On the Fifth Day

“We have to call the police,” said Thomas, crouching, steadying himself.

“After we’ve had a little chat,” said Parks.

He had dragged the corpse into a refuse-strewn corner and piled it with empty boxes “to buy some time.”

“We should call the police,” said Thomas again.

“They know where you are, Thomas,” said Parks. “Not the police. The others. The people who want you dead. The people who killed your brother. You call the police now and you’ll never stop them. You’ll never know why Ed died or why they’re going to kill you, cops or no cops.”

“You left me to die,” Thomas snarled.

“In a hot bath?” Parks sneered. “Please. I just forgot to turn it off. I knew you’d be okay. The place was full of people. All you had to do was yell.”

“I’m telling you nothing,” Thomas said.

“Nothing I don’t already know, trust me,” said Parks.

“Trust you?” Thomas snorted. “You’re joking.”

“I just saved your life,” said Parks. “For which, I think, you owe me dinner.”

He nodded toward the restaurant. “I believe you have company. Get them out and we’ll go somewhere less . . .” he mused as if searching for the word, “less close to people I killed on your behalf. What do you say?”

Kumi and Jim had both still been inside, mulling their options, saying their farewells. Kumi had made more calls and now was planning to return to Tokyo and work. Jim had not decided whether he would stay with Thomas or strike out alone for a few days before returning to Chicago. They responded to the news of the fight in the alley with shock and panic, and they watched Parks—who was bragging about the way he had tailed Thomas—as if he might assault them at any moment.

Thomas did not know what to think about Parks’s apparent change in attitude toward him, but his life had seemed over only moments before and Parks had saved him, however violently. What he felt as a result was less trust than relief, and though he was still steeped in doubt where Parks was concerned, he owed him at least the chance to talk.

“So,” said Parks, taking his seat at a pine table in a bustling restaurant-cum-bar full of shouting, sweating waiters balancing trays of beer bottles and sake flasks. “You just made a big discovery. Let’s think . . .” He placed one finger to his temple, closed his eyes, and hummed, an adolescent psychic gag. “You have just figured out—finally—that your brother wasn’t just interested in ancient pictures of fish; he was interested in ancient fish, if you see the distinction. More particularly, something that was kind of a fish, and kind of not, and had been dead for a very long time.”

“What is he talking about?” said Kumi. She still looked pale and wary.

Thomas said nothing and took a long swallow of beer. He was already on his second.

“His brother and I crossed paths the moment he strayed from his area of expertise—symbols, God, and associated hokum—into mine,” said Parks. “Though not in person. We shared an alliance with a Japanese man called Satoh who wound up getting gutted by that vampire freak who got his just deserts in the alley back there.”

“And your area is?” said Kumi. She was trying to focus, to get back on track, if only—Thomas thought—to keep her mind off what had just happened.

“Science. Biology: marine, to be precise and,” Parks continued, pleased with himself, “if we are going to be really specific, evolution.”

Kumi’s eyes flashed questioningly to Thomas, and back to Parks.

“The very reverend Ed,” Parks continued, “recognized certain oddities in the representation of a fish from a very limited geographical set grouped around Naples. The images were unlike anything he’d seen anywhere else and were confined to a span of about a thousand years, vanishing around the eighth century after the appearance of his Christ. He came to the conclusion—and this was the clever bit—that said images represented not just an abstract idea but an actual creature. It was fishlike, but with certain amphibian characteristics including a fully mobile head, lungs and—wait for it—legs, made up of shoulder, elbow, and wrist. It was what we wacky folks in the trade call a fishapod—a late Devonian transitional species between fish and landlubber tetrapods like Ichthyostega. Cool, huh?”

It was uncanny, thought Thomas, the way he just kept going, as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn’t killed someone only an hour ago. It was also ironic. Parks couldn’t have chosen a more perfect way to demonstrate that he was on Thomas’s side, but the ease with which he seemed to have recovered from the incident made Thomas still more wary of him, though the nature of that wariness had changed. Before he had assumed Parks was an enemy. Now he was an ally, but somehow this did not make him any less dangerous, any more human than his murderous adversaries.

“Thomas,” said Kumi, her eyes still fixed on Parks, “this is crazy, right? What is he talking about?”

“Ah, but Thomas doesn’t think it is crazy, do you, old buddy, old pal?” Parks oozed, loving every second of it.

Thomas reached into his pocket, drew out the New York Times article, and spread it out on the table, carefully, as if it were immensely fragile.

“Tiktaalik roseae,” said Parks. “You really did do your homework, didn’t you? I’m proud of you, buddy.”

Thomas ignored him, drank, and then said, “This was in Ed’s luggage. I don’t know, but I think Ed may have believed it.”

“That there were prehistoric fish in Pompeii?” said Jim, speaking up for the first time. He looked more than baffled. He was watching Parks and looked hostile.

“Not just in Pompeii,” said Thomas. He was mumbling, uncertain, even embarrassed by the strangeness of it all. “Ed thought they lived throughout the region. They weren’t common,” he said, “if they were there at all, I mean: rare enough to have mystical significance that made them suitable for use in religious iconography.”

“Amen, brother,” said Parks, lighting a cigarette.

“And they lived into the medieval period,” Thomas said, with sudden conviction, adding as an afterthought, “or at least Ed thought so.”

“He even thought he knew where the last one died, didn’t he, Tommy boy?” said Parks.

Thomas thought for a second, and then nodded.

“The Castello Nuovo in Naples,” he said, recalling what Giovanni had told him. “The legend was that it lived in the dungeons and occasionally took prisoners. Eventually it was hunted, killed, and hung over the castle entrance.”

“You said it was a crocodile from Egypt,” said Jim, doggedly.

“They wouldn’t have known a crocodile if it bit them in the ass,” said Parks, “as this one did. Several times. They also wouldn’t have known that the Nile crocodile is a freshwater animal, while the thing that haunted the castle dungeons came in from the sea.”

“Eduardo liked this story,” Thomas muttered to himself, quoting Giovanni. His emotions were high and confused, delight at solving the core of the mystery battling with sadness and disappointment that his brother had pursued so ridiculous a grail. He flagged down a waitress and ordered another beer. Kumi was watching, but he avoided her eyes.

“But you can’t actually believe this?” said Jim. “I mean, even if Ed did. This fish thing in the paper died out hundreds of millions of years ago, you said. It wasn’t around two thousand years ago because it was extinct! You don’t come back from extinct.”

“Tell that to the coelacanth,” said Parks.

“The what?” said Jim.

“Another Devonian lobe-finned fish that was supposed to have been dead for about as long as our friend here,” Parks said, tapping the newspaper article. “Till they started showing up off the Comoros islands near Madagascar in the 1930s. Caused quite the stir, I can tell you.”

“Just there?” said Kumi. “The Comoros islands?”

“Until 1997, when another one showed up in Indonesia,” said Parks. “A coelacanth, but genetically different from the African fish: a completely separate population that we just didn’t know existed.”

“But you don’t think there are coelacanth in the Mediterranean?” said Kumi.

“No,” Parks laughed. “There’s nothing in the Med we don’t know about.”

“But there was when Vesuvius buried Pompeii?” inserted Jim, still skeptical, even defiant.

“No,” said Parks. “The fish Ed identified is not a coelacanth. It’s something much more interesting.”

“More?” said Thomas.

“When coelacanths were first caught, scientists called them the missing link,” said Parks, “living proof of the evolutionary step when fish crawled out onto the land. This had been speculated based on the fossil record alone because of those large, lobed fins that could have functioned as legs. When scientists got to see them alive underwater they found that those fins moved in diagonal pairs, front left coordinated with rear right, like walking. But they didn’t walk and the fins, in the end, really were just fins. The coelacanth is an evolutionary cul-de-sac, not a step toward land animals.”

“Not my great-grandfather then,” said Jim, dryly.

“No,” said Parks. “But this,” he said, pushing the newspaper clipping toward the priest, “or something very like it, was. It seems that they survived in very small numbers into the medieval period, isolated, living in highly particular environments: dark undersea caves, often made by volcanic activity, incredibly secluded but giving access to land via shallow water for the animals’ rare forays ashore. Coelacanths live in deep water. One to three hundred meters or more. So deep that no one has been able to get them to the surface and keep them alive for more than a few minutes. Tiktaalik roseae probably lived in shallow pools, moving over land between them. Our boy is somewhere between the two, I think.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Jim. “It’s nuts.”

“De Profundis,” said Thomas, half to himself. “Remember the postcard he sent you? What if it wasn’t a joke about despair in this exotic place so much as a joke about what he had found?”

“What do you mean?” said Jim.

“Out of the depths,” said Thomas. “Not the depths of despair, but the depths of the sea.”

“Smart,” said Parks.

“I don’t see it,” said Jim, stonewalling.

“You think that my brother died over this?” said Thomas, slowly, purposefully, so that everyone—even Parks—stopped and looked at him. The four of them sat there quite still, wary, anxious. “Assuming he is dead, of course.”

Kumi gave him a quick look at that, but the others were preoccupied with the question.

“Yes,” said Parks simply.

“Why?”

“The root of all evil,” said Parks. “Money.”