Kingdom (19 page)

‘So, you made it. What’s the story?’

She took a deep breath.

‘I want to catch the plane tonight. I’ve got $5,000 in travellers’ cheques. I’ll cash them with the concierge and you can borrow the bone. That’s all I can afford – but you get the bone, like you wanted. I just have to be on that plane tonight.’

Jack Adams glanced back at the plump Indian man and then turned to her. If he felt any sense of conflict, he seemed to resolve it quickly.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you at the concierge desk in two minutes.’

Five minutes later a well-manicured hotel employee finished counting out the fresh banknotes and slid them across the marble counter top into Nancy’s waiting hands. My nest egg for my new life in Delhi, she thought ruefully. And I’m about to hand it over to this extremely untrustworthy man, all for the pleasure of being flown to Tibet so that I can put myself in even greater danger.

Suddenly she felt Adams’s hand clasp her elbow. With a hiss he whispered in her ear. ‘Go straight to the elevator and take it down to floor minus one. Then turn right and take the second door on the right marked “Staff only”. Then wait in the corridor.’

Urgently, he pushed her towards the bank of elevators on the far side of the marble corridor, then he marched briskly up the grand flight of steps that led to the Marchan Restaurant. In a state of confusion Nancy followed his bizarre command and instructed the bell-boy to take her to floor minus one. The doors opened and she turned right as instructed and found the second door on the right marked ‘Staff Only’. Her heart pounding, she pushed open the door and went through to the corridor beyond. It was spotlessly clean like the rest of the hotel, but featureless apart from a door at the far end and two other doors on the right-hand side marked ‘Housekeeping’. She was contemplating what to do next when Jack Adams burst through the door at the far end.

‘Quick, follow me. Hurry.’

She ran down the corridor towards him and through the open door and into the corner of a noisy underground kitchen.

‘Where are we going?’ she shouted as they hurried along.

‘We’re taking the scenic route.’

He grabbed her by the hand and marched her past a smiling cook, dressed in immaculate whites.

‘Why?’ she cried out.

‘Because there’s someone up there who seems to want to know where we’re going.’

Her heart skipped a beat, but Adams was moving too fast to notice her panic. He dragged her onwards, past a row of gleaming steel workbenches that were covered in neat, identical plates of food, waiting to be taken out to the hotel guests. A chef smiled at them from behind a steaming broiler and shouted to them in Hindi. Adams shouted something back and the chef laughed.

He must have spotted one of the people who was following her – perhaps someone had been standing in the lobby watching her and she hadn’t noticed. But then why didn’t he ask her who it was? Why didn’t he want to find out what was really going on? Surely he must be alarmed to find that she was being trailed? They reached a pair of swing doors. Jack barged through, dragging her along behind him, and they came out into a large underground loading area. A pair of vegetable delivery vans were parked side by side with their doors open, a kitchen porter was examining the contents of a pallet of lettuces that lay on the floor.

‘Here,’ said Adams before marching her past the delivery vans and over to a beaten-up old car that was waiting with its engine running.

‘Right,’ he continued, ‘we’ll leave my own car out front. Let’s get a move on, eh, Kim?’

She glanced through the window and now recognized the driver as Adams’s helper Kim. Mystified as to what all this meant, she ducked her head and climbed into the cramped and dusty back seat. Kim shifted over into the front passenger seat as Jack took the wheel and gunned the car up the delivery ramp and on to the hotel’s service access road. They passed through the back gates and out into the busy evening traffic.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Adams said. ‘We just had to get out of there as quickly as possible. I saw someone watching you change your travellers’ cheques and I was concerned someone had seen us talking in Rick’s Bar.’

‘I admire your quick thinking,’ said Nancy, drily.

‘Well, I’ve had some practice. It’s easy to make enemies in the antiques business.’

He swerved around a slow-moving lorry. Stunned into silence, Nancy sank back into the uncomfortable seat, marvelling at the good fortune of this particular case of mistaken identity: Adams had assumed that her pursuers were his own, and she had no intention of disabusing him of his mistake. He turned round one last time, his forehead dripping with sweat.

‘We’re on our way now. We’ll be at Indira Gandhi airport in half an hour, in time for the flight . . .’

As the monks carried him aloft through the jungle, Anton Herzog dreamed of his youth in Argentina. Deep in the grip of opium, in a trance-state that dimmed his pain and fear and plunged him deep into his past, the forest dimmed to a blur and then vanished. He was in dusty, sunlit Buenos Aires, in 1954. His mother, Anna, was getting him ready for school when a tall, gaunt, blond-haired man walked through the front door of the house and came straight into the kitchen. Anton was ten years old, playing with his breakfast and being scolded for it by his mother as she prepared him a packed lunch. He was a child again, it seemed, and he was watching his mother with the confusion and adoration of the child. He watched her from below, far below her lofty greatness, as she turned and stared at the man as if she was seeing a ghost, and then Herzog was hearing the man – he was whispering ‘Anna, Anna’ over and over again, as if he could not believe what he was seeing. There was a crash – and in the jungle Herzog twitched in his stupor, and tried to put out his hands – and now he saw that his mother had dropped everything – the cup she was holding in one hand, the plate from the other. She was oblivious; she did not mind at all. Instead she stepped over to the strange man and embraced him and clasped him to her as if she was afraid that if she didn’t he would disappear into thin air.

In the jungle Herzog’s mouth twitched, and he said, ‘Gustav Deutsch.’ The stretcher carrying him wobbled as the monks below stepped over a huge fallen tree trunk. His head lolled crazily but his body was tied in place, he could not fall. One of the monks tried to hear what he was saying – strange words, guttural sounds in a language he did not know.

His head lolling and his body tied, Herzog’s thoughts wandered across the globe, over the glittering pampas of Argentina, and now he remembered his eighteenth birthday, when Gustav had taken him away for the weekend on a short walking trip to celebrate his birthday. They were sitting on the side of a mountain overlooking a pine forest and Gustav said that the view reminded him very much of his native Austria, a land he hadn’t seen for eighteen years and which he doubted he would ever see again. With the peaceful forest below as a backdrop, Gustav Deutsch had told him for the first time, ‘I am your father. My real name is Felix Koenig.’

And Herzog remembered how he had stood up and walked into the woods and cried and cried until night began to fall. He did not know precisely why he was crying. He was young and overwhelmed. He could not understand. And as his head lolled and his body was carried high on a stretcher, tears coursed down Herzog’s shattered face; filling the deep hollows of his skull. He remembered how when he finally returned, when the gathering darkness frightened him back to his father again – this man who was now his father, and had ever been, though he had not known – Felix Koenig was still sitting exactly where he had left him, staring at the darkening pine forests below, looking weary and old. They went back to the campsite and lit a fire, and his father told him stories about the fabulous Himalayas, about India and the spice markets of Bombay, and about the holy rivers of Asia and the ancient lamaseries of Tibet.

As the monks carried him along – and he thought that he did not know where they were taking him, and that it no longer mattered – Herzog’s whole life passed before his eyes. He remembered his days studying oriental languages at Harvard, his youthful joy when he was offered the job as a cub reporter on the
Washington Post
. His days in Shanghai when he was a stringer, the happiest days of his life; his many journeys to explore the lands of the Chinese wild west: the fabulous cities of the old Silk Road, the vast Gobi and the endless sand sea of the Takla Makan desert; and his annual trips home to Argentina to spend the month with his parents. They had retired to Pilar – the air was better and they had managed to scrape together enough money to buy a small plot of land in the Pampas. There were woods and rivers and mountains in the distance. He remembered how he was taught the
I-Ching
by his father, how they had long conversations about Germany and the war. He had always been obsessed with the war, and what had happened in Germany that had allowed it to come about. An entire civilization had seemingly vanished overnight from the banks of the Rhine to be replaced by a new ethics, a new world order, a new morality. He remembered the endless circular conversations and his father’s complete incomprehension of his own motives.

And now one of the monks saw that the white man’s face was clenched into a grimace, and his hands were locked into fists, and he was trying to cry out. The skeletal body was tensed, as if anticipating an attack. Where are they taking me? Herzog wondered, but he could not think. He was not sure where he was, and sometimes the rolling motion of the stretcher made him think of a ship in a storm. He was on a ceaseless rolling ocean, and then he was flying – flying in a storm – and then he was sitting in the shade, in the garden in Buenos Aires. The rattling ceased, or he no longer noticed it. His father was beside him, telling him of Shangri-La. ‘I have seen it,’ he was saying. ‘I have seen cities and fabulous oases. I have seen Shangri-La.’ He was telling his son how they travelled with Reichsbank notes padding the linings of their fleece coats and bars of bullion, stamped with the swastika, weighing down their mules. In Koenig’s memories, Munich and Stalingrad mingled with Bombay and Tibet. His past poured out until it threatened to drown all sense of reality. Herzog had clung to hints and clues, a word here, a sentence there, as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a piece of driftwood, hoping that, if he could just hold on to one thing, then at some future point he would be thrown up on dry land – within touching distance of what had now become his obsession and his dream.

Finally, his father had spoken of a place of unrivalled tranquillity; a valley where the pagodas clung to the precipitous mountain sides like beautiful rare orchids. Such a place as exists only in dreams. He said they arrived there over the mountains and through steep gorges. It had taken them months and cost them the lives of three of their sherpas. They had been on the point of turning back when, early one morning, they awoke to find an emissary from the kingdom waiting up ahead on the path. The emissary was an old Chinese man, who spoke a quaint type of antiquated English and promised them hospitality and rest. They accepted the emissary’s invitation and followed him over a treacherous route – a route they would never have found on their own. Finally after two more days’ hard climbing among cloud-covered heights, they arrived. Among the pagodas, a deep silence reigned. Through focused meditation, a select brotherhood of Masters guided the world. They were kings of the subconscious mind, their writ extended into the darkest depths of the human soul.

Now Herzog knew he was alert, that he was not dreaming, this was lucid recall – he was struggling through the opium haze to remember everything. A select brotherhood, he was remembering. Through practices developed in former times, they have so improved their minds that they can leave their own egos behind and descend into this communal pool of being and thereby manipulate the fears and desires of the human race. For they are like gods, and all that we witness in our narrow lifetimes, be it war and destruction or peace and plenty, are but tiny fragments of their gigantic schemes. Their psychic machinery turns and empires rise and fall; for we are not the authors of our own destiny. We are but unknowing mortals, tumbling from love to hate and back again, believing in our state of delusion that we control events, that we are the active agents of our own destiny. Rather, we are owned; we are farmed in a sense; we are nurtured and developed, whilst these kings live in splendid glory, in palaces that cling to the walls of heaven itself. And there, in the heart of the palace, in the innermost sanctum, on a lectern where the walls were burnished gold, his father had held in his hands the most sacred and sought-after Aryan relic of all time.

And what was it? Herzog had asked him, and in the jungle his dry mouth framed the question. Inaudibly, and no one turned towards him. There came no answer. What did it look like? No answer. Had Felix Koenig seen these Masters? Yes. And why had he left? What had happened to his compatriots? How could he get to this wonderful land? Silence. Forgetfulness. No memories at all. Something had happened that had caused him to be ejected from this paradise, or he had ejected himself.

A splash of brilliant emerald green. Herzog saw it and believed it was in the past, or in the story his father had told him. But it might have been the forest cover shining in the sun. Then he was dreaming again, a dream within a dream; of high roads, golden highways, fields of beautiful flowers, a stone, a statue, a crystal, a Master, a King, a Queen, a palace, a lover, on an island somewhere in the clouds . . .

‘The clouds,’ he was muttering, as the monks carried him through the forest. And Herzog knew he was lost, and that he was alone.

They parked at a lonely gate in the airport perimeter fence. All around was darkness, except for the lights of aeroplanes rising into the night sky. Nancy walked quickly behind Jack Adams towards a small sentry box where the guard was slumped in his chair, watching television. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to simply ignore the guard or whether she should dig into her bag and present her passport.