'A slave?'
'An escaped prisoner?'
Ike said nothing. He went nose-to-nose with the gaunt face, hunting for clues. Tell your journey, he thought. Speak your escape. Who shackled you with gold? Nothing. The marble eyes ignored their curiosity. The grimace enjoyed its voiceless riddles. Owen had joined them on the shelf, reading from the opposite shoulder. 'RAF.'
Sure enough, the left deltoid bore a tattoo with the letters RAF beneath an eagle. It was right side up and of commercial quality. Ike grasped the cold arm.
'Royal Air Force,' he translated.
The puzzle assembled. It even half-explained the Shakespeare, if not the chosen lines.
'He was a pilot?' asked the Paris bob. She seemed charmed.
'Pilot. Navigator. Bombardier.' Ike shrugged. 'Who knows?'
Like a cryptographer, he bent to inspect the words and numbers twining the flesh. Line after line, he traced each clue to its dead end. Here and there he punctuated complete thoughts with a jab of his fingertip. The trekkers backed away, letting him work through the cyphers. He seemed to know what he was doing.
Ike circled back and tried a string in reverse. It made sense this time. Yet it made no sense. He got out his topographical map of the Himalayan chain and found the longitude and latitude, but snorted at their nexus. No way, he thought, and lifted his gaze across the wreckage of a human body. He looked back at the map. Could it be?
'Have some.' The smell of French-pressed gourmet coffee made him blink. A plastic mug slid into view. Ike glanced up. Kora's blue eyes were forgiving. That warmed him more than the coffee. He took the cup with murmured thanks and realized he had a terrific headache. Hours had passed. Shadows lay pooled in the deeper cave like wet sewage.
Ike saw a small group squatting Neanderthal-style around a small Bluet gas stove, melting snow and brewing joe. The clearest proof of their miracle was that Owen had broken down and was actually sharing his private stock of coffee. There was one hand-grinding the beans in a plastic machine, another squeezing the filter press, yet another grating a bit of cinnamon on top of each cupful. They were actually cooperating. For the first time in a month, Ike almost liked them.
'You okay?' Kora asked.
'Me?' It sounded strange, someone asking after his well-being. Especially her.
As if he needed any more to ponder, Ike suspected Kora was going to leave him. Before setting off from Kathmandu, she'd announced this was her final trek for the company. And since Himalayan High Journeys was nothing more than her and him, it implied a larger dissatisfaction. He would have minded less if her reason was another man, another country, better profits, or higher risks. But her reason was him. Ike had broken her heart because he was Ike, full of dreams and childlike naivete. A drifter on life's stream. What had attracted her to him in the first place now disturbed her, his lone wolf/high mountains way. She thought he knew nothing about the way people
really worked, like this notion of a lawsuit, and maybe there was some truth to that. He'd been hoping the trek would somehow bridge their gap, that it would draw her back to the magic that drew him. Over the past two years she'd grown weary, though. Storms and bankruptcy no longer spelled magic for her.
'I've been studying this mandala,' she said, indicating the painted circle filled with squirming lines. In the darkness, its colors had been brilliant and alive. In their light, the drawing was bland. 'I've seen hundreds of mandalas, but I can't make heads or tails out of this one. It looks like chaos, all those lines and squiggles. It does seem to have a center, though.' She glanced up at the mummy, then at Ike's notes. 'How about you? Getting anywhere?'
He'd drawn the oddest sketch, pinning words and text in cartoon balloons to different positions on the body and linking them with a mess of arrows and lines.
Ike sipped at the coffee. Where to begin? The flesh declared a maze, both in the way it told the story and in the story it told. The man had written his evidence as it occurred to him, apparently, adding and revising and contradicting himself, wandering with his truths. He was like a shipwrecked diarist who had suddenly found a pen and couldn't quit filling in old details.
'First of all,' he began, 'his name was Isaac.'
'Isaac?' asked Darlene from the assembly line of coffee makers. They had stopped what they were doing to listen to him.
Ike ran his finger from nipple to nipple. The declaration was clear. Partially clear. I
am Isaac , it said, followed by In my exile/In my agony of Light.
'See these numbers?' said Ike. 'I figure this must be a serial number. And 10/03/23
could be his birthday, right?'
'Nineteen twenty-three?' someone asked. Their disappointment verged on childlike. Seventy-five years old evidently didn't qualify as a genuine antique.
'Sorry,' he said, then continued. 'See this other date here?' He brushed aside what remained of the pubic patch. '4/7/44. The day of his shoot-down, I'm guessing.'
'Shoot-down?'
'Or crash.'
They were bewildered. He started over, this time telling them the story he was piecing together. 'Look at him. Once upon a time, he was a kid. Twenty-one years old. World War II was on. He signed up or got drafted. That's the RAF tattoo. They sent him to India. His job was to fly the Hump.'
'Hump?' someone echoed. It was Bernard. He was furiously tapping the news into his laptop.
'That's what pilots called it when they flew supplies to bases in Tibet and China,' Ike said. 'The Himalayan chain. Back then, this whole region was part of an Oriental Western Front. It was a rough go. Every now and then a plane went down. The crews rarely survived.'
'A fallen angel,' sighed Owen. He wasn't alone. They were all becoming infatuated.
'I don't see how you've drawn all that from a couple of strands of numbers,' said Bernard. He aimed his pencil at Ike's latter set of numbers. 'You call that the date of his shoot-down. Why not the date of his marriage, or his graduation from Oxford, or the date he lost his virginity? What I mean is, this guy's no kid. He looks forty. If you ask me, he wandered away from some scientific or mountain-climbing expedition within the last couple years. He sure as snow didn't die in 1944 at the age of twenty- one.'
'I agree,' Ike said, and Bernard looked instantly deflated. 'He refers to a period of captivity. A long stretch. Darkness. Starvation. Hard labor.' The sacred deep.
'A prisoner of war. Of the Japanese?'
'I don't know about that,' Ike said.
'Chinese Communists, maybe?'
'Russians?' someone else tried.
'Nazis?'
'Drug lords?'
'Tibetan bandits!'
The guesses weren't so wild. Tibet had long been a chessboard for the Great Game.
'We saw you checking the map. You were looking for something.'
'Origins,' Ike said. 'A starting point.'
'And?'
With both hands, Ike smoothed down the thigh hair and exposed another set of numbers. 'These are map coordinates.'
'For where he got shot down. It makes perfect sense.' Bernard was with him now.
'You mean his airplane might be somewhere close?'
Mount Kailash was forgotten. The prospect of a crash site thrilled them.
'Not exactly,' Ike said.
