The Breath of God

by Jeffrey Small

  Tim’s pulse quickened. His targets were on the street, near the entrance of the Taj Mahal. An hour earlier than their eight PM meeting time. He cranked the throttle to the full open position.

  As the skiff rounded a wide bend in the river, Tim caught his first glimpse of the immense sixteenth-century Agra Fort with its monumental sandstone walls rising from the far riverbank. Tim allowed himself to admire how the medieval Muslim fortress was strategically located along the banks of the river, making one flank impervious to attack, while also providing outstanding views across the flat land on the other three sides—a textbook military location. Seeing the Agra Fort, Tim knew that the Taj was close; his anticipation grew.

  Then the itching started. He scratched his arms. Damn, he thought. Why did his fucking eczema act up at times like this? While his right hand continued to steer the skiff around the river bend, he used his left hand to scratch furiously, even though he knew that scratching only made the itching worse.

  The moment the river straightened, however, he forgot about the itching. The Taj Mahal itself came into view on the southern bank. Its marble, onionshaped dome rose over sixty meters into the night sky, glowing an iridescent bluish white from the light of the full moon.

  Then Tim encountered his first unexpected problem. He slowed the motor, unconsciously scratching his arms again. In addition to the full moon, floodlights illuminated the two stone plazas surrounding the Taj. Unfortunately, the bright lights also glared on the flat grassy bank that extended from the red walls of the lower sandstone plaza to the river’s edge like a giant stage set.

  During his scouting trip the previous afternoon, he’d chosen the river as his access point because of the Kalashnikov-toting security guards gathered at the main entrance gate. But how was he to complete his mission illuminated by these spotlights?

  After enjoying a hurried dinner of chicken and vegetable curry, along with ample helpings of rice and naan to calm the effects of the spices in their stomachs, Grant and Kristin walked past the closed merchant stalls lining the narrow road leading from their hotel to the main entrance of the Taj Mahal complex. Grant enjoyed the relative peacefulness of the cool night. Only a few dogs barked in the distance. As they stepped over the papers that fluttered across the paved road from the stalls, Grant imagined the chaos during the day: merchants hawking fruit, bottled water, T-shirts, and cheap plastic models of the Taj. Now that the shop owners were at home with their families, only the debris from the day’s activities was left.

  Grant checked his watch. “We’re early.”

  She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “I can’t wait.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Ten minutes later, after stepping through a metal detector that beeped at everyone and receiving a pat down more intimate than an airport security line, they entered through the gate and into an expansive grassy courtyard. The change of scenery immediately struck Grant. The stench from the sludge running in the gutter outside the exterior walls disappeared while the garbage, dirt, and grime omnipresent throughout the rest of the city were also wiped away. The grass and hedges were meticulously manicured. This country, he realized, really did encompass two vastly different worlds.

  “Where is it?” he asked. Nowhere in the courtyard larger than two football fields did Grant see any sign of the Taj Mahal itself.

  “We just entered the outer courtyard.” Kristin gestured to their right, where an immense red sandstone building with white marble accents rose seven stories into the sky. From both ends of the building extended a low single-story structure defined by its cloisterlike arches. “That’s the main gate to the inner courtyard and the Taj itself.”

  She pointed to the gate’s multiple pointed arches. “Islamic architecture is characterized by its perfect symmetry.”

  Like souvenirs on a store shelf, a row of eleven marble domes sat on top of the tall building, mimicking in miniature the shape of the main dome on the Taj Mahal itself. The entire picture seemed to Grant like a medieval Islamic castle.

  “So, if that’s the main gate, then what are those buildings?” Grant nodded to their left across the lawn to a long, red single-story building whose arches matched those on the low building wings attached to the main gate.

  “Those are the barracks that held the workers who built the Taj. Over twenty thousand labored for twenty-two years. Legend has it that the emperor had the hands of the most skilled amputated once construction was completed so that they could never again create something as magnificent.”

  They walked over red sandstone pavers to the main gate. A few dozen tourists, speaking Hindi, Japanese, and German, walked along with them. Much better, Grant thought, than the thousands during the day.

  Kristin stopped outside the arched opening in the center of the gate, which Grant guessed to be over fifty feet in height. “See the black writing within the white marble surrounding the arch?”

  Grant craned his neck. “Arabic lettering.”

  “The letters are black onyx inlaid in the marble walls of the gate—an Italian process called pietra dura.”

  “Any idea what it says?” The languages he could read—ancient Greek, Tibetan, French, and German—didn’t include Arabic.

  “On my last trip here, my guide translated the verse for me. It’s from the Koran, and it invites God’s servants to enter his paradise.”

  The Koran? Grant’s interest was piqued. Shah Jahan, who built the Taj, was a Mughal ruler, Grant recalled. He’d brushed up on some Indian history before their trip and remembered that Muslim armies invaded India beginning in the early sixteenth century. The Muslim emperors who then ruled the country, known as the Mughal Empire, went to great lengths to destroy the ancient Hindu culture they encountered when they arrived. They forced many of the people, whom they considered to be heathens for their polytheistic religious practices, to convert to Islam.

  “Like the Christian Crusades and the Inquisition,” Kristin said, “convert to Christianity or be executed.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it, for religions centered on a merciful God? The crusaders, be they Christian or Islamic, believed they were saving the people they were conquering by torturing and killing them.”

  Kristin hooked her arm through Grant’s, leading him under the arch of the main gate. “Are you ready?” she asked.

  When they passed under the archway, Grant stopped. The vision ahead of him rendered him speechless.

  Tim maneuvered the skiff to the northern bank of the river opposite the Taj grounds and out of the exposure of the floodlights. Once he passed the Taj complex, he spotted his landing: on the northeast corner of the property, a construction site he’d seen on his morning scouting trip. He relaxed. The site was shrouded in shadow. The authorities must not have wanted to highlight the mess of the renovations taking place at the edge of the complex. He turned the skiff and doubled back to the opposite bank.

  Just ahead, Tim found the low floating dock where the construction crews unloaded their materials from the river barges. Tim twisted the throttle, slowing the motor from a roar to a low gurgle. Not that he was really worried about alerting the security guards, from what he’d seen on the Taj grounds during the day. After the initial vigilance at the security entrance, the guards supposed to be patrolling the grounds had congregated by the monument while they chatted among themselves instead of surveying the crowd for potential terrorists. Their Kalashnikov rifles were slung too casually on their shoulders. With his forty-caliber Glock, which now rested comfortably on his hip under his untucked safari shirt, Tim could take out an entire group of the slackers before any one of them would be able to chamber a bullet.

  Tim tied his skiff to the dock. Just beyond the construction debris littering the grass and adjacent to the plaza walls was scaffolding that rose at least forty feet in the air. Apparently the Indian government was in the process of restoring many of its national monuments, and here they had provided Tim with an easy means to scale the walls and to avoid the barbed wire that
ran along all but this ten-meter section of the grassy riverbanks by the complex. Tim was pleased to see that the mechanical lift running up the side of the scaffolding appeared to be in working order. He’d spotted the lift on his recon trip, guessing that the crews used it to haul up the stones and cement needed for the renovation. Though it was no more than a few boards strapped together and raised and lowered by hand ropes attached to pulleys, the crude lift would suffice to lower a semiconscious body to his skiff.

  He patted his oversized cargo pants pockets that held the specially modified EpiPens and smiled to himself.

  From the steps atop the main gate, Grant gazed across two long rectangular reflecting pools that stretched end to end for two hundred meters. Surrounded by formal gardens planted in symmetrical quadrangles, the pools terminated at the base of the pale marble structure of the Taj Mahal.

  “Much bigger than I expected.”

  “Pictures don’t do it justice, nor do written descriptions. Even mine.” Kristin pulled him down the steps to the red stone walkway alongside the first pool. Out of the corner of his eye, Grant watched her face glow with excitement.

  As they strolled closer to the monument, Grant realized that what he originally thought to be a rectangular building was actually an octagon. Unlike the other buildings in the complex, which were built of red sandstone with white marble accents, the Taj itself was constructed entirely of white translucent marble. In the center of the monument a two-story pointed arch mirrored the arch he’d just walked through. Pairs of smaller arches were also set into the walls on either side of the main arch in a display of Islamic symmetry and ideal proportion. Topping off the building were five domes—smaller ones on the outside corners and the largest one in the middle. Completing the picture, slender minarets as tall as the monument itself rose from each of the four corners of the raised marble plaza on which the Taj building rested.

  After pausing for several minutes to absorb the majesty of the architecture before him, Grant gestured to two identical red sandstone buildings that flanked either side of the Taj on the edge of the wide sandstone plaza below the marble plaza on which the Taj itself sat. “Are those mosques?”

  “The building on the left is a mosque. The one to the right was a guest house, built to preserve the symmetry of the design.”

  When they reached the end of the first reflecting pool, Grant spotted a solitary figure sitting on a stone bench on a raised marble observation platform between the two reflecting pools. The man wore jeans and a shortsleeved, collarless cotton shirt. He appeared to study the sight in front of him. Grant and Kristin climbed the three steps to the top of the platform. Without turning his shaved head, the man called out, “From here, you can see a perfect reflection of the building in the water.”

  “Jigme!” they both screamed in unison.

  Jigme rose and embraced Grant and Kristin. “So good to see you,” he said with clear diction, but in an accent slightly stronger than Kinley’s.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you without your robes,” Kristin said.

  “It has been quite a while since I have worn layperson’s clothing. I must say that these jeans are quite comfortable. Considering the commotion you two have caused lately, I thought our meeting might be less conspicuous this way.”

  “You know,” Grant said, still grasping Jigme’s arm, as if he were afraid to let him go, “this is the first time I’ve actually heard you speak.” The monk sounded more mature than his twenty years.

  “Please sit and enjoy the view.” Jigme motioned to the bench beside them. “Yes, I completed my retreat in silence. I never realized how much I missed, because I was too busy listening to my own voice.”

  Grant was reminded of how his own mind was rarely quiet and how Kinley had taught him to pay attention to the cycle of unproductive thoughts that often consumed him, a lesson that he hadn’t been heeding lately. He explained to Jigme the mysterious disappearance of the pictures they’d taken in Bhutan.

  “Quite strange,” the monk said.

  “We’ve had a difficult time contacting you,” Kristin said. “Is everything all right?”

  “Word of the controversy reached the dzong quicker than Kinley expected. Lama Dorji received many phone calls about the documents after you left.”

  “The reporter who interviewed him?” Grant asked. He wondered how this person had tracked down the lama.

  “At first, Lama Dorji was confused. He’d never heard of the Issa books in our library.”

  “The lama had limited his studies to the Tibetan Buddhist scriptures?” Kristin asked.

  Jigme nodded. “After receiving the first phone call, the lama went to Dawa, the monk who keeps the archives, and asked him about the books. I think you can imagine his reaction when he pieced together that Kinley must have brought the two of you into our library.”

  “That’s why he lied to the reporter about the existence of the texts?” Grant asked.

  “Well, technically, by the time the reporter called back, the books were no longer in the dzong’s library.” A mischievous grin spread across the young monk’s face.

  “What happened to them?” Grant asked.

  Before Jigme could respond, Kristin interjected, “And Kinley?”

  “To answer both your questions, both Kinley and the manuscripts are safe, but as to their respective whereabouts, I am in the dark.”

  “You don’t know—” Grant began, fighting back a frustration so acute that he nearly screamed the question.

  Jigme held up a hand. “Kinley did not want to put me in the position of lying to protect either him or the texts. But he did pass along a message.”

  A familiar twinkle appeared in the monk’s eyes.

  Tim spotted Matthews and Misaki sitting on a stone bench between the reflecting pools fifty meters from him. After tying the skiff to the dock, he’d easily scaled the scaffolding and followed the signal on his cell phone’s browser that led him to the formal gardens. The technology had served him well, exactly as he expected.

  Tim moved closer, sticking to the shadowy areas between the landscaping lights that illuminated the garden’s ornamental trees. He tried to appear casual, like a tourist exploring the grounds.

  A bald man sat on the bench with the couple. Tim noted his medium dark complexion, and a face that was rounder and more East Asian than Indian. Tim’s heart rate quickened. Although he wasn’t dressed in robes, Tim felt sure this was his man: the monk Kinley who had shown the texts to Matthews. The monk had met them just as the coded email message had said.

  Tim stepped closer, angling his head to see around the bench, as if he were looking past the three people sitting there in order to view the mosque on the other end of the gardens. A brief disappointment passed over him. The monk carried nothing with him. No bag of ancient books in sight. Not that he really expected the monk to bring the Jesus books to this place. Anyway, while grabbing the manuscripts here would have been easier, he was up for the challenge of getting his hands on them no matter what measures he had to take.

  “You have a message from Kinley?” Grant asked after the young monk had sat in silence for another few moments after the revelation.

  “Let us walk first,” Jigme said, rising to his feet. “You have traveled all this way to see the world’s grandest monument to true love. You might as well get your money’s worth.” He stepped off the platform and headed toward the Taj Mahal. Grant glanced at Kristin, who grabbed his hand and pulled him after Jigme.

  Grant called out, “Why Agra? And why didn’t Kinley meet us here himself?” With the planning and travel time, he’d already lost four precious days.

  “I see you have learned patience since returning to America,” Jigme said over his shoulder.

  Gently chastised by the young monk, Grant held back further comment, quickly limping to keep up with Jigme’s brisk pace. Grant’s mind raced as fast as his legs. What other purpose did Kinley have for bringing them here, if not to give them the texts? Grant had risked
his reputation and his academic career for these texts. Then another thought occurred to him: Kinley also had taken a huge risk. The monk had removed the manuscripts from the library and incurred the disapproval of the lama. But now he had disappeared.

  What if Kinley has changed his mind? What if he no longer thinks I’m worthy of the secret? The doubts began to multiply in his head. Their journey had better turn out to be more than a simple riddle leading them to a famous tourist site. He didn’t have time to play games, especially when his name was already a joke around the halls of the religious studies department. When he’d stopped in his office to collect some papers before leaving on the trip, he could hear the whispers of his fellow grad students behind his back.

  Several minutes later they climbed a shadowy stairwell that led from the garden level to the immense marble plaza on which the Taj Mahal stood.

  “Ah, here we are,” Jigme said.

  The sight of the architectural feat before him immediately distracted Grant’s thoughts from the texts and his troubles. Standing within fifteen meters of the monument, he understood the magnitude of the accomplishment of Isa, the Taj architect, and his workers three hundred sixty years ago. The smooth marble structure towered almost ninety feet over them, while the plaza stretched out over a hundred feet in each direction. Grant realized that the marble was not purely white as it appeared in the distance, but veins of beiges and grays ran through the blocks. Similar to the main gate, the massive stone walls contained squiggly Arabic text inlaid with black onyx, but on this monument the pietra dura assumed an even grander scale: a rainbow of semiprecious stones was also inlaid within the marble, forming vines and flowers that appeared to climb the sheer walls.