Prophet of Bones A Novel Page 9

  Then a moment later, from somewhere behind him: “Paul!” It was Margaret. The jeep loomed close behind, rolling in the frothing water. A battering ram ready to crush anything in its path.

  “Stay to the side!” Paul shouted. “Let the current take you.”

  But behind Margaret the jeep hit a boulder, turned, wedged itself sideways. Water roared up and over the top, pinning it in place. Margaret kicked away.

  Paul kept his feet out in front of him to fend off the rocks. Up ahead, a sound Paul knew. The roar of water, and the river dropped away.

  “Jesus,” James said.

  There was no time for anything else. James was swept into a narrowing and then was gone, over some hidden edge. Five feet or a hundred.

  “Look out!” Paul called behind him to Margaret. He sucked a deep lungful of air, and the river swept him over the falls.

  There was no sense of falling, only of being in the grip of the river.

  He hit and was pulled deep, spinning upside down. Kicking his way to the surface, he broke free and took a gasp of air. The current pulled him forward.

  The river flattened over the next few hundred meters. Trees hung low over the water in a broad green drape, and the rapids slowly died away.

  * * *

  They dragged themselves out of the dark flow several miles downriver, where a bridge crossed the water. It was the first sign of civilization they’d seen since leaving the camp. For a long while, they lay on the rocky shore, just breathing. When they could stand, they followed the winding dirt road to a place called Rea. From there they took a bus. Margaret had money.

  They didn’t speak about it until they arrived at Bajawa.

  “Do you think they’re okay?” Margaret asked. Her voice wavered.

  “I think it wouldn’t serve their purpose to hurt the dig team. They only wanted the bones.”

  “They shot at us.”

  “Because they assumed we had something they wanted. They were shooting at the tires.”

  “No,” she said. “They weren’t.”

  Three nights in a rented hotel room, and James couldn’t leave—that hair like a great big handle anybody could pick up and carry, anybody with eyes and a voice. Some of the locals hadn’t seen red hair in their lives, and James’s description was prepackaged for easy transport. Paul, however, blended—just another vaguely Asian set of cheekbones in the crowd, even if he was half a foot taller than most of the locals.

  * * *

  That night, staring at the ceiling from one of the double beds, James said, “If those bones aren’t us … then I wonder what they were like.”

  “They had fire and stone tools,” Paul said. “They were probably a lot like us.”

  “We act like we’re the chosen ones, you know? But what if it wasn’t like that?”

  “Don’t think about it,” Margaret said.

  “What if God had all these different varieties … all these different walks, these different options at the beginning, and we’re just the ones who killed the others off?”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “What if there wasn’t just one Adam but a hundred Adams?”

  “Shut the fuck up, James,” Margaret said.

  There was a long quiet, the sound of the street filtering through the thin walls. “Us or other,” James said softly, not a question but something else, the listing of two equal alternatives. After another long quiet he said, “Paul, if you get your samples back to your lab, you’ll be able to tell, won’t you?”

  Paul thought of the evaluation team and wondered. He said nothing.

  “The winners write the history books,” James said. “Maybe the winners write the bibles, too. I wonder what religion died with them.”

  * * *

  The next day, Paul left to buy food. There was no choice. When he returned, Margaret was gone.

  “Where is she?”

  “She left. She said she’d be right back.”

  “Why didn’t you stop her?”

  “How was I supposed to do that, hold her down? She said she wouldn’t be gone long, and then she left.”

  They ate in silence. Noodles and fish.

  Day turned into evening. By darkness, they both knew she wasn’t coming back.

  “How are we going to get home from here?” James asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And your samples. How are you going to get them off the island? Even if we got to an airport, they’d never let you on the plane with them. You’ll be searched. They’ll find the samples and they’ll be confiscated.”

  “We’ll figure out a way once things have settled down.”

  “Things are never going to settle down.”

  “They will.”

  “You still don’t understand, even after everything that happened.”

  “Understand what?”

  “What these bones could mean,” James said. “When your entire culture is predicated on an idea, you can’t afford to be proven wrong.”

  * * *

  Out of dead sleep, Paul heard it. Something. At the edge of perception.

  He’d known this was coming, though he hadn’t been aware that he’d known until that moment. The creak of wood, the gentle breeze of an open door.

  Shock and awe would have been better—an inrush of soldiers, an arrest of some kind, expulsion, deportation, a legal system, however corrupt. A silent man in the dark meant many things. None of them good.

  Paul breathed. There was a cold in him—a part of him that was dead, a part of him that could never be afraid. A part of him his father had put there.

  Paul’s eyes searched the darkness and found it: the place where shadow moved, a dark breeze that eased across the room. If there was only one of them, then there was a chance.

  He thought of making a run for it, sprinting for the door, leaving the samples and this place behind, but James, still sleeping, stopped him. He made up his mind.

  Paul exploded from the bed, flinging the blanket ahead of him, wrapping that part of the room, and a shape moved, a theoretical darkness like a puma’s spots, black on black—there even though you can’t see it. And Paul knew he’d surprised him, that darkness, and he knew, instantly, that it wouldn’t be enough. A blow rocked Paul off his feet, forward momentum carrying him into the wall. The mirror shattered, glass crashing to the floor.

  “What the fuck?” James hit the light, and suddenly the world snapped into existence, a flashbulb stillness—and the intruder was Indonesian, crouched in a stance, preternatural silence coming off him like a heat shimmer. He carried endings with him, nothingness in a long blade. The insult of it hit home. The shocking fucking insult, standing there, knees bent, bright blade in one hand: blood on reflective steel. That’s when Paul felt the pain. It was only then he realized he’d already been opened.

  And the Indonesian moved fast. He moved so fast. He moved faster than Paul’s eyes could follow, covering distance like thought, across the room to James, who had time only to flinch before the knife parted him. Such a professional, and James’s eyes went wide in surprise.

  Paul reacted using the only things he had, size, strength, momentum. He hit the intruder like a linebacker, sweeping him into his arms, crushing him against the wall. Paul felt something snap—a twig, a branch, something in the man’s chest—and they rolled apart, the intruder doing something with his hands; the rasp of blade on bone, a new blackness, and Paul flinched from the blow, feeling the steel leave his eye socket.

  There was no anger. It was the strangest thing. To be in a fight for his life and not be angry.

  The man came at him again, and it was only Paul’s size that saved him. He grabbed one arm and twisted, bringing the fight to the floor. They rolled, knocking over the table, and Paul came up on top. A pushing down of his will into three square inches of the man’s throat—a caving in like a crumpling aluminum can, but Paul still held on, still pushed until the lights went out of those black eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” h
e said to the empty eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Paul rolled off the dead man and collapsed to the floor. He crawled over to James. It wasn’t a pool of blood. It was a swamp, the mattress soggy with it. James lay on the bed, still conscious, the neck wound a surgical gash at the carotid.

  The blood from Paul’s eye spattered the red beard, mixing with the blood that ran onto the bed.

  “Don’t bleed on me, man,” James said. “I know all about you promiscuous Americans. No telling what you might carry, and I don’t want to have to explain it to my girlfriend.”

  Paul smiled at the dying man, crying and bleeding on him, wiping the blood from his beard with a pillowcase. He held James’s hand until he stopped breathing.

  12

  Paul’s eye opened to white. He blinked. A man in a suit sat in the chair next to the hospital bed. A man in a police uniform stood near the door. “Where am I?” Paul asked. He didn’t recognize his own voice. It was an older man. Who’d eaten glass.

  “Maumere,” the suited man said. He was white, mid-thirties, lawyer written all over him.

  “How long?”

  “A day.”

  Paul touched the bandage over his face. “Is my eye…”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Paul took the news with a nod. “How did I get here?”

  “They found you naked in the street. Two dead men in your room.”

  It came back to him then, all of it, like a weight settling onto him.

  “So what happens now?”

  “Well, that depends on you.” The man in the suit smiled. “I’m here at the behest of certain parties interested in bringing this to a quiet close.”

  “Quiet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is Margaret? Gavin McMaster?”

  “They were put on flights back to Australia this morning.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Whether you believe or not is of no consequence to me. I’m just answering your questions.”

  “What about the bones?”

  “Confiscated for safekeeping, of course. The Indonesians have closed down the dig.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “It is their cave, after all.”

  “What about my DNA samples in the hotel room, the lozenges?”

  “They’ve been confiscated and destroyed.”

  Paul sat quietly. He looked at the man, imagining his skull beneath the thin layer of epidermis. He knew all his bones would be smooth and fine, with hardly a mark of muscle attachment, the perfect gracile skeleton.

  “How did you end up in the street?” the man asked.

  “I walked.”

  “How did you end up naked?”

  “I figured it would increase my odds.”

  “Explain.”

  “I knew what they wanted,” Paul said. “And I was bleeding out. Being naked was the fastest way to prove I wasn’t armed and didn’t have the samples. I knew they’d still be coming.”

  “You are a smart man, Mr. Carlsson, leaving those in the hotel room.” The suited man stood, apparently satisfied with Paul’s answers. “So you figured you’d just let them have the samples?”

  “Yeah,” Paul said.

  The man nodded his good-bye, then turned to leave. He closed the door behind himself.

  “Mostly,” Paul said.

  * * *

  On the way to the airport, Paul told the driver to pull over. He paid the fare and climbed out. He took a bus to Bengali, and from there took a cab to Rea.

  He climbed on a bus in Rea, and as it bore down the road Paul yelled, “Stop!”

  The driver hit the brake. “I’m sorry,” Paul said. “I’ve forgotten something.” He climbed off the bus and walked back to town, checking for a tail. No car followed.

  Once in town, down one of the small side streets, he found it: the flowerpot with the odd pink plant. The flowerpot whose appearance and location he’d memorized the week before, when he’d first left the hotel room covered in blood. He scooped dirt out of the base.

  An old woman shouted something at him, coming out of her house. He held out money. “For the plant,” he said. “I’m a flower lover.” She might not have understood English, but she understood money.

  He walked with the plant under his arm. James had been right about some things. Wrong about others. Not a hundred Adams, no.

  Just two.

  All of Australoid creation like some parallel world.

  But why would God create two Adams? That’s what Paul had wondered. The answer was that He wouldn’t.

  Two Adams.

  Two gods. One on each side of the Wallace line.

  Paul imagined that it began as a competition. A line drawn in the sand, to see whose creations would dominate.

  Paul understood the burden Abraham had carried, to witness the birth of a religion.

  As Paul walked through the streets he dug his fingers through the dirt of the flowerpot. His fingers touched it, and he pulled the lozenge free. The lozenge no evaluation team would ever lay eyes on. He would make sure of that.

  He slid the last remaining DNA sample into his pocket.

  He passed a woman in a doorway, an old woman with beautiful teeth like dentists might dream. She reminded him of someone. He thought of the bones in the cave, and of the strange people who had once crouched on this island, fashioning tools from bits of stone.

  He handed her the flower. “For you,” he said.

  He hailed a cab and climbed inside. “Take me to the airport.”

  As the old cab bounced along the dusty roads, Paul took off his eye patch. He saw the driver glance into his rearview and then look away, repulsed.

  “They lied, you see,” Paul told the driver. “About the irreducible complexity of the eye. Oh, there are ways.”

  The driver turned his radio up, keeping his face forward. Paul pulled off the bandage. He grimaced as he unpacked his eye, pulling white gauze out in long strips, pain exploding in his skull. It was more pain than he’d ever experienced in his life, a white-hot nova in his head. The gauze made a small, bloody pile on the seat next to him.

  “A prophet is one who feels fiercely,” he said, and then he slid the lozenge into his empty eye socket.

  PART III

  Nature does nothing in vain.

  —ARISTOTLE

  13

  Gavin stepped out into daylight and spit blood onto the sun-bleached concrete. New South Wales, the sound of jets.

  He scanned the faces at the airport entrance, looking for the familiar, the unfamiliar, the out of place. He saw people coming and going. Taxis and buses and cars. People in a hurry, people laughing or frustrated, people towing suitcases or duffel bags or children. He stood, and he watched, and he saw no one he recognized. He saw not a single thing to arouse his suspicions.

  Gavin nodded to himself, accepting finally what he had before only suspected. They hadn’t even bothered to have him followed.

  He understood that for what it was: a parting insult.

  He started walking, for the first time feeling like the nightmare of the last four days might really be over. The reality of being in Australia gradually sank in. He was home.

  Unconsciously, he rubbed his swollen jaw.

  It was his fault, of course. The beating. Everything.

  He opened his cell phone and punched in the numbers.

  “It’s Gavin,” he said. “I’m here.” Then, after a silence: “It’s bad.”

  He spoke for another minute, explaining what needed to be done. He snapped his phone closed and slid it back into his pocket. There were other calls he needed to make. Calls to the university, and to the embassy, but he didn’t have the energy right now. There would be time for that soon enough. There would be official inquiries, investigations, an official response to everything that had happened. It would be out of his hands. For now, though, he just wanted to get to his office. Prepare himself for what was to come.

  The soldiers had taken his briefcas
e and his papers. Of his various forms of ID, only his passport remained, and they’d let him keep that only because he’d needed it to board the plane. The soldiers had stood with him in the Jakarta airport terminal. They hadn’t taken off his handcuffs until he’d stepped onto the aircraft.

  A bus horn sounded. Gavin tasted blood in his mouth and spit again. Bright red. Like betel nut juice.

  The beating hadn’t been planned, because it hadn’t been necessary. An overzealous guard said, “Move,” and Gavin had been shoved hard down the hall to the interrogation room. Gavin hadn’t liked that, being manhandled, and he’d glared over his shoulder at the guard. The guard only smiled. He was short and fat, maybe five-six, flat Malaysian nose, face like a fist.

  Gavin slowed his walk and prepared for the next shove, rolling his shoulder away when it came—and the guard had lost his balance, embarrassed in front of the others. Then came the guard’s roundhouse, splitting Gavin’s lip against his teeth and sending him careening against the wall.

  It’s hard to fight back when you’re in handcuffs.

  He should have known better. Indonesia was not a place to confront authority. And the short cops, anywhere, were always the biggest assholes.

  Gavin waved down a taxi. He collapsed inside and slammed the door.

  “No luggage?” the driver asked.

  “No.”

  “Where to?”

  Gavin gave the address.

  The driver looked skeptical. “A long drive,” he said.

  “And a big tip.”

  The taxi pulled away from the curb. The miles rolled by, and the shadows lengthened outside the window. By the time the taxi pulled up to the university offices it was evening, and the campus was in the process of emptying itself. Most of the faculty had already left for the night. He was grateful for that.

  Gavin paid the driver and crossed the street to the building’s entrance. He took the stairs up to the second floor and continued on to his office door, fidgeting the key into the lock. He stepped inside and hit the lights. He closed the door, being careful to lock it again behind him. He turned.

  The envelope looked wrong on his desk. The stark white alienness of it.