Read Online Adam & Eve by Sena Jeter Naslund - Free Book Online Page B

bring myself to meet his eyes. And now, in his golden gaze, I saw hope—his faith in me—ardent hope.
    “Yes,” I said simply. “I will help you.”
    Why did I agree? Because they needed me? Because I liked them—father and daughter? Because like my parents I wanted to define myself with a mission? I did regard religious rigidity as a growing global danger.
    As one, the three of us took a breath, then gently laughed away our tension. If the codex concealed in the retrofitted French horn case would cause people—Christians, Jews, and Muslims—to find unity in reading Genesis less literally, then I was all for it.

    When I asked about the crutches, one leaning against the table, the other against the white wall, Pierre drew up his robe a bit and stuck out his foot, coffined in a heavy plaster cast. “A simple accident,” he said. He wiggled his brown toes sticking out from the cutaway end of the cast. I actually recognized the square cut of the nail on his big toe, now rather more dusty than in Cairo. “After we spoke in Cairo, you left, but I could not let you go, after all. I hurried to the stairwell—you had taken the elevator—and in my haste I tripped on my sandal and broke my leg.”
    I expressed my regret at his mishap, but I wondered if the explanation was true. I asked suspiciously, “Why do you choose to ask me for help?”
    “From your husband, I knew something of your temperament.”
    “And you are a pilot,” Arielle said. “Perpetuity would like to have the flash drive as well as the codex.”
    “And you are”—Pierre paused as though searching his mind for the whole truth—“available. You are
at hand,
as the English say.”
    “As though sent to us by Allah,” Arielle added happily.
    “Even your name,” her father hurried on, “is strangely appropriate for your role.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Lucy is the name the paleontologists gave to the female fossil found at the Olduvai Gorge, south of us, in the heart of Africa. Actually, the gorge should be called the Oldupi—the scientists misheard the native pronunciation. In any case, for a long time Lucy was the oldest of all the fossils that had been found, the mother of us all. Lucy—your name—Lucy is the evolutionist’s Eve.”
    “How old was she?” I felt suddenly diminished, shrunken.
    “Lucy lived about two and a half million years ago.”
    I smiled. “I believe she was named for a Beatles song, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’”
    Arielle moved closer and asked, “Beatles?”
    “You know,” I said gently. “Four pop musicians, from Liverpool. John Lennon?”
    Instantly distressed, Arielle blurted, “John Lennon?” Then she coveredher mouth with her hand and softly said something that sounded like
“Igtiyal.”
For just a moment, she looked frightened, but I asked for no explanation.
    “We’ll meet again in France, God willing,” Pierre Saad said softly. He handed me a card that affirmed his affiliation with Lascaux.
    “May we not open the instrument case?” I asked. “I’d like to see the codex.” Suppose he was asking me unwittingly to smuggle drugs—germs, a bomb?
    “I alone have the key. I have already mailed it to myself in France.”
    “You would not have us break the lock,” Arielle said. “It would be very difficult to do.”
    During the pause that followed, I shifted my gaze back and forth between the father and daughter.
    Finally Pierre said, “Either you trust, or you do not.”
    Carrying the heavy French horn case, I walked with Arielle back into the turquoise anteroom, now filled with people examining wares displayed on the benchlike beds. How silently they had assembled! Their skin color, dress, and hair bespoke the far-flung fullness of the world. Tourists, like myself, whom chance had thrown together for a brief moment. It’s just a tour bus, I thought. Their presence just means a tour bus has arrived. Utterly silent, isolate, the unreal people examined small figures carved from