always was. 'The corkscrew, Santos. Just wait until you taste this. And some gudeg for our vagabond. A local specialty, Thomas, jackfruit and chicken and tofu simmered in coconut milk...'
With a long-suffering look, Santos went off to find the corkscrew and warm the food. De l'Orme cradled two of three bottles Thomas carefully produced. 'Atlanta?'
'The Centers for Disease Control,' Thomas identified. 'There have been several new strains of virus reported in the Horn region...'
For the next hour, tended by Santos, the two men sat at the table and circled through their 'recent' adventures. In fact, they had not seen each other in seventeen years. Finally they came around to the work at hand.
'You're not supposed to be excavating down there,' Thomas said.
Santos was sitting to de l'Orme's right, and he leaned his elbows on the table. He had been waiting all evening for this. 'Surely you don't call this an excavation,' he said.
'Terrorists planted a bomb. We're merely passersby looking into an open wound.' Thomas dismissed the argument. 'Bordubur is off limits to all field archaeology now. These lower regions within the hillside were especially not to be disturbed. UNESCO mandated that none of the hidden footer wall was to be exposed or dismantled. The Indonesian government forbade any and all subsurface exploration. There were to be no trenches. No digging at all.'
'Pardon me, but again, we're not digging. A bomb went off. We're simply looking into the hole.'
De l'Orme attempted a distraction. 'Some people think the bomb was the work of Muslim fundamentalists. But I believe it's the old problem. Transmigrai. The government's population policy. It is very unpopular. They forcibly relocate people from overcrowded islands to less crowded ones. Tyranny at its worst.'
Thomas did not accept his detour. 'You're not supposed to be down there,' he
repeated. 'You're trespassing. You'll make it impossible for any other investigation to occur here.'
Santos, too, was not distracted. 'Monsieur Thomas, is it not true that it was the Church that persuaded UNESCO and the Indonesians to forbid work at these depths? And that you personally were the agent in charge of halting the UNESCO restoration?' De l'Orme smiled innocently, as if wondering how his henchman had learned such facts.
'Half of what you say is true,' Thomas said.
'The orders did come from you?'
'Through me. The restoration was complete.'
'The restoration, perhaps, but not the investigation, obviously. Scholars have counted eight great civilizations piled here. Now, in the space of three weeks, we've found evidence of two more civilizations beneath those.'
'At any rate,' Thomas said, 'I'm here to seal the dig. As of tonight, it's finished.' Santos slapped his palm on the wood. 'Disgraceful. Say something,' he appealed to de l'Orme.
The response was practically a whisper. 'Perinde ac cadaver.'
'What?'
'Like a corpse,' said de l'Orme. 'The perinde is the first rule of Jesuit obedience. 'I belong not to myself but to Him who made me and to His representative. I must behave like a corpse possessing neither will nor understanding.''
The young man paled. 'Is this true?' he asked.
'Oh yes,' said de l'Orme.
The perinde seemed to explain much. Thomas watched Santos turn pitying eyes upon de l'Orme, clearly shaken by the terrible ethic that had once bound his frail mentor. 'Well,' Santos finally said to Thomas, 'it's not for us.'
'No?' said Thomas.
'We require the freedom of our views. Absolutely. Your obedience is not for us.'
Us, not me. Thomas was starting to warm to this young man.
'But someone invited me here to see an image carved in stone,' said Thomas. 'Is that not obedience?'
'That was not Santos, I assure you.' De l'Orme smiled. 'No, he argued for hours against telling you. He even threatened me when I sent you the fax.'
'And why is that?' asked Thomas.
'Because the image is natural,' Santos replied. 'And now you'll try to make it supernatural.'
'The face of pure evil?' said Thomas. 'That is how de l'Orme described it to me. I
don't know if it's natural or not.'
'It's not the true face. Only a representation. A sculptor's nightmare.'
'But what if it does represent a real face? A face familiar to us from other artifacts and sites? How is that anything other than natural?'
'There,' complained Santos. 'Inverting my words doesn't change what you're after. A
look into the devil's own eyes. Even if they're the eyes of a man.'
'Man or demon, that's for me to decide. It is part of my job. To assemble what has been recorded throughout human time and to make it into a coherent picture. To verify the evidence of souls. Have you taken any photos?'
Santos had fallen silent.
'Twice,' de l'Orme answered. 'But the first set of pictures was ruined by water. And Santos tells me the second set is too dark to see. And the video camera's battery is dead. Our electricity has been out for days.'
'A plaster casting, then? The carving is in high relief, isn't it?'
'There's been no time. The dirt keeps collapsing, or the hole fills with water. It's not a proper trench, and this monsoon is a plague.'
'You mean to say there's no record whatsoever? Even after three weeks?'
Santos looked embarrassed. De l'Orme came to the rescue. 'After tomorrow there will be abundant record. Santos has vowed not to return from the depths until he has recorded the image altogether. After which the pit may be sealed, of course.'
Thomas shrugged in the face of the inevitable. It was not his place to physically stop de l'Orme and Santos. The archaeologists didn't know it yet, but they were in a race against more than time. Tomorrow, Indonesian army soldiers were arriving to close the dig down and bury the mysterious stone columns beneath tons of volcanic soil. Thomas was glad he would be gone by then. He did not relish the sight of a blind man arguing with bayonets.
It was nearly one in the morning. In the far distance, the gamelan drifted between volcanoes, married the moon, seduced the sea. 'I'd like to see the fresco itself, then,' said Thomas.
'Now?' barked Santos.
'I expected as much,' de l'Orme said. 'He's come nine thousand miles for his peek. Let us go.'
'Very well,' Santos said. 'But I will take him. You need to get your rest, Bernard.' Thomas saw the tenderness. For an instant he was almost envious.
'Nonsense,' de l'Orme said. 'I'm going also.'
They walked up the path by flashlight, carrying musty umbrellas wrapped against their bamboo handles. The air was so heavy with water it was almost not air. Any instant now, it seemed, the sky must open up and turn to flood. You could not call these Javanese monsoons rain. They were a phenomenon more like the eruption of volcanoes, as regular as clockwork, as humbling as Jehovah.
'Thomas,' said de l'Orme, 'this pre-dates everything. It's so very old. Man was still foraging in the trees at this time. Inventing fire, fingerpainting on cave walls. That is what frightens me. These people, whoever they were, should not have had the tools to knap flint, much less carve stone. Or do portraiture or erect columns. This should not exist.'
Thomas considered. Few places on earth had more human antiquity than Java. Java Man – Pithecanthropus erectus , better known as Homo erectus – had been found only a few kilometers from here, at Trinil and Sangiran on the Solo River. For a quarter-million years, man's ancestors had been
