by Alex Archer
The younger woman was chunkily muscular. Annja had noticed in some of her photographs that she had short, square hands, large for her height. Practical, practiced hands. Even in glamour shots the exiled African princess disdained long nails, even paste-on fakes.
But even her exceptional hand strength couldn’t account for the lightning that shot through Annja’s body.
She could barely even gasp. It wasn’t the pain. There was pain, to be sure; it felt as if a giant spike had been driven up her arm and at the same time right through the middle of her body. The problem was, literally, the shock. It was as if a jolt of electricity had clenched her whole body in a spasm, dropped her to her knees and left her there, lungs empty of breath and unable to draw one. Her vision swam.
“Oh, dear,” Easy’s voice rang, clear with false concern. “Are you quite all right, miss? I’ll go and get help.” She trotted away up the stairs with rapid clacks of her elegant but practical low-heeled shoes.
Annja rocked back and forth. Darkness crowded in around the edges of her vision. What’s wrong with me? she wondered in near panic. It was as if she was suffering a giant whole-body cramp.
An unbreakable one.
But slowly, as if molecule by molecule, oxygen infiltrated back into her lungs and permeated her bloodstream. Slowly the awful muscle spasm began to relax. She slumped.
She was just regaining control of herself when two uniformed guards, a man and a woman in caps with little bills, came pattering down the steps for her.
“Oh, dear, miss,” the man said in a lilting Jamaican accent. “Are you all right?”
She nodded and let them help her to her feet. She didn’t have much choice. She still didn’t have the muscular strength to stand on her own.
“I-I’m fine,” she said. “I get these spells. Epilepsy. Petit mal. Had it since childhood. Really, thank you, it’s passed now.”
The two exchanged a look. “We don’t want you suing us,” said the blond woman.
“No. I’m fine. Did you see which way my friend went?”
“No,” the man said. “She seemed very determined that we help you right away.” He shook his head. “She was quite the little package. It was too bad we had to rush away—”
“Oi!” the woman exclaimed. “That’s so sexist! I’ve half a mind to report you for that.”
“Now, now,” he said, “don’t go flying off here like—”
“Like what? Were you going to make another demanding sexist statement, then?”
“Don’t you mean demeaning?” the male guard said.
Annja set off at what she hoped was a steady-looking pace, up the stairs to the next level. She made it through the door before she wobbled and had to lean back against it for a moment to gather herself.
The Korean exhibit was nearly empty. It was totally empty of any rogue archaeologist Zulu princesses. Annja drew a deep abdominal breath. It steadied her stomach and cleared her brain. Her vision expanded slowly but steadily. She no longer felt as if she were passing through a tunnel toward a white light.
She managed to walk briskly, with barely a wobble, through a door into a wider hall. Another set of stairs led down. Annja set her jaw.
The stairs descended to the ground level, and then to the north exit. She found herself outside on broad steps with Montague Place in front of her and the colonnaded pseudoclassical facade of the White Wing behind. It was called that not because it was white, but because it was named after the benefactor whose bequest made it possible to build.
The cool air seemed to envelop her. She sucked in a deep breath. The moist draft was so refreshing she scarcely noticed the heavy diesel tang.
A light rain began to tickle Annja’s face. She grunted, stamping one foot. Passersby glanced at her, then walked quickly on.
Calm down! she told herself savagely. This doesn’t always happen. She’s got the better of you twice. That’s not statistically significant.
She walked on as fast as she dared. She didn’t want some kind of behavior-monitoring software routine on the video surveillance to decide she was acting suspiciously. But she wanted to get away from the museum.
For a time she walked at random, lost in thoughts that whirled amid the noise of the city center. She stopped at a little café inside a glass front of some looming office building for a cup of hot tea.
Sitting on an uncomfortable metal chair, she gulped it as quickly as she could without scalding her lips. Outside she was surprised to see that twilight was well along. Gloom just coalesced atom by atom out of the gray that pervaded the cold heart of the city.
Setting the cup down, she strode out into the early autumn evening. The rain had abated. She headed toward Sir Sidney’s, a dozen or so blocks away. Maybe he’d turned something up.
IT ALWAYS AMAZED ANNJA how many little alcoves and culs-de-sac, surprisingly quiet even in the evening rush, could be stumbled upon in downtown London. Sir Sidney lived on a little half-block street, narrow and lined with trees whose leaves had already turned gray-brown and dead. It was so tiny and insignificant, barely more than a posh alley, it didn’t seem to rate its own spy cameras.
Trotting up the steps to the door of Sir Sidney’s redbrick flat, Annja wondered how his aging knees held up to them. Before she could carry the thought any further, she noticed the white door with the shiny brass knob stood slightly ajar.
She stopped in midstep. Her body seemed to lose twenty quick degrees. Foreboding numbness crept into her cheeks and belly.
“It’s all right,” she said softly. “He’s old. He might be getting absentminded. Just nipped out and forgot to fully close the door—”
Trying not to act like a burglar, she went on up the steps. She knocked quickly. “Sir Sidney?” she called. She was trying to make herself heard if he was within earshot inside without drawing attention to herself from outside.
She did not want to be seen.
Putting a hand in the pocket of her windbreaker, she pushed the door open and stepped quickly inside.
The entrance hallway was dark. As was the sitting room to her right. Nonetheless, the last gloom of day through the door and filtering in through curtained windows showed her the shape of Sir Sidney lying on his back on the floor.
The rich burgundy of the throw rug on which he had fallen had been overtaken by a deeper, spreading stain.
5
Annja knelt briefly at the old man’s side. The skin of his neck was cold. She felt no pulse.
She almost felt relief. If he was still alive with half his head battered in like that—
She shook her head and straightened. She would rather die than persist in such a state. She hoped Sir Sidney had felt the same way.
One way or another, he felt nothing now.
Moving as if through a fog that anesthetized her extremities and emotions, Annja took stock of the sitting room. The gloom was as thick as the cloying combination smell of old age, potpourri and recent death. She didn’t want to turn on a light, though. She wanted to draw no attention to her presence, nor leave any more signs of her presence than she had to.
Than I already have, she thought glumly. Irrationally if unsurprisingly, she regretted the earlier carelessness with which she had handled her teacup and saucer, the careless abandon with which she had handled the objects on display. Could I have left any more fingerprints?
The floor was scattered with toppled furniture. Strewed papers mingled with artifacts. Sir Sidney had welcomed his murderer—or murderers. There was no sign of forced entry. But he had not died easily.
Not far from the body lay a two-foot-high brass statue of Shakyamuni. The screen behind the seated figure was bent. The heavy metal object was smeared with blood. Annja looked away. She had seen too much death in her short life.
An overturned swivel chair drew her attention to the rolltop writing desk. Briskly she moved to it. She had little time. She racked her brain trying to remember if there had been anybody in the short, tree-lined lane who might have seen her en
ter the flat. Then again, anyone, driven by nosiness, caution or simple boredom, might have been peering out through the curtains to watch a long-legged young woman approach the apartment.
On the desk an old-fashioned spiral-bound notebook lay open. Annja almost smiled. She would have been surprised if the old scholar had kept his notes on a computer. But to her chagrin the first page was blank. Frowning, she started to move on.
Then she turned back and leaned close to study the page in the poor and failing light. With quick precision she tore the page away, folded it neatly and stuck it in her pocket.
She paused by the body. She made herself look down and see what Sir Sidney had suffered. It had been because of her, she knew—the laws of coincidence could be tortured only so far.
“I’m sorry, Sir Sidney,” she said in a husky voice. “I will find whoever did this.”
Already a deep anger had begun to burn toward Easy Ngwenya. Could her presence in the museum that afternoon possibly have been coincidence?
“And I will punish them,” Annja promised. It wasn’t a politically correct thing to say, she knew. Even to a freshly murdered corpse.
But then, there was nothing politically correct about wielding a martyred saint’s sword, either.
She quickly left the flat.
WHEN SHE WAS BACK in her hotel room the sorrow overtook her—suddenly but hardly unexpectedly. She didn’t try to fight it. She knew she must grieve. Otherwise it would distract her; unresolved, it might create a tremor of intent that could prove lethal.
She wept bitterly for a kind and helpful old man she had barely known. And for her own role in bringing death upon his head.
When her eyes and spirit were dry again, she took out the notepaper, ruled in faint blue lines, unfolded it under the lamp on the writing desk and examined it closely. The neat curls and swoops of the old scholar’s precise hand were engraved by the pressure of the pen that had written on the page above it.
Among the tools of the trade she carried with her were a sketch pad and graphite pencil. Extending the soft lead and brushing it across the sheet of paper, Annja was pleased when the writing appeared, white on gray.
She bit her lip. Not what I hoped, she thought. Not at all.
THE LIGHTS INSIDE THE Channel striped the window next to Annja in the bright and modern Eurostar passenger car. Annja placed her fingertips against the cool glass of the window. It was still streaked on the outside with rain from the storm that had hit London as it moved out, well before it headed into the tunnel beneath the English Channel.
The weather fit her mood.
The notebook page, burned in the hotel room sink to ashes Annja had disposed of crumpled in a napkin in a public trashcan on the street, hadn’t held the key to the mystery of the Golden Elephant as Annja hoped. But Sir Sidney’s memory, and perhaps a little research, had unearthed what could prove to be a clue.
“The Antiquities of Indochina,” Hazelton had written. It appeared to be the title of a book or monograph, since beside it he had written a name—Duquesne.
He had either done a bit of digging on his own or called friends. Without checking his phone records she’d never know. Given her contacts in the cyber-underworld it was possible. But she didn’t want to risk tying herself to the case.
Perhaps he’d simply remembered. In any event, after jotting down a few grocery items he had written “Sorbonne only.” The word only was deeply outlined several times.
It was the only lead she had. But the gentle old scholar’s ungentle murderers also had it.
If Sir Sidney’s murder had been discovered by authorities, it hadn’t made it to the news by the time she boarded the train in the St. Pancras Station—quite close, ironically, both to Sir Sidney’s flat and the British Museum. She’d bought passage under the identity of a Brit headed on holiday on the Continent.
Roux was right, she thought. As usual. This business was expensive. She hoped the commission from this mysterious collector would cover it.
She grimaced then. Nothing would pay for Sir Sidney’s death. No money, anyway. Her resolve to bring retribution on his killer or killers had set like concrete. And she felt, perhaps irrationally, she had a good line on who at least one of them was.
Although she was renowned for going armed, and for proficiency in the use of various weapons—neither of which Annja was inclined to hold against her—cold-blooded murder had never seemed part of Easy Ngwenya’s repertoire. But perhaps greed had caused her to branch out. Annja only wondered how the South African tomb robber could have learned about her quest.
Unless their encounter in the museum—just that day, although it seemed a lifetime ago—was pure coincidence. Oxford educated, Ngwenya kept a house in London. She was known to spend a fair amount of time there. And given she really was a scholar of some repute, it wasn’t at all unlikely she’d find herself in the British Museum on a semiregular basis at least.
But Annja had a hard time buying it.
She made herself put those thoughts aside. You can’t condemn the woman—on no better evidence than you’ve got, no matter how much reason you have to be mad at her, she told herself sternly. For better or worse, from whatever source, you have the role of judge, jury and executioner. You’ve carried it out before. But if you get too self-righteous and indiscriminate, or even just make a mistake—how much better are you than the monsters you’ve set out to slay?
6
“So, you work for an American television program, Ms. Creed?” The curator was a trim, tiny Asian woman with a gray-dusted bun of dark hair piled behind her head and a very conservative gray suit. Annja guessed she must be Vietnamese.
“That’s right, Madame Duval,” she said. “It’s called Chasing History’s Monsters.”
The woman’s already small mouth almost disappeared in a grimace of disapproval. “I’m employed as—” She started to say “devil’s advocate.” Taking note of the silver crucifix worn in the slightly frilled front of Madame Duval’s extremely pale blue blouse, Annja changed it on the fly. “I’m the voice of reason, on a show which, I’m afraid, sometimes runs to the sensational.”
Did she defrost a degree or two? Annja wondered.
“Why precisely do you seek credentialing to the University of Paris system, Ms. Creed?”
The University of Paris, commonly known as the Sorbonne after the commune’s 750-year-old college, was actually a collection of thirteen autonomous but affiliated universities. Annja stood talking with the assistant curator for the whole system in the highly modernized offices of University I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, one of the four modern universities located in the actual Sorbonne complex itself. If accepted as a legitimate scholarly researcher, she would gain access to collections throughout the system, even those normally closed to the public.
Annja smiled. “Whenever possible I like to combine what I like to call my proper academic pursuits with my work for the show. As an archaeologist I specialize in medieval and Renaissance documents in Romance languages. The predominant language, of course, being French.”
The woman smiled, if tightly. She was definitely warming.
“I have a particular interest in the witch trials of the Renaissance,” Annja said. She knew she gained a certain credibility because she showed she knew when the real bulk of the witch prosecutions took place; most people, including way too many college professors, thought they were a phenomenon of the Middle Ages. Still, the woman stiffened again, ever so slightly.
Annja was hyperattuned to her body language—and keying on that very reaction. “As what you might call the show’s revisionist,” she said, “I am particularly interested in the notion that the church might have had some justification for its actions in the matter. Not their methods, necessarily, but rather the possibility there existed a sort of witch culture that posed a real and deliberate threat to the church. Instead of the whole thing being a sort of mass hysteria, as is mostly assumed these days.”
Everything she said was true in the most leg
alistic and technical sense. There were such notions; they interested Annja.
Madame Duval smiled. “That appears to me to be a perfectly legitimate course of study,” she said in her own academic French. “If you will come with me, young lady, we will begin the paperwork to provide you the proper credentials.”
“Thank you,” Annja said.
FOUR HOURS LATER ANNJA’S vision was practically swimming. She was accustomed to deciphering fairly arcane writing. The Antiquities of Indochina was printed in a near-microscopic font. Unfortunately, unlike her Internet browsers, Annja’s eyes didn’t come with a handy zoom feature. The early-twentieth-century French itself was no problem; it was just hard to see.
Her heart jumped as she made out the words:
…the 1913 German expedition to Southeast Asia turned up many marvels indeed. Its reports included a fabulous hilltop temple complex, hidden in the reclaiming arms of the jungle, with the breathtaking golden idol of an elephant in its midst.
The passage then went on to talk about rubber production in Hanoi Province, in what was now Vietnam.
“Wait,” Annja said aloud, drawing glares from other researchers in the reading room. She glared back until they dropped their eyes back to tomes and computer screens.
Of course she felt bad about it at once. It’s not their fault, she reminded herself sternly.
Isn’t there more? she wondered.
She returned her attention to the book.
The crisp evening air felt good and smelled of roasting chestnuts. Annja was hungry, walking the summit of Montmartre with her hands jammed in her jacket pockets and her chin sunk into the collar. Over her left shoulder loomed the white domes of the Sacré Coeur Basilica. From somewhere in the middle distance skirled North African music. From nearer at hand came the thud and clank of what she considered mediocre techno music. The days of the Moulin Rouge and other noted, or notorious, cabarets were long gone. The fashionable night spots had long since migrated down across the river to the Left Bank and city center. Nowadays the area was given over to generic discos, artists’ studios and souvenir and antique shops, most of which were closed in the early evening.