tried her telephone, called the hospital where she worked in New York, sent her e-mails.”
“Who else knows her?” Arielle asked. “How can we inquire?”
“I’ll call her old friend, her husband’s friend. The British physicist. Gabriel Plum.”
There had been an air about Gabriel Plum, his cocksureness, that made Pierre wonder if he had slept with Lucy Bergmann. But perhaps not. In her eyes, there was something newly virginal. Pierre would have to confide to Gabriel that Lucy had agreed to smuggle an ancient manuscript out of Egypt, but Pierre doubted the ethics of that would matter to Professor Plum.
“Do you trust him?” Arielle asked.
Pierre saw a shadow pass over his daughter’s lovely, expressive face.
“No choice.”
RESCUE
WHEN THE SKY screamed with twining airplanes and the air exploded, Adam watched a parachute unfurl in rich orange, the signal of danger and caution. Yet the parachute swelled open with a color joyful as a zinnia, quite the opposite of that oddly shaped black egg the bird plane had erroneously laid upon the air.
Appended from the chute was surely a man, a brother, a soldier. On his own cheeks Adam felt the cold air rushing like two adzes made of ice past the soldier’s cheekbones. How had Adam himself come to this world? The descent of Adam, having been thrown from the scalding back of a truck, was shorter.
Who was coming? He stared and waited.
If the chute dropped plumb, it would land to the left of the tall trees, and if it descended in a drifting course, as surely it would, then it would settle like an orange drape among the high spires of the redwoods. And there the paratrooper would hang.
His body broken? His blood shed?
Adam glanced down at his naked feet, their clean, bare whiteness, and knew that they would take him where he needed to go. How beautiful are the feet of them who preach the gospel of Peace. If not a well-winged angel, then let him be mountain goat and more, sure-footed and practical.
Adam thought of his own five younger brothers, and he remembered the five not-brothers, Arab soldiers, God’s avenging angels, the Eumenides of Greek mythology, the five young men in the truck who had savaged his body and left him, dumped out, like a dung pie in the road left to bake in the sun.
But the monkey-god came, the hominoid or little homunculus had come to Adam. At first he had thought the creature was stuffing a gag into his mouth, but no, it was a juicy wad, a handful of fruit, wedges of tangerine, pomegranate seeds slimy as the jeweled sperm from a frog, oval grapes, and then the tapered end of a soft banana. The Samaritan monkey had fed him, had pulled and boosted him upright, had placed a skinny arm of surprising strength around his back and made him walk into the shade.
Having reached the bottom of the path from the rock shelter, Adam paused to enter the room of his mind that was not memory but the dwelling place of now, the place-time for planning and thinking. Here a forest of scrubby pines, there he would run through the aspens, green and flickering in sunlight, and he would come to the grasses, short and thick, dear cushions for his feet. Quickly, quickly he would run past the staked tomatoes and the rose garden with its tempting silvery gazing ball, past the twin pear trees eternally afluff with blossoms and attendant bees, because this was Eden—half-created, half-perceived, as Wordsworth said of all of nature.
Running, not just thinking of running, Adam passed through oaks—he loved those boldly, irregularly lobed leaves—and past the dogwoods, here as yet uncursed or dwarfed because their wood would form the tree whereon Christ died. Not the sacrificial future, now, this, he panted as he ran, was the beginning, the Genesis.
Here, in the beginning, God placed humans, a man and a woman whose nature it was to help each other because they were made mortal. Magnolias. The air was redolent from the perfume of their wide-open white blossoms, big as cereal bowls.
Suddenly Adam tripped in a tangle of ivy vines. He should have gone around. He didn’t fall, but the tough vine cut the flesh on top of his foot. Snared, he looked up and saw the redwoods, their height stretching sunward. Near the pinnacle of the tallest tree wavered the orange parachute, its lines terminating some twenty feet lower in the hanging man. He was suspended not over empty space, but above a