Land of Marvels

by Unsworth, Barry

  “Gesundheit!”

  “I was wondering,” Elliott said, “just out of curiosity, you know, which paper do you work for?”

  “I work for this one or that one. I am freelance.”

  “Freelance, eh? I see, yes.”

  “But it is not for the newspaper I come to see you. For the newspaper it is to talk with archaeologists, not geologists, that is my purpose.”

  These words cleared any doubt remaining in Elliott’s mind as to the true nature and purpose of his visitor. “Naturally,” he said. “We are a lesser breed altogether.”

  “Ha-ha. Lesser breed, very good. You Americans have a sense of humor very special. My good chap, I do not want to take up your time, so I will come to the point without delaying more. I am carrying a letter from Herr Kruckman of the Deutsche Bank giving me authority to collect the reports that so far you have made and take them back with me to Berlin when I return. Herr Kruckman is a close friend of your Lord Rampling, they have many interests in common.”

  “You mean Zurich, I suppose.”

  “Eh? No, no, I am stationed in Berlin.”

  By this time Elliott was feeling constrained to keep to the lines of the dialogue as far as he could remember them, as if there were an audience somewhere that expected it of him, having enjoyed the first performance. “I have not made any reports as yet,” he said. “It was not part of my commission to make reports at this stage. There must be some mistake.”

  “No, there is no mistake. I have the letter here.” Spahl’s hand went to the inside pocket of his coat.

  “I don’t need to see the letter; I have no doubt it is genuine. I mean some mistake in the instructions, some misunderstanding about the terms on which I was employed.”

  “If reports you do not have, it will be enough to take your notes and papers.”

  “How is it that you were landed with this job?”

  “Landed? Oh, yes, to land from a ship. It is an accident. They know I am leaving for Mesopotamia to do the article, they know I am traveling here in this region—”

  “I see, yes. It seemed a good idea for you to pick up the papers as you were passing by.”

  “Exactly, yes.” Spahl shot a sharp glance around the room. “You have them here, the notes?”

  Elliott explained—he was more fluent now than on the first occasion—that he had notes, yes, but for reasons of security he had used a private language of symbols that no one else could possibly decipher. He would need some days in order to summarize these in the form of a report and add some important facts that had come to light recently and had not been written up yet.

  He watched Spahl considering, guessed at the calculations going on behind those small, sharp eyes. And it was now, in these few moments, while he was hoping Spahl would understand that he had to be kept alive, at least until the report was made, that the idea came to him for a radical departure from the script. It was a difficult decision to make; Manning was keeping a watch on all his movements; it was almost certain that he would already know about this nighttime visit. He would have guessed immediately what Spahl was up to. He would have decided to kill Spahl to make sure no private arrangements were made, no privileged information passed on to him. Spahl would be a sitting duck; he could have no idea that the major was any other than he seemed. Was that more, or less, dangerous to himself? If they were both in the know, it might give him a breathing space. And there was a chance that one of them would succeed in killing the other, thus halving the opposition.

  “Let us say three days then,” Spahl said.

  “Agreed. It is odd, you know, an odd coincidence, but Major Manning, the British officer you met at dinner, he came tapping at my door at just this time two or three nights ago, and he too was carrying a letter that authorized him to collect my papers and take them back with him. We had a conversation very similar to the one I’ve had with you. Similar in some ways, at least. He wanted to take the papers to London, not Berlin.”

  The way his visitor took this news confirmed Elliott’s first impression that it was a dangerous man he had to deal with. He made no comment, showed no emotion. After some moments of silence he said, “Three days then, it is agreed,” and shortly after this he got up and took his leave.

  When the door was safely locked behind him, Elliott sat down at his table and began to compile his report. He had made notes and sketches over these last few days; they were the only papers he had of any value, those concerning the salt dome, the mineral constitution of the disk cap, estimates of the quantity of oil in the upfolds of rock and the closeness to the surface and consequent risks of drilling. The report would contain only the essentials; folded into an envelope, it would remain on his person day and night until he could get clear. The notes he would destroy.

  It became ever clearer to him as he worked that his original escape plan would have to be abandoned. He could not just ride out one morning and go on riding; it was too risky. There were two of them now; they would be watching each other, but they would also be watching him. At a distance, unseen, waiting for a chance to pick him off . . . It might not be so, but he could not take the chance. Both were in their ways opponents to be respected, the fanatical major with his highly developed sense of duty, Spahl with that soft-footed, watchful, professional look about him—a Secret Service man probably. A freelance, he had said. I’ll bet you are.

  He was beginning to doubt the wisdom of describing his earlier notes—still in the custody of Edith—as being comprehensible to no one but to himself. This gave him no protection, rather the opposite. He could make a false report, but that would not save him either. False or not, as soon as it was handed over his hours would be numbered. His only safety lay in these few days of grace, the belief on their part that he had knowledge of value. He must use the time to his advantage; he must somehow find a way of taking the initiative.

  It was true, as Elliott had surmised, that the major had kept his room under watch, witnessed Spahl’s visit to him, and come to the only possible conclusion. But Manning had done more than this: He had kept all the other rooms under observation too, which was made easier by the fact that the house was built in the local style; though some of the rooms were interconnecting, they were all entered from the courtyard. On the day following his talk with Elliott he had seen him return from his day’s work in late afternoon, seen him emerge with a jacket over his arm—suspicious in itself at this hour of the day—seen him make his way to the common room, which Mrs. Somerville had entered sometime before. They had remained there together for an hour, a fact that already raised some questions in the major’s mind. When they returned to their respective rooms, one ten minutes after the other, Elliott still had his jacket, but Mrs. Somerville was now carrying a cardboard folder.

  He continued to keep them under observation. On the next day too they had tea together at the same time; also on the day following. This led to certain conclusions on the major’s part, which condensed into a deepening contempt for the treacherous geologist. The scoundrel had somehow inveigled himself into the good graces of the lady of the house and in an effort to save his own skin had made her the depositary of his papers, thus abusing her trust and putting her in danger of harm. Thinking of this, the major could hardly find words in his mind for it. The fellow deserved to be strung up. Well, he promised himself grimly, he couldn’t be the hangman, but he would be the next best thing; he would be a one-man firing squad when the time came, though he might have to deal with the odious, soft-voiced Swiss first.

  He saw it as a clear duty to warn Mrs. Somerville, even though it meant a breach of his instructions, which were to preserve strict secrecy. An opportunity for this came when he found her sitting alone in the workroom, cleaning and assembling some pieces of ceramic. But he had not gone far with the relation of Elliott’s contemptible behavior when he found himself being regarded with eyes of fury and scorn.

  “How dare you.” It was the last straw; she could contain herself no longer; such insolence was
not to be borne. “How could you be so base, to hide behind this appearance of an officer and gentleman, to come here to me, a woman, to try to make a fool of me, to lay your own treachery at another man’s door, one who is worth twenty of you? Alex has told me everything. I know you are not what you seem. I know you are in the pay of the Russians.”

  The major had brown eyes, amber in shade, something like the color of marmalade. They were open now to their widest extent, and his jaw had slackened as he regarded his hostess. “In the pay of the Russians? He told you that?” His face was smoothed out. Astonishment had dispelled all sign of the nervous mannerism that twisted his mouth from time to time. He seemed about to speak but then fell silent. After a moment or two a strange, uncertain smile came to his face, one in which incredulity struggled with reluctant amusement. “By God, that’s rich,” he said.

  It was the smile that did it, more than the words that followed. That and the doubts that had been gathering in her mind for some time now, doubts about that fiery sincerity that Alex seemed to exude from every pore. But mainly it was the smile. Astonishment could be faked, but a smile like that never. Except perhaps by some superbly gifted actor, and the major was not that; he was too unmistakably the genuine article. Unless he had all this while, ever since his arrival, been acting the part of the genuine article, which Edith could not believe. The reasoning that had led Elliott to distrust the major led Edith now to believe him. It was Alex who was the actor. It was Alex who was in the pay of a foreign power, the Germans, the major was telling her now, Britain’s great enemy; that was why he had wanted to hide the papers. It was Alex who had done what she had just been furiously accusing the major of doing, even worse, because he had come as a lover, a more heinous offense, he had lied to her and deceived her and laid the blame on another man . . .

  Conviction of this, when it came, was total. And the distress of it brought sudden tears to her eyes. She could not listen to the major any longer, and she asked him to leave her, but in tones that told him he was believed. When he had gone the tears came faster. How could she have been so foolish, how could she have believed that a man like Major Manning was a hired assassin? It was someone else Alex was worried about; naturally he had not told her who. But it didn’t matter anymore; he could sink or swim as far as she was concerned. She had felt contempt for John because he had been Rampling’s dupe, and now she had been Elliott’s. That is the truth, she thought through her tears. No good trying to hide away from it. She and John were alike; they belonged in the army of the gullible. It is because we are believers, she whispered to herself, and the thought calmed her tears. He and I, together in this, perhaps we should try to believe each other.

  She felt soothed at this thought, though less than fully convinced by it. And it was followed by a strange feeling of relief. The major was genuine, and that meant that everything else was too, all the things that Alex’s lies had made her doubt, the honor of the British Army, the values of loyalty and devotion to duty, the foundations on which the British Empire was built. She would never forget the night of the fire, but she knew Alex now for what he was, a man who used fire to warm himself and fuel his lies and burn other people with.

  ______

  “I can’t say I’m sorry that the Johanssons have gone,” Patricia said.

  “They got on your nerves rather, didn’t they?”

  “Well, didn’t they get on yours? Darling, your glasses could do with a bit of a clean.”

  Palmer took off his glasses, which were often dusty owing to his habit of rooting about among dusty things, and, peering closely at them, fumbled in his pockets for a handkerchief, failed to find one, and gave the lenses a brisk rub on the front of his shirt. “I didn’t take them all that seriously,” he said. Patricia took things pretty seriously—he knew that—or she didn’t take them at all. She was feeling sorry now for having spoken so crossly to the Swedish couple, instead of being worldly and ironical.

  “I suppose it sounds ill natured,” she said, “but I think it was that rather awful joy of theirs that got me down most of all. I mean, they were totally out of reach. Neither of them has any sense of metaphor. I’m a member of the Anglican Church, I go to communion, but I can spot a myth when I see one. We all aim at happiness, I suppose, but I wouldn’t want to find mine in a literal belief in some vengeful brute up in the sky raining fireballs down on whole populations.”

  “They are happy in each other, more than in anything else, I think. Talk about common interests. Hand in hand they have discovered the earthly paradise. It’s enough to put a smile on anyone’s face, isn’t it? Personally, what I find really surprising, and somehow depressing, is the refusal to make comparisons, to allow the mind a bit of room. They will labor to prove the Genesis version of the Deluge, for example—I daresay that members of the Society for Biblical Research are combing Mount Ararat at this very moment, looking for fragments of the rudder. What they will never do is sit down quietly somewhere and read a bit of comparative mythology. They won’t say to themselves: Well now, this story already existed in both Sumerian and Babylonian as early as 2000 B.C. The names are different, of course—God is called Ea and Noah is called Uta-napishtim—but the instructions are all there: Build a boat, fashion it so-and-so, bring all seeds of life into it, and so on. I haven’t got the text here with me but I have it at home, it’s in volume four of Rawlinson’s Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia. I’ll show it to you when we are back in England, if you like.”

  Patricia smiled at him. “I’ll look forward to that,” she said, and rarely had she meant anything more profoundly. Sumerian mythology and working for the vote and friends by the fireside and a glass of sherry and the house they shared together . . .

  “Take this Garden of Eden business,” Palmer said, warmed and encouraged. She was interested in what he said; she approved of him—he had never felt so much approved of. “They have found similar accounts in Sumerian records, strikingly similar accounts actually. The whole story of an earthly paradise belongs to the mythology of the ancient Near East. I mean, the term itself derives from the Akkadian edinu, which was borrowed in its turn from the Sumerian eden. In the Sumerian story there occurs the word Nin-ti, Lady of the Rib. There are some variations, naturally. There were eight fruits forbidden to the Sumerian pair, and instead of a serpent the seducer was a fox.”

  “It’s the same thing, though, isn’t it? Whether they were tempted by a fox or a snake, it’s still about the danger of human overreaching, wanting to be like the gods, wanting to know more than we should.”

  “Notions of paradise differ,” Palmer said. “The Johanssons think of it in terms of an apple tree inside a diamond inside a triangle. Some see it in terms of speedboats. My idea of it is bound up with knowing more, not less. You with me day by day, a regular income, a reasonably spacious house in Bloomsbury, not too far from the British Museum . . .”

  14.

  They were helped in reaching the lower steps by the discovery of a natural cave where the limestone had split and shifted owing to the operation of underground streams. Miraculously, as it seemed, the water had bypassed the tomb.

  There were six steps altogether, descending steeply. Then, after a space of four feet, three broader steps that mounted to the doorway, fallen in and ruinous, of an entrance chamber. At once, just beyond the threshold, they began to make finds, various bowls and drinking vessels of alabaster and pottery, needed for feasting in the life to come. They were beneath the roof of the vault now. This had held up through the millennia, and the stone floor beneath was clear. There was a limestone statuette lying against the wall, a seated figure, upturned.

  Further work was suspended while Palmer took photographs with the aid of lamps. For a moment, while he did this, there was no one with him, Somerville and Elias and the group engaged in clearing the threshold having returned to the surface, where Somerville told them to remain for the time being. He was possessed now by fears, which he recognized as irrational but could not help, th
at someone, anyone, would do some irreparably clumsy thing, somehow interrupt and violate this miraculous sequence that had started with the first sight of the descending steps, had led to this threshold, would lead across the floor of the anteroom, through the fallen masonry that blocked the entrance beyond, and so into the burial chamber itself and the royal sarcophagus he believed would lie there. The sight of Jehar, standing some distance off, did nothing to reassure him. It was obvious that Jehar had not taken no for an answer; he haunted the site, a ubiquitous presence, always alone, always watching.

  Palmer did not touch the statuette, which was grotesquely tumbled from the sitting position, skirted knees raised, head lying back, rather like a large white beetle that had been overturned and could not get itself right again. But he looked closely at it, more closely than he had had leisure for up to now. And he played the narrow beam of his torch over it, the better to do this. And in so doing he noticed what neither he nor Somerville had noticed previously: There was the stylized symbol of a spade thinly incised along the forward base.

  Somerville, descending alone, found his assistant on his knees, as if in prayer. “The spade,” Palmer said, and he shone his torch on it again for Somerville’s benefit. “This can’t be Assyrian work.”

  “Why not?” There was no note of dissent in this, only a simple question. Palmer knew more about this sort of thing than he did. “It doesn’t look so very much like a spade, more like a hooded figure,” he said.

  “It’s the Babylonian symbol for a spade.”

  “Babylonian? What is it doing here then?”

  “It must have been placed here to guard the entrance to the tomb.” Palmer squatted to take another look. “There’s no doubt about it,” he said after a moment. He looked up at Somerville, and the beam of his torch cast a partial light over the lower part of his face, giving him a curiously disembodied look. “The spade is the sacred symbol of Marduk, the Great God of the Babylonians.”