The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

He’d been right about the hot water, Simone thought. She had barely soaped up in the shower before the water ran cool, then cold. But how, she wondered, did Lucas even maneuver in this cramped stall that had been jury-rigged under the eaves? She rinsed off hastily, got dressed, and tried to make herself look as proper as possible before daring to appear downstairs. It didn’t make it any easier that, apart from the medicine chest, the room had no mirror. She fixed her hair as well as she could, and was pleased to see that the extra few hours of sleep she had just had — the clock said it was almost noon already — had restored some of her normal skin color.

Now if only she could clear her thoughts as well. The ordeal at the Nassau Inn was something that she simply had to keep at bay.

Closing the door of Lucas’s room and tucking a scarf under the lapels of her coat, she stopped to listen for sounds downstairs. Earlier, she thought she’d heard men’s voices — and in her sleep, she’d dreamt of helicopters buzzing overhead — but now it was only the whine of a vacuum cleaner on the floor below. When she got there, and glanced into the front room, she saw what had to be the landlady, her hair tied up in a blue rag, pushing a Hoover back and forth across the floor. The drawers of the desk and dresser were all opened and empty, as was the closet; Simone saw nothing inside but wire hangers. The bed had been stripped of its linens.

“Hello,” Simone said, but the vacuum racket swallowed her words. She said it again, adding, “You must be Mrs. Caputo.”

This time the landlady did hear, and looking up, she shut off the machine, and said, “Oh, hello.”

“I’m Simone… Rashid.”

“Yes, I know.”

The two of them stood where they were awkwardly, wondering who should speak next.

Finally, breaking the silence, Mrs. Caputo said, “You and Lucas work together?”

“Yes, at the university.”

“You’re a professor there?” she asked, sounding a bit awestruck, perhaps at the notion of a woman — much less such a young one — holding that post.

“Oh, no, I’m just there temporarily — helping out with one project.”

Mrs. Caputo nodded nervously and glanced around as if looking for something other than the elephant in the room to discuss.

“Looks like someone has moved out,” Simone remarked.

“Yes, only this morning,” she said, averting her eyes altogether. “It was very unexpected.”

“I do want to thank you for allowing me to stay here last night. I was in a bit of a bind, to put it mildly. I know it won’t do for me to stay on.”

“No, that’s right, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Caputo agreed. “It’s just that there are city codes, you know, about unmarried people living together, and then there’s my daughter to think of. I wouldn’t want her to get the wrong—”

“No need to say anymore,” Simone assured her. “I understand completely.”

“I’m so sorry, but—”

“I’m sure I’ll find something in town.”

“I’m sure you will. In fact, I can recommend—” And then she stopped, her hand still on the vacuum cleaner, just as the same thought occurred to Simone. For a second or two, it hovered in the air like a hummingbird. “Of course, if you wanted to stay close to this neighborhood—”

“I do.”

“—and if it would be helpful to you to live near Lucas—”

“It would.”

“Then, well, perhaps,” Mrs. Caputo said, looking around the room that was even then in transition, “you might want to rent this room? It’s all cleared out now, and I’ll be making the bed up fresh this afternoon, as soon as the sheets have been ironed.”

For Simone, it was as if an enormous wave of relief washed over her. “Yes,” she said eagerly, “yes, I’ll take it. You are too kind.”

“Would fifteen dollars a week be okay?”

“Absolutely. This room is perfect, and it will allow me and Lucas to continue to easily confer about our work.” She wondered if she had just gilded the lily with that last bit.

Mrs. Caputo was plainly happy to stick to that fiction, too. “Yes, I think if you’re down here on this floor, and he’s up there, everything will be fine. There’ll be no questions about propriety and all that.” She beamed at her new tenant. “Well, welcome to the house.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll have to get new keys made.”

“No rush. I can get Lucas to make a copy of the front door key.”

“Of course. That would be a big help.”

“That is, if I can find him. Did he say, by any chance, where he was going?”

“Oh. I’m afraid he didn’t. His study, on campus?”

“I’ll try there,” Simone said. And waving a hand cheerily, she bounced down the rest of the stairs and out the front door. Five minutes earlier, she’d been trying to figure out where she might find a safe harbor for that very night — or as safe as any harbor could be for her — and now she’d just found it… only one flight away from Lucas. It was ideal.

As was the day. Crisp, the sun breaking through great banks of snow-white clouds, a strong breeze stirring the fallen leaves. She wasn’t the only one out taking advantage of the clear weather — on the other side of the street, she saw the familiar figure of Professor Einstein in his battered leather jacket, hands clasped behind his back, walking along with another man wearing owlish glasses and a long winter overcoat. That Austrian mathematician, if she wasn’t mistaken. They appeared to be engaged in an intense and animated conversation, and as they turned down the street leading to the woods surrounding Lake Carnegie, she saw Einstein tilt his head back and laugh out loud. He clapped his scrawny friend on the back and said something so tangled it had to be in German.

She’d have loved to know what they had been discussing.

Once she’d passed through FitzRandolph Gate, she headed for Lucas’s office, but as she passed by the art museum, she saw the incongruous sight of an army helicopter — a long one, painted in green-and-brown camouflage — parked on the open plaza in front of the main doors.

So she hadn’t just dreamt of helicopters — it had been real.

A campus security guard, one she knew, was at the doors, and when the military sentry tried to bar her entrance, the guard waved her through. Inside, she found the galleries deserted, but a great deal of noise coming from the conservation wing. Voices were raised, hammers were striking, wheels were rolling on the concrete floor. When she stopped in the doorway, she saw a stocky army officer in full uniform, with spangles on his hat and chevrons on his sleeve, barking orders at several soldiers who were bustling around the platform on which the ossuary stood.

“The chopper waits for no one, gentlemen. That means you had better get this job done a lot faster than you are doing it.”

“If they go any faster, Colonel, they’ll do lasting damage,” she heard, as Lucas’s head appeared on the other side of the sarcophagus. He had a roll of heavy-duty duct tape in one hand and a yardstick in the other. “We’re not moving a refrigerator. We’re moving a priceless artifact, thousands of years old.”

“Damn straight we are,” Macmillan replied. “We’re moving it because you and your colleagues couldn’t keep the thing safe and secure.”

“But our work isn’t done,” Simone said.

The colonel and the others suddenly took notice of her.

“Where are you taking it?” she said.

“Miss Rashid, I presume?” the colonel said.

“Yes.”

“I’m planning to take it where nobody but me and the OSS knows.”

The lower half of the ossuary had been wrapped in plastic sheets; braided ropes, waiting to be tied, were draped loosely over its lid. A steel trolley had been wheeled to the bottom of the short ramp on which it still rested.

“For starters, then, you’ll have to be more careful with the placement of those ropes,” she said. “Wherever they come into contact with the contours of the stone, you risk rubbing away some of the faintest carvings.”

“That’s right,” Lucas said, carefully planting his hand smack dab on the center of the lid, and with a flick of his eyes, directing Simone’s attention to the spot he was touching. “That’s exactly what I was telling him.”

The alabaster, she could see, was nicked and gouged there, as if someone had gone at it with a chisel or a spike.

“The diamond sign,” Lucas murmured, “it’s gone.”

“What’d you just say?” Macmillan demanded.

“I said, we need to use more padding under the ropes.”

Simone nodded. Removing the sigil of containment made perfect sense. The demon had vandalized the ossuary to make sure it could never be used to imprison it again.

Holding out one hand toward an adjutant, the colonel said, “The inventory,” and a clipboard was slapped into his palm. He glanced at the pages attached. “We’ve got the box itself accounted for, but I see we still have to round up a bunch of stuff — bones, a cross, a stick or staff of some kind. We’ll want those, too.”

Of course they would, Simone thought. The ossuary itself was merely the vessel for the powers, both evil and good, that it had held. Without them, it was only an alabaster box with a gabled lid and a hodgepodge of symbols and inscriptions carved all over it. Although it had cost lives, including her own father’s, she regretted losing it. As far as the colonel was concerned, she and Lucas had had their chance, and they’d bungled it. Once it was loaded on board that helicopter, she knew that she would never see the ossuary again. Would anyone? she wondered.

So, Macmillan said, looking around at all the other crates and cartons and easels littering the conservation room, “where are they? Which boxes do we take?”

“What you want isn’t here,” Lucas said, laying the tape and yardstick on a worktable, and brushing some dust from his hands. “But I can get it for you.”

“Then what have you been waiting for? I want everything on this list,” he said, rapping his knuckle on the clipboard, “and I want it by the time we load this damn sarcophagus into the cargo hold. Do not make me come back again.”

As Macmillan ordered the adjutant to continue wrapping the ossuary, Simone left with Lucas, down through the unlit galleries and out into the daylight. The sky, so bright and clear when she’d gone inside, was already becoming overcast; New Jersey weather, she had discovered in her short time there, was fickle in the extreme.

“I tried everything,” Lucas said, “but the decision to take it had already been made. It’s out of our hands.”

“Maybe it’s just as well,” Simone said.

“I never thought I’d hear you say that.”

“I never thought any of this. I never thought I’d be here, or that one day I’d be scattering my father’s ashes at the end of a pier. Let the OSS bury the ossuary in a salt mine or a bank vault or wherever else they’ve got planned.”

“And the relics?” he said, as they followed the winding path toward Guyot Hall.

“That’s all they are now.”

“When did you become so fatalistic? The last time we talked about this, you were on the warpath.”

“I still am. But whatever was in that box isn’t in it anymore. And if it’s done with us, then, as far as I’m concerned, this whole business is done.”

“What if whatever was in the box doesn’t see it that way?”

“Then it could be lying in wait for us anywhere. It could be lurking in that squirrel,” she said, gesturing at the bushy-tailed black squirrel foraging for nuts, “or in those birds in the trees. Evil is everywhere and nowhere at the same time these days. You only have to read the papers to know there’s no escaping it.”

As they approached Guyot Hall, she heard the squawking of crows and saw a flock of them arrayed among the grinning gargoyles guarding the parapets. The building looked unoccupied, though the windows were open, and the lights were on in Delaney’s lab.

“Thank goodness he’s there,” Simone said.

“He’s always there.”

The exhibition hall was as gloomy as ever, and they were halfway across it before Lucas stopped abruptly, his jaw dropping.

Turning around, Simone saw that one of the display cases was damaged, its door hanging from one hinge and swinging back and forth.

“Oh no, not again,” he said, under his breath.

Joining him beside the case, she saw a pair of straps hanging limply down, like strips of beef jerky. This time, though, whoever had tampered with the case had not only left a bloody impression on the glass — it looked to Simone like a frenzied paw had been scratching at the lock — but had fully severed the Caithness Man from his stake before making off with him altogether.