The Mongolian, cumbersome, leveled his submachine gun. He's aiming for Indy, she realized, directly at Indy. Something to hit him with, she thought. She reached instinctively for her barman's ax handle and struck the Mongolian across the skull as hard as she could, and he went down. But then there was somebody else in the bar, somebody who'd come crashing through the door like it was made of cardboard, and she raised her face to see somebody she recognized, a Sherpa, one of the locals, a giant of a man who could be bought by anybody for a couple of glasses of booze. He came through, a whirlwind, tackling Indy from behind, crushing him to the floor.
And then Toht was shouting, "Shoot! Shoot both of them!"
The man with the eye patch sprang to life at Toht's command. He had a pistol in his hand and it was clear he was about to follow Toht to the letter. Just as she panicked, a strange thing happened: in an unlikely conspiracy of survival, Indy and the Sherpa reached for the fallen gun simultaneously, their hands clasping it. Then they turned it against their assailant and the weapon fired, striking Eye Patch, a direct hit in the throat with a force that threw him across the room. He staggered backward until he lay propped against the bar with an expression on his face that suggested a pirate keelhauled during a drunken binge.
Then the struggle was on again, the unnatural joining of forces, the weird truce, brought to an end. The pistol had fallen away from the hands of Indy, and the Sherpa, and they were rolling over and over together as each tried to grab the elusive gun. But now Toht had a clear shot at Indiana. She picked up the submachine gun that had dropped from the Mongolian's shoulder and tried to understand how it worked-how else could it work, she thought, except by pulling the trigger! She opened fire, but the weapon kicked and jumped wildly. Her shots sizzled past Toht. Then her attention was drawn to the flames spreading from the curtains toward the rest of the bar. Nobody's going to win this one, she thought. This fire is the only thing likely to come out ahead.
From the corner of her eye she watched Toht crouch at the end of the bar as the flames were bursting all around him, searing the bar. He's seen it, she thought. He's seen the medallion. She watched his hand snake toward it, saw the expression of delight on his face, and then suddenly he was screaming as the fire-blackened medallion scorched his palm, burned its shape and design, its ancient words, deep into his flesh. He couldn't hold it. The pain was too much. He staggered toward the door, clutching his burned hand. And then Marion looked back toward Indy, who was struggling with the Sherpa. The Nepalese was circling them, trying to get a clear shot at Indy. She tapped the submachine gun, but the weapon was useless, spent. The pistol, then. The pistol behind the stuffed raven. Through flame and heat she reached for it, turned, listened to the bottles of booze explode around her like Molotov cocktails, took aim at the Nepalese. One true shot, she thought. One good and true shot.
He wouldn't keep still, the bastard.
Now smoke was blinding her, choking her.
Indy kicked the Sherpa, rolling away from him, and then the Nepalese had a clear target-Indy's skull. Now! Do it now!
She squeezed the trigger.
The Nepalese rose in the air, blown upward and back by the force of the shot. And Indy looked at her gratefully through the smoke and flame, smiling.
He grabbed his bullwhip and his hat and yelled, "Let's get the hell out of here!"
"Not without that piece you wanted."
"It's here?"
Marion kicked a burning chair aside. From overhead, in a spectacular burst of flame, a wooden beam collapsed, throwing up sparks and cinders.
"Forget it!" Indy shouted. "I want you out of here. Now!"
But Marion darted toward the place where Toht had dropped the medallion. Coughing, trying not to breathe, her eyes smarting and watering from the black smoke, she reached down and picked up the medallion in the loose scarf that hung round her neck. And then she looked for the wooden money-box.
"Unbelievable!" Ashes. Five grand up in smoke.
Indiana Jones grabbed her by the wrist, dragging her through the fire toward the door. "Let's go! Let's go!" he screamed.
They made it out into the chill night air just as the place began to crumble, as smoke and fire poured upward into the darkness in a wild display of destruction. Cinders, glowing embers, burning timbers-they danced through the fiery roof toward the moon.
From the other side of the street Indy and Marion stood and watched it.
She noticed he still had his hand around her wrist. That touch. It had been so long, so much time had dwindled away, and even as she remembered the contact, the friction of his skin upon hers, she fought the memory away. She took her arm from his hand and moved slightly away.
She stared at the bonfire again, and said nothing for a time. Timbers crackled with the sound of pigs being scorched over spits. "I figure you owe me," she said, finally, "I figure you owe me plenty."
"For starters?"
"For starters, this," and she held the medallion toward him. "I'm your partner, mister. Because this little gismo is still my property."
"Partner?" he said.
"Damn right."
They watched the fire a little longer, neither of them noticing Arnold Toht slinking away through the alleys that ran from the main street-slinking like a rat heading through a maze.
In the car Marion said, "What next?"
Indy was silent for a moment before he answered, "Egypt."
"Egypt?" Marion looked at him as the car moved through the dark. "You take me to the most exotic places."
The silhouettes of mountains appeared; a pale moon broke the night sky. Indy watched clouds disperse. He wondered why he felt a sudden apprehension, a feeling that passed when he heard Marion laugh.
"What's the joke?"
"You," she said. "You and that bullwhip."
"Don't mock it, kid. It saved your life."
"I couldn't believe it when I saw you. I'd forgotten about that ratty old whip. I remember how you used to practice with it every day. Those old bottles on the wall and you standing there with the whip." And she laughed again.
A memory, Indy thought. He recalled the odd fascination he'd had with the bullwhip ever since he'd seen a whip act in a traveling circus as a seven-year-old kid. Wide-eyed in wonder, watching the whip artist defy all logic. And then the hours of practice, a devotion that nobody, himself included, could truly explain.
"Do you ever go anywhere without it?" she asked.
"I never take it to class when 1 have to teach," he said.
"I bet you sleep with it, huh?"
"Now, that all depends," he said.
She was silent, staring out into the Himalayan night. Then she said, "Depends on what?"
"Work it out for yourself," Jones said.
"I think I get the picture."
He glanced at her once, then returned his eyes to the pocked road ahead.
6: The Tanis Digs, Egypt
A hot sun scorched the sand, burning on the wasteland that stretched from one horizon to the other. In such a place as this, Belloq thought, you might imagine the whole world a scalded waste, a planet without vegetation, without buildings, without people. Without people. Something in this thought pleased him. He had always found treachery the most common currency among human beings-consequently, he had trafficked in that currency himself. And if it wasn't treachery people understood best, then its alternative was violence. He shaded his eyes against the sun and moved forward, watching the dig that was taking place. An elaborate dig-but then, that was how the Germans liked things. Elaborate, with needless circumstance and pomp. He stuck his hands in his pockets, watching the trucks and the bulldozers, the Arab excavators, the German supervisors. And the silly Dietrich, who seemed to fancy himself overlord of all, barking orders, rushing around as if pursued by a whirlwind.
He paused, watching but not watching now, an absent look in his eyes. He was remembering the meeting with the Fuhrer, recalling how embarrassingly fulsome th
e little man had been. You are the world's expert in
this matter, I understand, and I want the best. Fulsome and ignorant. False compliments yielding to some deranged Teutonic rhetoric, the thousand-year Reich, the grandiose historic scheme that could only have been dreamed up by a lunatic. Belloq had simply stopped listening, staring at the Fuhrer in wonderment, amazed that the destiny of any country should fall into such clumsy hands. I want the Ark, of course. The Ark belongs in the Reich. Something of such antiquity belongs in Germany.
Belloq closed his eyes against the harsh sun. He tuned out the noises of the excavations, the shouts of the Germans, the occasional sounds of the Arabs. The Ark, he thought. It doesn't belong to any one man, any one place, any single time. But its secrets are mine, if there are secrets to be had. He opened his eyes again and stared at the dig, the huge craters hacked out of sand, and he felt a certain vibration, a positive intuition, that the great prize was somewhere nearby. He could feel it, sense its power, he could hear the whisper of the thing that would soon become a roar. He took his hands from his pockets and stared at the medallion that lay in the center of his palm. And what he understood as he stared at it was a curious obsession-and a fear that he might yield to it in the end. You lust after a thing long enough, as he had lusted after the Ark, and you start to feel the edge of some madness that is almost... almost what?
Divine.
Maybe it was the madness of the saints and the zealots.
A sense of a vision so awesome that all reality simply faded.
An awareness of a power so inexpressible, so cosmic, that the thin fabric of what you assumed to be the real world parted, disintegrated, and you were left with an understanding that, like God's, surpassed all things.
Perhaps. He smiled to himself.
He moved around the edge of the excavations, skirting past the trucks and the bulldozers. He clutched the medallion tight in his hand. And then he thought about how those thugs dispatched by Dietrich to Nepal had botched the whole business. He experienced disgust.
Those morons, though, had brought back something which served his purposes.
It was the whimpering Toht who had shown Belloq his palm, asking for sympathy, Belloq supposed. Not realizing he had, seared into his flesh, a perfect copy of the very thing he had failed to retrieve.
It had been amusing to see Toht sitting restlessly for hours, days, while he, Belloq, painstakingly fashioned a perfect copy. He'd worked meticulously, trying to recreate the original. But it wasn't the real thing, the historic thing. It was accurate enough for his calculations concerning the map room and the Well of the Souls, but he had wanted the original badly.
Belloq put the medallion back inside his pocket and walked over to where Dietrich was standing. For a long time he said nothing, pleased by the feeling that his presence gave the German some discomfort. Eventually Dietrich said, "It's going well, don't you think?"
Belloq nodded, shielding his eyes again. He was thinking of something else now, something that disturbed him. It was the piece of information that had been brought back, by one of Dietrich's lackeys, from Nepal. Indiana Jones.
Of course, he should have known that Jones would appear on the scene sooner or later. Jones was troublesome, even if the rivalry between them always ended in his defeat. He didn't have, Belloq thought, the cunning. The instinct. The killing edge.
But now he had been seen in Cairo with the girl who was Ravenwood's daughter.
Dietrich turned to him and said, "Have you come to a decision about that other matter we discussed?"
"I think so," Belloq said.
"I assume it is the decision I imagined you would reach?"
"Assumptions are often arrogant, my friend."
Dietrich looked at the other man silently.
Belloq smiled. "In this case, though, you are probably correct."
"You wish me to attend to it?"
Belloq nodded. "I trust I can leave the details to you."
"Naturally," Dietrich said.
7: Cairo
The dark was warm and still, the air like a vacuum. It was dry, hard to breathe, as if all moisture had evaporated in the heat of the day. Indy sat with Marion in a coffeehouse, rarely taking his eyes from the door. For hours now, they had been moving through back streets and alleys, staying away from the central thoroughfares-and yet he'd had the feeling all the time that he was being watched. Marion looked exhausted, drained, her long hair damp from sweat. And it was clear to Indy that she was becoming more and more impatient with him: now she was staring at him over the rim of her coffee cup in an accusing fashion. He watched the door, scrutinized the patrons that came and went, and sometimes turned his face upward to catch the thin passage of air that blew from the creaking overhead fan.
"You might have the decency to tell me how long we're going to creep around like this," Marion said.
"Is that what we're doing?"
"It would be obvious to a blind man that we're hiding from something, Jones. And I'm beginning to wonder why I left Nepal. I had a thriving business, don't forget. A business you torched."
He looked at her and smiled and thought how vibrant she appeared when she was on the edge of anger. He reached across the small table and touched the back of her hand. "We're hiding from the kind of jokers we encountered in Nepal."
"Okay. I buy that. But for how long?"
"Until I get the feeling that it's safe to go."
"Safe to go where? What do you have in mind?"
"I'm not exactly without friends."
She sighed and finished her coffee, then leaned back in her chair and shut her eyes. "Wake me when you've made up your mind, okay?"
Indy stood up and pulled her to her feet. "It's time," he said. "We can leave now."
"Brother," she said. "Just as I was trying to get some beauty sleep."
They went out into the alleyway, which was almost deserted.
Indy paused, looking this way and that. Then he took her by the hand and began to walk.
"You want to give me some idea of where we're headed exactly?"
"The house of Sallah."
"And who is Sallah?"
"The best digger in Egypt."
He only hoped Sallah still lived in the same place. And beyond that there was another hope, a deeper one, that Sallah was employed in the Tanis dig.
He paused at a corner, a junction where two narrow alleys branched away from one another. "This way," he said, still pulling at Marion's arm.
She sighed, then yawned. She followed.
Something moved in the shadows behind them, something that might have been human. It moved without noise, gliding quickly over the concrete; it knew only to follow the two people who walked ahead of it.
Indy was welcomed into Sallah's house as if only a matter of weeks had passed since they last met. But it had been years. Even so, Sallah had changed very little. The same intelligent eyes in the brown face, the same energetic cheerfulness, the hospitable warmth. They embraced as Sallah's wife, a large woman called Fayah, ushered them inside the house.
The warmth of the greeting touched Indy. The comfortable quality of the house made him feel at ease immediately, too. When they sat down at the table in the dining room, eating food that Fayah had produced with all the haste of a culinary miracle, he looked over at the other table in the corner, where Sallah's children sat.
"Some things change after all," he said. He placed a small cube of lamb into his mouth and nodded his head in the direction of the kids.
"Ah," Sallah said. His wife smiled in a proud way. "The last time there were not so many."
"I can remember only three," Indy said.
"Now there are nine," Sallah said.
"Nine," and Indy shook his head in wonderment.
Marion got up from the table and went over to where the children sat. She talked to each of them, touched them, played briefly with them, and then she came back. Indy imagined he saw some kind of look, something in
determinate yet obviously connected with a love of children, pass between Marion and Fayah. For his part he'd never had time for kids in bis life; they constituted the kind of clutter he didn't need.
"We have made a decision to stop at nine," Sallah said.
"I'd call that wise," Indy said.
Sallah reached for a date, chewed on it silently for a moment and then said, "It really is good to see you again, Indiana. I've thought about you often. I even intended to write, but I'm a bad correspondent. And I assumed you were even worse."
"You assumed right." Indy reached for a date himself. It was plump and delicious.
Sallah was smiling. "I won't ask you immediately, but 1 imagine you haven't come all the way to Cairo just to see me. Am I correct?"
"Correct."
Sallah looked suddenly knowing, suddenly sly. "In fact, I would even place a bet on your reason for being here."
Indy stared at his old friend, smiled, said nothing.
Sallahsaid, "Of course, I am not a gambling man."
"Of course," Indy said.
"We don't talk business at the table," Fayah remarked, looking imposing.
"Later," Indy said. He glanced at Marion, who appeared half-asleep now.
"Later, when everything is quiet," Sallah said.
There was a silence in the room for a second, and then suddenly the place was filled with noise, as if something had erupted at the table where the kids sat.
Fayah turned and tried to silence the pandemonium. But the kids weren't listening to her voice, because they were busy with something else. She rose, saying, "We have guests. You forget your manners."
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