine plaza, she saw only one other person, a security guard whom she knew. She waved to him and he waved back. Her own staff card allowed her to enter the building where her office was located. The carpeted halls, never noisy, were now completely silent; no phones were ringing, no copying machines were humming. It was all that she could have wished for.

Until she approached her own office. Lights were on, and spilling into the hall. And she could hear the clatter of computer keys, at a dizzying rate of speed. A rate that she knew only one person in the world would be capable of — her assistant.

When she stopped and looked inside, Elvis, his back to her, was staring at his computer monitor while his fingers flew across the keyboard and his head bopped to the jangling tune accompanying the program on his screen.

“Elvis,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

From the way he whirled around, it was clear that he was more than startled; he looked guilty. Beth’s eyes strayed to the computer — was he downloading porn? — but what she saw there looked a lot more like some super-high-tech version of “Dungeons and Dragons.” A wizard with a white beard was traveling up a winding road, toward a castle with several gates, while numbers flashed in the lower left corner of the screen and words scrolled across the top.

“Did I know you were coming in today?” he asked.

“No,” she said with a laugh, “because I didn’t know it myself.”

There was a creaking sound from the computer — one of the castle gates was lowering its drawbridge — and Elvis said, “Shit — can you give me a second?” He whipped around in his chair, glanced at the screen, tapped in a barrage of keystrokes, which were greeted with the sound of a heavy bell tolling ominously, and then the screen went blue.

“If you’re just playing some video game, why would you need to come here?”

“Because, well, it’s more complicated than that.” His skinny white arms poked out of his short-sleeved shirt. “It’s a network kind of thing — players from all over the planet — and the setup here is a lot faster and a lot more powerful than the crap I’ve got at home.”

“But didn’t it occur to you that it’s a beautiful day? The Fourth of July? You could be outside.” She realized that she had just channeled her mother.

And Elvis must have realized it, too. “Thanks, Mom,” he said with a smile. “But if you don’t mind my saying so, look who’s talking.”

Beth had the manila folder with the printout of the scribe’s letter in her hand, and clearly she wasn’t out on the beach, either.

“Welcome to Geek Central,” Elvis said. “I brought Doritos and Dr Pepper,” he added, gesturing at the junk food on his desk. “You want some?”

“No, thanks.” Shaking her head, Beth went around her assistant’s desk and on into her own office. “I’m going to log on myself.”

A few seconds later, she heard from Elvis’s desk the faint blast of a trumpet and the creaking of the drawbridge lowering again. “Could you turn that down?” she called out, and Elvis replied, “No problem — I’ll put it on the phones.”

Beth had really hoped to be alone, and wondered how she had wound up with the one assistant in all of Los Angeles who would rather be in the office on a national holiday than out smacking a volleyball somewhere. But she lowered her blinds — the afternoon sun was blinding — and then spread her papers out on the desk. She called up the graphemical database on the computer, then split the screen (as Elvis had taught her to do) and started scanning and transferring the remaining passages of the Latin text. She still felt lazy and vaguely unprofessional for relying on a computer to translate the Latin writing for her, but between the difficulties presented by the cramped handwriting and of course the archaic language, she knew that this was the safer and more expeditious route. And she could — and did — routinely check the work over afterward and smooth out the many rough edges.

And there were only a couple dozen lines left in the scribe’s hidden missive.

While she waited, she thought about giving Carter a quick call. She didn’t like what she was feeling around the house lately — a feeling that there were things in the air between them, things unspoken, and she wondered if Carter felt it, too. She’d never kept anything major from Carter — the way she was keeping her decision to hold on to the scribe’s letter from him now — and she suspected that the tension might stem from that. Or maybe she was imagining the whole thing — Carter had always been one to burrow deep into whatever intellectual puzzle he was trying to solve, and maybe he was just being true to form. And given that she, too, was sitting in her office on a hot, sunny Fourth of July — as Elvis had just pointed out — who was she to throw stones?

Her thoughts went back to that very morning, when Carter had been in the kitchen, feeding Champ several strips of raw bacon.

“Since when did he graduate from kibble?” Beth had asked, as she carried Joey to his high chair.

“From now on, this dog gets whatever he wants,” Carter said, though he didn’t explain why Champ had suddenly earned such privileges. And when Beth had asked about his late-night trip to the museum, Carter simply said, “I think I was able to put something to rest.” But again, he didn’t elaborate.

Even if Beth had been in a mood to confess her own transgression, Carter’s taciturnity would have turned her off.

Still, she thought, it was ridiculous to deal with a communication problem by not communicating. She picked up the phone and called Carter’s cell. He picked up after several rings and said, “Everything okay?” His voice was faint and muffled.

“Where are you?” Beth said. “It sounds like you’re in a bunker.”

“You’re close,” he said, “I’m in the closet.”

“That’s not how it sounds!” she heard another man’s voice call out.

“Del’s there, too?” she said. “Why?”

“We’re working on the La Brea Man, in a location undisclosed to the NAGPRA protestors. A storage closet.” He did not tell her why they had had to resort to such measures. “What’s up?”

She could tell he wanted to get back to work. “I was just checking in. Do you have any interest in going to that party later?” They’d been invited by the Critchleys, the elderly Getty donors, to a Fourth of July dinner at their Brentwood estate; Mrs. Critchley’s forebears had come over on the ship that landed right after the Mayflower.

“Do you?” Carter asked, sounding dubious. “I mean, if you think it’s important to put in an appearance…”

He left the question, a legitimate one, hanging. On the one hand, Beth thought it wasn’t a bad idea, politically speaking, to show up. On the other hand, it wasn’t the most enticing invitation. She heard a mumbled question from Del, and Carter saying, “Maybe the solvent needs more time…”

“Why don’t I call you later?” Beth said, and Carter said, “Huh? What was that?”

The bar on her computer screen was showing that the graphemical analysis was nearly done. “I’ll call you from home. We can decide then.”

“Okay,” he replied.

She could tell his attention was focused elsewhere. “Bye.”

She hung up, wondering if she had just bridged, or widened, any communication gap. It was like that a lot over the last week or so.

A soft chiming sound went off on her computer, signaling that the job was complete and she could now print out the results. She hit “Print,” then quickly got up from her desk. In another few minutes, she’d have the answer — or as much of one as she’d ever be likely to get — about the fate of the mysterious scribe and illuminator. Elvis had his head down as she passed through his outer office — on his screen she could see an open field, with a dragon at one end — and in the room where the printers and copiers were kept, even the lights were off. The moment she entered, a sensor flicked them on again, and she was able to retrieve the printouts from the bin.

On the way back, she was already reading them.

A plan? Beth thought. Had he actually hoped somehow to escape?

Ah. But was he planning to poison the guards somehow once they’d come to transport him to the monster’s maze?

Beth thought she could discern his intent.

She felt, suddenly, as if she were reading a speech from some bloody Jacobean tragedy.

Beth sat stock-still in her chair, wondering if she could possibly have read all that she just had. It wasn’t just the revelation of the scribe’s final scheme; that was ingenious enough, even though its outcome would never be known. No, what had shocked her even more were two things: the fact that he had inscribed his name — at last she knew who this unparalleled scribe and illuminator was! — and the curse that he had entered as a kind of colophon at the end.

It was so very similar to the curses laid by the mysterious scribe whom she believed had created all the manuscripts currently on display in the Getty exhibition hall.

The scribe that she had been trying to identify for so many years.

How could she have been so blind? How could she not have realized that she was dealing with the work of the same master? She went over it all in her head, all the things that would have kept her from even imagining it to be the same man. First there was the Middle Eastern origins of The Beasts of Eden. It had never occurred to her, until discovering the secret letter, that the author of the book could be anyone but a subject of the sultan, or at least an artist of regional repute. And then there was the sheer fortuitous-ness of it all: what were the chances that an Iraqi plutocrat would show up at the Getty and bestow upon her — of all people — the masterpiece, the capstone, in the career of the itinerant illuminator whose identity she had labored so long to determine? All those countless hours of research, in dusty archives and hushed libraries from London to New York, Oxford to Boston, and it was here, in Los Angeles, on a hot sunny day, that the answers should fall, as if from the sky, into her very lap.

It was almost too much to accept.

And to believe it truly, she would need to confirm it with her own eyes. She would need to compare the original letter with the handwritten text in the manuscripts she had assembled for display. She scooped up the printouts, along with the ancient letter itself, and hurried out of her office.

“Where are you off to?” Elvis said as she shot past.

“The manuscripts exhibit.”

“You haven’t seen it?” he said, mockingly. “You put it together.”

In the plaza outside, the leaves of the London plane trees were rustling in the dry wind that swept the Getty’s hilltop site, but there was no one, not even a security patrol, anywhere around. The sound of Beth’s heels echoed across the stone courtyard as she marched to the North Pavilion, where a red and gold banner above the entrance proclaimed THE GENIUS OF THE CLOISTER: ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. At the access panel, she entered first her own security code, and then the code to unlock the doors. She heard a faint buzzing, and quickly entered the hall. The heavy glass door slowly closed, and clicked shut, behind her. The motion sensors responded by turning on the overhead lights.

But they did not provide much in the way of illumination. The manuscripts were so precious, and so prone to fading, that the ambient light was kept to a bare minimum. Instead, each manuscript was gently cradled in its own display case — two dozen or so, ranged around the three rooms of the exhibition hall — and indirectly lighted by small tungsten halogen lamps inside the glass. The effect was to make the manuscripts shine like beacons, their burnished gold glittering like autumn leaves, the lapis lazuli gleaming like the Mediterranean, the red and blue and purple gemstones in their covers and bindings sparkling like a kaleidoscope. The first time Beth had seen the exhibition completely installed, she had stepped back, breathless at its beauty.

But now she went straight to the nearest display case, one that held a sacramentary, illuminated for the Cathedral Priory of Christ Church, Canterbury. The book was open to its frontispiece, depicting the Holy Spirit descending upon the Apostles at Pentecost. But now she looked at it with fresh eyes. Now she looked at it not as the work of an anonymous, though brilliant, traveling artist, but as an example of the work of a man who went by Ambrosius of Bury St. Edmunds. Could she see in it the same techniques, the same flair, that she had been studying for weeks in The Beasts of Eden? There was indeed a fluidity to the motion of the Apostles, their hands raised toward heaven, that suggested the work of the master, but it did not equal the artistry of his last great work for the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli.

She moved past it, to the first display case in the next room. And here she found an herbal, a treatise on plants and their medicinal uses, created for the English abbey of St. Augustine’s. A flowered stem, its crimson leaves now faded to russet, extended itself all the way across the page, while the text — drawn, as was the custom, from the ancient Greeks rather than practical observation — flowed all around it. The imagination of the design was striking — Beth couldn’t help but think of the splashy layouts in glossy fashion magazines — and the text, she could see now, bore the same unmistakable slant of the writing in the al-Kalli bestiary. Yes, she thought, it was all coming together!

But she would not be satisfied until she had seen another colophon, that final salutation by the scribe, and she knew exactly where to find one. A good example was on display in the last room, in a copy of the Apocalypse from East Anglia. At its end, she knew, there came a curse.

As she stepped into the room, the light sensors automatically responded, but this was still the gloomiest and most remote part of the exhibition. The display cases here were more widely spaced, and the shadows deeper and wider. And even though Beth had become accustomed over the years to working alone in empty museum halls, sometimes even late into the night, she wasn’t always impervious to the spooky aspects of the job. She reminded herself now that it was only late afternoon outside, that the sun was shining, that Elvis was sitting up in their office, playing some idiotic computer game. And that she would be done very soon — she would study the colophons, one against the other, and lay to rest any doubt whatsoever. And then her quest would be at an end, her discovery complete.

Still, she went quickly to the last case in the room, where the Apocalypse — better known in the Protestant tradition as the Book of Revelation — was on display. The illustration was of a seven-headed dragon, writhing in an ocean of fire. And she knew, from her work on the exhibition, that the final words of the biblical text were a warning to anyone who dared to alter or subtract anything from the Apocalypse; to do so, the book declared, would be to write yourself out of the book of life, for all eternity. Below that, separated by a miniature of a child being raised to heaven, came the colophon — in the form of a curse that echoed the final lines of the Apocalypse itself. In elegant Latin, it said that anyone daring to injure or deface the book before them would be stricken from the book of life, too.

Although she hardly needed to, Beth took the last page of Ambrosius’s letter from the folder under her arm, placed the rest of the papers on the floor, and then held the page up to the pale light emanating from the display case. The curses, in their very nature, not to mention the rhythm of the prose, were strikingly similar; the ornate character of the lettering was virtually identical, and the handwriting itself, tight and slanted to the left, was unmistakable. Ambrosius of Bury St. Edmunds — artist and soldier, scoundrel and Crusader, an unknown genius whose bizarre journey had taken him from the cloisters of Canterbury to his terrible end in a sultan’s maze — was the author of both, and the Michelangelo of his age.

And only Beth knew who he was.

She had hardly had time to savor her victory before she heard, in low tones from the shadows at the rear of the gallery, “Don’t be afraid.”

And suddenly she was as afraid as she had ever been in her life.

It was as if the shadows were coalescing, taking shape… the shape of a man — tall and elegant, with perfectly chiseled features, in a suit that seemed made of the darkness itself — who now took a silent step forward. His white-blond hair, which swept away from his forehead, glinted in the overhead lights. His eyes were concealed behind small round glasses with amber lenses.

“But you are afraid,” he said, in that strangely foreign accent.

The gallery was suffused with the scent of a forest, right after a light rain.

Beth wanted to turn and run — and as if the intruder had sensed that, he stopped where he was — but she could barely move.

“Consider this,” he said. “If I had wanted to harm you, or your son, wouldn’t I have done it by now?”

Her worst nightmare was now real: Arius was alive; Arius was here. All the times she had tried to persuade herself that it was just her imagination playing tricks, all the times that she had told herself that she was making something out of nothing… she’d been wrong.

And in her heart, she had always known it.

She wanted to say, “Why are you here? What do you want?” but her mouth was too dry — and it didn’t seem she had to. He answered as if she had.

“I’ve always been here, and what I want — what I have always wanted — is your welfare.”

Her welfare? Beth’s memories of Arius had always been muddled — it was as if they existed behind some veil, some superimposed scrim through which she could only catch glimpses of strange and confusing events — but protecting and caring for her was certainly not the way those memories came back to her now. Not at all. The memories — sensory impressions, really — were, all of them, dark and deeply troubling. Just seeing him here made her skin crawl.

Without his having visibly moved, he seemed again to have moved perceptibly closer. The smell of rain-washed leaves was stronger. And even though the light in the room was dim and ambient at best, he seemed somehow to have gathered it all to him. He stood out against the black shadows, in his black suit, his face subtly glowing, as if from a fire within. The amber lenses concealed the color of his eyes, but Beth had a recollection — a vague and terrible recollection — of eyes that churned and changed and penetrated, like knives, whatever they looked at.

“And to prove what I’m saying, I am here now only to give you a warning.”

“Of what?”

“Go home, now, to Joey.”

Beth felt jolted as if by an electric shock. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong with Joey?” In the flood of her concern, even her fear was subsumed.

“There’s still time. But go. You need to be with him now.”

With no reason to believe him, Beth did; with no reason to do what he was suggesting, she had an overwhelming impulse to race out of the gallery. But nothing would make her turn her back on Arius; it was as if she weren’t even capable of it. There was something riveting about his very presence, something hypnotic even in his partially concealed eyes.

He stepped back, and the shadows fell more fully over his face.

Was he deliberately doing that?

“I will,” Beth said, her voice soft and faltering, “but tell me: why? What’s going to happen?”

Again without moving, he seemed to have receded farther into the room. The white light meant to illuminate the final pages of the Apocalypse barely touched his perfect features and the waves of his white-gold hair.

But his head tilted to one side, as if he’d heard something, just a split second before Beth heard the whoosh of the gallery door opening, three rooms away, and a footfall approaching. “Hello? Ms. Cox? Are you in here?”

It was the security guard, the one she’d waved to at the tram plaza.

She didn’t answer at first — and she wondered why. Was it because she was actually seeking to protect Arius from discovery?

“Ms. Cox?” The voice was coming closer, and even though the lights in the exhibition hall were on, a flashlight beam was sweeping the darkened corners.

“I’m in here,” she finally said, turning her head.

The guard — she only remembered that his name started with a G—rounded the partition and said, “Everything okay? We registered an intrusion in the security office.”

Beth looked back toward Arius, but he was gone.

“I entered my code,” she assured him.

“I know — we had that. But security was tripped again, after that.” He played his flashlight around the dimly lighted room and poked his head behind a couple of the standing display cases. “Must have been a glitch, I guess.”

Now she could see the name on his laminated badge — Gary Graydon.

But where had Arius gone? There was only one way out of the gallery, and how could he have slipped past the guard unnoticed?

“What’s all that on the floor?” Graydon said, and Beth glanced down at the papers she had utterly forgotten were lying around her feet. She bent down and picked up the folder with the other pages of the secret letter in it. She slipped the page she was still holding — she’d forgotten she was holding that, too — inside, and after casting one last look around the gallery, said, “I’m done here.”

“Good,” Graydon replied. “We’ve got enough on our hands already today.”

“What do you mean?” Beth said, leaving the gallery with the guard close behind.

“The wildfires.”

Beth stopped, “Where?”

“Where aren’t they?” Graydon said. “They’re springing up all over town, from Bel-Air to the Palisades. Even with all the warnings about fireworks and the drought conditions, it looks like some people never listen.”

Beth didn’t need to hear any more. Clutching the folder tightly under her arm, she hurried out of the gallery, and then, with Arius’s warning to go home ringing in her ears, sprinted across the empty plaza toward the tram.