The Assassin Lotus

by David Angsten

  “How do you know for sure that I’m the one?”

  For a moment, I fell silent. Wondering what she meant. Then the emotion I saw in her eyes seemed to find its way into mine. The fear. The desire. The naked longing for love. To fall in love, to be in love, to stay in love forever.

  “You have to trust the feeling,” I said. “You have to take a chance.”

  Her gaze fell to my chest. “You mean...have sex.”

  “No. I mean yes. I mean... I want more than that. I want...” I didn’t know how to say it without sounding like a fool. I looked her in the eye. “I want to do what neither of us has ever done before. I want us to make love.”

  The word brought a sigh, as if she truly wanted to believe me.

  The train rumbled on, the night swimming past, air breezing in from all of Asia. “I’ve been dreaming about this night,” I said, “ever since we met.”

  Her eyelids closed a moment. Soft, feathery lashes. When she opened them again, it seemed she’d made up her mind. “I’ve been dreaming about it all my life.”

  I felt a sudden pang for her, an ache deep inside. “Phoebe...”

  She reached out slowly and touched my stubbly cheek. As if to feel if it was real, that I was no reflection, that this was not a dream. I gently laid my hand on hers and brought it to my beating heart. To let her feel it throbbing.

  Her other hand released the nightshirt she’d been tightly clutching. The shirt fell to her feet. Taking my free hand in hers, she laid my palm against her breast. A sharp breath escaped her.

  I caressed her gently. Phoebe started trembling.

  The scent of soap on soft white shoulders. Tousled, blue-black hair. Sun-bleached down on sun-dark forearms. Pink, unpolished nails.

  I gathered her beauty into my arms. The night air whirled around us. She raised her yearning face to mine and whispered, “I’m yours.”

  67.

  Conqueror of the World

  SOME HOURS LATER, in the middle of the night, the train hissed to a stop in the Samarkand station. Awakened from a blissful sleep, Phoebe and I reluctantly disentangled our limbs and dragged ourselves out of bed. We dressed and exited to the platform where we searched among the disembarking passengers for Anand. When we failed to find him there, we searched back through the train, then through the entire station, and finally, out into the street.

  He was nowhere to be seen. The Delhi snake charmer, after luring us into our lovemaking, had inexplicably vanished.

  SAMARKAND LOOKED BETTER IN THE DAYLIGHT. The night before, the dark streets and alleys had looked sordid and confining; we withdrew to sleep in the station until morning. Now, as our bus edged down a tree-lined boulevard toward the city’s center, turquoise domes blossomed from the red-tiled, green-leaved skyline, and a haze of snowless mountain peaks tinged the air beyond.

  We were on our way to the Gur-e Amir, Samarkand’s “Tomb of the King.”

  I was eager at the prospect. Despite the fact we had no idea how it might lead us to Dan, the tomb had been the subject of the stolen manuscript, and Woolsey had been convinced we had to travel there. A thin thread, perhaps, but it offered us some hope, and with Phoebe finally at my side, I needed little else.

  I took her hand in mine. “I know I probably shouldn’t be, but I have to say, for the first time in a very long time...I’m happy.”

  She squeezed my hand. “I’m happy, too.” But her smile seemed less certain. She turned to gaze pensively at the passing line of trees. “If we do find Dan...what will we tell him?”

  I wondered if Dan still loved her. It was clear that Phoebe still cared for him. “We’ll have to tell him the truth,” I said.

  Phoebe seemed reluctant. “It would be a shame to finally find him, only to lose him again.”

  I put my arm around her, and she leaned back snug against me. “We’ll take it one step at a time,” I said. “Right now, we just need to find him.”

  Morning sunbeams flared through the trees, searing our bleary eyes. We averted our gaze to the street life, observing local habits and attire. The citizens of Samarkand seemed more secular than Bukhara’s. Along with the usual peddlers in prayer caps and tweed were cell-phone chatting commuters in tieless business suits, book-lugging university students in jeans and miniskirts, construction workers in hardhats cueing up for cups of latte, and loitering clusters of unemployed youths playing hip-hop, texting, and hawking Blu-rays.

  Perhaps it was a legacy of the cosmopolitan Tamerlane. Phoebe said the continent-conquering psychopath was celebrated as a national hero in Uzbekistan. When freed of Soviet rule, Uzbeks had enlisted him as a patriotic icon to rally their struggling young nationhood. On her weekend visit here the previous summer, Phoebe had watched newlyweds pose for wedding pictures at the ogre-king’s monumental statue in the park. As we exited the bus and headed toward the mausoleum, I asked her to tell me what she knew about him.

  “He’s known here as Timur,” she said. “He was born the son of a petty Mongol chief in some small town south of the city. In his youth he was little more than a bandit and mercenary. Early on he was wounded in battle, and walked for the rest of his life with a limp, giving rise to the nickname “Timur the Lame.” In the West it became Tamburlaine, or Tamerlane.”

  “Tamburlaine the Great,” I said. “I remember now—my Shakespeare class at Grinnell. It was a play written by the Bard’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. First big hit of the London stage—audiences found it shocking.”

  “For good reason,” Phoebe said. “Timur was the worst of the worst.”

  The steppes of Central Asia, she explained, had long been a womb of terror—2000 years of pillaging and slaughter borne on the back of the horse. First came the marauding Scythians, fierce descendants of the Aryans. Then came Attila and his Huns, then the Mongols led by Genghis Khan. Finally, the Turkic-Mongol Timur emerged, Central Asia’s last and most terrifying conqueror.

  The “Earth Shaker” marched his massive armies into Persia, the Caucasus, Russia, India, the Middle East, and the Ottoman empire. Renowned for his bravery, the indomitable Timur—unlike Genghis Khan—led his military campaigns in person. His ruthlessness and brutality were calculated to terrorize. Resistance meant annihilation. In a rebellious city south of Herat, Afghanistan, two thousand captives were piled upon each other and cemented alive into a tower. A tax revolt in the Persian city of Isfahan led to the massacre of 70,000 citizens, piling 28 towers, each with 1500 heads. In the ruins of Baghdad, his men stacked 120 towers out of 90,000 skulls. His invasion of India left five million dead.

  Listening to Tamerlane’s catalog of horrors, I thought of the grinning Buddha and his frail little flower. Fearlessness, courage? The idea seemed absurd. Who could dwell in the miracle of “suchness” while facing an army like Timur’s? If “truth alone triumphs,” I thought, then truth clearly stood with the butchers.

  “The ultimate head-lopper,” I said. “Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’d stop to smell the lotuses.”

  “Yes, he was a monster,” she said. “But he was a brilliant monster. Uneducated but highly intelligent, with a ravenous curiosity and a passion for learning. He had a strong interest in history and in the practical disciplines—mathematics, astronomy, medicine—particularly as applied to war. If Tamerlane heard of a plant that might infuse his soldiers with courage, believe me, he would have been interested.”

  “Wouldn’t it go against the tenets of Islam?” I asked.

  “His approach to religion was entirely pragmatic. He fought in the name of Islam and used it to extend his power, but he also invoked shamanism, omens, astrology and ritual to serve his military ambitions. The religious rites of the Hashishin would have been fantastically intriguing.”

  We left the street and headed through a park toward the aquamarine dome we had spotted from across the city. It looked unlike any other—ribbed and swollen like a cantaloupe and crowned with a golden stem. The dome was flanked on either side by two slender minarets, and before it lay
a courtyard walled off by a monumental entrance portal.

  We passed through the portal under a blaze of blue and golden tiles. In the courtyard garden, a pair of toothless crones wearing dresses over pajama pants, and babushkas on their heads, were hacking overgrown hedges with short-bladed scythes. One of them muttered something to Phoebe.

  It was too early, Phoebe told me as we approached the mausoleum. The building wouldn’t open for at least another hour. Which explained the fact that no tourists had arrived, and why, in the nearby parking lot, there was only a single car.

  I gazed up at the dome. It was set atop a high drum of blue, green, and golden tiles blazed with an inscription in huge Arabic letters.

  “‘God is Immortal,’” Phoebe translated.

  “Thank God Tamerlane wasn’t,” I said. “Since when do you read Arabic?”

  “I don’t,” she said, still scanning the façade. “That’s what I was told the last time I was here. But I have to say I didn’t notice that.” She nodded toward a pattern of flower tendrils and a lotus motif woven into the intricate mosaics.

  “You often don’t see a thing until you’re looking for it,” I said.

  “Then you wonder how you ever could have missed it.”

  We walked under the entrance arch and tried the wooden door. As expected, it was locked.

  I pounded it in frustration. The door remained resolutely shut.

  “We can wait in the garden,” Phoebe suggested.

  I stood with her and stared across the courtyard at the crones, heading off with stuffed sacks of clippings. “We don’t even know why we’re here,” I said.

  “Wild goose chase,” Phoebe said.

  “Wild camel chase, you mean.” I pulled it from my pocket.

  “I can’t look at that now,” she said, “without imagining a bale of hay burning on its back.”

  “Camels on fire, hell of a distraction.” I pondered the jade piece. “Maybe Anand’s Delhi story was nothing more than that—a distraction, along with the dinner and that wine. I’d sure love to know what he’s up to.”

  “Research and analysis,” Phoebe said. “I just hope nothing bad has happened to him.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if—”

  The door creaked open behind us. A figure boded forth from the darkness.

  68.

  Moonbeam

  NO, NOT ANAND, IT TURNED OUT, but a thin, bearded man in an ill-fitting jacket and tattered skullcap, holding a wicker broom like a staff.

  “You’re open!” I exclaimed.

  “I am only the caretaker,” he said. “I am working in the cellar and hear banging. Gur-e Amir opens in one—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know we’re a little early, but it’s very import—”

  The man started closing the door, waving us way. Phoebe pleaded with him but the door kept moving.

  I held it open.

  “Last night a friend of ours was killed,” I said. “He gave us something we think might be related to the tomb. We have to find out why—what he was trying to tell us. Please, I beg you.”

  His scowl appeared to slacken. The man looked carefully at Phoebe, then carefully studied me. We certainly didn’t look like grave robbers. After glancing around the grounds to be sure we were alone, he stepped aside and waved us in.

  “You’re very kind,” I said.

  We followed him down a cool, dim passageway with a vaulted ceiling, our eyes slowly adjusting from the bright sunlight. At the end of it we emerged into the cavernous central chamber, far larger and more impressive than I’d imagined from outside.

  “Wow…”

  We had entered the heart of a jewel. Every surface glimmered. High above, sunbeams shone through latticed windows across the gilded dome, effusing a soft, luxurious shimmer on all that lay below. The four vast walls, each inset with elaborate bays, were lined with an astonishing array of tiles and patterns, from hexagonal onyx in the lower sections, to circling streams of Koranic inscriptions in flowing gold and jasper, to mosaics laced with golden flowers and iridescent stars.

  I immediately began searching for lotuses or camels, craning my neck and whirling, but no telltale image declared itself in the interlacing matrix, and the sheer dazzling complexity of it all put my head in a spin. It was as if the entire cosmos had been condensed into a puzzle. The futile attempt to decipher it left me visually overwhelmed.

  I steadied myself against a balustrade. The marble railing fenced off the central part of the chamber, directly beneath the dome, where the graves of the mighty were gathered. There were six rectangular blocks of pale marble and alabaster, and in the middle of them, where Phoebe was pointing, a six-foot carved monolith of near-black jade, set atop a marble plinth.

  “That’s Tamerlane’s,” she said. “He lies at the foot of his spiritual advisor, a Sufi imam. The others are Tamerlane’s sons and grandsons.”

  The imam’s grave was larger, and others were more ornate, yet Tamerlane’s simple stone stood out, dark amid their pallor. It appeared to be the same black jade as the chess piece. I moved to get a better view of it.

  The caretaker watched with casual interest, hands folded atop his broomstick. “Is carved from a single stone,” he said. “The largest block of jade in the world.”

  “It was placed here by his grandson,” Phoebe added. “The astronomer sultan Ulug Beg. He lies buried at Tamerlane’s feet.”

  His was a small block of flesh-colored marble, devoid of any inscription. In contrast, the entire perimeter of Tamerlane’s block seethed with a slashing Arabic. I asked the caretaker if he knew what it said.

  “Is listing of Timur’s ancestors,” he replied. “From Genghis Khan all the way back to the Commander of the Faithful, Caliph Ali. It say he appeared in the form of a moonbeam, to make pregnant Tamerlane’s virgin mother, Alangoa.”

  Phoebe glanced askance at him as she stepped up beside me. “It was propaganda perpetrated by his grandson, Ulug Beg, to unite the history of the Mongols with the heritage of Islam. Timur was a megalomaniac, but he never claimed descent from such noble ancestors.”

  The caretaker grinned wryly, as if in pity of Phoebe’s pettiness. “Greatness gives birth to great legends,” he said.

  “Yes, even virgin births,” Phoebe said.

  “Insha’Allah,” he replied. “It is written that truth, even if it were painful, delighted Timur.” Scowling, he took up his broom and poked at the floor.

  I looked at Phoebe. “Interesting about the moonbeam.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t get any ideas,” she said.

  I laughed. “Seriously.” Turning away from the caretaker, I lowered my voice so he couldn’t hear. “Soma was regarded as the moon, remember? Dan made note of it in his Rig Veda text.”

  “You’re right. The crescent moon was the cup that contained the soma drink for the gods. It waned when they drank it, and waxed when the Soma god replenished himself.”

  “And soma is described as enhancing the virility of the men and gods who consumed it.”

  Phoebe eyed Ulug Beg’s gravestone. “I wonder…”

  “If Timur’s grandson knew about soma?”

  Phoebe sighed. “I don’t know,” she said.

  We were grasping at straws. Our gaze fell dispiritedly on Tamerlane’s jade.

  Black jade, I thought. A Bactrian camel. Beast of burden on the famous Silk Road. What did it say about soma or Tamerlane?

  Staring down into the inky block, I tried to imagine the shrunken monster rotting for centuries beneath it. After all I had heard about the Conqueror of the World, it seemed somehow impossible that he’d be reduced to this.

  “He’s not there,” Phoebe said as if she’d read my thoughts.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a memorial, a cenotaph. The actual grave is in the crypt below. Isn’t it?” she asked the caretaker.

  He looked up from his sweeping and saw at once where this was heading. “The crypt is closed to visitors, madam.”


  Phoebe dug into her wallet. “Last time I was here, the guide took us down for a two dollar fee.”

  “But I am not a guide.”

  “I’ll pay you twenty,” she said, holding out the bill.

  He eyed it suspiciously. “Why do you offer this? The crypt is only a shadow of the glory you see here. What is it you seek?”

  Phoebe glanced at me, hesitant to answer.

  “We’re not exactly sure,” I said. “We just don’t think we’ve found it yet.”

  He eyed me as if deciding if I was a liar or just a fool. The latter, it seemed from his bemused shrug. He waved aside Phoebe’s cash. “I will take no barter in the presence of the dead. Please, follow me.”

  The man led us across to a corner of the chamber where a hidden stairwell descended steeply into the dark. He gestured for us to proceed him.

  I paused at the top of the stairs, overcome with a sense of foreboding.

  69.

  The Crypt

  PHOEBE AND I CAUTIOUSLY MADE OUR WAY down the shadowy steps. At the bottom we passed through a doorway into a glacial, echoing blackness. Phoebe hugged her arms. I tried to peer beyond her but couldn’t see a thing, until finally, behind us, the caretaker flipped a switch.

  The light fixture hung from a sweeping vault of bare brick and stone. Though smaller and drably unadorned, the crypt mirrored the layout of the great chamber above us, with deep, arched, inset bays tapering off into darkness.

  In the pool of light at the center of the room lay seven flat, rectangular graveslabs.

  “They’re arranged exactly the same as the cenotaphs upstairs,” Phoebe said.

  I moved among them. “Then this one would be his,” I said. I crouched down beside the emperor’s slab. It was not made of jade, but of plain, pale stone, split clean across in two places. Its entire surface was lightly inscribed with the same seething script as the cenotaph.

  “The genealogy again,” Phoebe said. “Lest anyone forget.”

  The caretaker stepped beside us. “Also it holds a warning: ‘Anyone who violates my stillness in this life or the next will be subjected to inevitable punishment and misery.’”