The Stolen

by T. S. Learner

  He instructed Jorges to translate, binoculars still held to his face. But before the astrochemist had repeated the request in Hindi, the youth answered in English. ‘This is not a question of money; this is a question of survival. I thank you for your kind offer, but I go now.’ He scrambled down the incline. Olek started after him but Janus grabbed his shoulder.

  ‘Let him go,’ he ordered, then returned to scanning the shores of the lake below through the binoculars. Towards the centre of the crater he caught sight of a bright yellow-orange turban winding its way towards the temple ruins. He focused the binoculars onto the bobbing head, then swung them slightly left. Matthias von Holindt’s distinctive figure reaching high above the canopy of bushes appeared, a woman walking behind him – it had to be the American girlfriend, Janus noted with satisfaction. He watched as the three of them disappeared into the temple then lowered the binoculars.

  ‘We’re going down there,’ he told Jorges. ‘Why don’t you lead? It’s your territory, after all.’

  Janus waited until the astrochemist was several feet below him, scrambling down the steep slope towards the lakes, then nodded to Olek, who took out his revolver.

  Liliane stared at her reflection in the polished glass of Mueller Bank. She looked years younger, like an innocent schoolgirl, with her hair in pigtails. She’d cleaned herself up in a public toilet and taken off her rings and piercings in an attempt to make herself unrecognisable. She had met Thomas’s granddaughter a couple of times and they had the same hair colour and were roughly the same size. It was the only way she could think of to reach the banker himself. She checked herself again, tugging down the hem of her school skirt. I have succeeded, she told herself, with a faint smile. She glanced at the bronze symbol of the bank hanging above the heavy glass doors. Inside her pocket the small gun seemed to burn with a heat of its own. Now, without a single qualm, she pushed her way through the heavy door and walked up to reception.

  ‘Heda Mueller, I’m here to see my grandfather,’ she told the receptionist, who reached for the phone. ‘It’s a surprise,’ Liliane added in a high, childish voice and the receptionist smiled back understandingly then buzzed her through to the inner chambers.

  The statue of Lord Shiva meditating, one arm held up and pointing to the heavens, dominated the small temple. It sat in a carved niche surrounded by reliefs depicting his relationship with his consort Kali, narrating the various stages of their marriage from their union to his death on the battlefield: the frenzied goddess stood over his mutilated corpse. Centuries of wear had blunted the features of the deities and the armies carved in the stone reliefs, and Shiva himself was missing several fingers. As soon as they had entered the temple the temperature had cooled dramatically, and Matthias had noticed a metallic smell.

  ‘The villagers think I am practising my hermitage here but they are wrong. This is merely the shell, the first level of holiness; the real sanctuary is far, far deeper,’ the sadhu explained as he approached the statue of Shiva. ‘Please, follow me.’ He gestured to Matthias and Helen then stepped behind the statue. Matthias followed cautiously, just as the sound of a gun being fired echoed around the valley outside. Matthias and Helen froze.

  ‘What was that?’ Helen whispered.

  ‘Hunters, my friends.’ Ravi’s voice came from the darkened recess behind the deity. ‘Nothing to be afraid of.’

  Unconvinced, Helen turned to Matthias, her eyes wide. ‘Do you think we’ve been followed?’

  ‘It’s possible – we should hurry.’

  Matthias peered in front of him; now there was no sign of the sadhu.

  ‘Ravi?’ Matthias called out, and suddenly a stone seemed to shift in front of him as an opening appeared in the otherwise solid wall. The holy man stood in the darkened entrance of a cave, holding aloft a paraffin lantern, the light making a kaleidoscope of shadows. ‘I am here, my friends; join me.’

  Moments later they stood at the top of a narrow stairway that had been hewn out of the rock, the line of rough steps winding into the bowels of the Earth.

  ‘This was made long before the temple was built; the temple itself is just an artifice, a façade to distract the unbeliever,’ Ravi told them, as he led them down, ‘and the villagers have forgotten its existence. I myself learned about it only from another devotee, a man who was over a hundred years in age before he abandoned his earthly existence.’

  Matthias, amazed by the sure-footedness of the sadhu, had to keep his head bent to avoid hitting it against the low ceiling. Helen was between Matthias and Ravi, her hands carefully touching the wall as they descended.

  ‘Matthias, look at this!’ She pointed to ancient graffiti, Sanskrit and Hindi symbols that had been carved into the stone; one piece of graffiti appeared to be pictorial – an image of a star seemingly crashing out of the sky.

  ‘This is the Sanskrit word for sky, and this means gold – or metal,’ she said, pointing to the deeply etched markings.

  Ravi looked up at them. ‘Please, we must hurry – we will not be able to make our way back if night falls.’

  Two carved pillars marked the entrance of the temple. One was of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of fortune, the other was a statue of Vishnu’s consort Lakshmi; both had been carved out of the actual rock of the cave. Pushing an overhanging vine, Janus paused for a moment, staring into the shadowy interior, his gun held ready, then stepped into the temple with Olek following closely.

  Inside, the cold air rising up from the stone interior crept into Janus’s bones, and the ghostly profile of the large statue of Shiva seemed to stare accusingly at him from the darkness. Despite his previous bravado, he shivered, then, glancing down at the stone floor he saw that the thin layer of moss there was marked with footprints – very recent footprints. Silently he pointed them out to Olek, tracing the trail to the front of the statue then behind it. Janus stared into the narrow space. A full-sized man would barely fit. He looked down again: the footprints – muddy outlines pressed into the green moss – definitely led there. He walked back out in front of the statue, then to the other side – no footprints there. He walked back and began inching his way behind the statue, his back pressed firmly against the stone – and suddenly it gave.

  Judging by the smoothness of the walls, the cavern the stairs led to had originally been hollowed out by water, Matthias guessed, and at the far end there were several stalactites growing from the ceiling – thin, glistening threads of crystals. Ravi walked out into the centre and, using the flame from his lamp, lit a couple of brass oil lanterns hanging from hooks embedded in the rock. Immediately the scale of the cavern was revealed. It was about twenty-five feet across, the ceiling low, only about ten foot at its highest point, narrowing to a couple of feet on either side. Matthias peered up; the ceiling appeared to be strangely blackened by soot or smoke.

  ‘This is the little temple; it sits in the heart of Kali. You are the first Europeans to have seen it. Truly an honour.’ Ravi stood, his voice resonating against the stone walls. He gestured, holding up his lantern, and Matthias could now see that each end of the cavern had been carved and transformed into traditional temple walls.

  ‘This is the east end of the temple, here. There used to be a statuette of Kali in her manifestation of the Maternal. All that is left is the infant Shiva…’

  Ravi walked over, holding up the lantern, and now Matthias and Helen could see a small stone male infant lying on the floor of the empty niche. The deity was smiling, his arms reaching up to an absent mother, his chubby legs kicking in the air.

  ‘This manifestation of Kali is not well known in the West,’ the holy man said, ‘but there is a story that Kali, after defeating her enemies and delirious with blood fever, was whirling madly on the battlefield and the Lord God Shiva, worried for the stability of the world, decided to come to her in the form of a crying baby. And the goddess, upon seeing the abandoned, crying infant, stopped her ululations and bent down to breastfeed the baby and order was restored.’

 
‘When was the statuette taken?’ Helen asked, her voice trembling with excitement.

  ‘Many, many centuries ago, by the first devotees of this holy place. I believe they wished to protect her from destruction by invaders, for to keep her safe is to keep the world safe.’

  ‘Matthias, I think this could be where our statuette belongs,’ Helen said in German.

  Suddenly he noticed the far wall, which appeared to curve out of the shadows like the side of a ball. Fascinated, he began to walk towards the opposite altar.

  ‘Careful my friend, that altar is of Kali as the slayer of demon Raktabija, the destructive manifestation of the goddess. It is not wise for the uninitiated to approach her.’

  Now Matthias could clearly see the statuette of the goddess; the dancing figure held miniature duplicates of the demon, some with their limbs and heads bitten off. The goddess herself had her head thrown back, as she held the demon with one of her four arms, her gaping red mouth in an act of decapitation. Despite the different depiction of the deity it was clearly the match to the Kalderash Kali statuette, the surface the same glittering metal as the other statuette.

  ‘Helen, you have to look at this!’ he shouted as excitement dried his mouth. Turning, he grabbed the lantern off Ravi and lunged back towards the altar to study the curved wall. Immediately the whole side of the curved rock lit up – the surface sprinkled with silver-like bluish flints that made the light bounce back.

  ‘Oh my God, this is it. Helen, this is the meteorite itself!’

  ‘So it is,’ she whispered, awed, now standing beside him. ‘And the statuette —’

  ‘Is the companion piece to the Kalderash statuette,’ Matthias turned back to the curved surface of the meteorite. He was just about to touch it when he noticed a spark jump from one pitted hollow to another.

  ‘It’s live,’ he murmured, astonished.

  Ravi stepped forward. ‘The monsoon was very bad last year. There were terrible storms; a bolt of lightning hit the temple on the first day of Kali Puja. I saw it with my own eyes two miles away, and it lit up the sky like a crack in heaven. It woke the stone, the stone of Kali,’ Ravi said and began to walk slowly to the centre of the temple.

  Amazed, Matthias turned back to the meteorite. ‘It’s charged – the whole rock is charged.’ He swung back to Helen and grabbed her. ‘Do you know what this means to my research? We’re there! We are actually looking at the future of a whole new industry!’

  He lifted her up and swung her round in his excitement. As her feet touched the ground again they became aware of a slight crunching underfoot. Horrified, they saw that there was a thick layer of white ash and ground bone covering the floor of the cavern. It was a crematorium of some sort – the layer of soot on the ceiling now made sense to Matthias.

  Matthias looked over to Ravi. The sadhu was kneeling on the floor, smearing his naked body with the white ash. He looked up.

  ‘Yes, Messenger, this is Smashan-Kali herself. Many devotees have offered Bhakthi here in her heart, as I myself will do, under your guidance,’ he told Matthias in a chant-like voice.

  ‘Bhakthi?’ Matthias said to Helen.

  ‘A meditation to Kali, a last meditation. Matthias, you have to do something!’

  Matthias swung back to Ravi. ‘As the Messenger I forbid you…’

  But Ravi, ignoring him, began swaying backwards and forwards, then sat cross-legged. He closed his eyes and went into a trance.

  ‘At the dissolution of things, it is Kala – Time – who will devour all,’ he chanted in English, then opened his eyes wide and addressed the statuette itself. ‘And by reason of this He is called Mahakala, a manifestation of Lord Shiva, and since Thou devourest Mahakala himself, it is Thou who art the Supreme Primordial Kalika. Because Thou devourest Kala, Thou art Kali, the original form of all things, and because Thou art the Origin of and devourest all things Thou art called the Adya, the Primordial One.’ With a dramatic gesture he reached into his loin cloth and pulled out a curved knife, holding it over his chest. ‘Thou art the Beginning and ending of All!’ Ravi continued and then, just as he was about to sink the knife into his heart, a gunshot rang out from the back of the temple and he fell face forward dead into the ash.

  ‘Don’t move!’ Janus and Olek stepped out from the shadows, the Russian’s gun now trained on Matthias and Helen.

  The luxurious office was empty. Liliane, her shoes silent against the thick carpet, made her way to the swivel chair behind the desk. She wanted to be him first, to see what it might be like to sit in his skin, live with his godless soul. It felt invincible to be up there looking down at the city – and all this he had created. No wonder he thought he was untouchable, she surmised, amazed at the clarity of her intention. In front of her stretched the oak desk, on it a photograph of Thomas Mueller as a young man. She picked it up and stared at it – to her surprise the red-headed man staring back at her looked handsome, sensitive. It was hard to equate him with the older Thomas. Next to the photograph was an antique pen holder and a paperweight, a dome that you shook with a tiny cityscape of Altstadt inside – all placed on the polished surface very deliberately. This was a man she thought she knew, the man who held her at her christening, someone she remembered being at her parents’ table throughout her childhood, her godfather. Trying not to think or feel too much, Liliane reached for the paperweight and shook it; tiny snowflakes showered down, burying the miniature Zürich and all its dirty secrets. It made her think about her mother. The way she died. At the sound of the door handle she spun round so that her back was to the door and her face was hidden.

  ‘Heggie, what a wonderful surprise!’ Thomas’s voice was unmistakable. She waited until he closed the door, then turned to face him, holding the revolver steady, pointing it directly at him.

  ‘Liliane!’ Thomas looked aghast. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Lock the door and sit down. Don’t even think about yelling out or picking up the phone.’

  Thomas didn’t move.

  ‘If you think I’m bluffing or that I don’t know how to use this you’re wrong. Christoph used to take me out hunting; I’m a crack shot.’

  Thomas sat down slowly in the leather chair opposite the desk. ‘We thought you were dead. How wonderful you’re safe! Your father —’

  ‘Shut up. I’ve only come here for one thing, Thomas: to know why you did it, why you had my mother killed.’

  ‘Liliane, you must be very stressed at this precise moment, your imagination running riot, understandable after the terrible things your father has done, what you must have witnessed —’

  ‘Cut the crap. I know the truth.’

  ‘Liliane, you know I loved your mother. I was the one who first set her up in her career… who got her the job at the Watch Company…’

  ‘Which makes your act even more despicable.’ She aimed the gun at his head and stood. Only now did Thomas’s confident façade crumble slightly.

  ‘All right. I’ll tell you. Marie was good, the best financial officer I’ve ever known. She was meticulous. Unfortunately Christoph was not, and in retrospect I suppose it was only a matter of time before she found the records…’ Thomas sighed, running a hand over his bald head, suddenly looking a lot older. ‘I was fond of her, you know, but we couldn’t afford for the truth to come out.’

  ‘The involvement with the Nazis?’

  ‘Christoph was careless; he’d concealed some papers at the Holindt schloss and Marie found them, undeniable evidence in any court. She called me, someone she had always completely trusted, straight away. The rest was easy. She was a creature of habit. Even I knew she always skied at the same time of day.’

  ‘There were two explosions.’

  ‘Dynamite triggering an avalanche – a small one but big enough. And so she was buried, along with the truth. It was exciting to watch, really it was. Extraordinary, really, how everyone believed it – even Christoph, at least for a while.’

  ‘I hate you.’ Her voice was ste
ady and for a moment she loved herself for staying calm, for the sense of total clarity that flooded through her like light. Thomas looked over, a slight smile playing across his lips.

  ‘But tell me, Liliane, who do you think the police will believe? A hysterical teenager with a history of drug addiction and an unhinged father – or one of the most prominent bankers and upstanding citizens in Zürich?’

  ‘If you move, Matthias, Olek will shoot the girl,’ Janus told them calmly.

  Both Matthias and Helen raised their hands.

  ‘So Inspector Klauser was right, then: you were one of them: Janus Zellweger.’ Matthias tried to keep the fear out of his voice, the imprint of Latcos’s dagger, hidden in the belt at his back, now burning against his skin. Staring across at the arms manufacturer and his bodyguard he tried to guess how many steps it would take to reach them.