Monday morning was one of those gray, grainy days when Philadelphia looked like a tinted black-and-white photograph of itself. A cold wind was blowing from the north-west and there was a feeling that winter was beginning to wake up, somewhere on the Canadian prairies, and shake his coat of icicles.
Nathan visited the Schiller building first, to see how Torchy was developing. Kavita was there, in the laboratory, but Aarif had taken the morning off to have his nose X-rayed. It was still swollen and he was having difficulty breathing.
The phoenix was larger and grander and more dazzling than ever, with plumage that shone like gold leaf. On the floor of his cage, Kavita had made him a comfortable nest of dried grass and feathers and dried flowers and laced-together twigs, and instead of sitting on his perch he now preferred to sit here with his head regally raised, looking from side to side as if he had nothing but contempt for everybody who approached him.
Kavita nodded toward the laptop at her workstation. On the screen was a picture of Sukie Harris, happily smiling. Her skin was almost completely healed, and even the redness had faded.
‘Doctor Berman sent that across at seven thirty this morning,’ said Kavita. ‘He’s expecting to be able to discharge her by Wednesday. He also says that he’d like to arrange a meeting with us as soon as possible, so that we can discuss the phoenix procedure for more of his patients.’
Nathan examined the picture on the laptop closely. ‘She looks terrific, doesn’t she, when you consider how seriously she was burned? I can’t wait to test it on some more patients. Third-degree burns, especially.’
He went across to Torchy’s cage and peered inside. Torchy ruffled his golden feathers and made that threatening warble in the back of his throat.
‘He still doesn’t like me, does he?’
‘I think he’s a woman’s bird,’ said Kavita. ‘In fact, I don’t think he realizes that he’s a bird at all. He thinks he’s my mate.’
‘Well, I don’t mind that, so long as he keeps on supplying us with stem cells. Unfortunately, we have to get approval from the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services before we can do any more tests. I know Doctor Berman is itching to get started – so am I. But the last thing we need is for somebody to hit us with a major lawsuit. Which they inevitably will, even if the phoenix procedure has cured them completely. And we don’t yet know if there are any long-term side-effects.’
‘You still feel well, don’t you, Professor?’ Kavita asked him.
‘So far. But I’ll feel a whole lot better once we’ve gotten rid of Theodor Zauber and his goddamned gargoyles. I’m supposed to be meeting him at ten o’clock this morning. I think I’ve managed to convince him that I’m prepared to help him. Well, half-convince him, anyhow. He still won’t tell me where his gargoyles are stashed.’
Kavita said, ‘I did a whole lot of research last night on gargoyles. Do you know of Zosimos of Panopolis?’
‘Sure. Good old Zosimos of Panopolis, where would modern science be without him? He was practically the first known alchemist, wasn’t he, back in three hundred AD, in Greece? Wasn’t he the guy who thought that fallen angels fell in love with human women, and married them, and taught them chemistry and metalworking and how to paint their eyelids? And as far as I remember there followed much licentiousness and fornication.’
‘That’s right. But he also wrote about gargoyles, and how to petrify them, centuries before Artephius, even though he never actually managed to do it, like Artephius did.’
‘No, I didn’t know that.’
‘Well, neither did I until I looked it up. But I thought one thing was really interesting. Zosimos warned that once a gargoyle was petrified, you can break it up, but you can never destroy it simply by smashing it to pieces. That is why gargoyles were always mounted on the tops of churches and cathedrals, rather than shattered. If they were shattered, the fragments would always come back together again, somehow, but if they were attached to a sacred building, they could never escape, for as long as the building remained standing, and they could never call on Satan to rescue them, because their mouths were purified by rainwater from the sacred building.’
‘Now that is interesting,’ said Nathan. ‘In fact it’s more than interesting. If I can manage to locate Theodor Zauber’s gargoyles, I’ll have to know how to destroy them, and if smashing them to pieces isn’t going to do it—’
‘That’s right,’ said Kavita. ‘But Zosimos believed that he had worked out the answer to that little problem. He theorized that you can exterminate gargoyles by changing their chemistry. All you have to do is expose them to intense heat and then drench them with water. Zosimos said that this will “purify” them with holy fire.’
Nathan thought about that, and then nodded. ‘He was right, chemically speaking. If you heat limestone it changes from calcium carbonate into basic calcium oxide. All you have to do then is drench it in water, and you get a fierce exothermic reaction. Up to one hundred fifty degrees Celsius, which changes it into quicklime.’
The clock on the laboratory wall now read 9:26. Nathan said, ‘Listen, Kavita, I’d better get going. I’m meeting Zauber at the Eastern State Penitentiary.’
‘Why does he want to meet you there, of all places?’
‘I don’t know. I think he’s trying to frighten me, that’s all.’
‘I think you should be frightened.’
Nathan kissed her on the cheek. ‘Who says I’m not?’