The Book of Lost Fragrances: A Novel of Suspense (42 page)

She slumped. Robbie grabbed her before she hit the ground. Put his arm around her back then tucked the pouch into her pants pocket.

“Now walk away,” she whispered. “Go away from the Dalai Lama.”

Jac took a step toward His Holiness while Robbie went in the other direction. She couldn’t see where he was going. He was behind her now. Jac took another step. Were the guards going to let her talk to the Dalai Lama?

From the right, Jac saw the young Asian man approaching. The guards were watching him. But not suspiciously. They seemed to be expecting him.

Maybe
. . . picking up her pace . . .
maybe
. . .

Jac bumped into Xie Ping. “
Je m’excuse
,” she said as she slipped the pottery into his pocket.

He gaze was deep and penetrating. As if he was seeing far into her and recognized something in her.

“
Pour le Dalai Lama
,
s’il vous plaît?
Please give it to his Holiness. Please?” Jac begged in a low voice.

She didn’t know if he spoke French. English? But he closed his eyes, then quickly opened. As if in response.

Jac was close enough to smell him. His scent was so familiar. As if she’d smelled him before once, in a dream. Now his aroma was mixing with the scents coming from the pottery.

The scented air waved and crashed around her.

Through the shadows, Jac watched as Xie reached the Dalai Lama. Bowed. Whispered something. The Holy Man reached out and pulled Xie to him. Instantly the bodyguards surged forward, surrounded them both, hid the old man and young artist from view.

From behind, strong arms grabbed Jac.

“Give it to me,” Ani said in Jac’s ear as she shoved a gun in her side.

Jac shook her head. “I don’t have it.”

“Give it to me!”

Then someone shoved Jac so violently, it broke Ani’s grip. Jac tumbled to the floor. Then smelled the cordite at the same instant she heard the gun. The odor was bitter and cold as it mixed with the scents still in her memory: Xie’s scent and the scent of the ancient perfume. Then both were overpowered by the aroma of rich, sweet blood.

Fifty-six

Xie bowed his head and whispered his name to the Dalai Lama. He felt the venerable man’s hand under his chin. He lifted up Xie’s face, smiled brightly, and put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. His Holiness turned, whispered something to the guard closest to him. In seconds, the cadre of guards had closed ranks around them.

Suddenly the room exploded. First there was a popping sound. Not too loud. But ugly. Screams. The bodyguards tightened even more. Xie heard someone shouting his name. He peered through a sliver of space in the human shield and saw Lan rushing toward him. At first he thought she was worried. Then he saw the flash of the ceramic knife in her hand, slashing her way through the crowd.

A melee had broken out. Visitors screamed. Museum security guards shouted. Held guns up in the air. Fought to control the hysteria, to hold the crowd away from the Dalai Lama’s guards.

Xie watched as Ru, the student he’d suspected was spying on him, grabbed Lan by the hair and efficiently threw her down in one expertly executed martial arts move.

As the Dhob guards pushed Xie and the Dalai Lama toward the exit, Xie was able to look back once more. The students he’d traveled with were watching—some in shock, others in horror. Only Professor Wu was observing the scene with equanimity, his face impassive except for the single tear slipping down his weathered cheek.

Outside, along with the Dalai Lama, Xie was hustled into a waiting limousine. From the backseat, through the window, he saw the dark-haired woman with the bright green eyes who’d spoken to him. There was a red stain on her white shirt. More red—the color of the ink he used on his stamps in his calligraphy—dotting the scarf around her neck. Her skin was as white as its fabric. Ghostlike, she moved as if in a trance, following a stretcher.

She wasn’t crying, but her face was ravaged with grief.

Xie wanted to get out of the car. Talk to her. See if he could help her. Soothe her. Then he remembered the packet and her desperate plea.

Please give it to His Holiness. Please?

Xie felt strange. Not pain. Not confusion. Not fear. It seemed as if he could see further and more deeply than he’d been able to see since he was a child. When he’d remembered things that hadn’t happened to him as Xie. But before this life. When he was a ninety-year-old monk living by a waterfall in the shadow of a tall mountain. And the man he’d been before that. Remembered a whole dreamscape of beings. Past embodiments.

Reincarnation was part of the fabric of what he had been taught. But there was a difference between learning and doing. Between imagining and knowing.

As the car took off, the Dalai Lama took Xie’s hands in his and told him how glad he was to welcome his spiritual son back.

“How long it has been. How much you have suffered. But you have been brave and done well, and we’re very proud of you.”

Xie was too moved to speak.

“The last time I saw you, you were just six years old.” His Holiness smiled. “A very impetuous six, with the soul of a much more educated man than me.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I think it is.” The holy man’s smile was expansive. “Do you have something for me?”

Xie nodded. Took the packet out of his pocket. “There was a woman at the gallery; she wanted me to give you this.”

The Dalai Lama looked at it. “I’m so pleased both efforts proved a success.”

“What is it?”

“I think you already know. I can see it in your eyes.”

“Something to help you remember?”

“So it is said. You are remembering, aren’t you?”

Xie, who now, for the first time in twenty years, didn’t have to hide what he knew and felt and saw, nodded. “Are you?”

“No,” replied the Dalai Lama. “But that doesn’t worry me very much. One of us is remembering. You are. And you are enough.”

Fifty-seven

SATURDAY, 7:00 P.M.

Jac hadn’t expected so many tubes and bandages. She gripped the door frame. Willed her knees to keep her standing. Forced herself to take in the worst of it.

Behind her, Robbie gasped, “Oh, no!”

The first thing that steadied her was the slight rise and fall of Griffin’s chest under the thin white sheet. The second was her brother’s hand in hers. Together they crossed the threshold and entered the hospital room.

They each took a chair on either side of the bed and began their vigil.

Griffin had taken the bullet Ani’s comrade had intended for Jac. It had gone into the fleshy part of his upper arm. He’d lost some blood, but the doctors had been able to remove the bullet without any trouble. The wound wasn’t life threatening.

His fall had been.

The gunshot’s impact had sent Griffin reeling. He’d cracked his skull against a bronze sculpture. The past six hours had been a nightmare of sketchy information, consultations with doctors, surgery to relieve some of the swelling in his brain, staples to hold his skull together, and, finally, a drug-induced coma.

While Griffin was in the operating room, Inspector Marcher arrived at the hospital. Debriefed Robbie. Took his statement and Jac’s. He told them there’d be a formal inquiry, but Robbie was no longer suspected of murder. His actions had clearly been taken in self-defense. Ani Lodro, also known as Valentine Lee, and her companion, known as William Leclerc, were in custody. Along with the pseudo-journalist found dead six days before, François Lee, they’d been identified as members of the Chinese Mafia. Hired to keep the pottery from getting to the Dalai Lama.

Jac and Robbie sat quietly. The lights in the room were low. Machines blinked red and green. Beeped and hummed. The medicinal odors filled the air. Clean. Crisp. Like the linens on the bed.

“What do we do now?” Jac finally asked her brother.

“We wait.”

“I remember Griffin telling me about seeing the artifacts from King Tutankhamen’s tomb,” Jac said. “How monumental the sarcophagus was. How much gold had been used. How brightly it shone. Griffin said by the time he saw the actual mummy, he’d forgotten that the king was a real man.”

The hydraulic hinge whooshed as the door opened. They both turned. Malachai came in, accompanied by a nurse who told them that only two visitors were allowed at a time. Robbie offered to get some coffee.

Malachai didn’t sit. Not yet. He stood behind Jac and looked down at Griffin.

“How is he?”

“It’s too soon.”

He shifted his gaze to her.

“And how are you?”

She shrugged.

He pulled the chair around so he was sitting next to her instead of on the other side of the bed. “What happened in the museum?”

For the next few minutes, she recounted the events that had occurred during that tense, life-changing half hour. While she spoke, they both watched the still figure on the narrow bed.

Jac tried but couldn’t discern Griffin’s scent over the antiseptic smells. It was the first time since she’d met him fifteen years before that she couldn’t smell it.

After all the fear, anxiety and terror of the past week, not being able to smell him was what broke her. She put her head in her hands. And sobbed.

“How I wish I could do something to help you,” Malachai whispered as he put a tentative hand on her shoulder.

For a moment, they stayed like that. She cried, and he tried to console her.

Finally, she said: “Griffin always said I put too much pressure on him. That I thought he was better than he was. Except in the museum . . .”

“What he did was very brave,” Malachai said.

“But look at him. This is my fault.”

“Your fault? I don’t understand.”

Jac didn’t answer.

“The scent affected you, didn’t it?”

“What scent?”

“Jac,” he reprimanded. “Coyness doesn’t become you. Griffin couldn’t smell anything on the pottery. Your brother could just sense it, but it didn’t do anything to him but give him a headache. You have the more sensitive nose. You could smell it, couldn’t you? It helped you remember other lives? All this time, what you thought were psychotic incidents were past-life memories.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Even now?”

“I have hallucinations that seem to be induced by olfactory triggers.”

“Still so cynical.”

She shrugged.

“One day, you’ll outgrow that.” Malachai smiled.

She picked up her head. Straightened her shoulders. This conversation wasn’t going to help. Not Griffin. Not her. “Let’s not do this, okay?”

“I’ve worked with so many people who’ve had past-life memories. Some perceive them but never fully comprehend them—nevertheless, they learn from them. Grow from them.”

“I know you want to believe that’s what’s been afflicting me, but you’re wrong.”

Robbie came through the door holding a tray. “I waited till the nurse was looking the other way,” he said as he handed each of them a cup. “I saw one of Griffin’s doctors downstairs. He seemed optimistic.”

Did Robbie sound as if he were trying to convince himself?

“That’s wonderful,” Malachai said.

Robbie walked around the bed and leaned against the windowsill. “This wouldn’t have happened if I’d just sold you the pottery,” he said to Malachai.

“No one wishes that more than me. But sometimes things happen for a reason. These events played out this way for a purpose. Have either of you seen the news?”

Jac and Robbie said they hadn’t.

Malachai pulled out his cell phone, tapped a web address into it and then handed the device to Jac. She was looking down at the front page of the
Herald Tribune
international edition.

“There are stories like this on every major news TV station and website. The young man who went off with the Dalai Lama isn’t just a Chinese art student named Xie Ping. He’s a Tibetan Panchen Lama who was kidnapped when he was six years old, taken to China and completely brainwashed. It’s quite a harrowing story. For the past twenty years, his family and the Buddhist community thought he was dead.”

Jac clicked on the photograph of the artist standing next to the Dalai Lama and made it full screen. His Holiness was beaming. Xie looked like a lost soul who had finally found safe harbor. She handed her brother the phone.

“The Panchen Lama and his story will bring a fresh wave of sympathy to the Tibetan cause,” Malachai said.

Robbie nodded. Something in him, Jac thought, was finally at peace.

“There’s a mention in the article about you,” Malachai said to Jac. He held out his hand for the phone, and she gave it back to him. He scrolled through the story, and when he found the part he was looking for, he read aloud.

“‘Miss L’Etoile and her brother exhibited amazing bravery in getting a package to us,’ the Dalai Lama said in an interview after the incident. ‘In it are thirty-three shards of Egyptian pottery inscribed with hieroglyphics. A translation by Griffin North was enclosed. It explains the jar once held an ancient perfume that induced past-life memories. It’s a precious gift. We hope with all our hearts that the far more precious gift of someone’s life was not lost in the effort to get this treasure to us.’”

Fifty-eight

SUNDAY, MAY 29

Jac, Malachai and Robbie had held vigil at the hospital all evening, but at midnight she insisted they both leave her and go home. Robbie hadn’t slept more than an hour or two at a time in the week he’d been in hiding, and he was falling asleep in the chair. Malachai’s driver was going to drop off Robbie. Then the reincarnationist was going back to his hotel. He was leaving in the morning.

“If you need me, please, call,” he’d said to Jac as he pulled her toward him in an embrace. In all the years she’d known him, he’d kept his distance, at most touching her on the shoulder. “Anything at all,” he said as he let her go.