The Einstein Prophecy (14 page)

His approval didn’t matter to her. Only his access to the ossuary did.

Delaney used his key ring to open the side door to the museum lobby, then turned off the internal alarm and led her through the galleries, faintly illuminated by night-lights, and back to the locked door of the conservation wing. As he fumbled with the keys—Was he as nervous as she was?—she could see a crack of light under the threshold and hear the faint scraping of metal on a hardwood floor. She hoped that Lucas hadn’t jumped the gun and started the work without them.

Inside, she found that the door was nearly blocked by all the spindly easels and old crates that the army crew, or Lucas himself, had moved out of the way in order to clear a perimeter around the ossuary, which was now bathed in the glare of several spotlights mounted all around it. It looked like a magazine photo shoot. Lucas himself was standing on a cinder block, adjusting the lens on a movie camera fixed to a sturdy tripod. He lifted one hand to signal that he had seen them, but otherwise continued with what he was doing.

Delaney carried the Gladstone bag to a nearby worktable and unclasped its handles. An old, thin mattress, the kind used on dormitory cots, was tucked under the table.

Simone wasn’t sure where she should go or what she should do. She considered taking her coat off and draping it on one of the stools, as Delaney had just done, but there was something chilly, and discomfiting, about the room.

“Looks like this is going to be a Cecil B. DeMille production,” Delaney joked.

But Lucas was still so absorbed in the camera he made no reply.

Simone looked around. It was a big space, cluttered with wooden boxes, stacked canvases, and half-restored sculptures. The clerestory window, the one the bats had apparently flown through, had been securely closed after the incursion. Lucas had spread drop cloths around the base of the pedestal on which the ossuary rested.

Removing his good eye from the viewfinder on the camera, Lucas leaned back and surveyed the setup. He had still not looked directly at her.

“So, whose idea was the movie?” Delaney asked, removing from the bag what Simone now saw was a hacksaw, and laying it on the worktable.

“Colonel Macmillan’s.” Lucas wound a crank on the side of the Bell & Howell Eyemo assembly. “But it was standard procedure in the field, too.”

“Maybe for the Cultural Recovery Commission, it was—I hear you guys got whatever you wanted.” Turning to Simone, he said, “You knew, right, that Lucas here was one of the guys assigned to recover the artworks the Nazis had stolen?”

“I did.” Despite whatever personal problems they had, she would be forever grateful to him for rescuing the ossuary from the Nazi hoard.

Flicking a lever on the camera and positioning himself in front of one of the three lenses on the turret, Lucas announced his name, the date, the time and location of the filming, and, finally, the other dramatis personae.

“Professor Patrick Delaney, of the Princeton Mineralogy and Geophysics Department,” he said, “and . . . um . . .” He didn’t seem to know exactly how to complete the introduction.

“Simone Rashid, PhD Oxford, representing the Egyptian Ministry of Culture,” she said, putting him out of his misery by stepping into full view of the lens as she spoke. “Oh, and currently an interim professor attached to the Middle Eastern Studies Department here.”

Then, like an extra who had strayed onto the center of the stage, she dutifully took one big step back. Unless she was mistaken, Lucas had visibly blushed when she’d stood at his side.

“Yes, thanks for that,” Lucas mumbled, and finally gave her a glance, at once so bashful and sincere that it threw her into further confusion. Maybe he wasn’t the only one feeling some unacknowledged current passing between them, she thought. He flicked off the camera in order to preserve the remaining film in the canister.

“I see you’ve got a blowtorch there,” Delaney said, taking an inventory of the tools Lucas had laid out on the table. “I wouldn’t recommend it. If you try to use it to sever the chains, it’s going to scorch the alabaster for sure, and you’re going to get a very nasty chemical reaction.” Holding up his own hacksaw, he said, “Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.”

Lucas acceded, and then asked Simone if she could run the movie camera while he helped with the removal of the chains.

“I’ve never done that before,” she confessed. The Egyptian ministry was lucky if it could procure a still camera.

“There’s nothing to it,” he said, guiding her up onto the cinder block. “You just direct the lens by looking through here—the focus is already set—and flick this lever forward to begin filming, and backward to stop. I’ve loaded extra stock, so we have a total running time of almost fifteen minutes.”

Simone took up her position, glad in a way to have something to do, and watched as Lucas, wearing heavy-duty work gloves, lifted the first chain away from the lid of the ossuary—it allowed for only an inch or two of leeway—and wedged a protective cloth underneath it.

“Start rolling,” he said, and as she put her eye to the viewfinder and pushed the lever forward, she felt the low hum of the spring-wound camera vibrating against her cheek.

Lucas held the chain taut as he watched Delaney, wearing his own gloves, place the blade of the hacksaw to the links. He could hardly believe that this time had come, that within a matter of minutes he would finally know what the ossuary contained. After only a half-dozen strokes, the rusty links gave way, dissolving into a gingery powder.

“Hope it all goes that smoothly,” Delaney said.

“Hear, hear,” Lucas said, noting that his pulse had begun to race. Curiosity was quickly overtaking his anxiety.

The next chain, however, did not yield as easily. It took some persistent sawing to remove it. For the last one, directly positioned over the diamond shape that he had yet to identify, Lucas said, “Let’s switch,” and took the saw into his own hands. This spot was too delicate to risk incurring any damage.

“Be my guest,” said Delaney, lifting the last links as far from the alabaster surface as the chain would allow. “This is your baby.”

Lucas touched the blade to the chain and pulled it back as if he were drawing the bow across a violin. Flakes of rust fell onto the soft rags wedged underneath. He pushed the blade forward again, and this time larger flakes fell, like ashes from an open fire. After several more strokes, the link broke, and the two ends of the chain slithered off of the sarcophagus like snakes racing back to their burrows. One of them coiled over Lucas’s shoe, and he involuntarily shuddered as he kicked it aside.

“Should I keep filming?” Simone said as the two men stood back to assess the next step.

“No, hold on for a second,” Lucas said, retrieving the thin mattress from under the worktable, then wedging it on the floor at the top end of the ossuary. “We’re going to slide the lid off lengthwise. That way, we can support it from both sides all the way.”

“Gotcha,” Delaney said. “Say when.”

Lucas took a deep breath, and got as firm a grip as he could on the smooth white stone. Even through his gloves he could feel how cold it was. After instructing Simone to start rolling again, he said, “On three,” and at the end of the count, he and Delaney gently pushed in the same direction. At first, the lid went nowhere, as though it were riveted in place, and Lucas wondered if it somehow had been. But there were no indications of that—no nails, no bore holes in the sides of the box—so he counted it off again and they both pushed harder. This time, there was a tiny grinding noise, as the accumulated grit of the centuries began to crumble under their exertions.

“At least we know that we can budge it,” Delaney said, brushing grains of sand from his gloves.

Lucas nodded, his gaze fixed on the capering creatures carved along the borders of the lid. For the first time—no doubt it was just the peculiar angle from which he was viewing them—he thought he detected a gleeful expression on one or two.

“Again?” Delaney said, bending slightly to put his shoulder into it.

“Again.”

Together, they pushed the lid farther along the length of the box, fully a foot or two, before they both had to take a breather. The bottom of the interior was now exposed, though even the glare from the surrounding lights somehow failed to penetrate it. Lucas didn’t want to look, anyway. He wanted to wait until the lid was entirely, and safely, removed, and then take in the contents all at once. He checked to see that Simone was following the action, then returned to the task.

The ponderous lid scraped along the rim of the sarcophagus until enough of it protruded over the top end that Lucas had to change positions. With Delaney pushing from the bottom, while he kept the slab balanced, they were finally able to tilt it on end, and from there lower it flat, with a resounding thump, against the mattress. A cloud of dust rose from the old mattress, and the ossuary itself, as if exhaling, released a gust of acrid air, a smell like burnt matches and desert sand. Lucas barely had time to turn his head away and catch a breath of less tainted air when he heard Simone murmur, from behind the camera, “Oh my God.”

Straightening, he turned to the open box. Delaney was standing mute, staring into it. Lucas’s eye jumped from the jumble of bones to the crooked staff, and from that to the ancient iron crucifix—or was it silver, dulled by the centuries?—all lying helter-skelter inside. He had certainly expected to find skeletal human remains, but he had not expected—nor, apparently, had Simone—to find so
many
bones, including two separate skulls, only one of which was plainly human. The other one was more perplexing. Smaller, and with a sloping brow and unusually close eye sockets, it might have been the skull of an ape, or even a hideously deformed child.

“Are you getting this?” Lucas asked, and Simone, still manning the camera, said, “Yes,” in a hushed tone.

Lucas leaned forward, and as if under some strange compulsion, lifted the odd skull from the heap of other bones and artifacts. Like Hamlet staring into the empty orbs of poor Yorick, he held it up for closer scrutiny.

“Something’s going wrong with the camera,” Simone said. “Everything’s getting blurry.”

Before Lucas could even think to come to her aid, he felt an even stranger sensation—a feeling that the yellowed skull was somehow looking
back
at him. A shiver descended his spine, and a breeze stirred the hair on his head. He looked at Delaney—his hair was blowing, too, and Simone, he saw, was struggling to keep her balance on the cinder block. A wind had sprung up in the room, out of nowhere, and was rustling the tarps around the base of the pedestal, making the paintings quiver on the creaking easels.

Delaney said, “Put it back,” and Simone, nearly falling, left the camera running, its lens pivoting on the tripod as she stepped down to the floor, hugging herself as though she were freezing.

Lucas dropped the skull back among the other bones, but the turbulence only grew stronger, as if something unseen was gathering speed and racing around the room in search of escape. The new window groaned in its frame, the glass splintered but held, and though it might only have been the wind, Lucas thought he heard a low moan from behind the crates piled around the door.

The spotlights flickered and dimmed, and before they came back on again, there was a banging sound as the door was flung open so violently that the hinges squeaked and the wood cracked.

The wind followed, sucked out into the dark galleries, leaving an eerie emptiness in the room. The camera had swiveled toward the door, and it clicked and whirred as the last of the film was depleted. Simone’s teeth were chattering, and Lucas instinctively went to her and wrapped her in a bear hug—a hug she did not resist.

“Did that just happen?” Delaney said, slumping against a worktable and passing his hand across his eyes in disbelief.

“Yes,” Simone whispered, so low it was as if she were speaking only to herself.

Lucas said nothing, though he, too, had been gravely affected. Inside him now, there was a melancholy ache, a sorrow more profound than any he had ever known. He sensed that he had served as a conduit, however fleetingly, for something suddenly free and wild, something as old as time, and unutterably bad.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Get out of here!” Andy Brandt shouted at the kids gathered around the Caithness Man’s display case. “Go to school!”

“Make us!” one of them retorted.

“It’s a Saturday!” another one said.

But they did disperse, scooting around him and out the door of Guyot Hall, hooting and hollering as they skipped down the front steps. Those damn kids treated the collection of artifacts as if they were a freak show, and Andy longed for the chance to give a couple of them a good swat.

He couldn’t risk getting into any trouble with the university, however. It had taken a lot of cunning and a lot of time, to get securely situated there, and anything that called undue attention to him, or his work, would be dangerous to everyone involved. Most of all, to Andy.

Besides, he thought, as he unlocked the door to his cluttered first-floor lab, he had other, more immediate problems.

For one, he had felt like crap since sneaking into the conservation room with the key he’d secretly copied off of Delaney’s ring. From his perch behind the crates and easels stacked by the door, he’d only been able to see bits and pieces of what was going on. But he’d seen enough to know that it was an undertaking of great significance.

A movie camera had been set up, with that Egyptian woman running it, and although what Lucas and Delaney said to each other had been largely inaudible to him, he could hear their grunts and groans as they had sawed through the chains and removed the lid from a white stone chest. An ossuary, to be precise—the one his superiors back in Berlin had been tracking.

It was pure luck that Brandt had already been safely ensconced at Princeton when the thing arrived on campus. For purposes the Reich chose to keep secret, his original mission had been to keep a close eye on the radio isotope experiments being conducted in Delaney’s lab; no fool, Andy had surmised the reason had something to do with the invention of new weaponry. Then, out of the blue, this ossuary had shown up, and virtually overnight, all of the priorities had changed. It was enough to make Andy’s head spin.

“The artifact was stolen from the Führer’s own collection,” the encoded telegraph message had said. “It is critical to the war effort.”

A box of old bones
?

“Alert us to any developments. Procure and immediately transmit any information relating to its study, disposition, or relocation.”

Okay, he’d thought. He would do as he was told.

Only, something very odd had happened the moment the box was opened. A chill wind had inexplicably sprung up out of nowhere, as if there were air filters or fans hidden around the room. He’d hunkered down, afraid that the easels might topple over and blow his cover, but something even more troubling had occurred instead. He’d felt certain that there was something in that wind, something sentient, though invisible—how crazy was that?—and that it was careening around the room, like a wild beast desperately searching for a way out of a trap. He’d been knocked flat, shivering, and when he could get back on all fours, he’d made a mad scramble for the door. Running through the dark gallery, he’d been sure something was following close on his heels, but he’d been too afraid to stop, or even look back.

All the way to his apartment, one dingy room on Harrison Street, where the grad students and preceptors lived, he’d had that same sense of something nipping at his heels. Once or twice, he had even imagined he heard a weird gibbering at his ear. Home, he’d slammed the door shut, thrown the bolt lock, and then slumped, utterly out of breath, against the edge of the bed, where his transmitter was cleverly concealed inside a compartment cut into the box spring.

But whatever sense of relief or safety he’d expected, it had not come. He didn’t feel that he had locked anything out.

On the contrary, he felt that he had locked something in.

Under the shower, even with the hot water running at full blast, he couldn’t get warm. After making his brief and surreptitious nightly broadcast to his foreign contact, he had gotten into bed with every blanket and sheet he owned piled on top of him. What the hell was wrong with him? Had he suddenly caught the flu, or some bizarre disease carried on that wind out of nowhere? It wasn’t like he’d be able to ask any of the others—Delaney, Lucas, or that Simone somebody—if they were feeling ill themselves. To do that, he’d have had to admit he’d been there in the first place.

The next morning, he’d awakened feeling even worse, so bad he’d contemplated going to the campus infirmary. He hadn’t felt like himself. Brushing his teeth, he hadn’t felt it was his own hand, under his own control, holding the brush. Shaving, he’d been wary of holding the blade close to his own neck. His eyes had a faint yellowish cast, like jaundice, and more than once he’d had the bizarre impression that someone else was looking out of them.

Even his actions had felt slightly . . . remote. Delayed. His mind had gone to a terrible place, to fatal diseases of muscular degeneration. He’d dropped to the floor and done a set of pushups, just to be sure that he still could. Then he had jogged in place with the radio news on. The war wasn’t going so well for the Axis powers on the Western Front. The four-hundred-mile long Siegfried Line, built by Hitler in the late 1930s to protect the borders of the old German empire, was under attack. A CBS reporter announced, “With any luck, the German redoubts are going to fall like dominoes. It won’t be easy—nothing in war ever is—but it looks like it will just be a matter of time before the Stars and Stripes are flying over the Fatherland.”

What, he had wondered, would happen to him when the war ended? In victory, his future would be assured . . . but in defeat? Would he wind up marooned in America?

But then, in a stroke of luck he could never have foreseen, Lucas and Delaney had dropped into his lap exactly what he wanted—a batch of bones and bone fragments that Andy knew had come straight out of that ossuary.

Pretending ignorance, he’d asked, “Where did these come from?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Lucas had replied.

“It does to an anthropologist.”

“Okay, then, from an anonymous donor. I just need you to tell me, as soon as possible, everything you can about their origin and anatomy.”

Sorting through them, Andy had seen a femur and a fibula, a tibia, a patella, a scapula, assorted odds and ends, and two skulls, one plainly misshapen.

“I’m especially interested,” Lucas had said, “in what they’re from—human or animal—and in how the creatures died. I also want to know if there are any signs of violence or disease having played a part. Can you do that for me?”

Not wanting to betray his eagerness, Andy’d said, “Well, I do have a lot of prep work to do for my senior seminar in—”

“Skip it. Do this first.”

And so he had. So he had.

Drawing the stool up to the lab counter now, he picked up where he had left off the day before—with the last fragment he had been working on. It was a nub of yellowed bone the size of a fat thumb, with a blunt base and sharpened end—and he held it again under the high-intensity lamp.

A knock sounded, and the door opened just enough for Lucas to put his head in. Andy had always meant to ask him how he’d lost that eye.

“Glad to see you’re hard at it,” Lucas said, coming in.

“That’s what you do when you don’t have tenure.”

“If it’s any comfort, I don’t either.”

“Maybe so, but they’re not going to let a combat veteran like you, a war hero, go.”

Lucas didn’t take the bait and divulge anything. Coming close enough to see the stub that Andy was studying, he asked, “That
is
one of the bones I gave you, right?”

“Yep.”

“So, what’s the verdict?”

Andy put it down. “I can tell you what it
isn’t
,” he said. Even then, he had to wonder if he should be sharing his findings so freely. After all, it wasn’t like Lucas and Delaney were his allies.

“Why don’t you start by telling me what you
do
know about the bones.”

But if he
didn’t
share what he had learned, he might find himself cut off from any further teamwork on this project—a project his superiors deemed of the utmost importance. “What I do know is that we’ve got a pretty eclectic selection here.” For the time being, he decided to err, if err it was, on the side of cooperation. Gesturing at the human skull and some other bones arranged on a worktable in the corner, he said, “Over there, we’ve got one almost complete skeleton.”

“Of what?”

“A man, on the tall side, and, putting aside the evident antiquity of the bones, very elderly. I know Delaney has some other samples—has he figured out anything of their actual age?” he asked innocently.

“They’re old. Maybe a couple of thousand years. Go on.”

“Okay,” Andy said, drawing the word out.

“Do you know what he died of?”

“Hard to say with any certainty. I can tell you that he led a hell of a hard life. There’s evidence of extreme nutritional deficiencies, along with more marks of physical violence than I can count, ranging from scratches and bites to fractures and bone breaks. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy had been a soldier or a gladiator or maybe even a slave. In any case, he took a lot of beatings.”

Lucas nodded, absorbing it all.

“I mean, by the end of his life, the guy had maybe six fingers and three teeth left, and judging from the indentation of the right zygomatic bone, I’d be surprised if he still had that eye at all.” He paused before adding, “Sorry, I guess you know how that goes.”

Ignoring the apology, Lucas said, “What about the other skull and fragments?”

Andy shrugged and turned on his stool to face the counter right behind him. “This one’s much more of a puzzle.”

“Why?”

He held up the smaller skull with its sloping brow, broad nasal plane, and unusually elongated mouth, to which several pointed incisors still clung. “You might think it’s human—and it’s close—but there are enough substantial anomalies to rule that out. I assumed it was one of our close simian cousins, maybe one of them that had died young, before it had grown to its full proportions.”

“And is it?”

“The contours of the bones and some of the tiny cartilaginous remnants are what you might expect to find in a sample like that,” Andy conceded, “but then there are some things that you definitely wouldn’t.”

“Such as?”

“Such as this,” he said, picking up the nubbin he’d been studying when Lucas came in.

“It looks like a shard of stone to me.”

“Oh, no, it’s not that. It’s definitely organic.”

“Is it a finger? You said the other skeleton was missing several of them.”

“It’s not that, either.”

“I don’t have all day, Brandt. What are you getting at?”

“A horn. It’s a piece of horn, like from a goat.”

“Okay, it’s from a goat.”

“Only it’s not. And it’s not from a bull or a rhino or anything else I can think of offhand.” He twirled it under the lamp. “Of course, it might help if you could provide me with some salient information on how and where you found it.” It was time, he thought, for a little quid pro quo. He wanted to hear, from Lucas himself, what he already knew about the ossuary. He wanted to elicit at least that one small vote of trust.

“I told you, it doesn’t matter,” Lucas replied distractedly. “Just put down everything you’ve told me in a written report, right away. I need it.”

“Who for?”

Now Lucas looked irritated. “Has it ever occurred to you simply to do what you’re asked?”

“Has it ever occurred to you that you’re not my boss?” Andy shot back, before he could stop himself. “You’re not even in my department. I’m the one doing you the favor.”

Lucas couldn’t argue with that, and Andy knew it. Still, it wasn’t a smart move to piss him off; he should have held his tongue.

“You’re right,” Lucas replied, in an even tone of voice that Andy could see was costing him. “Slip it under my study door at your earliest convenience.”

Well, that had not been the most fruitful exchange, Andy thought—he’d given out plenty, and he’d received nothing in return, except for the renewed sense that these bones were important—very important—and it behooved him to figure out why.

For the next couple of hours, he worked on the written report, while sipping hot tea one moment to warm himself up, and a glass of cold water the next to cool himself down. It was as if his body was at war with itself. Outside, he could hear the occasional sound of a tuba or a trombone blaring as a marching band member made his way down toward the stadium. There was a football game that afternoon, though he could not recall the opponent. Was it Columbia, or maybe Dartmouth? On the one hand, he tried to participate in all these collegiate events; he wanted to give the impression he was devoted to the school and to his employment there, however tenuous. In truth, though, he couldn’t stand all this rah-rah nonsense. At Heidelberg, the university had been a temple dedicated to things of the mind, not the body, and that was just one of the myriad ways in which the German system, in his estimation, surpassed the American.

He was getting too tired to see straight. The notes he was typing up were rife with misspellings, and his back was killing him from sitting on the stool. Shutting down the lab, he put on his coat, locked the door behind him, and went out into the dim exhibition hall.