The Adventures Of Indiana Jones (10 page)

“You’re an idiot.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I’ve heard that.”

He got down from the stool. He wondered where he was going to spend the night. In a snowbank, he supposed. If Marion had her way. He turned to leave.

“Do one thing for me,” she said.

He turned to look at her.

“Kiss me.”

“Kiss you?”

“Yeah. Go on. Refresh my memory.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Then don’t come back tomorrow.”

He laughed. He leaned toward her, surprised by his own eagerness, then by the sudden wildness of the kiss, by the way she pulled at his hair, the way her tongue forced itself between his lips and moved slickly against the roof of his mouth. The kiss of the child was long gone; this was different, the kiss of a woman who has learned the nature of lovemaking.

She drew herself away, smiled, reached for her drink.

“Now get the hell out of my place,” Marion said.

She watched him go, watched the door close behind him. She didn’t move for a time; then she undid the scarf she wore around her neck. A chain hung suspended between her breasts. She pulled on the chain, at the end of which there was a sun-shaped bronze medallion with a crystal set into it.

She rubbed it thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger.

Indy trembled in the freezing night air as he went toward the car. He sat inside for a time. What was he supposed to do now? Drive around this hole until morning? He wasn’t likely to find any three-star hotel in Patan, nor did he relish the idea of spending the night asleep in the car. By morning he’d be frozen solid as a Popsicle. Maybe, he thought, I’ll give her some time and then she’ll soften and I can go back; maybe she can show me some of that hospitality for which innkeepers are supposed to be famous. He cupped his hands and blew into them for heat, then he started the engine of the car. Even the rim of the steering wheel was chilly to touch.

Indy drove off slowly.

He didn’t see the shadow in the doorway across the street, the shadow of the raincoated man who had boarded the DC-3 in Shanghai, a man by the name of Toht who had been sent to Patan at the express request of the Third Reich Special Antiquities Collection. Toht moved across the street, accompanied by his hired help—a German thug with an eyepatch, a Nepalese in a fur jacket and a Mongolian who carried a submachine gun as if anything that might move in his line of vision would automatically be a target.

They paused outside the door of The Raven, watching Indiana Jones’s car depart in a flare of red taillights.

Marion stood reflectively in front of the coal fire, a poker in her hand. She stabbed at the dying flames and suddenly, despite herself, despite what she considered a weakness, she was crying. That damn Jones, she thought. Ten years down the road, down a hard bloody road, he comes dancing back into my life with more of his promises. And the ten years collapsed, time flicked away like the pages of a book, and she was remembering how it had been back then—fifteen years old and fancying herself in love with the handsome young archaeologist, the young man her father had warned her about. She remembered his saying, “You’ll only get hurt, even if you’ll get over it in time.” Well, the hurt had been true and real—but the rest of it wasn’t. Maybe it was true what they sometimes said, that old wives’ tale—maybe you never really forgot the first man, the first love. Certainly she had never forgotten the delicious quality, the trembling, the feeling that she might die from the sheer anticipation of the kiss, the embrace. Nothing had touched that wicked heightening of the senses, that feeling of floating through the world as if she were insubstantial, flimsy, as if she might be transparent when held up to light.

She decided she was being stupid, crying, all because Mr. Big Shot Archaeologist comes strutting through the door. The hell with him, she said to herself. He’s only good for the money now.

Confused, she went to the bar. She slipped the chain from her neck, laid the medallion on the bar. She picked up the money Indy had left and, reaching behind the bar, put it inside a small wooden box. She was still staring at the medallion, which lay in the shadow of the huge taxidermic raven, when she heard a noise at the door. She whipped quickly around to see four men come in, and at once she understood that there was trouble and that the trouble had come in the wake of good old Indiana Jones. What the hell has he landed me in? she wondered.

“We’re closed. I’m sorry,” she said.

The one in the raincoat, who had a face like an open razor, smiled. “We didn’t come for a drink,” he said. His voice was heavily accented, German.

“Oh.” And she watched the razor’s companions, the Nepalese and the Mongolian (dear God, he has a machine gun), poke around the place. She thought of the medallion lying on the surface of the bar. The guy with the eye patch passed very close to it.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Precisely the same thing your friend Indiana Jones is looking for,” the German said. “I’m sure he must have mentioned it.”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Ah,” the man said. “Has he acquired it, then?”

“I don’t think I understand you,” she said.

The man sat down, drawing his raincoat up. “Forgive me for not introducing myself. Toht. Arnold Toht. Jones asked about a certain medallion, did he not?”

“He might have done . . .” She was thinking about the gun that lay on the ledge behind the stuffed raven, wondering how quickly she could reach it.

“Don’t play silly games with me, please,” Toht said.

“All right. He’s coming back tomorrow. Why don’t you come back then too, and we’ll hold an auction, if you’re
that
interested.”

Toht shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I have to have the object tonight, Fräulein.” He rose and looked in the fire, bending, lifting the poker from the embers.

Marion pretended to yawn. “I don’t have it. Come back tomorrow. I’m tired.”

“I am sorry you’re tired. However . . .” He motioned with his head. The Mongolian caught Marion from behind, pinning her arms at her back, while Toht pulled the red-hot poker from the fire and moved toward her.

“I think I see your point,” she said. “Look, I can be reasonable—”

“I’m sure, I’m sure.” Toht sighed as if he were a man weary of violence, but that sound was misleading. He advanced toward her, still holding the poker close to her face. She could feel its heat against her skin. She twisted her face to the side and struggled against the grip of the Mongolian, but he was too strong.

“Wait, I’ll show you where it is!”

Toht said, “You had your opportunity for that, my dear.”

A sadist of the old school, she thought. The medallion doesn’t matter a bit to him, only the sight of that poker searing my face. She struggled again, but it was useless. Okay, she decided, you’ve lost everything else, you might as well lose your looks, too. She tried to bite the big man’s arm, but he simply slapped the side of her face, stinging her with an open palm that smelled of wax.

She stared at the poker.

Too close. Five inches. Four. Three.

The sickening smell of hot metal.

And then—

Then it all happened too quickly for her to follow for a moment, an abrupt series of events that occurred in a blur, like an ink drawing that has been caught in the rain. She heard a crack, a violent crack, and what she saw was the European’s hand go up in the air suddenly, the poker flying across the room to the window, where it wrapped itself in the curtains and started to smolder. She felt the Mongolian release her and then she realized that Indiana Jones had come back, that he was standing in the doorway with that old bullwhip of his in one hand and a pistol in the other. Indiana Jones, just like the damn cavalry coming at the last possible moment.
What the hell kept you?
she wanted to scream. But now she wanted to move, she had to move, the room was filled with all manner of violence, the air was charged like the atmosphere of an electrical storm. She swung over the bar and reached for a bottle just as Toht fired a gun at her, but the bullets were wild and she rolled over on the floor behind the counter in a rage of shattered glass. Gunfire, deafening, loud, piercing her ears.

The Mongolian, cumbersome, leveled his submachine gun. He’s aiming for Indy, she realized, directly at Indy. Something to hit him with, she thought. She reached instinctively for her barman’s ax handle and struck the Mongolian across the skull as hard as she could, and he went down. But then there was somebody else in the bar, somebody who’d come crashing through the door like it was made of cardboard, and she raised her face to see somebody she recognized, a Sherpa, one of the locals, a giant of a man who could be bought by anybody for a couple of glasses of booze. He came through, a whirlwind, tackling Indy from behind, crushing him to the floor.

And then Toht was shouting, “Shoot! Shoot both of them!”

The man with the eye patch sprang to life at Toht’s command. He had a pistol in his hand and it was clear he was about to follow Toht to the letter. Just as she panicked, a strange thing happened: in an unlikely conspiracy of survival, Indy and the Sherpa reached for the fallen gun simultaneously, their hands clasping it. Then they turned it against their assailant and the weapon fired, striking Eye Patch, a direct hit in the throat with a force that threw him across the room. He staggered backward until he lay propped against the bar with an expression on his face that suggested a pirate keelhauled during a drunken binge.

Then the struggle was on again, the unnatural joining of forces, the weird truce, brought to an end. The pistol had fallen away from the hands of Indy, and the Sherpa, and they were rolling over and over together as each tried to grab the elusive gun. But now Toht had a clear shot at Indiana. She picked up the submachine gun that had dropped from the Mongolian’s shoulder and tried to understand how it worked—how else could it work, she thought, except by pulling the trigger! She opened fire, but the weapon kicked and jumped wildly. Her shots sizzled past Toht. Then her attention was drawn to the flames spreading from the curtains toward the rest of the bar. Nobody’s going to win this one, she thought. This fire is the only thing likely to come out ahead.

From the corner of her eye she watched Toht crouch at the end of the bar as the flames were bursting all around him, searing the bar. He’s seen it, she thought. He’s seen the medallion. She watched his hand snake toward it, saw the expression of delight on his face, and then suddenly he was screaming as the fire-blackened medallion scorched his palm, burned its shape and design, its ancient words, deep into his flesh. He couldn’t hold it. The pain was too much. He staggered toward the door, clutching his burned hand. And then Marion looked back toward Indy, who was struggling with the Sherpa. The Nepalese was circling them, trying to get a clear shot at Indy. She tapped the submachine gun, but the weapon was useless, spent. The pistol, then. The pistol behind the stuffed raven. Through flame and heat she reached for it, turned, listened to the bottles of booze explode around her like Molotov cocktails, took aim at the Nepalese. One true shot, she thought. One good and true shot.

He wouldn’t keep still, the bastard.

Now smoke was blinding her, choking her.

Indy kicked the Sherpa, rolling away from him, and then the Nepalese had a clear target—Indy’s skull. Now! Do it now!

She squeezed the trigger.

The Nepalese rose in the air, blown upward and back by the force of the shot. And Indy looked at her gratefully through the smoke and flame, smiling.

He grabbed his bullwhip and his hat and yelled, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

“Not without that piece you wanted.”

“It’s here?”

Marion kicked a burning chair aside. From overhead, in a spectacular burst of flame, a wooden beam collapsed, throwing up sparks and cinders.

“Forget it!” Indy shouted. “I want you out of here. Now!”

But Marion darted toward the place where Toht had dropped the medallion. Coughing, trying not to breathe, her eyes smarting and watering from the black smoke, she reached down and picked up the medallion in the loose scarf that hung round her neck. And then she looked for the wooden money-box.

“Unbelievable!” Ashes. Five grand up in smoke.

Indiana Jones grabbed her by the wrist, dragging her through the fire toward the door. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” he screamed.

They made it out into the chill night air just as the place began to crumble, as smoke and fire poured upward into the darkness in a wild display of destruction. Cinders, glowing embers, burning timbers—they danced through the fiery roof toward the moon.

From the other side of the street Indy and Marion stood and watched it.

She noticed he still had his hand around her wrist. That touch. It had been so long, so much time had dwindled away, and even as she remembered the contact, the friction of his skin upon hers, she fought the memory away. She took her arm from his hand and moved slightly away.

She stared at the bonfire again, and said nothing for a time. Timbers crackled with the sound of pigs being scorched over spits. “I figure you owe me,” she said, finally, “I figure you owe me plenty.”

“For starters?”

“For starters, this,” and she held the medallion toward him. “I’m your partner, mister. Because this little gismo is still my property.”

“Partner?” he said.

“Damn right.”

They watched the fire a little longer, neither of them noticing Arnold Toht slinking away through the alleys that ran from the main street—slinking like a rat heading through a maze.

In the car Marion said, “What next?”

Indy was silent for a moment before he answered, “Egypt.”

“Egypt?” Marion looked at him as the car moved through the dark. “You take me to the most exotic places.”

The silhouettes of mountains appeared; a pale moon broke the night sky. Indy watched clouds disperse. He wondered why he felt a sudden apprehension, a feeling that passed when he heard Marion laugh.

“What’s the joke?”

“You,” she said. “You and that bullwhip.”

“Don’t mock it, kid. It saved your life.”