“That would be most pleasant,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “And please, call me Tarik.”
“And I am Leonhard.” The banker smiled. “But my friends call me Lenny.” He opened a drawer in the desk, took out a card and used an expensive-looking fountain pen to scribble on it.
“I meet few men of culture in my work,” said Saint-Sylvestre, sighing as he dangled the carrot. “Certainly not ones who can recite Yeats from memory.”
“As I mentioned, he is a favorite of mine. I wrote several essays about him over the years at school.”
“A prescient man,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “In parts of Africa he would be thought of as a griot, a shaman, a foreteller of the future.”
“A role which seems to fall to bankers now.” Euhler laughed with a strange, strangled sound that was almost a giggle. He smiled again. “Perhaps you would like dinner tonight and we can discuss it?”
Saint-Sylvestre smiled. The banker was definitely wooing him. “That sounds very pleasant.”
“There is a place nearby. Very modern. The Krone. The Crown. They do a very nice steak tartare, if you like that sort of thing.”
“Very much,” said Saint-Sylvestre, who loathed raw meat.
“I live in Zurich, but I have a pied-a-terre in Aarau on the Delfterstrasse.”
“Like the porcelain,” said Saint-Sylvestre, nodding toward the ornate display cabinet.
“Ah, yes,” said Euhler, flushing a little. “A small hobby of mine.” He handed over the card:
“Wonderful,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “I’ll see you at seven. We can continue our discussion.”
“At the very least,” said Euhler, his round, grinning face eager.
Carrot, hook, line and sinker; the only thing left was the stick.
19
After hiding the dugouts deep in the brush they went down the pathway to the big stone platform, then turned down a narrow path leading downward toward the distant bowl of the jungle floor. After fifty yards they reached the old portage point-a spindly tooth of rock, a knob worn by a thousand ropes used to lower dugouts to the course of the foaming river far below.
A few feet away a huge iron ring had been spiked into the rock wall of the cliff, a testament to later travelers portaging downriver. They found several more pop cans here and a discarded running shoe, the canvas rotted away and the rubber sole smooth and full of ragged holes. Peggy paused to take a photo of the empty shoe and Holliday could see that the image was souring in his young cousin’s soul.
“It never ends,” she said softly, looking out over the enormous expanse of the valley cut through by the dark artery of the river. “The whole continent is going to tear itself apart with genocide, corruption and greed. It really is the Dark Continent, not because the people are black but because no one from anywhere else can penetrate its heart.”
“It’s like Afghanistan,” said Holliday, standing beside her. “I’ve often thought the best thing is just to leave places like that alone. They have their own laws, their own culture and their own way of life and we stole it all away and gave them Chicago Bulls T-shirts in return. They watch our television and see our lives and they can’t have them and it festers in them like a wound. That’s really why we have wars and revolutions-plain old envy.”
“Pretty philosophical for an old soldier,” said Peggy.
Holliday, his smile slight, answered her. “The first philosophical thought that comes into a warrior’s head might as well be his death warrant. Think about war and you can’t fight them anymore, because when you really think about war there’s no good reason to fight one.”
“That’s a bit simplistic, isn’t it?” Peggy asked.
“Wars are simple things, despite what politicians tell you. You want what the other guy wants. . Louis Vuitton jeans, Gucci handbags, gasoline, you name it and you’re willing to kill him to get it. Stealth fighters and nuclear submarines are hardly the tools of diplomacy; they’re the modern version of the Neanderthal club. The club makers want you to go to war so they can sell a lot of clubs, so they’re always whispering in your ear that their club’s better than the other guys’ and so on.”
“But children?” Peggy said. “It’s obscene.”
“Now who’s being simplistic?” said Holliday. “In the tenth century, twelve was considered the optimum age for marriage. In the Viking era if you were old enough to hold a sword and war shield you were a man. I bet this Waldo the Brain Smasher we’re following was no more than twenty. The average age of a kid fighting in Vietnam was nineteen or twenty, the average age for the guys fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan even younger.”
“He speaks like this all the time?” Eddie asked Rafi as they came down the path.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Holliday said.
“You sound like
“He means you’re doing it again, Doc,” said Rafi.
“Doing what?”
“Giving a lecture.” Peggy laughed. “You’re back at West Point in a class full of fourth-year ‘firsties’ laying down the law according to Lieutenant Colonel John ‘Doc’ Holliday, U.S. Army Ranger.”
Doc laughed at himself. “I guess I was at that,” he said. It was true. He missed teaching, watching his kids get their chops together so maybe they could go out and fight the good fight and come out the other end intact, maybe thanks to him, even if it was only for a little bit of learning.
They headed down the long, steep, winding path that led down the escarpment, the thunder of the falls booming on their left and the looming jungle wall on their right. Holliday could see the mural in the Templar tomb in his mind’s eye and wondered at the ethereal, slightly other worldly aura that the artist had seen a thousand years ago and that was just as visible now.
When he was a kid he’d read Conan Doyle’s
As they all walked down the lowering path to the bottom of the valley he wondered for a moment if being left in that past might just be the best thing for him. Once upon a time it seemed that duty and honor had been part of life, as well as real pride in the things that he did well, but all that had gone, it seemed, and it didn’t look likely to reappear anytime soon.
So what of Lucius Gellius Publicola, the disgraced general sent on a suicide mission to replenish Anthony’s war chest? Had he thought that great riches from this hidden jungle valley would buy his honor back? Or of Ragnar Skull Splitter and his men, making that same voyage nine hundred years later, looking for the treasure of the vanished Eighteenth Legion and its desperate, failed leader?
And what of Roche-Guillaume, the Lost Templar, three hundred years after Ragnar, more a historian than a soldier-knight, a man in many ways very much like him, given to philosophy and curiosity in equal parts? What had it been like to see and feel all these things, to climb out on that rocky slab above them now and see that timeless rainbow and wonder if it was leading him to the treasures of Solomon?
And what if it was all no more than someone’s flight of fancy, Roche-Guillaume dreaming of the place he knew existed, but a place of failure he could not admit? What if they had all put themselves in potentially fatal harm’s way for no more than a fantasy from seven hundred years before?
Eddie reached the bottom first with Holliday right behind him. There was a definite path where the child soldiers had pushed the dugouts through the tall grasses looking for a safer spot than directly beside the falls, and a second track, narrow and rough, probably used by animals.
Leaves and branches were broken off knee-high and there were mounds of boar scat here and there. The
