Bestiary

“Mr. al-Kalli?” Beth asked. “I don’t believe I know him.”

“The Beasts of Eden,” she said, peremptorily, “the bestiary. I messengered the photos to you.”

“I’m still not following.”

“Mr. al-Kalli is the owner of the book! The man who is asking us to study and restore it.”

“Oh,” Beth said, at last making the connection. But the cover letter from Mrs. Cabot had never named the owner of The Beasts of Eden, and she wondered now if she should bring that up in her own defense.

When Carter did. “Oh yes, honey, don’t you remember that you told me there was an exciting new project for you, but that the owner of the work had chosen to remain anonymous?” He turned to Mrs. Cabot. “Beth was very pleased”—he knew enough not to divulge to Mrs. Cabot that his wife might have shared any details with him—“but I thought she was purposely concealing the owner. Now I guess she wasn’t.”

Mrs. Cabot was momentarily stymied. “Oh yes, that’s right,” she conceded, “he had asked to remain anonymous.” Then, quickly picking up the cudgels again, “But I’ve just been told that he has decided to come here, quite unexpectedly, tonight. He expressly wants to meet you, Beth, as you will be the person in charge of the project.”

Beth wished that she’d been given more notice — it might have been nice to prepare some thoughts and a few remarks about how she planned to proceed — but she was pleased, too. The few photos she’d been given of the mythical creatures depicted in the manuscript had been striking, beautiful, and even, in a way, haunting. The fact that the book was of Middle Eastern origin — the information so far provided to her had been fairly sketchy — made it all the more intriguing. Not many manuscripts from that region had survived so well, and for so long.

“In fact,” Mrs. Cabot said, glancing up at the top of the stairs leading to the garden, “that’s Mr. al-Kalli now.”

Beth and Carter followed her gaze. A bald man, somewhere in his fifties perhaps, wearing an impeccably cut black suit, was standing with military rectitude on the top step, surveying the party as a general might survey a battlefield. He was flanked on one side by a surly teenage boy — Carter could see his scowl even from here — and on the other by a stocky man, clearly a bodyguard, who hung one deferential step back.

Mrs. Cabot raised a hand to signal their whereabouts, and the guard, spotting her, leaned toward his employer.

As Mr. al-Kalli approached, he took off his sunglasses and slipped them into the inside pocket of his suit coat; the waning sunlight glinted off his eyes, reminding Carter of the glittering obsidian on the beaches of Hawaii. His skin was a burnished gold, and the perfect dome of his head looked as if it had been buffed to a high sheen with a chamois cloth.

He introduced himself and his son, Mehdi — who shrugged and looked away — but said nothing of the guard, who now stood several feet back, his head turning slowly from side to side, taking in everything and everyone, in close proximity to his boss. Mrs. Cabot seemed flustered — odd, Carter thought, for someone whose job brought her into such close contact with the high and mighty all the time — but Beth remained poised and collected. One of the countless things Carter admired about her.

“I know quite a lot about you, Ms. Elizabeth Cox,” Mr. al-Kalli said with a slight smile.

“You do?”

“Oh yes,” he said. His voice was very smooth, and he spoke with an upper-crust English accent. “And all of it, I may say, is good.”

Beth put the back of her hand to her brow, as if in relief.

“It’s why I came tonight. I wanted to meet the woman who is going to take charge, as it were, of my family’s most precious possession.”

“From what I’ve seen of it,” Beth said, “it’s a beautiful piece of work.”

“Oh, it’s more than that,” al-Kalli said. “It’s the legacy of my family, it’s the source, some would say, of our… enduring.”

Beth didn’t know quite what to make of this, but she said, “We’ll take every precaution to make sure no harm comes to it.”

“I know you will,” he said. “I have had a thorough study of your career done — you graduated with highest honors from Barnard College, you did exceptional work in London, you have dealt, scrupulously, with some of the finest Old Master works in the world—”

He had done his homework, Beth thought, though his recitation was starting to give her the chills.

“—and your previous monographs on medieval manuscripts have been both accessible and intelligent.” He glanced over at Carter, “And I don’t need to tell you how inaccessible, to the layman, many of these scholarly works tend to be.”

Now Carter found himself in the spotlight — and he didn’t know why.

“You, too, I know something about.” He listed several of Carter’s accomplishments — from the discovery of the Well of the Bones to his appointment to the Kingsley Chair at NYU, and on to his recent post at the Page Museum — before adding, “I do my homework, you see.”

His lips curled in a tiny, self-satisfied smile, as if he’d just performed a popular parlor trick. Carter sensed that he liked to do this, to gain the upper hand.

“You forgot to mention the fact that I won the American Legion Good Citizenship medal in my senior year of high school.”

“At Evanston Township High School,” al-Kalli replied. “You were also the valedictorian,” he added, and now Carter really was nonplussed. “But may I borrow Beth for a few moments?” he continued. “There are just a few things I want to go over with her.” To his son, he said, “Have something to eat, and Jakob”—to the guard—“make sure he does not drink anything but soda.”

Beth felt herself taken by the elbow and steered toward the less-tenanted portion of the garden. The Getty Center was built high atop a hill on the west side of Los Angeles, and from here it commanded a panoramic view of the city below. Sometimes, when Beth had been closeted all day in the galleries or the conservation lab, she would come out here just to breathe the air and look out into the far distance; she felt like she was exercising her eyes, giving them a chance, after hours of intensive work, to range freely over a great distance, all the way to the soothing blue of the Pacific Ocean beyond. Tonight, with the sun going down, the view was especially magnificent.

But her focus right now had to remain on al-Kalli, who was busy telling her what methods he wanted employed to restore the manuscript, what methods he definitely did not, and what information he hoped to glean from her study of the manuscript. She also had the distinct impression that he just wanted to spend a bit more time in her company, making sure of his decision, getting a feel for her. Everything he was telling her could just as easily have been written in a cover letter or introductory document — indeed, she was sure it had — but al-Kalli seemed to want something more than that. He was like a climber who wanted to make sure of his partner before a difficult ascent. Can I rely on you? Are you trustworthy? Although she knew he wasn’t actually putting his life in her hands, she sensed that he wanted her to feel that way.

When he had finished, Beth said in her most reassuring tones, “It’s an extraordinary manuscript, and there’s no better place than the Getty to have this work done.” She felt like a summer camp director taking responsibility for someone’s child.

He studied her face, as if reading it for any further clues. And then, apparently satisfied, he put his sunglasses back on and clasped his hands behind his back. Turning his gaze to the fading gold of the horizon, he said, “I will have it delivered to you.”

CHAPTER SIX

The car, a Mercedes-Benz limousine, looked like any other of its kind — long and black, gleaming and powerful. But this one had a secret: It was built to withstand almost any attack. Its entire chassis — posts, columns, door frames, roof — had been buttressed with high-hardened steel, reinforced fiberglass, and ballistic