The phone’s insistent ring cut deep into Kovac’s REM sleep, and he woke grasping at the last fading tendrils of a vague erotic dream. He withdrew one arm from under the sheet that covered him, and, in his daze, reached for the offending instrument without looking at the screen. He likely would have passed on the call if he had done so.
“Hello?” he murmured.
“Anton, it’s Kevin Hobart,” perhaps identifying himself lest Kovac had purged his number from his contacts (which he had).
Kovac shot upward in his bed. “Kevin,” he replied. “It’s been…”
“Twenty years,” Kevin Hobart interrupted. Hobart was the most well-known botanist on the planet and director of the most extensive research botanical garden in the United States. He had also once been Kovac’s employer. Twenty years ago.
Kovac swung out of bed and traipsed into the small kitchen in his boxers and t-shirt. The shirt, old, thin, and stretched out, had a graphic of an incandescent plant with beautiful flowers. It was a Brazilian species that Anton had himself described a quarter century ago. He started the coffee machine while framing his next words in his head.
“Anton?” Hobart queried.
“Uh, yeah, Kevin … sorry, I just got up.” He paused, closing his eyes and leaning against the counter. “What’s on your mind?”
“A mutual friend,” Hobart continued. “Garwell Sorrentino.”
Kovac grunted and muttered, “You feeling sentimental, Kevin?” He regretted it immediately.
Hobart sighed theatrically, then cleared his throat before speaking again. “I have it on good counsel that he’s still alive. I thought you would want to know.”
Kovac suddenly grew light-headed and pulled a small wooden chair away from an equally small table he could easily reach in his starkly apportioned kitchen. He fell, more than sat, onto it heavily. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“There was no trace,” Hobart replied
“Yeah, I know. And given the preponderance of animal scavengers in the area, no one was surprised.”
Garwell Sorrentino was solo piloting an ultralight aircraft above a primary site in southeastern Peru twenty-five years ago, when its engine stalled and caught fire, causing the ultralight to plummet a thousand feet towards the treetops. The craft was smashed to smithereens by the expansive canopy of a forest giant. When a recovery team arrived weeks later (it took a minor miracle to get one into the trackless tropical wilderness at the height of the rainy season), no trace of the botanist’s remains was discovered. Sorrentino was widely crowned as the world’s most knowledgeable authority on tropical forest dynamics and biodiversity and had been conducting canopy surveys of a region rumored to be the richest tract in the southwestern corner of the upper Amazon basin. Despite entreaties by his collaborators to involve others in these surveys, Garwell had thrown caution to the wind and went aloft by himself that time. His collection numbers were a legend unto themselves; over a hundred thousand unique herbarium specimens bore his name as the primary collector. Gar, ten years Kovac’s senior, had also been his doctoral academic mentor at the midwestern botanical garden helmed by Kevin Hobart, through a collaborative relationship between the Garden and the Ohio State University. In more ways than one, Sorrentino had shaped the caliber of scientist that Anton Kovac had once been, and had also, across the decades of their association, become his closest friend.
“So, Anton,” Hobart said. “What’s your schedule like in the next few months?”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
“He wants you to do what?” Nell exclaimed, eyes growing wide as she lowered her wineglass to the table. Kovac leaned back in his chair and eyed Nell Sorrentino with a bemused look. They were seated at a table for two at Kovac’s favorite restaurant in Little Italy.
Nell was Garwell’s widow, though truth be told, they had separated shortly before his ill-fated field trip to Peru. Kovac often wondered why she retained her married name all the years since. He paused while their server deposited another basket of warm bread on the table between them. Sorrentino had been a legendary philanderer; some would have said a predatory one at that, based on the average age of his universe of bedmates, starry-eyed female graduate students for the most part, at least those with whom Anton was familiar. The great irony was that Sorrentino treated them badly, casting them off with heartless abandon once he grew bored or they became too besotted. It was the one character flaw in his friend that Anton judged harshly, but he wasn’t beneath being the young ladies’ rebound comfort when the opportunity presented itself. Nell had built a productive and awarded career with the New York Botanical Garden as a specialist in the coffee family, a successful, sprawling inter-continental assemblage that included not only coffee but quinine. She had recently accepted a generous offer for early retirement. She had shifted her work on the family to its Asian branches after their separation, and then to Brazil. Both of her children with Garwell, son and daughter, were each pursuing careers in zoology and medicine, respectively. Anton had been something of a Dutch uncle for them in the absence of their father. Nell was nearing 63 but was fit and lithe. Her long gray hair was typically tied up in a bun; that night, she wore it down, and Kovac almost didn’t recognize her.
Kovac turned to survey the other patrons at various stages of their meals. His eyes caught those of a middle-aged man of indigenous South American appearance, a phenotype he knew well from years of field experience in the region. The man held his gaze, and a small smile twitched at the corners of his mouth.
“Says he’ll pay for the entire trip with a generous per diem,” he said, turning back to the still-warm bread.
“To look for my dead husband,” Nell snorted.
“In a nutshell.”
Nell inhaled deeply and raised herself up in her chair. “I’m coming with you,” she said forthrightly.
“No, you’re not,” Anton replied. “That’s a non-starter—end of story. I haven’t even said ‘yes’ yet.”
“Oh, you will,” Nell retorted. “And I’m coming with you. I’ll buy my own ticket.”
Kovac sighed. He’d known Nell long enough to be familiar with her powerful obstinance. “What will you tell the kids?”
Nell smiled sweetly. “That their uncle and I are taking a field trip to Peru.”
