Kingdom (16 page)

‘Where did they go?’ asked the Abbot’s deputy.

‘Five months later,’ said Herzog, and now sweat was running down his face, so that the doctor tried to cool him with the wet rag again, ‘Felix Koenig walked into the German Consulate in Bombay, alone and seemingly out of his mind. He could not explain what had happened to the other members of the expedition and he refused to talk about where he had been, but he made a statement that Germany was heading in the wrong direction and that the German people was being misled. He was put aboard a ship to Hamburg, arrested on his arrival, sent to an asylum in the Alps, discharged from the army and relieved of all his privileges, a broken and exhausted man. Then a ray of light: Anna, a beautiful, vivacious twenty-two-year-old girl who was – alone of all people – able to distract and console him. They were married in ’44.’

And now Herzog was in tears, mingling with the sweat, and he turned his half-seeing eyes upwards. There, the jungle canopy. Or was it the firs of the Bavarian Alps? He did not know. The doctor wiped his brow again, and Herzog said, ‘It is true, what I say, everything is true. You do believe me?’

The Abbot’s deputy looked grimly at the doctor, who looked back at him. For a moment nobody spoke. Herzog sweated and wept in the fit of his delirium, though in a sense, thought the Abbot’s deputy, he was sounding more and more lucid, even though what he actually said was so strange.

‘We believe you,’ said the Abbot’s deputy softly, and Herzog turned his eyes towards him – bright blue but filmy with moisture.

‘Then I must tell you that Koenig became implicated in a plot to murder Hitler. When the secret police arrived at his house, he had been married for only three days. They had not even had time to register their marriage at the town hall; the policemen had literally to tear him from the arms of his Anna. He was given an unholy choice: either Auschwitz or the Russian Front. The following day Koenig was parachuted into the
Kessel
, the besieged triangle of German-occupied territory to the west of Stalingrad, in November 1944, with the rank of lieutenant. In charge of eleven young men, none of whom was over the age of eighteen, he was last seen leading his troops on a dawn raid, in an attempt to capture the ground floor of a derelict department store – just one more soldier lost in the brutal fighting on the Eastern Front . . .’

Now at last, Anton Herzog had exhausted himself. The Abbot’s deputy managed to stutter out a question. ‘So Felix Koenig died and that was the end of the dream of finding Shangri-La?’

Herzog sighed long and hard. Wearily, he struggled to say, ‘No, you don’t understand. He told all this to me, he taught me the
I-Ching
. I promised him I too would go to Shangri-La. Felix Koenig was my father.’

What on earth to do? So much had happened, and so quickly. Nancy’s world had been turned upside down. Everywhere she looked, more and more mysteries seemed to be emerging. And yet she felt more energetic and focused at this moment than she had ever felt in her old monotonous life in New York.

She looked at her watch: eight p.m. The flight she could catch if she wanted to get to Tibet unnoticed by the authorities left in four hours. There was no point pretending to herself that she wasn’t very tempted. The injustice of her arrest, the lack of support given to Herzog by Dan Fischer and the paper, the chance of getting in on the greatest story of all time, and now the tragic plight of Herzog’s fiancée, all motivated her to go in search of him – and yet still she prevaricated, still she couldn’t decide. Krishna’s arguments were perfectly sensible and his logic was overwhelming. Quite simply it was reckless to pursue Anton Herzog into Tibet, if indeed he was in Tibet at all. Dan had given her clear instructions to stay in Delhi and do some local-colour stories; the police had bailed her on condition that she stayed put. She had made snap decisions throughout her life, but she had never before been drawn to a course of action so clearly fraught with danger.

Krishna had gone to make a phone call, and she could hear him in his office, though his words were indistinct. She felt helpless and alone.

For some reason she could not entirely unfurl, she could not just forget about Anton Herzog. It perplexed her that he had been abandoned, but it perplexed her too that she felt such a significant sense of loyalty to him – it would be so much simpler just to leave his fate in the hands of Dan and the police. He was a colleague she admired, but he was not a friend after all and, in a way, he hardly needed more people searching for him; he already had an array of spooks combing the mountains and plains of the Far East to find him. Admire him, she told herself, but don’t charge in there and imagine you can save him.

For all she knew, Anton Herzog wanted to be lost. That was a whole other strand she hadn’t really considered. And perhaps he wanted no part of Maya’s life. Perhaps he had wanted to escape before the child was born. She had always heard him spoken of as a confirmed bachelor, after all. But despite the urgings of her reason, something was still drawing her in. The unresolved questions, turning in her brain: what had Herzog really been doing all these years in India? What was he really doing in Tibet? Why had he watched over her career? What in his past had propelled him to these extremities, to such obsessions and dangerous acts? Most of all she wanted to know what was the great story that had caused Herzog to disappear into Tibet like a great hunter in search of a mythical beast?

Despite all these questions, all the caveats she rehearsed to herself, she knew she had to try – nothing else would do. And if she did, something told her that all the threads of the last twenty-four hours would be drawn together: the inconsistent family history, the disturbing fact that the second medal had the same design as the ancient bone trumpet – even Jack Adams’s sudden enthusiasm to take her to Tibet: all would make sense, all would become clear.

Then, by chance, her eyes fell on the Oracle. A wave of adrenalin flooded through her body. It somehow seemed utterly appropriate. She reached out for the book and with the noise of Krishna murmuring on the phone in the other room she asked the question and tossed the coin six times.

Oracle, please help me. You have to tell me what to do.

Hexagram 42, Increase. She looked it up.

Two definitions for the price of one, she thought. She flicked to the back of the book and looked up ‘Increase’, number 42. Uncertainly, she scanned the text, trying to fathom the cryptic meaning. Gradually, like fog clearing on a sunny day, the advice became absolutely clear. It made the hairs on her arms stand up, to perceive that it actually made sense, that the Oracle was offering her lucid suggestions about how she should act. It read:

The Himalayas! She almost cried out loud. Surely the Oracle was telling her to cross the Himalayas and go to Tibet.

The King? She almost fell off her chair. ‘Koenig’ was the German word for King. It could not be a coincidence.

The Oracle knew that she had suffered unfortunate events but that she felt enlivened by her new situation. How? How did it know that? Was the Prince the same as the King? She did not know. She turned from the definition of Hexagram 42 to the definition of Hexagram 43. It had the ominous name of ‘The Judgement’.

My God! she thought. Unless she was lurching into over-interpretation, finding significance where there was none, it seemed as if the Oracle was telling her to go. She was almost certain of it – the message was: Get up, go to Tibet and find the King. Find Koenig– Herzog. There would be danger, it was necessary to notify one’s own city – and she wondered if that meant she should make her peace with Dan Fischer, explain everything, or perhaps with Krishna – but the urging seemed insistent. She should go at once.

It was incredible. She exhaled in amazement and relief. She closed the book and sat there for a moment, trying to gather her thoughts. As soon as the book shut she was plagued with doubts. Perhaps she was reading way too much into the ancient definitions. Perhaps it was just coincidence that it spoke of a King and great obstacles. But then she wondered if that mattered. The fact she interpreted it thus was compelling anyway. Clearly she wanted to go to Tibet. The cryptic words of the ancient book had pushed her over the edge, had forced her to make up her mind: she was going to Tibet. She was going to find Anton Herzog and – she could not disguise the thrill this gave her – she was going to unearth an immense story.

Krishna walked back into the room with a tea tray. Nancy watched him place it on his desk and then carefully transfer the two cups. He thinks he’s persuaded me, she thought, he thinks I’m giving up, the poor man.

‘Krishna?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you please call me a cab? I’m going back to the apartment.’

There was something in her tone of voice that betrayed her at once, she could tell. His head hanging dejectedly, Krishna set down his cup of tea. She saw his hands were trembling and she regretted once more that she was causing him such anxiety.

‘Nancy,’ he said, quietly, ‘you are not thinking of getting in contact with that man Jack Adams again, are you? You’re not going to take all this nonsense any further?’

‘You’ve already made your opinion perfectly clear and I promise I will make it absolutely clear to anyone that you were totally opposed. I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to do. If you can bear to, it would be great if you could just help me a little. There must be more we can find out about Anton and his family. Call our German office and get them to help, try anything.’

But Krishna was shaking his head. ‘Nancy, I am not having anything more to do with this. Dan Fischer has expressly said you should stay in Delhi and he has given no indication that he wants us spending our time looking into Anton’s disappearance. The
Trib
isn’t a private detective agency, we’ve got a paper to write.’

‘Do you actually believe what you’re saying, Krishna, or are you just trying to save your ass?’ said Nancy in a sharper tone, which made Krishna face her directly and stare at her in silence for a moment.

Then he said, no longer trying to suppress his anger, ‘With respect, you know very little about this region. I know you have an excellent reputation as a journalist, but you are not a regional expert. You do not speak the languages. You have never even been to Tibet. I was advised that you are brilliant but impulsive, and that you would need a lot of advice about local detail,’ he said bluntly. ‘I didn’t quite realize I would be spending the first day trying to persuade you out of a crazy scheme like this, but if that comes within the remit of advising you then that is what I have to do.’

‘And I appreciate your advice,’ said Nancy, speaking more quietly now, though she too felt a surge of rage. ‘I have been listening to your advice. You’ve given me nothing but advice since I arrived. Thank you. Now, as an intelligent free-thinking person, equipped with all your advice, I have made up my mind. I’m going and that’s that. If you feel like helping, then please find everything you can about Felix Koenig. I’ll be on my cell if you get any leads.’

‘You’ll be on your cell until you vanish too, most likely,’ said Krishna.

‘Did you argue like this with Anton? Or was he too much of a myth? Too much of a character? Too much of a man? Is it only young female journalists who get this kind of treatment from you?’

‘That is out of order,’ Krishna shouted back. ‘Anton knew the region better than I do. It would have been inappropriate to question his judgement. You are simply being arrogant.’

‘Well that’s interesting,’ said Nancy. ‘In men, I find this sort of behaviour is more often called determination. In women, it always gets called arrogance.’

Krishna shrugged as she said this. ‘It is pointless defending myself against such a ridiculous charge,’ he said.

‘I agree, it’s pointless, our whole discussion,’ said Nancy. ‘I’m sorry I can’t persuade you to see things my way. But I will assure Dan Fischer that you have done everything to explain to me what a bad idea this is. You will not be reproached in any way, I promise you.’ Now Nancy picked up Herzog’s copy of the Oracle and grabbed her jacket from the back of the chair.

‘I just hope you can live with your conscience,’ she said. And then she marched out of the office, not looking back.

Nancy knelt on the floor of the apartment bedroom and stuffed some clothes from her suitcase into her small knapsack. Whatever she did next, whether she stayed in India or not, she wanted to leave this place. It was the scene of her arrest and it was filled to overflowing with memories of Anton Herzog. She wanted to disappear, to throw her pursuers off her trail, get space to think.

The interior of the flat was dark; she had chosen not to turn the lights on. She was almost certain that her cab had been followed back to the apartment, though perhaps it was just that the strain was beginning to make her paranoid. But she preferred now to be in the semi-darkness. If they were watching her – whoever they might be – at least it would be harder for them to see what she was doing.