The Assassin Lotus

by David Angsten

  THE LID WOULD NOT SLIDE LOOSE. The heavy box, thick as a block, repelled the blows of my blade. Even using the tip of the kukri, I could not prize the lid. Finally, jamming down the point, it slipped and sliced my hand. I wailed in a fury.

  I thought of the Buddhist, sitting smugly silent. Bristling, I realized that he must have the key.

  STEALTH. SURPRISE. The only chance I had.

  Dragging my bleeding ankle behind, clenching the knife in my teeth, I clawed my way across the sand, creeping toward the hole. Sharp-weaponed, irresistible in battle, attacking, slaying his foes—

  I spotted something moving. A pair of hands pushing an object out over the rim of the hole.

  The jade medicine box! I eagerly crept toward it.

  EXITING THIS DEEP TRENCH was not going to be easy. My foot could find no purchase in the crumbly sand walls, and there was nothing at the top that I could hold to. I struggled in vain to clamber up the side. My fingers clawed the rim. Sand tore loose and cascaded to my feet. With each attempt, I lost more strength. Finally, I collapsed.

  Lying on the floor of the pit, I waited to catch my breath. Blood had drenched my shirt and belly—the devil Mahbood’s handiwork. He had skillfully punctured my spleen—

  The knives—of course!

  I scrambled to my feet. The crescent lay half-buried. The kukri stood erect. I extracted it, turned it flat, and jammed it into the wall. This would be my stair-step. The crescent would be my rail.

  I REACHED for the jade box.

  The Damascene dagger suddenly swung out of the hole and plunged down before me, hooking deep into the sand.

  I stared at the blade in shock. Vanitar rearranged his grip and pulled himself up to the rim. The moment he did, he saw me.

  With a yell, I lunged—dagger in hand—burying my blade in the back of his neck.

  Vanitar cried out. I backed away in horror.

  Locked in a grimace, the knife still poking out of him, the Iranian collapsed back down into the hole, hauling his crescent dagger with him.

  A silence fell over the site. I listened with growing relief. Despite the terrible thing I had done, I felt a surge of triumph. Irresistible in battle! Attacking, slaying his foes!

  I crawled forward to peer into the pit...

  THE OLD MAN had said he could trust me. Me, and me alone, of all of them.

  I cannot displease him. I must do what I must do. Retrieve the lost lotus. Avenge Arshan’s death. For the Old Man, for the Mahdi, for the Glory of Islam!

  Reaching back I extracted the stinging dagger from my neck. Blood sang from the wound, and the song gave rise to a rage. I flung the paltry knife aside and grabbed the Dagger of God.

  May the Lord curse the American and get Hell ready for him. He and the devil monk are about to face the Wrath of Allah.

  “Allahu Akbar!”

  WITH A SHOUT Vanitar burst from the hole, his bright dagger flashing. I rolled aside as the blade slammed down, catching my shirt in the sand. Still halfway in the hole, Vanitar raised the knife again. I scrambled back and away. The crescent crashed down between my legs. I turned and scuttled toward Fiore.

  The white-thatched monk sat motionless against the garden wall, exuding a deathlike calm. Even in the twilight I could see wet blood on his beard. Somehow I thought he had to be alive.

  Fear had reignited. I had no weapon now. As I scurried toward the monk, I glanced back at the hole. With his dagger spiked in the sand, Vanitar had hauled himself out onto the ground. Starting on all fours, he struggled to his feet. For a moment he stood staggering against the evening sky, its blueness turning nearly black behind him. He bent down for his dagger and could barely pull it out. Then he reached down and lifted up the black jade box.

  I crawled over to Fiore and peered into his face. Still I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. “Doctor—he’s coming for us. Please. Wake up.”

  Nothing. No reaction. The Buddha of my dream.

  Vanitar lurched toward us. The knife hung from his hand. I thought, if I could stand up, I might beat him back, or tackle him and try to take the dagger. But I could not stand up. My ankle wouldn’t hold. And with all the blood I’d lost I’d grown too weak.

  I looked again to Fiore. His swollen eyes still shut. Which one of us, I wondered, would the crescent fall on first?

  91.

  Like Water

  VANITAR WALKED UNSTEADILY TOWARD US, holding the jade box and the scythe-like dagger, his shadowy figure more distinct with every step. When finally he stopped and stood teetering above us, I found myself horrified at the condition he was in. Blood drained down his shoulder where he’d pulled the knife from his neck, and below the ribs his soiled shirt glistened blackish red. His face, gaunt and pallid from the loss of so much blood, gave off a ghoulish glow like the moon above his head. The scar he had managed to conceal for so long now looked like the trace of a kiss on a corpse.

  Only his eyes looked alive. They flared wide and white, desperate with desire, craving this precious thing it seemed he could not live without.

  I couldn’t help feeling pity for him. Perhaps I simply could not shake the bond I’d thought we had. He had been Faraj to me, my ally and companion, a role he had performed with great conviction. Could that better part of him really be so dead and buried? Could the bond I felt have been completely false?

  Vanitar’s gaze fell on the immobile Buddhist monk. “The key,” he uttered.

  I realized then the box he held still remained unopened, and turned to see if Fiore would respond.

  He did. Slowly. His eyes gradually opened as if waking from the dead. His lungs once again took in air. He raised his gaze to Vanitar and observed him for a moment. Then, in his soft and gentle voice, he spoke to him in a language I assumed must have been Persian.

  Vanitar looked stunned.

  A THUNDERBOLT STRUCK ME as I stood before the monk. It came not from the words he spoke, but from the voice that spoke them. In the same flawless, formal tongue I’d been hearing from the Ayatollah, he was quoting a Persian Sufi poet, a favorite of Faraj:

  “All the hundred and twenty-four thousand prophets were sent to preach one word. They bade the people say ‘Allah,’ and devote themselves to Him. Those who heard this word by the ear alone let it go out by the other ear; but those who heard it with their souls imprinted it on their souls and repeated it until it penetrated their hearts and souls, and their whole beings became this word. They were made independent of the pronunciation of this word; they were released from the sound of the letters. Having understood the spiritual meaning of this word, they became so absorbed in it that they were no more conscious of their own—”

  I had stopped listening to the tale he was telling. All I could hear was the familiar sound of his voice—the voice of the Ayatollah! The same voice I had first heard through my brother’s mobile phone, the voice I had presumed belonged to the Old Man back in Qum, the voice I had submitted to, the voice I had obeyed.

  They had gotten Arshan’s phone number the very night he died! The “Ayatollah” calling me had been this sly imposter—a Buddhist monk who lied in perfect Persian.

  “You must follow my instructions,” he had ordered back in Rome “—and my instructions only. Trust no one but me.”

  I flushed away my phones. Cut off contact with Mahbood. Killed Hashishin I’d thought had turned against us.

  But I’d believed in lies. Mahbood had spoken the truth. He’d been taking orders from the true Ayatollah. I had been recruited by this devil!

  VANITAR’S LOOK OF DISBELIEF had soured into a rictus. “Who are you to speak to me of Allah?!” he asked in English.

  Fiore answered calmly. “I speak only of the Truth that lies behind the word.”

  “What do you know of the Truth? You’re with the CIA. You’ve been telling lies to me for days.”

  I turned to Fiore in astonishment. “You’re with the CIA?”

  The doctor methodically unfolded his legs and achingly rose to his feet. “It would be m
ore accurate to say that the Americans are with me.” He looked directly at Vanitar. “They don’t seem to share your fascination with our lotus. Their only wish is to see your cult of Mahdism destroyed.”

  Vanitar peered back at him, a deathlike, ghostly glare. “The key,” he demanded.

  Fiore looked down at the jade box and the knife in Vanitar’s hands, then back up into the desperate eyes that glared at him. Although Fiore himself had been badly beaten and bloodied, he seemed to have retained within a great reserve of strength. He reached out slowly toward Mahbood while opening up his hand. On his palm lay a blackened brass key.

  Vanitar seemed surprised at how readily it was offered. With a wary look, he took the key and tried it in the keyhole.

  The lock turned. The lid slid open.

  As Vanitar peered into the box, he seemed to grow delirious, unsteady on his feet, his face disintegrating in despair. The box slipped from his hands, landing open in the sand. He gazed at it, bewildered.

  “It’s empty.”

  He said the word in English and I saw that he was right. There were no seeds, no lotus flowers. Nothing at all in the box. He looked in desperation at Fiore.

  “The Truth is like water,” the monk said gently. “It needs a vessel to carry it. But you mistook your vessel for the Truth.”

  Vanitar seemed to hang on the word, struggling to comprehend it.

  The Truth.

  What Truth? I’d believed in lies. Lies about myself. Lies about my father. Lies about my mother’s honor. Lies about Faraj.

  At Kahrizak I had killed Faraj because he spoke the truth.

  My legs gave way. I dropped to my knees. Fear drained all the life from me. I was being hollowed out, emptied into the sand. There’d be nothing left...

  “Nothing.”

  On his knees before the monk, visibly bleeding to death, Vanitar looked like a supplicant who had lost the ear of God, or a saint who suddenly realized he’d been confessing to the devil. The zealotry that lit his eyes had melted into uncertainty, and his face now reminded me of Faraj again, the boy who had been his childhood pal, the man who had been my friend. Vanitar had tortured and killed that friend in prison. How had he lived with that sin?

  Lies. Falsehood. The comfort of illusion.

  Truth has arrived, and falsehood perished. I am left naked and alone. Fatherless. Motherless. My half-brothers dead. One of them, my dearest friend, killed by my own hand.

  All is lost. I am lost. I do not know who I am.

  Vanitar turned to me, desperate now for some way out, a way to hold on to what he believed in spite of all that had happened. But when he saw me looking at him—with curiosity and compassion—a flash of panic crossed his face. On impulse he gripped hold of his dagger and attempted to raise the blade. But the weight of the weapon was too much for him; he no longer had any strength. I laid my hand on top of his and gently pressed it down. Offering no resistance, he let the knife fall easily, then raised his eyes to mine.

  I did not look away.

  I gazed into Duran’s eyes and saw the way he looked at me, as if I were still Faraj, garnering his high regard, eliciting his pity. It frightened me at first. His eyes were like a mirror. But then I fell deep into them, like limpid pools of water, sinking into him somehow, seeing from his eyes. Gazing at me openly, without a trace of fear, it seemed he saw himself in me, or me inside of him.

  Peering into his eyes, I felt I all but disappeared. Time came to a stop.

  “You are perfectly safe now,” Fiore was saying. “Everyone must taste death...”

  The Buddhist monk was speaking, but his voice slowly morphed into the haunting voice of Faraj. Faraj, my brother. Reciting a line from Rumi:

  “We become these words we say, a wailing sound moving out into the air...”

  Vanitar’s gaze climbed slowly skyward. “Allah,” he whispered, and with that last exhalation of breath, the last of the Hashishin keeled over, dead.

  92.

  Home

  NIGHT HAD DESCENDED on the Taklimakan. Beyond the wall the camels stood against the starry sky, while the stupa loomed above like a monument to darkness, and Vanitar’s corpse, lying out before us, offered its last drops of blood to the sand.

  As Dr. Fiore delicately wrapped the slit across my ankle, he explained how the CIA had approached him that final night in Rome. Aware that the Assassins were searching for the lotus, they had been listening to my cell phone calls in hopes of locating Dan. In the process they discovered that Dr. Fiore and his granddaughter were trying to do the same. When they began to pick up the calls and numbers of the Iranians as well, they decided to join forces with Fiore. Given his intimate knowledge of the Iranians’ language and religion, they approached him to play the starring role of the Ayatollah in Qum.

  “We are close to the same age,” he said. “And they knew a lot about him. His teachings. His temperament. His apocalyptic vision. They said the Old Man and his Hashishin were a major destabilizing force throughout the Middle East.”

  It didn’t take long for Fiore to decide. He’d have access to CIA intelligence and surveillance capabilities, vital aids to track down Dan and get his lotus back. And if he managed to trick Vanitar into turning on his own, he could flush the other assassins out and destroy the Hashishin.

  The doctor quickly agreed to the scheme, but under two conditions: that they would supply the intelligence, under his direction, and that the soma lotus would be left in the hands of the Buddhist monks alone.

  To his surprise, the Agency agreed. “Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia—not to mention Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State—the hands of the CIA are plenty full these days. Stopping the Assassins was high up on their list, but chasing after a lotus flower? They just didn’t get it.”

  “Do you trust them to keep their word?” I asked. “I know my brother wouldn’t.”

  He thought for a moment before he replied. “The Americans have indeed displayed a lack of wisdom on occasion. There is no one in this world can see all ends. But one thing they don’t suffer from is a deficit of courage. You proved that yourself unmistakably today.”

  Despite the enduring effects of the soma, my ego swelled with a sweet surge of pride, punctured by a pinprick of uncertainty. “I can’t help wondering if we’d all been better off...if I’d done what you first suggested and just gone home.”

  Fiore finished wrapping and looked me in the eye. “You are home,” he said. He gradually gathered himself to his feet. “Rest here for a moment. We’ve another long journey ahead of us.”

  With that he trudged off to retrieve the two camels and a bamboo ladder he had hidden in the sand. I laid back and stared up at the stars.

  You are home.

  Oddly enough, I knew exactly what he meant. We were far out in the desert in the cold of night; I was badly injured and unable to walk; Anand was probably dead or dying and Jamyang in despair; it was miles back to the car and still more miles to the hospital, where Phoebe was frantic to save Dan and Govindi, while all around them the rioting city was going up in flames.

  And yet...

  I felt right at home.

  Blame it on the soma, or perhaps the loss of blood. Call it the House of the Lord. The Refuge of the Buddha. The Infinite Ground of Being. Madness. I lay safe in the center of the mandala, halfway between East and West, suspended in a state of equilibrium, a human being balanced on the finger of God between the worlds of eternity and time. Faced with the prospect of death and calamity, my soul remained stoical and calm, the same calm I’d tasted at the sight of Vinny’s Christ, or the Rembrandts in Steinberg’s foggy shop window, everything intimately vivid and real, yet somehow transparent and infinite, too, as if cruel samsara were a dance through nirvana, as if God inhabited everything and the Buddha was in the world.

  The doctor sidled by with the bamboo ladder. A fire-trailing meteor rode the sky. A sudden spark of pain sent a spasm up my leg. A camel raised its muzzle to the stars.

  This might be my last night on earth, I
imagined. Or the beginning of a magnificent new life. One simply must go forward without knowing, guided only by the longing of the heart. For what is courage, after all, but love overcoming fear?

  I closed my eyes a moment and at once I fell asleep. Unafraid of darkness, or of death.

  93.

  The Cry

  “JACK!”

  I awoke beneath the ancient oak. Wind tearing through its branches. Dan and Phoebe gone.

  Phoebe’s cry came faintly to me, borne inside the gusts. “Jack! Come back to me!”

  I could not see her anywhere; she’d vanished in the air. “Phoebe!” The wind snatched my voice away. The heaving branches creaked. I cupped my hands around my mouth and cried out, “Phoebe!”

  “Jack. Wake up.”

  My eyes snapped open. The red-robed Santa Claus doctor peered down at me. I sat up, wincing as the pain returned to my leg.

  We were still at the stupa.

  “You were calling for someone,” he said.

  The lingering sound of her cry troubled me. “Just a dream,” I said.

  “Well...now you are awake.”

  Behind him, the moonlit camels waited languidly. The night, utterly still, seemed magical, unreal. “How do I know that for certain?”

  “Pain,” he said. “You don’t feel pain in dreams. Only fear. That’s why you’re supposed to pinch yourself to see if you’re awake.”

  “Then for sure I’m awake,” I said. “How do I stop the pinching?”

  “Pain is inevitable,” he said. “But suffering is a choice. Ready to join the caravan?”

  I nodded toward the bulging sack slung over his shoulder. “We going by camel or reindeer?”

  He dropped the bag in front of me and dusted off the sand. “When you get back to Rome, I want you to do me a favor. Keep your eye on that pond in the garden. If you discover the lotus is growing there, tear it out and destroy it.”