Vigil (7 page)

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.

He flipped back to the letter. There, Russo, too, conceded that he could make no further headway using the customary carbon-based techniques.

But Carter’s next stop would have been to do an analysis of the surrounding rock formation, and try to figure out what the fossil was, or could be, based on the age, and mineral composition, of the rock it was embedded in. Apparently, Russo had come to the same conclusion: “Studies of the contiguous rock are contained in Appendix B.”

Again, Carter checked Russo’s work, and again he could find no obvious error or omission. Russo was doing things by the book. But the results, once more, were absolutely baffling. The rock was igneous, basaltic, heavy on the pyroxene, that much was clear. But judging from its stupendously high silica content, striations, and density, it had been corkscrewed toward the surface of the earth from an almost unimaginable depth and temperature. Inside the rock, as a reminder of its tortuous progress all the way from the asthenosphere through the upper mantle, there remained an inordinately high content of trapped, volatile gases. Carter sat back in his chair and thought about it for a second. What they had here, in effect, was an immensely durable and dense lithic specimen, which could also, if handled incorrectly, explode in your face like a homemade bomb. A powerful homemade bomb.

No wonder Russo was hesitant to proceed without plenty of consultation.

The problem, Carter could see, would be to find a way to remove the fossil in as intact a state as possible from the volatile material to which it might be indissolubly wed, without setting off that bomb.

“In the cardboard folder,” Russo wrote, “you will find photographs of the fossil
in situ.
”

This was what Carter had been waiting for. When the photos had first spilled out, he’d purposely put them back; he didn’t want to look at them until he’d read over the other materials and seen what was what. Now, knowing what had already been ascertained—or, in this peculiar case, left hanging—he was ready to look at the visual evidence and see for himself. He leaned forward and opened the folder on the table.

The top picture was so beautiful, it could have been something from a travel brochure. In the foreground, there was nothing but blue water, with a slight chop, and in the background a wall of craggy gray cliffs with cypress trees up top, bending in the breeze. At sea level, barely discernible in this shot, was the mouth of a cave, still partially submerged. Carter glanced at the back of the photo, where Russo had dated it and printed “Lago d’Avernus, cave, from approx. 150 meters.”

Carter laid the photo facedown on the table and lifted the next one in the stack.

This one was from much closer up—the opening of the cave was rough and jagged, and two divers’ heads, wearing goggles and clamping down on snorkels, were off to one side. On the back, it said, “Mouth of cave,” which was hardly necessary, but appended to it in parentheses was, “Did you know I could scuba dive?” Carter smiled. No, he hadn’t known Russo could scuba dive.

The next few photos were from the interior of the cave and were clearly lighted by a high-intensity, handheld lamp. There was a bright, shadowy glare off of the wet walls and ceiling; the rock glittered like pyrite and diamond. But Carter could see nothing of the fossil.

He picked up the next shot—and this time his breath stopped in his throat. In the harsh, bright light shed by the lamp, which was partly visible in the upper left corner, he could now see the bones embedded in the rock. He’d seen thousands of such photos, of fossils from all over the globe, but never anything quite like this; the first thing he was reminded of, oddly enough, was Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment,
painted on the Sistine Chapel. This fossil—its claws, or talons, or
fingers,
gnarled and distended—summoned up the writhing figures from the artist’s vision of Hell. It was almost as if this creature—
there,
Carter thought, he’d just used the very word that Russo had resorted to—was
in extremis,
suffering beyond endurance, struggling to break free. A portion of its limb was detectable, or at least the vague outline of it was, but that was really all. And yet Carter still felt the most visceral and overwhelming reaction.

There were several more photos, from varying angles, but they revealed nothing more of the fossil; the rest of it was simply buried in the rock. In the next set of shots, the fossil itself was carefully draped and covered, while workers in wet suits actually demarcated a section of wall, drilled bore holes for pressure release, and with jackhammers, electric drills, and hand picks laboriously cut loose the rock. In the last of the on-site shots, a research vessel with a crane mounted on the rear deck was hauling away the slab of rock, now secured to a platform made from six huge yellow pontoons. Russo and the other diver, their masks off but still in their wet suits, stood on either side of the slab, their legs spread and their hands resting on the rock like big-game hunters being photographed with their trophy kill.

In the last photograph from the folder, the slab was seen in what appeared to be an open courtyard, under a plastic canopy, supported by what looked like half a dozen steel sawhorses. On the back, Russo had written, “Hall of Biological Sciences, University of Rome,” and then the specimen statistics. “Fossil block measures 3.5 meters long, 3.5 meters wide, and 2.5 meters deep.” Or, in feet, about ten by ten by seven. Its weight, measured in metric tons, was 1.25—or, in Carter’s quick mental calculation, roughly 3300 pounds. By any standards a massive, and massively unwieldy, specimen.

Carter put the last photo down and picked up Russo’s cover letter again. The final line said, “It is my considerable opinion that the unusual characteristics of this specimen suggest it may be of great, scientific importance.”

You could say that again.

Carter leaned back in his chair and glanced at his watch. To his surprise, it was almost midnight already. And then his eye fell once more on the photo taken inside the cave, the one where the creature seemed to be clawing its way out of the very rock. It was an image he knew he’d never be able to shake. He got up, turned off the lamp, and then, before going to bed, found himself stopping to turn the photo over so that it was face down on the table.