10

Peter was at the dig early. He made a cup of Nescafé, and pried the lid off the bottle of milk he had brought from his flat. He believed in keeping milk and sugar and tea and such things in the main Portakabin. It made things cozy for the workers. He believed in tea breaks, and kept a big black kettle on the two-burner propane stove. He rolled one of his slim cigarettes, but it was difficult because it was a cold morning and his fingers were stiff.

His desk was a clutter of notebooks for his personal site journals, and for ideas that came to him in a flash. He had experienced several exciting ideas recently, and scrawled them in his spiral notebooks. He also kept a Munsell soil chart on his desk, and context cards for noting finds. There was also, often ignored, a yellow RMJ plastic helmet, made in England to protect the head of the absent-minded.

The poplar trees were like coarse, black feathers standing against a perfect gray sky, a sky as flat as a sheet of paper. It would snow, he thought.

Peter generally did not need much sleep. This was a good thing. He had been at York District Hospital until late the night before. Dr. Hall, the freckled physician, was, it seemed, an expert neurosurgeon. He had examined the young man, a gifted student in history. The student had been entirely lucid and reassured Peter that he still wanted to pursue archaeology. “Although, perhaps, at a different dig.”

There was, Dr. Hall reported, nothing wrong with the young man.

“You’re quite sure?” Peter had asked.

“There’s very little evidence of even a slight concussion. Why—what happened?”

“We gave him a helmet, but, for some reason, he decided not to wear it.”

There had been the telephone calls with Langton, and with Dr. Higg. It was all very annoying, and although the event itself had been chilling, now Peter felt only sick of bureaucrats and their many questions.

It was easy to understand why someone might choose not to wear a helmet. They were always slipping down and blocking vision, and Peter often wore his backward, to avoid that problem.

Jane was always at the dig very early. She wanted to be professional in every way. Peter wondered if this had attracted her to him—the fact that he had, after all, some small reputation as a professional archaeologist, including a very recent article on Roman walls in St. Albans. Some of the walls had been painted to resemble stone, a motif well in keeping with modern Britain, in which heaters were decorated with plastic coals.

But the chat he wanted to have with Jane now was not professional, and it was not pleasant. Perhaps it was not even wise to have it here, but Peter, for the moment, did not feel like being wise.

Even so, he looked forward to seeing her.

The generator started, and the padlock on the toolshed surrendered after a few strong tugs. The inner workings of that particular lock always froze in the slightest cold.

Last night, when he had left, the tools had been lined up tidily, and the yellow helmets stacked, one on top of the other, in a column.

So many mornings he had arrived to see the tools in a jumble. Traffic vibration, Jane had suggested. The wind, suggested Mandy. Perhaps we don’t leave them all that tidy after all, Langton had once offered.

They had been tidy last night.

Peter wrenched open the door.

The tools were a tangle. The helmets were strewn about the interior. Peter cursed. He didn’t care what caused the mattocks to dance with the trowels anymore. The mystery, and it was a deep one, did not interest him at this moment. He had something more important on his mind.

It was not going to be a perfect day for work, but no one on the team would be reluctant to stand in the groundwater. They were a tough lot, even though some of the groundwater might well be frozen and have to be pried out with a shovel, like chocolate ice cream.

Jane was a round figure with all of her clothing, including a very long gray wool muffler. Her nose was pink, and she panted in the relative warmth of the Portakabin, beside Peter’s desk, where a floor heater made a modest battle against the cold.

“Not very nice, is it?” Peter offered.

“It isn’t,” she said, running the words together so they sounded like tisn’t.

He made her coffee.

“You’re going to make this all very awkward for me, Peter.”

Something in Peter twitched.

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore, for a while, at least.” She would not look at him as she said this, and then she did. Right into his eyes. “I really think it’s best.”

Peter turned away. Muscles in his neck knotted.

“I think what we did that night was lovely, but it was also, I’m afraid, a mistake.”

A beautiful night. Right after an Italian dinner and a walk up Dean Gate, right beside the Minster. Starlight through the naked trees.

Peter had expected a difficult moment with her. But the morning had vanished, and what was before him was a woman he loved, changed, in an instant, into a stranger. Her cheeks were pink. A lock of blond hair wandered. She had that too correct set to the jaw, and her eyes were cool. He saw it now. He had been right.

“You and Davis,” he said in a low voice.

“I’m sorry?” she said, as though she had not heard him clearly, or did not understand.

“You and Davis,” he said, very clearly.

“It’s not true, Peter.”

He knew it was true. He had seen them.

“I think, simply, that it’s unprofessional to have a close relationship with a colleague, and while I am very fond of you—Please, Peter, don’t make it more difficult.”

Peter smiled. He knew this was not a pleasant smile. He would not make it difficult at all. He would make it very easy. He would make it all extremely easy for her. Because he did not blame her. He knew who was at fault. He had been a fool to think Davis and he might be able to work together. He would continue the charade, of course. Why let Davis know how much he was hated?

She was murmuring words about a continuing professional relationship. “I do so much value your friendship, and your expertise, Peter.” She was ambitious, Peter knew, and knew how to succeed in a field that was thick with competition. No doubt this was a part of Davis’s charm. The celebrity archaeologist, whose bed was one of the quickest paths to a bright future. He had promised her a chair at a university in California, a future of book signings and cocktails in exotic places. Even Jane, with all her confidence, was having trouble continuing. Her voice faltered. “If you could at least make some sort of effort to understand.…”

Peter turned to her, and he used his best manner. “Of course,” he said. “I understand perfectly what has happened.”

He left, and found the heaviest hammer in the shed—“the giant-killer” he called it in his imagination. It was a great iron fist at the end of a shaft of wood. He stalked to Trench Nine, which had just been clawed open by the heavy equipment the week before. It was still a jumble of concrete and chunks of lumber, nineteenth-century warehouse beams.

Peter flung himself into the pit. The voices of workers reached him. They were just arriving. One of the men laughed, another whistled. The air compressor that worked the pneumatic drill coughed and started up. The site was all business now.

Peter used the great hammer, the giant-killer, on a chunk of concrete the size of a man. Concrete exploded. Peter grunted, and swung. And as he worked, something fluttered in his head, that sound he had hoped he had left far behind him, in the wet nights of his youth.

But he welcomed the sound now. Let it come—let it all come back. The old, terrible times had been life itself. He had been a fool to try to forgive Davis. He had been a fool to beg himself to spare Davis’s life. He had been right all along. Davis was a trespasser, a greedy interloper, a man who took whatever he wanted, unthinking, uncaring.

Peter would smile and seem to be thinking of soil samples and finds notations. No one would be able to tell what he was thinking. What is the face but the most perfect, living mask?

Peter swung the hammer. It made the most solid, delicious sound, iron and concrete, and the concrete was beginning to surrender. It was beginning to crumble. It was powder.

A little boy’s voice was speaking in his head. A soft, alert voice. “This has been a very, very naughty kitty, and it will have to be punished so awfully, awfully badly.”

He would start with cats. He had always loved that. A man who can beguile a cat, deceiving the most cautious creature of the night, could deceive anything. Or anyone. And a cat was much like Davis. Self-assured, self-confident, arrogant to the point of making a fatal blunder.

But he was out of practice. He would have to sharpen his powers. It would be like the old times, when he had felt pleasure like nothing his adult life had given him. Why had he waited so long?

The concrete was demolished. It lay scattered at his feet. He let the hammer fall, and leaned, panting, against the wall of the trench.

First, cats. And then the man.