“Oh, no! Nan’s real good about that. She only charges for doin’ it, but that does include blow jobs, of course. It’s all carnal knowledge, Nan says.” The way she said carnal it sounded like a polyester blend. “She’s a Christian.”

  “Oh!” Baldwin said. He tried to draw on his pipe and then remembered that he hadn’t filled it. “Let’s see, not much room to sit down here. Uh . . . here’s a chair. Let me get that stuff off it.” Baldwin began to gather up papers. He’d sit on the bed. She'd sit on the chair. He didn’t know why he was so nervous. The worst thing that could happen was that he’d get laid. And after the chicly libidinous Austrian wife of the Swiss ambassador, well, this little wilted desert blossom might be a relief. Helga was so demanding. She had actually tried to squeeze his balls during the Smithsonian dinner dance at the opening of the Copan exhibit. It was lucky that Switzerland had an elaborate policy of neutrality. Helga had enough heat to melt the Eiger glacier. She had a thing about the arts and museum types. While she had been sleeping with Baldwin, she had also been consorting with someone at the National Gallery. Baldwin had found it rather curious. He was not in love with her by any means, but when he found out that she was also sleeping with someone at the Corcoran and the Hirshhorn he was slightly upset. “What’s so upsetting, darling?” she had asked. She was wearing a black velvet cocktail suit at the time and her blond head with the hair pulled back into a sleek twist shone like a golden helmet. Her hair was never messy, even when she came, which was often. “Are you jealous?” “Jealous? No! But what if I get herpes?” He did make her promise that she would confine her activities to the staffs of museums and the performing art centers and not go anywhere near the National Zoo. Later he was embarrassed about his herpes remark and sent her a bumper sticker that said “Honk if you have herpes.” She didn’t think it was funny. Helga had very little in the way of a sense of humor, which was ultimately why Archie had ended the affair.

  “So what’s your name?” he said to the girl on the chair.

  “Joy.”

  “Joy,” he repeated. Why would anybody name a child that, he thought. Joystick might be more suitable. “Well, pleased to meet you, Joy. I’m Archie Baldwin.”

  “Archie! Archie Baldwin!” She nearly shrieked. “You mean your parents really named you that name?”

  “No, actually I was a foundling and the nuns of St. Ignatius of Louisburg Square . . .” She was not catching on to the joke. He ended it abruptly. “Yeah, my parents really did name me that.”

  She was giggling now. “I don’t believe it. It’s just like Archie Bunker.”

  “You mean the guy on television?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “I guess the names are somewhat similar. I don’t think my parents ever thought of it, really.”

  “Well . . .” She was wiping a tear away from her glistening sagebrush eyes. “What’s Archie short for?”

  Baldwin swallowed. If she thought Archie was funny . . . “Archibald.”

  “Archibald! Phew! Heavy.” She didn’t seem to think it was that funny. “Awful big name for a little kid.”

  “I was never a little kid. I was born a full-blown anthropologist. Master’s degree in hand. Ph.D. in the afterbirth.”

  Joy was looking at him with a kind of half smile. “You make a lot of jokes, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I guess I do. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Oh no! Not at all. I like funny people. We need some laughs now and then. You know with all this stuff—nuclear war, cancer. Did you know someone shot the pope?” Her black-rimmed sagebrush eyes opened as wide as a surprised raccoon. “Can you believe that!” “Yeah, I heard that.” Baldwin was packing his pipe. He was sitting on the bed, his back against the headboard, legs stretched out.

  “I mean, he’s such a nice old guy. Why would anybody want to do such a thing?”

  He thought there was something a little unfair in a world where Joy of the Desert Bloom could show so much real compassion for the pope, but who was out there to cry over Joy? “Yeah,” Baldwin said.

  “I tell you,” Joy’s eyes narrowed, “that guy comes in here for a blow job, I’d bite off his goddamn dick!”

  Baldwin grimaced and crossed his legs. He presumed she was talking about the would-be assassin and not the pope. “So Nan’s a Christian.” He shifted the conversation slightly.

  “Yeah. Born again.” She sat back in the chair, drew her legs onto the seat, and crossed them. He could see right up to her crotch. She was wearing candy-cane-striped panties. He thought about his own shorts. If she thought Archie was a funny name, she ought to see him in his reindeer shorts complete with Santa Claus figures, a joke present from his sister and her family last Christmas. When he left Washington he was short on clean underwear.

  “Born again, huh?”

  “Yep. She’s born again. I might myself.”

  “Might what?”

  “Get born again, if I don’t go to Reno.”

  Baldwin was intrigued by the statement, but decided not to pursue it. "What about Peter Gardiner?”

  “Well, there’s not much to tell. He was not what you call a real regular customer. Once a month or so, you know.” She paused and looked at Baldwin. “I can’t tell you everything about what he liked me to do and all. I mean nothing weird, mind you. But I don’t talk about what my clients like.” She put her smallish palms facing outward and patted the air lightly for emphasis. “I mean in my book that’s private. It’s like with a doctor and a patient. What do they call that?”

  “Patient confidentiality,” Baldwin offered.

  “Yeah.” She nodded firmly. “I believe in that with my customers. You know when I was thirteen I got pregnant and I went to this doctor to get fixed up. Damned if he wasn’t a Mormon and wanted to tell my folks. I was so pissed.”

  “What happened?”

  “Cussed him out. Left. Found me a doctor who’d do it.”

  “So anyhow, getting back to Peter. You saw him a few times. Did he ever talk about his work?”

  “No. Not much really. He got pissed when I told him that I had a whole collection of arrowheads that I’d found just south of Rosestone. My family used to have a trailer off the old Miller Road. Anyhow, I found all these old arrowheads and stuff, me and my little brother that is, and we took them down and sold them to the Mother Lode Souvenir Shop. You know, just outside Elko on Route 66. He gave me this whole lecture on how I was selling off America’s past, our heritage. ‘Prostituting our past.’ ” Baldwin rolled his eyes slightly. “Yeah, can you believe he’d use a word like that with me? Kind of weird isn’t it? He kept talking about how our history was written in the dust, sand, and rock out here. And I say maybe your history, not mine. Far as I’m concerned it’s just friggin’ dust and it gets into everything. I told him that. But then he says to me you got to want to know about the past and the people. It’s what makes us human and if we find out about the humanness in the lives of the oldest people in this land, we’ll find out more about ourselves, or something like that.” She paused. “Mr. Baldwin, you got the most beautiful blue eyes I ever seen. But right now they look so cold. They’re like blue ice.” He blinked. “Sorry.”

  “There they are!” Joy smiled. “Back warm and blue.”

  “So what else about Gardiner?”

  “Well, pretty much what I told you. He had this thing about humans—humanness. I guess you call those kinds of folks humanitarians—right?”

  “Yeah.” Baldwin puffed on his pipe. “A real Dr. Schweitzer.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Anything else?”

  “Well, about the middle of September he came in all excited. Said he’d been finding some stuff people never dreamed of.”

  “Isn’t that the truth!”

  “He was real excited though. He kept talking about the thrill of intellectual something or other, and all that stuff about the past and the Indians and everything. He even said I should go back to finish my schooling.”

  “Hmmm.” Baldwin wondered if Gardiner loved Joy in some way or was just trying to work out his Pygmalion fantasies at the same time as his Paleo-Indian one. Maybe he was envisioning them as a team of some sort, Will and Ariel Durant, desert style.

  “Anyway, he kept talking about the past and I say I don’t give a coyote’s shit about who was doing what out here ten thousand years ago. I want to get to the future—Reno. There’s human beings there too. Then ... I don’t know. Seems like a short time after that he kind of just quit talking about it all. He wasn’t excited. Kind of down really.”

  “In what way?” Baldwin moved toward the foot of the bed closer to where Joy sat in the armchair in the corner. He held his pipe in his hand and leaned forward waiting for an answer.

  “There you go again, Mr. Baldwin—blue ice.”

  “Sorry.” He blinked. “But what do you mean he was down? Depressed?”

  “Yeah, depressed. Didn’t talk so much about the past. I asked him once. Said ‘How come you’re not so het up about the past anymore?’ ”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing really. Something like it doesn’t amount to much or something like that.” She paused a second. “But now I do remember, ‘cause I said to him, you know, trying to be cheerful like, ‘Why’nt you start thinking about the future?’ And he says to me, ‘There’s no future either. We’ll blow up the world.’ And I say, ‘How do you know?’ and then he just starts talking about nuclear war and all that. That’s why I said before, I like people like you who are funny, make jokes and things.” She stopped a moment. She looked straight at him. “You know, Mr. Baldwin.” She tilted her head slightly. “You and me. We could do it real nice together. You know.” She wrinkled her nose a bit, and for a moment really did look like a fourteen-year-old. “I wouldn’t want to push you or anything but I think it would be real enjoyable. I wouldn’t even charge you.” There was a long pause. He didn’t know how to tell her that it wasn’t the economics that were holding him up. “You married?”

  “Oh no. It’s not that.”

  “Well, for a man your age, I mean you look in real fine shape— you’re not having peter problems are you?”

  “Oh no! No!” At least not of the kind she had in mind.

  “You know, my friend Betty, she had a customer die on her one time. Had a heart attack right in the middle of it all!”

  “You don’t say!”

  “He was a lot older than you, though.”

  “Good.”

  “So you’re sure you don’t want to do it?”

  “Pretty sure, Joy.”

  “Well, it’s all right.”

  “Joy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know why I don’t want to make love to you?”

  “Mr. Baldwin, you don’t have to go calling it making love, and you don’t have to explain.” She had uncrossed her legs. The candy- cane stripes disappeared. She was getting up to leave.

  “No, Joy, I want to explain. I think you’re a very nice young woman. I think you have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. They’re like sagebrush—a real quiet green. But Joy, I just can’t stand the idea of guys coming in here, sticking their dicks in you, and dropping their loads. I just don’t want to be one of them.”

  Joy’s eyes had moistened. “You’re not like one of them at all, Mr. Baldwin.”

  “Joy, I’m not going to tell you to continue your education, find Christ, get born again, or any of that shit. But do me a favor. Go into the bathroom and wash off those black rings around your eyes. Then look in the mirror. Do that every night for a while and every morning. Look at your own beauty and talk to yourself and figure out what you really want to do in Reno.”

  Five minutes later Joy emerged from the bathroom. Her face was scrubbed, her eyes quiet and green. Baldwin stood leaning against the wall, his arms crossed, one hand holding the pipe in his mouth as he studied her.

  “You’re lovely, Joy.”

  He kissed her on the cheek and she went out the door. He watched her go down the corridor. She stopped briefly and looked over her shoulder. “Thanks a lot, Archie.”

  Chapter 23

  Calista woke up thinking about she-crab soup. The trip would be a total waste if she went home without even trying it.

  “So Mom, are you going to try and see Baldwin today?” Nothing like a kid, Calista thought, for straightening out your priorities.

  “Well, who knows if he’s back yet?”

  “That lady, Miss Goodfellow.”

  “Oh God! She’d probably throw up if she ever saw me again.” “Hmmm. You may be right.”

  “Charley, I hope that you never behave with anyone as abominably as I did with her yesterday morning.”

  “You weren’t that bad.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Well, toward the end she seemed kind of nicer. After you apologized and all.”

  “I know.”

  “So what do we do next?”

  “I don’t know.” Calista got out of bed and walked over to the window. She stood barefoot in her flannel nightgown and looked down on M Street. There was a lot of construction, but toward the extreme right on the corner was a familiar-looking building. “National Geographic,” she whispered. “Charley, isn’t that the Geographic building over there?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Where’s that map you had yesterday? Never mind, we don’t need a map. Why didn’t I think of this before!”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Charley was confused, but excited. Last night he had thought his mother was going to give up, drive home, and say that’s that. His dad might have been murdered but they’d never be able to prove it.

  “Do you remember when we were out in Wyoming? Dad had written the article for National Geographic and they sent the photographer out that second summer to show us time slicing?”

  “Sure, it’s my only appearance in a national magazine and I look like a complete twerp in those shorts you bought me.”

  “Remember that fall how that guy—what’s his name? Colin Mercer! That’s it. Colin Mercer, he was an associate editor of the magazine and he came to Cambridge. We had him for dinner.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Well, I do. He was a very nice man.” She also remembered that he was a tad too macho for her taste. Very much however in the National Geographic tradition. Lots of stories about staring down Bengal tigers with 105-millimeter lenses at one-thirtieth of a second and helicoptering into Cambodia for some story on Southeast Asia. She had served mussel saffron soup, a duck ragout, and made a pecan pie for dessert. Mercer had had three helpings and declared it the best pie ever. He had taken down the recipe for his wife, saying that he couldn’t imagine life without that pecan pie. A man of lusty tastes, she dared say. She had caught a suggestion of a wandering eye that might have sought out more than pecan pie recipes. However, even more exciting to him than Calista’s dessert had been Tom’s work with the Time Slicer. Mercer had edited the story on the Wyoming site and the two had struck up a friendship. Tom always saw him in Washington and he had written her a long letter when Tom died. As far as she was concerned, Baldwin could not be considered a neutral party. He had too much at stake in terms of his own position in the field. The time had come to take her case to Mercer at the Geographic. He knew better than most the meaning of Tom’s work with the Time Slicer. She could show him the figures from the Wyoming and the Rosestone files. Out of his high regard for Tom, he might just listen to her.

  “May I ask who’s calling?” the secretary said.

  She was tempted to say Calista of the pecan pie but didn’t. “Tell him it’s Calista Jacobs. Mrs. Tom Jacobs.” She waited a few seconds. “Calista! Good to hear from you!”

  “Hi, Colin.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “A lot.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “Anytime.”

  “How about in five minutes?”

  “Where are you?” She could read the confusion in his voice and she thought she detected a note of exasperation that “anytime” was now.

  “Across the street. Look Colin, I can’t talk about this on the phone. It’s about Tom. It’s about his death.”

  “You heard about Peter Gardiner?”

  “Of course. That’s part of it.”

  “Okay, Calista. Come on over.”

  “Can we come down here afterward, Mom, and go through the Explorer’s Hall?”

  “Yeah,” Calista said as she headed for a reception desk in front of the elevators.

  “You have an appointment?” the woman behind the desk asked.

  “Yes, with Colin Mercer.”

  “He’s on the fourth floor.”

  They stepped out of the elevator. It was one of those dumb buildings that had been designed with perfect symmetry so that the two elevator systems were mirror images. The guard had said turn right. That only applied if one had entered the right bank of elevators, but they had not, as the one on the left had arrived first. After heading in the wrong direction and coming to a water cooler instead of Mercer’s office, she retraced her steps and turned left.

  “Calista?” The door swung open and Colin leaned out. He had graying curly hair and he wore expensive suits. Calista had forgotten that.

  “Hi, Colin. I brought my son, Charley.”

  “Hi, Charley. Come on in, folks.” He had that soft drawl that was a little too fast to be southern and that Calista thought of as definitely Washington. A lot of newscasters out of Washington seemed to have it.

  Several enlarged photographs from Colin’s various trips to Southeast Asia hung on the walls. There was a magnificent photo of a tiger, presumably the one he stared down with his 105-millimeter lens in India. There were no inscribed presidential photographs, just an autographed picture of Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, the founder of the society.