Indy watched Musgrove take a sheet from his briefcase. He held it a moment, then he said, “This communiqué contains some information concerning the activity in the desert, but we don’t know what to make of it. We thought it might mean something to you.” And he passed the sheet to Indy. The message said:
TANIS DEVELOPMENT PROCEEDING.
ACQUIRE HEADPIECE, STAFF OF RA,
ABNER RAVENWOOD, US.
He read the words again, his mind suddenly clear, suddenly sharp. He stood up, looked at Brody and said, incredulously, “The Nazis have discovered Tanis.”
Brody’s face was grim and pale.
Eaton said, “Sorry. You’ve just lost me. What does Tanis mean to you?”
Indy walked from the podium to the window, his mind racing now. He pushed the window open and breathed in the crisp morning air, feeling it pleasingly cold in his lungs. Tanis. The Staff of Ra. Ravenwood. It flooded back to him now, the old legends, the fables, the stories. He was struck by a barrage of knowledge, information he’d stored in his brain for years—so much that he wanted to get it out quickly, speed through it. Take it slow, he thought. Tell it to them slowly so they’ll understand. He turned to the officers and said, “A lot of this is going to be hard for you to understand. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s going to depend on your personal beliefs, I can tell you that much from the outset. Okay?” He paused, looking at their blank faces. “The city of Tanis is one of the possible resting places of the lost Ark.”
Musgrove interrupted: “Ark? As in Noah?”
Indy shook his head, “Not Noah. I’m talking about the Ark of the Covenant. I’m talking about the chest the Israelites used to carry around the Ten Commandments.”
Eaton said, “Back up. You mean the Ten Commandments?”
“I mean the actual stone tablets, the original ones Moses brought down from Mount Horeb. The ones he’s said to have smashed when he saw the decadence of the Jews. While he was up in the mountain communing with God and being shown the law, the rest of his people are having orgies and building idols. So he’s pretty angry and he breaks the tablets, right?”
The faces of the military men were impassive. Indy wished he could imbue them with the kind of enthusiasm he was beginning to feel himself.
“Then the Israelites put the broken pieces in the Ark and they carried it with them everywhere they went. When they settled in Canaan, the Ark was placed in the Temple of Solomon. It stayed there for years . . . then it was gone.”
“Where?” Musgrove asked.
“Nobody knows who took it or when.”
Brody, speaking more patiently than Indy, said, “An Egyptian pharaoh invaded Jerusalem around 926 B.C. Shishak by name. He may have taken it back to the city of Tanis—”
Indy cut in: “Where he may have hidden it in a secret chamber they called the Well of the Souls.”
There was a silence in the hall.
Then Indy said, “Anyway, that’s the myth. But bad things always seemed to happen to outsiders who meddled with the Ark. Soon after Shishak returned to Egypt, the city of Tanis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm that lasted a year.”
“The obligatory curse,” Eaton said.
Indy was annoyed by the man’s skepticism. “If you like,” he said, trying to be patient. “But during the Battle of Jericho, Hebrew priests carried the Ark around the city for seven days before the walls collapsed. And when the Philistines supposedly captured the Ark, they brought the whole shooting works down on themselves—including plagues of boils and plagues of mice.”
Eaton said, “This is all very interesting, I guess. But why would an American be mentioned in a Nazi cable, if we can get back to the point?”
“He’s the expert on Tanis,” Indy said. “Tanis was his obsession. He even collected some of its relics. But he never found the city.”
“Why would the Nazis be interested in him?” Musgrove asked.
Indy paused for a moment. “It seems to me that the Nazis are looking for the headpiece to the Staff of Ra. And they think Abner has it.”
“The Staff of Ra,” Eaton said. “It’s all somewhat farfetched.”
Musgrove, who seemed more interested, leaned forward in his seat. “What is the Staff of Ra, Professor Jones?”
“I’ll draw you a picture,” Indy said. He strode to the blackboard and began to sketch quickly. As he drew the chalk across the board, he said, “The Staff of Ra is supposedly the clue to the location of the Ark. A pretty clever clue into the bargain. It was basically a long stick, maybe six feet high, nobody’s really sure. Anyhow, it was capped by an elaborate headpiece in the shape of the sun, with a crystal at its center. You still with me? You had to take the staff to a special map room in the city of Tanis—it had the whole city laid out in miniature. When you placed the staff in a certain spot in this room at a certain time of day, the sun would shine through the crystal in the headpiece and send down a beam of light to the map, giving you the location of the Well of the Souls—”
“Where the Ark was concealed,” Musgrove said.
“Right. Which is probably why the Nazis want the headpiece. Which explains Ravenwood’s name in the cable.”
Eaton got up and began moving around restlessly. “What does this Ark look like, anyhow?”
“I’ll show you,” Indy said. He went quickly to the back of the hall, found a book, flipped the pages until he came to a large color print. He showed it to the two military officers. They stared in silence at the illustration, which depicted a biblical battle scene. The army of the Israelites was vanquishing its foe; at the forefront of the Israelite ranks were two men carrying the Ark of the Covenant, an oblong gold chest with two golden cherubim crowning it. The Israelites carried the chest by poles placed through special rings in the corners. A thing of quite extraordinary beauty—but more impressive than its appearance was the piercing and brilliant jet of white light and flame that issued from the wings of the angels, a jet that drove into the ranks of the retreating army, creating apparent terror and devastation.
Impressed, Musgrove said, “What’s that supposed to be coming out of the wings?”
Indy shrugged. “Who knows? Lightning. Fire. The power of God. Whatever you call it, it was supposedly capable of leveling mountains and wasting entire regions. According to Moses, an army that carried the Ark before it was invincible.” Indy looked at Eaton’s face and decided, This guy has no imagination. Nothing will ever set this character on fire. Eaton shrugged and continued to stare at the illustration. Disbelief, Indy thought. Military skepticism.
Musgrove said, “What are your own feelings about this . . . so-called power of the Ark, Professor?”
“As I said, it depends on your beliefs. It depends on whether you accept the myth as having some basis in truth.”
“You’re sidestepping,” Musgrove said and smiled.
“I keep an open mind,” Indy answered.
Eaton turned away from the picture. “A nut like Hitler, though . . . He might really believe in this power, right? He might buy the whole thing.”
“Probably,” Indy said. He watched Eaton a moment, suddenly feeling a familiar sense of anticipation, a rise in his temperature. The lost city of Tanis. The Well of the Souls. The Ark. There was an elusive melody here, and it enticed him like the seductive call of a siren.
“He might imagine that with the Ark his military machine would be invincible,” Eaton said, more to himself than to anybody else. “I can see, if he swallows the whole fairy tale, the psychological advantage he’d feel at the very least.”
Indy said, “There’s one other thing. According to legend, the Ark will be recovered at the time of the coming of the true Messiah.”
“The true Messiah,” Musgrove said.
“Which is what Hitler probably imagines himself to be,” Eaton remarked.
There was a silence in the hall now. Indy looked once more at the illustration, the savagery of the light that flashed from the wings of the angels and scorched the retreating en
emies. A power beyond all power. Beyond definition. He shut his eyes for a second. What if it was true? What if such a power did exist? Okay, you try to be rational, you try to work it like Eaton, putting it down to some old fable, something circulated by a bunch of zealous Israelites. A scare tactic against their enemies, a kind of psychological warfare even. Just the same, there was something here you couldn’t ignore, couldn’t shove aside.
He opened his eyes and heard Musgrove sigh and say, “You’ve been very helpful. I hope we can call on you again if we need to.”
“Anytime, gentlemen. Anytime you like,” Indy said.
There was a round of handshakes, then Brody escorted the officers to the door. Alone in the empty hall, Indy closed the book. He thought for a moment, trying at the same time to suppress the sense of excitement he felt. The Nazis have found Tanis—and these words went around and around in his brain.
The girl, Susan, said, “I really hope I didn’t embarrass you when you were with Brody. I mean, I was so . . . obvious.”
“You weren’t obvious,” Indy said.
They were sitting together in the cluttered living room of Indy’s small frame house. The room was filled with souvenirs of trips, of digs, restored clay vessels and tiny statues and fragments of pottery and maps and globes—as cluttered, he sometimes thought, as my life.
The girl drew her knees up, hugging them, laying her face down against them. Like a cat, he thought. A tiny contented cat.
“I love this room,” she said. “I love the whole house . . . but this room especially.”
Indy got up from the sofa and, hands in his pockets, walked around the room. The girl, for some reason, was more of an intrusion than she should have been. Sometimes when she spoke he tuned her out. He heard only the noise of her voice and not the meaning of her words. He poured himself a drink, sipped it, swallowed; it burned in his chest—a good burning, like a small sun glowing down there.
Susan said, “You seem so distant tonight, Indy.”
“Distant?”
“You’ve got something on your mind. I don’t know.” She shrugged.
He walked to the radio, turned it on, barely listening to the drone of someone making a pitch for Maxwell House. The girl changed the station and then there was dance-band music. Distant, he thought. Farther than you could dream. Miles away. Oceans and continents and centuries. He was suddenly thinking about Ravenwood, about the last conversation they’d had, the old man’s terrible storm, his wrath. When he listened to the echoes of those voices, he felt sad, disappointed in himself; he’d taken some fragile trust and shattered it.
Marion’s infatuated with you, and you took advantage of that.
You’re twenty-eight, presumably a grown man, and you’ve taken advantage of a young girl’s brainless infatuation and twisted it to suit your own purpose just because she thinks she’s in love with you.
Susan said, “If you want me to leave, Indy, I will. If you want to be alone, I’ll understand.”
“It’s okay. Really. Stay.”
There was a knock on the door; the porch creaked.
Indy moved out of the living room along the hallway and saw Marcus Brody outside. He was smiling a secretive smile, as if he had news he wanted to linger over, savor for as long as he could.
“Marcus,” Indy said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I think you were,” Brody said, pushing the screen door.
“We’ll go in the study,” Indy said.
“What’s wrong with the living room?”
“Company.”
“Ah. What else?”
They entered the study.
“You did it, didn’t you?” Indy said.
Brody smiled. “They want you to get the Ark before the Nazis.”
It was a moment before Indy could say anything. He felt a sense of exaltation, an awareness of triumph. The Ark. He said, “I think I’ve been waiting all my life to hear something like that.”
Brody looked at the shot glass in Indy’s hand for a moment. “They talked with their people in Washington. Then they consulted me. They want you, Indiana. They want you.”
Indy sat down behind his desk, gazed into his glass, then looked around the room. A strange emotion filled him suddenly; this was more than books and articles and maps, more than speculation, scholarly argument, discussion, debate—a sense of reality had replaced all the words and pictures.
Brody said, “Of course, given the military mind, they don’t exactly buy all that business about the power of the Ark and so forth. They don’t want to embrace any such mythologies. After all, they’re soldiers, and soldiers like to think they’re hard-line realists. They want the Ark—and I’ll quote, if I can—because of its ‘historic and cultural significance’ and because ‘such a priceless object should not become the property of a fascist regime.’ Or words to that effect.”
“Their reasons don’t matter,” Indy said.
“In addition, they’ll pay handsomely—”
“I don’t care about the money, either, Marcus.” Indy raised a hand, indicated the room in a sweep. “The Ark represents the elusive thing I feel about archaeology—you know, history concealing its secrets. Things lying out there waiting to be discovered. I don’t give that for their reasons or their money.” And he snapped his fingers.
Brody nodded his head in understanding. “The museum, of course, will get the Ark.”
“Of course.”
“If it exists . . .” Brody paused a moment, then added, “We shouldn’t build our hopes up too high.”
Indy stood up. “I have to find Abner first. That would be the logical step. If Abner has the headpiece, then I have to get it before the opposition does. That makes sense, right? Without the headpiece, voilà, no Ark. So where do I find Abner?” He stopped, realizing how quickly he’d been talking. “I think I know where to start looking—”
Brody said, “It’s been a long time, Indiana. Things change.”
Indy stared at the other man for a second. The comment was enigmatic to him: Things change. And then he realized Marcus Brody was talking about Marion.
“He might have mellowed toward you,” Brody said. “On the other hand, he might still carry a grudge. In that case, it’s reasonable to assume he wouldn’t want to give you the headpiece. If in fact he has it.”
“We’ll hope for the best, my friend.”
“Always the optimist, right?”
“Not always,” Indy said. “Optimism can be deadly.”
Brody was silent now, moving around the room, flicking the pages of books. Then he looked at Indy in a somber way. “I want you to be careful, Indiana.”
“I’m always careful.”
“You can be pretty reckless. I know that as well as you. But the Ark isn’t like anything you’ve gone after before. It’s bigger. More dangerous.” Brody slammed a book shut, as if to emphasize a point. “I’m not skeptical, like those military people—I think the Ark has secrets. I think it has dangerous secrets.”
For a second Indy was about to say something flippant, something about the melodramatic tone in the other man’s voice. But he saw from the expression on Brody’s face that the man was serious.
“I don’t want to lose you, Indiana, no matter how great the prize is. You understand?”
The two men shook hands.
Indy noticed that Brody’s skin was damp with sweat.
Alone, Indy sat up late into the night, unable to sleep, unable to let his mind rest. He wandered from one room of the small house to another, clenching and unclenching his hands. After all these years, he thought, all this passage of time—would Ravenwood help him? Would Ravenwood, given that he had the headpiece, come to his assistance? And behind these questions there lingered still another one. Would Marion still be with her father?
He continued to go from room to room until finally he settled in his study and put his feet up on the desk, looking at the various objects stuffed in the room. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, tried
to think clearly, and rose. From a bookshelf he removed a copy of Ravenwood’s old journal, a gift from the old man when the two were still friends. Indy skimmed the pages, noticing one disappointment listed after another, one excavation that hadn’t lived up to its promises, another that had revealed only the most slender, the most tantalizing, of clues to the where abouts of the Ark. The outlines of an obsession in these pages; the heartbreaking search for a lost object of history. But the Ark could flow in your blood and fill the air you breathed. And he understood the old man’s single-mindedness, his devotion, the kind of lust that had led him from one country to an other, to one hope after another. The pages yielded up that much—but there was no mention of the head piece anywhere. Nothing.
The last item in the journal mentioned the country of Nepal, the prospect of another dig. Nepal, Indy thought: the Himalayas, the roughest terrain on earth. And a long way from whatever the Germans were doing in Egypt. Maybe Ravenwood had stumbled onto something else back then, a fresh clue to the Ark. Maybe all the old stuff about Tanis was incorrect. Just maybe.
Nepal. It was a place in which to start
It was a beginning.
He fingered the journal a moment longer, then he set it down, wishing he knew how Abner Ravenwood would react to him.
And how Marion would respond.
FOUR
Berchtesgaden, Germany
DIETRICH WAS UNEASY in the company of René Belloq. It wasn’t so much the lack of trust he felt in the Frenchman, the feeling he had that Belloq treated almost everything with equal cynicism; it was, rather, the strange charisma of Belloq that worried Dietrich, the idea that somehow you wanted to like him, that he was drawing you in despite yourself.
They were seated together in an anteroom at Berchtesgaden, the Führer’s mountain retreat, a place Dietrich had never visited before and which filled him with some awe. But he noticed that Belloq, lounging casually, his long legs outstretched, gave no sign of any similar feeling. Quite the opposite—Belloq might have been sitting sprawled in a cheap French café , in fact in the kind of place where Dietrich had found him in Marseilles. No respect, Dietrich thought. No sense of the importance of things. He was irritated by the archaeologist’s attitude.
The Adventures Of Indiana Jones Page 5