“So what’s so terrible about that?” Winnie asked.

  “Well, you just don’t say that sort of thing to the man who has written the only existing textbook on the subject. I am not of that group, but one would prefer to have the most recent word in the latest edition of one’s own text. I curse my own insensitivity.”

  Calista found something profoundly moving in Bill Carlisle’s little speech. It was not just its humility, but the grace and sincerity with which he spoke. It was a speech as much about himself as it was about Baldwin. Calista took one last look at him. He appeared fragile but elegant in front of the clipper ship William E. Carlisle, the one that had sunk in the Indian Ocean with most likely a ton of opium and a missionary or two.

  She stepped into the chill night air with Charley and held his hand tight. The door shut solidly behind them. “I’m not sure if I want to stick around to meet Baldwin,” Calista whispered.

  “Why not?”

  “He scares me.”

  Chapter 22

  It was more of a rock shelf with an overhang than an actual cave. Rosestone faced south and west, which made this time of day the most beautiful. Archie Baldwin sat on a ledge three or four feet above the excavated pit below. The grid lines were still set up. The most recently worked areas seemed to be those of the fire hearth and the cache pits which covered levels D and C, squares Dl, D2, D3, D4, and C6, C7, and C8. On his lap Baldwin had two field notebooks opened to pages that documented identical grid units at the E4 level, ten to twenty centimeters down. Both pages had identical dates. However, there were two differences, one rather minor, the other major.

  The major difference was that field notebook number one, as Baldwin had come to think of it, contained one extra artifactual entry, a fragment of a projectile tip that in its broken state suggested a bifacial, lanceolate blade point. The other difference was the handwriting in the two books. It seemed as if in book number one the entire page had been written up in one sitting. There was none of the variation in pencil sharpness or writing style that one might expect to find had a running record been kept over the ten-day period it took to excavate the unit.

  But Baldwin at the moment was trying hard not to think of these discrepancies. All day he had been trying to sort out the tangled stratigraphy of what had seemed to the rest of the archaeological community to be characterized by an orderly classicism. “Fucking mess!” Baldwin muttered and tossed the two books aside. He reached for his knapsack and pulled out a beer. He looked toward the flat- bottomed valley, once an old glacial lake. It ran fifteen miles in length and two in width, ringed by low mountains covered with juniper and pinon. Clouds were gathering now just above the ridges. At this time of day the valley appeared dusty purple. Great splashes of sunlight poured out of the cloud holes and spilled down the mountain flanks to make big lakes of light across the valley floor.

  Baldwin sipped his beer. When he was alone in the desert, when all the young eager-beaver graduate students had left, the ones who quoted your text back to you more accurately than you could ever remember, that was a fine time of day. It was then that the ancient hunters came, melted out of the desert veils of dust, out of the dim light of the cave, to make their hunting magic. And Baldwin himself did not think about which blade and how or when, or the projectile point type sequence articulated when he was barely twenty which had now been used by archaeologists for nearly thirty years. He didn’t think about Clovis and the nine-thousand-year marker or before Clovis and pre-projectile and the ten-thousand-year marker, or lower lithic and upper lithic stages, or any of the myriad of handy schemes that staged, abstracted, and conceptualized millenniums of time and people and technology. He simply thought about the people. How they felt when they were cold or worried or fearful. What their bodies looked like when they were dog tired after hunting for days with no luck. What did it feel like to be wrapped in a bison hide and holding a suckling baby in this cave on a late winter afternoon; to watch the weather coming in from the west, knowing that your seed basket was three-quarters of the way down and there were no hunters on the horizon, and here was this little baby tugging on your teat.

  He crunched up the beer can and stuffed it in his pocket. He wished he didn’t have to drive into Lurvis tonight, but he hadn’t had anything but beer since breakfast, which had consisted of coffee and a Pop Tart. He was starved. He hadn’t planned on staying the extra day and had only packed his gear and provisions with two days in mind. He’d come back out tomorrow, leave Lurvis before dawn with more supplies.

  After reading the field notebooks tonight he would have a better idea of precisely how Peter Gardiner thought he was going to pull this off and just when the cold-feet heebie-jeebies set in. As soon as he got all that straight, he would have to blast out of Rosestone for Boston and meet with Mrs. Jacobs to tell her what he really suspected about her husband’s death. As he loaded up the Bronco, he wondered just how much Mrs. Jacobs would know or could know about her husband’s work. She was some sort of kids’ book illustrator. So it seemed unlikely that she would know that much. Of course, who was he to say, having been married for less than a year to an anthropologist who after one month of marriage showed no interest whatsoever in his own work, body, mind. Wrong, he corrected himself. She did love having lunch at the Castle. It was the closest she’d ever get to being a Woodrow Wilson Fellow.

  He started up the Bronco and headed northwest over an implied road that led to a vague road at the head of the valley, which in turn would lead to a suggestion of asphalt and ultimately to Route 66. One hundred and two miles down Route 66 was the nearest town to Rosestone: Lurvis, Nevada. For ninety miles there was nothing— zero, zilch. No billboards, no signs, no trees, no houses, no restaurants, no gas stations. Nothing except for one airstreamer set back from the highway a couple of hundred feet with a small white picket fence. Archie liked to imagine that it belonged to a retired couple from Flatbush come to claim their little piece of silence and space after fifty years of dense-pack living.

  Sometimes on the long ninety-mile stretch one could spot the flickering fire of a Basque sheepherder tending his flock as they wintered in the desert valley, his weathered tent at the base of a low sagebrush foothill. But tonight there were no Basque campsites to be seen. In the daytime you could see flattened jackrabbits or smashed rattlesnakes, and the salt flats on either side, but now there was nothing except flat, straight road. Twelve miles outside of Lurvis was the first big cultural landmark: Sid’s—a small wooden building that listed slightly to the east. A sign nearly as big as the building advertised cocktails and topless dancing. There was a painted girl in a G-string prancing off the edge of the sign. Two red light bulbs had been screwed in for nipples. One was out. Archie thought about buying one in Lurvis and presenting it to Sid on his return trip. Sid could do with a little symmetry he felt. He was not ordinarily hung up on such things but after ninety miles in one of the starkest and most monotonous landscapes imaginable, it would be nice to see two tits twinkling instead of one.

  He looked in his rearview mirror. The car behind him he could have sworn he saw yesterday. A blue Chevy Impala. It was following him. Of course, what else could it do, unless it turned around and headed for New Jersey? Route 66 offered few choices. He tried to think when he had first noticed it this evening. When he had turned onto 66 he hadn’t remembered any other cars. He went back in his mind over the featureless landscape. It had been almost dark when he had reached the highway so there had not even been a dead animal for a marker. Was he getting a little buggy? How many Chevy Impalas could there be in the state of Nevada, especially out here where Broncos, Blazers, and jeeps constituted at least ninety percent of the car population, and four-wheel-drive pickups the rest. Supposing more than just Gardiner was in on this thing. Baldwin reached over to the knapsack on the empty seat beside him and pulled out another beer. Maybe Gardiner was tied in with Mauritz in New York in some way; the dark side of Mauritz that is, the side nobody talked about, but secretly always wondered about. Mauritz, an antiquities dealer in New York for at least thirty years, had managed very successfully to play both sides of the fence between museums and private collectors, between countries that had antiquities preservation laws and those that did not. He sipped his beer and watched the road and the mirror. He was approaching Lurvis.

  He passed the gas station and the laundromat. Fifty yards up from the laundromat was the Desert Bloom Motel. He swung into the drive. It was also, for those wanting less than a full night’s sleep, the only cathouse in town. It functioned as a farm camp of sorts for the girls before they moved on to Ely, which in turn was a farm camp for Reno, and from Reno a quick hop to the Cotton Tail Ranch in Las Vegas. Baldwin pulled in. The Chevy continued on Route 66 heading due west.

  “I'd like a single room for the night. Do you have one?”

  “Got anything you want, sir.” Baldwin would have thought the remark lascivious had the woman not borne such a striking resemblance to the rare books librarian at Widener during his graduate school years. He dumped his gear in the small room, and headed for the superette to stock up for another day or so at Rosestone. After shopping he headed for Gastagna’s, a Basque restaurant.

  The food at Gastagna’s was extremely hearty. The menu included massive omelettes made with peppers and tomatoes, stews, cassoulets, and paellas. Baldwin started with garlic soup, a basket of sourdough bread, and a carafe of red wine. He followed it with a bean and sausage dish and a large salad. For dessert he had apple pie. He ordered a second cup of coffee after he had finished the pie. He did not particularly want to sleep tonight, not that he had any intentions of availing himself of the other services rendered at the Desert Bloom. He wanted to read Gardiner’s notebooks. There was a third notebook he had found that morning. At first he had thought it was simply an accounts and provisions book for the camp, but just before going to dinner he had glanced at it quickly and noticed some writing in the back section of the book in what appeared to be Gardiner’s hand.

  He took a short walk through town. Short was the only kind of walk one could manage in a town that was three city blocks long and two wide. The laundromat seemed to be where most of the action was this evening. He stopped briefly to look in. There were four women and three kids. One woman was reading People magazine, one the National Enquirer. One stood at a slot machine pulling the crank with one arm and holding her baby in the other. Another woman slept in a chair. Two little girls played on the floor with dolls that didn’t look like the baby dolls his own sisters had played with. They were skinny, grown-up-looking dolls with breasts and stiff, bleached hair. One little girl looked up at him, held up her doll, and moved its arm stiffly in the simulation of a wave. Baldwin smiled and waved back.

  He was back in his room by nine-thirty. He quickly spread out on the bed the site distribution maps, aerial photos, artifactual distribution graphs, and surface area survey maps. He knelt beside the bed and reviewed the surface survey documents. No wonder Gardiner had become excited five years ago. There were an inordinate number of surface discoveries, some of the crude early percussion tools or fragments thereof that are often ascribed to a “pre-projectile point horizon”—in other words somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 B.C. But hadn’t Baldwin warned Gardiner when he first showed up in his office not to get overly excited? Wasn’t he always issuing warnings about the goddamn pre-projectile point horizon? Of course, in his gut he really did believe that that man had trotted across that Bering land bridge as far back as, say, 35,000 B.C. He wasn’t enough of a tight-ass scholar to reject the possibility. He had even said so in papers and lectures, but he always followed it with a cheerfully judicious but. Maybe it should have been sternly judicious. “But, as the situation is now, the pre-projectile point horizon will not be proven until an assemblage of materials ascribable to it are found, not on the surface, but stratigraphically beneath artifacts of the well-known ten-thousand- and twelve-thousand-year-old bifacially flaked lanceolate, or in incontrovertible association with middle or early Pleistocene deposits and radiocarbon dates.’’ He had written that in the new introduction to the last edition of his text. He had stated it in so many words more or less about five times a year at various conferences and seminars. Tom Jacobs, where are you when we need you, Baldwin thought, and then muttered, “What did you get on this son of a bitch?”

  Baldwin had only met Jacobs once, but he had really liked the man. The morning before Tom Jacobs had flown out to Rosestone he had come down to Washington and met with Baldwin in his office. Baldwin had brought in a bag of doughnuts, so they sat and drank coffee and ate doughnuts while he laid out his doubts about Gardiner. They only talked for a couple of hours, but it didn’t take him long to figure out that Jacobs was not only brilliant, but a very classy kind of thinker. It was not a sleek classiness. It was too lacking in ego. There was this nice mix of irreverence and self-deprecation.

  It was not all business. They talked a little about Vermont and New Hampshire where they had both spent time. They talked about canoeing and trout fishing. Trout fishing was obviously a passion of Jacobs’, and his wife was his other passion. When Jacobs talked about fishing there was an odd spare beauty to his language. He might have been talking in haiku. Baldwin had asked Jacobs if he ever went white-water canoeing or kayaking near his vacation house in Vermont. He had laughed and said something about “hot stars, still water, cold feet” being his sport.

  Baldwin felt a profound sadness about Jacobs. Why had it happened? Why hadn’t he come out here with him? No, that would have tipped off Gardiner. But Gardiner had been tipped off, Baldwin was sure. He did not really need Jacobs’ findings now. The two field notebooks, the one true and the other a fiction, were setting forth the details rather nicely of the pre-projectile point hoax Gardiner had been hatching. Hell, all he had done was literally begin to translate into material form Chapter 2 of Baldwin’s text which said in no uncertain terms what would be necessary in order to constitute indisputable evidence of man’s presence in the New World prior to 20,000 B.C. The cf apter concluded with another one of Baldwin’s innumerable warnings: "Although I think it is probable that a pre-projectile point horizon is a reality, present evidence is not adequate to support this conjecture beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  From the looks of the field notes, this was where Gardiner was heading—direct for the twenty-thousand-year mark. He was not even waiting for spring for an assemblage of Asiatic choppers and related tools to turn up. It had already been found, according to notebook number one, the fictional one. Or at least a very suggestive fragment of it had turned up early in September, conveniently after all his graduate students had gone back to school. What had he done, knapped it himself? After years of studying projectile points and stone tools, any number of archaeologists with steady hands became passable flintknappers, not so they could plant bogus points in excavations, but so they could better understand the stone projectile technology. So already Gardiner had placed his ass firmly on the 10,000 B.C. marker. Now with a little nudge he would be over the hump.

  But first Baldwin wanted to see the projectile points. He had the artifact cases in the motel room. Most of the summer’s materials had gone back to the Peabody with returning students. But the Clovis point should be in one of the two cases that Baldwin had brought in. Before opening the case he decided to check out what else he might be looking for. “My goodness, Peter, you were a busy boy in September,” he muttered. Baldwin had skipped a few pages ahead in the first notebook. He opened a beer, took a swallow, belched softly, and continued his cheerful dialogue with himself and the absent Gardiner. “Were you really planning on getting us past the pre-projectile horizon by Christmas? And who knows what might have happened by Easter. Why, Dr. Leakey watch out! There’s bound to be a most interesting resurrection in store, Australopithecus rosestoneus as staged by Peter Gardiner.” The fictional notebook stopped abruptly with a half-page entry dated September 30. Baldwin dug his pipe out of his back pocket, opened his Swiss Army knife, and began digging out the bowl furiously. “Run out of steam Peter? Writer’s block? The tyranny of the blank page? What’s that restaurant in New York where all the writers go? Elaine’s? Maybe you should go there and schmoo around a little with Norm Mailer, Bill Styron, Nora Ephron. Maybe you can get unblocked and continue this...” There was a soft tapping on the door. “Just a minute.” Baldwin got up, jammed his pipe in his mouth. “Yes?” he said, opening the door. “Oh God!” he muttered. It was one of the Desert Bloom’s little blossoms.

  “Hi.” She was probably eighteen, but she looked like a used four- teen-year-old. Her hair, a limp version of Farrah Fawcett’s, framed a slightly pudgy face with a skin that looked like it had never seen the light of day. Her eyes were nice—sagebrush green. Too bad she had ringed them like a raccoon’s, with black pencil, Baldwin thought. She wore a fringed miniskirt, vest, and saddle shoes. The Desert Preppie Bimbo look.

  “I was thinking maybe you wanted some company. But then I heard you talking in there.”

  Baldwin leaned against the doorjamb. “Nobody in here. Just talking to myself.”

  “Well, if you want some company . . .”

  “No. I’m just . . . uh . . . working on some stuff, and talking to myself sometimes helps me figure things out.”

  She was looking over his shoulder. “You one of them archaeologist fellows?”

  “Yeah. That’s me, one of the archaeologists. You have an interest?”

  “Little bit. I spent some time with that last fellow.”

  “Peter Gardiner?”

  “Yeah, the one who got himself et by a rattler.”

  “You did?” Baldwin took his pipe out of his mouth. “I’d like to talk to you.” He paused. “If that’s possible.” Jesus Christ, she was going to think that he was like one of those little old men who engaged prostitutes just to talk and then got a hard-on when they sobbed out their stories of being raped by Daddy, and finally ejaculated when allowed to untie the girl’s shoe. “You charge for that? I mean, I don’t mind paying.”