“Reminds me of a place called Brighton Beach,” al-Kalli said. “Ever been to Great Britain, Captain Greer?”
“No, not yet,” Greer replied, trying to keep the frustration out of his voice.
“It’s just as tacky as this, but it lacks the California sun.”
Greer knew that he had to take charge, or else al-Kalli would just keep snowing him with this bullshit. Setting himself squarely in front of al-Kalli, and using the line he had practiced at home, he said, “Have you had time to consider my proposal?”
But at home he had never imagined it getting a laugh. “Why,” al-Kalli said, “are we getting married?”
Jakob snorted, too, and Greer felt even more like a fool.
“In business,” al-Kalli advised him, “never appear too eager.”
Christ, Greer thought, he’s giving me blackmail advice. Al-Kalli stopped in front of one of the Skee-Ball booths and watched as a fat kid with a Lakers T-shirt hanging down to his knees rolled ball after ball up the alley.
“You sell yourself short,” al-Kalli finally said, without even bothering to look at Greer—who had no idea how to take that remark. How could he have asked for too little? He hadn’t even mentioned an actual price in the letter.
“Why stoop to blackmail when you have proven yourself, up until now, so resourceful?”
The kid in the Lakers shirt, unhappy with his final score, kicked the booth and stomped off, brushing past Greer like he wasn’t even there. Greer was starting to wonder if the kid was right.
Al-Kalli had moved on, too, strolling with his cane in hand toward the bumper car rink. Greer caught up to him again at the rail.
“I know, for instance, how you gained entrance to my estate,” al-Kalli said, his eyes riveted on the bumper cars careening around the course. “And that’s been taken care of. But what, precisely, did you see? And how much do you really know? Your letter was somewhat vague on these points.”
Now, Greer thought, they were finally getting down to brass tacks. “I saw enough,” Greer replied, ever conscious of Jakob hovering just out of earshot.
“Enough for what?”
One of the bumper cars banged up against the rubber wall in front of them, and then got smacked by two others from either side.
Al-Kalli finally turned to face him, and his eyes glittered like beetles in the afternoon sunlight. “You don’t seriously believe I would pay you hush money, do you?”
Greer was speechless.
“It would never end. I’d have you showing up with your hand out for the rest of my life.” He turned his gaze back toward the bumper cars. “No, I’d much sooner have you killed.”
“You could try,” Greer said.
Al-Kalli laughed again. “Please, Captain, we both know your car—the green Mustang, with the cracked window, parked by the exit ramp—could easily have been wired by now. I could be done with you by nightfall.”
This was not going at all as Greer expected. Maybe he should have mentioned an actual figure in the letter. Maybe al-Kalli thought he was going to be unreasonable, and yes, keep showing up for more money. But Greer wasn’t like that; he was a man of his word. If he asked for a million, he’d take the million and then he’d be gone. Hadn’t al-Kalli seen, from his actions in Iraq, that he was as good as his word?
“So what are you suggesting?” was all Greer could come up with. He felt that he needed time to fall back and regroup, but he wasn’t going to get any.
Al-Kalli was already moving on, toward the video game arcade. The racket emanating from its doors was unbelievable.
“A job.”
A what? Greer thought he might not have heard him correctly over the din. “What did you say?”
“Clearly, I need help with my security,” al-Kalli conceded. “I’ve fired the gatekeeper, fired the Silver Bear company, and you, as it happens, are already compromised. I can either employ you or . . .” He shrugged, as if to suggest the Mustang could still blow sky high.
Greer was dumbfounded. He caught Jakob staring at him from a few yards off. Did he know what was going down?
“But you will need to tell me now,” al-Kalli said, “so I can make my plans accordingly.”
The bells and chimes and buzzers and whistles going off in the video arcade made it hard even to think. But Greer knew he had to.
Al-Kalli started to walk away, idly rapping the end of his walking stick on the wooden boards underfoot. Jakob followed him, and turned toward Greer as he passed him by.
Greer stood where he was, unsure of what to say or do.
They were fifteen or twenty feet away, before Greer, who felt himself suddenly fresh out of options, said, “Okay.”
But they didn’t stop or turn around, and for all he knew they hadn’t even heard. So he had to swallow his pride and shout, “Okay!” after them.
They were just disappearing around the corner of the next concession, on their way back toward the parking lot.
“Okay!” he shouted again, and a bunch of kids gave him a funny look. “I’ll take it!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
WE WERE TWENTY-FIVE days with barely enough food and water to sustain us, and in the dead of night, when we most needed his help, Peter the Hermit fled our camp, with William, Viscount of Melun, known to us as the Carpenter because of the axe he wielded so prodigiously in battle. The next day, the Frankish lord Tancred pursued and recaptured them, and upon their return they were made to give their public oath that they would not again abandon the cause of Christ and our pilgrimage.
Beth knew that the scribe’s account was true; she had checked the standard historical texts, and Peter’s desertion was well recorded in the annals of the First Crusade. As was the scribe’s account of the siege of Antioch, which immediately followed.
Though the walls of Antioch had been breached, the inner citadel and its defendants still resisted, and we found ourselves besieged in turn by a mighty army led by Kerboga, the Prince of Mosul, and twenty-eight Turkish emirs. We were offered but two choices—servitude or death—and so, under the Banner of Heaven we went forth to meet the enemy. It was in the first hours of that battle that I was
made prisoner, and while those in my company fell to the curved blade of the Saracen, I was spared by the Grace of God and by the peculiar skills of my hand. A commander of the infidels, judging by my tools that I was capable of both art and writing, ordered that I be taken not as a prisoner, but as an honored guest, to his palace. It is here that I write these last words, tomorrow to become but blood sport in the garden of this dread ruler, once my patron and now my executioner, the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli.
Even though she might have expected it, Beth was still stunned at seeing the al-Kalli name. Mohammed had not been mistaken;
The Beasts of Eden
had indeed been created, nearly a thousand years before, for one of his direct ancestors. Despite the remarkable odds against it, it had been successfully passed down for countless generations within the family, and preserved in miraculous condition—though only now, and to her, had it yielded these terrible secrets.
“Which tie should I wear?” Carter said, coming out of the closet with two different ones draped around his neck, and laughed when he saw Beth, still sitting on the edge of the bed in her underwear, utterly absorbed in the pages. “You’re worse than I am,” he said. “You’ve got to get dressed or we’ll be late.”
She heard him, but she just couldn’t change her focus quite yet.
“Beth?” he said. “Earth to Beth? It’s six forty-five.”
“You won’t believe what I just read,” she said, and then she told him about the mention of the Sultan Kilij al-Kalli’s name.
“Mohammed will be glad to hear about it,” Carter said, “if we ever get there.”
She laid the printouts on the bed.
“Tie?” he reminded her.
“Oh—the one with the blue stripes.”
“Of course, that all depends,” he called out from the bathroom where he’d gone to put on the striped tie, “on whether or not you decide to tell him about your little discovery.”
That very question had been tormenting Beth; on the one hand, she hadn’t yet been able to get the whole thing translated, and she didn’t want to share what she had found until she absolutely
knew
what she had found. On the other hand,
The Beasts of Eden
did not belong to her; it belonged to Mohammed al-Kalli, and he had the right to know everything there was to know about it.
She could not put off telling him for very much longer.
She quickly finished dressing—a simple black dress, heels, a strand of pearls her aunt had bequeathed to her—and left Robin with all her final babysitting instructions. Joey was in his playpen, absorbed in his toys. Although they drove to Bel-Air in Beth’s car, a white Volvo that was a little newer (and a lot cleaner) than Carter’s Jeep, Carter took the wheel and Beth navigated. Once or twice they had to stop and consult their Thomas Guide.
“Dark up here, isn’t it?” Carter said, as Beth confirmed that they were to bear to the left, and not the right.
Beth was surprised at it, too. They’d only been in L.A. for less than a year, and nothing so far had taken them into the heady precincts of upper Bel-Air. She felt as if they’d been driving up and away from the rest of the city, from all the ordinary people, like themselves, who led ordinary lives, and she imagined a celebrity or studio head or tycoon of one kind or another behind every towering hedge or shuttered pair of gates.
The houses up here were getting fewer and farther between, and most of the time all you could really see was the tip of a gable, the hint of a roofline, or, now and again, the back fence of a tennis court.
“Al-Kalli’s should be at the very crest,” Beth said, putting down the map. For the distance of several blocks already, the street had felt more like a private drive, and straight ahead they could now see a lighted gatehouse. As they pulled up, a squat Asian man in a blue uniform checked their name off the invitation list and told them to follow the drive—but slowly. “The peacocks sometimes stand in the road,” he said.
“Peacocks?” Carter said to Beth as they drove, slowly, onto the grounds.
And sure enough, there they were—a flock of them, their tail feathers fanned out in a beautiful display of blue and gold, strutting around the lip of a splashing fountain.
“An awfully good replica of the Trevi,” Carter said of the ornately sculpted fountain.
“What makes you think it’s a copy?” Beth said, and Carter laughed.
“You could be right,” he said. “What’s next? The Eiffel Tower?”
At the top of the winding drive, in front of a massive stone and timber manor house, a valet in a red jacket stepped into the drive and gestured for them to stop. Another valet materialized out of the dark and swiftly opened Beth’s door. Carter could see a dozen other cars lined up neatly in front of a garage wing. All the cars were Bentleys or Jaguars or BMWs, with the lone exception of a dusty green Mustang off at the far end. They were ushered up the front steps and into a spacious, marble-floored foyer, with a wide, winding staircase on both sides; ahead of them they could hear music, and a maid in a white skirt and cap escorted them out to the back garden, where a string quartet in formal attire was playing Brahms under the boughs of a jacaranda tree.