Year Zero (22 page)

T
HE
L
AST
W
EEK OF
M
AY

F
or a week, Nathan Lee wandered invisibly through their domain. Occasionally he heard rattling noises or muttered monologues in the darkened hallways and spied ancient curators kneeling in bubbles of light, making lists, appraising objects. Otherwise he had the run of the place.

At one time, the Smithsonian empire had employed a staff of over three thousand people. Now there were just eleven of them in the mothballed museum. Lurking in the shadows at the edge of their meetings and meals, Nathan Lee learned that the scholars and curators had been living here since Christmas. They inhabited a network of tunnels that linked four neighboring Smithsonian galleries. It was a lonely existence. There had been two suicides. He’d found their bodies quick-frozen in the taxidermist’s freezer.

Nathan Lee was afraid to reveal himself, uncertain how they might treat him. Just because old Spencer Baird was tickled by his reputation as a murderer and cannibal didn’t mean the others would be, too. For now, it seemed wiser to hunt for his clues in silence.

Gradually he pieced together their story. Last December, just before sealing all the government buildings shut, soldiers had transported art, artifacts, and documents from more distant museums to here for safekeeping. The Castle and its connecting buildings were stuffed with file boxes, paintings, statues, skulls, Egyptian mummies, butterfly and beetle collections, inventions, rare coins…and papers from the Natural History Museum which he hoped might include clues about Ochs.

The ancient curators talked to one another about keeping things tidy for whatever came next, the cure or extinction. The simple truth was they could not disconnect from the marvels heaped around them. Sometimes he saw them carting “loaners” off to their apartments with bare hands, dragging Rembrandts and bronze vessels from the Han dynasty like haunches of meat. There was an air of going down in grand style. One night they gathered to hear a curator play a lovely Bach solo on a Stradivari cello made in 1701. Nathan Lee stood in the shadows and swayed with the notes.

It was said the Smithsonian was in an infinite state of inventory. That was never truer than now. Despite months of cataloging, the curators themselves seemed to have no idea what lay where. The chaos was overpowering. Nathan Lee struggled to bring a system to his search, but each hour it seemed the labyrinth grew more complex, the number of things more numerous. Battle helmets were mixed with moon rocks in between boxes of receipts dating to the Indian Wars. He tried mapping the place so that he wouldn’t repeat himself, but each line sprouted other lines. Tunnels shot off of tunnels. He slept in musty bomb shelters with Civil Defense signs and walls scratched with the names of Union soldiers.

He began to lose hope. He could spend the next ten years rooting through file boxes and never find a memo or check stub with Ochs’s name on it. He began to lapse into their topsy-turvy twilight world, where days masqueraded as nights.

Being collectors, they had begun collecting artifacts of the plague: posters of Olympians and movie stars urging the public to donate money or support the national effort; magazines with articles about Virus Z; photos of victims who looked like plastic, see-through models; government publications about quarantine (the word derived from the forty days foreign ships would sometimes be isolated in a harbor, the forty days derived from Noah’s Ark), curfews, interstate travel, refugee care; devices for taking and testing blood; and so on. Being archivists, they were also archiving themselves, taking pictures of one another in different acts of opening or closing boxes, locking doors, and generally waiting for the end.

On the fifth day, he bumped into a woman old enough to be his great grandmother. He hadn’t heard her white sneakers, and she toppled right over. Nathan Lee bent over her. “I’m so sorry,” she said to him.

He recognized her as the cellist. “Are you all right?” he asked.

She looked up at him with a smile. “Why it’s you,” she said, touching his face. “You finally made it. We’ve been waiting months for you.”

“Let me help you,” Nathan Lee said, and took her arm.

“This is wonderful. It means you’re still searching. You must tell us about your progress. We’d started to give up hope.” Her hand was trembling.

Obviously she had no idea who he was. He’d given her a bad scare. The poor woman was so confused, he could have faded back into the darkness and she would forget him. But on the spot, Nathan Lee decided it was time to end his concealment before he gave one of them a heart attack. He was getting nowhere by himself in here.

“You’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

“Not at all,” she insisted. “He told us you were coming. But that was last November.”

He went along with her delusion. “It took me awhile,” he said.

“Are the planes running again?” she asked.

“What planes?” The skies were empty. They belonged to the birds and children’s kites.

“He said he had to catch his plane.”

“Who?”

“A large man. It was an issue of national security, he said. He kept us busy for days. We put together what artifacts we could on such short notice. Then he dashed off to catch the military plane. He left the list for us to complete. It’s all ready for you.”

A large man, copping artifacts on the edge of disaster?
It couldn’t be, he decided. “Do you remember his name?”

“He was exceptionally rude,” she recalled. She took his arm. “Come along. Ellison will know. And we need to get you back on the road.”

As she led him through the corridors, other curators appeared from the darkness like phantoms and joined the procession. Baird drifted from a room. “There you are.” To the others, he crowed, “The Swift boy. What did I tell you?”

They reached Ellison’s place, a large office beneath the Freer Museum, and as it turned out, they
had
been waiting for him, or someone like him.

Ellison was their acting deputy secretary. He sat tall and erect at his desk, which was flanked by a lanky, spear-high Giacometti bronze tastefully lit with flashlights. He had a Brown Bess musket mounted on one wall, a Morris Rippel watercolor of cottonwoods on another. His desk was spartan, bare except for a lantern and a small statue of a nude woman reclining on one elbow, hip cocked. Her breasts were ripe and fat and arrogant.

The curators crowded into the room with excited babble. Their shadows filled the walls. Baird was acting like quite the hero. “Found him in the rain, shivering like a kitten. You would not believe the tempest out there.” Nathan Lee didn’t tell him the rain had been a full week ago.

Ellison looked severe. He wished to bring them to order. “Please,” he said to the room. He saw Nathan Lee’s eyes on the statue, and unfolded his thin hands, and moved it slightly closer to himself. “Matisse,” he said primly.

“How are the roads, son?” a man called from the back. “Is it true the interstates are mined?”

“How bad’s the martial law?” asked another.

“You mean, how good?” someone said.

“Betrayed ourselves, martial law,” the first retorted. It had the sound of an ongoing debate. “Mark my words. If I’d known we were going to turn into the the bloody Third Reich….”

“Law. Order.”

“Please,” said Ellison. “Please.”

Gradually the assembly fell silent quiet.

Ellison stared at Nathan Lee. “We knew you were here,” he stated. “Some of the curators thought you were an apparition haunting the premises. I was an inch from calling the Marines to hunt you out.”

“It’s Swift, you fool,” Baird said. “I told you. We don’t need no stinking badges.” He cackled.

“I take it, you’ve finished your pilfering?” Ellison said.

“I’m looking for information,” said Nathan Lee. “A man named David Ochs.”

“Ochs,” said Ellison. “Yes, the professor was here. He told us all about the grief you brought him. Nothing compared to the grief you brought us. Do you realize the scandal you wreaked upon this body? The Smithsonian! Body snatching. The FBI. An audit…by the Metropolitan Museum, for god’s sake! Receipts, money paid to a convicted murderer! Heads rolled because of you, Mr. Swift.”

“Quit wasting time, Ellison,” snapped Baird. “The boy’s come a long way. And that Ochs fellow, an egg sucker if I ever saw one. Didn’t believe a word….”

“Ochs was here?” said Nathan Lee.

Ellison opened a drawer. He found a file. It contained a single sheet of paper with a list. He began sucking his teeth, reviewing the line items with a pencil point. “One hundred and ten artifacts listed here. The professor took twenty-three with him. Hasty job. Nearly missed his flight. Harrowing for him. I can only sympathize. Overland travel was getting too risky. That was then. Now? How did you get here?”

“He’s got his ways.” Baird was delighted. “Maybe you’ll listen to me now. He’s a resourceful boy.”

This ignited the ancient crowd all over again. Questions rained down. “What’s the news? What’s it like out there?”

“Are they closing in on the vaccine, sir?” asked the petite cellist. She was still holding Nathan Lee’s arm as if he were a bravo and she were a belle.

Ellison almost injured himself clearing his throat. “Professor Ochs did promise a messenger would be sent for the other eighty-seven artifacts on this list. But that was supposed to be six months ago.”

They kept thrusting his script at him. All Nathan Lee had to do was play his part. “It took me longer than expected,” he said without apology. “Like you say, the road.” He spoke
the road
darkly.

“Good lad,” said Baird. “Hell in the wastelands, do you see,” he told the others. They murmured. They saw.

“I am troubled,” continued Ellison.

“By god,” agreed Baird.

Ellison let his knuckles drop on the tidy desk top. “Why on earth would they send a thief?”

Who was this
they?
Where had Ochs come from? Where had he gone?

“You want the job done or not, Ellison?” snapped Baird. “These are uncivilized times. It takes a certain kind of man. Not a journey for the weak.”

Ellison was annoyed. “My point is that I know what you are, Mr. Swift. Whatever it is you’ve spent this week stealing from us, stays here. You were sent for a reason. A great deal is expected of you.”

In fact, Nathan Lee had been stealing things. Small things. Precious things. His gold had run low, and he still had a country to explore. But he wasn’t about to confess to a bureaucrat who was only guessing. “Do you have my shipment?” he said.

“We did our best,” Ellison sniffed. “All we could locate were thirteen more items.”

“Thirteen.” Nathan Lee scowled. “They told me eighty-seven. I came all this way for nothing?” He reached across and pulled the list from Ellison’s hands.

It was an inventory printed on Los Alamos National Laboratory letterhead. Nathan Lee recognized some of the artifacts from his days on the Year Zero digs. The rest were religious trinkets from the Mideast and Europe, talismans and holy relics. That made no sense to him. But there at the bottom was a hastily written note taking possession of the twenty-three objects. Underneath, larger than necessary, was Ochs’s signature.
Los Alamos?
thought Nathan Lee.

“Thirteen is hardly nothing,” Ellison protested.

“It’s hardly eighty-seven,” said Nathan Lee. His mind was racing. “I’ll need transport,” he said. “And food. And letters of passage.”

Ellison’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a lot of needs,” he said. “You almost sound like a man trying to make something out of nothing.”

“He’s the courier,” said Baird. “They sent him.”

“I don’t think so,” said Ellison.

“This is government business,” protested the cellist. “Mr. Swift is a patriot. He’s come to save us.”

“You’re jeopardizing the cure,” an old man said. “I have children out there.”

“Grandchildren,” another said.

“Great-grandchildren.”

“Who do you think you are, Ellison? What right….”

Ellison tried to stand his ground. But there were too many of them. “Put him on the road, then,” he barked. “Give him what he needs. Get him out of here.”

The group started to leave. But Nathan Lee paused. He turned. Ellison shifted uncomfortably. “Now what?” he said.

Nathan Lee picked up the Matisse statue and hefted it. In front of them all, he slid it into his jacket pocket. “For good luck,” he announced.

His brazenness gave them heart. They followed him like a great hero.

N
EXT MORNING
, on the front lawn of the museum, Nathan Lee kick-started an antique Indian 101 Scout motorcycle to life. According to the museum label, it had been built in 1928. Massive and low slung, carrying a spring-mounted seat like something from a farm tractor, the bike was no Easyrider. The Scout was Baird’s idea, a bit of his own wild youth projected onto Nathan Lee’s highway. It would not have been Nathan Lee’s choice from all the other motorcycles in the collection, but he owed the old man a dream. Fortunately, the machine was in mint condition. The donor had lovingly changed the oil and put in new ring valves just two years ago.

White smoke poured from the exhaust, then cleared. He had a sleeping bag from the Natural History Museum’s Mt. Everest exhibit strapped to the handlebars, and a wooden-handled machete reputed to be the same one used by Stanley on his search for Livingstone. His saddlebags—taken from another museum piece and customized to the Scout—carried two packages of artifacts, authorization letters typed on Smithsonian stationery, maps, food from the Castle kitchen, four wine bottles filled with fuel, his book for Grace. The rare coins, jewels, crystals, and gold that he’d stolen from the museum were hidden in pockets or taped to his shins.