“Nobel Prize,” Yanni replied, “wit outta doubt.”
Mac shook his head. “Well, your elephant friend seemed entertained, although Professor Blather had his own ideas about why that was.”
Yanni gestured, as if shooing away a fly. “That schmuck? Elephants aren’t brutes, Mac. They’re as intelligent as you and me. Only different . . . sorta like—”
MacCready suddenly felt uncomfortable—a tightness in his throat. “So, you still like Brooklyn, right?” he blurted. “Your apartment and all.”
“What?” Yanni responded, seemingly confused by the abrupt change of topic.
Yanni paused. “Yeah, Mac. Of course, I love it.” Now he could see that she knew exactly where his thoughts had gone.
“That’s . . . good,” he said, awkwardly.
“Speakin’ of which, I gotta get home,” Yanni said, standing. “And you got work to do, I suppose.”
MacCready hesitated. “You’re right,” he said. “I do want to check out those Parahippus specimens before I quit for the day.”
“I could walk you to the museum, Mac, and then just take the B downtown?”
“No, I’m fine, thanks,” he said, with a hint of a smile.
Once again, Yanni managed to impress him with her adaptability, this time leaving him to wonder how a woman from the rainforest had so quickly become an expert on the intricacies of the New York City subway system.
Yanni gave Mac a quick peck on the cheek, then strode off toward Fifth Avenue.
He watched her walking away, let out a long sigh, and headed back for the West Side and the fossils of the extinct horses that he hoped were romping through central Brazil. I’ve got an expedition to finalize.
Major Patrick Hendry had become a frequent visitor to Mac’s office at the museum. They’d both been transferred to Fort Hamilton after the war, which actually made it easier for Mac to keep another set of trusted eyes on Yanni and her artsy-fartsy neighbors.
Harder to tolerate was the fact that Hendry was often careless about the way he handled museum specimens, a habit which placed him in what Bob would have called “a somewhat less than positive light” with the curators. Now the major was eyeballing a set of ancient horse fossils that Mac had arranged on a lab bench.
“Here, hold this for a minute,” Mac said, intercepting his friend by placing a Civil War–era cannon ball into his hand. “This you can’t break.”
“What, you don’t trust me?” Hendry said, feigning shock. “You’re not still busting my balls about Triceratops?”
“You mean Bi-ceratops?”
“Yeah, well. Accidents happen,” Hendry responded, with an embarrassed grin.
Unfortunately, though, Mac also saw something behind the grin that told him this was not one of Hendry’s friendly, bull-in-a-China-shop visits.
“So, Mac,” the major began, when the phone rang.
“Excuse me, Pat,” Mac said, picking up the receiver. “Oh, hi, Yanni. What’s going on?”
He noticed with some alarm that Hendry had put down the cannonball and was headed straight for the fossils. “What? You want me to get you a what? Wait a second. Don’t touch those, sir!”
Hendry picked up a grapefruit-size skull.
“No, Yanni, I wasn’t calling you ‘sir.’ Major Catastrophe just stopped by. Yeah, Hendry.” Now MacCready pointed frantically toward the lab bench, flashing his commander the universal sign for Put That Down.
“You bought a what? Yeah, that’s what I thought you said. Sure. Right. See you soon, Yanni.” MacCready hung up the receiver. Wearing an incredulous look, he turned back toward the major.
“What’s the matter?” Hendry asked. “They run out of bananas in the Monkey House?”
“No. Yanni just bought a baritone saxophone.”
Hendry laughed. “Why’d she do that?”
“There was this jazz band at the zoo yesterday. I guess the sax guy made a bigger impression on her than I thought.”
“You know those musician types. Gotta be careful there, Mac.”
“Yeah, don’t remind me,” Mac said, gesturing toward the horse skull. “You wanna put that down now?”
“Horses, huh? Is this the little filly you ran into in Brazil?”
“That specimen you’re holding happens to be about thirty million years old . . . so, unless you want to be offed by curators and have your body consumed by dermestid beetles, I suggest you don’t drop it. And the specimen I saw was considerably livelier. But I can tell you didn’t come up here to talk about fossil horses.”
“No, I didn’t,” Hendry said, carefully placing the skull back on the lab bench. “There’s something in the air, Mac, and it just might have your name on it.”
“So spill it.”
“Like I said, nothing solid yet.” Hendry gestured down at the fossils. “Just don’t plan any field trips.”