… something. And Sam, the drifter, the broken home kid, the college dropout, stung from one too many dumpings by indifferent ratty-haired girlfriends, and one too many lazy betrayals by self-centered traveling mates, and with one too many fuckups from one too many drinks or joints or dumb-ass decisions… had only secretly sensitive Sam for company. His very own self, indivisible, with liberty and restlessness for all. Reduced to accompanying people he didn’t know and sometimes didn’t like, for a fee, like a Craigslist whore. What the hell was he doing with his life, driving to Outer Bumfuck and trying to make conversation about Nazis? Driving belongers around. Barrow, he thought, gave all the signs of being in some kind of tight fraternity. A let-me-challenge-political-correctness nerd who Sam decided was annoying as hell.
Rominy, he liked.
“But Adolf can’t get over his own private frustration?” Sam challenged. “So he kills six million Jews, and six million more besides? Poles, Russians, gypsies, retarded people, homosexuals, Freemasons… I mean, come on.”
“Let’s assume he did,” Barrow said mildly. “Some people think he was possessed by the devil. Hitler’s own explanation is simpler. He was gassed during World War I and said he had a vision while in the hospital of saving Germany. He thought Jewish financiers and leaders had cost Germany the war.”
“You defend this guy?”
“I try to explain him. Unlike most people, I’ve actually studied him. If we could understand Hitler, maybe we could understand anyone. Even ourselves.”
“Good luck with that.” Yep, Barrow was a smug little prick. Or maybe Jake was just fascinated with the Third Reich, like any number of people who pause to look at accidents, tour torture museums, and walk the gravel of old concentration camps.
“You know what’s funny?” Sam asked. “He goes after the Jews and gets Israel. Be careful what you wish for. That’s why I’m laid back, man. Why the Tibetans are laid back. Mind your own business and look after your own soul-if everyone did that, the world would be happier, right? That’s what Jesus said. That’s what John Lennon said.”
“One crucified, the other shot.”
“That doesn’t make them wrong.”
“No, but their world would be medieval.”
“John Lennon’s world would be medieval?”
“Their laid-back world, I suspect, would have no Land Cruisers,” Barrow trumped.
“We wouldn’t miss Land Cruisers if we didn’t have them,” Sam said doggedly.
“It’s a long walk to the Kunlun Mountains.”
“We wouldn’t miss the Kunlun Mountains.”
“Look,” said Jake, “I’ve studied Hitler because where we’re going is where the Germans went in 1938. I’m curious what they found. Curious what they were looking for. Rominy here is an heir to someone who got wrapped up in it all, an American explorer. So the more I understand about the Nazis, the more idea I have of where they might have gone.”
“The Kunlun? They went to Nowhere Central, man. They went to where there’s no there there.” He glanced at Barrow. “You really got the hots for Hitler, don’t you?”
“I just think he was complicated, like everyone, and interesting, like everyone.”
“Complicated? That’s an interesting way to put it.”
“What if he was an idealist in his own way, driven into wars he didn’t want?”
“That’s not how I heard it went down, bro.”
“Yes, get real, Jake,” Rominy chimed in. “Don’t be provocative just to be provocative.”
“A lot of people followed him for some reason.” Barrow sounded defensive. “I’m just saying, if you want to make sense of history, let’s understand what it was, not parrot cowboy-and-Indian dogma about who was right and who was wrong.”
“Sorry, amigo, I saw the movie. The Nazis were wrong.”
“That’s my point. All you’ve seen is the movie.”
Holy-moley. “ Hey, you want a picture of some yaks?” Sam pointed. Time to change the subject before he got too steamed.
Rominy was in the backseat, trying to ignore the debate of the men while sifting through the satchel documents again. The more she read them, the more she came to believe that Benjamin Hood hadn’t written them. The script was in a feminine hand, and the maps and diagrams had a vagueness that might come from someone getting the information secondhand, from memory. There were no measurements or dimensions, no logical depiction of a machine with interlocking parts. The entire packet was impressionistic.
Could that mean it was myth, that they were chasing a fairy tale?
Or did it mean that someone like the woman pilot in the picture had befriended Ben and taken his dictation or descriptions? Beth Calloway, 1938. A good deal of the journal seemed incoherent, more a collection of notes than a narrative or diary. There were names: Kurt, Keyuri, Beth, Ben. Was her great-grandmother’s name Beth? Rominy considered. Maybe Calloway and Hood pursued the Nazis together, Beth flying a plane. So they get back to the Cascade Mountains, and Beth tries to make sense of it all. Maybe Hood was disabled. But the journal was riddled with question marks, arrows, and blanks, as if it were a jigsaw puzzle only half put together.
Maybe Rominy could put it together here in Tibet.
Maybe she was supposed to finish what her great-grandmother started.
Maybe the journal would make sense in Shambhala.
40
Concrete, United States
September 7, 1945
S o this is where the elusive Benjamin Hood has gone to ground, thought Duncan Hale, special agent of the Office of Strategic Services. His agency had been created in the cauldron of the recently concluded World War II and had absorbed his old Army Corps of Intelligence Police.
I’ve arrived, Hale thought. Backwater, USA.
It wasn’t until the end of the war that Hale had realized the necessity to start tracking the man he’d sent to Tibet eight years before. Rumors of Hood’s discoveries had been fantastical, and his disappearance perplexing. The millionaire had gone mad, most thought, and withdrawn like a hermit crab somewhere into the American wilderness.
Then, with the wartime explosion of science, the fantastic had become commonplace. The German V2s. Jet fighters. The atomic bomb. And suddenly an anonymous letter had arrived that made the strange rumors more compelling. Just what had Benjamin Hood discovered in the nether reaches of Tibet? And would any of it be of use in this new, uneasy embrace with the bearlike Soviet Union?
With the help of the FBI, banking records had led Hale to this tiny burg at the edge of the known universe, the aptly named Concrete, Washington. Now, as he stood on the train station platform near the junction of the Skagit and Baker rivers, Hale could look uphill to a one-block downtown that slumbered under a haze of morning mist and coal smoke. With gas rationing still in effect, not much moved on the roads. The war had ended only three weeks before. But a new, more dangerous war, the OSS believed, was just beginning: with the Red Hordes of the Soviet Union. It was time to learn what Ben Hood knew and make sure nobody else could learn it.
Hale, burdened only with a briefcase, walked uphill to State Bank of Concrete. Flags and bunting from the recent VJ Day celebration still hung from houses, and no service personnel were back home yet. Yet the sense of relief, after a bad Depression and worse war, seemed as palpable as the sweet smell of the surrounding forest. The bomb had ended the thing and ushered in a whole new world. There were even rumors of turning the OSS into some new kind of permanent intelligence outfit, he’d heard. The Russians were throwing their weight around just like the Nazis had, and America was going to have to respond.