She didn’t dare look, imagining bullets puncturing the old truck as if it were aluminum foil. They were weaving like Road Warrior lunatics, and all Rominy’s attentions were focused on trying to recall half-forgotten Hail Marys for what she was convinced were the last seconds of her life. The nuns were right, she should have gone to Confession.
“They’re coming…”
She squeezed her eyes shut. She could hear the full-throated roar of a heavy SUV or truck and the answering whine of the old pickup. Then a pop, and a whistle of wind.
“Damn.” He seemed resigned. “They’re shooting.”
“Please, please, stop this thing…”
“Cops!” He sounded exultant and their speed abruptly slackened. “They tried to keep up and the Patrol nailed them!” They swerved a final time and steadily decelerated. “Hallelujah yes, the cops are stopping them! Oh boy, they’d better get rid of that gun.”
“Are the police following us, too?” she asked with hope.
“No, thank God. They’re busy with skinheads.” The truck’s sound changed, and she sensed they’d taken an off-ramp. She was shaking in fear and confusion, humiliated at having her head almost in this bastard’s lap. Then they coasted to a stop.
He put his hand on her head again. “Stay down, for a light or two.”
Of course, maybe he’d saved her life once more. Or he was a complete schizoid. Hail Mary, what in heaven is going on? “Where are we?”
“Everett. We’ll go through town to make sure we’ve shaken them before getting back on the freeway.”
“Please go to the authorities.” She felt defeated, exhausted, hopeless.
“I told you, the police can’t help us, not yet. Though I gotta say, three cheers for the Washington State Patrol. They nailed those bastards. That’s a big ticket, driving like we were. They’ll have to breathalyze, the whole nine yards. I think we’re safe, Rominy. At least for the next five minutes.”
“I don’t feel safe. I thought we were going to crash.”
“I’m a better driver than that.”
“It felt like Mister Toad’s Wild Ride in Disneyland.”
“I’ve done some amateur stock car.” He gently touched her shoulder. “You can sit up now.”
They were on an avenue that ran by Puget Sound, still heading north, a bluff with houses to their right. Rominy felt sick, and light-headed from fear. Her cheeks were wet from tears, and she was ashamed of them. Shouldn’t she be braver?
“I just want it to end.”
“Sorry, it’s just beginning.” He gave her a sympathetic look, his features strong but not unkind. “But we’ll make it, you’ll see. It’s important, or I never would have involved you.”
She groaned and noticed a draft of cool air by her neck and a thin whistling. She turned.
There was a bullet hole in the pickup’s rear window and a web of radiating cracks.
7
New York, United States
September 10, 1938
T he American Museum of Natural History was a castle of curiosities bordering New York’s Central Park, a national junk drawer of the sensational and the educational. Depression crowds still paid their quarter to see bone hunter Barnum Brown’s Tyrannosaur in the Jurassic Hall, the reconstructed Pueblo Indian village in the anthropological wing, or the speculative trip to the moon at Hayden Planetarium. There was a diorama of mountain gorillas against the volcanoes of the Belgian Congo, painted to re-create the spot where the museum’s Carl Akeley had succumbed to tropical disease. In adjacent halls were Carter’s mounted animals from the upper Zambezi, Inca relics from Bennett’s explorations of Peruvian ruins, and stuffed birds from Burma’s Irawadi River. And there was the magnificent bharal , or blue sheep, brought back and mounted by the Benjamin Hood Expedition of 1934. The horned male looked eternally over a high, rolling plateau toward the distant snowy crests of the painted Himalayas, school children viewing the Roof of the World through glass.
Hood’s office was in the prestigious southeast tower overlooking Central Park, just one floor below the museum’s mercurial director, famed Gobi Desert explorer Roy Chapman Andrews. Hood’s family had the money to finance his explorations and contribute to museum coffers, meaning that he’d been given a higher ceiling and better view. Less favored (or less rich) curators sweated in tighter, darker rooms. The favoritism made Hood feel guilty, but not enough to give the office up.
The flamboyantly self-promoting Andrews perched above them all. The museum director had led the first Dodge trucks into Mongolia and protected his dinosaur bones in shoot-outs with bandits. Since those cowboy days he’d proven to be as bad an administrator as he was good at finding bones and attracting publicity. He was erratic, demanding, and forgetful. It was no surprise, then, that Hood reacted with distrust when his boss telephoned to say he was sending down some government functionary to confer. The director had wasted Hood’s time before with political errands and donor meetings that came to nothing.
“Can’t see him,” Hood lied. “I’ve got a meeting with a Rockefeller Foundation man on that Hudson Bay expedition I proposed.”
“Forget Hudson Bay,” Chapman said in his brusque manner. “Hudson Bay isn’t happening. Even if you can afford it the rest of us can’t. The Depression won’t let up and our budget is bleeding. We need to gear up for next year’s world’s fair here in New York. You know that.”
“Roy, I’m not a world’s fair type of guy.”
“Which is why you need to speak with Mr. Duncan Hale. Don’t close doors just when they’re opening for you, Ben. This one will get your blood up, I promise.”
Hood remained suspicious. “Then why’d you send him to me?”
“Because it’s Agent Hale and you’re the expert he wants on loan. Oh, and by the way: we don’t have a choice.” Andrews hung up.
The director asserted his authority over Hood because in truth he had little leverage; the millionaire had no need for a curator’s job. Hood’s family was rich from lumber, paper, and real estate. Ben could have been like a thousand wealthy sons, rampaging his way through private schools and plowing nubile debutantes before marrying the proper pedigree and managing an empire he’d not created.
But Hood was different. He stayed outside even in foul weather while growing up at Palisade, the family estate in the Hudson Valley. He was fascinated by the natural world. His father taught him to hunt and fish-they’d hiked the Rockies and gone on safari in Africa-and he climbed and hiked on his own. Rich people were boring, he decided, knowing nothing but money, while scientists, who worked for pennies, were pursuing the secrets of the universe. The least rewarded had the most fascinating jobs.
There’s snobbery in the sciences, as in all professions, and it was a reverse snobbery that would have discriminated against a rich man like Ben. But Hood bludgeoned his way into their fraternity by contributing to others’ causes and financing his own expeditions to unknown Tibet. He took along British, German, and Swiss companions and bore hunger, thirst, and insects without complaint.
Like Andrews, he was featured in National Geographic, and it was quietly let known that the Hood family might make a donation to the hard-pressed New York museum if a permanent position could be made on its staff. The fact that Dr. Hood had published in the best peer-reviewed journals made such an appointment defensible to the museum employees he vaulted ahead of. So he’d been given the second-best office, a starving wage, and periodic reminders from Andrews that he must answer to the museum hierarchy. The subordination grated, but it also gave him something in common with the other curators. He’d become, through routine slights from his boss and quiet contributions to his rival’s projects-he was buying friendship, Hood knew-one of them.