The Eighth Day (44 page)

It wasn’t. They continued walking for another few minutes until the passageway opened upon a cavern with high ceilings and a vaulted recess in one wall. A gold curtain hung limply in the darkness from an iron bar, concealing what lay behind it.

Zebek was standing in the middle of the room, flanked by Kukoc and Buddy/Buddy, fulminating amid the Elders. The flashlights’ beams trembled in the moldering air. Danny had a bad feeling.

“So here we are!” Zebek declared with an expansive gesture. “And for what? Why? What is
this
supposed to prove?” His voice seemed higher-pitched than it usually was and stoked with bravado.

Mounir cleared his throat. “I was thinking that you might be right,” he said. “That this young man and Remy—and the other man, Terio—conspired against you.”

“Exactly!” Zebek shouted. “And why not? Not one of them was a believer! Why would anyone believe him, this American boy, instead of me? We—the true Yezidis, the faithful—we’ve been schemed against for a thousand years!”

Mounir nodded, as if agreeing. “I asked myself,” he said, “how are we to know if the Sanjak is a fake—or if it is the report instead that is a fraud? Did the scientist in Norway test a slice of wood that came from the Sanjak—or was it, perhaps, a piece of driftwood that someone found on the shores of Lake Van? In either case it is a serious matter. If the true Sanjak, our most sacred object, fashioned by Sheik Adi himself, was replaced by a fake, then it is a question of the deepest sacrilege.”

The old man paused and cleared his throat. “On the other hand,” he continued, “it is possible that parties exist who for their own political or personal reasons do not approve the Imam duly selected by the Eders. It is possible that such parties sought to seed doubt and confusion upon that selection by launching a false report, questioning the legitimacy of the new guide. A play for time, perhaps, while they planned an assassination.” The old man looked at Danny, who felt suddenly restless and claustrophobic.
Tranquilo,
he told himself, working to keep his eyes from sliding away from Mounir’s calm glance. “A fake report,” the old man continued, “would be equally a sacrilege, an attempt to interfere in the will of the Tawus and in the prophecies of the
Black Writing
.” Mounir broke off, looked from Danny to Zebek, shook his head. “But how to determine?”

Zebek started saying something, but Mounir held up a restraining hand and the billionaire grew still.

“It occurred to me,” Mounir said, “that if the Sanjak we Elders saw while deliberating the selection of the new Imam was a fake, then whoever created it would destroy it as soon as the statue had outlived its purpose. The Sanjak is never on display. It is exposed to view only during the election procedure. The new Imam is young. He should easily outlive every Elder. It is even possible that the genuine Sanjak would have been returned to its rightful place, but of course in such an instance we would know at once upon seeing it that it was a
different
Sanjak, not the one to preside over our proceedings.”

Danny’s eyes darted from Zebek to the alcove and back again. The bankrupt billionaire was like a deer staring at a lighthouse.

“But if the
report
was a fraud,” Mounir went on, “any piece of wood would have served as a sample for testing. And in this case the Sanjak would be here still, exactly as we remember.” The old man sighed. “So which is it?” he asked, looking from Danny to Zebek.

“I think I’ve had about enough of this,” Zebek blustered, and turned to leave.

Buddy/Buddy stepped in his path. “Buhhh-ddy,” he cajoled. “
Buhhh
-ddy . . .”

Mounir walked slowly across the room to the recess in the wall. As he reached for the curtain, Zebek lunged at him, only to be restrained by Kukoc and his sidekick.

“It’s forbidden!” Zebek declared. “It’s not to be seen—”

The old man drew the curtain aside, and the Elders drew their breath as one. Behind the curtain was a pedestal of black marble on which a small square of velvet rested—and nothing else. One of the Elders stepped toward Zebek with a flick-knife in his hand. Zebek sidestepped him, then dove for the passageway out—only to find Kukoc barring the way.

“What did you do with it then, Zerevan?” Mounir asked in a soft voice. “Where is the true Sanjak?”

Zebek seemed to have diminished in size, shrunk into himself. “If I tell you,” he wheedled, “will you release me?”

Mounir issued a little snort and shook his head. “Ali and Suha can persuade you,” he said, indicating Kukoc and Buddy/Buddy, “or you can save yourself the misery.”

“I’m not responsible,” Zebek blustered. “I don’t know anything about it.”

That was Zebek’s last, feeble protest. Danny’s two old adversaries advanced on him and Danny steeled himself. He wasn’t sure he could just stand by and watch what was euphemistically termed a hostile interrogation. In the end, the threat alone sufficed, or maybe Zebek was smart enough to know that resistance would simply prolong the agony. He caved in without so much as a blow being struck.

The word dribbled out of his mouth. “Sotheby’s,” he said.

Mounir was so stunned, he could barely get the words out. “You
sold
it?”

“Not yet,” Zebek said dispassionately. “There’s an antiquities auction next month.”

Mounir’s face went hard and he stood up straight, then executed a small, formal bow. “We leave you,” he said, then barked an order that Danny didn’t understand. One by one, the Elders filed slowly from the room. Zebek began ranting in Kurdish, his meaning betrayed by his tone:
Don’t! Please! For God’s sake! I’ll kill you!

It was something like that, Danny thought, a mixture of threats and pleas. As they began to leave the room, Mounir put a hand on Danny’s sleeve. “Give him your flashlight,” he ordered. “Later, we’ll put him out on the platform, for the birds. It’s the old way.”

The birds?
What? Danny remembered something about birds, but he couldn’t think about it now. What he could think about was that he couldn’t get out of here fast enough. He turned and stepped quickly back into the room. “Here,” he said, and thrust the flashlight into Zebek’s hands. The disgraced Imam stared at the light for a long moment, then raised his eyes to Danny’s. Tears of terror glittered on his cheeks. “Please,” he said. “Not this.”

Tell it to Chris Terio,
Danny thought, but kept the message to himself.
“Ciao,”
he muttered, and, turning, moved quickly out of the room. Re-joining Mounir and the Elders, he watched as Kukoc wielded an iron pry bar, stabbing time and again at the rock that pinned the massive stone to its place in the alcove. Suddenly the rock shifted, its tremendous weight heaving forward. Danny threw a wild glance at Zebek, who was standing where he’d left him with the flashlight in his hand, pointed at the floor, his mouth widening in a silent scream.

Then everyone jumped back as the rock tumbled into place across the passageway, confining Zebek in the pitch-black tomb of his childhood.

EPILOGUE

The hardest thing wasn’t getting ready for the show. It was getting ready for Caleigh.

He’d put together the
Talking Heads
installation for about a hundred bucks, using coat hangers and old sheets to create the frameworks. The papier-mâché that covered the frames was made with newspapers from the recycling center, fifty pounds of bulk flour, and gallons of water boiled on the stove in his mother’s kitchen.

Now the heads were more or less done.

There were seven of them, and it was just a matter of pasting on more and more layers of paper until they were sturdy enough to survive the trip to the gallery. For now, they stood in the basement of his parents’ house, soggy and surreal, drying amid a forest of borrowed fans and dehumidifiers.

The more he thought about the heads, the more he liked them. Stranded in their suburban setting, they were almost as mysterious as their Easter Island counterparts. Soon he’d cover them with collages of newspaper headlines and photographs of anchormen and talk-show hosts. Mike Wallace and Oprah. Dan Rather and Barbara Walters. Once finished, the installation would say something about the way America elevates celebrity to a kind of gnosis.

That was the idea, anyway.

When he wasn’t working on the heads, he was working the phones, getting a nursery to donate enough sod to cover the floor of the gallery and borrowing TV sets to install in the painted plywood plinths that his father had agreed to build for the heads. He was so busy he still hadn’t gotten around to getting his tooth fixed. Not that he could afford it, but his mother—who winced every time he smiled—kept after him. “Daniel, I’ll pay for it. Call it a late birthday present. You look like a derelict.
Please.
”

But there was so much to do. He’d lined up a U-Haul to transport paintings and sculptures—including
Babel On II
—to the Neon Gallery. His father would help him partition that sculpture, color-coding each of the segments so that they could put them together again. Then they’d shrink-wrap the parts, using materials Dad ordered from a company called Mr. Shrinky. His father had already watched the instructional video. “All you need is a roll of polyethylene and a heat gun,” he said, psyched with the idea. “You wrap it, you zap it, and the whole thing comes out solid as a rock. You know you can shrink-wrap a boat? You can shrink-wrap anything!”

It wasn’t easy—it was a lot of work—but Danny could tell the show was going to be good. In fact, it was going to be great. And the buzz was building. According to Lavinia,
Culturekiosque
wanted to do an on-line interview with him and the
Post
was going to feature him in a Sunday piece about “three Washington artists on the way up.”

If only his love life was half so promising.

But Caleigh wouldn’t even talk to him. He’d thought about ways to win her back, but all of them were corny or expensive and sometimes both: A billboard or, better yet, a skywriter. In either case, saying the same thing:
Danny
Caleigh
. Baskets of daisies (her favorite) delivered to her office. An opera singer beneath her window. A puppy.

It didn’t matter if the ideas were corny, actually. He could
do
corny. It was just that he knew they wouldn’t work. What he’d done was unforgivable in Caleigh’s eyes, and those were the only eyes that mattered.
You blew it,
he told himself.
It’s as simple as that.

Only it wasn’t. He was sitting on the couch in his parents’ living room, watching
Forrest Gump
, when the idea came to him. If Gump could dance with Elvis and shake hands with JFK—then there was hope for Danny, too. It wasn’t exactly ethical, this idea that he had, but it did have one virtue that his other schemes lacked. It just might work.

“Last I talked to her,” Caleigh’s father said, “she didn’t want nothing more to do with you, mister.”

The
mister
hit him like a cruise missile, and he faltered. Over the years, Danny and Caleigh’s father had come close to something like genuine friendship. They kidded around when they were together and genuinely liked each other’s company. And now Danny was “mister.” He sighed. He didn’t know what to say.

“Mom and I, we just don’t know what to make of this.”

Mom and I.
That was missile number two. Caleigh’s parents called each other Mom and Dad. They were the linchpins of a big, hearty family that radiated generosity and good humor. They lived on a ranch in a place that was so wide open that you couldn’t see a single artificial light at night—except maybe a plane, and then it would be so high up you couldn’t tell it from a star. Ultimate Frisbee with the tribe, shooting the breeze on the porch gliders, pinochle games. Without Caleigh, he’d be losing all that, too.

“Always thought you and Cay would get married one day,” Clint told him. “Give us a bunch of artsy-fartsy grandkids.” He chuckled.

“I
want
to marry her,” Danny swore. “But I can’t get close enough to ask her. She won’t . . . she won’t even talk to me.”

There was so much to say that neither of them said anything for a long while. Finally, Clint asked, “So how’d you get on her shit list?” Before Danny could reply, Clint added, “Never mind. I oughta know better.”

“It was . . . really stupid,” Danny told him.

Clint sighed. A long prairie sigh. “Let me guess. Another dame.”

A dame.
Danny almost laughed. But what he said was: “It was in another country, and . . . I was drunk.”

“That’s exactly what
I
said when I hit Ralph Tanner’s dog,” Clint remarked. “Except it wasn’t in another country and, besides—the dog was still dead, you know?”

“Yeah,” Danny replied. “I know.”

“Thing about Cay is, she don’t have what you’d call ‘a forgiving spirit.’ ”

“I know.”

“Not at all.”

“Not at all at all,” Danny added. It was an Evans family expression, and Clint chuckled when Danny used it.

“You got that right,” he said.

“Listen, Clint . . . I got an idea. Maybe a way of getting her back.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. But I need a video.”

“What kind of ‘video’?” Clint asked.

“Anything with Caleigh. Just a couple of minutes. A birthday party or . . . didn’t you have something with her playing lacrosse?”

“What do you want it for?”

Danny hesitated. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“Why?” The guy didn’t back off at all. Not at all at all.

“I don’t know. I just thought . . . I thought if I made a film—and she liked it—it might help me to get my foot in the door.”

Clint grunted—a grudging sound—and Danny could hear that he wasn’t sure he believed him. Finally, he said, “I guess I could help you out.”

“Great!” Danny heaved a sigh of relief.

“I just hope you get through to her,” Clint told him. “I never thought I’d say this, because the first time she brings you out here, I was skeptical. A vegetarian
artist
? Hoo, boy. But I think you’re the one for our Cay.”

Jake helped him. They took the video to a place called Technicality and had it digitized. Then they downloaded the trial module of Simulacra software from Sistema’s Beta site, loading it onto Jake’s IMac. Danny was glad the Web site was still up, though Jake told him you could find similar software on other sites. There were half a dozen companies working on the technology.

Finding a useful rock-climbing video was harder. Though Google generated 109,000 hits, only a few of the sites made clips available for downloading, and of these, almost all of them were of men. So it took a while, but after an hour he found what he was looking for: a young woman free-climbing a vertical rock face in Australia’s Blue Mountains.

“And now,” Jake said, “for the Vulcan mind merge.”

The machine whirred as the Simulacra program executed. Two hours later, they had a fifty-three-second video that showed Caleigh in close-up, hanging off the side of one of the Three Sisters, her legs splayed as she searched for her next handhold. Then the camera drew back even more to show her from a distance. She was navigating an overhang suitable only for a fly when she missed her hold and fell, plummeting—not to her death, as it turned out, but thirty or forty feet before the rope caught. The camera zoomed in on the little figure, twirling above the abyss at the end of her brightly colored rope. Her eyebrows were raised, and there was a smile on her lips that seemed to say,
Thank you, Jesus!
—but which in reality was the reaction of a child seeing a birthday cake.

It was Caleigh to the core and, except for the fact that the climber was only nine years old and dressed not in rock-climbing gear but in jeans, cowboy boots, and a yellow sweater with pandas on the back, the video was entirely realistic.

“That’s unbelievable!” Jake exclaimed.

“Isn’t it!?” Danny said.

“I mean—whoa—it’s a little scary.”

“You think?”

They watched it again. And again.

“Caleigh’s knuckles will turn white just looking at it!” Jake announced. “It’s unbelievable—and you
will
make your point.”

Danny nodded, feeling a little subdued and uneasy. This was the only way he could think of to get her back, but he was a little superstitious about it. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to use Zebek’s software to trick the woman he loved into forgiving him. It could be bad karma.
Then again,
he thought,
it could be “poetic justice.” And if there was ever a case of the means justifying the end, this was it because the end was love, and love is all you need. John Lennon said so. Or was it Paul?
He vowed to the god of Second Chances that he would be worthy of an answered prayer. Anyway, he’d tell her the truth, someday, he really—

“Earth to Danny! Hello?”

“What?” He looked up from the IMac.

“I said, you
will
make your point!”

“My ‘point . . . ’?”

“
You
know: that you can’t believe your eyes.”

He waited until the day of the opening, when everything was done—so he still had something to look forward to in case the video didn’t work out. He bought an armload of daisies from three different flower shops and, to his relief, found that Caleigh hadn’t bothered to change the locks at the apartment. So at least he didn’t have to break in.

Being in the apartment was weird—and not just because of all the daisies he strewed around. Caleigh had boxed up all his belongings and stacked them in a corner. It was like visiting a place where someone had died. Especially with the flowers.

He was in the apartment for twenty minutes before he heard her on the stairs, and when she came in he was sitting on the couch with a flower in his teeth and his heart in his mouth. She did not look happy to see him.

“Cute,” she said, hanging her handbag on the coatrack next to the door. “Very romantic. Now, get out.”

He let the flower drop. “Before I go—”

“Out.”

“Hang on—just gimme a second. Remember that e-mail I sent? Where I told you not to believe your eyes? Remember?”

She looked away. “No. Maybe. I don’t know. The only e-mail I remember is your little video.” She paused. “Do you mind? I’d like to take a bath.”

“No. I mean, look—I didn’t send that thing. Swear to God.”

She peered at him. “Then who did?” Before he could answer, she threw up her hands and said, “And it doesn’t matter, anyway. It doesn’t matter who sent it!”

“But it does. It matters more than anything—because it wasn’t real. Let me show you.” He held up the video that he and Jake had made.

“No thanks,” she told him, looking bored and angry, all at once.

“Caleigh. I want you to marry me.”

Her face flushed. “
Marry
you?!”

“Yeah!”

Her eyes fell to the cassette. “And what’s that? Part Two?”

“No. It’s actually . . . you.”

“Right.”

“I mean it,” Danny told her. “It’s only about a minute long. And after you look at it, if you still want me to leave . . . I will.”

“Deal,” she growled. Plucking the video from his hands, she slid it into the VCR and waited for the cassette to load. With her arms crossed and her lower lip sticking out. Finally, she pressed
PLAY
.

He couldn’t see her face, actually. She was looking at the TV with her back to him, but when he heard her gasp he knew that he had a shot. She was terrified of heights and anyway, there was no way it was real.

When she turned to look at him, her face was a study in bewilderment. “So the e-mail attachment you sent—”

“I didn’t send it.” He gestured toward the computer screen where, even now, the virtual Caleigh dangled from a rope. “It’s a trick,” he told her. “A software trick.”

“Well, I know one thing,” she said, her voice cool. “I know that’s not me.” There was something in her eyes, a skeptical glint that sent a shaft of dread through him. He felt shaky, almost dizzy, certain that somehow she recognized the video as the desperate ploy that it was.
Same brain,
he thought, and at that instant her gaze sharpened, almost as if he’d spoken.

She studied him for a long moment. He hoped that she might accept the video as a bridge to the future, a construct that would allow them to get past this. He hoped that she guessed the truth, but that even so she would find it in her heart to forgive him.