The Golden Elephant

by Alex Archer

  Annja felt a chill run down her spine. The destructive everyday practices of early archaeologists struck her, as they did any well-brought-up modern archaeologist, as actively obscene. At least as abhorrent as the depredations of a modern-day tomb robber like Easy Ngwenya.

  “He apparently met with great success, as his letters back to the University of Berlin attest—the few that survived the bombardments of the Second World War. But when it came time to return home, he faced a difficulty.”

  “World War I?” Annja asked as the waitress delivered their pastries.

  “But yes.” Gendron picked up a fork and addressed herself to a hearty slice of chocolate cake. “Owing to British control of the Suez Canal, von Hoiningen was forced to travel an arduous, dangerous, circuitous land route. He had to travel up through China to the ancient Silk Road, then through Turkestan into Turkey.”

  She gestured with her fork. “Having survived all that, he loaded his specimens and journals onto a ship, the freighter Hentzau, and set sail from Istanbul. Whereupon a British submarine lurking in the Sea of Marmara promptly torpedoed it.”

  “Oh, dear,” Annja said.

  “The explosion killed poor Rudolf outright. The captain, thinking fast, managed to ground his ship in shallow water. Von Hoiningen’s assistant, Erich Dessauer, who may or may not have been his lover, recovered a few of his artifacts and journals. The assistant made his way back to Germany with as many journals and crates of artifacts as he could, intending to send for the rest later. Instead he was promptly drafted and died in the British tank attack at Cambrai in 1918. Most of what he brought home vanished in the Second World War. What survives remains in the Istanbul University collection.”

  Annja winced. “That’s quite the litany of disasters,” she said.

  “Almost enough to make one believe the expedition was cursed,” Gendron said. She smiled. “But we know there are no such things as curses, yes?”

  “Sure,” Annja said.

  “A Turkish researcher stumbled across the bare facts of the lost von Hoiningen expedition in the middle fifties. In the seventies much of the story was pieced together by a writer for American adventure magazines. In 1997, scholars substantiated the American’s account and filled in the gaps.”

  She shook her handsome head and smiled sadly. “In the modern archaeological world the doomed von Hoiningen expedition is remembered, to the minor extent it is at all, more as a cautionary tale about the dangers and disappointments of the archaeological life than for its science.”

  “I’d imagine. Thank you so much,” Annja said.

  Gendron sat back. Despite talking fairly steadily, she had managed to polish off her cake without chewing with her mouth open. Annja admired the feat.

  “So why the interest in this most obscure of misadventures? You don’t seem to have the taste for others’ misfortunes,” the professor said.

  “Not at all. Recently I’ve been given hints of important cultural relics the Germans found. Perhaps even a vast temple complex which has yet to be rediscovered.”

  “A lost temple? In this day and age?” Gendron seemed bemused. But she shrugged. “Still, I read every now and again of such things being found around the world with the help of satellites and aircraft.”

  “It’s a tantalizing possibility,” Annja said. “Whether or not it’s more than that—well, that’s what I’d like to find out.”

  “To be sure. What archaeologist worth her whip and revolver wouldn’t want to be the one to discover a grand new lost temple?”

  Annja laughed out loud at the Raiders of the Lost Ark reference.

  Gendron’s own smile was brief. “Adventures are all good and well. You seem a most competent young woman, well able to take care of yourself. I was always more the scholarly type, at home in the musty stacks of the library, rather than the adventure-seeker. Still, I learn things in this old imperial capital. Southeast Asia does not currently get as much lurid press as, say, the Mideast or Afghanistan, or even Africa, but it is a most perilously unstable place these days.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Annja said. “I’m not even to Istanbul yet. I guess that’s my next stop.”

  “Turkey is no picnic these days, either, I fear. So much unrest.”

  “But where’s that not true?” Annja asked.

  “Fewer and fewer places these days,” Gendron said.

  “Really, Professor,” Annja said, “I’m in your debt. If there’s any way I can help you, please let me know.”

  Gendron looked pensive. “You might do one favor for me,” she said. “There is a certain cable-television personality—if at all possible, I’d be most grateful if you could arrange for me to meet him someday. Or at least put in a good word.”

  “Well, I’ll try. For what it’s worth,” Annja said.

  “A most fascinating gentleman,” Gendron said, “of obvious French extraction.”

  That didn’t fit any Knowledge Channel hunk Annja could remember. “Who?”

  “Anthony Bourdain.”

  Annja’s smile was half grimace. “Wrong network.” She took a sip of her drink. Seeing her companion’s crestfallen expression she said, “There’s kind of a Montague-Capulet thing between our network and his. Except nastier. Tell you what, though. I only know him as you do, from seeing him on television, but I get the impression he has no more patience for that sort of rivalry nonsense than I have. Should I chance to meet him, I’ll tell him he has a fan. One definitely worth his while to get to know.”

  The professor’s own smile was impish. “You’d make such a sacrifice for an old lady, for so trifling a favor?”

  Annja snorted. “Old lady my foot,” she said. “If I look half as good as you do at your age, I’ll consider myself the luckiest woman on Earth.

  “And as for sacrifice—well, while I admit he’s a very attractive man, I also made a vow a couple years back not to date older men.”

  Gendron’s eyebrows rose. “But at your age, dear child, doesn’t that leave you with nothing but boys?”

  Annja shrugged. “There is that.”

  Then she recalled recent events, and brightened. “But perhaps not always.”

  11

  “It is with very great pleasure that I am able to place the Istanbul Archaeology Museum at the disposal of so distinguished a peer as Ms. Annja Creed,” the curator said as he led her through the dimly lit exhibition hall. He was a huge, fat man with a bandit moustache, tapering shaven head and dark wiry stubble on his olive jowls. Ahmet Bahceli looked like the stereotypical evil Turk from central casting. He was in fact a cheerful, gentle-voiced scholar of enormous international repute. He was curator of special collections for the museum and overflowing with enthusiasm.

  Annja looked into a case of Byzantine coins so he wouldn’t see her slight grimace. Is it because I’m really such a notable archaeologist, she thought, or because I play one on TV?

  Still, enough lay at stake that she needed to swallow her ego and go with what worked. Again. She wasn’t deceiving the man. She just was taking a hit to her pride. Again.

  “It’s so good of you to allow me access to the von Hoiningen collection, Dr. Bahceli,” she said.

  “Please understand,” he said, “that it is meager and incomplete.”

  “I gathered as much from my previous research. But believe me, Doctor, anything will help. Even if it’s only something to peer at through glass.”

  Istanbul was a modern city, so big and boisterous and full of history that a single continent wouldn’t hold it. It sprawled like an unruly giant across the Bosporus Straits, which ran from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, upstream of the Aegean, and separated Europe from Asia. She loved visiting there.

  They city was surprisingly green. Although the green was turning rapidly sere with the onset of a chilly autumn. Winter was a ways off yet, but the autumn was damp and cool enough for her.

  She didn’t have time for sightseeing. She felt driven. She sensed other forces moving around her—probably i
ncluding the tomb-raiding renegade Easy Ngwenya. That made it urgent to find the truth about the von Hoiningen expedition, beyond the fact of its being well and truly doomed. And if there was anything to the rumors of a fabulous temple lost in the jungle, with its appropriately fabulous treasure, she had to find and secure them before the plunderers arrived like a Biblical locust plague.

  The looming, vaguely conical mass of her guide halted by a case of small artifacts displayed against a cream-silk backdrop. “Here you see such artifacts as we possess. Von Hoiningen’s assistant lacked the means to carry them with him back to Germany. His misfortune proved a blessing for archaeology. No doubt you are aware the bulk of the artifacts he saved from the sunken Hentzau were destroyed in the Allied bombing of Berlin in World War II.”

  Annja nodded.

  Bahceli shook his head ponderously. “Even though expeditions are notoriously prone to catastrophe, I have seldom if ever heard of such a concatenation of calamities as befell the von Hoiningen expedition. It is almost enough to make one believe in a curse.”

  She smiled. “But you don’t, do you?”

  “Of course not! Especially a curse by infidels. That would be mere superstition.”

  Bahceli rather grandly produced a set of keys and opened the case’s glass cover. He gestured for Annja to examine what she would.

  Not much to see, she thought glumly as she pulled on the pair of nonlatex medical-style gloves he had provided her. A few coins, a few small carvings and castings, a lacquer medallion.

  One object caught her eye. She reached in and gingerly picked up an elephant figurine no bigger than the palm of her hand, in verdigrised bronze. Its workmanship was exquisite. It stood with trunk curled to forehead and mouth open. It almost seemed to be smiling.

  “Ah,” the curator said. “That catches your eye, as well? There is something to it, some…quality I cannot put my finger upon.”

  He shrugged. “It has been rumored since Dessauer’s departure that it is the replica of a larger statue, of pure gold, to which von Hoiningen referred in his notes,” he said. “Sadly, we do not have these notes. It is why we exhibit these items as relics of the tragic expedition itself, since we cannot authoritatively source them or connect them to specific sites or cultures, other than by inference.”

  With a sigh Annja handed the figurine back to Bahceli. “Thank you,” she said. “If I could see the surviving notebooks, now, please?”

  His villainous face split in a great benign grin. “Of course,” he said.

  ANNJA SAT IN THE dark and cool confines of a private reading room with the journal open before her. To her right lay her computer, connected to the Internet via the museum’s wireless network. Despite the fact that the museum’s exterior was pure faux classical, the facility itself seemed most thoroughly up-to-date. She was typing in promising-looking passages from the journal and then running them through a translation program.

  The work was tedious but she plodded on. And then words jumped out at her—“the jungle a mighty temple gave up.”

  She stopped, reared back, barely able to believe it. She carefully studied the words surrounding the phrase.

  “The climb up the plateau was hazardous. We lost two bearers to a mudslide when a rope in a sudden downpour gave way….”

  A few sentences on she read more.

  “The guardians of the temple were cautious. Our guide, Ba, managed to convince them we meant no harm. We only meant honor to the ancients and the Buddha to give.”

  There followed a matter-of-fact discussion of his dealings with the plateau’s inhabitants, who were wary of them. They warmed after the expedition’s physician, Dr. Kramer, set a child’s broken arm. Annja got the notion the natives were capable of the feat—they just appreciated the gesture. At last the visitors got permission to climb a small peak in the center of the plateau.

  “The special sanctuary, the holy of holies. The Temple of the Elephant was colossal! Our hearts were in our throats at the splendor of this marvel, this treasure, this golden elephant with emeralds for eyes.

  “I made complete sketches of the temples, and the idol, in my sketchbook—”

  “Oh no,” Annja said softly. None of that had survived the Hentzau’s torpedoing.

  She sighed and read on. “It can still be found where I found the map. Inscribed on the base of the statue of Avalokiteshvara in the Red Monastery outside Nakhon Sawan, in the Kingdom of Siam.”

  Annja sat back, frowning speculatively. On the one hand, she thought, it makes me crazy that the solution to the mystery isn’t here. On the other, at least there really is a Temple and a Golden Elephant.

  “Ms. Creed?”

  She started and looked up. A painfully earnest young man with a mop of heavy coal-black hair stood respectfully back from her chair. “Yes?” she said.

  “Curator Bahceli would like to speak with you in his office immediately, if it is convenient to you.”

  Bahceli had been more than kind in granting Annja access to the museum’s special collection, as well as giving her a personal tour. If he wanted to see her, the polite and politic thing to do would be to respond promptly.

  “Certainly,” she said, rising. She felt a brief tug of concern over leaving her computer unattended. But the reading room was closed to the public. And Bahceli, for all his jovial manner, did not strike Annja as the sort who’d put up with pilferage in his department. It was a cardinal sin in such an institution, for obvious reasons. She walked briskly back to his office.

  But when she rapped on the open door, then peeked around the frame, the office was empty.

  A dreadful certainty she’d been tricked stuck in the base of her throat. She turned and walked back to the reading room as quickly as she could without making a scene that would raise questions she didn’t want to answer—or leave hanging.

  Her computer and von Hoiningen’s open journal still sat on the table. Disappearing out the far door of the long, narrow room she saw a familiar, expensively clad figure whose well-schooled grace did not conceal a certain walk-through-a-wall thrustfulness to its gait.

  “Easy,” Annja said, as if cursing.

  The figure vanished from sight. Annja sprinted after. She got all the way out into the warm daylight with nothing to show but a wisp of expensive scent and a suspicion of mocking laughter hanging in the air.

  She made herself march back to the reading room, neither dashing nor slouching in defeat. Rudolf von Hoiningen’s aggravating notebook was intact. A surprisingly quick diagnostic reassured her that no nasty software had been quickly and covertly installed on her computer.

  “But it’s not like there’s no such thing as a digital camera,” Annja muttered.

  She was sure the little witch of a pot hunter had photographed the relevant pages to translate or digest at her leisure. Annja knew it with bitter certainty. Not that Easy didn’t speak German, along, apparently, with every other known language and an alien tongue or two. She probably had a photographic memory to boot.

  Cautious, here, Annja told herself. Let’s not wallow too deeply in paranoia.

  But even paranoids have enemies, she thought.

  And once more hers had gotten the better of her.

  12

  “Annja! Annja Creed! What a delightful surprise.”

  On the steps of the museum Annja stopped and turned at the greeting.

  “Giancarlo!” she exclaimed, with a rush of genuine pleasure. Then, frowning slightly, she said, “This is quite a coincidence.”

  His dark, lean, handsome face lit with a smile. “Some might call it kismet. As they do here, come to think of it. I might call it synchronicity.”

  He came forward holding out his hands to her. He was dressed in that expensively casual way that only the wealthy can pull off. His hair was slicked back seal-like.

  “But really, it’s not such a great coincidence after all, is it? We share a profession, and many particular interests. My researches have brought me to Istanbul. Naturally, as a Mediter
ranean archaeologist, I gravitate here. I can only presume you have done the same,” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied guardedly.

  “Of course, you are a Renaissance scholar,” he said, taking her hands in his firm, strong grip. Despite the humid heat off the Bosporus his palms were dry. She envied him; she herself had been outdoors less than a minute and felt as if she’d just emerged from the shower with her clothes on. Autumn or not, cold nights or not, it still got plenty warm during the day. “The Turks were the great enemy of Renaissance Europe. So naturally at some point in your studies you likewise find yourself here.”

  He said it with such conviction that she didn’t have the heart to disabuse him. She accepted a warm hug and a peck on her cheek.

  She smiled at him. “It’s good to see you again,” she said, “no matter the reason.”

  “Will you join me for a cup of coffee?” he said. “The coffee here is excellent. But what am I saying? Of course it is. It’s Turkey!”

  He laughed delightedly. She laughed with him. She always appreciated a man who could laugh at himself.

  “SO THAT’S WHERE THINGS stand,” Annja said. She sat slumped in a chair in the air-conditioned comfort of a café two blocks from the Museum. “Every clue I find seems just to add another link to the chain. I never seem to get closer.”

  She shook her head. “And the most substantial clue I’ve managed to locate I just handed to the world’s most notorious pot hunter on a silver platter.”

  Giancarlo nodded sympathetically. He had listened raptly as she poured out her story to him—minus the details of exactly what it was she sought.

  “Surely it’s not so bad, Annja, my dear,” he told her.

  “But it is,” she said, tossing back her hair. A ceiling fan swooshed overhead. Annja wasn’t sure whether it was needed to circulate the refrigerated air or just there because it was an expected element of Turkish atmosphere. “I think—I think people have been killed over this already,” she concluded.