The Adventures Of Indiana Jones (13 page)

He surveyed the wreckage. He wondered if there were any more takers. The urge for action he felt was exalting.

Nobody moved except the merchants who had seen their stalls wrecked by some lunatic with a bullwhip. He began to back away, moving toward the door in the wall, reaching for the bolt as he did so. He could hear Marion banging on the wood. But before he could slide the bolt, a burnoosed figure lunged toward him with a machete. Indy raised his arm to fend off the blow, catching the man by the wrist and struggling with him.

Marion stopped banging and backed away from the door, looking for some other access to the square. Damn Indy, she thought, for thinking he’s got some God-given right to protect me! Damn him for an attitude that belongs to the Middle Ages! She turned down the narrow alleyway in which she found herself and then stopped dead: an Arab was walking toward her, walking in quick, menacing steps. She slipped down the nearest alley, heard the man coming up from behind.

A dead end.

A wall.

She hoisted herself onto the top of the wall, listening to the Arab grunt as he chased her. She scrambled over, got to the other side, hid herself in an alcove between buildings. The Arab unsuspectingly went past her and, after a moment, Marion peered out. He was coming back again, this time in the company of one of the Europeans. She stepped back inside the alcove, breathing hard even as she tried despairingly to still her lungs, to stop the rattle of her heart. What do you do in a situation like this? she thought. You hide, don’t you? You plain hide. She had stepped back further into the alcove, seeking the shadows, the dark places, when she encountered a rattan basket. Okay, she thought, so you feel like one of the Forty Thieves, but there was an old saying about any port in a storm, right? She climbed inside the basket, pulled the lid in place and remained there in a crouching position. Be still. Don’t move. She could hear, through the slits in the rattan, the sound of the two men skulking around. They spoke to one another in an English so broken, she thought, as to be in need of a major splint.

Look here.

In this place I already looked.

She remained very still.

What she didn’t see, what she couldn’t see, was the monkey sitting on a wall that overlooked the alcove; she could hear it chattering suddenly, wildly, and it was a few moments before she understood what the noise was. That monkey, she thought. It followed me. The affectionate betrayal. Please, monkey, go away, leave me alone. But she felt herself being raised up now, the basket lifted. She peered through the narrow slats of the basket and saw that the Arab and the European were her bearers, that she was being carted, like refuse, on their shoulders. She struggled. She hammered with her fists against the lid, which was tight now.

In the bazaar Indy had pushed the man with the machete aside; but the place was in turmoil now, angry Arab merchants milling around, gesticulating wildly at the crazy man with the whip. Indy backed away against the door, fumbled for the bolt, saw the machete come toward him again. This time he lunged with his foot, knocking the man backward into the rest of the crowd. Then he worked the door open and was out in the alley, looking this way and that for some sign of her. Nothing. Only two guys at the other end of the alley carrying a basket.

Where the hell did she go?

And then, as if from nowhere, he heard her voice call his name, and the echo was strangely chilling.

The basket.

He saw the lid move as the two carriers turned the corner. Briefly, a strange chattering sound drew his attention from the basket, and he looked upward to see the monkey perched on the wall. It might have been deriding him. He was filled with an overwhelming urge to draw his pistol and murder the thing with one well-placed shot. Instead, he ran quickly in the direction of the two men. He took the same turn they had made, seeing how fast they were running ahead of him with the basket wobbling between them.

How could those guys move so quickly while they carried Marion’s weight? he wondered. They were always one turn ahead of him, always one step in front. He followed them along busy thoroughfares filled with shoppers and merchants, where he had to push his way through frantically. He couldn’t lose sight of that basket, he couldn’t let it slip away like this. He pushed and shoved, he thrust people aside, he ignored their complaints and outcries. Keep moving. Don’t lose sight of her.

And then he was conscious of a weird noise, a chanting sound that had somber undertones, a certain melancholy to it. He couldn’t place it, but somehow it stopped him; he was disoriented. When he started to move again, he realized he had lost her. He couldn’t see the basket now.

He started to run again, pushing through the crowd. And the strange sound of the lament, if that was what it was, became louder, more piercing.

At the corner of an alley he stopped.

There were two Arabs in front of him carrying a rattan basket.

Immediately, he drew his whip and brought one of them down, hauled the whip away, then let it flash again. It cracked against the other Arab’s leg, encircling it, entwining it like a slender reptile. The basket toppled over and he stepped toward it.

No Marion.

Confused, he looked at what had spilled out of the thing.

Guns, rifles, ammo.

The wrong basket!

He backed out of the alley and continued up the main street of bazaars, and the odd wailing sound became louder still.

He entered a large square, overwhelmed by the sudden sight of misery all around him: a square of beggars, the limbless, the blind, the half-born who held out stumps of arms in front of themselves in some mindless groping for help. There was the smell of sweat and urine and excrement here, a pungency that filled the air with the tangibility of a solid object.

He crossed the square, avoiding the beggars.

And then he had to stop.

Now he knew the nature of the moaning sound.

At the far side of the square there was a funeral procession moving. Large and long, obviously the funeral march of some prominent citizen. Riderless horses hauled the coffin, priests chanted from the Koran, keening women walked up front with their heads wrapped in scarves, servants moved behind, and at the rear, cumbersome and clumsy, came the sacrificial buffalo.

He stared at the procession for a time. How the hell could he go through that line?

He looked at the coffin, ornate, opulent, held aloft; and then he noticed, through a brief break in the line, the basket being carried by the two men toward a canvas-covered truck parked in the farthest corner of the square. It was impossible to be sure over the noise of the mourners, but he thought he heard Marion screaming from inside.

He was about to move forward and shove his way through the procession when it happened.

From the truck a machine gun opened fire, raking the square, scattering the line of mourners and the mob of beggars. The priests kept up their chant until the blasts burst through the coffin itself, sending splinters of wood flying, causing the mummified corpse to slide through the broken lid to the ground. The mourners wailed with renewed interest. Indy zigzagged toward a well on the far side of the square, squeezing off a couple of shots in the direction of the truck. He slid behind the well, popping up in time to see the rattan basket being thrown into the back of the truck. Just then, almost out of his line of vision, barely noticeable, a black sedan pulled away. The truck, too, began to move.

It swung out of the square.

Before it could go beyond his sight, Indy took careful aim, an aim more precise than any other in his lifetime, and squeezed the trigger. The driver of the truck slumped forward against the wheel. The truck swerved, hit a wall, rolled over.

As he was about to move toward it, he stopped in horror.

He realized then he could never feel anything so intense in his life again, never so much pain, so much anguish, such a terrible, heavy sense of numbness.

He realized all this as he watched the truck explode, flames bursting from it, fragments flying, the whole thing wrecked; and what he also realized was that the basket had been thrown into the back of an ammunitions truck.

That Marion was dead.

Killed by a bullet from his own gun.

How could it be?

He shut his eyes, hearing nothing now, conscious only of the white sun beating against his closed lids.

He walked for what seemed like a long time, unknowing, uncaring, his mind drifting back time and again to that point where he had leveled the gun and shot the driver. Why? Why hadn’t he considered the possibility that the truck might be carrying something dangerous?

You ruined her life when she was a girl.

Now you’ve ended it when she was a woman.

He walked the narrow streets, the alleys thronged with people, and he blamed himself over and over for the death of Marion.

It was more pain than he could think about, more than he could bear. And he knew of only one remedy. He knew of only one reliable form of self-medication. So he found himself walking toward the bar where, earlier, he had arranged to meet Sallah. That seemed locked in some dim past now, another world, a different life.

Even a different man.

He saw the bar, a rundown place. He stepped inside and was assailed by thick tobacco smoke, the smell of spilled booze. He sat on a stool by the bar. He ordered a fifth of bourbon and drank one monotonous glass after another, wondering—as he grew more inebriated—what it was that made some people tick while others were as animated as broken clocks; what was that clockwork so necessary to successful relationships that some people had and others didn’t. He let the question go around in his mind until it shed its sense, floating through alcoholic perceptions like a ghost ship.

He reached for another drink. Something touched his arm and he twisted his head slowly to see the monkey on the bar. That stupid primate to which Marion had become so witlessly attached. Then he remembered that this idiot creature had splashed a kiss on Marion’s cheek. Okay, Marion liked you, I can tolerate you.

“Want a drink, you baboon?”

The monkey put its head to one side, watching him.

Indy was aware of the barman watching him as if he were a fugitive from a nearby asylum. And then he was aware of something else, too: three men, Europeans—Germans, he assumed, from their accents—had crowded around him.

“Someone wishes your company,” one of them said.

“I’m drinking with my friend here,” Indy said.

The monkey moved slightly.

“Your company is not requested, Mr. Jones. It is
demanded.”

He was hauled from the stool and rushed into a back room. Chattering, squealing, the monkey followed. The room was dim and his eyes smarted from smoke.

Someone was sitting at a table in the far corner.

Indy realized that this confrontation had been inevitable.

René Belloq was drinking a glass of wine and swinging a chain on which hung a watch.

“A monkey,” Belloq said. “You still have admirable taste in friends, I see.”

“You’re a barrel of laughs, Belloq.”

The Frenchman grimaced. “Your sense of repartee dismays me. It did so even when we were students, Indiana. It lacks panache.”

“I ought to kill you right now—”

“Ah, I understand your urge. But I should remind you that I did not bring Miss Ravenwood into this somewhat sordid affair. And what is eating you, my old friend, is the knowledge that
you
are responsible for that. No?”

Indy sat down, slumping into the chair opposite Belloq.

Belloq leaned forward. “It also irks you that I can see through you, Jones. But the plain fact is, we are somewhat alike.”

Through blood-shot eyes Indy stared at Belloq. “No need to get nasty.”

“Consider this,” Belloq said. “Archaelogy has always been our religion, our faith. We have both strayed somewhat from the so-called true path, admittedly. We are both given to the occasional . . . dubious . . . transaction. Our methods are not so different as you pretend. I am, if you like, a shadowy reflection of yourself. What would it take to make you the same as me, Professor? Mmm? A slight cutting edge? A sharpening of the killer instinct, yes?”

Indy said nothing. Belloq’s words came to him like noises muffled by a fog. He was talking nonsense, pure nonsense, which sounded grand and true because it was delivered in a French accent that might be described as quaint, charming. What Indy heard was the hissing of some hidden snake.

“You doubt me, Jones? Consider: What brings you here? The lust for the Ark, am I correct? The old dream of antiquity. The historic relic, the quest—why, it might be a virus in your blood. You dream of things past.” Belloq was smiling, swinging a watch on a chain. He said, “Look at this watch. Cheap. Nothing. Take it out into the desert and bury it for a thousand years and it becomes priceless. Men will kill for it. Men like you and me, Jones. The Ark, I admit, is different. It is a little removed from the profit motive, of course. We understand this, you and I. But the greed is still in the heart, my friend. The vice we have in common.”

The Frenchman stopped smiling. There was a glassy look in his eyes, a distance, a privacy. He might have been conducting a conversation with himself. “You understand what the Ark is? It is like a transmitter. Like a radio through which one might communicate with God. And I am very close to it. Very close to it, indeed. I have waited years to be this close. And what I am talking about is beyond profit, beyond the lust of simple acquisition. I am talking about communicating with that which is contained in the Ark.”

“You buy it, Belloq? You buy the mysticism? The power?”

Belloq looked disgusted. He sat back. He placed the tips of his fingers together. “Don’t you?”

Indy shrugged.

“Ah, you are not sure, are you? Even you, you are not sure.” Belloq lowered his voice. “I am more than sure, Jones. I am
positive.
I don’t doubt it for a moment now. My researches have always led me in this direction. I
know.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Indy said.