HiveComb

Unearthing archeological artifacts is one thing—retrieving religious relics is another.

As any seasoned archeologist will tell you, if all the slivers of the so-called true cross of Christ were gathered together, there’d be enough wood to build Noah’s Ark.

So, when Jerrod Mason of the Smithsonian came calling with a proposal to mount an expedition in search of the Holy Grail, I politely, but firmly declined.

I was comfortable in my own little Eden in the Clouds, as I referred to my penthouse apartment with its tree-lined terrace in New York.

I was solitary and content. Besides, teaching Biblical Archeology at Purchase College had its perks—frequent sabbaticals as well as two, long, uninterrupted months of summer vacation.

I loved that vacation and was presently enjoying it with feet up, a glass of Yellow Tail in hand, and a seemingly endless summer of leisure stretching out before me.

But that was before Jerrod Mason decided to pull out all the stops to convince me.

It was really a quite simple thing for him to do—to send in Astrid Simpson to seduce me.

If you haven’t seen Astrid in khaki jodhpurs crawling in and out of tunnels, then maybe you might have seen Elizabeth Taylor mounting the stairs to her and Brick’s apartment in the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

At any rate, the effect on me is the same. Breathlessness.

À bout de souffle—that’s how I felt standing in my doorway looking into Astrid’s violet eyes.

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” she teased. She tilted her head to one side and slanted a mischievous glance that turned my knees to jelly.

“Enter,” I said with a mock dramatic flourish that was meant to conceal my discomfiture—but she wasn’t fooled—not Astrid, not the Queen of the Nile.

She walked in as if she owned the premises, when it was only my heart she possessed.

“Should I give in now, or should I feign resistance?” I said, pouring her a glass of Shiraz.

She perched on my leather couch, legs curled under her, like a sleek Persian cat.

“You know resistance is futile,” she purred. “We have a bond since we spent those nights together camped out in the Land of Nod.”

She had deftly played on all my vulnerabilities, capping it with an allusion to our search for Paradise—but all that expedition showed me was what Paradise really was—and for me, it was summed up in the person of Astrid Simpson.

“Just tell me one thing,” I asked, “was it your idea or Jerrod’s to go tilting at windmills looking for a mythical Holy Grail?”

“This time it was Jerrod,” she smiled. “He found a reference in Raff Munoz’s journals about a possible location of the Jerusalem Chalice—but the poor man died on a dig and was never able to follow up. Jerrod wants us to do it.”

“When do we leave?”

“Our flight’s booked at 7 a.m.”

I looked at the grandfather clock in the corner—it was past eleven. “Oh great!” I groused.

“C’mon, Paul—you’re a veteran and I know you’ve got a bag packed. Besides, I thought we could spend the night out—sort of a second honeymoon like in the Land of Nod. We can spread out sleeping bags on the terrace and sleep under the stars.”

I smiled ruefully to myself.

That last ‘honeymoon’ was spent under the constellation Virgo, not Libra—but I loved her and I was hooked.