Death is Forever

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Unaware of the cold and isolation of the vast Alaskan landscape, Erin made a final adjustment on her camera and stepped back from the tripod. She tripped the shutter with fingers that no longer could feel the texture of the bulb release. The shutter opened and closed reluctantly, stiff with cold. As insurance, she exposed several more frames of film. The long, silk-on-silk sound of the camera mechanism was loud against the arctic silence.

  After the last exposure, she immediately went to work on a new combination of settings. When she fumbled the settings a second time, she swore softly, sending out her breath in a plume of glittering silver moisture. She had only moments to capture the shot she wanted. Right now the moon was at just the right angle to illuminate three of the river’s sinuous curves and to suggest similar curves in the folds of the mountains themselves.

  But the world was turning and the wind was pushing clouds into a single mass. Each passing second changed the most important element in the entire image—light.

  Erin’s watch cheeped a warning.

  She ignored it. The sound was only the first of several mechanical reminders she’d programmed into the watch. When she was shooting pictures, no other reality existed for her. Her ability to concentrate was a double-edged gift, putting her at odds with a civilization that required time to be divided and subdivided into portions that had no meaning beyond urban landscapes.

  “Dammit, hands, settle down,” she muttered as her numb fingers made slow work of resetting the camera’s finicky time and exposure mechanisms.

  The watch cheeped again.

  Even as she shut out the sound, part of her mind reluctantly understood that there was a world beyond her camera lens. And in that other world she had a plane to catch to civilization, the very civilization she’d avoided for seven years.

  Like the geese and shorebirds she photographed on the tundra, and like the whales she photographed from skin boats, she was southward bound. Unlike the birds and whales, she was heading toward days divided into hours divided into minutes divided into seconds, with no time off for good behavior, world without end, amen.

  She squeezed the bulb release, advanced the film, then squeezed again, listening as the shutter delicately framed instants of time that transcended clocks and heartbeats.

  Rapt, patient, shivering with a cold she didn’t feel, she worked over the camera again, compelled by the black and silver starkness of the landscape, photographing her farewell to a land she loved.

  There was a mythic quality to the arctic that had attracted her on first sight. That quality was reflected in the “uncivilized” lives of the Eskimo and Aleut subsistence hunters she’d met and lived among. She’d gone with men in skin boats through shifting leads in pack ice, hunting whales. Out in the frail boats she’d learned that primitive man feared, loved, and revered his prey.

  Modern man simply killed with high-tech weapons, risking nothing of himself and therefore learning nothing of himself or his prey, of life or death or transcendence. She had known those kinds of men, too. Modern men.

  She would rather freeze to death in the arctic than live as they did.

  Her watch’s warnings came at shorter intervals until they became constant, reminding Erin of the urgency of the telegram that had been read to her over the shortwave radio that morning.

  You must return immediately stop family emergency stop instructions to follow stop james rosen esq.

  “Shut up,” she muttered. “Just…shut…up.”

  She jabbed a numb index finger at the alarm button on her watch, silencing it. But she knew it was too late. Her concentration had been ruined, because she couldn’t turn off James Rosen Esquire as easily as she’d silenced her watch.

  You must return immediately stop

  Erin shoved aside the demand. She’d ignored civilization for seven years. She could ignore it for seven more minutes. She would have ignored the summons forever if she hadn’t realized that her own arctic cycle was ending.

  But it was.

  She hadn’t taken all possible pictures of the arctic, but she’d taken all the images that were necessary for her own needs. The violence that had driven her into the wilderness seven years ago had faded to a whisper. She wasn’t the same person she’d been then.

  The answers she’d found in Alaska no longer fit the questions she was asking herself.

  Jeffrey will be ecstatic, Erin thought, wishing the idea gave her greater comfort.

  Jeffrey Fisher, her New York editor, didn’t understand the part of her life she spent in the wilderness. Nor did he understand the restlessness that sent her out to places where others rarely went. He loved her photographic technique, her artist’s eye, but he was forever trying to get her to do “civilized” photography—English farmhouses and French vineyards, ancient Greek statues and modern Mediterranean resorts.

  At first she’d tried to make Fisher understand why she didn’t want his European assignments. She’d tried to explain to him that while civilization removed the grueling lows of physical deprivation, it also leveled off the psychic highs of survival.

  Fisher hadn’t understood. Her preferred world of stark Pacific Rim landscapes and remote cultures was simply too distant from Manhattan, and too different in ways both obvious and subtle, for him to understand. The East Coast looked east, toward Europe and the past. The West Coast looked west, toward the undeveloped Pacific Rim and the future.

  Unfortunately she’d run out of internal and external excuses for not accepting the European assignments, for not shooting farmhouses and wine cellars and sterling silver by candlelight. She’d made herself clear her schedule so that no one would be left hanging if she was gone for several months or even a year. She’d done everything but work up enthusiasm for shooting European set pieces when she would rather shoot almost anything else.

  She’d been to the Continent many times. She’d been more depressed than impressed. Part of it was simply that her former fiancé had been European, or at least had claimed to be.

  Family emergency stop

  Part of it was that she associated Europe with her father’s work, diplomacy and secrets and treachery, the kind of betrayal that scarred its survivors for life.

  Assuming there were any survivors to scar.

  Instructions to follow stop

  Instructions, but no truth. Man had invented civilization in order to escape natural truth and had invented time in order to more carefully package human lies.

  Family emergency

  Motionless, Erin stood surrounded by brilliant silver light and radiant natural silence, eternity condensed into a shimmering unity that had a sweeping disregard for human concepts such as truth and lies, life and death, fair and unfair.

  You must return

  Life wasn’t fair or unfair; it was simply unexpected. Sometimes life’s surprises were breathtakingly beautiful, like the arctic. Sometimes they were breathtakingly cruel, like Hans. But surprises were always the raw material of life, and she had chosen to live.

  Erin silenced her wristwatch alarm for the last time and began packing up her equipment for the long trip to Los Angeles.

  3

  Antwerp

  “How long ago did the two Chinese assassins die?”

  The voice, slightly distorted by the satellite link and the scrambler, had a dry Etonian disdain. Hugo van Luik was a stocky Dutchman with a full head of white hair, but he sounded like a whingeing Pom to an Australian ear.

  There was the sound of a bottle gurgling at the other end of the line. Van Luik could imagine Jason Street swilling beer from an oversized can.

  “Twelve hours,” Street said, “maybe a bit more.”

  “Why was your report delayed?”

  “You want me spilling our business on open phone lines, do you?” Street shot back. “This is bloody Australia, remember. Anybody with a receiver can listen in on two-way radios. I buried the chokies, took the place apart, and then got back here to Perth before I called.”

  Van Luik was gratefu
l to be ten thousand miles away from the country and the man he detested yet was never free of. Van Luik’s office on the fifth floor of the gray, anonymous office building on Pelikanstraat, the main street of Antwerp’s diamond trade, might as well have been in hell for all the comfort it gave him.

  He closed his eyes against the blinding pain of a growing headache. At the moment he was alone in his office, so he allowed himself the luxury of slumping. He felt like he was impaled on a giant fishhook. Nausea twisted in his stomach, then slowly subsided. He drew a deep, grateful breath. He was a powerful man, both physically and in his profession, but he paid the price of power. Lately that price seemed to grow every day.

  “Very well,” van Luik said. “To summarize, the holographic will, the velvet sack, and the tin box were gone by the time you arrived. A decade’s work—wasted.”

  “Too bloody right. You should have let me open Abe Windsor up my own way. He’d have spilled his secret soon enough.”

  “Perhaps. But more probably a man his age would have died under torture and left the secret to his heir. At the time, the risks seemed too great.”

  “Not now, mate. Now they look bloody small.”

  “Your hindsight is superlative.”

  No reply came from the other end of the line, unless another gurgle of beer could be called a comment. Street loathed the precise Dutchman whose power was hidden behind the bland, meaningless title of Director of Special Operations, Diamond Sales Division. But even while Street loathed van Luik, he feared him.

  “Very well,” van Luik said. “Now go back over it from the beginning.”

  It was his favorite tactic with a hardhead like Jason Street. Repetition reinforced the subordinate role and at the same time exposed little inconsistencies that suggested information withheld or lies told.

  Street knew the drill as well as van Luik did. The Australian took another long swallow of beer and belched into the telephone. “Not much to tell, really. Abe had been drinking for a few days. Full as a boot, he was. Nothing different there. About three days ago he went crook, grabbed a shovel, and took off into the bush, screaming something about digging his own grave.”

  “Was that unusual?”

  “Hell no, mate. Happens once a month, like a woman bleeding. Only this time Abe was telling the truth. He must have died out there in the bush. His body looked like he’d been slow-roasted on a spit. Dead as tinned fish and three times the smell.”

  Van Luik felt nausea welling up again, though not because of Street’s words. Death and corruption were matters of indifference to the Dutchman. It was helplessness that made him feel sick.

  “How did Windsor’s body get back to the station?” van Luik asked.

  “The chokies must have found him.”

  “Chokies?”

  “Chinks, slants, slopeheads, Chinamen,” Street said impatiently. Van Luik spoke four languages but couldn’t—or wouldn’t—remember the Australian slang Street always used. “They trucked him back.”

  “How do you know that? Did your informant at the station tell you?”

  “Sarah? She’d already gone walkabout with her bronze-wing brats. She was drinking with Abe, same as usual, and passed out. When she sobered up and he still wasn’t back, she called me, then headed for the back of beyond.”

  “Why?”

  “She knew I’d kill her if Abe was dead.”

  “Then how do you know the Chinese found Windsor?”

  “There were no new tracks going into the station. The cook must have called in the chopper when Abe didn’t come back. Or else he followed Abe and staked him out in the sun for a yak about missing mines.”

  Van Luik let his silence reach halfway around the world.

  Street kept talking. “The bloody cook had to be a tout, same as Sarah. Lots of people knew Abe had some nice stones in the sack. Wasn’t just us on to him.”

  Van Luik massaged the bridge of his nose. “Go on.”

  “It must have been the chokies that found Abe out in the bush, brought him back, then ransacked the station, which means Abe didn’t talk before he died.”

  “I profoundly hope so. Unfortunately the ‘chokies’ knew enough to take the tin box as well as the diamonds, didn’t they?”

  Jason Street took a swig of beer and said nothing. He’d been hoping van Luik wouldn’t realize the implications of the missing box so quickly.

  “Didn’t they?” Van Luik’s repeated question had an edge to it.

  “Right, they took the bloody box.”

  “So we must assume they are at least as well informed as we are. They must realize that the contents of the bag are worth only a fraction of what the contents of the box may ultimately be worth.”

  The encrypted satellite channel hummed invitingly, waiting for Street to agree with the obvious.

  “I suppose,” the Australian said reluctantly.

  Van Luik looked out across the wet, gray rooftops that housed the most skillful diamond cutters and the most ruthless gemstone brokers in the world. Sometimes he could relieve the pain by resting his eyes on distant vistas. And sometimes he simply had to endure.

  He closed his eyes and endured, trying to think beyond the blinding instants of pain that measured his heartbeats in the blood vessels behind his eyes. Jason Street had come to ConMin with the highest recommendations ten years ago, when he had been barely thirty. Nothing had happened since then to make van Luik doubt Street’s abilities or his ultimate loyalties.

  Until now. Now something was wrong. Street was temporizing, lying, or withholding some crucial bit of information. Van Luik couldn’t tell whether the Australian was lying to avoid ConMin’s wrath or for some other, less obvious reason.

  “Were you able to get any information on the helicopter?” van Luik asked softly.

  “I checked every charter operator in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. No luck. No trace of a flight plan in the air traffic control system, either. Must have been privately owned.”

  “Find that helicopter.” Van Luik almost gagged with the sudden blinding agony his outburst triggered. He breathed shallowly through his mouth for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was controlled and calm. “We must find out who has the poetry and the stones.”

  “I’m working on it, mate.”

  Van Luik shifted the phone to his left hand and massaged his right temple with long, well-manicured fingers. Light flashed from the little finger of his right hand, where he wore a five-carat, emerald-cut, D flawless diamond. The stone was pavé set in matte-finish platinum. It was the only jewelry van Luik wore or needed to wear. In Antwerp the stone was a calling card, instantly identifying him as a fellow of the international diamond brotherhood.

  “You have, of course, a copy of ‘Chunder from Down Under’?” van Luik asked.

  “Sarah checked it a week before Abe died. It hadn’t been changed since the last time I sent a copy to you.”

  “I don’t suppose she was able to copy the will, though?” Van Luik’s tone was quiet, almost accusing. When Street didn’t answer, the Dutchman added, “Did she even manage to look at it?”

  Street drew a deep breath and prepared to tell van Luik what he already knew. “Abe left ‘Chunder’ on his bedside table, but his will was his own bloody little secret, and he kept it even closer than the stones around his neck.”

  Van Luik grunted. He opened the file on the desk in front of him and glanced through a sheaf of photographs. They were grainy prints, blown up from the tiny negatives of a Minox camera, page after page of spidery, old-fashioned handwriting on rough, lined tablet paper. Meaningless ramblings or a dead man’s cleverly disguised clues to a missing diamond mine. The truth of the poetry was still elusive.

  “You have a copy with you,” van Luik said.

  It was a statement, not a question. Street bit back a savage retort and said only, “Yes.”

  “Begin.”

  “Rack off, van Luik. We’ve been around this course so many times that—”


  “Begin,” van Luik interrupted coldly.

  There was a silence, followed by the subtle rustling of paper as Street shuffled through pages of Crazy Abe’s oddly lucid handwriting.

  “Any particular verse strike your fancy?” Street asked in a goading tone. He knew that “Chunder” offended van Luik in more ways than his inability to pierce its central secret.

  “The fourth verse this time, I think.”

  “Right.” Street began reading aloud, his voice uninflected. “‘Find it if you can,/If you dare to go/Where the dark swan floats/Over a dead sea’s bones,/Where men are Percys and Lady Janes are stone.’” When he finished reading, Street waited.

  So did van Luik.

  With a muttered curse, Street began explaining lines he’d read and explained so many times he no longer really saw them. “The first line—”

  “Is self-explanatory,” van Luik cut in. “So is the second. Begin with the third.”

  “Right. Black swans are all over the outback, like koalas used to be all over the east coast. He could be talking about a strike near a billabong.”

  “Explain.”

  “A billabong is a deep river pool that becomes a waterhole in the dry season when the shallow parts of the river dry up,” Street said mechanically.

  “Go on.”

  Street’s hand tightened on the telephone. Of all van Luik’s quirks, the one of making someone repeat the same information over and over again was the most irritating. It was also the most effective in preventing lies, a fact Street understood and had put to use for himself with his own subordinates.

  “Abe could have made a strike near a billabong, except that there aren’t any waterholes on his mineral leases or on his station that are big enough to be called a billabong,” Street said in a monotone. “The only reliable year-round water is the well at his station house.”

  Van Luik made a curt sound that could have meant anything. Street knew it was a signal to keep talking.

  “That leaves the bloody ‘dead sea’s bones,’” Street continued tonelessly. “Since we don’t have a billabong for the swans to swim in, it’s no shocker that we don’t have any waterholes sitting on top of a marine fossil bed to point the way to the mine.”