Bestiary Page 17

  Instead, he ran to the taller of the olive trees, leapt into its lower branches, and scrambled, screaming, all the way to its fragile top.

  Al-Kalli smiled and turned toward Jakob, who smiled back. They had both seen this particular ploy before . . . and knew how it would turn out.

  “How long,” al-Kalli asked, “do you think you’ll be able to stay there?”

  Rafik simply screamed again, the other animals in the facility joining in. There were barks and yelps and lonely howls from the other enclosures.

  “He has . . .” Rafik started to say, “he has . . .” But he couldn’t finish. The beast had turned and was moving toward the base of the tree.

  “He has what?”

  “He has a girlfriend!”

  “Who?”

  “Fatima. Fatima Sayad.”

  “And where would I find her?”

  “Tikrit!” he wailed in terror, and clung to the swaying branch. “On the Avenue of the Martyrs.”

  Al-Kalli glanced back again at Jakob, to make sure he was jotting this down. He was, in a small leather notebook.

  “That’s good,” al-Kalli said. “That’s very good.”

  “Mercy!” Rafik cried out. “Have mercy!”

  But the creature had come to the trunk of the tree now, and did just as al-Kalli expected it to do. Rising up on its stubby back legs, it stretched its long scaly body to its full length—nearly fourteen feet—and lifted its head toward Rafik’s dangling heels. He yanked them up, just out of reach, and the beast let out a guttural blast of fury. Today, it was tired of the game already.

  Its long tongue shot out, flicking at Rafik’s ankles, and its fangs snapped at the empty air.

  Rafik clung to the top of the tree.

  “Please!” Rafik cried. “I’ve told you everything I know!”

  “I believe you,” al-Kalli said. “I believe you have.”

  And then he waited. The beast stretched, with its powerful limbs, another foot or two up the trunk, enough to catch one of Rafik’s feet in its jaws. And to drag him, shrieking in terror, back down to the ground. He sprawled in the dirt and managed to free himself, bleeding and torn. He ran wildly, in a wide circle, and when he came within a few yards of the cave, the beast suddenly sprang, with the power of a lion but the splayed legs of a lizard, on top of him. Rafik was crushed under its mighty bulk, and before he could scream again, the creature’s jaws had fastened on his throat.

  Al-Kalli sighed; from here on, it became far less interesting.

  Rafik’s legs kicked out, his heels digging into the dirt.

  The monster shook him, like a plaything, and sank its fangs deeper. The legs stopped kicking, the feet flopped to each side.

  “You got it all?” al-Kalli asked over his shoulder.

  “Yes,” Jakob said. “I will send the information to our people tonight.”

  Good. It shouldn’t be hard to find the girlfriend . . . and from there . . .

  As al-Kalli watched, the beast dragged the body by the throat toward its lair. It liked to dine in privacy. It climbed up onto the rock ledge, never letting go of its limp prize, and then, flicking its thick tail, disappeared into the cave with it.

  Al-Kalli was happy to see it acting so much like its old self again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “I’VE ASKED THE police to move them back another hundred yards, but they say they can’t do it,” Gunderson fumed, glaring out the window at the picketers chanting and beating their drums on Wilshire Boulevard.

  “The street is public property,” Carter said.

  “Not the sidewalk in front of the goddamn museum!”

  As Carter followed Gunderson’s gaze, he saw a TV station truck pull up outside. No doubt there’d be another evening news story, focusing on the tragic death of the unidentified victim they had dubbed “the Mystery Man,” a Native American driven to violence by the desecration of his people’s remains. Ever since the accident, the local news had been featuring the story prominently, following the search (so far unsuccessful) for the man’s body, along with lots of talking heads debating the pros and cons of anthropology: “Where does science end,” as one fatuous commentator had intoned, “and respect for the dead begin?”

  Carter could only listen to so much of this gibberish. These were bones he excavated—not people. These were fossils—not souls, or spirits, or sacred vessels. Whatever immortal elements they might ever have possessed—and he wasn’t a true believer there, either—it was long gone, into the air, into the ether. There was nothing deader than a petrified bone.

  “We’ve had another interview request,” Gunderson said, wheeling away from the window as if he couldn’t bear to witness that spectacle another second. “The Vorhaus Report.” It was a serious-minded cable TV show—so serious almost no one watched. “I said you’d do it.”

  “You said what?” Carter blurted out.

  “I said,” Gunderson explained coolly, “that the head of our paleontology field unit—the man who not only discovered the remains of the La Brea Man, but who was in the pit when this unfortunate man fell to his death—would be happy to represent the museum and explain our interests.”

  “Why did you do that?” Carter said. He’d been ducking reporters, interview requests, even mikes shoved in his face when he got out of his car in the museum parking lot, for days.

  “Because I’m tired of taking the heat, and because, frankly, this is your mess.”

  Carter had to bite his tongue, or he knew he’d say something fatal. What had really happened here, he could see, was that Gunderson, who’d been only too happy to stand in front of the cameras initially, with a sorrowful face and a beautifully folded silk pocket square, had gotten burned. He’d thought this would be a little blip of a story, a chance to make his own name and face synonymous with the museum, but it hadn’t gone that way. The story had “legs,” it wasn’t going away overnight, and the more Gunderson talked, the more trouble he got himself, and the museum, into. Finally, he’d come to see that, and now he wanted to set up a new fall guy—Carter.

  “But that’s not why I sent for you.”

  Carter waited for the rest.

  “I want to know what’s happening in Pit 91 now. How long is it going to be until we find that man, that Geronimo’s, body?”

  Nobody liked calling him Geronimo—and on the air, and in public, they simply referred to him as “the victim,” or even “the Mystery Man”—but in private, they reverted to the early shorthand.

  “We’re doing everything we can,” Carter said, “but it’s extremely difficult, for reasons I’ve already gone into.” And reasons Gunderson kept conveniently forgetting.

  The body of the Mystery Man had been sucked down into the pit in a way Carter had never before seen, and even now could not explain. The tar normally didn’t work that way; hell, it hadn’t worked that way for tens of thousands of years. It trapped animals, it didn’t devour them. But something had changed; maybe it was a result of the high-power suction hoses (insisted on by Gunderson) or the steel sectioning plates that Carter had installed, or something else entirely—there was a theory that heavy construction work on nearby Curson Street had altered the underground geology—but whatever it was, it had caused the pit to behave in a totally anomalous fashion. And now, just when he was about to excavate one of the most fascinating and important finds of his career—the bones of only the second human being ever to be discovered in the La Brea pits—Carter had to find a way first to recover the body of a man who had somehow, impossibly, become its only modern prey.

  “I simply do not understand this,” Gunderson went on. “Why can’t they just dredge the pit? How far down does it go? How far down can the body be?”

  “We don’t know,” Carter said, as calmly as his growing impatience would allow. “Nothing here is going according to form. The pit has been agitated in a way we have never seen, and it’s possible—though unlikely—that the body has somehow shifted laterally.”

  “What the
hell does that mean?”

  “It means, the body may have been dragged sideways, into a subterranean pocket or asphalt seam that we didn’t even know was there.”

  Gunderson ran his hand over his carefully groomed gray head. “So how do we ever find it then?”

  Carter had wondered about that himself. “It’s possible,” he said, “that we could try some kind of ground-based sonar.” He’d actually started investigating the possibility, just in case everything else failed.

  “Good Lord,” Gunderson muttered, more to himself than Carter, “what’s that going to cost?”

  Plenty, Carter thought. But there was no point going into that now. He knew that there was a new Emergency Rescue Team, on loan from the San Bernardino Fire Department, down at the pit today, and he was due there to help oversee their activities. In fact, glancing at his watch, he realized that he was overdue.

  “I’ve got to go down there now,” Carter said.

  “When you leave the building, try not to call any undue attention to yourself.”

  What would they have to do next, Carter thought—wear masks?

  THE MOMENT HE left the air-conditioned confines of the museum, the pounding of the drums became louder. It was another painfully hot and arid day, and in the pit it would be at least ten degrees hotter. He didn’t relish what he would have to do there.

  As he walked past the pond of black asphalt near the entrance to the museum, where the life-sized replicas of a family of mastodons stood, someone shouted, “Grave robber!” at him. What grave? Carter thought. The La Brea Man had died a terrible, and probably solitary, death, either stuck in the tar and dying slowly of dehydration, or torn to pieces by predators, who had likely then died with him. For all anyone knew, he might have been happy to be found.

  The LAPD had set up barricades that allowed visitors to the museum to go in and out, but blocked off all access, for now, to the parklike grounds where Pit 91 was located. Carter had to show the official pass that hung on a laminated card around his neck before the cop at the barrier would let him pass.

  The pit, from here, looked like some kind of triage site. Where there was usually just one trailer, for changing and showering, there were now several, for coordinating the work of outside agencies, dealing with media requests, community outreach. The coroner’s department had a person there at all times, to make sure the body of the Mystery Man was handled with kid gloves, whenever it might finally be found. To Carter, it was all a massive case of overkill.

  Down in the pit, there were maybe a dozen workers now, none of them his usual crew. Rosalie and Claude had been relieved of duty for the foreseeable future, and even Miranda—the poster girl for enterprising UCLA graduates—had been informally banned. The workers now were postdoc paleontologists, and even a retired professor or two, who knew how to do the painstakingly close labor that the extraction of the La Brea Man now required. This was delicate, highly skilled work that was tough to do right under the best of circumstances. But to do it now, with fire-men and cops and coroners looking over your shoulder, and rescue workers trying to figure out how to dredge a nearby quadrant of the site for a recent victim, was nearly impossible.

  Carter could tell there was no news as soon as he started down the ladder into the pit. The San Bernardino crew had installed some kind of rope and tackle assembly, and their generator rested precariously on one of the wooden walkways; its operator, dripping with sweat, had stripped down to his navy, SBFD T-shirt and suspendered overalls. It made Carter sick to his stomach to think of what damage all this equipment might be doing to the as-yet-unrecovered finds that lay below.

  The operator glanced up at Carter, and it appeared he knew who he was. Carter was having to get used to that, people knowing who he was without his ever having met them. “Nothing so far,” the guy called out over the thrumming of the motor.

  Carter nodded.

  Several neighboring sections of the grid had men and women with piles of tools and paraphernalia all around them. Most were on their knees, using chisels and hand picks and stiff brushes to isolate the fossils that had been partially revealed. Others were carefully applying the burlap strips, soaked in plaster of paris, to the areas already exposed; once the cast had hardened, the fossil would be removed, hopefully intact, to the labs, where the finer work would be done.

  A couple of the workers looked up as Carter approached, but under their hats and headbands, and with their goggles over their eyes, it was tough to tell who was who. His friend Del, however, he could always pick out. A middle-aged guy with a mane of prematurely white hair (tied up today, quite sensibly, with a thick rubber band), he leaned back on his haunches and pushed his goggles up onto his head.

  “Hey, Bones,” he said, using the nickname Carter had acquired years before. “Where you been? We’ve hit the mother lode.”

  Carter had to smile. He and Del went way back, to grad school; Del had already been an assistant professor at the time, and he had helped to get Carter on a couple of prize assignments. Now he was a full professor up near Tacoma, and when he’d heard about the situation in L.A., he’d been among the first to heed the call.

  “Hell,” he’d said upon arrival, “I was on sabbatical anyway, and I still wasn’t writing my book.” It was a running joke between them that Del had been working on his book—a revolutionary theory of the Permian extinction—all his life.

  “Oh yeah? What have you found?”

  “We’ve pulled up a six-pack of Tab—you know how hard that is to find these days?—and a Partridge Family lunch box.”

  Carter laughed and said, “Don’t forget to catalogue them.” Crouching down, he said, “It looks like you’re making progress.” A thick white layer of plaster was coating a section a few feet square.

  “Yeah, we’re getting there. But this plaster’s a bitch to work with in this heat.”

  “Foam would have been worse.” A more modern method, which Carter had rejected, was to apply polyurethane foam to an aluminum sheath.

  “Would have made a lighter cast,” Del replied.

  “But the fumes would have killed us all down here.”

  “True,” Del said. “But it’s a small price to pay . . .”

  Carter took off his shirt, draped it over a rung of the rear ladder—the very one that Geronimo had descended—and borrowed a pair of safety goggles from one of the workers too hot to continue. He picked up a chisel and began to work away at an area just beyond the plaster, where what might have been a scapular was still concealed. He felt better the second he started. He felt like himself again—a scientist, doing fieldwork—and not a bureaucrat dodging interview requests. With his head down, and the chisel in his hand, he could forget about all the other distractions and concentrate instead on what he loved . . . and what he did best.

  For the next hour, Carter simply worked, occasionally trading a word or two with one of the other diggers, swigging regularly from the Gatorade bottles that made the rounds, glopping tar into the heavy black buckets. As if by some unspoken consent, the other workers had left the prize area of the La Brea Man’s skull and upper torso to Carter, while they worked in the region of the man’s extremities. Overall, the bones appeared to be remarkably connected still, especially considering the wild frenzy that the man’s entrapment had apparently inspired. Bears, wolves, lions, every predator for miles around must have heard his cries, or seen him flailing to get out, and come running. Ordinarily, they’d have torn a limb loose, and dragged the meaty bone off to consume in safety elsewhere, but in this case the conditions must have been disastrous for all. The tar must have been heated and thick, the temptation of human prey too irresistible, and the fight for a piece of him too violent. All across the pit, the signs of an epic struggle were more than evident.

  So why, Carter wondered, were the man’s bones laid almost horizontally? It was quite possible, of course, that they had just been pushed and pulled into that configuration over thousands of years in the tar—bones were scraped and scatte
red and broken and abraded all the time—but there was something about these that still struck Carter as strange. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed again the plastered dome where the skull now resided. He tried not to look right at it—skulls still had a peculiar resonance that made them hard to ignore, even for Carter—but looking now, he had the impression that the face had indeed been turned up toward the sky at the time of his death. That he had lain flat, surrendering to the tar . . . and offered himself to the animals that had come to kill him.

  Had he just run out of strength and been pinned down by the hot tar? Had he simply given up and resigned himself to his fate? Or had he, out of some primitive atavistic sense, sacrificed his body and his spirit to what he might have perceived as the great chain of being?

  “Now this might be interesting,” Del said, prolonging that last word.

  Del, sort of the unofficial second-in-command now, had been working a few feet to his left, in the area of the hand.

  Carter pushed his goggles back on his head to get a better look.

  To a layman’s eye, it would appear to be no more than a lump of tar-covered rock, but to Del, or Carter, it was more than that. It had a special shape, a man-made shape, and it appeared to be cradled in the palm of his hand.

  “Looks like something that mattered to him,” Del said, and Carter couldn’t have agreed more. He scooted closer. It might have been a weapon, used in his final struggle. Or simply the last thing, as the breath left his body, that his dead fingers had closed upon.

  Or was it something the man might have cherished?

  Carter had no more time to consider the possibilities before there was a shout from the other side of the pit. “Yo! We’ve got something.”

  Carter turned and heard a high-pitched whine from the generator on the walkway as the pulley chains drew taut.

  The other workers all stopped, too, took off their goggles, and waited.

  The drag chain, with a steel claw on the end, had been submerged to a depth of twenty-five feet or more. The operator, his damp T-shirt clinging to his body, waved up to another fireman standing at ground level.