The Adventures Of Indiana Jones (5 page)

He opened his eyes and saw a boa constrictor coiling itself in a threatening way around his upper leg. He jumped upright quickly.

“Jock!”

The pilot looked round, smiled. “He won’t hurt you, Indy. That’s Reggie. He wouldn’t harm a soul.”

“Get it away from me, Jock.”

The pilot reached back, stroked the snake, then drew it into the cockpit beside him. Indy watched the snake slide away from him. An old revulsion, an inexplicable terror. For some people it was spiders, for some rats, for others enclosed spaces. For him it was the repulsive sight and touch of a snake. He rubbed at the sweat newly formed on his forehead, shivering as the water soaking his clothes turned abruptly chill.

“Just keep it beside you,” he said. “I can’t stand snakes.”

“I’ll let you in on a wee secret,” Jock said. “The average snake is nicer than the average person.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Indy said. “Just keep it away from me.”

You think you’re safe, then—a boa constrictor decides to bask on your body. All in a day’s work, he thought.

For a while he looked out of the window and watched darkness fall with an inscrutable certainty over the vast jungle. You can keep your secrets, Indy thought. You can keep all your secrets.

Before he fell asleep, lulled by the noise of the engines, he hoped it would not be a long time before his path crossed once again with that of the Frenchman.

I
N AN OFFICE
on the Wilhelmstrasse, an officer in the black uniform of the SS—an incongruously petite man named Eidel—was seated behind his desk, staring at the bundles of manila folders stacked neatly in front of him. It was clear to Eidel’s visitor, who was named Dietrich, that the small man used the stacks of folders in a compensatory way: they made him feel big, important. It was the same everywhere these days, Dietrich thought. You assess a man and his worth by the amount of paperwork he is able to amass, by the number of rubber stamps he is authorized to use. Dietrich, who liked to consider himself a man of action, sighed inwardly and looked toward the window, against which a pale brown blind had been drawn. He waited for Eidel to speak, but the SS officer had been silent some time, as if even his silences were intended to convey something of what he saw as his own importance.

Dietrich looked at the portrait of the Führer hanging on the wall. When it came down to it, it didn’t matter what you might think of someone like Eidel—soft, shackled to his desk, pompous, locked away in miserable offices—because Eidel had a direct line of access to Hitler. So you listened, and you smiled, and you pretended you were of lesser rank. Eidel, after all, was a member of the inner circle, the elite corps of Hitler’s own private guard.

Eidel smoothed his uniform, which looked as if it had been freshly laundered. He said, “I trust I have made the importance of this matter clear to you, Colonel?”

Dietrich nodded. He felt impatient. He hated offices.

Eidel rose, stretched on his tiptoes in the manner of a man reaching for a subway strap he knows to be out of range, then walked to the window. “The Führer has his mind set on obtaining this particular object. And when his mind is set, of course . . .” Eidel paused, turned, stared at Dietrich. He made a gesture with his hands, indicating that whatever passed through the Führer’s mind was incomprehensible to lesser men.

“I understand,” Dietrich said, drumming his fingertips on his attaché case.

“The religious significance is important,” Eidel said. “It isn’t that the Führer has any special interest in Jewish relics per se, naturally.” And here he paused, laughing oddly, as if the thought were wildly amusing. “He has more interest in the
symbolic
meaning of the item, if you understand.”

It crossed Dietrich’s mind that Eidel was lying, obscuring something here: it was hard to imagine the Führer’s being interested in
anything
for its symbolic value. He stared at the flimsy cable Eidel had allowed him to read a few minutes ago. Then he gazed once more at the picture of Hitler, which was unsmiling, grim.

Eidel, in the manner of a small-town university professor, said, “We come to the matter of expert knowledge now.”

“Indeed,” Dietrich said.

“We come to the matter, specifically, of archaeological knowledge.”

Dietrich said nothing. He saw where this was leading. He saw what was needed of him.

He said, “I’m afraid it’s beyond my grasp.”

Eidel smiled thinly. “But you have connections, I understand. You have connections with the highest authorities in this field, am I right?”

“A matter of debate.”

“There is no time for any such debate,” Eidel said. “I am not here to argue the matter of what constitutes high authority, Colonel. I am here, as you are, to obey a certain important order.”

“You don’t need to remind
me
of that,” Dietrich said.

“I know,” Eidel said, leaning against his desk now. “And you understand I am talking about a certain authority of your acquaintance whose expertise in this particular sphere of interest will be invaluable to us. Correct?”

“The Frenchman,” Dietrich said.

“Of course.”

Dietrich was silent for a time. He felt slightly uneasy. It was as if the face of Hitler were scolding him now for his hesitance. “The Frenchman is hard to find. Like any mercenary, he regards the world as his place of employment.”

“When did you last hear of him?”

Dietrich shrugged. “In South America, I believe.”

Eidel studied the backs of his hands, thin and pale and yet indelicate, like the hands of someone who has failed in his ambition to be a concert pianist. He said, “You can find him. You understand what I’m saying? You understand where this order comes from?”

“I can find him,” Dietrich said. “But I warn you now—”

“Don’t warn
me,
Colonel.”

Dietrich felt his throat become dry. This little trumped-up imbecile of a desk clerk. He would have enjoyed throttling him, stuffing those manila folders down his gullet until he choked. “Very well, I
advise
you—the Frenchman’s price is high.”

“No object,” Eidel said.

“And his trustworthiness is less than admirable.”

“That is something you will be expected to deal with. The point, Colonel Dietrich, is that you will find him and you will bring him to the Führer. But it must be done quickly. It must be done, if you understand,
yesterday.”

Dietrich stared at the shade on the window. It sometimes filled him with dread that the Führer had surrounded himself with lackeys and fools like Eidel. It implied a certain cloudiness of judgment where humans were concerned.

Eidel smiled, as if he was amused by Dietrich’s unease. Then he said, “Speed is important, of course. Other parties are interested, obviously. These parties do not represent the best interests of the Reich. Do I make myself clear?”

“Clear,” Dietrich said. Dietrich thought about the Frenchman for a moment; he knew, even if he hadn’t told Eidel, that Belloq was in the south of France right then. The prospect of doing business with Belloq was what appalled him. There was a smooth quality to the man that masked an underlying ruthlessness, a selfish ness, a disregard for philosophies, beliefs, politics. If it served Belloq’s interests, it was therefore valid. If not, he didn’t care.

“The other parties will be taken care of if they should surface,” Eidel was saying. “They should be of no concern to you.”

“Then that is how I’ll treat them,” Dietrich said.

Eidel picked up the cable and glanced at it. “What we have talked about is not to go beyond these four walls, Colonel. I don’t have to say that, do I?”

“You don’t have to say it,” Dietrich repeated, irritated.

Eidel went back to his seat and stared at the other man across the mountain of folders. He was silent for a moment. And then he feigned surprise at finding Dietrich seated opposite him. “Are you still here, Colonel?”

Dietrich clutched his attaché case and rose. It was hard not to feel hatred toward these black-uniformed clowns. They acted as if they owned the world.

“I was about to leave,” Dietrich said.

“Heil Hitler,”
Eidel said, raising his hand, his arm rigid.

At the door Dietrich answered in the same words.

I
NDIANA
J
ONES
sat in his office at Marshall College.

He had just finished his first lecture of the year for Archaeology 101, and it had gone well. It always went well. He loved teaching and he knew he was able to convey his passion for the subject matter to his students. But now he was restless and his restlessness disturbed him. Because he knew exactly what it was he wanted to do.

Indy put his feet up on the desk, deliberately knocked a couple of books over, then rose and paced around the office—seeing it not as the intimate place it usually was, his retreat, his hideaway, but as the cell of some remote stranger.

Jones, he told himself.

Indiana Jones, wise up.

The objects around him seemed to shed their meaning for a time. The huge wall map of South America became a surreal blur, an artist’s dadaist conception. The clay replica of the idol looked suddenly silly, ugly. He picked it up and he thought: For something like
this
you laid your life on the line? You must have an essential screw loose. A bolt out of place.

He held the replica of the idol, gazing at it absently.

This mad love of antiquity struck him all at once as unholy, unnatural. An insane infatuation with the sense of history—more than the
sense,
the need to reach out and touch it, hold it, understand it through its relics and artifacts, finding yourself haunted by the faces of long-dead artisans and craftsmen and artists, spooked by the notion of hands creating these objects, fingers that had long since turned to skeleton, to dust. But never forgotten, never quite forgotten, not so long as you existed with your irrational passion.

For a moment the old feelings came back to him, assailed him, the first excitement he’d ever felt as a student. When? Fifteen years ago? sixteen? twenty? It didn’t matter: time meant something different to him than it did to most people. Time was a thing you discovered through the secrets it had buried—in temples, in ruins, under rocks and dust and sand. Time expanded, became elastic, creating that amazing sense of everything that had ever lived being linked to everything that existed in the now; and death was fundamentally meaningless because of what you left behind.

Meaningless.

He thought of Champollion laboring over the Rosetta stone, the astonishment at finally deciphering ancient hieroglyphics. He thought of Schliemann finding the site of Troy. Flinders Petrie excavating the pre-dynastic cemetery at Nagada. Woolley discovering the royal cemetery at Ur in Iraq. Carter and Lord Carnarvon stumbling over the tomb of Tutankhamon.

That was where it had all begun. In that consciousness of discovery, which was like the eye of an intellectual hurricane. And you were swept along, carried away, transported backward in the kind of time machine the writers of fantasy couldn’t comprehend: your personal time machine, your private line to the vital past.

He balanced the replica of the idol in the center of his hand and stared at it as if it were a personal enemy. No, he thought: you’re your own worst enemy, Jones. You got carried away because you had access to half of a map among Forrestal’s papers—and because you desperately wanted to trust two thugs who had the other half.

Moron, he thought.

And Belloq. Belloq was probably the smart one. Belloq had a razor-blade eye for the quick chance. Belloq always had had that quality—like the snakes you have a phobia about. Coming out unseen from under a rock, the slithering predator, always grasping for the thing he hasn’t hunted for himself.

All that formed in the center of his mind now was an image of Belloq—that slender, handsome face, the dark of the eye, the smile that concealed the cunning.

He remembered other encounters with the Frenchman. He remembered graduate school, when Belloq had chiseled his way to the Archaeological Society Prize by presenting a paper on stratigraphy—the basis of which Indy recognized as being his own work. And in some way Belloq had plagiarized it, in some way he had found access to it. Indy couldn’t prove anything because it would have been a case of sour grapes, a rash of envy.

1934. Remember the summer of that year, he thought.

1934. Black summer. He had spent months planning a dig in the Rub al Khali Desert of Saudi Arabia. Months of labor and preparation and scrounging for funds, putting the pieces together, arguing that his instincts about the dig were correct, that there were the remains of a nomadic culture to be found in that arid place, a culture predating Christ. And then what?

He closed his eyes.

Even now the memory filled him with bitterness.

Belloq had been there before him.

Belloq had excavated the place.

It was true the Frenchman had found little of historic significance in the excavations, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was that Belloq had stolen from him again. And again he wasn’t sure how he could prove the theft.

And now the idol.

Indy looked up, startled out of his reverie, as the door of his office opened slowly.

Marcus Brody appeared, an expression of caution on his face, a caution that was in part concern. Indy considered Marcus, curator of the National Museum, his closest friend.

“Indiana,” he said and his voice was soft.

He held the replica of the idol out, as if he were offering it to the other man, then he dropped it abruptly in the trash can on the floor.

“I had the real thing in my hand, Marcus. The real thing.” Indy sat back, eyes shut, fingers vigorously massaging his eyelids.

“You told me, Indiana. You already told me,” Brody said. “As soon as you came back. Remember?”

“I can get it back, Marcus. I can get it back. I figured it out. Belloq has to sell it, right? So where’s he going to sell it? Huh?”