Vigil Read online

  “Lab, Carter speaking.”

  “Carter Cox?” The connection wasn’t great, but he could already guess who was speaking. Dr. Giuseppe—Joe, to his American friends—Russo.

  “Russo? Joe Russo?”

  “Yes! The secretary, she told me you would be there. I have been calling.”

  “Where are you calling me from? The line is bad—can I call you back?”

  “No, no, my friend. Now that I’ve got you, I do not want to let you go.”

  “It must be important for you to pay for the call.”

  Russo laughed—it had been a running gag on the dig site in Sicily, where they’d met, that Russo had no money in his budget for anything, even food and water.

  “I have the job now, at the University of Rome.”

  “Congratulations! That’s great.”

  “That is why I am calling.”

  “You want me to come and give a lecture? Beth will be ecstatic. She’s always looking for an excuse to go to Italy.”

  “No. No lecture. I do that myself.”

  “Okay, I can take no for an answer.” But then why was he calling, and so persistently?

  “Did you not get my package?” Russo asked. “The material I mailed to you with the Federal Express?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “I send it to your department office, last week.”

  Shit. “I haven’t picked up my mail for days.”

  The line crackled, but under it Carter could hear Russo cluck.

  “You must get it,” Russo said, “and read it. Soon. It is very important.”

  “I’ll pick it up the minute I leave the lab. What’s in it?”

  Either there was a time delay on the line, or Russo was pondering how to respond. “We have found something here,” he finally said. “Actually, to be true, it was two Americans who found it first—and it is a very . . . interesting find. We will need your help, I think.”

  Russo—a man who’d helped Carter unearth the remains of some of Europe’s earliest inhabitants from the “Well of the Bones” in Sicily—was not a man to make empty pronouncements. And Carter knew that if he claimed something was a “very interesting find,” it meant that something very big might be in the offing. Carter felt a tingle of anticipation in the back of his neck.

  “What do you want me to do? Look over what’s in the package and call you tomorrow?”

  “Yes! My number is on the package. Call me at six in the evening, Rome time. You will want to, my friend,” he said, with a chuckle. “You will not want to wait.”

  Carter could hardly wait right now—and he silently swore to himself that he would never again let his departmental mail back up. As soon as he’d hung up, he put the donated fossils away—force of habit made him do it by the book—then grabbed his jacket and headed for the door.

  Mitchell was just coming in, holding a bag from Burger King. “Whoa, Bones, what’s the rush?”

  “Forgot to pick up something at the office,” Carter said as he squeezed past him.

  “Good luck,” Mitchell said, “they’re probably closed up for the weekend.”

  That was just what Carter dreaded. “You were right, by the way, about the jaw fragment,” he shouted over his shoulder as he turned the corner of the hall. “It is a Smilodon.”

  The departmental office was indeed closed up by the time Carter, all but out of breath, managed to get there. Through the glass door, he could actually see his mailbox, the top slot in the wooden cabinet, jammed to bursting—and he could even make out one of those distinctive FedEx envelopes, with its big block lettering, sitting on top of the stack. He rattled the door handle, hoping against hope, but it was locked.

  That’s when he heard the janitor, Hank, plunging his mop into a bucket down the hall.

  “Hank, that you?” he called out, rounding the corner.

  Hank looked up, the mop still in the metal bucket. “What’s up, Professor?”

  “Could you do me a huge favor? Could you unlock the departmental office for me?”

  “You know I’m not supposed to do that.”

  “Yeah, I do, Hank, and I wouldn’t ask you to, but there’s something in there that I absolutely have to have tonight.”

  Hank blew out a gust of air, ran one hand over his bald head, and then rolled the bucket and mop against the wall. “I never did this for you, okay?”

  “Never.”

  Hank trudged to the office door, unlocked it, and waited while Carter grabbed the FedEx envelope, which was thick and heavy, from his mailbox; he checked the return address to make sure it was the right one, and sure enough, it had come from Russo in Rome. “This is what I needed,” Carter said, showing it to Hank. “You’ve saved my life.”

  Hank nodded, locking up the office again. “That’s what I do.”

  All Carter wanted to do next was rip open the envelope and read its contents right there, but it was now close to seven, and he knew he was supposed to be meeting Beth and their friends Abbie and Ben Hammond at Minetta’s Tavern for dinner. Opening the envelope would just have to wait. But at least he’d been able to get his hands on it—if he hadn’t, the chances of his getting any sleep that night, or all weekend for that matter, would not have been good.

  The restaurant was only a few blocks away, and when he got there he spotted Beth and the Hammonds at a table near the bar, sharing an antipasto platter.

  “I’m glad you didn’t wait,” Carter said, bending down to kiss Beth on the cheek.

  “It never even occurred to us,” Ben said, spearing an olive.

  Carter laughed, pulled out the empty chair, and sat down. There was a half-empty carafe of white wine on the table, and he poured himself a glass. Ben was still in his banker’s suit, and Abbie—who worked at an ad agency whose name Carter could never remember—was also in a suit, though hers was red with white piping around the lapels and collar. To Carter, she looked like she was auditioning for the role of Santa’s wife.

  “What’s in the FedEx?” Abbie said. “You’re clutching it like it’s a winning lottery ticket.”

  “Oh, just some work I need to get done later tonight.”

  But Beth, who could read him like a book, tilted her head and gave him a curious smile; there was more to it, she knew, than that.

  “What are all these?” Carter asked, hoping to change the subject and gesturing at a bunch of photographs spread out on the table. In one, he could see a winding country road, in another an old farmhouse with a wide front porch.

  “They bought a country house,” Beth said, with enthusiasm. “Upstate.”

  “In Hudson,” Abbie said, proudly. “With four acres of land and an old apple orchard.”

  “And don’t forget the barn falling down in back,” Ben added.

  “That’s terrific,” Carter said, studying the photo of the house, which looked small but well maintained, with a range of low mountains off in the distance behind it. “I’ve been meaning to get out of the city more, I just never had a place to go.” He looked at Ben and Abbie and said, “Thank you so much. I’ll bring my own marshmallows.”

  “Don’t forget the graham crackers and Hershey bars,” Abbie said.

  Beth raised her glass in a toast. “To the landed gentry!”

  “Salud!” they all said, clinking glasses as the waiter approached with the menus.

  After hearing the specials and ordering, the Hammonds went on some more about the house; they’d been looking for a place for months—“we’ve really needed a place outside the city,” Abbie said, “to unwind”—but Carter thought he knew the real, unspoken reason for getting the house. It was meant to serve as a distraction from the problems they were having starting a family—and he could certainly relate to that. In fact, before very long, Beth and Abbie had fallen into their own conversation about Dr. Weston (it was Abbie who had consulted with him first). They lowered their heads toward each other and spoke intensely—and not for the first time Carter found himself admiring the depth of their frie
ndship. As far as he could tell, there was nothing under the sun that Beth and Abbie couldn’t talk about with each other—and probably nothing that they hadn’t. They’d met as roommates at Barnard, and been best friends ever since. Even when Beth went to England for a year to study art history at the Courtauld Institute, Abbie snagged a Sloan Fellowship at the London School of Art. Her original goal had been to be an artist herself, an abstract expressionist, the next Lee Krasner, but things hadn’t worked out that way, and she’d had to settle instead for a lucrative but spiritually less rewarding position as an art director for an ad agency.

  Ben and Carter were just the appendages in this relationship, and they both knew it. While their wives laughed and chattered, and continued to confer in lowered tones, Carter and Ben searched amiably for one topic or another to talk about. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other—they did—but their backgrounds and professions, even their interests, were pretty dissimilar.

  Ben came from Main Line Philadelphia money, prepped at Exeter, graduated at the top of his class from Wharton Business School, and had been rising through the investment banking ranks ever since.

  Carter’s family was what he’d come to refer to, out of their earshot of course, as “comfortably lower class.” His father had driven a delivery truck for a dairy chain in northern Illinois, and his mother had stayed home to raise Carter and his four brothers and sisters. A lot of the time, Carter had been home sick; as a boy, he’d suffered from all the usual ailments—mumps, measles, chicken pox—but he’d also had what seemed to be a kind of asthma. He would always say “seemed to be” because it had mysteriously cleared up by the time he was a teenager. And ever since then, he’d done his best to make up for lost time, by rock climbing, skiing, and traveling all over the world. When he’d won a generous scholarship to Princeton—to everyone’s astonishment, including his own—he’d grabbed it and never looked back.

  But it was only in the past few years—after he’d made his remarkable finds in Sicily, in fact—that he’d ascended to the top echelons of his own field. The chair that Carter occupied at New York University was a much-coveted prize, in part because Mr. Kingsley, after whom it was named, had also left a large enough endowment to generate a respectable salary for its occupant. Carter had not gone into the bone business for the money—no one in his right mind did—but in the end, he would have to concede, bones had indeed been pretty good to him.

  While he and Ben drifted from books and movies to foreign affairs, Carter had more and more trouble staying focused. He did his best to keep up his end of the conversation, but his mind kept going back to the FedEx envelope tucked under his chair. He wished he could run home, rip open the envelope, and find out what Russo was going on about. While Carter had first discovered and excavated the Well of the Bones, Giuseppe Russo—then just a doctoral candidate in paleontology—had been his right hand, literally. Once, when Carter’s rope had inexplicably slipped its clip, Russo had reached down at the last second, grabbed the collar of his poncho, and hauled him up out of the ground. Carter could easily recall the feeling of dangling in midair over the narrow tunnel that burrowed more than sixty feet into the earth, above a grisly mound of prehistoric human bones; he knew that if it hadn’t been for Russo, he would have wound up joining them.

  Fortunately, by the time the dessert cart was brought around, everyone was too full even to think about it. Carter prayed that no one would ask for coffee or an after-dinner drink, and his prayer was answered; Ben actually said he had to get back to the office. Outside they parted ways, and Beth slipped her arm through Carter’s as they walked home.

  “So,” she said, “I’ve been dying to know all night. What’s in the magic envelope?”

  “I’ll know when we get home,” he said, “but it’s from Russo.”

  “The guy who worked with you in Sicily?”

  “Yes. He says they’ve found something, something he thinks is special enough that I’ll want to take a look at it.”

  “Does he want you to go there?” she said, sounding concerned.

  “Not as far as I know. But why, you don’t think you’d find enough Renaissance art over there to keep you busy for a few weeks?”

  “It’s not that,” she said, as they waited for the walk light at Bleecker. “I can’t leave the gallery right now, and if you’re gone, how can we . . . ?”

  Carter got it. “Oh. I guess I couldn’t just leave a few specimens in the fridge for you, huh?”

  “You’re so romantic. But that’s what I wanted to tell you. Dr. Weston’s office called today, and you’ve got an appointment there next Saturday morning.”

  To have his virility tested. Carter contemplated it with dismay as they walked the last few blocks toward home. Already he could feel the performance anxiety kicking in.

  Their third-floor apartment, in an old red brick building, faced directly onto Washington Square Park, and in the madness that was Manhattan real estate it would ordinarily have fetched several thousand dollars a month. But fortunately the university owned the building and made the apartments available to faculty members at a bargain rate.

  Carter unlocked the door and flicked on the lights while Beth hung her coat on the wooden hat rack that stood in the foyer.

  “You want the shower first?” she asked.

  “No, you go ahead,” he said, already pulling at the flap of the FedEx envelope.

  “That’s what I figured.”

  Carter went into the living room and plunked himself down in his favorite armchair, a worn leather wingback that he’d had since college, and tore the envelope nearly in two. Some glossies immediately started to slide out of a folder and onto his lap, and he had to grab them before they scattered on the floor. With his foot, he pulled the coffee table closer, and poured everything out onto its mottled surface.

  On top was a letter typed on the letterhead of the University of Rome, and he picked that up first. “Dottore,” it began, which was the salutation Russo had always used for Carter, “I send to your attention all the materials enclosed. Also my greetings. I will tell you now the story of these things, which I think will greatly interest you, and we will then talk about them after.” His English, Carter could see, had improved a lot. It still had that wonderfully stilted quality—Russo never used contractions, for instance—but the document, so far, was perfectly comprehensible. Carter flipped through the rest of the letter—it was six pages, single spaced—before starting again at the beginning.

  It began, mysteriously enough, with an account of the water levels at a place called Lago d’Avernus, which Carter had never heard of. Apparently, they had dropped to a point not seen for perhaps several million years. A cave, which would have been underwater all that time—maybe even hundreds of feet deeper than it was today, having been pushed up slowly by the seismic forces active in that region—had for the first time become accessible, and a young American couple had been the first to happen upon it. In a parenthetical, Russo mentioned that the man had accidentally drowned there.

  In that cave, a fossilized creature had been discovered. Russo apologized for the use of the vague word creature, but explained that this very uncertainty was why he was contacting his old friend Carter in the first place. “It is not clear, from the parts of the fossil which we see, what at all we are dealing with.” There were what looked like distended talons, the letter went on, suggesting this might be a moderately sized raptor of some sort, but the talons also appeared to display an articulated metacarpal and phalanx—features that could only suggest a hominid ancestor. “But a hominid that, in the scheme of evolution, is too old to be possible.”

  Carter could see already why Russo was so puzzled. But why not do a simple carbon-14 test on the specimen and see what it revealed? That’s where Carter would have started.

  But so, it seems, had Russo. In the very next paragraph, Carter read, “As you would expect, we have employed the standard radiocarbon-dating techniques. While we do not here have the access to AMS
”—accelerated mass spectrometry, which, Carter knew, was seldom available outside the United States—“we have isolated 5 grams of pure carbon from the base material and conducted repeat tests on that sample. The laboratory reports on those tests are enclosed—see Appendix A.”

  Carter riffled through the materials until he found the appendix. It was the usual readout, a complex graph of elemental composition and isotopic decay, but Carter’s finger coursed down the pages until he came to the number he was looking for—the final estimate of date. And that number, it was true, didn’t make any sense at all; the method worked, when it did work, because the radiocarbon isotope carbon-14, which was contained in all organic matter—whether it was wood, plant fiber, seashells, or animal bones—decomposed at a steady rate of 50 percent every 5,730 years. If you had an adequate sample of the specimen—and at 5 grams, Russo had had it—you could get a very good idea of the age of even the most prehistoric matter. The famous cave paintings at Lascaux, for example, were estimated to be between 15,000 and 17,000 years old. But there was always a small margin of error, since the production of carbon-14 had not been consistent throughout time, and radiocarbon dates had to be “corrected” or “calibrated” to account for the chronological anomalies. The resulting discrepancy could leave you with a possible range of a few hundred, or in some rare cases a couple of thousand, years.

  But even a few thousand years’ leeway would not make Russo’s calculations compute—especially not if he was still entertaining the notion that this might be a hominid-related find. This fossil from Lago d’Avernus, according to radiocarbon tests, dated from millions of years before mankind’s most distant ancestors walked, or even crawled, the earth.

  Though he couldn’t yet pinpoint where the mistake had been made, the results, Carter decided, had to be so erroneous as to be useless. The only thing to do would be to disregard them utterly.