by Ben Mezrich
The minute they’d entered the back room of the souvenir shop, Unger had begun to regale Jack with stories about his father, most of which involved drinking, women, and violence; from the time they’d nearly been beheaded because Unger had made a pass at the daughter of a Kyrgyzstani warlord, to the moment Kyle and he had parted ways, due to a “misunderstanding” involving a pair of emerald daggers they’d liberated from a Mongol tomb. According to Unger, they’d remained friends—even though both bore matching inch-long dagger scars hidden somewhere under their clothes.
But Jack wasn’t in Delhi to reminisce about his father. It wasn’t until Unger led him and Sloane through a second door—this one much more substantial than the first, thick redwood lined in what appeared to be plates of iron—and shifted his dialogue to the great mausoleum, the subject of “the greatest love story ever told,” that Jack’s focus snapped tight.
The change from the front of the shop to the back was night and day; all pretense of the place being a common souvenir market disappeared the moment Unger flicked on the fluorescent ceiling lights, revealing a windowless, rectangular room lined with pristine glass shelves and oversize, backlit onyx cabinets. The fixtures alone looked like they’d cost a fortune, but it was the items on the shelves that immediately drew Jack’s attention. In just the first few shelves, he counted three Buddhas carved from pure jade, a pair of gold statues of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god—each of her eight hands holding what appeared to be a perfectly formed opal, sparkling ocean-blue in the harsh light—and an Indo-themed Fabergé egg, lodged in a Plexiglas cube.
The collection only grew more exceptional the farther Unger led them into what could only be described as a warehouse for precious antiquities. A second shelving unit displayed more gold statues of a dozen different Hindu gods, spaced between cabinets filled with glistening antique jewelry—necklaces, bangles, anklets, rings. Next to that, a cabinet was filled with a variety of swords, daggers, and other ancient weapons of war—spiked maces, halberds, and spears, as well as various antique torture devices, including brass thumbscrews, steel-tipped flails, even a miniature iron maiden in perfect condition. Another cabinet contained more of the traditional masks that Jack had seen out front, but these masks weren’t made of cheap plaster. They had been carved from the finest bronze, gold, and silver, their features accented with semiprecious gemstones.
Jack knew, from the first item to the last, that none of these objects had been acquired legally; you didn’t store a legally acquired Fabergé egg in a backroom in a slum in Old Delhi. This wasn’t a souvenir store, it was a one-stop shopping mart for black-market antiquities. No wonder Unger had come at Jack with the gun; just one of the golden elephant gods, no doubt pilfered from a local tomb, could land Unger in an Indian prison for the rest of his life.
But Jack kept his thoughts to himself as Unger showed him and Sloane to a small circular table at the back of the room, right in front of the glass cabinet of weapons and torture devices, and directed them to a trio of metal folding chairs. While they took their seats, he rummaged through a large crate tucked behind the cabinet; when he returned to the table, his grin had doubled in size, revealing a few more missing teeth—and in his hands was a long cardboard canister about the size of a poster mailer, sealed on both ends with plastic knobs.
“Like you said,” Jack started as Unger yanked at one of the knobs. “Love story or no, a poster of the Taj isn’t exactly what we’re looking for.”
Unger laughed, then pulled a rolled-up sheet of aging paper out of the canister and slammed it down against the table.
“Impatience runs in your family, Little Jacky. Feast your eyes on this.”
It wasn’t a poster, it was an architectural blueprint of the entire Taj Mahal complex, and it was quite unlike anything Jack had ever seen before. The level of detail was incredible, from the three-dimensional cutaways of the famous white marble tomb that topped the mausoleum, to the four paneled gardens that led past the reflecting pool, to the building’s arched entrance. It was as if almost every blade of grass was accounted for, every inch of marble and stone. Much of the written notations along all four sides of the blueprint were in Hindi and Sanskrit, languages that Jack had never mastered; but there were also measurements in easily decipherable numbers, along with longitudes and latitudes.
“So the story goes,” Unger said as Jack and Sloane leaned over the blueprint. “The Taj was built between 1632 and 1652 by the most powerful Mughal king, Shah Jahan, as a mausoleum for the beloved third wife of his harem, Mumtaz Mahal. Architecturally, it’s an Indo-Persian blend of style, technology, and artistry that set the bar for all Muslim constructs that came afterward.”
“The third wife of his harem,” Sloane said. “Not exactly an auspicious beginning for a love story.”
“Harem or no, it was a special relationship,” Unger winked. “Especially for the time period. Mumtaz Mahal had been given to Jahan in childhood, and he had grown up with her as his best friend. He called her ‘the chosen one of the palace,’ and considered her not only his wife, but also his most important advisor. Together, they built his empire into one of the most powerful and enlightened of the time; its breadth and scale rivaled that of his forefather, Genghis Khan.”
Jack had heard the story before, at some point in his undergraduate work at Princeton. He’d even visited the Taj twice with his father, but he’d been too young to appreciate the magnificence of the architecture, which was surprisingly even more pronounced in the perfectly balanced lines and symmetrical curves spread across the antique blueprint.
“When Mumtaz passed away giving birth to her fourteenth child,” Unger continued, “Shah Jahan went into a fit of mourning. He fasted for eight days, and spent the next two years alone in the dark basement halls of the Red Fort, his castle in nearby Agra. When he came out of the basement, he set to work building the ultimate memorial to his perfect love—the Taj Mahal.”
Jack’s father had given Jack the same monologue as they’d toured the pristine gardens, then gazed at the shimmering reflection of the marble Wonder in the still water of the reflecting pool at the garden’s exact center.
“On her deathbed,” Jack said, remembering, “Mumtaz had asked Jahan to build her a resting place that rivaled anything that had ever been built before. She asked for nothing less than the most beautiful building in the world, something that would be eternal, like their love.”
“Women, right?” Unger grunted, giving a sideways glance to Sloane, and again, lingering a little too long over the soft glade of pale skin above the collar of her buttoned shirt. Then he turned back to Jack.
“When you think of the Taj, what do you think of first?”
Jack didn’t have to pause.
“The dome.”
“Of course. White marble, perfectly, mathematically symmetrical. One hundred and fifteen feet tall, one hundred and eighty feet in diameter, situated on a cylindrical base that’s about twenty-five feet long. Shaped like an onion, a true wonder of architecture.”
Jack nodded. It was all there in the blueprint. No mortar or support struts; the dome had been built by laying concentric circles of stone on top of each other, and it was actually the weight of the construct itself that kept it together. The main dome was surrounded by four smaller onion domes, which in turn were placed between four working minarets, each a hundred and thirty feet tall. The minarets were perfectly symmetrical with each other—but instead of being built at a ninety-degree angle with their base, the minarets stood at ninety-two-degree angles, bowed slightly outward, away from the central dome. Jack remembered his father telling him that this had been done for two reasons. First, it created a highly sophisticated optical illusion when you stared at the complex from directly ahead. The minarets appeared perfectly straight, rather than bowed inward, as they would had they been built at the proper ninety degrees. Secondly, and more importantly, in the event of an earthquake, the minarets would fall outward, instead of crashing inward, destroying the perfec
t main dome.
“But see,” Unger said, pointing with a thick finger. “The dome is really just an ornament. It draws the attention, gets all the press. But it really is an onion—peel away the circles of stone, you’ve got nothing but air. It’s the base of the building that’s truly magnificent—more than that, it’s the base that’s significant.”
He ran his hand above the central portion of the blueprint, careful not to touch the yellowing paper. Jack couldn’t begin to guess how old the blueprint was; for all he knew, it dated all the way back to Jahan’s day, which made it insanely valuable. It should have been in a museum behind glass, not in a cardboard canister in the backroom of a store guarded by a drooling rat. Jack was reminded again of what his father had told him about Unger, after a phone call from the Brit that had interrupted one of Jack and Kyle’s rare dinners together. If you truly need something that nobody else can deliver, Unger’s your man. Otherwise, avoid him like rabies. And then he’d added: Sharp as a weasel, hungry as a wolf.
“The base is essentially an enormous cube cut into many chambers, with arched doorways at each entrance. In the center, on a raised platform, is a gilded, gem-encrusted sarcophagus.”
“Mumtaz’s coffin,” Sloane said. She seemed surprisingly captivated by the blueprint, and didn’t seem to mind Unger ogling her as he spoke. Or maybe she was just oblivious. She didn’t strike Jack as a woman who was aware of how she looked. The way she kept her hair, the stiff way she moved, the beige of her clothing—this wasn’t a woman who knew, or cared, that she was pretty enough to affect the men around her.
“That’s what you’re meant to think, my dear. And most of the two million visitors who wander through the gardens, gazing at the mausoleum every year, believe it to be so. But Mumtaz isn’t in the sarcophagus. It’s actually a cenotaph, an empty tomb.”
Jack took Unger’s lead, nodding toward the blueprint.
“There’s a second, identical chamber below the domed mausoleum, built entirely of marble, that contains the actual sarcophagus of Mumtaz.”
“Secrets within secrets,” Unger said. “The second chamber is only the beginning. The interior itself is a goddamn labyrinth, full of hundreds of secret rooms, chambers, and even faux domes. And much of the building has been inaccessible for years. Hell, there are rumors that the subground floors haven’t been entered in centuries. The entire complex is built on the edge of the Yamuna River. Like an iceberg, most of it is underground, many feet below the river. Nobody has been down there in years, maybe centuries.”
Sloane looked at him.
“Why? It’s one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and the most famous building in India—maybe the world. I’d expect daily tour groups, if not periodic scientific surveys.”
Unger shrugged.
“Since 2007, the official reason is terrorism, the threat from militants within India, or from neighboring Pakistan. But in truth, the interior of the Taj has been closed for decades, and much of the complex has been forbidden ground dating all the way back to the beginning. Shah Jahan was one of time’s great lovers, but he was also an Emperor, and a man of many dark secrets.”
“How dark?” Jack asked.
“When the complex was finished, the story goes, Shah Jahan invited all of the workers who had been involved in the construction to a grand party. As many as twenty thousand skilled engineers, architects, and manual laborers partied the night away under massive outdoor tents, imbibing from Jahan’s personal wine collection, dancing to the music from his royal musicians.”
Unger’s grin shifted slightly, more wolf than weasel.
“At first light, Jahan gathered the drunken workers beneath the main tent, all twenty thousand of them—and then he had all of their hands cut off, so that they could never build anything as beautiful as his love’s tomb again. Supposedly, the hands are buried somewhere beneath the Taj, in one of those many secret chambers.”
Jack saw a tremble move through Sloane’s shoulders. If Unger saw it, too, he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he seemed more than a little pleased with himself, for getting some form of emotion out of her. Jack took the heavy moment as a cue to shift the focus to the real reason he had sought out Unger among all the shady contacts his father had collected over four decades of living primarily off the grid.
Jack reached into an inner pocket in his jacket and retrieved the folded parchment from beneath Christ the Redeemer, spreading it out on the table in front of him next to the yellowing blueprint. He tried his best to cover much of the snake image with his hand and wrist, but he made sure Unger could clearly see the tiny pictogram—the half man–half woman holding the trident aloft—next to the second segment.
For a brief moment, Unger’s grin seemed to freeze in place, his eyes growing a fraction larger. Then he quickly tried to cover up his reaction, leaning closer to the pictogram.
“Ardhanarishvara,” he said, and Jack nodded.
Jack had recognized the Hindu god shortly after he’d first seen the pictograph, which was why he knew they’d needed to head to the next most recent of the Seven Wonders: the Taj Mahal. Though a slightly lesser known deity than many of the other major idols of the ancient Indian religion, Ardhanarishvara was the composite, androgynous form of the main Hindu god Shiva, blended with his consort Parvati. As such, Ardhanarishvara was depicted as half-male and half-female, split down the middle. There weren’t many temples in India—or anywhere, for that matter—dedicated to the androgynous deity, but it was clearly an image that pointed toward India. Jack just didn’t know what a Hindu god had to do with a Muslim mausoleum built by a lovesick, seventeenth-century Mughal emperor.
Unger rose away from the parchment, and then pointed toward a shelving unit nearer to the front of the room.
“I’ve got a few of the she-hes behind the one with the elephant snout, the too many hands, and the bit of the weight problem. One of ’em is top condition, gold and inlaid pearl, from a tomb up north. A steal at twenty thousand, and I’ll even include a paper that might get you through customs.”
Jack shook his head.
“Again, just looking for information.” He nodded toward the blueprint, still open on the table. “Specifically, anything you might know about a connection between Ardhanarishvara and the Taj Mahal.”
Unger paused, drumming his fingers against his jaw, then spun on his heels and dove back into the crate where he’d first gotten the blueprint. When he returned to the table, he was holding a stack of black-and-white photographs held together by a pair of rubber bands, and there was a new, almost manic energy flowing through him.
“Well, now, that’s interesting. Because everything I’ve just told you about the Taj, the great love story, the dark and brooding Shah Jahan—take all of that and shove it right in a fucking dumpster.”
He tore the rubber bands away and spread the photographs out next to the blueprint. Most of the pictures had been taken in extremely low light, and had faded so badly, it was hard to make out anything beyond shapes and shadows. But a few were a little more clear: Jack could see old stone statues, similar to the cheap ones in the souvenir shop out front, and the expensive, gilded ones in the glass shelves. Hindu gods, hidden within the shadows of some sort of underground chamber.
“There’s a growing movement pushing a pretty remarkable theory about the Taj,” Unger said. “That, in fact, its origins predate the Mughals and Shah Jahan, perhaps by hundreds of years. That Jahan had usurped the location for his architectural love story, and that originally, it was the site of a major Hindu shrine. Supposedly, some say, in those subground levels beneath the mausoleum, there are numerous sealed floors with hundreds of rooms, bricked over and never opened, containing evidence of the site’s original purpose.”
Sloane picked one of the photographs up, peering at one of the statues, a creature with a lion’s head and a woman’s body.
“These were taken inside the Taj? In one of the forbidden chambers?”
Unger held his hands out, palms up.
“I buy things and I sell things. Beyond that, I don’t ask a lot of questions. But I’ve heard stories. About an anteroom, six floors below the empty sarcophagus. An anteroom filled with statues. And at the end of that anteroom, a red brick door sealed for a very, very long time. And in front of that door, a particular statue of a particular Hindu god.”
Unger dug through the photographs until he’d found what he was looking for. He held the black-and-white picture up so both Jack and Sloane could see. The lighting was bad, the shadows so extensive that most of the photo was indecipherable, but near the very back corner, almost as much shadow as form, a small statue—half-man, half-woman, with a trident in its hand.
“Christ,” Jack whispered. Unger laughed.
“Off by a few thousand years, Jacky.”
Then Unger jabbed a finger toward the parchment and the pictogram.
“You’ll notice the she-he in my photo isn’t wearing the necklace.”
Jack looked down at the pictogram and noticed that indeed, Ardhanarishvara appeared to be wearing a tiny pendant.
“Ardhanarishvara isn’t usually depicted that way?”
Unger shook his head.
“May I?”
Jack didn’t like handing over the parchment, but he didn’t see what choice he had. Unger held it by the upper corners as gingerly as his thick fingers would allow. He put his face so close to the pictogram, the material of the parchment fluttered with each of his breaths.
“Well, look at this. It’s not a necklace at all. It’s a moondial.”
“A what?” Sloane asked.
Then Unger was up out of his seat, still holding the parchment. He rushed over to a shelving unit on the other side of the one holding the bejeweled masks and worked quickly at a combination lock. The shelves came open, and he retrieved a small stone object on a linked necklace chain, then hurried back to where Jack and Sloane were waiting.