Esme said. “The male follows after her. She goes as far as she can, until the river’s so shallow she can’t go any further. That’s where she gives birth. The land carnivores can’t get at her in the water. There aren’t any aquatic carnivores large enough to threaten her that far upriver. And the male swims back and forth to the downriver side, to make sure nothing comes up after her.
“Isn’t that neat?”
Griffin, who had read Salley’s original paper, as well as the later popularization, had to agree. Aloud, however, he said, “You know why I’m here, don’t you, Esme?”
It was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. “It’s time for me to leave.”
“Alas.”
Somebody came up to the table and stood silently waiting for the conversation to end. A servant. His posture was too good for him to be anything else.
“This was the best night of my life,” the girl said fervently. “When I grow up, I’m going to be a paleoicthyologist. A marine ecologist, not a wrangler or a specialist. I want to know everything about the Tethys.”
Leyster was smiling mistily. The kid had really gotten to him. He must’ve been a lot like her when he was that age. “Oh, wait. I almost forgot to give you this.” His hand dipped into a pocket, emerged with the shark’s tooth, dropped it in her palm.
She stared down at it in wonder.
The stranger offered Esme his hand. Evidently, her parents were staying to dance.
The girl left.
She’d had a conversion experience. Griffin knew exactly how it felt. He’d had his standing in front of the Zallinger “Age of Reptiles” mural in the Peabody Museum in New Haven. That was before time travel, when paintings of dinosaurs were about as real as you could get. Nowadays he could point out a hundred inaccuracies in how the dinosaurs were depicted. But on that distant sun-dusty morning in the Atlantis of his youth, he just stood staring at those magnificent brutes, head filled with wonder, until his mother dragged him away.
Thinking about Esme and what would become of her made him sad. For an instant he felt the weight of all his years, every petty accommodation, every unworthy expedience.
Minutes after Esme left, a young woman in a short red dress arrived. She hadn’t been here earlier—Griffin would have noticed. He snatched out his cheat sheet and, stomach souring, read the final item.
As he’d suspected, it was Esme again.
Esme, ten years older.
She’d been a beautiful child. It should be no surprise that she was a beautiful young woman.
She looked around the room anxiously. Her gaze passed right over Griffin. Evidently, she had forgotten him years ago. But when she saw Leyster, her face lit up and she headed straight toward him.
The band began to play. People began to dance. Griffin watched from the far side of the room as Esme explained to Leyster who she was.
She wore a shark’s tooth around her neck on a silken cord.
“Who’s the chippie talking to Leyster?”
Griffin turned. It was Salley. She was smiling in a way he couldn’t read. “It’s a sad story.”
“Then tell me it on the dance floor.”
She took his hand and led him away.
A slow dance is a slow dance the world around. Briefly, Griffin was able to forget himself. Then Salley said, “Well?”
He explained about the girl. “It really is a pity. Esme was so full of curiosity and enthusiasm when she was a child. She’d make a great biologist. But it was her misfortune to be born wealthy. She had dreams. But her parents had too much money to allow that!”
“She could’ve broken away,” Salley said dismissively. “Hell, she still could. She’s young.”
“She won’t.”
“How do you know?”
Griffin knew because he’d glanced through the personnel records for the next hundred years and Esme’s name wasn’t there anywhere. “It’s what happened.”
“Why’s she back here?”
“I suppose she’s reliving her moment of glory. The last time she seriously thought she might make a life for herself.”
Salley watched how the girl put her arms around Leyster’s neck, how she stared deeply into his eyes. Leyster looked spooked. He was definitely out of his depth. “She’s just a headhunter.”
“She doesn’t get to be what she wanted. Why not let her have her consolation prize?”
“So she gets her trophy fuck?” Salley said scornfully. “Much good it will do either of them. He looks ashamed of himself already.”
“Well, things don’t always work out the way we’d like them to.”
They danced for a time. Salley put her head on Griffin’s shoulder, and said, “How’d she get back here in the first place?”
“We don’t publicize it, but occasionally, we’ll make that kind of arrangement. For a considerable fee. Under carefully controlled circumstances.”
“Tell me something, Griffin. How did I get that Allosaurus hatchling past all your security people?”
“You were lucky. It won’t happen again.”
She drew back and looked at him coldly. “Don’t give me that. I waltzed right through. People turned their backs. Halls were empty. Everything fell into place. How?”
He smiled. “Well… thwarted, as I so often am, by bureaucracy, I came to feel that all this secrecy was… an unnecessary burden. So I may have given Monk a few hints and pointed him in your direction.”
“You shithead.” She pressed her body against his. They couldn’t have been any closer if they tried. “Why make me jump through hoops? Why make everything so convoluted and baroque?”
He shrugged. “Welcome to my world.”
“They say that once in her life, every woman should fall in love with a real bastard.” She looked deeply in his eyes. “I wonder if you’re mine.”
He drew back from her a little. “You’re drunk.”
“Lucky you,” she murmured. “Lucky, lucky you.”
Hours later, personal time, Griffin returned to his office. The lights were on. Other than himself, there was only one person he trusted with the key. “Jimmy,” he said as he opened the door, “I swear my body aches in places I never—”
His chair swivelled around.
“We need to talk,” the Old Man said.
Griffin stopped. Then he shut the door behind him. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a shot of 90-proof Bulleit. The Old Man, he noted, had been there before him. “So talk.”
The Old Man lifted the top report from the stack and read: “ ‘Defector said priority was given to opportunities to assassinate high-profile individuals, to which end a short list had been made of opportunities. Primary among these were fundraisers.’ ”
He dropped the report on the desk. “Had you bothered to read this, you’d know that Holy Redeemer’s hit list of people they particularly want to take out has our two favorite media hounds, Salley and Leyster, in positions one and two. You should not have been taken by surprise today. You should have known to keep those two apart.”
“So? Jimmy caught the terrorists. You notified him to do so. The system worked as well as it ever does. Meanwhile, I get to keep my options open.”
