Jake’s map was green and much more finely drawn. “Here, I’ve marked where we are, so we just need to orient Hood’s map to our own.”
They studied the two.
“They’re nothing alike,” Rominy finally said. “Yours shows the river, but Hood’s is just lines.”
Barrow frowned. “You’re right. I don’t get it.”
“Maybe his map is of Tibet.”
“But where in Tibet? Damn!” There was ferocity in his frustration. He wanted this story very badly. Maybe his career depended on it.
“Or maybe it’s some other clue entirely.”
He glanced at her. “What?”
“I don’t know, Jake. I’m so tired.” She slumped into a kitchen chair. “I’m hungry and I’ve had a headache all day. All I’ve had is wine.”
He glanced from the map to her, fingers drumming, clearly impatient. But then he nodded sharply. “Yes. Yes! I’m an idiot. Look, I’ve got food in my toolbox, too. Stove, sleeping bags in the cab, the whole nine yards.”
“What are you, a Boy Scout?”
“Eagle. Be prepared. I’m going to cook up something on my camp stove and we’ll think about it. Sleep on it, even. We’re close, Rominy. Closer than I’ve ever been. But we need to eat and think. I’m missing something.”
So they did eat. The can of spaghetti, with carrot sticks as salad and M amp;M’s for dessert, apparently stretched Jake Barrow’s cooking skills to the limit. No wonder he’d been in frozen foods. While he heated she changed into some old-boy jeans he loaned her, cinching them in with a belt. Her heeled shoes were set aside for the boots, which did fit. She wondered about the girl who’d worn them but didn’t ask. Then she swept the place out with a fir bough, throwing away the ratty fur rug.
It got cold as the sky darkened. Jake had gathered some wood and now he lit a fire in the old fireplace, the flames pushing aside the musty feel. The crackle and scent of smoke was reassuring. Rominy was more comfortable in the new clothes and warming cabin, but it also felt like she was losing her identity. She’d fallen down a rabbit hole.
Jake heated water on the camp stove and used powder packets to make hot apple cider. The warmth relaxed her. Rominy still felt trapped at having to sleep here, but it was too late, and she was too tired, to think of any alternative. She unzipped one of the sleeping bags and draped it on herself like a quilt as she sat in the chair, considering it a shield against the chill of dusk and anything Barrow might try. Not that he tried anything. And not that she wouldn’t have been curious if he had tried something. He seemed to be leaving any move to her, which was good, except for the ways in which it wasn’t.
She realized she’d phoned no one, since she had no phone. The radio had never been switched on. Had the MINI Cooper been identified with her? Was somebody searching? Her adoptive parents were gone and there was no real boyfriend at hand, but what were her friends thinking?
She would miss work tomorrow. It seemed on another planet.
“There’s obviously no mattress but I brought pads,” he said. “We’ll sleep on the floor and figure out what to do in the morning.”
“We?”
“You can sack out as near or far as you want. No drama.”
She wished there was drama, just a little, so she could have the satisfaction of telling him to stick to his own side of the cabin, but he seemed as weary as she. So they bedded down on either side of the fireplace, a Puritan six feet between them.
Rominy begged for sleep to come but her mind kept nagging at where she’d seen Hood’s pattern before. Some art museum, maybe, or a child’s book of mazes. Why couldn’t she think of it? She needed sleep! She sneezed from all the dust.
And then it came to her with a bang like the explosion of her beloved car. She sat abruptly upright in her bag. It was utterly dark in the cabin, inky and spooky.
“Jake, I’ve got it!” she hissed.
No reaction.
So she crawled out, still in jeans and her morning’s knit top-she wasn’t about to give him a peek at her panties, although she had considered it-and shook him. “Jake!”
“What?” He’d already fallen asleep. Men!
“I think I’ve got it! Hood’s map-it’s not contours, it’s a fingerprint.”
“Huh?”
“Light the lantern.”
When he did so, both of them shivering in the cold of the cabin now that the fire was only dull coals, she reached inside the cookie tin from the bank and took out Hood’s mummified finger. Carefully she rolled it in the dust of a kitchen shelf and lifted the hissing camp lantern to study the dust. It had left the faint impression of a fingerprint. Then she looked at the inked calendar page. “This one.” Jake bent close. “See? This ridge has the same pattern as his finger.”
He sucked in his breath. “What does that mean?”
“I’ve no idea. It’s midnight in the middle of nowhere.”
He grinned, looking up at her. “I rescued a genius,” he whispered in triumph. And then, before she had a chance to think about it, he kissed her.
19
Lhasa, Tibet
September 21, 1938
T he close cropping of her hair had the effect of emphasizing the beauty of Keyuri Lin’s face: the dark eyes, the fine ears, the sculpture of cheek and chin and brow as she and Raeder stood in the glow of butter lamps off the main audience hall, the serene gaze of a gigantic Buddha filling the chamber like a cloud. She had the regal bone structure of a Nefertiti. There was also a calmness that Raeder didn’t remember from before. That crazed religion, he guessed.
Serenity made him uneasy.
Her presence in the Potala Palace was the worst luck, and yet he still felt the old desire. She was exquisite! Once more he ached to possess her, especially since as a nun she was more unobtainable than ever. Yes, the Germans were tormented by longing, as Reting had said, but wasn’t that what made them succeed?
At the same time, his weakness irritated him. A fabled power at stake, and he wasted feeling for this woman? Any woman? Discipline!
She studied him with an objectivity that surprised him; why wasn’t she more afraid? Maybe she thought she was untouchable because of the protection of the Reting and the nunnery. That was nonsense. Everyone was vulnerable. In the end, you had to rely on yourself.
“You’ve come a long way from washing camp dishes,” Raeder began.
“And you from hunting specimens for a museum, Herr Raeder. Now you’re a diplomat for Himmler and Hitler?”
“I represent my country. It’s humbling.”
“I very much doubt that.”
Again, that disquieting self-confidence. “Does your regent know about our past together?”
“He knows I’m a scholar of Shambhala. Its purity intrigues me.”
If she was trying to insult him by referring to his impure tastes, he wouldn’t acknowledge it. “Why do you think Reting is willing to help us?”
She thought. “The Reting is curious if you could actually find Shambhala, but isn’t unhappy at the thought of your failure, either. If you search for what you seek, there’s a good chance you’ll never return, and the problem you represent is solved. If you do return, he’ll take the secret from you. I suspect he finds humor in putting us together, a woman and the uniformed Nazis. And my research has alarmed him.”
“Alarmed?”
“What if myth is true? Dangerous opportunities. Delicious dilemmas.”
Which was why he was here. “Why did you become a nun?”
“You know that better than anyone.” Now she betrayed some coolness, a flash of bitterness, that actually reassured him. As long as he understood her, he could control her. He was already sifting possibilities.
“Why do you study?”
“You Europeans talked of these tales during Hood’s expedition, and after experiencing what I did, it was time to retreat and think. As the Buddha pondered, why is there suffering?” She held his eyes with her own, her hands splayed at her sides. “So tell me, Kurt Raeder, what I still wonder in the dark of every night: Did I cause my husband’s death by being friends with you?”