Savage Love by Douglas Glover Page B

apocalypse.
    He gazed at me sympathetically and, swinging his legs off the bed, sat upright so that our knees touched, took my wrists in his hands, made a curious tsk, tsk sound with his tongue, and said, “I was wrong, Lennart. All along I was wrong. Here —,” he said, handing me a crumpled printout. “Read it yourself.”
    His resemblance to the actor Nick Nolte in this moment was extraordinary, and of course he knew I would be unable to read the statistical gobbledygook, the drone work, albeit the very foundation of forensic archaeology that had always escaped me — genomic sequencing, radiocarbon dating, counting the rat bones in a garbage dump. Even now this was his way of putting me in my place.
    â€œIt’s the DNA analysis for the Royal Child,” Nedlinger said. “It’s finally come through. It took years because the samples were infinitely small and, after the first results, deemed corrupt. But we ran the tests again and again, always with the same outcome, until, over time, we came to believe them.” He sighed, his chest heaving convulsively. “Besides, the procedures have improved. Read it. It was not the Sun Lord’s —” He broke off, clearly in the throes of some deep inner struggle, the truth, it seemed, being too much for him to speak aloud. “It was much more recent, not prehistoric, not even Native. ”
    â€œJesus,” I said, gasping. Ever the master of dramatic situations, he had me in thrall. The implications were obvious: the whole of Nedlinger’s research, his fame, his personal fortune, had been founded in error. This was far more important than Melusina’s sorry demise; I felt a white-hot nub of triumph in my gut, the heat slicked through my veins like a drug. “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning not a word.
    But Nedlinger continued, gripping my wrists in his huge, spatulate hands. “There can’t be any doubt now,” he said. “ It was your mother’s child, a fetus, born near term, abandoned and buried in a field. Your brother, perhaps. It happened to be buried at the edge of the ossuary, bits and pieces of artifact got mixed up in the grave. I should have recognized this, but I was blind with ambition. You know how it is, I think.”
    I don’t know what I looked like, a staring wreck, in trousers forever too short and a cardigan sweater stained with coffee, a bow tie askew at my throat. I heard the words with uncanny clarity and thought, Of course, he’s right. I thought, I knew it all along. I grew up in the House of Atreus, where children were consumed like canapé s. I had a brother, but my envious mother slaughtered him, an epic act of negation to blight my life. No happiness for little Lennart, that was the rule. Betrayal, meanness and horror everywhere. My triumph evaporated. I had toppled Armand Nedlinger’s world, shattered his version of reality, and now he had returned the favour. I was tranquil in the cosmic justice of it all.
    But then I wasn’t tranquil. It should have been me, I thought, dead in the furrows, forever innocent and pure, while, in life, I had done everything wrong, followed a dark star, fallen in love with the wrong woman, failed, failed, failed. What kind of story was this? I asked myself. Some malign, entropic, broken-mirror version of the Round Table knights, Lancelot and Guinevere, Lennart and Melusina, destined to ruin everything they touched and foul the dreams of greater men. Or was it just a piece of sordid Canadian Gothic, dead babies under the hedgerows, shadowy adulterous unions in cornfields, thin-lipped murderous mothers forever drinking their Alberta vodka tea and kneeling in the front pew at the Iona Station United Church, whispering “Amen” and quivering in ecstasies of puny triumph?
    â€œMy father —” I began.
    â€œI don’t think he knew, Lennart,” said Nedlinger. “His archaeological enthusiasm,