The Adventures Of Indiana Jones (6 page)

Brody looked tolerantly at him. “Where, Indiana?”

“Marrakesh. Marrakesh, that’s where.” Indy got up, indicating various figures that were on the desk. These were the items he’d taken from the Temple, the bits and pieces he’d swept up quickly. “Look. They’ve got to be worth something, Marcus. They’ve got to be worth enough money to get me to, Marrakesh, right?”

Brody barely glanced at the items. Instead, he put out his hand and laid it on Indy’s shoulder, a touch of friendship and concern. “The museum will buy them, as usual. No questions asked. But we’ll talk about the idol later. Right now I want you to meet some people. They’ve come a long way to see you, Indiana.”

“What people?”

Brody said, “They’ve come from Washington, Indiana. Just to see you.”

“Who are they?” Indy asked wanly.

“Army Intelligence.”

“Army
what?
Am I in some kind of trouble?”

“No. Quite the opposite, it would seem. They appear to need your help,”

“The only help I’m interested in is getting the cash together for Marrakesh, Marcus. These things have to be worth
something.”

“Later, Indiana. Later. First I want you to see these people.”

Indy paused by the wall map of South America. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll see them. I’ll see them, if it means so much to you.”

“They’re waiting in the lecture hall.”

They moved into the corridor.

A pretty young girl appeared in front of Indy. She was carrying a bundle of books and was pretending to look studious, efficient. Indy brightened when he saw her.

“Professor Jones,” she was saying.

“Uh—”

“I was hoping we could have a conference,” she said shyly, glancing at Marcus Brody.

“Yeah, sure, sure, Susan, I know I said we’d talk.”

Marcus Brody said, “Not now. Not now, Indiana.” And he turned to the girl. “Professor Jones has an
important
conference to attend, my dear. Why don’t you call him later?”

“Yeah,” Indy mumbled. “I’ll be back at noon.”

The girl smiled in a disappointed way, then drifted off along the corridor. Indy watched her go, admiring her legs, the roundness of the calves, the slender ankles. He felt Brody tug at his sleeve.

“Pretty. Up to your usual standards, Indiana. But later. Okay?”

“Later,” Indy said, looking reluctantly away from the girl.

Brody pushed open the door of the lecture hall. Seated near the podium were two uniformed Army officers. They turned their faces in unison as the door opened.

“If this is the draft board, I’ve already served,” Indy said.

Marcus Brody ushered Indy to a chair on the podium. “Indiana, I’d like to introduce you to Colonel Musgrove and Major Eaton. These are the people who’ve come from Washington to see you.”

Eaton said, “Good to meet you. We’ve heard a lot about you, Professor Jones. Doctor of Archaeology, expert on the occult, obtainer of rare antiquities.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Indy said.

“The ‘obtainer of rare antiquities’ sounds intriguing,” the major said.

Indy glanced at Brody, who said, “I’m sure everything Professor Jones does for our museum here confirms strictly to the guidelines of the International Treaty for the Protection of Antiquities.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Major Eaton said.

Musgrove said, “You’re a man of many talents, Professor.”

Indy made a dismissive gesture, waving a hand. What did these guys want?

Major Eaton said, “I understand you studied under Professor Ravenwood at the University of Chicago?”

“Yes.”

“Have you any idea of his present whereabouts?”

Ravenwood.
The name threw memories back with a kind of violence Indy didn’t like. “Rumors, nothing more. I heard he was in Asia, I guess. I don’t know.”

“We understood you were pretty close to him,” Musgrove said.

“Yeah.” Indy rubbed his chin. “We were friends . . . We haven’t spoken in years, though. I’m afraid we had what you might call a falling out.”
A falling out,
he thought. There was a polite way to put it. A falling out—it was more like a total collapse. And then he was thinking of Marion, an unwanted memory, something he had yet to excavate from the deeper strata of his mind. Marion Ravenwood, the girl with the wonderful eyes.

Now the officers were whispering together, deciding something. Then Eaton turned and looked solemn and said, “What we’re going to tell you has to remain confidential.”

“Sure,” Indy said. Ravenwood—where did the old man fit in all this fragile conundrum? And when was somebody going to get to the point?

Musgrove said, “Yesterday, one of our European stations intercepted a German communiqué sent from Cairo to Berlin. The news in it was obviously exciting to the German agents in Egypt.” Musgrove looked at Eaton, waiting for him to continue the narrative, as if each was capable of delivering only a certain amount of information at any one time.

Eaton said, “I’m not sure if I’m telling you something you already know, Professor Jones, when I mention the fact that the Nazis have had teams of archaeologists running around the world for the last two years—”

“It hasn’t escaped my attention.”

“Sure. They appear to be on a frantic search for any kind of religious artifact they can get. Hitler, according to our intelligence reports, is obsessed with the occult. We understand he even has a personal soothsayer, if that’s the word. And right now it seems that some kind of archaeological dig—highly secretive—is going on in the desert outside Cairo.”

Indy nodded. This was sending him to sleep. He knew of Hitler’s seemingly endless concern with divining the future, making gold out of lead, hunting the elixir, whatever. You name it, he thought, and if it’s weird enough, then the crazy little man with the mustache is sure to be interested in it.

Indy watched Musgrove take a sheet from his briefcase. He held it a moment, then he said, “This communiqué contains some information concerning the activity in the desert, but we don’t know what to make of it. We thought it might mean something to you.” And he passed the sheet to Indy. The message said:

TANIS DEVELOPMENT PROCEEDING.

ACQUIRE HEADPIECE, STAFF OF RA,

ABNER RAVENWOOD, US.

He read the words again, his mind suddenly clear, suddenly sharp. He stood up, looked at Brody and said, incredulously, “The Nazis have discovered Tanis.”

Brody’s face was grim and pale.

Eaton said, “Sorry. You’ve just lost me. What does Tanis mean to you?”

Indy walked from the podium to the window, his mind racing now. He pushed the window open and breathed in the crisp morning air, feeling it pleasingly cold in his lungs.
Tanis. The Staff of Ra. Ravenwood.
It flooded back to him now, the old legends, the fables, the stories. He was struck by a barrage of knowledge, information he’d stored in his brain for years—so much that he wanted to get it out quickly, speed through it. Take it slow, he thought. Tell it to them slowly so they’ll understand. He turned to the officers and said, “A lot of this is going to be hard for you to understand. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s going to depend on your personal beliefs, I can tell you that much from the outset. Okay?” He paused, looking at their blank faces. “The city of Tanis is one of the possible resting places of the lost Ark.”

Musgrove interrupted: “Ark? As in Noah?”

Indy shook his head, “Not Noah. I’m talking about the Ark of the Covenant. I’m talking about the chest the Israelites used to carry around the Ten Commandments.”

Eaton said, “Back up. You mean
the
Ten Commandments?”

“I mean the
actual stone tablets,
the original ones Moses brought down from Mount Horeb. The ones he’s said to have smashed when he saw the decadence of the Jews. While he was up in the mountain communing with God and being shown the law, the rest of his people are having orgies and building idols. So he’s pretty angry and he breaks the tablets, right?”

The faces of the military men were impassive. Indy wished he could imbue them with the kind of enthusiasm he was beginning to feel himself.

“Then the Israelites put the broken pieces in the Ark and they carried it with them everywhere they went. When they settled in Canaan, the Ark was placed in the Temple of Solomon. It stayed there for years . . . then it was gone.”

“Where?” Musgrove asked.

“Nobody knows who took it or when.”

Brody, speaking more patiently than Indy, said, “An Egyptian pharaoh invaded Jerusalem around 926
B.C.
Shishak by name. He
may
have taken it back to the city of Tanis—”

Indy cut in: “Where he may have hidden it in a secret chamber they called the Well of the Souls.”

There was a silence in the hall.

Then Indy said, “Anyway, that’s the myth. But bad things always seemed to happen to outsiders who meddled with the Ark. Soon after Shishak returned to Egypt, the city of Tanis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm that lasted a year.”

“The obligatory curse,” Eaton said.

Indy was annoyed by the man’s skepticism. “If you like,” he said, trying to be patient. “But during the Battle of Jericho, Hebrew priests carried the Ark around the city for seven days before the walls collapsed. And when the Philistines supposedly captured the Ark, they brought the whole shooting works down on themselves—including plagues of boils and plagues of mice.”

Eaton said, “This is all very interesting, I guess. But why would an American be mentioned in a Nazi cable, if we can get back to the point?”

“He’s
the
expert on Tanis,” Indy said. “Tanis was his obsession. He even collected some of its relics. But he never found the city.”

“Why would the Nazis be interested in him?” Musgrove asked.

Indy paused for a moment. “It seems to me that the Nazis are looking for the headpiece to the Staff of Ra. And they think Abner has it.”

“The Staff of Ra,” Eaton said. “It’s all somewhat farfetched.”

Musgrove, who seemed more interested, leaned forward in his seat. “What is the Staff of Ra, Professor Jones?”

“I’ll draw you a picture,” Indy said. He strode to the blackboard and began to sketch quickly. As he drew the chalk across the board, he said, “The Staff of Ra is supposedly the clue to the location of the Ark. A pretty clever clue into the bargain. It was basically a long stick, maybe six feet high, nobody’s really sure. Anyhow, it was capped by an elaborate headpiece in the shape of the sun, with a crystal at its center. You still with me? You had to take the staff to a special map room in the city of Tanis—it had the whole city laid out in miniature. When you placed the staff in a certain spot in this room at a certain time of day, the sun would shine through the crystal in the headpiece and send down a beam of light to the map, giving you the location of the Well of the Souls—”

“Where the Ark was concealed,” Musgrove said.

“Right. Which is probably why the Nazis want the headpiece. Which explains Ravenwood’s name in the cable.”

Eaton got up and began moving around restlessly. “What does this Ark look like, anyhow?”

“I’ll show you,” Indy said. He went quickly to the back of the hall, found a book, flipped the pages until he came to a large color print. He showed it to the two military officers. They stared in silence at the illustration, which depicted a biblical battle scene. The army of the Israelites was vanquishing its foe; at the forefront of the Israelite ranks were two men carrying the Ark of the Covenant, an oblong gold chest with two golden cherubim crowning it. The Israelites carried the chest by poles placed through special rings in the corners. A thing of quite extraordinary beauty—but more impressive than its appearance was the piercing and brilliant jet of white light and flame that issued from the wings of the angels, a jet that drove into the ranks of the retreating army, creating apparent terror and devastation.

Impressed, Musgrove said, “What’s that supposed to be coming out of the wings?”

Indy shrugged. “Who knows? Lightning. Fire. The power of God. Whatever you call it, it was supposedly capable of leveling mountains and wasting entire regions. According to Moses, an army that carried the Ark before it was invincible.” Indy looked at Eaton’s face and decided, This guy has no imagination. Nothing will ever set this character on fire. Eaton shrugged and continued to stare at the illustration. Disbelief, Indy thought. Military skepticism.

Musgrove said, “What are your own feelings about this . . . so-called power of the Ark, Professor?”

“As I said, it depends on your beliefs. It depends on whether you accept the myth as having some basis in truth.”

“You’re sidestepping,” Musgrove said and smiled.

“I keep an open mind,” Indy answered.

Eaton turned away from the picture. “A nut like Hitler, though . . . He might really believe in this power, right? He might buy the whole thing.”

“Probably,” Indy said. He watched Eaton a moment, suddenly feeling a familiar sense of anticipation, a rise in his temperature.
The lost city of Tanis. The Well of the Souls. The Ark.
There was an elusive melody here, and it enticed him like the seductive call of a siren.

“He might imagine that with the Ark his military machine would be invincible,” Eaton said, more to himself than to anybody else. “I can see, if he swallows the whole fairy tale, the psychological advantage he’d feel at the very least.”

Indy said, “There’s one other thing. According to legend, the Ark will be recovered at the time of the coming of the true Messiah.”

“The true Messiah,” Musgrove said.

“Which is what Hitler probably imagines himself to be,” Eaton remarked.

There was a silence in the hall now. Indy looked once more at the illustration, the savagery of the light that flashed from the wings of the angels and scorched the retreating enemies. A power beyond all power. Beyond definition. He shut his eyes for a second. What if it
was
true? What if such a power
did
exist? Okay, you try to be rational, you try to work it like Eaton, putting it down to some old fable, something circulated by a bunch of zealous Israelites. A scare tactic against their enemies, a kind of psychological warfare even. Just the same, there was something here you couldn’t ignore, couldn’t shove aside.