From the jumble of flakes and chips and bone fragments there leapt into the foreground of Baldwin’s vision one unmistakable and unforgettable object.

  “Jesus Christ! I can’t believe it.” He picked up the longish piece of flint. It was a prismatic blade fragment that had been made by the punch method of indirect percussion, and probably derived from Upper Paleolithic Siberian origins. Baldwin would have recognized this fragment anywhere, because he had been there when Bud Weld had dug it up at Hellsgate, New Mexico, in 1948. It was a blade that was considered part of the Llano complex, a name given to the earliest North American artifacts: bone bits, points, scrapers, flakes. Hellsgate was the first dig Archie Baldwin had ever gone on. He was eighteen years old and just finishing his sophomore year at Dartmouth. The fascinating stratigraphy of the Deep Rock site between Portales and Clovis had just been found and Bud Weld had led a group, all from Harvard except for Archie, to another site a hundred miles north and west of Deep Rock. It was a small group because most people wanted to go to Deep Rock, for which there were more funds and a better cook. A pretty woman named Faye Lindermeir from Radcliffe and a graduate student, George Rappaport, and himself had signed on with Weld. Fay and George had already gone back to Cambridge when Bud had scraped up the prismatic blade. But Baldwin was still there and leaning over his shoulder when he found it.

  It would be another two and a half years before they had the technology to radiocarbon date the hearth just over it, but they knew it was early, very early. They knew that there was a real similarity between it and those blades found in western Siberia in the Mousteri- an-like Paleolithic contexts. They knew that they had found something as good as the guys over at Deep Rock. This and a handful of other fragments had started Baldwin toward refining a projectile typology. Four years later, Weld was dead in Korea and Archie had started digging Two Horn Cave.

  Baldwin flipped the stone piece in his hand. The catalogue numbers had been removed. It was not the most definitive or diagnostic piece of rock ever dug up but still it was descriptive enough. Was it all that daring to use this piece? Faye Lindermeir had died of cancer several years ago. Weld was gone and, as for George Rappaport, he had disappeared into some other field entirely. Baldwin thought he had gone into medical school. The Hellsgate excavation had never really amounted to much compared to the other stuff that had started showing up in eastern New Mexico and Colorado. So it had all probably been put up in crates in the attic of the Peabody. He wondered if three graduate students in the last thirty years had ever asked, what was her name, the old lady—Scroop—Jean Scroop—to even see the stuff. He put the blade fragment back in the case.

  It was still a couple of hours before dawn. Baldwin had no doubt as to what Gardiner had been doing. But there were several questions that remained unanswered. Why had his work become so sloppy toward the end and the subterfuge so obvious? No attempt had been made to destroy the forgery. It was almost as if Gardiner wanted to be discovered. The two notebooks that documented the dig in real and fictitious terms had been left in the lab tent. And if it was suicide, why hadn’t he left any kind of note to explain it? What was it finally that made him stop the forgery three weeks ago after continuing for more than a year after Tom Jacobs’ death?

  If he had indeed killed Jacobs because he was suspicious of the lanky physicist and his instrument, why stop once the obstacle had been removed? Was it guilt? Had the lie become too difficult to sustain? Or was there someone else involved? Had something scared Gardiner toward the end? Why had he finally thrown in the towel, or the trowel, as it were? Baldwin winced at his bad pun. He then remembered the third notebook, the one with the provisions list and writing in the back. It was three-thirty in the morning. He felt hungry and stiff and tired. He wished there was a coffee maker in the room. He certainly didn’t feel like another beer. He would have an apple and a Pop Tart from the supplies he had bought, then take a shower and shave before reading the third notebook.

  Fifteen minutes later, feeling considerably better, he opened the notebook and began reading: “I speak for the earth. The scribes of old —Christ, Muhammed, Einstein, we must learn a new language, the one of ultimate truth and beauty, the pure symbolic language of God —mathematics. Through the dark tunnel of intertidal slime comes the word and the cosmic integration based on first order and second order differentials hovering toward the center of the theological mystery. It is the scribes who are the manipulators of the time/space continuum. There is the earth’s clock, our clock, and the cosmic clock and the cesium clock. The hour is 11:59.8. Between the atoms and the dust there is the terrible secret in the loins of the earth. The deceleration of earth’s rotation 1/50,000th of a second per year. It is but a half minute from the origin of the earth to cosmic explosion five billion years away, but the manipulators of the time/space continuum . . .”

  Baldwin read on, amazed at Gardiner’s ramblings, which were delivered nonstop in a mixture of scientific language, diagrams, and poetry. There were disjointed phrases and a jumbled blend of philosophies ranging from H. G. Wells to Einstein to Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard evolutionary biologist. Many of Gould’s reflections, such as those on the deceleration of the earth 1/50,000th of a second a year, Gardiner kept returning to again and again. Often he would incorporate bits of Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Baldwin had found in one case two volumes of Eliot’s poetry. “Burnt Norton” in the Four Quartets was heavily underlined and from “The Dry Salvages” Gardiner had written in his notebook, “to apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time, is an occupation for the saint.” He had then continued to write, “the saint no longer moves but is at the still point. He exists within the still 1/50,000th of the second, the eye of Eliot’s whirled vortex that shall bring the world to the destructive fire which burns before the ice-cap reigns. ”

  Gardiner had switched from pencil to pen in the notebook just at this point and then resumed writing for another page: “You dance alone your solemn dance in dark voids beyond Roche limits. Within the black hole the marks of the fangs all but vanish and are star pricks in the night. ... I said to my soul be still and let dark come upon you in the square root of time which shall be the darkness of God.”

  And then clipped neatly from the paperback of Eliot’s Four Quartets and taped to the bottom of the page were these lines: “The future futureless, before the morning watch / When time stops and time is never ending; / And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning, / Clangs / The bell.”

  Below this clipped piece written in Gardiner’s neat hand were the words “ ’Tis but 1/50,000th of a second before midnight, and the serpent’s nails shall strike and leave the five marks and the blood shall run clean from the venom.”

  Chapter 28

  For hours Baldwin had immersed himself in the mire of Peter Gardiner’s mind. It was a classic testimony of extreme paranoia, a convoluted psychotic structure of vague ideas that culminated in a delusional system of persecution and expiation. But there had been brief moments of lucidity and clarity when the paranoic miasma cleared off and certain stark truths came to light. It had taken Baldwin a while to decipher the significance of some of the truths, but as he drove the one hundred twelve miles between Lurvis and Rosestone, one thing became increasingly clear. Gardiner, although he had killed Jacobs, believed that he had killed him for the wrong reason. As psychotic as Gardiner had become in his last month, there was, as with much paranoid thought, a weird kind of internal logic.

  Sitting on the ledge of the Rosestone cave in the cold clear light of late morning, Archie Baldwin tried to find a path through the deep delusional maze created by Peter Gardiner—what was the wrong reason from Gardiner’s point of view? He realized that ever since he had begun reading this testimony, he had not given so much as a second’s thought to the fraudulent field notebooks. He had not thought about the prismatic blade filched from the Hellsgate collection, or anything in fact to do with the hoax Gardiner was perpetrating. He had thought mostly about Gardiner’s obsession with time— the 1/50,000th of a second and the constant allusions to clocks. Baldwin looked down the valley. In the clear light of this morning the valley now appeared golden. If he squinted his eyes there were brilliant shafts of light. “The surface glittered out of heart of light, / And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.” There was a small swirl of dust out there now on the implied road at the head of the valley. He watched the dust swirl come closer. Fragments of the Quartets— was it “Dry Salvages” or “Burnt Norton”—wove through his brain. Sometimes he spoke them softly to himself. “Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, . . . Go, go, go, . . . human kind cannot bear very much reality.” The car’s engine could be heard throbbing across the cold hard ground. It was difficult to imagine 1/50,000th of a second. It was a seemingly insignificant number. “An ant,” Gould had called it, “before the behemoth” of a full second. But then again . . . Yes, it came clearly now. The clock was the geological clock, and when had man appeared? Seconds before midnight and the time now was 1/50,000th of a second before midnight. “The future futureless . . . / When time stops . . .”

  The door on the Chevy slammed shut. A man started walking toward him. Baldwin stood up thinking it was time for deus ex ma- china. He took a deep breath. “You got a rattlesnake for me, pal?”

  Chapter 29

  “So you’ve been tailing me for two days, have you?” Archie Baldwin handed the young man a second beer.

  “Right. Been tailing a lot of folks out here.”

  “So I gather.” Baldwin paused and took a swallow of his beer. “And the gist is I’m off base.”

  “Not exactly. Let’s just say that this forgery theory of yours, true as it may be, is small potatoes next to . . . uh . . .” The man paused.

  “Fuck the forgery, Jack. Do you really think the government killed Tom Jacobs?”

  “I don’t know, but they sure were nervous as hell over what he and his machine could possibly prove. He had the potential for throwing a real kink in the works of any strategies aimed at slowing down a comprehensive test ban. It’s one thing to be a great spokesman for a movement. It’s another to be a practitioner with the hardware to prove your opponents wrong.”

  Baldwin squinted at the young man. He was twenty-four or twenty-five, very passionate, and very sharp. He was a reporter for the Washington Post, young and fresh, but there were no romantic notions of investigative journalism. There was a nuts and bolts methodology to the guy’s manner, a kind of plodding, interpretive style that might occasionally exhibit a little flash but never at the expense of discipline.

  “So how did you get on to Jacobs’ case?”

  “Sorry, I can’t say.”

  “Well, can I ask you why you got on to it in the first place—-just a reporter nosing out a good story?”

  “Not exactly. I’m not that kind of a journalist. I have a science background, and let’s just say that Tom Jacobs was definitely one of the more interesting scientific minds of this century. Ever read the collection of his essays, Trout Fishing and Singularity?”

  “No. Can’t say as I have.”

  “Well, try it. It’s really something.”

  Baldwin crumpled up his beer can. “Maybe we should be getting back to Lurvis. I’ll buy you dinner, Jack.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s not on me. It’s on the government.”

  “In that case, no argument.”

  As the two men walked into the Desert Bloom, Nan looked up from behind the desk. “Dr. Baldwin?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “A Mr. Leon Mauritz called from New York. Says you’re to call back immediately. It’s urgent.”

  “All right.”

  The phone rang twice.

  “Leon?”

  “Archie! My dear boy.” The voice was a cultivated ooze over the phone but not unlikable or repellent by any means. “Only yesterday at tea I was saying to a certain associate of yours up from Dumbarton Oaks—you know, of course, they’re looking at that weaving you saw? Anyhow, as I was saying, the young woman working with their textiles is just quite smashing and would be ever so suitable for you. And they said she’s an Astor actually, lots of money of course and I really think that’s important for you because you have money and therefore this relieves any notions of merely pecuniary interests . . .”

  “Since when, Leon, are you interested in anything but pecuniary interests?”

  “Come! Come! Archie, I am not that coarse or single-minded in regard to money. I just feel it would be tragic if someone were solely interested in you for your monied background. This is alleviated, of course, with an Astor or the like.”

  Baldwin sank down on his bed. It was always this way with Mauritz. Conversations wound like the path through a chambered nautilus until he finally got to the point. Hence Baldwin’s love life or non-love life had to be discussed, some nubile assistant curator at Dumbarton had to be proffered up like a canape from Mauritz’s tea platter. He was now going on about manners and money.

  “Leon, I don’t mean to interrupt . . .”

  “Oh no, dear boy, not at all.”

  “Well, for Christ sake would you stop sounding like something out of Jane Austen and tell me why the hell you called me up out here in the middle of the desert?” He would not even ask how Mauritz had found him.

  “In a nutshell?”

  “Yes, that would be nice.”

  “Well, Harvard’s falling apart.”

  “So what else is new?”

  “I doubt they’d appreciate your cavalier attitude, especially with your father a member of the corporation.”

  “Well what the hell kind of statement is that—‘Harvard’s falling apart’? What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “It’s rather serious Archie. Bregman . . .”

  “Bregman! Since when are you dealing with that prick?”

  He could feel Mauritz wince. “I’m not dealing with him and as Jane Austen never said—shut up and listen. Bregman’s been offered some ceramics, gold, etc., from an Ancon bundle.”

  “Ancon—you mean . . .”

  “Precisely, Archie—mummy bundles, Ancon, Peru.”

  Baldwin felt something turn in his stomach. “Why are you calling me about this?”

  “Because, Archie, it’s all being engineered by the same people— it’s an in-house operation at the Peabody—the very same people who so tidily fixed up the young Great Basin genius.”

  “You know about Gardiner.”

  “As of the last four hours I do.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  There was a deep sigh. “Let’s just say it takes a prick to catch a prick.”

  “So why are you telling me, prick?”

  “Because dear boy, in spite of my seemingly unmitigated interest in money, I really am somewhat loathe to see the entire collection of the Peabody wind up in Dallas drawing rooms!”

  They talked for another minute. It was no use trying to find out how exactly Mauritz had extracted the information from Bregman.

  Bregman would not have found his way into Mauritz’s bed, because Mauritz did not sleep with dealers. Dealers, as Mauritz once had told him, were “para intellects” and he only consorted with artists and scholars.

  Ten minutes later Baldwin came out of his room and walked over to Jack Dexter, who was reading a paper on a threadbare sofa in the lobby.

  “Jack,” he said, scratching his head. “Ummm ... how do you feel about skipping dinner?”

  “What happened? You go over your government expense account limit?”

  “No. But how about coming with me to Boston? If we leave right now we can catch the afternoon flight out of Reno. I’ll explain on the ride. Seems we’ve got a CIA guy there who’s just decided on a midlife career change, as they say, and is going into black market antiquities starting with a Peruvian mummy bundle.”

  “A what?”

  “Come on—I’ll tell you about it on the way to Reno.”

  Fifteen minutes later the two men were driving west on 66 toward Reno.

  “So what’s he going to do?” Jack asked.

  “That’s what I’d like to know. If he unwraps that fellow he might get the goodies but the chances of reassembling the body and sending it back to the Altertumskunde in one piece are nil.”

  “Is that what this guy Mauritz says he’s trying to do?” “Apparently he wants to send something back home that looks just like the real thing but what he’s going to have is one big wad of wrappings and no body to wrap.”

  “Maybe he’ll have to look for one.”

  “That’s a thought.”

  Chapter 30

  “What do you mean, it’s over?” Charley stared across the kitchen table at his mother.

  “It just is, Charley. The trip to Washington was a washout. Nobody listened to us. We can’t keep going around with this story.” Calista sighed. She didn’t know what else to say. She didn’t want to say that she hated being regarded as a fool, but that was the impression that she was being left with fairly consistently.

  “Baldwin wasn’t even there. He hasn’t even heard our story yet, Mom.”

  “I don’t think it would make that much difference.”

  “What do you mean? He’s out there at Rosestone now. He’s probably just as suspicious as we are.”

  “We’ve gone over this, Charley. He’s got a lot to gain by Gardiner being proven a fraud.”

  “But if he is a fraud, that makes it more likely that Gardiner did kill Daddy.”

  “Didn’t or did!” Calista jerked her head up fiercely. “What does it matter, Charley? Daddy’s dead! Gone! Whether it was murder or not! Nothing will bring him back!” She stomped out of the kitchen and headed for her studio. Before she reached the heavy sliding door of the room she turned and walked quickly back to the kitchen. Charley was still at the table, head bent down. She came up behind him and ran her fingers through the thick red curls. “I’m sorry. I know I’m a grouch. I know it matters whether Daddy was murdered or not, but Charley ...” She dropped to her knees and buried her head in his lap. “I still miss him so much.” Her shoulders shook.