"The Frenchman," Dietrich said.
"Of course."
Dietrich was silent for a time. He felt slightly uneasy. It was as if the face of Hitler were scolding him now for his hesitance. "The Frenchman is hard to find. Like any mercenary, he regards the world as his place of employment."
"When did you last hear of him?"
Dietrich shrugged. "In South America, I believe."
Eidel studied the backs of his hands, thin and pale and yet indelicate, like the hands of someone who has failed in his ambition to be a concert pianist. He said, "You can find him. You understand what I'm saying? You understand where this order comes from?"
"I can find him," Dietrich said. "But I warn you now-"
"Don't warn me, Colonel."
Dietrich felt his throat become dry. This little trumped-up imbecile of a desk clerk. He would have enjoyed throttling him, stuffing those manila folders down his gullet until he choked. "Very well, I advise you-the Frenchman's price is high."
"No object," Eidel said.
"And his trustworthiness is less than admirable."
"That is something you will be expected to deal with. The point, Colonel Dietrich, is that you will find him and you will bring him to the Fuhrer. But it must be done quickly. It must be done, if you understand, yesterday."
Dietrich stared at the shade on the window. It sometimes filled him with dread that the Fuhrer had surrounded himself with lackeys and fools like Eidel. It implied a certain cloudiness of judgment where humans were concerned.
Eidel smiled, as if he was amused by Dietrich's unease. Then he said, "Speed is important, of course. Other parties are interested, obviously. These parties do not represent the best interests of the Reich. Do I make myself clear?"
"Clear," Dietrich said. Dietrich thought about the
Frenchman for a moment; he knew, even if he hadn't
told Eidel, that Belloq was in the south of France right
then. The prospect of doing business with Belloq was
what appalled him. There was a smooth quality to the
man that masked an underlying ruthlessness, a selfish
ness, a disregard for philosophies, beliefs, politics. If it
served Belloq's interests, it was therefore valid. If not,
he didn't care.
"The other parties will be taken care of if they should surface," Eidel was saying. "They should be of no concern to you."
"Then that is how I'll treat them," Dietrich said.
Eidel picked up the cable and glanced at it. "What we have talked about is not to go beyond these four walls, Colonel. I don't have to say that, do I?"
"You don't have to say it," Dietrich repeated, irritated.
Eidel went back to his seat and stared at the other man across the mountain of folders. He was silent for a moment. And then he feigned surprise at finding Dietrich seated opposite him. "Are you still here, Colonel?"
Dietrich clutched his attache case and rose. It was hard not tofeel hatred toward these black-uniformed clowns. They acted as if they owned the world.
"I was about to leave," Dietrich said.
"Heil Hitler," Eidel said, raising his hand, his arm rigid.
At the door Dietrich answered in the same words.
3: Connecticut
Indiana Jones sat in his office at Marshall College.
He had just finished his first lecture of the year for Archaeology 101, and it had gone well. It always went well. He loved teaching and he knew he was able to convey his passion for the subject matter to his students. But now he was restless and his restlessness disturbed him. Because he knew exactly what it was he wanted to do.
Indy put his feet up on the desk, deliberately knocked a couple of books over, then rose and paced around the office-seeing it not as the intimate place it usually was, his retreat, his hideaway, but as the cell of some remote stranger.
Jones, he told himself.
Indiana Jones, wise up.
The objects around him seemed to shed their meaning for a time. The huge wall map of South America became a surreal blur, an artist's dadaist conception. The clay replica of the idol looked suddenly silly, ugly. He picked it up and he thought: For something like this you laid your life on the line? You must have an essential screw loose. A bolt out of place.
He held the replica of the idol, gazing at it absently.
This mad love of antiquity struck him all at once as unholy, unnatural. An insane infatuation with the sense of history-more than the sense, the need to reach out and touch it, hold it, understand it through its relics and artifacts, finding yourself haunted by the faces of long-dead artisans and craftsmen and artists, spooked by the notion of hands creating these objects, fingers that had long since turned to skeleton, to dust. But never forgotten, never quite forgotten, not so long as you existed with your irrational passion.
For a moment the old feelings came back to him, assailed him, the first excitement he'd ever felt as a student. When? Fifteen years ago? sixteen? twenty? It didn't matter: time meant something different to him than it did to most people. Time was a thing you discovered through the secrets it had buried-in temples, in ruins, under rocks and dust and sand. Time expanded, became elastic, creating that amazing sense of everything that had ever lived being linked to everything that existed in the now; and death was fundamentally meaningless because of what you left behind.
Meaningless.
He thought of Champollion laboring over the Rosetta stone, the astonishment at finally deciphering ancient hieroglyphics. He thought of Schliemann finding the site of Troy. Flinders Petrie excavating the pre-dynastic cemetery at Nagada. Woolley discovering the royal cemetery at Ur in Iraq. Carter and Lord Carnarvon stumbling over the tomb of Tutankhamon.
That was where it had all begun. In that consciousness of discovery, which was like the eye of an intellectual hurricane. And you were swept along, carried away, transported backward in the kind of time machine the writers of fantasy couldn't comprehend: your personal time machine, your private line to the vital past.
He balanced the replica of the idol in the center of his hand and stared at it as if it were a personal enemy. No, he thought: you're your own worst enemy, Jones. You got carried away because you had access to half of a map among Forrestal's papers-and because you desperately wanted to trust two thugs who had the other half.
Moron, he thought.
And Belloq. Belloq was probably the smart one. Belloq had a razor-blade eye for the quick chance. Belloq always had had that quality-like the snakes you have a phobia about. Coming out unseen from under a rock, the slithering predator, always grasping for the thing he hasn't hunted for himself.
All that formed in the center of his mind now was an image of Belloq-that slender, handsome face, the dark of the eye, the smile that concealed the cunning.
He remembered other encounters with the Frenchman. He remembered graduate school, when Belloq had chiseled his way to the Archaeological Society Prize by presenting a paper on stratigraphy-the basis of which Indy recognized as being his own work. And in some way Belloq had plagiarized it, in some way he had found access to it. Indy couldn't prove anything because it would have been a case of sour grapes, a rash of envy.
1934. Remember the summer of that year, he thought.
1934. Black summer. He had spent months planning a dig in the Rub al Khali Desert of Saudi Arabia. Months of labor and preparation and scrounging for funds, putting the pieces together, arguing that his instincts about the dig were correct, that there were the remains of a nomadic culture to be found in that arid place, a culture pre-dating Christ. And then what?