Because Cooper refused to fly American Eagle, he rode his Apache to St. Thomas, where he’d discovered by way of a few clicks that a direct flight ran to Dallas twice a day-American Airlines, no Eagle. He connected to Austin and was picked up outside the baggage claim by a stork-legged, humongous-breasted woman who was already giggling when Cooper saw her leap out of her Mercedes. She was already giggling, he supposed, because she was always giggling. She had bee-stung lips, long black hair lopped off into bangs, and big, round eyes with creases in the wings that made her look as if she were smiling even when she wasn’t, which, from Cooper’s three-day, hands-on experiential episode, wasn’t often. She was a tenured professor of archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin, though this wasn’t how Cooper knew her: he knew her as one of three women chartering a trimaran out of Tortola during a “ladies’ week out,” a six-day trip bopping around the snorkeling and watering holes of the Virgin Islands.
The Conch Bay Beach Club Bar & Grill had been a natural stop on the tour, but after the planned one-night stay, Susannah had convinced her two friends to leave her at the club for the last few days of her trip, while they caroused about the rest of the Virgins and retrieved her on their return to Road Town.
It seemed Cooper had triggered the release of a hormone from a long-dormant gland; despite Susannah’s admitting, over their first drink, to going without sexual activity for six years running, Cooper seemed to remember nineteen as the number of times they had managed to copulate in the succeeding seventy-two hours. Susannah had handed him her card on her exit walk out the dock-flipping it over, tapping him on the ass, kissing him on the cheek, and waving so-long as Cooper read the inscription she’d written on the back of the card: If you ever want to try that again, you call me right away, Island Man!
Seeing as how the federal government had already handed Minister Roy his share of expense and inconvenience by way of the Coast Guard’s antics, Cooper decided he’d charge the first class airfare for the trip to Austin on his Agency expense account. Take a pound of flesh out of Uncle Sam’s hide: a $1,600 penalty for causing a temporary disruption of paradise.
Cooper came to the States twice a year at most. When he came, he tried to limit the extent of his travels to somewhere around a thousand-mile radius from Conch Bay. This pretty much meant Florida, though he was occasionally willing to stretch and hit a spot along the Gulf of Mexico or, on the rare occasion when it became necessary, Washington. Normally he stayed away from points in between. Normally, he stayed away, period.
He’d called Susannah and asked whether she would be the right person to speak with about sourcing and dating a collection of apparent Central or South American native artifacts. Susannah had squealed with glee and answered in the affirmative. Cooper thinking that it wasn’t a bad thing, getting that kind of response, particularly with him calling for the first time since their three-day tryst eleven months back.
Susannah drove them through Austin in her circa early eighties 450 SEL, the car spewing toxic diesel exhaust as it puttered along Sixth Street, Susannah chattering the whole way about Austin’s music scene and the film festival they held there in the spring. When they hit the campus, Susannah pointed out a few passing landmarks before slipping into her reserved space in one of the faculty lots.
“We’re here,” she said through a toothy grin, “Island Man.”
Cooper had a dive bag containing the pictures Riley had given him and a change of clothes for a one-night stay-along with his canvas bag of loot, which had required the Secret Service ID card he’d been trying out lately to get him through Houston customs without causing a four-alarm panic. He’d told the U.S. Customs supervisor he was part of a National Security Council task force, and that the artifacts were seized contraband. He provided a phone number and the name of a deputy secretary in the State Department in case the customs supervisor saw fit to delay him unnecessarily and verify what he’d just been told. The guy didn’t place a verification call on the spot; Cooper assumed he dialed the number as soon as Cooper left the customs wing in the airport, but remained in view of the closed-circuit cameras. Cooper knew the call would yield the proper verification.
They came into the E.P. Schoch building, home of the department of archaeology, and Cooper saw that it looked pretty much like every other graduate school building he’d seen-classroom doors, bulletin boards, semigloss concrete floors, a lot of natural light, and a few fluorescent fixtures that added little to the illumination equation. Susannah took him to the basement, unlocked a door that said LAB 14 on an orange plaque, reached in, flipped on a bank of lights, and exposed a room that looked like Cooper expected a place called LAB 14 to look: a series of long soapstone countertops populated with microscopes, racks of tools and flasks, textbooks, and the usual implements of note taking and calculation.
He swung his bags onto the teaching slab, an island built perpendicular to the counters meant for the students. Susannah went behind the island, opened a drawer, and came out with some glasses, brushes, and a series of tools Cooper couldn’t identify.
Then she put the glasses on and dropped them down her nose in a way that made her look a little older, though considerably more appealing.
“Whattaya got for me?” she said.
Cooper opened his two bags, stacked the pictures in front of her, and stood the three gold objects on the counter behind the pictures. He’d left the priestess idol on his shelf to ward off evil spirits like Cap’n Roy and Ronnie while he was gone.
“The pictures are of the whole set,” he said. “There’s literally a boatload of these things, some the size of the real deals here, some bigger than this table, some a lot smaller than what I brought.”
“Okay.”
“I’d like to know from what period they originate. What region, tribe, whatever, too. If they’re real, that is. Presuming that’s something you can determine. I want to know mainly so I can figure out what they’re worth and who would want to buy them. I suppose if you can answer my last two questions, I don’t really care about the others.”
Susannah began her examination of the pictures. After the first few, she started making little “hm” and “mmph” sounds while she looked them over. Following something like three rounds of such noises, she said, still looking at the photographs, “Did you steal these, Island Man? Or am I not supposed to ask.”
Cooper admired the way she asked the question: jovial and deferential, giving him the chance to shoot down what she was implying, but still asking the question. He found a stool and pulled it under him.
“You’re not supposed to ask,” he said.
She took some closer looks at selected shots with a magnifying glass, moving it around, leaning down and peering through it. As she leaned forward, Cooper noticed, and remembered, the sheer, unadulterated size of her breasts. They were drooping loosely inside the cotton summer dress she wore. Susannah dressed like a Jimi Hendrix fan from the sixties, all the way down to the Birkenstocks; keeping bangs in the front, on this particular week she’d twisted the rest of her hair into a French braid that ran to the top of her ass. If he remembered correctly, she’d claimed to be in her late thirties when he’d met her. She could easily pass for early thirties, at least from the right angle-more than he could say for himself, from any angle whatsoever.
Susannah eyed him after pulling up from one of her magnifying-glass looks.
“You can have them if you like,” she said.
She refocused on her work, taking a look at the originals he’d lined up on the countertop, lifting the gold box, turning it upside down and around, running her finger across one of the symbols inscribed on its base. She set it back down, picked up, examined, and returned the other two originals, then came back at the box, taking it and heading to the back corner of the room, where some microscope-looking pieces of equipment were clustered on a stretch of countertop beneath a periodic table of the elements on the wall.
“You ever take a walk around the campus here?” she asked him from the corner, not bothering to look up from whatever she had begun working on.
“Here?” Cooper said. “No.”
“You’ll like it. Some of the finest-looking coeds anywhere in the country. Probably in the world. Blows me away sometimes.”
Cooper realized she was asking him to skedaddle.
“How long do you need?”
“Probably take me two hours. You’ll be able to take your collection home with you, but it’ll take a couple days to get results on some of the tests I’ll do. Even before you leave, though, I should be able to answer most of your questions.”
She continued to work on whatever it was she was working on.
Cooper stood, paused, almost said something, decided not to, shrugged, and took his leave of LAB 14, destined for a stroll around the campus of the University of Texas.
Cooper had worn pressed beige khaki shorts, a white polo shirt with stitched monotone patterns of tropical flowers, and a dressier pair of Reefs-brown leather with a buckle-to help him clear the customs check. It was warm in Austin, but not BVI warm, so he felt a little chill strolling from one quad to the next. He didn’t give a shit about the University of Texas coeds, and instead decided he’d use the two hours to get a dose of exercise. The dressy Reefs, which he’d almost never worn, weren’t as comfortable as his other pair, but he managed to avoid any blistering on his stroll, Cooper choosing a course he figured would take him on the widest possible loop around the campus.
On the return leg he checked a directory and found his way to the university’s main library, called the Flawn Academic Center. He ducked into the air-conditioned building, feeling the icy chill on his sweaty arms, and found the periodicals archive without asking for help. On a card beside each monitor, the workstations in the archive displayed a list of the periodicals the UT system was able to search, dating back to 1994. He found the system didn’t require a password for use, so he plugged in three keywords as a string, and in a little under a minute the system returned just under three dozen hits. He scanned the headlines, chose nine articles that appeared relevant to his intentions, and punched the Print icon for each article. It took him a few minutes to find the printer the workstations delivered to, but when he did, Cooper walked around behind a vacant librarian’s counter and snatched the pages he’d printed off the device. He then made his way to the big study room he’d seen near the front entrance and sat down to read.
Each of the articles covered a slightly different angle on the same political scandal. With a pencil and a few slips of notepaper, he took down a few lines of notes, mostly pertaining to a pair of names that either recurred in or, in some cases, were the subjects of the articles he’d printed. When he was finished reading, he tossed the articles in a wastebasket, pocketed the two slips of notepaper he’d filled, and walked back outside to complete his exercise loop.
“You on island time?”
Cooper checked his watch for the first time that day. It had been four and one-half hours since he’d left the lab.
“Live slow, mon,” he said.
Susannah, who had been reading a thick, well-worn book while perched on one of the stools, set down the book and stood.
“I’m finished with what you wanted me to do,” she said. “So what do you say? You want to see the bats?”
“Excuse me?”
“The bats. Come on. I’ll show you. You’ve never seen anything like this. And when we’re finished, maybe you can bat me around for a while.”
She giggled and made for the door.
Cooper gathered his dive bag and canvas sack, discovering that she’d already replaced the photos and artifacts and zipped them up inside the bags. He came over to her by the door. Susannah’s hand rested on the light switch; she had long fingers and strong hands. While he stood there, his chest brushed against one pillowy breast; he could hear her breathing too, the two of them standing in the doorway where the sounds they made were bounced back at them by the doorjamb.
His flight back to St. Thomas wasn’t until nine-fifteen tomorrow morning.
“Whatever the hell you’re talking about with the bats,” he said, “let’s do it.”
She flipped off the lights, locked the door, started toward the stairs, then spun, ran at him, leaped into the air, wrapped her legs around his waist, and emitted a high-pitched squeal that Cooper decided was Susannah’s version of a rebel yell.