The Golden Elephant. Alex Archer
of the Renaissance,” Annja said. She knew she gained a certain credibility because she showed she knew when the real bulk of the witch prosecutions took place; most people, including way too many college professors, thought they were a phenomenon of the Middle Ages. Still, the woman stiffened again, ever so slightly.
Annja was hyperattuned to her body language—and keying on that very reaction. “As what you might call the show’s revisionist,” she said, “I am particularly interested in the notion that the church might have had some justification for its actions in the matter. Not their methods, necessarily, but rather the possibility there existed a sort of witch culture that posed a real and deliberate threat to the church. Instead of the whole thing being a sort of mass hysteria, as is mostly assumed these days.”
Everything she said was true in the most legalistic and technical sense. There were such notions; they interested Annja.
Madame Duval smiled. “That appears to me to be a perfectly legitimate course of study,” she said in her own academic French. “If you will come with me, young lady, we will begin the paperwork to provide you the proper credentials.”
“Thank you,” Annja said.
F OUR HOURS LATER A NNJA’S vision was practically swimming. She was accustomed to deciphering fairly arcane writing. The Antiquities of Indochina was printed in a near-microscopic font. Unfortunately, unlike her Internet browsers, Annja’s eyes didn’t come with a handy zoom feature. The early-twentieth-century French itself was no problem; it was just hard to see.
Her heart jumped as she made out the words:
…the 1913 German expedition to Southeast Asia turned up many marvels indeed. Its reports included a fabulous hilltop temple complex, hidden in the reclaiming arms of the jungle, with the breathtaking golden idol of an elephant in its midst.
The passage then went on to talk about rubber production in Hanoi Province, in what was now Vietnam.
“Wait,” Annja said aloud, drawing glares from other researchers in the reading room. She glared back until they dropped their eyes back to tomes and computer screens.
Of course she felt bad about it at once. It’s not their fault, she reminded herself sternly.
Isn’t there more? she wondered.
She returned her attention to the book.
The crisp evening air felt good and smelled of roasting chestnuts. Annja was hungry, walking the summit of Montmartre with her hands jammed in her jacket pockets and her chin sunk into the collar. Over her left shoulder loomed the white domes of the Sacré Coeur Basilica. From somewhere in the middle distance skirled North African music. From nearer at hand came the thud and clank of what she considered mediocre techno music. The days of the Moulin Rouge and other noted, or notorious, cabarets were long gone. The fashionable night spots had long since migrated down across the river to the Left Bank and city center. Nowadays the area was given over to generic discos, artists’ studios and souvenir and antique shops, most of which were closed in the early evening.
Annja had found a fairly deserted section of the windy, narrow streets winding gradually down the hill. That suited her mood.
The one reference to the 1913 German expedition had been it. Not just for the book. For such as she’d been able to check of the University of Paris collection until they booted her out of the reading room at seven-thirty.
The good news was that she now knew stories of a golden elephant statue in a vast lost temple emanated from a German expedition to Southeast Asia in 1913. The bad news was that wasn’t much to go on.
It hadn’t been enough to lead to any more information, at least so far. The various archaeological reviews and journals from the period she had read stayed resolutely mute concerning any such expedition. She would have thought there’d be some mention.
Walking along in air just too warm for her breath to be visible, with fallen dry leaves skittering before her like small frightened mammals, she wondered if chauvinism might have come into play. The Great War, as it was then naively known—and for a few years afterward, until an even greater one happened along—broke out a year or so after the expedition. Indeed, if it set forth in 1913 the expedition might well have still been in progress when the First World War began. And in 1913 the French were still grumpy over the Franco-Prussian War.
So it struck her as possible that mention of German expeditions might’ve been embargoed in French journals. But scientists of the day still would have considered themselves above such political disputes, cataclysmic as they might be. Wars came and went—science endured. So the Germanophobe angle might mean much or little.
I see two main possibilities, Annja told herself as she turned down a quaintly cobbled alley between steel-shuttered storefronts that reminded her of home in Brooklyn. One, that the expedition simply got lost in the shuffle of World War I. It was easy enough to see how that would happen.
And two, she thought, the frown etching itself deeper into her forehead, that it was all just rumor.
That made her bare her teeth in dismay. It was possible. Probable, even. Scientific anthropology and archaeology were rife with such speculations in the wake of Schliemann’s discovery of Troy—or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
So the whole Golden Elephant yarn could just be hyperactive imagination.
“There’s a third possibility,” she said quietly to herself. “Or make it a subset of the first possibility,” she said with a certain deliberateness. “That there was such an expedition—and the only mention of it that still exists anywhere on Earth is the sentence you read in that book today.”
She knew that was an all-too-real likelihood. The priceless ceramic relics Schliemann had sent back to Berlin had been busted in some kind of grotesque drunken Prussian marriage ritual. The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt had been lost when the Allies bombed the museum where they were stored. Paris had famously been spared the ravages of WWII. But the expedition, of course, was German. That was not so good, from a preservation point of view. The whole country had been handled pretty roughly. And most artifacts went through Berlin—which, between relentless bombing and the Red Army’s European tour, had pretty much been destroyed.
Every last journal or other scrap of writing relating to the 1913 expedition stood a really excellent chance of having been burned up, shelled to fine gray powder.
She sighed again. “Great,” she said. She decided she’d give it at lest one more try in the University of Paris system. If that came up dry—
From behind she heard a masculine voice call out, “There she is!”
7
Annja stopped. She set her mouth. She sensed at least two men behind her. She braced to run. Then from the shadowed brickwork arch of an entry into a small garden courtyard she hadn’t even noticed before, a third man strolled out into the starlight before her.
She’d wandered, eyes wide open, into a classic trap.
Annja scolded herself furiously. Walking around like that and not paying attention to your surroundings! she thought. Doing a perfect impression of a perfect victim. What were you thinking?
Unfortunately, thinking was what she had been doing. In contrast to maintaining situational awareness. It was an unfortunate propensity of hers. And what really annoyed her was that she knew better.
“What have we here?” the man who had appeared in front of her said in nasal, slangy Parisian French. He was a bit shorter than Annja, wearing a knit cap and a long dark cloth coat against the autumn chill.
Annja looked around. The other two men came up on her left and right, winging out to the side. They were positioned to catch her no matter which way she might bolt.
“Careful,” one said in an Algerian accent. “She has long legs, this one. She could run fast.”
She was in a tight spot, she knew. They were very smooth, very tactical,