“You might have the decency to tell me how long we’re going to creep around like this,” Marion said.
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“It would be obvious to a blind man that we’re hiding from something, Jones. And I’m beginning to wonder why I left Nepal. I had a thriving business, don’t forget. A business you torched.”
He looked at her and smiled and thought how vibrant she appeared when she was on the edge of anger. He reached across the small table and touched the back of her hand. “We’re hiding from the kind of jokers we encountered in Nepal.”
“Okay. I buy that. But for how long?”
“Until I get the feeling that it’s safe to go.”
“Safe to go where? What do you have in mind?”
“I’m not exactly without friends.”
She sighed and finished her coffee, then leaned back in her chair and shut her eyes. “Wake me when you’ve made up your mind, okay?”
Indy stood up and pulled her to her feet. “It’s time,” he said. “We can leave now.”
“Brother,” she said. “Just as I was trying to get some beauty sleep.”
They went out into the alleyway, which was almost deserted.
Indy paused, looking this way and that. Then he took her by the hand and began to walk.
“You want to give me some idea of where we’re headed exactly?”
“The house of Sallah.”
“And who is Sallah?”
“The best digger in Egypt.”
He only hoped Sallah still lived in the same place. And beyond that there was another hope, a deeper one, that Sallah was employed in the Tanis dig.
He paused at a corner, a junction where two narrow alleys branched away from one another. “This way,” he said, still pulling at Marion’s arm.
She sighed, then yawned. She followed.
Something moved in the shadows behind them, something that might have been human. It moved without noise, gliding quickly over the concrete; it knew only to follow the two people who walked ahead of it.
Indy was welcomed into Sallah’s house as if only a matter of weeks had passed since they last met. But it had been years. Even so, Sallah had changed very little. The same intelligent eyes in the brown face, the same energetic cheerfulness, the hospitable warmth. They embraced as Sallah’s wife, a large woman called Fayah, ushered them inside the house.
The warmth of the greeting touched Indy. The comfortable quality of the house made him feel at ease immediately, too. When they sat down at the table in the dining room, eating food that Fayah had produced with all the haste of a culinary miracle, he looked over at the other table in the corner, where Sallah’s children sat.
“Some things change after all,” he said. He placed a small cube of lamb into his mouth and nodded his head in the direction of the kids.
“Ah,” Sallah said. His wife smiled in a proud way. “The last time there were not so many.”
“I can remember only three,” Indy said.
“Now there are nine,” Sallah said.
“Nine,” and Indy shook his head in wonderment.
Marion got up from the table and went over to where the children sat. She talked to each of them, touched them, played briefly with them, and then she came back. Indy imagined he saw some kind of look, something indeterminate yet obviously connected with a love of children, pass between Marion and Fayah. For his part he’d never had time for kids in his life; they constituted the kind of clutter he didn’t need.
“We have made a decision to stop at nine,” Sallah said.
“I’d call that wise,” Indy said.
Sallah reached for a date, chewed on it silently for a moment and then said, “It really is good to see you again, Indiana. I’ve thought about you often. I even intended to write, but I’m a bad correspondent. And I assumed you were even worse.”
“You assumed right.” Indy reached for a date himself. It was plump and delicious.
Sallah was smiling. “I won’t ask you immediately, but I imagine you haven’t come all the way to Cairo just to see me. Am I correct?”
“Correct.”
Sallah looked suddenly knowing, suddenly sly. “In fact, I would even place a bet on your reason for being here.”
Indy stared at his old friend, smiled, said nothing.
Sallah said, “Of course, I am not a gambling man.”
“Of course,” Indy said.
“We don’t talk business at the table,” Fayah remarked, looking imposing.
“Later,” Indy said. He glanced at Marion, who appeared half-asleep now.
“Later, when everything is quiet,” Sallah said.
There was a silence in the room for a second, and then suddenly the place was filled with noise, as if something had erupted at the table where the kids sat.
Fayah turned and tried to silence the pandemonium. But the kids weren’t listening to her voice, because they were busy with something else. She rose, saying, “We have guests. You forget your manners.”
But they still didn’t hear her. It was only when she approached their table that they became silent, revealing in their midst a small monkey sitting upright in the center of the table, chewing on a piece of bread.
Fayah said, “Who brought this animal in here? Who did it?”
The children didn’t answer. Th«y were busy laughing at the antics of the creature, which strutted around with the bread in its paws. It bounced over, performed a perfect handstand and then leaped from the table and skipped across the floor to Marion. It jumped up into her lap and kissed her quickly on the cheek. She laughed.
“A kissing monkey, huh?” she said. “I like you too.”
Fayah said, “How did it get here?”
For a time none of the children spoke. And then the one that Indy recognized as being the oldest said, “We don’t know. It just appeared.”
Fayah regarded her brood with disbelief. Marion said, “If you don’t want to have the animal around—”
Fayah interrupted. “If you like it, Marion, then it’s welcome in our home. As you are.”
Marion held the monkey a moment longer before she set it down. It regarded her in a baleful way and immediately bounced back into her lap.
“It must love you,” Indy said. He found animals only slightly more bothersome than children, and not quite so cute.
She put her arms around the small creature and hugged it. As he watched this behavior, Indy wondered, Who could hug a monkey that way? He turned his face toward Sallah, who was rising from the table now.
“We can go out into the courtyard,” Sallah said.
Indy followed him through the door. There was trapped heat in the walled courtyard; at once he began to feel lethargic, but he knew he had to fight the tiredness a little longer.
Sallah indicated a raffia chair and Indy sat down.
“You want to talk about Tanis,” Sallah said.
“You got it.”
“I assumed so,” Sallah said.
“Then you’re working there?”
Sallah was quiet, looking up into the night sky for a time.
“Indy,” he said. “This afternoon I personally broke through into the Map Room at Tanis.”
This news, though he had somehow expected it, nevertheless shook him. For a time his mind was empty, thoughtless, as if all perceptions, all memories, had fled into some dark void. The Map Room at Tanis. And he thought of Abner Ravenwood after a while, of a lifetime spent searching for the Ark, of dying in madness because the Ark had possessed him. Then he considered himself and the strange jealous reaction he had begun to experience, almost as if he should have been the first to break through into the Map Room, as if it were his right, like a legacy Ravenwood had passed down to him in some obscure way. Irrational thinking, he told himself.
He looked at Sallah and said, “They’re moving fast.”
“The Nazis are well organized, Indy.”
“Yeah. At least they’re good at something, even
if it’s only following orders.”
“Besides, they have the Frenchman in charge.”
“The Frenchman?”
“Belloq.”
Indy was silent, sitting upright in his chair. Belloq. Wasn’t there anywhere in the world the bastard wouldn’t turn up? He felt angry at first, and after that something else, a feeling he began to enjoy slowly, a sense of competition, the quiet thrill of seeing the opportunity to get even. He smiled for the first time. Belloq, I’ll get you this time, he thought. And there was a hard determination in the prospect.
He took the medallion from his pocket and passed it to Sallah.
“They might have discovered the Map Room,” he said. “But they won’t get very far without this, will they?”
“I take it this is the headpiece of the Staff of Ra?”
“That’s right. The markings on it are unfamiliar to me. What do you make of it?”
Sallah shook his head. “Personally, nothing. But I know someone who would. I can take you to meet him tomorrow.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Indy said. He took the medallion back from Sallah and put it in his pocket. Safe, he thought. Without this, Belloq might just as well be blind. A fine sense of triumph there, he told himself. René, this one is all mine. If I can arrange some way to get around the Nazis.
He asked, “How many Germans are involved in the dig?”
“A hundred or so,” Sallah said. “They are also very well equipped.”
“I thought so.” Indy closed his eyes and sat back. He could feel sleep press in on him. I’ll think of something, he said to himself. Soon.
“It worries me, Indy,” Sallah said.
“What does?”
“The Ark. If it is there at Tanis . . .” Sallah lapsed into silence, an expression of suppressed anguish on his face. “It is not something man was meant to disturb. Death has always surrounded it. Always. It is not of this world, if you understand what I mean.”
“I understand,” Indy said.
“And the Frenchman . . . he’s clearly obsessed with the thing. I look in his eyes and I see something I cannot describe. The Germans don’t like him. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t even seem to notice anything. The Ark, that’s all he ever thinks about. And the way he watches everything—he misses nothing. When he entered the Map Room . . . how can I describe his face? He was transported into a place where I would have no desire to go myself.”
Out of nowhere, shaken out of the hot dark, there was an abrupt wind that blew grit and sand—a wind that died as sharply as it had risen.
“You must sleep now,” Sallah said. “My house is yours, of course.”
“And I’m grateful.”
Both men went indoors; the house was quiet.
Indy walked past the room where Marion was sleeping; he paused outside the closed door, listening to the faint sound of her breathing. A child’s breathing, he thought—and he had a flash of Marion years ago, when their affair, if that was the word, had taken place. But the desire he felt right then was a different thing altogether: it was a desire for the woman now.
He was pleased with the feeling.
He passed along the corridor, followed by Sallah.
The child is buried, he thought; only the woman lives now.
Sallah asked, “You resist temptation, Indy?”
“Didn’t you know about my puritan streak?”
Sallah shrugged, smiled in a mysterious way, as Indy closed the door of the guest room and went toward the bed. He heard Sallah move along the corridor, then the house was silent. He closed his eyes, expecting sleep to come in quickly—but it didn’t. It remained an elusive shadow just beyond the range of his mind.
He turned around restlessly. Why couldn’t he just let go and sleep? You resist temptation, Indy? He pressed his knuckles against his eyelids: he turned around some more, but what he kept seeing inside his head was a picture of Marion sleeping quietly in her room. He got out of bed and opened the door. Go back to bed, Indy, he said to himself. You don’t know what you’re doing.
He stepped out into the corridor and walked slowly—a burglar on tiptoe, he thought—toward Marion’s room. Outside her door he paused. Turn around. Go back to your insomnia. He twisted the handle, entered the room and saw her lying on top of the bed covers. Moonlight flooded the room like a silver reflection thrown by the wings of a vast night moth. She didn’t move. She lay with her face to one side, arms across her stomach; the light made soft shadows around her mouth. Go back, he thought. Get back now.
Beautiful. She looked so beautiful, vulnerable, there. A sleeping woman and the touch of the moon—a dizzying combination. He found himself going toward the bed, then sitting on the edge of the mattress. He stared at her face, raised his hand, placed the tips of his fingers lightly against one cheek. Almost at once she opened her eyes.
She said nothing for a time. Her eyes seemed black in the room. He put a finger over her lips.
“You want to know why I’m sitting here, right?” he asked.
“I can hardly begin to guess,” she said. “You’ve come to explain the intricacies of Mr. Roosevelt’s New Deal? Or maybe you expect me to swoon in the moonlight.”
“I don’t expect anything.”
She laughed. “Everybody expects something. It’s a little lesson I picked up along the way.”
He lifted her hand, felt it tremble a little.
She didn’t say anything as he lowered his face and kissed her on the mouth. The kiss he received in return was quick and hard and without emotion. He drew his face away and looked at her for a time. She sat up, drawing a bedsheet over herself. The nightdress was transparent and her breasts were visible—firm breasts, not those of a child now.
“I’d like you to leave,” she said.
“Why?”
“I don’t have to give reasons.”
Indy sighed. “Do you really hate me that much?”
She stared at the window. “Nice moon,” she said.
“I asked you a question.”
“You can’t just trample your way back into my life, Indy. You can’t just kick over all the props I’ve made for myself and expect me to pick up the pieces of the past. Don’t you see that?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“That’s my lecture. Now I need some sleep. So go.”
He got up slowly.
When he reached the door he heard her say, “I want you too. Don’t you think I do? Give it some time, okay? Let’s see what happens.”
“Sure,” and then he stepped out into the corridor, unable to silence the echo of disappointment that seemed to roll inside his head. He stood in the moonlight that came in slivers through the window at the end of the hallway, and he wondered—as his desire began to fade—whether he’d made an ass of himself. It wouldn’t be for the first time, he thought.
She couldn’t sleep after he’d gone. She sat by the window and stared at the skyline of the city, the domes, minarets, flat roofs. Why did he have to try this soon, anyhow? The damned man had never learned patience, had he? He was as reckless in matters of the heart as he was in everything else. He didn’t understand that people needed time; it might not be the great healer, but it was a lot better than iodine. She couldn’t just haul herself out of the past and land, like some alien creature from a far galaxy, in the rude awakening of Indiana Jones’s present. It had to be mapped more gently.
If there was anything to be taken; if there was anything to be mapped.
The figure moved quickly through the cloakroom where Indy and Marion had left their suitcases and belongings. It moved with unnatural stealth, opening cases, sifting through clothes, picking up pieces of paper, examining them with laborious slowness. It did not find what it had been trained to discover. It understood it had to look for a particular shape—a drawing, an object, it didn’t matter as long as it had the shape. When it found nothing, it understood its owner would be disappointed. And that would mean a lack of food. That might even mean punishment. It ma
de a picture of the shape once more in its brain: the shape of the sun, small marks around it, a hole in the center. It began to rummage again.
Again, it found nothing.
The monkey skipped lightly into the corridor, removed some items of food scraps from the table where it had played before with the pretty woman, then swung out through an open window and into the dark.
EIGHT
Cairo
THE AFTERNOON was sunny, the sky almost a pure white. Whiteness reflected from everything, from walls, clothing, glass, as if the light had become a frost that lay across all surfaces.
“Did we need the monkey?” Indy asked. They were going quickly through the crowded street, passing the bazaars, the merchants.
‘It followed me, I didn’t exactly bring it,” Marion said.
“It must be attached to you.”
“It’s not so much me it’s attached to, Indy. It thinks you’re its father, see? It’s got some of your looks, anyhow.”
“My looks, your brains.”
Marion was silent for a while before asking, “Why haven’t you found yourself a nice girl to settle down with and raise nine kids?”
“Who says I haven’t?”
She glanced at him. It pleased him to think he saw a brief flash of panic on her face, of envy. “You couldn’t take the responsibility. My dad really had you figured, Indy. He said you were a bum.”
“He was being generous.”
“The most gifted bum he ever trained, but a bum anyhow. He loved you, you know that? It took a hell of a lot for you to alienate him.”
Indy sighed. “I don’t want to rehash it, Marion.”
“I don’t want that, either,” she said. “But sometimes I like to remind you.”
“An emotional hypodermic, is that it?”
“A jag, right. You need it to keep you in your place.”
Indy began to walk more quickly. There were times when, despite his own defenses, she managed to slide just under his skin. It was like the unexpected desire he’d felt last night. I don’t need it, he thought. I don’t need it in my life. Love means some kind of order, and you don’t want order when you’ve become accustomed to thriving on chaos.
The Adventures Of Indiana Jones Page 9