Bestiary

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Beth could picture him all too well. Sitting by the narrow window at dawn, shaving the nib of a fresh quill (goose feathers were most commonly used, but for such close work as this he might have employed a crow or raven feather), then returning to his work for as long as he would be allowed, before the sultan’s guards came inside to lead him to his death.

For Beth, reading the English rendering of the secret epistle, it was like looking a thousand years into the past, like glimpsing a scene no one else even knew had taken place. A scene whose truth, she believed, was undeniable. When she had first discovered the letter, and begun to read its fantastic tale, it had certainly crossed her mind that it was an elaborate game or ancient ruse. But there was no written record of any such equivalent performance from the eleventh century; writing at all, and the mastery of Latin, were such rare achievements that its practitioners were loath to use them for anything but the most practical, and well-paid, tasks. Vellum wasn’t cheap, the work wasn’t easy — the sheer physical labor of mixing inks, stretching skins, preparing pens, hand-lettering each exquisite character — was immense, and the skills of the consummate craftsman were considered a kind of divine gift which it would have been sacrilegious to defile. No, the letter was real.

The slave Salima still attends me and weeps now in the bed. Beth had read of Salima earlier — a concubine whom al-Kalli had permitted the scribe to choose from among the many in his private seraglio. But was she weeping at the plight of the scribe, or was she, too, doomed?

It will be her charge to take this letter to my accomplice that he may place it in its secret grave. May she be spared to do this deed. Knowing no more than this, Beth could only assume that the slave girl had survived — at least long enough to convey the letter.

Someone was suddenly talking right in front of her. “The bowers that you see here are made of steel and covered with three different varieties of bougainvillea,” said the tour guide as a dozen visitors stopped in front of the one Beth was sitting under. It was a hot, bright day, but here, in the shadow cast by the flower-draped sculpture, she had been able to read in comfort and, best of all, seclusion. Out here, she ran little risk of being interrupted by Mrs. Cabot; only Elvis, her assistant, knew where she was holed up.

“Let me get out of your way,” Beth said as several tourists raised their cameras.

“No, no, you’re fine,” the guide, an older man, said. “These bowers should always look so good.”

Beth smiled, but she got up anyway, clutching the pages in her lap, and walked over to the lip of the Central Garden below. It was made up of concentric circles, gravel paths winding around and around and culminating in a reflecting pool adorned by banks of azaleas. It was, it occurred to her, a kind of maze of its own. How strange that she should have found herself reading the scribe’s letter in just such a place. The plantings here were not so tall or so thick as to obscure where you were, or how you could get out, but the design was unquestionably inspired by the classical maze.

And, now that she thought of it, it was here that she had first encountered Mohammed al-Kalli, when he’d come to the party to inaugurate her show of illuminated manuscripts. Though she didn’t for one minute believe in such stuff, it was almost as if things were unfolding according to some plan.

Standing above the circular garden, the hot sun beating down on the shoulders left bare by her summer dress, she went back to the letter in her hand. There was not much left to go, and the suspense was killing her.

Beth could hardly credit what she was reading. It read as if it were a real-life account of Theseus and the Minotaur; she struggled to remember the myth. Every nine years, the Athenians were made to pay a terrible tribute to King Minos, as part of an earlier truce; they were required to send a group of young men and women — seven of each, if she recalled correctly — to be devoured by the dreaded Minotaur, half man and half bull, who lived in a labyrinth from which there was no escape. Had the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli modeled his own maze on that legendary one? And what was the actual beast who haunted, and hunted in, his own deadly theater? A Minotaur, she knew, it was not; that was only a myth. But what was it really — a lion? A tiger? Something even more exotic — and dangerous?

The terebinth had been mentioned earlier, too, and Beth had done some research into it — enough to reveal that it was a massive indigenous tree, better known to botanists as the Palestine pistacia, that was known to live as long as a thousand years. Though sometimes called by other names, it was prominently featured in many scriptural passages: It was under such a tree that King Saul had been buried. It was in the mighty branches of the terebinth that Absalom, great in his own eyes, had been trapped and then murdered. And it was in the valley of Elah, thick with these always green trees, that David with his sling had brought down the Philistine champion, Goliath.

Beth let the hand holding the translation drop to her side. It was too bizarre, too unbelievable, what she was reading. And yet she did not doubt a word. It was as if the scribe were whispering these words into her very ear. And it certainly reinforced her initial feeling about the illuminations — that they weren’t simple flights of fancy, but were drawn from living models. The artist, she felt, had faithfully reproduced the evidence of his own eyes.

Impossible as that, even now, seemed.

“There you are,” Elvis called to her as he scuffed across the gravel path in his shorts and sandals. In the bright sun, he looked so pale as to be nearly transparent. “Mrs. Cabot’s looking all over for you.”

“Why?”

Elvis adjusted his wraparound shades and glanced about, as if he had never seen daylight up close like this. “Don’t know exactly, but there’s a lot of commotion. That Arab guy—”

“Mr. al-Kalli.”

“He showed up about a half hour ago, with his bodyguard, and he wants everything back.”

“The book?”

“That, and all the translation work we’ve done so far. He’s already been down to Hildegard’s lair and come back with the book itself.”

“I can only imagine how Hildegard reacted.”

“You don’t need to — I can tell you. I had to bring him down there. She wasn’t happy. But she reattached the front cover — for some reason it was still separate—”

At Beth’s request.

“—and the minute she’d put the last stitch through the binding, he had his bodyguard—”

“Jakob.”

“Right. He had him put it back in the big box it came in—”

Beth couldn’t help reflecting that Elvis made it sound like repackaging a car stereo.

“—and then they came back upstairs and started looking for you.” Having finished his summation, he removed a pebble from his sandal. “Hot out here,” he said. “The Santa Anas must be blowing.”

Beth folded up the letter, reluctantly, as there was just a small portion to go, and knew she had no choice but to reenter the lion’s den. If al-Kalli was up in her office and he wanted all the work they had done so far, she would give it to him, gladly. The computer-driven translations of the bestiary text had been interesting, no question about it, but they had also been fairly pro forma. The animals, from chimeras to leviathans, all so naturalistically depicted in the illuminations, had been summarized and described in the accompanying text in the routine, Christian-iconographic manner of the age. The fire-breathing basilisk, for instance, had been portrayed as a symbol of lust and the Devil, and the Vulgate passage—Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis—had been duly included. (Translated into the New Revised Standard Version many centuries later, the passage read “You shall tread upon the lion and the adder: the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot,” all of which Beth recognized as a standard reference to Christ’s victory over Satan.) The griffin, because it had four clawed feet but the wings of a bird, was classed, as per Leviticus 11:13–20, among the unclean creatures. The phoenix, because its flesh was incorruptible and it rose, after three days, from its own ashes, was of course a symbol of the Resurrection. And the manticore, the lethal beast that none could withstand, “hungered after human flesh most ravenously,” and, like the Devil himself, could never be sated. What was surprising was to find such Christian tropes and allegories in a book of Middle Eastern origin, but Beth attributed that to its foreign-born author.

She waited while another tour group began the climb back up the gently sloping hill toward the main museum complex, then followed them on the meandering path. The gardens of the Getty had been laid out with an elaborate plan designed to suggest no plan at all. Wooden foot-bridges crossed running streams dotted with boulders from the Sierra foothills, all arranged to create slightly different sound effects. Seemingly random collections of flowers— deer grass, dymondia, geranium, lavender, and thyme — were all strategically grouped by color and texture. Elvis said, “You want me to print out a copy of all the files for them?”

“Yes.”

“What about the completed list of the catchwords?”

It was the list of catchwords, of course, that had led her to the discovery of the scribe’s secret letter, but what, if anything, would al-Kalli be able to make of it? He’d been unimpressed when Elvis had first blurted out something about it. And even Elvis did not know about the letter; Beth had scanned the text into their laboriously constructed database on her own, after hours. Apart from Carter, the only person who knew anything about it at all was Hildegard, and Beth was confident that she had kept mum. Hildegard thought that most of the wealthy people who owned these precious artifacts were precisely the wrong custodians — and she seldom shared with them information she felt they couldn’t appreciate. Still, Beth would call her later just to make absolutely sure.

The moment that thought occurred to her, Beth realized that she had come to a decision without really meaning to. Apparently, she had decided to hold on to the scribe’s letter after all. She was shocked in a way. It was wrong; it was unethical. And it could lead to professional disaster. How could she ever even publish her findings without disclosing her source material and revealing how she had come by it?

But if she told al-Kalli about the letter and returned it to him, there was a very good chance it would never again see the light of day. She would never be able to have an analysis done of the paper and ink; she would never be able to display it to the world, and she would never be able to prove that its eyewitness account of the First Crusade, or the scribe’s imprisonment and death, were anything more than some frustrated scholar’s concoction. It was bad enough that The Beasts of Eden might wind up locked away from sight for another thousand years, but the idea that this rare and powerful and terrifyingly authentic letter should also vanish into oblivion was simply too much. Maybe Hildegard was right — the wrong people possessed these treasures.

As she approached her office, she saw Jakob, holding the heavy box in which she had first seen the bestiary, waiting by the door, and she could hear Mrs. Cabot inside saying, “I’m sure she’s on the premises. The garage attendant said her car is still here.”

From the nervousness in Cabot’s voice, Beth could tell things were going badly. She put on her brightest, most reassuring smile and swept past Jakob into the room.

“Mr. al-Kalli,” she said, extending her hand — he was standing at the corner of her desk, as if he’d been surreptitiously looking over the papers spread out there—“it’s a pleasure to see you.”

Mrs. Cabot looked as if she could faint from relief.

“My assistant, Elvis Wright, tells me you’d like to see the results of the work we’ve been doing.” In her heart of hearts, she was still hoping to persuade him to leave things as they were, and to let the book itself remain in the conservation wing.

He took her hand, but coldly. He was dressed immaculately, as always, in a midnight blue suit and a yellow silk tie fixed by a gold pin at the collar.

“The computer software is yielding a more thorough and accurate English version than we could ever have expected.” Keep emphasizing the progress being made. “And faster than a whole battery of scholars could do it.”

“Not fast enough, I’m afraid. I want everything you have done to date.”

“I’ve already told Elvis to prepare that for you. He’s next door compiling it all right now.” Unable to restrain herself, she glanced at Jakob, holding the box — now containing the book itself — right outside the office. “But without the actual bestiary on the premises, it will be harder to continue the work in the way we would like. By completing the graphemical catalogue, and its accompanying translation, we had hoped to make the wonders of this work readily accessible, online, to scholars everywhere.”

“Really?” said al-Kalli dryly. “That was never my hope.”

Even after dealing with al-Kalli for some time now and suspecting the worst, Beth was still taken aback by his tone. “It wasn’t?”

“What I wanted — what I needed — was to know what every word in the book said. If that’s been done, and if the book itself has been suitably restored, the work is done.”

“But you have no intention, ever, of sharing The Beasts of Eden with the world?”

Al-Kalli glanced at the door as Elvis entered, carrying a stack of multicolored cardboard folders, each one devoted to a separate quire in the book and the work that had been done on it. Elvis plopped them on the desk in front of al-Kalli.

“No,” he said to Beth as he leafed through the folders, reading the tabs that indicated what each contained. Satisfied, he looked up at Jakob, who came in, placed the folders on top of the iron box, and then walked out again.

Al-Kalli reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a slim, ivory-colored envelope. “But I don’t want you to think I am ungrateful,” he said, handing it to Beth. Then he turned on his well-polished heel, nodded to a speechless Mrs. Cabot, and left. There was a faint scent of Bay Rum in the air.

Beth stood stock-still, as did Mrs. Cabot, until Elvis shrugged and said, “It’s not like we don’t have our own copies of everything.”

That was true. But without the actual book, Beth thought, what good did it all do? It was like a wonderful review of a movie no one could see, an authoritative article on a painting never to be exhibited, an exegesis of a text no one could ever read. Worse, without a public source, or an authentic artifact, to point to, it was like an exercise in the fantastic. None of it could, or would, ever be taken seriously.

She turned the envelope over in her hand. It was closed, to her surprise, with red sealing wax, on which the initials MAK had been impressed; she hadn’t seen anything like it outside the movies, where people like Sir Thomas More got missives from the Archbishop of Canterbury. She broke the seal and removed two cashier’s checks — the first, in the amount of one million dollars, was made out to the Getty Conservation Institute. She passed it wordlessly to Mrs. Cabot. The second check, she had no idea what to do with. It was made out to her personally, in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. Elvis craned his neck to get a good look at it, then whistled.

“Whoa,” he said, “looks to me like that includes a hefty bonus for your executive assistant.”

Beth wanted to say that she couldn’t accept this, but al-Kalli was already gone. Mrs. Cabot came closer, and Beth held it out for her to see. “Should I just tear it up?” Beth said.

“It’s a cashier’s check,” Mrs. Cabot said, “it’d be like tearing up the actual money.”

“What should I do with it?”

Mrs. Cabot looked puzzled, too. She was running all the ethical standards through her mind, but it wasn’t clear exactly which one was being violated. Al-Kalli wasn’t asking Beth to lie about anything; he wasn’t enlisting her official support in a dubious claim. He wasn’t asking her to back up a suspicious provenance or declare something to be the work of an Old Master that had been previously attributed to a lowly apprentice. In fact, he was removing the object in question from all such considerations. So it clearly wasn’t a bribe — it was a gift. But the Getty did have in place a clear and strictly enforced policy that required all museum employees to report anything at all that might represent, in any way, a conflict of interest. And on those grounds alone, the check had to be declared, cleared, and only then, possibly released.

“I say cash it, quick,” Elvis whispered in Beth’s direction, then scooted out before Mrs. Cabot could admonish him.

“I’ll have to take this to the CFO’s office,” Mrs. Cabot said of the million-dollar check. “And I might as well take that one, too, for safekeeping,” she continued, snatching it out of Beth’s hand. “The museum counsel will have to decide whether or not you can accept it.”

Mrs. Cabot left, too, now, and Beth suddenly found herself bereft in her own office — alone, in the late afternoon, without The Beasts of Eden, and without the king’s ransom she had just been holding in her hand. She didn’t hold out much hope of ever seeing it again — Mrs. Cabot would find a way either to have it returned or, if al-Kalli consented, deposited instead in the museum’s coffers. Nobody ever became a museum curator for the money… but still, it had been nice to feel rich, even if it was only for a minute or two.

There was one thing, however, she did have left. Sliding open the bottom drawer of her desk, and lifting out a folder purposely mislabeled “Personal Correspondence,” she removed the original, eleventh-century letter that had been hidden in the bestiary. As she held its fragile pages in her hand, she felt that maybe the label wasn’t so misleading after all. It did feel as though it had been written to her, as if she were its most appropriate and appreciative audience. No one would ever have known it even existed had it not been for Beth’s sleuthing. And if it hadn’t been for her breach of professional ethics now, the letter would once again be in the possession of its rightful owner, on its way back to Bel-Air… and oblivion. She knew she should feel guilty about the ethical questions — her training in New York and London had always stressed the highest professional standards — but if she were perfectly honest with herself, she felt instead as if she had saved something precious from an all-consuming fire.