Kingdom (41 page)

He smiled ruefully.

‘Well that’s wonderful. Congratulations. Thank you for showing it to me.’

But she couldn’t understand what it meant. She could see that his expression had changed, he had lost all his surface calm. His hands moved over the bone, as if he was afraid to touch it. Now he said, ‘There have not been many people who have ever understood my work Nancy, let alone believed in it. In fact there was really only one man . . .’ He gazed down at the bone.

‘It arrived by post two weeks ago – it was sent to my home in Delhi . . .’

Suddenly Nancy didn’t want to hear any more, and she even raised a hand, as if that might stop him. She was thinking she should walk away, but something rooted her to the spot. And Jack was continuing, his mouth was moving and now she had to hear what he was saying.

‘It was sent to me from Pome, near Bhaka gompa, it was sent from Tibet. There was a note attached, addressed to you. I’m afraid I read it before I realized it wasn’t for me. Perhaps I would have read it anyway, I don’t know. It had an exact longitude and latitude written on it – and it said something else as well.’

He placed a scrap of paper onto the table and gestured to her to pick it up.

‘Once again, I am the pawn,’ he said, managing a wan smile.

Nancy took the note and read what it said. Then she dropped it as if it was burning her hand. The sun was bright. All around them was a scene of such ordinary tranquillity – the people moving past, holding their coffees and their newspapers, as if there was no mystery to life at all. For half a minute, Jack Adams waited for her to say something, and then, with an embarrassed shrug, he packed away the bone.

‘I’m sorry I came here today, I just thought you might want to see it. I thought that it would stop you feeling guilty. But perhaps I’ve just made things worse for you . . .’

The note was there on her lap, just an innocuous piece of paper, but she could barely look down at it.

‘Look, it doesn’t mean much,’ said Jack. ‘God knows how he survived. I can only guess some tribes-people found him. It just means he’s alive and mad. Completely and utterly mad.’

Nancy found she still couldn’t speak. Slowly, she shook her head.

‘If it has made things worse, then I’m sorry,’ said Jack, and his face was so full of remorse that Nancy gripped his hand.

‘No, no, that’s not it. Thank you for coming. You did the right thing.’

Gingerly, she took up the note and read it again. To Jack, the six words it contained meant that Herzog was mad and lost to his crazy dreams. But to her – and this was why in a sense they had never understood each other, and even after everything they had shared there was a fundamental gulf between them – these words meant that her dream of normality had been shattered, that nothing would be the same again. She was changed, everything was changed for ever. Anxiously, her eyes scanned Tompkins Square Park. How long did the world have left? Days? Weeks? Then her gaze fell on the headline of the copy of the
New York Times
that lay on the table next to the box: ‘US Navy warns of new Cuban missile crisis as China surrounds Taiwan with nuclear submarines. President vows to use nuclear weapons to defend the island nation.’ A sudden wind chased litter down the sidewalk. Black clouds rolled across the sun, casting Tompkins Square into darkness.
Götterdämmerung
, the Twilight of the Gods. With Jack watching her, she read out the words on the note, as if they were a magic spell. The world was under the power of this spell and, she realized, no one would ever escape again.

‘Greetings, from the King of Shangri-La . . .’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The quotations from the
I Ching
or ‘Book of Changes’ that appear in this novel are based on the translations by C.J. Jung, Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes. I have also made use of many other sources, including Claire Scoby,
Last Seen in Tibet
(Rider, 2006), one of the greatest books ever written about Tibet by a foreigner; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke,
The Occult Roots of Nazism
(Tauris, 1985); Thupten Jinpa, Graham Coleman and Gyurme Dorje,
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: First Complete Translation
(Penguin Classics, 2006); and Patrick French,
Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land
(HarperCollins, 2003).