The Golden Elephant

by Alex Archer

  “But you have the information you needed, do you not?”

  “Well—I have leads to follow. And I seem to have confirmation that what I’ve come chasing clear across Europe is actually real. That’s encouraging, anyway. But I just feel so frustrated. I keep running and running after this…thing, and I never seem to get any closer.”

  “But you have gotten all there is to be gained in Istanbul, yes?” he asked.

  Reluctantly she nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  He stood with an abruptness that belied the languid ease with which he’d sat and listened to her outpourings of woe. “Well, then! You are off duty. Is it not time to relax and put your troubles aside? This is a beautiful city, full of history that you are rarely qualified to appreciate. At least let me show some of it to you and take your mind off your troubles.”

  “Sure,” she said, and stood to join him. “That sounds wonderful.”

  WITH GIANCARLO AS HER laughing, knowledgeable and attentive guide they took in the sights of the great ancient city. Annja thoroughly enjoyed being a tourist for the day.

  “In 1534,” Giancarlo said that evening, with candlelight dancing in his eyes, “the sultan, Suleiman, heard that the young widow of the count of Fundi was the most beautiful woman in all Europe. She was also renowned for her wit and erudition, although it is possible these mattered less to the sultan. So he sent his great corsair captain Barbarossa to kidnap her. They attacked in the middle of the night. As her family retainers battled to hold them off she leaped on a horse, rode down several would-be abductors and galloped off to safety in her nightgown.”

  The conversation of the other diners was soft susurration in the background. Through the great window beside the couple the fabled ancient city tumbled down to the water from seven hills almost as famous as Rome’s. Its lights made jeweled streaks across the slowly rippling waters of the Golden Horn.

  “A woman after my own heart,” Annja said.

  They’d taken in a few sights such as the Blue Mosque, and a few nondescript stubs of wall, here incorporated into later structures, there holding up green slopes, that Annja’s escort told her dated from Lygos, the first port settlement, which predated even Byzantium’s founding by the Greeks of Megara. At evening they found themselves sitting in a pleasantly upscale Turkish restaurant.

  Annja felt a strange vibration. She frowned, wondering if she were somehow getting dizzy. Then she noticed ice tinkling in glasses and silverware rattling. A French tourist couple across the dimly lit restaurant looked around in wild-eyed dismay; a middle-aged Japanese couple sitting near Giancarlo and Annja continued eating without paying visible attention.

  Annja smiled and tried to relax back into her chair, although her hand was not altogether steady setting her lamb kabob down into its bed of rice. “I’m not used to earthquakes,” she said. “I guess that comes from growing up in New Orleans and now living in New York. They’re what you’d call pretty seismically stable. And I’ve never really experienced them much on digs.”

  Giancarlo grinned back over a forkful of dolma, eggplant stuffed with lamb and rice, doused with hot red pepper in olive oil and the sour yogurt Turks served with every meal and practically every course. “A tremor,” he said, with a gleam in his dark eyes. The lashes were long, almost feminine. Yet they had no effect of reducing his masculine appeal. Rather the opposite—something Annja was becoming more and more uncomfortably aware of as she passed time in his company. “Hardly an earthquake by Turkish standards,” he said.

  He took a sip of wine. “Turkey is terribly afflicted with earthquakes, you may be aware,” he said. “The great tsunami of 1509 overrode the seawall and killed ten thousand people.”

  She smiled wanly. “Let’s hope these shocks stay more modest,” she said. “At least while we’re here. Oh, dear. I guess that sounds selfish.”

  “It sounds eminently sensible,” he said. “More wine?”

  “No, thanks. I’m not really much of a drinker. I am surprised to find alcohol so readily available in a Muslim country.”

  “The Turks have long had a reputation for their…relaxed interpretation of Islam. And of course the country’s been officially secular since the 1920s, although that could change in an eye blink, the way things go these days.”

  “You’re very knowledgeable about Turkey,” Annja said.

  He shrugged. “I feel great affinity for Istanbul. Much history has passed through here—passed through that great harbor out there.”

  “Much cruelty, too, it would seem,” she said. “As much before the Ottomans conquered the city as after.” She thought of her recent adventures in the city with Roux and Garin, then pushed them aside.

  “You speak of the Byzantines with their blindings and other baroque punishments? To be sure. But was there ever a ruler more justly named Magnificent than Suleiman? A cruel man, claro. But a scholar, a warrior, a patron of the arts.”

  He shook his sleek head. Annja thought she saw genuine sadness in his eyes. “There’s so little of splendor in our present age, isn’t there?” he said.

  She sighed. “I suppose so,” she said. “Maybe that’s why I spend so much time burrowing into the past myself.”

  AS THEY WALKED A PROMENADE Annja’s arm had threaded into the crook of Giancarlo’s. She kept meaning to disengage it.

  “That story you told me over dinner,” she said. “About Suleiman sending raiders to kidnap that Italian countess. Was that real? That actually happened?”

  “Ah, but yes,” he said. “The woman in question was Julia Colonna, of a great and famous family. You forget I am Italian! Would I lie about such a thing—to a fellow archaeologist and historian, to boot? Not to mention a woman herself notable for both beauty and intellect!”

  Annja laughed and shook her head. “Thank you. And no. I suppose not. Although it’s a delightfully lurid episode I somehow managed never to hear about. It just seems too melodramatic to have taken place in reality. Like the stories I read when I was a girl. I’d get enthused about them, and then the sisters would tell me they never happened and never could happen. Since then I’ve kind of…collected stories like that from history. To prove to myself that adventures really are real.”

  Listen to yourself, her inner voice said. You carry the sword of a martyred French saint. You find yourself fighting evil. And you need proof there’s such a thing as adventure?

  But Giancarlo’s handsome face had set. He lifted his chin, stopped, turned to face her in the light of the crescent moon rising over the plateau behind them. He gripped her arm. Is he going to kiss me? she wondered. She carefully refrained from wondering whether she would let him.

  “I fear I have a more disturbing tale for you now, Annja,” he said. “I hope you will forgive me for not telling you before. But you seemed so distraught by your misadventure in the museum that I hadn’t the heart until you had time to recover.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Professor Gendron has been murdered,” he said. “She was found shot to death in her office with a .40-caliber handgun.”

  Annja turned to the ancient weathered parapet. She was scarcely aware of breaking free of his double grasp, strong though it was.

  A .40-caliber handgun. Trademark of Easy Ngwenya.

  She walked a few blind steps, stopped when the wall’s rough stone rapped her knees and its sharp edge bit into her thighs. She felt as if she were encapsulated in a glass bubble, around which seethed a storm, a veritable tempest of emotions—rage, grief, fear and self-reproach.

  Despite their flash acquaintance she had connected with Isabelle Gendron. As she had with Sir Sidney Hazelton.

  It was a paradox of Annja’s life, or nature. She was a highly empathetic person, someone who tended to get along with others and make friends easily. Yet she led an essentially hermitic existence. She had trouble maintaining friendships. It wasn’t that she fell out with friends; she kept touch with a horde of people dotted all over the globe.

  But it was
a desultory sort of contact, conducted almost entirely through e-mail, the odd text message or cell-phone call. Sparse and at distance.

  It was Annja’s gift, and curse, to make contact at a fairly deep level almost instantly. But not to keep it. Everyone she met, it seemed, touched her deeply—and went away.

  Which, needless to say, contributed more than slightly to the lack of romance in her life.

  Annja shook her head and forced herself back into the present moment—horrible as it had become. The news of Isabelle Gendron’s murder was like an amputation in her soul.

  Especially since she could not avoid the guilty certainty that she, Annja Creed, was the reason that joy-and life-filled woman had been murdered.

  She found herself sobbing in Giancarlo’s arms on a concrete bench. He held her and let her sorrow run its course.

  Finally the tears ran dry. Such open displays of emotion were unlike her. But this atrocity had blindsided her. She sat up. Felt long, surprisingly strong fingers grip her chin and lift her face upward. His lips touched hers.

  For a moment she yielded to his kiss. Then she turned away.

  Giancarlo stiffened. From the corner of her eye, still tear-blurred, she could see a hurt expression on his handsome face in the amber glow of a distant street lamp.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She stood and took a few steps away. And Easy Ngwenya, she thought. There was no question—she was locked in a contest with a conscienceless murderer.

  “At least let me help you!” he cried.

  Annja shook her head. She avoided his dark and fervent eyes. “I wish I could, Giancarlo,” she said. “But I don’t want to put you in the crosshairs, too.”

  The main reason she couldn’t look at him was her dread he would read in her face her real fear.

  What if I already have?

  13

  Annja flew from Istanbul to Bangkok. Have I let the little murderess get too big a lead on me? she could not stop thinking. If only I hadn’t wasted the afternoon and evening playing tourist with Giancarlo.

  She also flew in a state of increasing stiffness. She’d been able to get an early-morning flight out of Istanbul on Turkish Airlines. Unfortunately that went no farther than the capital, Ankara; it seemed no flights left the country from Istanbul. Then for some reason the only way to Bangkok was through Germany, far to the north-west—the opposite direction from where she wanted to go. She flew to Frankfurt, where she had to hustle to catch a Royal Brunei flight leaving for Bangkok little more than an hour later. She considered herself quite fortunate to have snagged a desirable window seat directly aft of the jumbo jet’s midship exit, where she could stretch her long legs instead of riding with her knees up under her chin, as she so often found herself doing.

  The bad news was that she’d be in the seat for eleven hours.

  She touched down just before seven the next morning. Customs was the usual drag, but no worse than what you went through anywhere in a terrorism-obsessed world. The most significant difference was that the Thai customs officers tended to treat foreign tourists with less rudeness than their English or American counterparts.

  She left everything but a light daypack in a locker at the airport. A taxi to the riverfront was pricey, but nothing compared to the cost of the short-notice plane ticket. She could have bought the taxi for that. She could hear Roux complaining. They were really going to need the commission the mysterious collector was willing to pay.

  But for Annja it was no longer about the money. If indeed it ever had been.

  Bangkok was called “the Venice of Asia,” along with a lot of less complimentary names. It was veined with canals and its whole existence centered on Chao Phraya, the great green waterway that ran through the middle of the country. Annja had the driver let her off at an open-air market a few blocks from the waterfront so she could buy some fruit and packaged snacks. She was blessed with a ferocious immune system, a vital attribute for anyone who did extensive fieldwork around the globe. But she didn’t want to press her luck; getting laid out with dysentery or some kind of awful amoeba would allow her deadly rival the latitude to rob the Temple of the Elephant of whatever artifacts it held. And quite possibly she would leave more dead bodies in her wake.

  The fruit was protected with rinds Annja could peel; the snacks had their plastic wrappers. Annja couldn’t answer absolutely for the cleanliness of the plants where they’d been packaged, but knew standards were likely to be higher than for random street vendors. Several bottles of water also went into the pack to sustain her.

  Then she found a riverboat, basically an outsized canoe with a rounded roof and an engine, and engaged passage upriver to Nakhon Sawan. The railroad had run that way for over a century, and reasonably modern highways connected the city to the national capital. But even though central Thailand was flat, Annja didn’t care to trust her life to the buses any more than necessity required, which was hair-raisingly often enough. She knew the trains were likely to be overcrowded and stifling. Water travel was quicker—especially since Annja would bet both the trains and the buses stopped frequently and often at random—and were the least uncomfortable option.

  Slipping under the shade of the low rounded roof, Annja slid her pack under the bench and settled against the gunwale amid a haze of smells of the river water, commingled with raw sewage. The boatman shouted, the engine snarled and the craft set out into the great sluggish flow, wallowing slightly in waves reflected from the bank. Once it got out in the stream and under way for true, the water’s slow rhythms were soporific and the engine noise became white noise blocking out other sounds. Annja had slept on the flight, but that never seemed to rest her. Little bothered by the relative discomfort, she huddled in upon herself and fell sound asleep.

  By midafternoon they reached their destination. The city of Nakhon Sawan, capital of the province of the same name, lay near where the rivers Nan and Ping converged to form the arterial Chao Phraya. It was a lot less modern and glossy than Bangkok—the modern and glossy parts of it, anyway. The riverfront gave her mostly the impression of stacks of huge teak logs, the region’s main resource, lying or being loaded onto barges.

  Shopping around, Annja found a cabbie who demonstrated some grasp of English, and hired him as guide, as well as driver. She herself couldn’t understand a word of the local language.

  The guide’s name was Phran. He knew about the Red Monastery. He drove Annja out of town through country not a lot different from that around New Orleans to a graveled lot in the midst of a stand of tall hardwoods he told her weren’t teak. He was a skinny, middle-aged man without much of a chin and a sort of loose-jointed look. He seemed cheerful but did not, blessedly, insist on chattering. He answered her questions readily enough. Mostly he seemed to go along in his own little world. Fortunately he was not so immersed in it that he drove alarmingly.

  Stepping out into the slanting, mellowing light of late afternoon, Annja was once again struck by the difference even the wind of passage through the car’s open windows made. Walking resembled wading through a swimming pool, but with more bugs. She scarcely felt the lack of a shower after her flight anymore; she couldn’t be any more sweat-drenched and grubby, and was hardly more so than if she’d arrived in fresh-laundered clothes.

  Phran followed her to the monastery doors with a head-bobbing gait like a species of wading bird. Annja saw little mystery to why this was called the Red Monastery. Rather than the massive stone piles she usually saw in pictures or documentaries about Southeast Asian temples, this place had been built out of native hardwoods. It was enameled in a scarlet that was as bright and startling as fresh blood even in light well diluted by angle and long tree shadows. Where it wasn’t red it was gilded, like the heads of ceremonial guardian dragons carved into the beam ends.

  The doors opened at their approach. A large-bellied monk in a scarlet robe over a saffron undershirt stood with sandaled feet splayed far apart. A gaggle of younger, thinner monks wearing yellow robes hung
behind him. They gazed in seeming amazement at the tall foreign woman.

  But the head monk, or at least senior monk on duty, wasn’t impressed. His scowl and head shake were universal language.

  “Am I too late?” Annja said. She wasn’t thinking as clearly as she should, with stress and travel. It had slipped her mind that the monastery might reasonably impose visiting hours.

  “Tell him I’m not just a tourist,” she said. “I’m an archaeologist—a scientist. I’d like to spend a few minutes examining some of their relics. I’ll be no trouble.” She began fumbling in her pack. She had come well credentialed with a letter of introduction from a prominent Columbia University professor and various documents attesting to her status as an archaeologist in good standing.

  For once Phran’s sunny disposition clouded. “Is not that,” he said sadly, after listening to a string of grumpy grunts Annja was surprised amounted to intelligible speech.

  “Please tell him I’m a consultant for Chasing History’s Monsters,” she said. “The American television show.”

  To her amazement Phran shook his head. “No, missy,” he said. “Problem is, no women allowed. This monastery. You see?”

  Whether she did or not, she couldn’t misunderstand the heavy door slammed in her face.

  Annja stood before the blazing-red door with a smiling Buddha and sinuous Thai characters embossed on it in gold, feeling foolish. “Oh,” she said.

  She felt no outrage. Although like most modern nations Thailand made a great show of celebrating women’s rights, Asia remained thoroughly patriarchal. Which, in Annja’s observation and research, meant that in reality the women ran everything, albeit behind the scenes, without official or acknowledged power. Lording it over women in petty ways was the men’s way of getting some of their own back.

  And Annja was a foreign woman. If she stormed into town and complained to the authorities, they’d hear her out, smiling and nodding. Then they’d do nothing.