The writers sounded so flaky, Mercer determined that no one had ever tried a scientific approach to finding the hamlet. He contacted a commecial satellite imaging company in La Jolla, California, and requested every high-resolution photo they had of the north flank of the Himalaya Mountains for the past five years. That’s where Tisa indicated she’d been born, and at five hundred dollars per picture, the cost of expanding the search beyond that area would be staggering.
As it stood, the weeks he’d spent consulting in Canada for De Beers would cover just a portion of the price of the two thousand prints that had been delivered late yesterday afternoon.
Until he studied the pictures, he would put the search for Rinpoche-La out of his mind and concentrate on the second puzzle Tisa had given him. Leper Alma.
“Yup,” Mercer finally answered Harry’s question about his day’s plans. “Another wasted effort on the computer. I can’t do much else until I hear from Ira.”
“Sure you can.” Harry held up his empty drink. “Pour yourself one of these and relax for a while. I’ll call Tiny and see if he’ll open early or maybe we can take a ride up to Pimlico to watch the ponies.”
As tempting as it sounded, Mercer shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Killing yourself won’t get her back,” Harry said softly.
Mercer froze. He wasn’t surprised Harry had figured out what was driving him so hard; he probably understood Mercer’s motivations even better than Mercer did. He was just startled that Harry had brought it up. In their unwritten code, neither man discussed their emotions much. Each carried several lifetimes’ worth of scars and saw little need to irritate them further.
“Do you love her?” Harry prodded.
“I don’t know.” Mercer’s reply was slow, deliberate. “Maybe. We only spent one day together, not enough time to know for sure.”
“When it comes to love, no one’s ever really sure.”
“That sounds like something you heard on Oprah.”
Harry smirked. “Jerry Springer. Overweight teen cross-dressers in love with their teachers was the show’s topic.” He turned thoughtful. “The amount of time you spend with someone doesn’t matter. A day, a week or a year. It’s all the same. Christ, there are couples who spend a lifetime together only to finally admit they’ve hated each other since day one.”
“Too true. More than anything, Harry, I’m pissed that some asshole has denied us the opportunity to find out.”
“And what if it isn’t love?”
“I’d still go after her for no other reason than the chance to kill Donny Randall.”
Harry smiled and slapped the bar. “Now that sounds like the Mercer I know.”
“So what the hell do I do?”
“Pour us that drink for one thing and I guess keep doing what you’re doing. Only don’t think about why you want to find her. It’ll cloud your judgment. Concentrate on the how.”
Not bad advice, Mercer admitted, considering the source. “What’s the longest you’ve ever spent with a woman?”
Harry gave him a lecherous look. “An hour and ten minutes, but that was at midnight when the clocks roll forward.”
“Seriously.”
“Seriously? About six months. This was years ago when I first moved to Washington and thought it was time to settle down.”
“What happened?”
“I realized that when I was with her I wasn’t being true to myself. I was already settled by then and was using her just to legitimize my life. For a while I hid my feelings in a misguided attempt to protect her. Big mistake. The night I broke up with her, she was expecting me to propose. She had no idea how I really felt. It was one hell of an ugly scene. I know it was for the best. I could have faked it for a while longer, years maybe, but in the end it wouldn’t have worked. I’m sure someday she realized it too. I guess in your situation, you have to ask yourself if you are still who you’re supposed to be when you were with Tisa. And that’s a trickier question than it sounds.”
“I know it is,” Mercer agreed. “And the truth is I don’t know yet.”
“But when you were with her?”
Mercer didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
Harry sat back in his stool, a smug expression on his weathered face. “There you go then. Go back to work, but at three o’clock we’re going to Tiny’s and I’m going to buy rounds until one of us is blind drunk. That’s not an offer. It’s a threat.”
With a fresh pot of coffee in hand, Mercer left Harry to his crossword puzzle and went down to his office. The room was decorated like the bar, with green carpet and plenty of oak and brass. In one corner was one of Mercer’s prize possessions, a blackened piece of lightweight metal that had once been a girder of the airship Hindenburg. Passing the credenza by the door, Mercer’s hand brushed a slab of a bluish mineral called kimberlite. He considered this particular rock, which was the lodestone for diamond mining, his personal good-luck charm. It had been presented to him by a grateful mine manager whose life Mercer had saved.
He sat at the antique desk and ramped on to the Internet. He typed “Leper Alma” into a search engine and groaned when he saw there were a quarter million matches. He had no idea what the name meant yet the computer readily matched it to two hundred and fifty thousand Web sites.
After an hour’s worth of education about leprosy, he knew he was on the wrong track. There were only a handful of leper colonies, or leprosariums, left in the world and none of them was affiliated with the name Alma. Nor were there any famous lepers or physicians who treated them named Alma either.
“Wrong track?” he muttered. “I’m not even in the right station.”
He’d obviously misheard what Tisa had told him. The trick now was to recall her exact words. Mercer got up from his desk and went to the closet in the corner of the office. Amid the junk, files, and miscellaneous paperwork that was easier to shelve than sort, Mercer found a large shoebox. He returned with it to his desk. He pulled out a soft towel from the box and spread it across his desktop, then set a foot-long piece of railroad track in the center. Cans of metal polish, rags, and scraps of steel wool came next.
For thirty minutes he worked on the rusted section of rail, working the metal with the concentration of a diamond cutter facing a priceless stone. The repetitive act of polishing the track was the way Mercer helped focus his mind. It was a habit he’d formed in school as a way to alleviate the pressure of studying without turning his brain to mush, much the way Winston Churchill built brick walls in the yard behind Number 10 Downing Street even during the bleakest days of the Blitz.
A half hour after starting, he’d purged his mind of everything but those fleeting seconds as Tisa swam toward her brother. He could again feel how his movements had been slowed by the weight of water and the throb from where he’d hit his head against the tanker’s windshield.
“I’m here, Luc. It’s Tisa.” Her voice echoed across the dark sea, a cry that rang clear over the background of misery. Her head was barely above water as she swam awkwardly for her brother’s boat. Halfway there she stopped, turned back to Mercer, her body shuddering as she treaded water. “Oh my God! Leper Alma, Mercer. Watch for Leper Alma.”
He heard it the same way again and again. Leper Alma. Leper Alma.
Forcing himself to watch her vanish time and again was worse than the emptiness he’d woken to for the past three days. His heart beat furiously, and yet his hands maintained their unhurried rhythm as he scoured rust from the length of railroad track.