The Adventures Of Indiana Jones (52 page)

He bent down and picked up a photo album that had been cast aside. Several pictures fell out, and he plucked them from the ruin and stared at the top photograph. A young boy stood with an unsmiling older man whose beard had not yet turned completely gray. Both the man and the boy were stiff, obviously uncomfortable, and they both looked as though they wanted to be anywhere other than where they were. And that, he thought, had always been the point with him and his father, even as far back as when this picture had been taken. They had never felt comfortable around each other, and now, as all the old feelings flooded back, something hitched in Indy’s chest.

The picture had been taken the year after his mother’s death. His father had been sullen that year, and Indy knew he thought a lot about the woman who had formed a bridge between father and son. When she died, the bridge vanished. His father had never talked to Indy about her. If he mentioned his mother or anything related to her, his father would cast a frigid glance at him and change the subject or give him a chore to do.

Then there was the intimidation. He remembered the constant reminders that he would never measure up to the old man. He didn’t have the discipline, the determination, the intellect. Sure, he had a sense of curiosity, his father had conceded. But what good did it do him? All he did was get into trouble.

As Indy grew older, all the anger and resentment he felt only grew worse. One day, he told his father that he would show him. He would be an archaeologist, too, and a good one. His determination to be as knowledgeable as his father seemed to have grown in direct proportion to his old man’s stubbornness and insistence that he would never amount to anything.

The sound of Brody’s footfalls on the stairs snapped him back to the present. His misgivings about his father were quickly replaced by a huge and terrible guilt for the times he had wished he would never have to see him again. And for the times he had wished him dead. In spite of his father’s toughness and unwillingness to grant him an inch, the texture of everything was different now that he was missing. Right this second there was no one in the world whom Indy wanted to see more desperately.

“He isn’t anywhere in the house,” Brody said.

“I didn’t think he would be.”

Brody’s face skewed with concern and worry. “What’s that old fool gotten himself into, anyway?”

“I don’t know. But whatever it is, he’s in over his head.”

“I just can’t imagine Henry getting involved with people he couldn’t trust. Look, they’ve even gone through his mail.”

Indy stared at the clutter of torn papers and envelopes and suddenly realized he had forgotten about his own mail.

“The mail. That’s it, Marcus!”

He immediately rifled through his pockets and pulled out the overstuffed envelope he had been carrying around since he left his office. He looked at the foreign postmark again and shook his head.

“Venice, Italy. How could I be so stupid?”

Brody looked baffled. “What are you talking about, Indy?”

He tore open the envelope and pulled out a small notebook. He quickly flipped through several pages. It looked like a journal or diary. Page after page was covered with handwritten notes and drawings.

Brody glanced over Indy’s shoulder at it. “Is it from Henry?”

“That’s right. It’s Dad’s Grail diary.”

“But why did he send it to you?”

“I don’t know.” He looked around at the room again and back to the diary. “I’ve got the feeling this is what they were after. It looks like somebody wanted it pretty badly, too.”

He lightly stroked the leather cover of the diary. He trusted me. He finally did something to show that he trusted and believed in me.

“Can I see it?” Brody asked.

“Of course. It’s all in there. A lifetime’s worth of research and knowledge.”

As Brody paged through the diary, the lines on his face deepened by the second. “The search was his passion, Indy.”

“I know. But do you believe in that fairy tale, Marcus? Do you believe the Grail actually exists?”

Brody stopped turning pages as he came to a picture pasted into the diary. It was a depiction of Christ on the cross, his blood being captured in a golden chalice by Joseph of Arimathaea.

He glanced up and spoke with conviction. “The search for the cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all of us.”

Indy nodded and tried to disguise his skepticism. But his indulgent smile wasn’t lost on Brody.

“I know. You want facts. But I don’t have any for you, Indy. At my age, I’m willing to accept a few things on faith. I can feel it more than I can prove it.”

Indy didn’t say anything. His gaze flicked to a painting on the wall. It portrayed eleventh-century crusaders plummeting to their deaths over a high cliff. One crusader, however, floated safely in midair because he was holding the Grail in his hands.

He remembered how his father had forced him to read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s
Parzival
—the Grail story. He was only thirteen and couldn’t think of a drearier way of spending his summer afternoons. At least not until the next year, when Dad made him read it again, this time in the early German version. That was followed by Richard Wagner’s opera,
Parsifal,
based on Eschenbach’s work.

Each day his father would ask him about the story, to make sure that he was understanding it. If he didn’t know the answer to one of the questions, he was required to go back and reread the related section. As an incentive his father promised him that he would be rewarded when he had satisfactorily completed Wagner’s work.

He had thought about what kind of reward his father might give him and hoped it would be a trip to Egypt to see the pyramids, or maybe to Athens to see the Parthenon, or Mexico to the Yucatan to see the Mayan ruins. At the very least he figured he deserved a trip to the museum in the state capitol to see the mummies.

As it turned out, his reward was the Arthurian Grail legends. First came
Le Morte d
’
Arthur
by Sir Thomas Malory, and he had to read it in French first, then English. After that was Lord Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King.
Some reward, he glumly thought. In spite of his hatred of the difficult books and his silent anger about his reward, he had never forgotten the adventures of the knights Parzival, Gawain, and Feirifs—the heroes of
Parzival—or
Arthur, Lancelot, and Merlin from the Arthurian legends. In fact, now that he thought of it, those books probably had considerable bearing on how he lived his life.

When Indy didn’t speak, Brody cleared his throat, and continued: “If your father believes the Grail is real, so do I.”

Indy wasn’t sure what to believe, except that he needed to act, to do something, to begin searching. “Call Donovan, Marcus. Tell him I’ll take that ticket to Venice now. I’m going to find Dad.”

“Good. I’ll tell him we want two tickets. I’m going with you.”

They motored to the airport in style, seated in the rear of an opulent limousine, accompanied by its owner, Walter Donovan. Indy had taken an emergency leave of absence from the university. At first, when he had made the request, the dean had stared at him askance. How could he even think about petitioning for a leave when he’d just missed the first week of the semester? Then Indy had informed him of the details, and the dean’s attitude immediately changed at the mention of his father’s name.

He had nodded solemnly, glanced out the window, and told Indy a story about his father. Indy had heard it before, but this time the story had a different twist at the end. It dealt with an incident in which a particularly arrogant colleague of Dr. Jones held an exhibition of his latest archaeological finds. Because of his prominence and his power in academic circles, the reception was attended by scholars and archaeologists from several eastern universities. They had attended not because they admired the man but because they feared him.

When the moment came to unveil the most significant find of the collection, Dr. Jones had stridden to the front of the room, ripped the covering from a piece of pottery that supposedly predated anything ever discovered in the New World. He then smashed it on the podium and declared it fraudulent. He had been quickly ushered away by guards, but the evidence left behind proved him right, and the professor’s reign of terror ended.

The dean had turned from the window and looked Indy in the eye. “That professor had been my adviser and had been on the verge of having me expelled because I’d disagreed with him on the dating of an artifact. What your father did inadvertently saved my career. Yes, by all means, go and find Dr. Jones. The world needs men like him.”

Indy spent the trip to the airport quietly mulling over what he knew about his father’s disappearance. The problem was that there were still too few facts. What he suspected was that the man’s passionate interest in the Grail Cup could very well have led him to undertake an uncharacteristic expedition. Considering his age, he had probably felt this would be his one and only opportunity to find the Grail and to complete his life’s quest.

Damn that old man and his obsession.

If only they had been on better terms, this never would have happened. He blamed himself. He always had a bad attitude about anything that dealt with his father. But now, somehow, he was going to make up for his past shortcomings and rectify things.

As the limo pulled over to the curb outside the airport entrance, Donovan shook Brody’s hand. “Well, Marcus. Good luck.”

Like luck’s got anything to do with it, Indy thought.

“Thank you, Walter.” Brody nodded nervously. “Now, when we arrive in Venice . . .”

“Don’t worry,” Donovan assured him. “Dr. Schneider will be there to meet you. I maintain an apartment in Venice. It’s at your disposal.”

“I appreciate that, Walter.”

Brody climbed out of the car, and Indy was about to follow, when Donovan touched his shoulder. “Be careful, Dr. Jones. Don’t trust
anybody.
You understand?”

Indy met his gaze. “I’m going to do whatever is necessary in order to find my father.”

The plane soared through bright sunlight, past clouds that clung to the sky like tiny white commas. The Atlantic stretched below them, an endless stretch of blue, a desert of blue, brilliant and blinding. But Indy saw none of it. For most of the trip he was preoccupied with his father’s Grail diary.

He went through it, carefully reading each entry, each page, seeking clues. “ ‘The word
Grail
is derived from
graduale,
which means step-by-step, degree by degree,’ ” he read on a page near the beginning. “ ‘There are six degrees or levels of awareness in the Grail quest, and each one is represented by an animal.’ ”

The raven was the symbol of the first degree and represented the messenger of the Grail and “the finger of fate” that initiated the quest.

The peacock signified the second degree and symbolized the search for immortality. It also suggested the colorful and imaginative nature of the quest.

The sign for the third degree was the swan, because the one who took up the Grail quest sang a swan song to selfish and indulgent ways. In order to succeed in the quest, one must overcome weaknesses of the mind and heart and move beyond petty likes and dislikes.

The fourth degree was signified by the pelican, a bird willing to nurture its young by wounding its own breast. It symbolized the quality of self-sacrifice and the willingness to endanger self for the sake of saving one’s own people.

The lion was the sign of the fifth degree. It stood for leadership, conquest, and the attainment of high goals.

The sixth and highest level, represented by the eagle, was achieved at the end of the quest. At that time the seeker of the Grail would have gained the power and knowledge necessary to understand fully the significance of the search.

Indy looked up from the book and shifted his position in the tight quarters of his seat. It was typical of his father to couch things in symbols and metaphors. As a scholar, he worked in the abstract. He suspected that the Grail diary was almost as mystifying as the Grail Cup itself.

The mention of the animals reminded him of something he hadn’t thought about for a while. When he was eighteen, he had returned to the Southwest and undertaken a vision quest under the guidance of an old Navajo Indian. He had climbed a mesa in New Mexico alone and without food. There he had built a shelter and waited.

The Indian had told him that he must wait until an animal approached him, and from that time on it would be his protector, his spiritual guardian. Two days passed, and his stomach was empty, his throat dry. He wanted more than anything to climb down and find water. He stood up and walked to the edge of the mesa and stared down. Whatever had possessed him to do something so crazy?

He was about to start his descent when he thought he heard the voice of the old Indian telling him to wait. Startled, he turned around. No one was there. His hunger and thirst were causing him to hear voices, he thought. But instead of climbing down the mesa, he headed back to his shelter.

He had taken no more than a dozen steps when suddenly an eagle swooped out of the sky, skimming low over the flat, rocky surface. The majestic creature landed on the wall of his shelter. He had found his protector. When he had told his story, the old Navajo nodded and said that the eagle would always guide him on his journeys.

Indy snapped out of his reverie as the steward tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he’d like a drink. He nodded, and as he adjusted himself in the seat, a folded piece of paper fell from the diary into the aisle. The steward picked it up and handed it to him along with a drink. He set the glass down on the tray in front of him and unfolded the paper.

It was a rubbing that he immediately recognized as an impression of Donovan’s Grail tablet. The top part of it was blank, as if space had been left for the missing section of the tablet.

“Look at this, Marcus.”

He held it out to Brody, then realized his traveling partner was fast asleep.

He refolded the paper and was about to slip it into the diary when he noticed the drawing on the page that had fallen open.