Kingdom

by Tom Martin

  ‘Nancy, it’s Jack,’ said the voice.

  For a moment she couldn’t reply. He said, ‘Nancy?’ again, as if he was worried the line was bad, and she said, ‘Jack, what a surprise,’ trying to inject her response with ordinary friendly warmth. Old travelling companions, that was what she was aiming for.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I – well, perhaps you understand why. The reason I’m calling is – I’m passing through New York. I’m at the airport now, I wondered if you’d like to have a coffee this morning. Deadlines permitting of course?’

  She tried to laugh at his joke. But she had tensed up, as if she was back in the jungles of Pemako, unsure where to turn. She was afraid, afraid of seeing him again and afraid of revisiting her memories of those days in Tibet that she had worked so assiduously to suppress. She had consciously chosen to accept the banal world, to bury all knowledge of the alternatives, and it was not solely a negative act. She had come to understand it as a positive one as well: she was taking sides with history, with a general view of the universe, and it was probably the only way of staying sane. And besides it upset her greatly even to think of Anton Herzog, left to die, alone, in the gloomy jungle.

  ‘You know, it would be really nice to meet,’ she said. ‘But this morning is difficult. I have – a lot of things to do.’

  ‘Come on, Nancy, just a quick coffee. I won’t take up much of your time.’ He knew why she was reluctant. He understood, she was certain. That made her easier in her mind. She heard herself saying, ‘OK, outside the Bagel Zone – it’s on Tompkins Square Park, in Alphabet City. The cab-drivers all know the park. I’ll see you there in forty-five minutes.’

  Deeply troubled, but trying not to admit it, she jumped in the shower, threw on some clothes. Briskly, she walked out of her apartment and found a cab. It was a fine clear day. The green grass at the centre of Tompkins Square Park was already filled with people enjoying the morning sunshine: bicycle couriers waiting for their next jobs, passers-by drinking coffee and glancing at the headlines, lolling lazily on the lawn, chatting in small groups. Nancy found a bench and sat down, though she didn’t have to wait long: Jack’s cab pulled up at the kerb, almost right by where she was sitting. He got out, looking around for her. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw him – he looked the same as ever – handsome, agile and dynamic, and yet she knew now how much else lurked beneath his macho veneer.

  ‘Hello there,’ she called out, in a voice that sounded high and nervous. He turned and smiled. As he approached he extended a hand, then when she took it he pulled her to him, kissed her on the cheek. His breath was warm. She felt a wave of pure familiarity washing over her, and that made her all the more confused. She stepped back from him.

  ‘Nancy, it’s good to see you,’ he said, looking her up and down. ‘You look well.’

  ‘You mean compared with last time, when we were both half-starved in Tibet? I’m glad you think so.’

  He laughed generously, sat down on the bench with her. For a moment neither of them said anything, and she could see that he wasn’t sure how to begin.

  ‘So, what brings you to New York?’ she said, helping him out.

  ‘I’m on my way to the Metropolitan Museum, it’s to do with my research; palaeontology of the Himalayas and all that . . .’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember.’

  ‘And how’s life back in sunny Park Slope?’

  ‘It’s good, thanks. I’m a section editor, not quite as glamorous as being a foreign correspondent.’

  ‘Well, I guess there are fewer run-ins with the Indian secret police,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Yes, not much of that. Just the daily hazards of New York supper parties and endless office politics.’

  ‘Sounds treacherous enough to me,’ he said.

  There she was nodding and smiling at him, and all the time she was thinking it was crazy; they’d shared so much together, had really gone to hell and back, and now they were talking in this stilted formal way. It made her so frustrated, and she was angry with herself for not being able to say what she wanted to say.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ she blurted out. ‘This is not what I really think . . . Not what I really . . .’

  He put his hand on hers; she felt the warmth of his skin. ‘Nancy, I know what you mean. I understand.’

  ‘I’ve been . . . trying to get things back to normal. For months, I’ve managed not to think about it. I find it all too upsetting.’

  Jack watched her silently. She wanted to say more but nothing came out. Finally he took his hand away from hers and reached down to his bag.

  ‘I want to show you this.’

  He pulled out a copy of the morning’s New York Times and discarded it on the table and then wrestling hard in the depths of his rucksack he pulled out a box. He swept the newspaper to one side and then very carefully placed the box on the table and proceeded to take its top off, revealing what appeared to be a piece of bone.

  ‘What on earth is that you’ve got there, Jack?’ said Nancy, trying to recover her wryness.

  ‘It’s a human skull. The skull of an anatomically modern hominid. A Homo sapiens. This skull could fit on the body of almost any Caucasian man alive today.’

  ‘It looks like a piece of a tree.’

  ‘That’s because there is a tree growing out of the skull – it has broken through the top. If I lift it up then you can see: this part is the skull and this is the tree. A seed must have fallen into the skull, many millennia ago. Perhaps the brain provided the moisture for the germination of the seed, or perhaps there was rainwater in the upturned skull. However it happened, the skull acted as a kind of flowerpot.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s perfect. The wood and the skull together vastly improve the reliability of the dating.’

  He looked at her as if expecting a response. ‘It’s the oldest hominid bone ever discovered in Asia. It’s what I’ve been looking for all these years. It brings my work to a close and proves – pretty much conclusively, it turns out – that I am right. Modern man did walk the earth a quarter of a million years ago. I won’t make any money out of it but at least I know I am right. I’m taking it to the Met today. They won’t believe me either, but I will show them all the same.’

  He smiled ruefully.

  ‘Well that’s wonderful. Congratulations. Thank you for showing it to me.’

  But she couldn’t understand what it meant. She could see that his expression had changed, he had lost all his surface calm. His hands moved over the bone, as if he was afraid to touch it. Now he said, ‘There have not been many people who have ever understood my work Nancy, let alone believed in it. In fact there was really only one man . . .’ He gazed down at the bone.

  ‘It arrived by post two weeks ago – it was sent to my home in Delhi . . .’

  Suddenly Nancy didn’t want to hear any more, and she even raised a hand, as if that might stop him. She was thinking she should walk away, but something rooted her to the spot. And Jack was continuing, his mouth was moving and now she had to hear what he was saying.

  ‘It was sent to me from Pome, near Bhaka gompa, it was sent from Tibet. There was a note attached, addressed to you. I’m afraid I read it before I realized it wasn’t for me. Perhaps I would have read it anyway, I don’t know. It had an exact longitude and latitude written on it – and it said something else as well.’

  He placed a scrap of paper onto the table and gestured to her to pick it up.

  ‘Once again, I am the pawn,’ he said, managing a wan smile.

  Nancy took the note and read what it said. Then she dropped it as if it was burning her hand. The sun was bright. All around them was a scene of such ordinary tranquillity – the people moving past, holding their coffees and their newspapers, as if there was no mystery to life at all. For half a minute, Jack Adams waited for her to say something, and then, with an embarrassed shrug, he packed away the bone.

  ‘I’m sorry I came here today, I just thought you
might want to see it. I thought that it would stop you feeling guilty. But perhaps I’ve just made things worse for you . . .’

  The note was there on her lap, just an innocuous piece of paper, but she could barely look down at it.

  ‘Look, it doesn’t mean much,’ said Jack. ‘God knows how he survived. I can only guess some tribes-people found him. It just means he’s alive and mad. Completely and utterly mad.’

  Nancy found she still couldn’t speak. Slowly, she shook her head.

  ‘If it has made things worse, then I’m sorry,’ said Jack, and his face was so full of remorse that Nancy gripped his hand.

  ‘No, no, that’s not it. Thank you for coming. You did the right thing.’

  Gingerly, she took up the note and read it again. To Jack, the six words it contained meant that Herzog was mad and lost to his crazy dreams. But to her – and this was why in a sense they had never understood each other, and even after everything they had shared there was a fundamental gulf between them – these words meant that her dream of normality had been shattered, that nothing would be the same again. She was changed, everything was changed for ever. Anxiously, her eyes scanned Tompkins Square Park. How long did the world have left? Days? Weeks? Then her gaze fell on the headline of the copy of the New York Times that lay on the table next to the box: ‘US Navy warns of new Cuban missile crisis as China surrounds Taiwan with nuclear submarines. President vows to use nuclear weapons to defend the island nation.’ A sudden wind chased litter down the sidewalk. Black clouds rolled across the sun, casting Tompkins Square into darkness. Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods. With Jack watching her, she read out the words on the note, as if they were a magic spell. The world was under the power of this spell and, she realized, no one would ever escape again.

  ‘Greetings, from the King of Shangri-La . . .’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The quotations from the I Ching or ‘Book of Changes’ that appear in this novel are based on the translations by C.J. Jung, Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes. I have also made use of many other sources, including Claire Scoby, Last Seen in Tibet (Rider, 2006), one of the greatest books ever written about Tibet by a foreigner; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (Tauris, 1985); Thupten Jinpa, Graham Coleman and Gyurme Dorje, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: First Complete Translation (Penguin Classics, 2006); and Patrick French, Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land (HarperCollins, 2003).