He swallowed. “Hope you like the wine.” He gestured to the buildings with his hand. “Challenger is on the way we need to go.”
Rominy felt like a rabbit uncertain when the trapdoor is raised. The air was clean, insects hummed, birds tweeted. The world remained surprisingly normal. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“This way.”
It was a Porta-Potty-not exactly Napa-but then they went into the tasting room with its overstuffed couches, gas fire, and dark paneling. Cozy as a sleep sack. The young woman who sold them a bottle introduced herself as Cora and Jake chatted her up, almost flirting, which unexpectedly annoyed Rominy. Then the woman pointed them up the hill. “Nice view. Do you need a corkscrew?”
“If you please.” Barrow smiled as if this whole thing was a lark.
Cora gave them plastic drinking cups as well.
Rominy and Jake ascended to a wooden table resting beneath the canopy of a three-trunked cedar tree, the painted planking littered with needles. The view was soothing; purposely so, she assumed. Vines marched in soldierly columns down to the main highway, trees, and the green Skagit beyond. Across the river, rank upon rank of forested hills receded. Early autumn gave everything that honey glow.
Rominy was sore, tired, frustrated, and curious. She could run, she could scream, she could beg to use the winery phone… and she did none of these things. Watching Barrow work the corkscrew, the river and highway a distant murmur, the shade cool but not unpleasant, she felt oddly relaxed. Was this the Stockholm syndrome, where victims identify with their captor? Or had Barrow really saved her in order to tell her something important? Certainly nothing remotely this interesting occurred in her cubicle at work.
Rominy spent most days staring at either pixels on a glass screen or the gray fabric of her office enclosure, and more evenings than she cared to admit staring at another glass screen at home. Her abode was an apartment on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill she couldn’t really afford; she kept the heat at 65 to justify premium cable. She went to a gym three mornings a week, belonged to a book club, purposely limited her gossip magazine time to the monthly stint at the hairdresser, club-hopped with girlfriends, and dated with more wariness than excitement. She shopped at IKEA but waited for the Nordstrom sale. On a package to Mexico she’d used her high school Spanish, wore a swimsuit it took two weeks to select, and applied sunblock with religious zeal. She wrote press releases for software engineers who alternately treated her with disdain or flirted from boredom. Her ambitions were to buy a bungalow, own a significant piece of art, or visit Africa, but her dreams were hazy after that. If anyone had asked- and they didn’t-she would have said she was happy.
Yes, something had at last happened.
“A toast.” He poured the wine and hoisted his. “To your illustrious ancestor!”
“My what?” She took a sip, eyeing Jake over the rim of her glass. Not bad, both him and the wine. Her moment of contentment confused her.
“To your great-grandfather, Rominy. To the famous and infamous adventurer, explorer, curator, and secret agent Benjamin Hood.”
“Whatever.”
“Apparently disgraced, however. Stripped of his prerogatives and effectively exiled to the murk of Skagit County at a time, World War Two, when his country might have needed him most. If you think this is rural now, it was the end of the earth then. A man lost to history, and even to his own family. Meaning you.”
“I have a great-grandfather?”
“Everyone does, trust me.” He smiled. “You were adopted, correct?”
“Yes. How do you know that?”
“I told you, I’ve been investigating. It’s my job.”
“My parents died in a car accident when I was a baby.”
“And no other family that you knew about?”
“There wasn’t any.”
“But there had to be at one time, right? One’s parents have parents. Didn’t you ever wonder?”
“Mom and Dad-my adopted parents-said they didn’t know. I haven’t dwelled on it, really. They never made me feel adopted-I was an only child, their child. We didn’t obsess on the accident. It’s not what you want to talk about, you know?”
“Of course. Icy road. Mountain plunge. And you mysteriously found: abandoned, but bundled, in a cradle in a Forest Service campground
…”
“Not abandoned.” She flushed. All her old dread at the rumors, and her frustration at her adoptive parents’ evasions, was coming back. “No. Not a suicide. Something terrible must have been going on, and they left me for a moment to go get help, and the ice…” She felt the threat of tears again and willed them back. It didn’t make sense. It had never made sense. It annoyed her that he’d obviously looked at the old clippings. It seemed an invasion of her privacy, of a tragedy buried by time.
“It wasn’t a suicide, Rominy, of course not.” He took a quick swallow. “So you know your name isn’t really Pickett?”
“It is. This is what this is about? You bring this up now? Here ?”
“It’s your adoptive parents’ name.”
“It’s my name, the one I’ve had as long as I can remember. And my poor dead parents were not named Hood.”
“But your mother’s mother’s father was. I’m going to show you the genealogy, and your descent from him is on the female side. But that’s not my point. It wasn’t a suicide, I agree. But it was murder.”
“What?”
“By the same crazy fanatics who just tried to murder you.”
She shook her head in bewilderment. “Skinheads killed my real parents?”
“Not skinheads, Rominy. Nazis. Neo-Nazis.” He took out his own cell phone. “Which reminds me. I’ve got to make a call about your inheritance.”
10
Kangra La, Sikkim
July 28, 1938
K urt Raeder looked back from the Himalayas to a flat world gauzed with haze, the steel of India’s great rivers faint threads of orientation. The Germans had escaped the hot, damp hell of the British Raj and were climbing toward their goal, the heaven promised by old Tibetan texts that Himmler had sent along in a steel box: Shambhala, the lost kingdom that would violently redeem the world.
On Raeder’s neck, kept warm by his own body, was the vial that reputedly held the antique blood of Frederick Barbarossa.
The explorer found himself lightening as they climbed. For more than a month he and his four companions had felt trapped in British India as news from Europe grew more ominous. Traveling through Calcutta and the Himalayan province of Sikkim was the quickest way to Tibet, but it was getting harder for both sides to pretend England’s relations with Germany weren’t fraying. Meanwhile, the monsoon came in full force, rain pouring down. The humidity on the Bengal plain became suffocating. Snakes slithered from drowned burrows. Mosquitoes rose in clouds. His companions chafed and quarreled. The heat, the bugs, and the sheer bureaucratic sloth of a dying empire all weighed on them. England was in decline and Calcutta was crowded and chaotic. As Hitler tried to reunite a Germany brutally disenfranchised after the Great War, the old enemies grew jealous again, seeking to hem in the Teutons. So had the German Tibetan Expedition been corralled by the arrogant, frightened English! For that, Raeder held them in contempt.
Where, the officials in Calcutta had demanded of him, are your permits to travel to the Forbidden Kingdom of Tibet? Of course there could be no permits, since there was no permitted travel, and there could be no permission until the Germans met personally with the three-year-old god-king’s regent in Lhasa. But they could not meet, because none but the British consul was permitted to travel there. The Germans stewed under the circular and
