She tore through the house and down into the basement. As she hit the bottom step all she registered were two red heads. One was a grotesque effigy, severed and lolling obscenely amidst darkened leathery sticks on a pile of cloth. The other head with identically colored hair was Charley, chin bowed against his chest, a trickle of blood over the left eye.

  “No! No! No!” she shrieked. His body was slumped and lifeless in the corner. Jean and Tobias Scroop stood beside him. Von Sackler sat dazed in another corner.

  “Calista,” he whispered, “this was not to have happened.”

  "What have you done to my baby?” she screamed. “What have you done?”

  “He was just too nosy, Calista.” Tobias spoke like a fussy old schoolmarm talking about a classroom behavior problem.

  “You killed my baby!”

  “Well . . .,” Tobias began.

  “Shut up Tobias!” Jean Scroop took a step toward Calista. “We didn’t plan to, but it has worked out rather nicely.” She had walked straight toward Calista and looked up with those dreadful agate eyes. She was wringing her hands.

  “But why?”

  “Our little joke on Harvard, you might say.” Jean Scroop’s face was so close to Calista’s that she could see every vein and pore. The old lady seemed oddly young now and animated. “It seems that Herr von Sackler took quite a liking to our little Ancon prince, and, well, decided that perhaps he would rather run off, elope with the little fellow, so to speak, rather than take him back to the Altertumskunde. Perspicacious man that he is, Herr von Sackler caught on to, oh, how should I put it, Tobias’s special talents and,” she gestured with her hand sinuously in the air, “decided to engage our skills. I shan’t call it blackmail, Herr von Sackler,” she said, turning to him.

  “But Calista,” von Sackler was standing now, “you must believe it that it was never intended that Charley should be involved. I would never, never . . .”

  “Shut up!” Calista spat. “Why did you kill him? He would have never hurt you.”

  “Oh no, we never feared that. It was actually rather fortuitous that Charley was so curious. You see, Tobias, in his haste, managed to botch up the little Ancon prince, but how conveniently we came upon Charley for a stand-in, or rather, Toby did.”

  “You’re crazy!” Calista shouted.

  “No, just practical. Herr von Sackler will be able to send a replica of our Ancon prince to the Altertumskunde. Tobias has already made, or I should say scavenged, four or five cups and jewelry from other collections. Nobody really knew what was wrapped up with him, anyway, except . . .”

  “I can’t believe this!”

  “You’d better,” Jean Scroop said evenly. “The revolver, Toby.” “Oh no!” von Sackler said weakly, getting to his feet.

  “You shut up!” Jean snarled. “It’s too late.”

  Tobias had taken down an ancient-looking revolver. “It still works. Belonged to my dad,” he said proudly. “And I’d be most obliged to use it.”

  “Toby, you sound just like one of those westerns!” Jean Scroop smiled slightly as she spoke.

  Calista thought she was going to be sick. The room seemed to sway. All she really wanted to do was to get across the floor to Charley. To hold him once more, to cradle him, to kiss that dear curve of cheek. Just as the room started to sway she thought she heard a tiny cough from where Charley lay.

  “Okay, drop the gun!” Something went whistling by Calista. It clattered to the floor and with it went Tobias. “Don’t worry Mrs. Jacobs,” Archie Baldwin went clambering by her over some boxes, “I would never have thrown that unless I was one hundred percent sure. I’m as good with a rabbit stick as the Sundance Kid was with a gun.” Baldwin stepped over Tobias and knelt by Charley. Calista was at his side. “He’s not dead. He’s breathing.”

  Lieutenant Finnegan was there. “He’s okay, ma’am—bad blow on the head. Albert, call an ambulance.”

  “He’s alive!” Calista cried. “Charley’s here! He’s alive!” She cradled his head. For the first time now as she cradled Charley’s head she looked directly into von Sackler’s face. It was unbelievable to her. How could he have done it? Said all the perfect things, laughed at all her jokes, marveled at her cooking, made that kind of love to her— not love with a capital L or the love of the in-love, but that small temporary kind of love that was passionate yet fragile in its own way and that had become a witty yet moving celebration of her body. It was not a profound kind of love but what it was she had received in grace and good faith, and yet it had all been wrong and false. It had been nothing more than the semen of a frog caster.

  He came to in the ambulance a couple of blocks before they turned in to the hospital.

  “Mom.”

  “Oh Charley! Charley! Am I glad to hear you say something!” Calista hugged him.

  “What’s happening?”

  “You’re in an ambulance, sweetie. That insane man Scroop conked you on the head.”

  “Are you a doctor or something?” Charley said, turning to Archie Baldwin.

  “I’m the ‘or something.’ ”

  “Charley,” Calista clapped her hands, “you’ll never guess who this is.”

  “Who?”

  “Archie Baldwin!”

  “No shit . . . ooh, my head!”

  “Don’t talk too much,” the ambulance attendant said.

  Chapter 41

  Calista sat by Charley’s bed. A young resident came in. “Everything checked out just fine from the CAT scan, Mrs. Jacobs. We just like to monitor any kind of head injury for the first twenty-four hours. So, he can leave tomorrow evening. Any questions?”

  “No, not really. Can I get a cot in here to stay with him?”

  “Sure thing. I’ll tell the nurse.”

  Charley was sleeping now. Calista touched his hair gently. There was an adhesive patch where they had shaved it for the stitches.

  “Calista?”

  “Yes?” She looked up. Baldwin was leaning around the door.

  “Want some coffee and doughnuts?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  He came in and set the box down on a table.

  She took a sip of coffee and looked over at Charley. “He’s beautiful isn’t he?” Then she bent over and burst into tears. She never knew a sob could come from so deep.

  “It’s over now, Calista.” Baldwin put his arm around her curved back and bent over so his head was very close to hers. He whispered in her ear, “It’s really over now.”

  Chapter 42

  The technicians had been scurrying about in the lecture hall with enormous spools of cable. For fifteen minutes Calista had been sitting on the stage observing the flurry of activity. Big cameras with familiar logos were now being wheeled into place. So far she had remained calm. Oliver Harrison sat next to her, checking out his statement for the fiftieth time, and neatly wrote in the changes in wording that Calista had suggested. The president of Harvard had just come up on the stage and knelt by Calista’s chair. She could barely hear what he was saying, but it sounded nice and sympathetic. He patted her knee. It all seemed more substantial than the perfunctory inquiries about her work at the faculty club sherry hours.

  Suddenly the thousand-watt lights came on. She was enveloped in a blinding white flood and everything became unreal. She reached for Harrison’s hand. It was there and grasped hers firmly. The room filled with students, faculty, and newspeople. Harrison and the president were talking about the order of things. The president then strode to the lectern and the bank of mikes.

  “Ladies and gentlemen . . .”

  In another room, in another city, another president pulled a chair closer to the three televisions tuned to the major networks. Some cabinet officers and the national security advisor sat behind him tensely.

  Late in the afternoon of that same day she took Charley home and put him to bed with two Big Macs, a chocolate shake, and the television set.

  “He must be okay, if he wants to eat all that,” Calista said as she entered her studio. Baldwin was sitting in the wing chair eating a Big Mac and drinking a beer.

  “How about you?”

  “Well . . .” She paused and took up a pencil and began fixing Rapunzel’s mouth so it didn’t look quite so hard. She would try to pick up some of that background texture of the trees in her dress. “I’m still awfully jittery, as one can witness by this line I’m trying to draw. But the jitters are nothing compared to my happiness in having Charley in one, whole, beautiful piece.” She shut her eyes tight for a second. “Tell me one thing, Archie.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Was it really Gardiner who killed Tom, and not the CIA?” “Yeah, it was Gardiner. But the CIA sure didn’t shed any tears. I mean, as you can see from the papers already, no way are they getting a clean bill of health in this thing. But Tom was on to Gardiner through me and Gardiner knew it. I’d been on to him for about six or eight months. I just needed the proof. When I heard about Tom and the Time Slicer, I knew there was a good chance.”

  “And Tom thought it was a good opportunity to see if anything had been exploding in the desert.”

  “I guess so. He never told me about that. He seemed genuinely interested in Gardiner’s ruse. I think he really was. Gardiner somehow figured it out that Tom’s focus was more archaeological than just the plain old geological stuff he had been doing for earth sciences departments, and Gardiner being well on the road to total insanity— I mean the pressure of this forgery must have been immense—well, he did it, Calista. He killed him. Put the snake in the bag and made sure no bite kit or other human being was around . . . What can I say, Calista. I wish I had never . . .”

  Calista waved her hand. “There’s no way you could have known he was homicidal. And, besides, we’ll never know how far the CIA would have been willing to go.”

  Baldwin leaned his head back against the chair and dug the palm of his hand into his left eye and rubbed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “God am I sorry.”

  A small gulf of silence hovered between them.

  “Tell me something else, Archie . . .”

  “What?”

  “Well . . She paused. “You may think this is kind of a grizzly question, but why do you think Gardiner committed suicide? And why did he do it with a snake?”

  “Guilt. You see, when he finally caught on, after he had killed Tom, that Tom was out there also for the anti-nuke stuff, well, he couldn’t live with that. He didn’t seem to have trouble living with the notion of himself as a murderer, but as an obstacle to liberal causes and one who had unwittingly abetted the CIA, this really ruffled his radical feathers. Remember, Gardiner in his undergraduate days at Columbia had been deeply involved with the student strikes of the late sixties. SDS, the whole thing. He was appalled by what he had done. For all the wrong reasons. His only course left was suicide, and some sort of crazy rationale made him want to experience the same sort of death. It’s hard to understand.”

  “No, it’s not that hard,” Calista murmured. “Tell me about the Scroops,” she said suddenly.

  “Well, it’s peculiar,” Archie said, taking another swallow of his beer. “We’ll be able to read the whole account tomorrow or the next day in the Times and the Globe. Jean Scroop apparently had an affair fifty or more years ago with Josiah Dickerson, class of 1920 or something like that. Tobias was the product of that union, although Dickerson never married her. He married someone else. In his day Dickerson discovered some remarkable stuff for the Museum of Comparative Zoology and headed up, pardon the pun, which you will soon understand, the great diplodocus expedition of that time. He found a most remarkable specimen, very articulate and all. Just one problem.” “What was that?”

  “No head on it.”

  “So?”

  “So that did not deter Josiah in the least. He simply stuck another head on and that was the way all diplodocus looked until 1932 or something when some people at the MCZ came up with the right head. Jean never forgave them. Ground her axe for fifty years. She became increasingly obsessed with it and then when Tobias was rejected by Harvard, well, that was the last straw. She eventually hatched what she kept referring to last night at the station as her ‘little joke on Harvard.’ It began with those forgeries where a fake would be put on the shelves in storage and the real item sold on the black market. Peter Gardiner somehow found out and enlisted their services for his own purposes. Gardiner couldn’t have done it without the Scroops.”

  “I can’t believe it, people getting so upset over Harvard. I mean, let’s face it, Harvard’s not that great. For one thing, they’re in the dark ages as far as salaries go. The University of Texas offered Tom three times his Harvard salary to go there. Of course, we preferred Boston, but not necessarily Harvard.”

  “I know. The whole thing is slightly bizarre.”

  “I guess,” she said softly.

  “You guess!” Baldwin leaned forward in the wing chair, resting his elbows on his knees and holding his beer can with two hands. “I think it’s about the goddamn weirdest thing I’ve ever heard!”

  She liked Baldwin. She liked him a lot. There was a bedrock honesty about this man. His deep blue eyes were as clear as a new day. She stuck the pencil in the pile of hair on top of her head. She leaned forward across her drawing board.

  “Do you want to hear something really weird?”

  “I doubt if I’ll be impressed.”

  “Give it a try.” She didn’t know what was compelling her to tell him this, but she went ahead. “This is sort of embarrassing—sort ofl What am I talking about? It’s humiliating!”

  “You don’t have to tell me, Calista.”

  “Yes, I do. You’re about the only person I can tell. Although I’m sure everyone will soon find out.” She leaned farther forward. “Can you imagine this: fifteen years Tom and I were married. We went together for three years. Almost twenty years of sleeping with one man. Now, who’s the first person I wind up in the sack with other than my husband after eighteen years?” Calista turned her head. She could feel the skin on her neck growing red.

  “A goddamn CIA agent! I’m not crying,” she said, turning her face to Baldwin again. Indeed, he was startled to see her smiling, red-faced, but smiling a little wildly. “But it is so embarrassing. I mean, never in my wildest sexual fantasies did I ever entertain notions of a CIA agent. Never even during the James Bond craze. I mean, let’s face it—it’s just so incredible. Why, I once had a date with Tom Hayden! And you know what else?” She jabbed another pencil into her hair. “I had a roommate my sophomore year at Bryn Mawr who had a cousin who slept with Abbey Hoffman and Jerry Rubin!” “At the same time?” Baldwin asked.

  “No. Well, actually, I don’t know. But anyhow, you get my point. I mean, really, me with the CIA—my whole attitude is, well.. .” She ran her fingers through her hair. “I’m just not keen on government institutions.”

  “Well,” Baldwin swallowed a combination burp and chuckle. He was biting the inside of his mouth to keep from bursting out laughing. This had to be one of the funniest ladies he had ever met, a genuinely funny, gallant lady. “Well, as I was saying, I ... uh ... do feel compelled as an employee of a government institution . . .”

  “Oh shit, Archie! I forgot. The Smithsonian, of course!”

  “Yes, the Smithsonian, and I would like to say in all seriousness,” but he had already started to laugh, “that the Smithsonian has a lot more to recommend it than the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “Oh really, now!” she said slyly. The hooded eyes were like dark shining crescents. “Listen,” she said suddenly, “would you do me a favor and get me a beer out of the refrigerator? I’ve got to get this goddamn Rapunzel into some sort of shape.”

  “You mean she’s not going to live happily ever after?” Baldwin said, getting out of his chair.

  “Not if she remains the twerp she is now. She’ll wind up in the sack with a CIA agent!”

  "Well, try jabbing a few pencils in her hair. It always helps to sort of hold things together—you know, until the prince comes.”

 

 

  Kathryn Lasky, Trace Elements

 

 

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