Vigil by Robert Masello Page A

amiably for one topic or another to talk about. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other—they did—but their backgrounds and professions, even their interests, were pretty dissimilar.
    Ben came from Main Line Philadelphia money, prepped at Exeter, graduated at the top of his class from Wharton Business School, and had been rising through the investment banking ranks ever since.
    Carter’s family was what he’d come to refer to, out of their earshot of course, as “comfortably lower class.” His father had driven a delivery truck for a dairy chain in northern Illinois, and his mother had stayed home to raise Carter and his four brothers and sisters. A lot of the time, Carter had been home sick; as a boy, he’d suffered from all the usual ailments—mumps, measles, chicken pox—but he’d also had what seemed to be a kind of asthma. He would always say “seemed to be” because it had mysteriously cleared up by the time he was a teenager. And ever since then, he’d done his best to make up for lost time, by rock climbing, skiing, and traveling all over the world. When he’d won a generous scholarship to Princeton—to everyone’s astonishment, including his own—he’d grabbed it and never looked back.
    But it was only in the past few years—after he’d made his remarkable finds in Sicily, in fact—that he’d ascended to the top echelons of his own field. The chair that Carter occupied at New York University was a much-coveted prize, in part because Mr. Kingsley, after whom it was named, had also left a large enough endowment to generate a respectable salary for its occupant. Carter had not gone into the bone business for the money—no one in his right mind did—but in the end, he would have to concede, bones had indeed been pretty good to him.
    While he and Ben drifted from books and movies to foreign affairs, Carter had more and more trouble staying focused. He did his best to keep up his end of the conversation, but his mind kept going back to the FedEx envelope tucked under his chair. He wished he could run home, rip open the envelope, and find out what Russo was going on about. While Carter had first discovered and excavated the Well of the Bones, Giuseppe Russo—then just a doctoral candidate in paleontology—had been his right hand, literally. Once, when Carter’s rope had inexplicably slipped its clip, Russo had reached down at the last second, grabbed the collar of his poncho, and hauled him up out of the ground. Carter could easily recall the feeling of dangling in midair over the narrow tunnel that burrowed more than sixty feet into the earth, above a grisly mound of prehistoric human bones; he knew that if it hadn’t been for Russo, he would have wound up joining them.
    Fortunately, by the time the dessert cart was brought around, everyone was too full even to think about it. Carter prayed that no one would ask for coffee or an after-dinner drink, and his prayer was answered; Ben actually said he had to get back to the office. Outside they parted ways, and Beth slipped her arm through Carter’s as they walked home.
    “So,” she said, “I’ve been dying to know all night. What’s in the magic envelope?”
    “I’ll know when we get home,” he said, “but it’s from Russo.”
    “The guy who worked with you in Sicily?”
    “Yes. He says they’ve found something, something he thinks is special enough that I’ll want to take a look at it.”
    “Does he want you to go there?” she said, sounding concerned.
    “Not as far as I know. But why, you don’t think you’d find enough Renaissance art over there to keep you busy for a few weeks?”
    “It’s not that,” she said, as they waited for the walk light at Bleecker. “I can’t leave the gallery right now, and if you’re gone, how can we . . . ?”
    Carter got it. “Oh. I guess I couldn’t just leave a few specimens in the fridge for you, huh?”
    “You’re so romantic. But that’s what I wanted to tell you. Dr.