The Adventures Of Indiana Jones (11 page)

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw you. I’d forgotten about that ratty old whip. I remember how you used to practice with it every day. Those old bottles on the wall and you standing there with the whip.” And she laughed again.

A memory, Indy thought. He recalled the odd fascination he’d had with the bullwhip ever since he’d seen a whip act in a traveling circus as a seven-year-old kid. Wide-eyed in wonder, watching the whip artist defy all logic. And then the hours of practice, a devotion that nobody, himself included, could truly explain.

“Do you ever go anywhere without it?” she asked.

“I never take it to class when I have to teach,” he said.

“I bet you sleep with it, huh?”

“Now, that all depends,” he said.

She was silent, staring out into the Himalayan night. Then she said, “Depends on what?”

“Work it out for yourself,” Jones said.

“I think I get the picture.”

He glanced at her once, then returned his eyes to the pocked road ahead.

A
HOT SUN
scorched the sand, burning on the wasteland that stretched from one horizon to the other. In such a place as this, Belloq thought, you might imagine the whole world a scalded waste, a planet without vegetation, without buildings, without people.
Without people.
Something in this thought pleased him. He had always found treachery the most common currency among human beings—consequently, he had trafficked in that currency himself. And if it wasn’t treachery people understood best, then its alternative was violence. He shaded his eyes against the sun and moved forward, watching the dig that was taking place. An elaborate dig—but then, that was how the Germans liked things. Elaborate, with needless circumstance and pomp. He stuck his hands in his pockets, watching the trucks and the bulldozers, the Arab excavators, the German supervisors. And the silly Dietrich, who seemed to fancy himself overlord of all, barking orders, rushing around as if pursued by a whirlwind.

He paused, watching but not watching now, an absent look in his eyes. He was remembering the meeting with the Führer, recalling how embarrassingly fulsome the little man had been.
You are the world’s expert in this matter, I understand, and I want the best.
Fulsome and ignorant. False compliments yielding to some deranged Teutonic rhetoric, the thousand-year Reich, the grandiose historic scheme that could only have been dreamed up by a lunatic. Belloq had simply stopped listening, staring at the Führer in wonderment, amazed that the destiny of any country should fall into such clumsy hands.
I want the Ark, of course. The Ark belongs in the Reich. Something of such antiquity belongs in Germany.

Belloq closed his eyes against the harsh sun. He tuned out the noises of the excavations, the shouts of the Germans, the occasional sounds of the Arabs. The Ark, he thought. It doesn’t belong to any one man, any one place, any single time. But its secrets are mine, if there are secrets to be had. He opened his eyes again and stared at the dig, the huge craters hacked out of sand, and he felt a certain vibration, a positive intuition, that the great prize was somewhere nearby. He could feel it, sense its power, he could hear the whisper of the thing that would soon become a roar. He took his hands from his pockets and stared at the medallion that lay in the center of his palm. And what he understood as he stared at it was a curious obsession—and a fear that he might yield to it in the end. You lust after a thing long enough, as he had lusted after the Ark, and you start to feel the edge of some madness that is almost . . . almost what?

Divine.

Maybe it was the madness of the saints and the zealots.

A sense of a vision so awesome that all reality simply faded.

An awareness of a power so inexpressible, so cosmic, that the thin fabric of what you assumed to be the real world parted, disintegrated, and you were left with an understanding that, like God’s, surpassed all things.

Perhaps. He smiled to himself.

He moved around the edge of the excavations, skirting past the trucks and the bulldozers. He clutched the medallion tight in his hand. And then he thought about how those thugs dispatched by Dietrich to Nepal had botched the whole business. He experienced disgust.

Those morons, though, had brought back something which served his purposes.

It was the whimpering Toht who had shown Belloq his palm, asking for sympathy, Belloq supposed. Not realizing he had, seared into his flesh, a perfect copy of the very thing he had failed to retrieve.

It had been amusing to see Toht sitting restlessly for hours, days, while he, Belloq, painstakingly fashioned a perfect copy. He’d worked meticulously, trying to recreate the original. But it wasn’t the real thing, the
historic
thing. It was accurate enough for his calculations concerning the map room and the Well of the Souls, but he had wanted the original badly.

Belloq put the medallion back inside his pocket and walked over to where Dietrich was standing. For a long time he said nothing, pleased by the feeling that his presence gave the German some discomfort. Eventually Dietrich said, “It’s going well, don’t you think?”

Belloq nodded, shielding his eyes again. He was thinking of something else now, something that disturbed him. It was the piece of information that had been brought back, by one of Dietrich’s lackeys, from Nepal.
Indiana Jones.

Of course, he should have known that Jones would appear on the scene sooner or later. Jones was troublesome, even if the rivalry between them always ended in his defeat. He didn’t have, Belloq thought, the cunning. The instinct. The killing edge.

But now he had been seen in Cairo with the girl who was Ravenwood’s daughter.

Dietrich turned to him and said, “Have you come to a decision about that other matter we discussed?”

“I think so,” Belloq said.

“I assume it is the decision I imagined you would reach?”

“Assumptions are often arrogant, my friend.”

Dietrich looked at the other man silently.

Belloq smiled. “In this case, though, you are probably correct.”

“You wish me to attend to it?”

Belloq nodded. “I trust I can leave the details to you.”

“Naturally,” Dietrich said.

T
HE DARK WAS
warm and still, the air like a vacuum. It was dry, hard to breathe, as if all moisture had evaporated in the heat of the day. Indy sat with Marion in a coffeehouse, rarely taking his eyes from the door. For hours now, they had been moving through back streets and alleys, staying away from the central thoroughfares—and yet he’d had the feeling all the time that he was being watched. Marion looked exhausted, drained, her long hair damp from sweat. And it was clear to Indy that she was becoming more and more impatient with him: now she was staring at him over the rim of her coffee cup in an accusing fashion. He watched the door, scrutinized the patrons that came and went, and sometimes turned his face upward to catch the thin passage of air that blew from the creaking overhead fan.

“You might have the decency to tell me how long we’re going to creep around like this,” Marion said.

“Is that what we’re doing?”

“It would be obvious to a blind man that we’re hiding from something, Jones. And I’m beginning to wonder why I left Nepal. I had a thriving business, don’t forget. A business you torched.”

He looked at her and smiled and thought how vibrant she appeared when she was on the edge of anger. He reached across the small table and touched the back of her hand. “We’re hiding from the kind of jokers we encountered in Nepal.”

“Okay. I buy that. But for how long?”

“Until I get the feeling that it’s safe to go.”

“Safe to go where? What do you have in mind?”

“I’m not exactly without friends.”

She sighed and finished her coffee, then leaned back in her chair and shut her eyes. “Wake me when you’ve made up your mind, okay?”

Indy stood up and pulled her to her feet. “It’s time,” he said. “We can leave now.”

“Brother,” she said. “Just as I was trying to get some beauty sleep.”

They went out into the alleyway, which was almost deserted.

Indy paused, looking this way and that. Then he took her by the hand and began to walk.

“You want to give me some idea of where we’re headed exactly?”

“The house of Sallah.”

“And who is Sallah?”

“The best digger in Egypt.”

He only hoped Sallah still lived in the same place. And beyond that there was another hope, a deeper one, that Sallah was employed in the Tanis dig.

He paused at a corner, a junction where two narrow alleys branched away from one another. “This way,” he said, still pulling at Marion’s arm.

She sighed, then yawned. She followed.

Something moved in the shadows behind them, something that might have been human. It moved without noise, gliding quickly over the concrete; it knew only to follow the two people who walked ahead of it.

Indy was welcomed into Sallah’s house as if only a matter of weeks had passed since they last met. But it had been years. Even so, Sallah had changed very little. The same intelligent eyes in the brown face, the same energetic cheerfulness, the hospitable warmth. They embraced as Sallah’s wife, a large woman called Fayah, ushered them inside the house.

The warmth of the greeting touched Indy. The comfortable quality of the house made him feel at ease immediately, too. When they sat down at the table in the dining room, eating food that Fayah had produced with all the haste of a culinary miracle, he looked over at the other table in the corner, where Sallah’s children sat.

“Some things change after all,” he said. He placed a small cube of lamb into his mouth and nodded his head in the direction of the kids.

“Ah,” Sallah said. His wife smiled in a proud way. “The last time there were not so many.”

“I can remember only three,” Indy said.

“Now there are nine,” Sallah said.

“Nine,” and Indy shook his head in wonderment.

Marion got up from the table and went over to where the children sat. She talked to each of them, touched them, played briefly with them, and then she came back. Indy imagined he saw some kind of look, something indeterminate yet obviously connected with a love of children, pass between Marion and Fayah. For his part he’d never had time for kids in his life; they constituted the kind of clutter he didn’t need.

“We have made a decision to stop at nine,” Sallah said.

“I’d call that wise,” Indy said.

Sallah reached for a date, chewed on it silently for a moment and then said, “It really is good to see you again, Indiana. I’ve thought about you often. I even intended to write, but I’m a bad correspondent. And I assumed you were even worse.”

“You assumed right.” Indy reached for a date himself. It was plump and delicious.

Sallah was smiling. “I won’t ask you immediately, but I imagine you haven’t come all the way to Cairo just to see me. Am I correct?”

“Correct.”

Sallah looked suddenly knowing, suddenly sly. “In fact, I would even place a bet on your reason for being here.”

Indy stared at his old friend, smiled, said nothing.

Sallah said, “Of course, I am not a gambling man.”

“Of course,” Indy said.

“We don’t talk business at the table,” Fayah remarked, looking imposing.

“Later,” Indy said. He glanced at Marion, who appeared half-asleep now.

“Later, when everything is quiet,” Sallah said.

There was a silence in the room for a second, and then suddenly the place was filled with noise, as if something had erupted at the table where the kids sat.

Fayah turned and tried to silence the pandemonium. But the kids weren’t listening to her voice, because they were busy with something else. She rose, saying, “We have guests. You forget your manners.”

But they still didn’t hear her. It was only when she approached their table that they became silent, revealing in their midst a small monkey sitting upright in the center of the table, chewing on a piece of bread.

Fayah said, “Who brought this animal in here? Who did it?”

The children didn’t answer. Th«y were busy laughing at the antics of the creature, which strutted around with the bread in its paws. It bounced over, performed a perfect handstand and then leaped from the table and skipped across the floor to Marion. It jumped up into her lap and kissed her quickly on the cheek. She laughed.

“A kissing monkey, huh?” she said. “I like you too.”

Fayah said, “How did it get here?”

For a time none of the children spoke. And then the one that Indy recognized as being the oldest said, “We don’t know. It just appeared.”

Fayah regarded her brood with disbelief. Marion said, “If you don’t want to have the animal around—”

Fayah interrupted. “If you like it, Marion, then it’s welcome in our home. As you are.”

Marion held the monkey a moment longer before she set it down. It regarded her in a baleful way and immediately bounced back into her lap.

“It must love you,” Indy said. He found animals only slightly more bothersome than children, and not quite so cute.

She put her arms around the small creature and hugged it. As he watched this behavior, Indy wondered, Who could hug a monkey that way? He turned his face toward Sallah, who was rising from the table now.

“We can go out into the courtyard,” Sallah said.

Indy followed him through the door. There was trapped heat in the walled courtyard; at once he began to feel lethargic, but he knew he had to fight the tiredness a little longer.

Sallah indicated a raffia chair and Indy sat down.

“You want to talk about Tanis,” Sallah said.

“You got it.”

“I assumed so,” Sallah said.

“Then you’re working there?”

Sallah was quiet, looking up into the night sky for a time.

“Indy,” he said. “This afternoon I personally broke through into the Map Room at Tanis.”

This news, though he had somehow expected it, nevertheless shook him. For a time his mind was empty, thoughtless, as if all perceptions, all memories, had fled into some dark void.
The Map Room at Tanis.
And he thought of Abner Ravenwood after a while, of a lifetime spent searching for the Ark, of dying in madness because the Ark had possessed him. Then he considered himself and the strange jealous reaction he had begun to experience, almost as if
he
should have been the first to break through into the Map Room, as if it were
his
right, like a legacy Ravenwood had passed down to him in some obscure way. Irrational thinking, he told himself.