Bestiary Read online

  She leaned back with a sigh. “Thanks. You’re a lifesaver.”

  “Not a problem,” Carter said. “I had to promise the museum I wouldn’t let any of my crew get swallowed in the pit.”

  “What happens if one of us does?” Claude asked.

  “There’s a ten-dollar fine,” Carter replied, “and I lose my parking privileges for a week.”

  “Good thing we signed up for your shift,” Rosalie said, as she plopped a handful of wet tar into a waiting bucket, and they all laughed.

  GETTlNG THE STUFF off your hands and out of your hair always took at least half an hour. There were showers installed in a trailer parked right next to the pit, equipped with loofahs, pumice stones, sponges, long-handled brushes, shampoo, and enough skin scrub to clean a battleship.

  Your work clothes you left hanging on a wooden peg. You were never going to wear them for anything else as long as you lived.

  Carter got into a fresh pair of jeans, a blue Polo shirt, and white sneakers. Although he’d never been what you’d call formal, this was still a far cry from the way he’d dressed when he held the Kingsley Chair in Paleontology and Vertebrate Biology at New York University. There, he’d at least have worn a shirt with long sleeves. But everything in L.A. was more casual, and it was one of the things, he had to admit, that made the city appealing.

  So did the weather. It was late afternoon now, and even though the pit tended to trap the heat, the air outside it, in the surrounding park, was mild. A breeze was stirring the tops of the palm trees, and squirrels were scampering up the trunk of a California oak. Carter hadn’t ever planned on living in L.A.—he’d always nursed the standard-issue Eastern prejudices against the glitz and superficiality of the place—but when he looked at it objectively, as the scientist he was trained to be, he had to concede that the climate was advantageous, too.

  As were the job opportunities, if it came to that.

  After the lab disaster at NYU, he’d become pretty much persona non grata in the department. He had tenure and an endowed chair, but he didn’t have anybody’s faith or loyalty. In fact, people hardly knew where to look when they passed him in the halls. So when his wife, Beth, got the call from the Getty art museum, inviting her to come and work for them in L.A., the two of them only had to think about it overnight before deciding she should take it.

  The only question had been what Carter would do. But with his scholarly credentials still as impressive and unchallenged as they’d been before the accident, it hadn’t been hard for him to find a post on the West Coast himself. The tough part, in fact, had been sorting through all the offers.

  But their lifestyle here couldn’t be more different. In New York, they’d lived in a cramped apartment on Washington Square Park; here they rented, from a museum trustee who was generous enough to take a loss, a fully furnished house in a private, gated community called Summit View. To get there you took a main artery, Sepulveda Boulevard, which wound along beside the San Diego Freeway. It was a looping, dipping, four-lane highway with brushy hills on one side, and the freeway up above on the other, and while most people preferred the freeway because you could move a lot faster (when it wasn’t slowed to a crawl), Carter liked the Sepulveda route because it felt more like a road to him. It wasn’t predictable, it wasn’t jammed with traffic, it had character (including a tunnel through the Santa Monica Mountains that you had to pass through to get to the San Fernando Valley). Today, for a Friday afternoon, the traffic wasn’t bad, and he’d only had time to listen to maybe forty-five minutes of a taped lecture on the Galápagos Islands before he was pulling into the Summit View drive.

  The minute you hit the drive, it was like entering another world. It was a broad, empty concourse that swept up into the hills, past neatly cropped lawns and a pristine community center. Halfway up, as always, Carter spotted the private patrol car parked on the right. Carter gave the cop a wave—at this time on a weekday, it’d be Al Burns—then continued on toward the top of the rise.

  Their house was on the left, with a flagstone drive in front of the garage. It was a modern house, white, with a sloping red-tile roof, and coming home to it was still a new enough experience to Carter that he felt out of place parking in its driveway.

  But it wasn’t just the unfamiliarity of the place that struck him every time; it was the silence. All the houses that lined both sides of the wide, winding street were neat and orderly and silent as the grave. Not a kid playing in the street, not a lawn mower growling, not a light on in any of the windows, not a stereo blaring anywhere. And not a soul on the immaculate, new sidewalks.

  To be honest, it felt a little creepy. But he told himself he’d get used to it.

  “I’m home,” he called out, coming through the door. He dropped his backpack, heavy with books and papers, on the parquet floor of the foyer. “Hello?”

  No answer. He’d expected to hear from Robin, the nanny they’d hired to help out with the baby.

  “Robin? You here?”

  He climbed the stairs—thickly carpeted by the owner when he learned that Carter and Beth had a one-year-old—and headed for the nursery. Beth was in the corner rocking chair, her sweatshirt hiked up, nursing little Joey. “I didn’t want to shout,” she whispered.

  “Where’s Robin?”

  “I didn’t go in today, so I gave her the day off.”

  “Still got that cold?”

  “I can’t seem to shake this one.”

  “The prince looks happy.”

  “Oh yeah—nothing bothers this guy.” It was something they joked about—Joey had yet to have a cold, an ear infection, colic, you name it. They’d been prepared by all the baby books for a litany of problems and complaints, but so far . . . nada. This kid was made of steel.

  “You want me to make some dinner?” Carter asked.

  “I’m not hungry. But there’s still some of that salmon from last night.”

  “That’s fine,” Carter said. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said, nodding at the busy Joey.

  Downstairs, he took a Heineken out of the fridge and, as there wouldn’t be any witnesses, drank it straight from the bottle. The mail was on the counter—some bills, a couple of catalogues—but what looked like a more interesting pile of papers lay scattered on the butcher-block table in the breakfast nook. Carter pushed out two of the chairs, rested his long legs across one, and turned some of the papers around so he could read them.

  The cover letter, addressed to Beth, was from Berenice Cabot, an important administrator at the Getty, asking her to examine the contents enclosed and prepare for a meeting with the owner of the work of art displayed there, a man whose anonymity Mrs. Cabot had been asked at this point to maintain. That wasn’t so unusual, Carter knew; museums often dealt with wealthy donors who didn’t want their names made public until they chose to do so themselves.

  By now Carter felt he should probably stop snooping. This was between Beth and the Getty, he thought as he took another swig from the bottle. But then, she had left it all out in plain view. In a court of law, wasn’t that justification enough? And what harm could it do just to take a little peek at some of the photos enclosed? Even a quick glance told him they were pretty unusual.

  He put the letter aside and looked at the glossy eight-by-ten that lay on top of the pile. It showed a massive old book, with what looked like an ivory cover, studded with jewels. A ruler, laid beside it in the shot to offer scale, indicated that its pages were large—perhaps two feet long and almost as wide. Although Carter was no expert in this sort of thing, it reminded him of ancient books he’d seen in Europe, most notably the Book of Kells at Trinity College, Dublin. That volume dated from the eighth century, and this book looked, to his unpracticed eye, to be in the same league.

  The other photos, their colors muted by what Carter guessed to be insufficient light, were of the book’s contents. And most appeared to be of fanciful creatures, mythological beasts made up of strange composites—the heads of lions on the bodies of snakes, a
chicken’s beak on a lumbering bear, a towering giraffe with eight legs and a prominently displayed set of curving tusks. They were all rendered in the primitive, but forceful, medieval style Carter had seen in some of Beth’s textbooks from her days as a student at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

  “Snoop,” she said as she padded into the kitchen in her stocking feet.

  “You caught me.”

  She plopped onto his lap and leaned her back against the edge of the table.

  “Looks like they’ve got you working from home.”

  “Mrs. Cabot messengered those over this morning.” She was wearing matching sweatpants, too, and had her black hair tied up hastily in a ponytail.

  “What’s she want you to do?” Carter asked innocently.

  She smiled. “Didn’t you read the cover letter first?”

  Carter laughed. “So when are you supposed to meet with Mr. Mysterious? It failed to specify that.”

  “Who knows? Whenever he chooses to come forward.”

  “Looks like a very interesting project.”

  She snuggled closer. “I think so, too. It looks like one of the earliest and most complete bestiaries ever found. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.”

  “And I can’t wait to get my hands on you,” Carter said, wrapping his arms around her; she smelled of Dove, Prell, and milk, a combination he would never have thought could be so heady. “You know, with the prince asleep . . . ,” he said suggestively, running his hand up the front of her sweatshirt.

  “And the queen so sore,” she said, taking his hand away but kissing the knuckles. She laid her head on his shoulder, and as he held her, Carter’s eye fell on a photo lying upside down on the table. He reached out and turned it around, to see what at first he took to be a beautiful illuminated picture of a peacock. Its head was turned to one side, its tail feathers were fanned out in a wide display, but unlike any peacock he’d ever seen, this one was bright red and had an unmistakable aura of menace. Its eyes glowed like rubies, and its talons looked as sharp and gnarled as thorns. It reminded him less of an ornamental creature than a prehistoric bird of prey.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE VETERANS ADMlNlSTRATlON hospital was just off Wilshire Boulevard, but most motorists never even noticed it. They were too busy looking for the on-ramp to the 405 freeway, and traffic at this spot as a result was almost always a nightmare—even by L.A. standards.

  The hospital access ramp was separate from all the others, and every time Greer took it he felt slighted. As his beaten-up Mustang convertible left the other cars, he felt afresh his injuries. All those bastards driving by, he thought, had no idea of the pain he’d suffered, and the wounds he had borne, fighting for his country in Iraq. It was just so damn easy to drive on by, in your Mercedes or your SUV, babbling into your cell phone, and never give another thought to guys like himself who had made the big sacrifices.

  And for what? That was one question that had kept him up more nights than he cared to count.

  By now, he knew the VA routine inside out. He parked his car in one of the few spots that offered any shade, checked in with the security guard, who always demanded that he show his credentials every time he came in (one more way for the military to still stick it to you), and then hobbled down the hall to the physical therapy clinic.

  Most of the other patients in there he knew—there was Gruber, who’d lost both hands to a booby trap in Tikrit; and Rodriguez, who’d stepped on a land mine outside Basra; and Mariani, who’d never talk to anybody about what had happened to put him in that wheelchair. Greer would look around at all these other guys, many of whom had suffered far worse injuries than he had, and try to make himself feel better. See, he’d say, you could be pushing yourself around like Mariani, or using clampers for hands like Gruber, or clomping around like Rodriguez on a carbon-fiber leg. But it never worked the way he wanted it to; he was just as pissed and bitter when he left as when he arrived.

  Indira was his usual therapist, and today she had the table already prepared for him. “How are we feeling, Captain Greer?” she said, smoothing the paper cover on the table nearest the windows. “Are we grumpy as usual?”

  He never knew how to answer stuff like that. Affirmative?

  She patted the table with a smile, as if she were urging a dog to jump up onto the sofa. “Come on and get ready. I’ll get the towels.”

  There was a changing room to one side, and he went in there, put most of his clothes and valuables in a locker, and came back out in his clean T-shirt and running shorts. He refused to wear those open gowns.

  Indira was waiting, and as soon as he levered himself up onto the table, she slipped a small pillow under the crook of his neck, another one under his knees, then gently wrapped the hot towels around his left leg. He tried not to let her see him studying her as she did all that, but he suspected that she was aware of it. The first time he’d seen her, he was so consumed with pain and rage that he’d hardly noticed her. But the next time, and the time after that, he’d been able to take a good look.

  She wasn’t like anyone he’d ever known. She was small, with dark hair and dark eyes, and her skin was a kind of copper color. Kind of like the Iraqis’. She didn’t talk a lot about herself, but over the many sessions he’d had, he’d learned a few things. She was from Bombay, which accounted for that kind of singsong way she spoke, and she was something called a Zoroastrian. It was some ancient religion (he’d looked it up on the Internet) that believed in cycles of fire, or something like that, lasting millions of years. She lived somewhere in West L.A., with her parents and a bunch of brothers and sisters. He could never figure out a way to ask her how old she was, but he was thirty and he knew that she had to be younger than that.

  “Let’s give it fifteen minutes,” she said, setting an egg timer and leaving it by his feet. “Tell me if it gets too hot.”

  The heat was used to limber up the leg, before they tried the exercises designed to increase the muscle tone and range of motion. He’d never told her how his leg had been injured, and she’d never asked; he wondered if that was part of their training. Wait till the gimp volunteered the information; don’t press him on it. He knew a lot of the guys—like Mariani in the wheelchair—didn’t want to talk about it. And in his case, he was just as happy to keep quiet. When he’d been brought into the camp’s medical tent outside Mosul, Sadowski had corroborated his story; they’d been conducting a perimeter patrol when a sniper had taken a potshot. In those days, not a lot of questions got asked; everything was up for grabs, and sniper attacks were an hourly occurrence. The army had given him his Purple Heart, his honorable discharge, and a monthly disability check that didn’t go nearly far enough.

  He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, listening to the ticking of the timer and the grunts and groans and murmured conversations of the other vets talking to their therapists and going through their agonizing drills. Still, he kind of looked forward to these sessions; the government paid, and Indira took care of him.

  When the timer went off, she came back, unwrapped the towels and tossed them into the bin, then told him to bend the knee. At first it wouldn’t go.

  “I’ll help,” she said, lifting the leg slightly. “Tell me if you need to stop.”

  Her hands were cool and smooth, and the leg felt better just from her touch. He tried to flex the knee, but sometimes it felt like the damn thing had just locked in place. Like right now.

  “Just relax,” she said, “let me bend it. Don’t you try to do anything.”

  He closed his eyes, and willed himself, or tried to, into a state of passivity. Indira gently flexed the knee, a few degrees at a time, then went through the other exercises, bringing the leg slowly to one side and then the other, to make sure he wasn’t losing lateral motion. She had him do some standing exercises, a couple of squats that were more like crouches, and finished up, as usual, with the ultrasound, designed to penetrate the muscles and break up the scar tissue.

  “Are you
doing your exercises at home?” Indira asked, as usual, and Greer, as usual, lied that he was.

  “Are you okay on your meds?”

  “I’m running low on the Demerols, and I’m out of the Vicodin.”

  She gave him a puzzled look. “Didn’t we get you a renewal on the Vicodin last time?”

  “Yeah, but I spilled ’em. Most went down the kitchen sink.”

  She frowned. “You know, those can be addictive,” she said. “We’re limited on what we can prescribe.”

  “Oh yeah, sure, I know that,” he assured her. He could never tell if she knew he was lying, or if she was just doing what she could to help.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and as she went off to the clinic dispensary to see if she could get him a new prescription, Greer got dressed and checked the time. He was due to meet Sadowski at the Blue Bayou, the strip club where Sadowski’s girlfriend danced.

  Indira, God bless her, got him the pills—“They were very suspicious,” she told him, “and next time we will have to get an okay from Dr. Foster”—and he slipped them into the breast pocket of his shirt on the way out to the parking lot. The sun had moved, and the steering wheel had come out of the shade; it was blazing hot when he tried to hold it. He flicked on the radio, and used a crumpled page of the L.A. Weekly to hold the wheel.

  Going against traffic, it took him only ten minutes or so to drive down toward the ocean and pull up in front of the club. He hung his Handicapped placard on the rearview mirror, and noticed that parked right behind him was a Silver Bear Security Service patrol car. Sadowski was already here.

  Inside, the place was nearly empty. The stage lights were off, and a guy with a mop was washing down the runway for tonight’s show.

  Greer got a Jack Daniel’s at the bar from Zeke, who asked him in a low voice, “That it?” Zeke also sold him his drugs, especially the ones the VA would never prescribe.

  “Yeah,” Greer said. “I’m set.”