The Adventures Of Indiana Jones (23 page)

“We appreciate your service,” Musgrove said. “And the cash reimbursement—we assume it was satisfactory?”

Indy nodded and glanced first at Marion, then at Marcus Brody.

Brody said, “I don’t understand yet why the museum can’t have the Ark.”

“It’s someplace very safe,” Eaton said evasively.

“That’s a powerful force,” Indy told him. “It has to be understood. Analyzed. It isn’t some game, you know.”

Musgrove nodded. “We have our top men working on it right now.”

“Name them,” Indy said.

“For security reasons I can’t.”

“The Ark was slated for the museum. You agreed to that. Now you give us some crap about top men. Brody there—he’s one of the best men in this whole field. Why doesn’t he get a chance to work with your
top men?”

“Indy,” Brody said. “Leave it. Drop it.”

“I won’t,” Indy said. “This whole affair cost me my favorite hat, for openers.”

“I assure you, Jones, that the Ark is well protected. And its power—if we can accept your description of it—will be analyzed in due course.”

“Due course,” Indy said. “You remind me of letters I get from my lawyers.”

“Look,” Brody said, sounding strained, “all we want is the Ark for the museum. We want some reassurances, too, that no lasting damage will be done to it while in your possession—”

“You have them,” Eaton said. “As for the Ark going to your museum, I’m afraid we will have to rethink our position.”

A silence. A clock ticking. The faceless bureaucrat fiddled with his cuff links.

Indy said quietly, finally, “You don’t know what you’re sitting on, do you?”

He rose and helped Marion out of her chair.

“We’ll be in touch, of course,” Eaton said. “It was good of you to come. Your services are appreciated.”

Outside in the warm sunlight, Marion took Indy’s arm. Brody shuffled along beside them. Marion said, “Well, they aren’t going to tell you anything, so maybe you should forget all about the Ark and get on with your life, Jones.”

Indy glanced at Brody. He knew he had been tricked out of something that should have been his.

Brody said, “I guess they have their own good reasons for holding on to the Ark. It’s a bitter disappointment, though.”

Marion stopped, raised her leg and scratched her heel a moment. She said to Indy, “Put your mind on something else for a change.”

“Like what?”

“Like this,” she said, and kissed him.

“It’s not the Ark,” he said and smiled. “But it’ll have to do.”

The wooden crate was stenciled on the side:
TOP SECRET, ARMY INTEL,
9906753,
DO NOT OPEN.
It sat on a dolly, which the warehouseman pushed in front of him. He hardly paid any attention to the crate. His was a world filled with such crates, all of them meaninglessly stenciled. Numbers, numbers, secret codes. He had become more than immune to these hieroglyphics. He looked forward only to his weekly check. He was old, stooped, and very few things in life engrossed him. Certainly none of these crates did. There were hundreds of them filling the warehouse and he had no curiosity about any of them. Nobody did, it seemed. As far as he could tell nobody ever bothered to open any of them anyhow. They were stacked and left to pile up, rising from floor to ceiling. Crates and crates, hundreds and hundreds of the things. Gathering dust, getting cobwebbed. The man pushed his dolly and sighed. What difference did another crate make now? He found a space for it, slipped it in place, then he paused and stuck a finger in his ear, shaking the finger vigorously. Damn, he thought. He’d have to get his hearing checked.

He was convinced he’d heard a low humming noise.

Shanghai, 1935

T
HE NIGHTCLUB
had that wild and smoky air. Ladies and gentlemen and not so gentle men, of every nationality, and some no nation would claim, sat, formally attired, at tables that were scattered around the dance floor. Cigarette girls with long legs, bouncers with long faces, exotic food, tuxedoed waiters, laughter soft and loud, champagne and broken promises and opium lacing some of the tobacco—that was the flavor to the smoke. A decadent place, in a time of deep decay. But still,
très gai.
Like the last party before the apocalypse. In a few years the world would be at war.

Along the side wall, Deco curves and Oriental arches weaved around to form private booths, or step-up balconies. The bar was off to the back. Up front, beside the kitchen doors, stood the bandstand, slightly raised, and beside it, directly before the dance floor, was the stage.

Flanking the stage were two giant, carved wooden statues: Chinese warlords slouching on their thrones, sporting golden broadswords, smiling coolly, as if presiding over these festivities.

Beside the stage-left statue, an enormous gong hung by two thick cords, from the ceiling almost to the floor. In bas-relief on its face, an angry dragon hovered above a great mountain. Beside the gong stood a muscular attendant in harem pants, the striker resting across his bare chest.

Facing front, center stage, its mouth open wide, was the head of a huge dragon. Its great eyes bulged frantically in different directions, its
papier-mâché
antennae quivered in uneasy resonance with the clatter of the room, its paper-lantern scales rippled back to the curtains.

And now smoke began to issue from its maw.

Ceremoniously, the attendant struck the gong.

Fire-red light suffused the steam filling the dragon’s mouth. The smoky light poured down the steps, off the stage, onto the dance floor, as the band began playing.

And then, slowly, through the jaws of the beast, out of its fiery snarl, emerged the woman.

She was twenty, maybe twenty-five. Green-blue eyes, dark blond hair. She wore a high-necked, fitted gold-and-red sequinned gown, with matching gloves, spike heels, butterfly earrings. She paused at the dragon’s lip, reached overhead to tug coyly on one of its upper teeth, then stepped forward with a sultry purr. Her name was Willie Scott. She was a knockout.

A dozen girls danced down the stairs that winged the dragon’s head. They fluttered fans before their exquisitely painted faces; they wore thigh-length golden kimonos, showing more than a glimpse of silk stocking, as Willie started to sing:

“Yi wang si-i wa ye kan dao

Xin li bian yao la jing bao jin tian zhi

Dao

Anything goes.
”

The crowd was mostly inattentive, but Willie mostly didn’t care. She went through her moves like a pro, up the steps and down, growling her song, while her mind wandered in the smoke that swirled over the stage, floating thickest around the set-creature’s head, like the dreams of the dragon. In her mind, this was no sleazy Shanghai night-spot: it was a Grand Stage. And these two-bit hoofers behind her were a tight chorus line, and it was back in the States, and she was the glamorous star, rich and adored and dazzling and independent and . . .

The smoke cleared a little. Willie remembered where she really was.

Too bad for this mob,
she thought.
They’re too low down to appreciate a class act when it taps right up to their table.

The bandleader cued her, and she went into her last chorus, pulling out a red scarf, taunting the audience from behind it.

“Anything goes!”

The band wrapped it up; the crowd applauded. Willie bowed. The three men at the front table clapped politely, managing to turn their lips up without smiling: the gangster Lao Che, and his two sons.

Vile scoundrels, dressed in the faintest veneer of
beau monde.

Willie winked at them.

Or, more specifically, at Lao Che, who was currently her mealticket.

He nodded back at her—but then something else caught his eye, and a shadow held his face. As Willie ran back upstairs and offstage, she followed Lao Che’s gaze, to see what it was that engendered his disfavor.

It was a man, entering the club, walking down the staircase at the back of the room. He wore a white dinner jacket with a red carnation in the lapel, black pants, vest, bow tie, shoes. Willie couldn’t see much more than that, except that the man seemed to carry himself pretty well. He gave her a bad feeling, though. She wondered if he was some kind of cop.

She saw him reach the bottom of the stairs, where he was greeted by a waiter, just as she made her exit off stage. Her last thought on the matter was:
Well, he’s pretty, but he looks like trouble.

Indiana Jones stepped off the elevator and walked down the stairway into the Club Obi Wan just as the floor show was ending. He watched the twelve red-and-gold-clad dancers scurry out of sight to loud applause, smiled to himself:
Hey, don’t run off now, ladies, I just got here.

Nonchalantly, he finished descending the stairs, but his eyes scanned the room like a chary cat.

It was as he remembered it, only more so: the dissolute horde, the hollow revelry; these were the people of a dying tribe. He wondered if even their artifacts would last, if his own counterpart, in a thousand years, could dig up their boxes and jewelry and picture the life in this room.
Picture the lowlife, that is,
he thought, his eyes coming to rest on Lao Che’s table.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, a waiter came up to him. The man was young, though his hairline was thinning; slight of build, though there was something dangerous about him; half-Chinese, half-Dutch. His name was Wu Han.

He bowed slightly to Indiana, with a vacant smile of greeting, and spoke so that only Jones heard: “Be careful.”

Indy nodded back absently, then walked toward Lao Che’s group. They reseated themselves as he approached. The applause ended.

“Dr. Jones,” said Lao Che.

“Lao Che,” said Indiana Jones.

Lao was pushing fifty. Several layers of high living puffed out his cheeks and belly, but it was all hard under the surface. Like lizard meat. He wore a black silk brocade dinner jacket, black shirt, white tie. His eyes were heavily lidded, reptilian. On his left little finger he wore the gilt signet ring of the royal family of the Chang Dynasty—Indy noted this with professional admiration.

To Lao Che’s left was his son, Kao Kan, a younger version of the old man: stocky, impassive, ruthless. On Lao’s right sat his other son, Chen. Chen was tall, thin almost to the point of ghostliness. The white scarf hanging loosely around his neck made Indy think of the tattered swathing that sometimes clung to long-shriveled corpses.

Lao smiled at Indy. “Nee chin lie how ma?”

Chen and Kao Kan laughed malignantly.

Indy smiled in return. “Wah jung how, nee nah? Wah hwey hung jung chee jah loonee kao soo wah shu shu.” He turned the joke around on Lao Che.

The three seated men became silent. Lao stared at Indy with venom. “You never told me you spoke my language, Dr. Jones.”

“I don’t like to show off,” Indy deadpanned.

Two bodyguards appeared, frisked him quickly, and faded out of sight again. He didn’t like that, but he’d expected it. He sat down across from Lao.

A waiter arrived at the table with a large dish of caviar and a bucket of chilled champagne, which he set beside Lao.

The smile returned to the crime-lord’s face. “For this special occasion I have ordered champagne and caviar.” He stared at Indy with a strange intensity as he went on. “So it is true, Dr. Jones: you found Nurhachi.”

Indy leaned forward slightly. “You
know
I did. Last night one of your boys tried to take Nurhachi without paying for him.”

Kao Kan brought his left hand up and rested it on the table. It was newly bandaged. It was newly missing an index finger.

Lao Che seethed, nodding. “You have insulted my son.”

Indy sat back. “No, you have insulted me. But I spared his life.”

Lao gazed at Indy like a cobra at a mongoose. “Dr. Jones, I want Nurhachi.” He placed a wad of bills on the lazy Susan that occupied the center of the table, and spun it around until the money rested in front of Indy.

Indy put his hand down on the pile, felt the thickness of the wad, converted his estimate to dollars, came up short. Way short. He revolved the turntable back to Lao, and shook his head. “This doesn’t even begin to cover my expenses, Lao. I thought I was dealing with an honest crook.”

Kao Kan and Chen swore angrily in Chinese. Chen half-stood.

Suddenly an elegant, gloved hand rested on Lao’s shoulder. Indy let his eyes glide up the smooth arm to the face of the woman standing behind Lao; she stared directly back at Indy. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” she said softly.

Lao Che waved Chen back down to his seat. “Dr. Jones, this is Willie Scott,” said Lao. “Willie, this is Indiana Jones, the famous archaeologist.”

Willie walked around toward Indy as he rose to greet her. In the moment of the handshake, they appraised each other.

He liked her face. It had a natural beauty weathered by natural disasters, like a raw gem after a flood, crystal-rough and waiting for a setting. She wore a diaphanous butterfly barrette that seemed to grow out of the substance of her hair; Indy took this to indicate a certain extravagance to her personality, if not actual flightiness. She wore gloves; Indy saw this as a statement on her part: “I do a lot of handling, but I don’t touch.” She wore expensive perfume, and a sequinned dress cut high in front and low—real low—in back; Indy took this to mean she came on cool, and left you with a nice memory. She was with Lao Che. To Indy, this signaled alarm.