emirs. We were offered but two choices — servitude or death — and so, under the Banner of Heaven we went forth to meet the enemy. It was in the first hours of that battle that I was made prisoner, and while those in my company fell to the curved blade of the Saracen, I was spared by the Grace of God and by the peculiar skills of my hand. A commander of the infidels, judging by my tools that I was capable of both art and writing, ordered that I be taken not as a prisoner, but as an honored guest, to his palace. It is here that I write these last words, tomorrow to become but blood sport in the garden of this dread ruler, once my patron and now my executioner, the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli.
Even though she might have expected it, Beth was still stunned at seeing the al-Kalli name. Mohammed had not been mistaken;
“Which tie should I wear?” Carter said, coming out of the closet with two different ones draped around his neck, and laughed when he saw Beth, still sitting on the edge of the bed in her underwear, utterly absorbed in the pages. “You’re worse than I am,” he said. “You’ve got to get dressed or we’ll be late.”
She heard him, but she just couldn’t change her focus quite yet.
“Beth?” he said. “Earth to Beth? It’s six forty-five.”
“You won’t believe what I just read,” she said, and then she told him about the mention of the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli’s name.
“Mohammed will be glad to hear about it,” Carter said, “if we ever get there.”
She laid the printouts on the bed.
“Tie?” he reminded her.
“Oh — the one with the blue stripes.”
“Of course, that all depends,” he called out from the bathroom where he’d gone to put on the striped tie, “on whether or not you decide to tell him about your little discovery.”
That very question had been tormenting Beth; on the one hand, she hadn’t yet been able to get the whole thing translated, and she didn’t want to share what she had found until she absolutely
She could not put off telling him for very much longer.
She quickly finished dressing — a simple black dress, heels, a strand of pearls her aunt had bequeathed to her — and left Robin with all her final babysitting instructions. Joey was in his playpen, absorbed in his toys. Although they drove to Bel-Air in Beth’s car, a white Volvo that was a little newer (and a lot cleaner) than Carter’s Jeep, Carter took the wheel and Beth navigated. Once or twice they had to stop and consult their Thomas Guide.
“Dark up here, isn’t it?” Carter said, as Beth confirmed that they were to bear to the left, and not the right.
Beth was surprised at it, too. They’d only been in L.A. for less than a year, and nothing so far had taken them into the heady precincts of upper Bel-Air. She felt as if they’d been driving up and away from the rest of the city, from all the ordinary people, like themselves, who led ordinary lives, and she imagined a celebrity or studio head or tycoon of one kind or another behind every towering hedge or shuttered pair of gates.
The houses up here were getting fewer and farther between, and most of the time all you could really see was the tip of a gable, the hint of a roofline, or, now and again, the back fence of a tennis court.
“Al-Kalli’s should be at the very crest,” Beth said, putting down the map. For the distance of several blocks already, the street had felt more like a private drive, and straight ahead they could now see a lighted gatehouse. As they pulled up, a squat Asian man in a blue uniform checked their name off the invitation list and told them to follow the drive — but slowly. “The peacocks sometimes stand in the road,” he said.
“Peacocks?” Carter said to Beth as they drove, slowly, onto the grounds.
And sure enough, there they were — a flock of them, their tail feathers fanned out in a beautiful display of blue and gold, strutting around the lip of a splashing fountain.
“An awfully good replica of the Trevi,” Carter said of the ornately sculpted fountain.
“What makes you think it’s a copy?” Beth said, and Carter laughed.
“You could be right,” he said. “What’s next? The Eiffel Tower?”
At the top of the winding drive, in front of a massive stone and timber manor house, a valet in a red jacket stepped into the drive and gestured for them to stop. Another valet materialized out of the dark and swiftly opened Beth’s door. Carter could see a dozen other cars lined up neatly in front of a garage wing. All the cars were Bentleys or Jaguars or BMWs, with the lone exception of a dusty green Mustang off at the far end. They were ushered up the front steps and into a spacious, marble-floored foyer, with a wide, winding staircase on both sides; ahead of them they could hear music, and a maid in a white skirt and cap escorted them out to the back garden, where a string quartet in formal attire was playing Brahms under the boughs of a jacaranda tree.
Al-Kalli, spotting them, stepped away from a small group of people and came forward with his hand extended. “I was beginning to fear that you wouldn’t make it,” he said, and Carter apologized for the delay.
A waiter with a silver tray of filled champagne flutes appeared and al-Kalli handed a glass to each of them. His ruby cuff links glittered in the pale glow of the standing lights that had been positioned here and there in the garden.
“Your house is beautiful,” Beth said, and al-Kalli looked up at its mullioned windows and gray stone walls as if taking it in for the first time. “It’s a pity you couldn’t see our palace in Iraq.”
Carter wondered to himself if it was still standing.
“But come and meet the other guests,” al-Kalli said, “we’ll be going in to dinner soon.”
Beth had already noticed several familiar faces, including the wealthy museum patrons the Critchleys and her own boss, Berenice Cabot. The others, an interesting-looking mix of all races and ethnicities, had what appeared to be but one thing in common — money. They all exuded sophistication and style in everything from the cut of their clothes to the way they held themselves. Even as she approached them, she could hear a smattering of accents, a few words in Italian, a mention of the Venice Biennale. Beth and Carter were introduced to everyone as if they, too, were visiting royalty, and as Beth fell into the general conversation — she recognized one of the guests as a board member of the Courtauld Institute, where she had studied in London — she noticed that Carter was drawn off by al-Kalli to meet the one man who seemed not to fit in somehow. He was wearing an ill-fitting suit, and there seemed to be something wrong with his left leg. But then Mrs. Critchley launched into a story about a Mantegna, just on the market, that she thought “someone in Los Angeles really must buy,” and Beth had to shift her attention back to the conversation at hand.
“This is Captain Greer,” al-Kalli was saying to Carter as he drew the two men aside. “Formerly a member of the United States armed forces in Iraq, he is now in my employ, in charge of security.”
Carter started to introduce himself, but the soldier stopped him short. “I know you. You’re the paleontologist.”
Even al-Kalli looked surprised. Impressed a bit, too.
“I saw you on TV,” Greer explained. “You were arguing about Indian artifacts, with some guy named Running Horse.”
“I was hoping nobody’d seen that show.”
“Sorry — too late. But I can’t say I remember your name.”
“Carter Cox.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Al-Kalli smiled. “Well, now that that’s all cleared up, I will leave you two alone for a few minutes. Excuse me.”
Why, Carter wondered, was he leaving them alone? Beth was off in the thick of things, and he was now marooned with this ex-army guy. Just looking at him, Carter could tell this guy was in a bad way. His skin had an unhealthy pallor and there was a dull gleam in his eye that Carter had seen before — usually in friends of his who’d burned out in grad school and gotten hooked on one drug or another.
