The Assassin Lotus

by David Angsten

  Phoebe followed close behind as I pressed my way into the throng. Several onlookers eyed me warily—the American who’d yelled from the tower—but a man in loose clothes and a black-and-white turban, assuming we might be of help, urged the others to clear a path and eagerly guided us through.

  Before we knew it we were staring down at Woolsey’s lifeless corpse. It was clear to me at once he was dead. Lying twisted on his back, he did not move or breathe, and his eyes stayed frozen open. Bright blood flowed out over his buttoned shirt and jacket, pooling into a lake beneath him. The murder weapon was nowhere to be seen. After cleaving through his rib cage and apparently piercing his heart, the blade had been withdrawn by the Hashishin and carried off with Woolsey’s satchel.

  The encircling crowd hung back from the corpse as if it leaked some lethal contagion, a menace spreading toward them like the growing pool of blood. Even I stood back instinctively, grimacing, repulsed. This gentle scholar I’d been sharing tea with only an hour before, now looked like some horrifying harbinger from hell. I wanted to flee from the sight of him.

  Phoebe, however, remained detached, and crouched to examine the body. Dispassionate, focused—I’d seen this demeanor with her before. Bringing her expertise to bear. The others might have thought her a detective or mortician, some dark-suited, inky-haired, grim-faced public servant. To me she was simply the archaeologist inspecting a treasure of bones. She studied the corpse carefully, but did not move or touch it. Finally, she threw a glance my way that drew me down beside her.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “His hand,” she whispered, nodding toward the clenched fist half-buried under his thigh. I’d hardly noticed it before, but now I could see it was clutching something. Suddenly I remembered: when I’d called down to warn him, Woolsey had reached into his bag.

  “Get it,” I whispered. “I’ll distract them.”

  I stood up and addressed the crowd. “He’s dead,” I announced, arousing a ripple of reaction. “Does anyone know who he was? Did anyone see the killer?” I continued throwing out questions, eliciting responses in Uzbek and English. Claims were quickly countered and arguments ensued. Stealing a glance at Phoebe, I saw her bending over the body. When I looked up again, a squad car was pulling into the plaza from the street.

  “Here they are!” I said, pointing. The crowd turned to watch as the squad came to a stop and two uniformed policemen clambered out.

  Phoebe popped up and nodded—she had it!

  With all eyes focused on the approaching police, we made our way through the back of the crowd, slipping finally into a lane behind the mosque.

  “He saw me,” she said as we hurried away.

  “The cop?” I asked.

  Phoebe glanced back. “That man—he’s following us.”

  I looked back and saw the bearded guy in the checkered turban who had guided us into the crowd. He wore a long dark vest over a knee-length white gown, with baggy white trousers and open leather sandals, Bible-era garb I’d seen little of in Bukhara.

  We picked up our pace. “He was at the funeral this morning,” Phoebe said.

  Woolsey had said more than one man followed us. I’d assumed the second “man” was Phoebe, but now realized there may have been three. “He must have followed Woolsey when he left the apartment,” I said. The other man—and Phoebe—had waited to follow me. “We better lose him.”

  Without another word, we took off running, and several blocks later hustled into a cab.

  “Train station,” I commanded the driver. As he pulled away, we peered out the back. The man ran out onto the street and watched us speed away. I felt a familiar thrill. It was déjà vu all over again, exactly as happened in Baku.

  “Forgot to wear his Armani,” I said.

  “That man is not Iranian,” Phoebe said. “From the looks of him, I’d say Pashtun.”

  Pashtun. Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Hindu Kush. “Don’t tell me.”

  “I think I’ve seen him before,” she said. “He came with another Pashtun to the dig site in Turkistan. Vladimir was convinced they were Taliban.”

  IT’S RARE TO FIND A MAN ALONE IN A TEA HOUSE, drinking the stuff by himself. In this one there were two of us: him at one end of the high-vaulted room and me far off at the other.

  Between us the tables bristled with men, alive with convivial chatter. They tasted sweets, sipped spiced tea, and inhaled smoke from hookah pipes while samovars steamed and simmered. No one seemed aware that a few blocks away a man had just been murdered. I peered through the crowd of bobbing heads, catching glimpses of the unnamed killer. Leafing through the pages he had pilfered, the man appeared completely absorbed in his reading and never seemed to notice I was watching.

  I sipped my tea and waited. A blurry TV against the wall showed news footage of riot police and clouds of tear gas in the streets. Waiters crisscrossed in front of it, transporting trays of cakes and cookies. At a chessboard nearby, a big Uzbek in a three-piece suit stoked a fat cigar, watching the beady-eyed hunchback in front of him take out his bishop with a knight.

  Nearly half an hour passed. Finally the Assassin made some inquiry of his server, who pointed off as if giving directions, then exchanged some coins and bills. I watched the killer gather up his papers and depart. After waiting a half a minute, I followed him outside.

  The sun had gone down behind the buildings. I spotted him a block away, facing a wall with his back to me. As I approached, I realized he was talking on a payphone. I kept my head down and walked past him.

  He was probably talking to Mahbood. But why a payphone? I wondered. Afraid cell calls were being monitored? I ducked into a doorway and waited in the dark, silently unsheathing my dagger.

  Women’s voices caught my ear. A block away, three nuns in habits scrambled into a taxi. I moved the blade behind my back. The taxi glided by.

  A steel point pricked my throat. I froze.

  “Enjoy your tea, Vanitar?”

  60.

  Black Camel

  I COULD NOT TURN MY HEAD. The Assassin was nothing but a blade and a voice.

  “You look more like a talib than a Hashishin,” he said. “Too many years in the seminary?”

  “I studied as I serve,” I said, “at the good pleasure of Allah.”

  He poked the knife deeper, pinning me to the door. “You serve Christians and Hindus, fench. And maybe the Pashtun who tail you like a dog.”

  “I serve Islam. You dishonor my name and the name of my bro—”

  He slammed my head against the door and held it there, hissing: “Do not speak of your brother’s name. He was a warrior, now a shahid. You are his betrayer and will burn in God’s Hell.”

  A trickle of blood ran the rim of my clavicle. “My brother was betrayed. But not by me.”

  “The Old Man begs to differ,” he said, pressing the dagger still deeper.

  I strained for a glimpse of his face. To show him the truth in my eyes. “The devil Mahbood deceives you—”

  “Enough—”

  I stumbled back suddenly as the door behind me opened inward. The Assassin, startled, raised his dagger. I quickly slashed his belly. White pages floated to the ground. As he folded forward, I brought the dagger down, severing the tendons of his shoulder.

  He fell. Alive.

  I plunged the knife through the ribs of his back, down through his left lung and into his heart. Drawing the blade back out again, I staggered for a second, then turned.

  A white-eyed boy in his teens stood gaping at me from the door. He wore a stained apron and held a dishrag. Steam billowed from the piled sink behind him.

  We stared, for a moment, into each other’s eyes. Then his eyes went to my dagger rising overhead.

  I prayed to the Exalted One to accept another martyr—

  THE TRAIN STATION lay 30 kilometers east of Bukhara in a suburban town called Kagan. As our cab wound its way out of the city, Phoebe asked where we were going.

  “I’ve got two tickets to Samarkand,�
�� I said. When she asked me why, I told her I wasn’t sure. “What did you find in Woolsey’s hand?”

  “A camel,” she said, reaching into her pocket. I thought she meant the cigarette, but what she lifted before her eyes was a small, black stone carving. “A two-humped Bactrian camel, to be exact.” She handed it to me.

  On closer inspection, I could see the inky stone had a glistening emerald tinge. “It’s jade,” I said. “This is from a chess set in Baghestani’s office. He supposedly kept his manuscript in the table underneath it.”

  I handed it back and she studied it. “How curious,” she said. “Why do you suppose Woolsey grabbed it?”

  “He must have wanted to tell us something.” I related what Woolsey had mentioned about Tamerlane chess, and Baghestani’s research on the Mongol’s mausoleum. “He assumed when you met the professor you must have talked to him about it. He thought you’d be on your way to Samarkand and Tamerlane’s tomb.”

  “The tomb? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The answer is in that manuscript. Baghestani never mentioned it?”

  “I went to his office to ask him about Dan. He wouldn’t talk, said it was dangerous for me to be there. He didn’t even trust his own cell phone—and warned me not to trust mine. Finally he agreed to meet in the evening at a coffeehouse near his home.”

  “What happened?”

  “I waited there for hours. He never showed up. It wasn’t until this morning that I found out he had been murdered.”

  “So you dyed your hair and…” I glanced over her attire. “Went to his funeral.”

  She adjusted her hat and fussed with her jacket, appraising her Uzbek disguise. “I didn’t have much time—Muslims always rush to bury their dead. I was hoping to find some friend of his there, someone who might be able to help me. Your man Woolsey was the only European. I noticed the Pashtun in the turban watching him. Then I saw you.”

  As Phoebe told her story, I found her dissemblance fascinating: the beguiling face of the Dutch blonde kept morphing into the visage of an Asiatic man. She seemed like a character from a dream I must have had, or some mutating goddess from Dan’s Buddha book. The duplicity aroused and confounded me. Her clothes, the makeup, the ink in her hair—I longed to strip them all away and see her.

  “Something wrong?”

  I’d been staring. “You were with Dan for two weeks in Turkmenistan.”

  “Ten days, actually.”

  I nodded. “Ten days. In the desert.”

  She cocked her head. “Yes?”

  “Did he… Did he ever talk to you about any of this?”

  “Not about Tamerlane. I had no idea.”

  “Did he say why he met with Baghestani?”

  “He wanted to show him the seeds he’d found. Dan knew Baghestani from that summer he spent in Iran. The professor was working on an excavation there—”

  “Alamut,” I interjected. “The castle of the Hashishin.”

  Phoebe looked impressed. “Well. Somebody’s done their homework.”

  I related Woolsey’s conjecture, and she confirmed it was true. Beneath the ruins at Alamut, in a sealed chamber carved into the bedrock under the castle, Baghestani had found a cache of Damascene daggers, a large bronze cauldron, a number of ritual drinking vessels, and a crock containing the seeds of a lotus thought to be extinct.

  “Soma,” I said.

  “That’s what Dan suspected, but at the time, the professor wouldn’t say. A commander from the Quds Force had confiscated everything and forced him to sign an oath to never speak of them again. To do so would have put his family in danger.”

  “Then why did Baghestani tell Dan about it now?”

  “To warn him. He said if the Hashishin knew he had viable seeds, they were sure to come after him with their knives out.”

  The professor told him they had managed to sprout a number of Alamut’s 800-year-old seeds, but the lotuses they produced were stunted and deformed, and failed to grow seed pods and propagate. Consequently, only a limited amount of soma was extracted from the plants—enough to prove the potion still delivered.

  “As in ‘full of strength, irresistible in battle?’”

  Phoebe arched her “Asian” brows. “You have been doing your homework.”

  I told her how I’d come into possession of Dan’s Rig Veda text in Rome. She was shocked to hear of Maya’s murder.

  “A lot of people have been killed,” I said. I told her about the two Iranians I shot to death in the desert. “And now Baghestani and Woolsey have been murdered. I don’t see how the loss of life could possibly be worth it.”

  Phoebe explained that, without the sacred soma, the central rite of the Hashishin could not be consummated. “The Ayatollah in Qum seems determined to find another source,” she said. “When the news hit about our find in the desert, his agents were the first to pay a visit.”

  But the ancient Aryan seeds proved useless. It wasn’t until later, when word got out that fresh seeds had been tested at the lab in Zurich, that the Iranians returned to Turkistan, bent on finding out who had sent them.

  Dan had foolishly disregarded Baghestani’s warning. I asked Phoebe why.

  “For the same reason he urged us to dig at the place where the Aryan Vajra was found. Dan wanted to know the truth. He wanted to know if the lotus seeds he found were from the same sacred soma plant treasured by the ancients.”

  “Where did he find his seeds?” I asked. It seemed the critical question.

  “He wouldn’t tell me,” Phoebe said. “He wouldn’t even let me tell Karakov what Baghestani had said.”

  “Why?”

  “To keep the source a secret. He’s determined to keep the soma safe from those who would misuse it.”

  The Iranians, the Indians, the Taliban—and Dan would undoubtedly add the Americans to the list. “That must be why he didn’t tell you about Tamerlane,” I said. “He didn’t want you or anyone to know what Baghestani had discovered.” I squinted at the blood-red sun setting behind the passing trees. “Now the Hashishin have his research on the tomb, and we’re left groping in the dark.”

  “We do have this,” Phoebe said, holding up the black jade camel.

  I took it from her and examined it again. “What did you call it—Bactrian?”

  “Yes. As opposed to the one-humped dromedary, the Arabian camel. Bactria was the ancient Greek name for this region of Central Asia.”

  I eyed the double humps. “From which the ancient Aryans emerged, splitting off into Persia and India?”

  “Yes,” Phoebe said. “The Persian word for the region was Bakhtar—derived from the Pashto word, Pakhtar.”

  “Pashto?”

  “Language of the Pashtun.”

  The Taliban again. Zealots. Warriors. Throat-cutters. “Haven’t we got enough trouble with the Iranians?” I asked.

  Phoebe took back the camel—some quality of the jade seemed to make you want to clutch it. She said, “The fact is, the Pashtun may be the most direct descendants of the Aryans. You could say they have a greater claim to the soma lotus than anyone.”

  IN THE REFLECTING POOL of the Bolo Hauz mosque, the molten orange sky shimmered. I sat cross-legged at the rim of the pond, the finished pages piled before me. My eyes had grown bleary and the twilight had dimmed, but the title, in Persian, still read boldly:

  “The Sultan’s Dream of Paradise”

  by Borzoo Baghestani

  It hadn’t taken long to find the secret I had sought. I’d skipped ahead to the ending. Where else should one expect a Muslim king to find his dream? And sure enough, there it was, in a fabled city of dreams—the source of the lotus of the Hashishin!

  I peered across the pond in wonder. The epigraph to Tamerlane’s tale, four lines in Persian verse from his grandson, Ulug Beg, voiced itself within me as I gazed out on the mosque:

  His yearning, born in the womb,

  Still sought with his last breath,

  Now lay above his silent tomb,
r />   Unconquered yet in death.

  By the grace of Allah, I prayed, I shall fulfill the Sultan’s quest!

  61.

  Heaven on Earth

  AS THE TAXI APPROACHED THE TRAIN STATION, we noticed a squad car parked out front, just like the one at the Kalon minaret. My pulse began to race again.

  But it wasn’t just the cops that worried Phoebe. “After you left the travel office,” she said, “the man who was following you went inside. When he came out, I saw him make a call on his cell.”

  She looked at me and I grasped her implication: The man had forced the travel agent to tell him where I was going.

  I scanned the people entering and exiting the station. “So you think it’s likely they’ve sent someone here.”

  “Here...or to Samarkand.”

  We had half an hour before our train was to depart. No sense parading ourselves in front of the police—or any Hashishin who might be looking for us. I directed the cab to drop us off at a street of shops nearby.

  BAGHESTANI’S REPORTED VISITS to the Samarkand tomb had long piqued the Ayatollah’s curiosity. Now at last the reason for those many trips was clear.

  “Allah be praised!” he said, his voice betraying a rare excitement. “You’re sure of what you’ve read?”

  One hand on the wheel, the other on the phone, I answered, “Yes, it’s true, I’m certain.”

  “There is only one Truth with certainty,” he cautioned. “Insha’ Allah, you’ll see it with certainty of sight. Such is the power of the pure drink of Paradise.”