The Adventures Of Indiana Jones (7 page)

He opened his eyes and heard Musgrove sigh and say, “You’ve been very helpful. I hope we can call on you again if we need to.”

“Anytime, gentlemen. Anytime you like,” Indy said.

There was a round of handshakes, then Brody escorted the officers to the door. Alone in the empty hall, Indy closed the book. He thought for a moment, trying at the same time to suppress the sense of excitement he felt.
The Nazis have found Tanis
—and these words went around and around in his brain.

The girl, Susan, said, “I really hope I didn’t embarrass you when you were with Brody. I mean, I was so . . . obvious.”

“You weren’t obvious,” Indy said.

They were sitting together in the cluttered living room of Indy’s small frame house. The room was filled with souvenirs of trips, of digs, restored clay vessels and tiny statues and fragments of pottery and maps and globes—as cluttered, he sometimes thought, as my life.

The girl drew her knees up, hugging them, laying her face down against them. Like a cat, he thought. A tiny contented cat.

“I love this room,” she said. “I love the whole house . . . but this room especially.”

Indy got up from the sofa and, hands in his pockets, walked around the room. The girl, for some reason, was more of an intrusion than she should have been. Sometimes when she spoke he tuned her out. He heard only the noise of her voice and not the meaning of her words. He poured himself a drink, sipped it, swallowed; it burned in his chest—a good burning, like a small sun glowing down there.

Susan said, “You seem so distant tonight, Indy.”

“Distant?”

“You’ve got something on your mind. I don’t know.” She shrugged.

He walked to the radio, turned it on, barely listening to the drone of someone making a pitch for Maxwell House. The girl changed the station and then there was dance-band music. Distant, he thought. Farther than you could dream. Miles away. Oceans and continents and centuries. He was suddenly thinking about Ravenwood, about the last conversation they’d had, the old man’s terrible storm, his wrath. When he listened to the echoes of those voices, he felt sad, disappointed in himself; he’d taken some fragile trust and shattered it.

Marion’s infatuated with you, and you took advantage of that.

You’re twenty-eight, presumably a grown man, and you’ve taken advantage of a young girl’s brainless infatuation and twisted it to suit your own purpose just because she thinks she’s in love with you.

Susan said, “If you want me to leave, Indy, I will. If you want to be alone, I’ll understand.”

“It’s okay. Really. Stay.”

There was a knock on the door; the porch creaked.

Indy moved out of the living room along the hallway and saw Marcus Brody outside. He was smiling a secretive smile, as if he had news he wanted to linger over, savor for as long as he could.

“Marcus,” Indy said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I think you were,” Brody said, pushing the screen door.

“We’ll go in the study,” Indy said.

“What’s wrong with the living room?”

“Company.”

“Ah. What else?”

They entered the study.

“You did it, didn’t you?” Indy said.

Brody smiled. “They want you to get the Ark before the Nazis.”

It was a moment before Indy could say anything. He felt a sense of exaltation, an awareness of triumph.
The Ark.
He said, “I think I’ve been waiting all my life to hear something like that.”

Brody looked at the shot glass in Indy’s hand for a moment. “They talked with their people in Washington. Then they consulted me. They want you, Indiana. They want
you.”

Indy sat down behind his desk, gazed into his glass, then looked around the room. A strange emotion filled him suddenly; this was more than books and articles and maps, more than speculation, scholarly argument, discussion, debate—a sense of reality had replaced all the words and pictures.

Brody said, “Of course, given the military mind, they don’t exactly buy all that business about the power of the Ark and so forth. They don’t want to embrace any such mythologies. After all, they’re soldiers, and soldiers like to think they’re hard-line realists. They want the Ark—and I’ll quote, if I can—because of its ‘historic and cultural significance’ and because ‘such a priceless object should not become the property of a fascist regime.’ Or words to that effect.”

“Their reasons don’t matter,” Indy said.

“In addition, they’ll pay handsomely—”

“I don’t care about the money, either, Marcus.” Indy raised a hand, indicated the room in a sweep. “The Ark represents the elusive thing I feel about archaeology—you know, history concealing its secrets. Things lying out there waiting to be discovered. I don’t give
that
for their reasons or their money.” And he snapped his fingers.

Brody nodded his head in understanding. “The museum, of course, will get the Ark.”

“Of course.”

“If it exists . . .” Brody paused a moment, then added, “We shouldn’t build our hopes up too high.”

Indy stood up. “I have to find Abner first. That would be the logical step. If Abner has the headpiece, then I have to get it before the opposition does. That makes sense, right? Without the headpiece,
voilà,
no Ark. So where do I find Abner?” He stopped, realizing how quickly he’d been talking. “I think I know where to start looking—”

Brody said, “It’s been a long time, Indiana. Things change.”

Indy stared at the other man for a second. The comment was enigmatic to him:
Things change.
And then he realized Marcus Brody was talking about Marion.

“He might have mellowed toward you,” Brody said. “On the other hand, he might still carry a grudge. In that case, it’s reasonable to assume he wouldn’t want to give you the headpiece. If in fact he has it.”

“We’ll hope for the best, my friend.”

“Always the optimist, right?”

“Not always,” Indy said. “Optimism can be deadly.”

Brody was silent now, moving around the room, flicking the pages of books. Then he looked at Indy in a somber way. “I want you to be careful, Indiana.”

“I’m always careful.”

“You can be pretty reckless. I know that as well as you. But the Ark isn’t like anything you’ve gone after before. It’s bigger. More dangerous.” Brody slammed a book shut, as if to emphasize a point. “I’m not skeptical, like those military people—I think the Ark has secrets. I think it has dangerous secrets.”

For a second Indy was about to say something flippant, something about the melodramatic tone in the other man’s voice. But he saw from the expression on Brody’s face that the man was serious.

“I don’t want to lose you, Indiana, no matter how great the prize is. You understand?”

The two men shook hands.

Indy noticed that Brody’s skin was damp with sweat.

Alone, Indy sat up late into the night, unable to sleep, unable to let his mind rest. He wandered from one room of the small house to another, clenching and unclenching his hands. After all these years, he thought, all this passage of time—would Ravenwood help him? Would Ravenwood, given that he had the headpiece, come to his assistance? And behind these questions there lingered still another one. Would Marion still be with her father?

He continued to go from room to room until finally he settled in his study and put his feet up on the desk, looking at the various objects stuffed in the room. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, tried to think clearly, and rose. From a bookshelf he removed a copy of Ravenwood’s old journal, a gift from the old man when the two were still friends. Indy skimmed the pages, noticing one disappointment listed after another, one excavation that hadn’t lived up to its promises, another that had revealed only the most slender, the most tantalizing, of clues to the where abouts of the Ark. The outlines of an obsession in these pages; the heartbreaking search for a lost object of history. But the Ark could flow in your blood and fill the air you breathed. And he understood the old man’s single-mindedness, his devotion, the kind of lust that had led him from one country to an other, to one hope after another. The pages yielded up that much—but there was no mention of the head piece anywhere. Nothing.

The last item in the journal mentioned the country of Nepal, the prospect of another dig. Nepal, Indy thought: the Himalayas, the roughest terrain on earth. And a long way from whatever the Germans were doing in Egypt. Maybe Ravenwood had stumbled onto something else back then, a fresh clue to the Ark. Maybe all the old stuff about Tanis was incorrect. Just maybe.

Nepal. It was a place in which to start

It was a beginning.

He fingered the journal a moment longer, then he set it down, wishing he knew how Abner Ravenwood would react to him.

And how Marion would respond.

D
IETRICH WAS UNEASY
in the company of René Belloq. It wasn’t so much the lack of trust he felt in the Frenchman, the feeling he had that Belloq treated almost everything with equal cynicism; it was, rather, the strange charisma of Belloq that worried Dietrich, the idea that somehow you
wanted
to like him, that he was drawing you in despite yourself.

They were seated together in an anteroom at Berchtesgaden, the Führer’s mountain retreat, a place Dietrich had never visited before and which filled him with some awe. But he noticed that Belloq, lounging casually, his long legs outstretched, gave no sign of any similar feeling. Quite the opposite—Belloq might have been sitting sprawled in a cheap French café , in fact in the kind of place where Dietrich had found him in Marseilles. No respect, Dietrich thought. No sense of the importance of things. He was irritated by the archaeologist’s attitude.

He listened to a clock tick, the delicate sounds of chimes. Belloq sighed, shifted his legs around and looked at his wristwatch.

“What are we waiting for, Dietrich?” he asked.

Dietrich couldn’t help talking in a low voice. “The Führer will see us when he’s ready, Belloq. You must think he has nothing better to do than spend his time speaking to you about some museum piece.”

“A museum piece.” Belloq spoke with obvious contempt, staring across the room at the German. How little they know, he thought. How little they understand of history. They put their faith in all the wrong things: they build their monumental arches and parade their strutting armies—failing to realize you cannot deliberately create the awe of history. It is something that already exists, something you cannot aspire to fabricate with the trappings of grandeur. The Ark: the very thought or the possibility of discovering the Ark made him impatient. Why did he have to speak with this miserable little German house painter, anyhow? Why was he obliged to sit through a meeting with the man when the dig had already begun in Egypt? What, after all, could he learn from Hitler? Nothing, he thought. Absolutely nothing. Some pompous lecture, perhaps. A diatribe of some kind. Something about the greatness of the Reich. About how, if the Ark existed, it belonged in Germany.

What did any of them know? he wondered.

The Ark didn’t belong anywhere. If it had secrets, if it contained the kind of power it was said to, then he wanted to be the first to discover it—it wasn’t something to be lightly entrusted to the maniac who sat, even now, in some other room of this mountain lodge and kept him waiting.

He sighed impatiently, shifting in his chair.

And then he got up, walked to the window and looked out across the mountains, not really seeing them, noticing them only in an absent way. He was thinking of the moment of opening the box, looking inside and seeing the relics of the stone tablets Moses had brought down from Mount Horeb. It was easy to imagine his hand raising the lid, the sound of his own voice—then the moment of revelation.

The moment of a lifetime: there was no prize greater than the Ark of the Covenant.

When he turned from the window, Dietrich was watching him. The German noticed the odd look in Belloq’s eyes, the faint smile on the mouth that seemed to be directed inward, as if he were enjoying an immensely private joke, some deep and amusing thought. He realized then how far his own lack of trust went—but this was the Führer’s affair, it was the Führer who had asked for the best, the Führer who had asked for René Belloq.

Dietrich heard the clock chime the quarter hour. From a corridor somewhere inside the building, he heard the sound of footsteps. Belloq turned expectantly toward the door. But the footsteps faded and Belloq cursed quietly in French.

“How much longer are we supposed to wait?” the Frenchman asked.

Dietrich shrugged.

“Don’t tell me,” Belloq said. “The Führer lives his life by a clock to which we ordinary men have no access, correct? Perhaps he has visions of his own private time, no? Perhaps he thinks he has some profound knowledge of the nature of time?” Belloq made a gesture of despair with one hand, then he smiled.

Dietrich moved uncomfortably, beset by the notion that the room was wired, that Hitler was listening to this insane talk. He said, “Does nothing awe you, Belloq?”

“I might answer you, Dietrich, except I doubt you would understand what I was talking about.”

They were silent now. Belloq returned to the window. Every moment stuck here is a moment less to spend in Egypt, he thought. And he realized that time was important, that news of the dig would spread, that it couldn’t be kept secret forever. He only hoped that German security was good.

He looked at the German again and said, “You haven’t fully explained to me, as a matter of interest, how the headpiece is to be obtained. I need to know.”

“It is being taken care of,” Dietrich said. “People have been sent—”

“What kind of people, Dietrich? Is there an archaeologist among them?”

“Why, no—”

“Thugs, Dietrich? Some of your bullies?”

“Professionals.”

“Ah, but not professional archaeologists. How are they to know if they discover the headpiece? How are they supposed to know it isn’t a forgery?”

Dietrich smiled. “The secret lies in knowing
where
to look, Belloq. It doesn’t entirely depend on knowing
what
you’re looking for.”