The Reincarnationist Papers Page 28

  Bando was shouting as he emerged, struggling against the two men holding him by his upper arms. Juan broke into a full run toward the village. Bando tore free from their grasp and fell at the feet of the angry semi-circle. He got to his hands and knees and looked up in time to see the club blow that landed squarely above his left eye, knocking him flat again. "Teszin! Teszin!" shouted Bando in between kicks and club blows to his head and torso.

  Juan, running at full stride, let out a scream at the top of his lungs. The mob stopped attacking and turned toward the noise in unison. Juan was about fifty yards away and closing rapidly while waving his sword menacingly overhead.

  Bando, on his hands and knees again, looked out through the legs of the mob and crawled along the outside wall away from them. Juan slowed his pace when they turned their attention on him.

  A man with a club turned and saw Bando get to his feet and start running. He swung and caught Bando against the ear, knocking him off stride and into the wall. The rest of the crowd turned and pursued the black shadow around the corner. Juan could see that Bando had a ten pace head start and was pulling away from them as he ran up a trail leading into the cliffs.

  Juan stopped at Bando's open doorway and bent over to catch his breath. Two small pools of blood dried into the dirt. He looked inside and saw the finished pieces. They were piled together at the end of the workbench, glistening brilliantly even in the dim light of morning. Juan couldn't help but step inside to get a better look at them. The pile was larger than he dared think it would be, heavier too probably. His mind raced; 'the gold, the mob, the pride, Bando, the gold.' He walked backward out the door, not taking his eyes off the pile. When he was clear of the doorway, he closed his eyes and threw his head back.

  "Bando!...Bando!" Juan's shouts echoed back off the cliffs. "Meet.. me.. by.. the.. horses.. and.. we.. go..!" He shouted the words slowly so that each one had a chance to echo back before the next rang out.

  He couldn't see Bando but he saw that the crowd had stopped pursuing him up the trail. He reentered the shop, grabbed a rug and began placing the pieces from the pile onto it. He worked as quickly as he could without risking damage to Bando's works. Taking another rug from the corner, he placed the remaining pieces of gold jewelry onto it, grabbed each of the rugs by their four corners and left with his makeshift bags.

  Outside, he scanned the surroundings for the angry mob and did a double take back at the nearest corpse. His eyes locked on the fibrous rope around the dead man's waist. He untied it and pulled at one end until the man's weight shifted and it came free. When the corpse rolled back into its original position Juan noticed a silver bracelet on the man's wrist. He leaned over and spun it round on his arm, examining it, but being careful not to touch the clammy brown skin. Juan searched the bodies until he found another section of rope and removed it. Sword in hand, he quickly made a small button hole incision in each of the four corners of the rugs and laced the ropes through, increasing the capacity of each of the bags. He listened carefully for the crowd, they were quieter now. He bent over the first corpse, removed the bracelet and put it in the nearest bag without taking his eye off the necklace on the 3rd woman over. He removed the necklace and stepped carefully to the next woman for her gold collar.

  Juan was about halfway through the bodies when he heard a woman's shrill scream behind him. He turned suddenly and lost his balance, almost falling into the bodies at his feet. It was Teszin, looking up to the cliffs above the village.

  Bando stood at the edge of the bluff, his black figure silhouetted against the blue sky. His shirt was torn off and blood ran from his head onto his shoulders and chest. The wind atop the cliff whipped at his frayed trousers. He didn't respond to Teszin's shouting, but instead stared directly at Juan who held a large silver necklace still partially draped around an old woman's neck. Juan threw his head straight back and squinted against the bright blue background to return Bando's stare. He smiled up at Bando.

  "Are you ready?" Juan asked in a soft tone only strong enough to echo up to him.

  Bando closed his eyes and pitched forward on his perch. He stayed aloft only for an instant, but he looked graceful and confident, as if he knew he could fly all along, and had waited patiently to demonstrate his unique skill. Juan saw him fly only for that graceful instant. He closed his eyes tight as Bando started his decent. Teszin let out a scream that echoed well past the impact. It took longer than Juan though it should have for Bando to land; perhaps he really had flown in that instant of grace.

  17

  ...perhaps Bando really had flown in that instant of grace."

  "Why did she jump?" I asked. The numerous faces looking out from the portraits on the walls seemed to want an answer as well.

  "I've often thought about that myself. You'll have to ask her."

  "She spoke about you before we came to Zurich," I said.

  "How so?" asked Samas.

  "I asked her if the one that found her acted as advocate in her Ascension. She responded with a vehement 'No'. I sensed a deep animosity on her part."

  "You're right about that. She's been hostile to me ever since she came back. I'm accustomed to it by now. Besides, I understand where it comes from."

  "Where does it come from?" I asked, wanting him to say it.

  "Well part of it is obvious, because of what I did that last day at Latsei. But there's something else, something with edges that don't dull with time. I think she feels responsible for their deaths. If she hadn't gone in search of them they wouldn't have been exposed to the smallpox virus that was latent in both our bodies. No matter how you look at it, you cannot dispute the fact that she was responsible."

  "You can't blame her for that," I said in her defense.

  "No, no, no," he said shaking his head. "Don't confuse culpability with responsibility. They're different. It's not her fault, but you can't deny it wouldn't have happened the way it did had it not been for her. She was responsible. That responsibility, no matter how you justify it, is your own in the end. You can't help but carry it around with you. My only transgression is that I was witness to hers. Is there nothing in your lives for which you have felt responsible in the same way?"

  His simple question cut to the very core of my being. At times it seemed as if everything I did could be reduced down to the lowest common denominator of reacting to the guilt I felt. It didn't matter that I'd inherited the guilt from unknowing benefactors. They were as real as my own. They were mine now, and equated to who I was and what I thought I--what I thought we were. "Are we evil?" I asked looking at him.

  "Which we? We humans, we palingenesists, or you and I specifically?"

  "We Palingenesists. Are we evil for replacing and perhaps cutting short the lives of those before us?"

  A look of surprise came over his face. "I've never thought of it that way. Why do you ask?"

  "Samas I've wrestled with that same kind of responsibility and guilt for eight years. I've known for some time now that I could never absolve myself of those sins, and recently, with meeting you and Poppy, it has occurred to me that there may not even be a need of absolution."

  "That's right," he said emphatically. “That's the way it works. Personally, I think you're ahead of Poppy in that respect."

  "What do you mean ahead of?"

  He leaned back as if exasperated that I didn't get it. "As palingenesists we are burdened by the knowledge that we, and only we, are responsible for our actions. We know there is no divinity on whose shoulders we can lay the blame for any errs in our lives. Normal humans embrace the divine precisely because they can burden other shoulders with their sins, thereby absolving them. We know differently. But it's important for you to realize that we live in their world, not the other way around. So when you speak of absolution, you will eventually find that your desire for the quarter it can provide, and your knowledge of the truth, are incompatible. The only vehicle within which you can find solace is responsibility.”

  "Unrighted wrongs can haunt yo
u like a spectre. I believe they haunt Poppy to this day, which in someway explains her actions. You may be haunted as well, only you know for sure. Ultimately, there is only one way to exorcise such a fiend; you must accept him." He leaned forward in his chair and stared at a painted face on the wall. "You must look him square in the eyes without turning away, taking in every unsightly nuance of his repellant face and say: 'Yea I know thee brother, and love thee as I love myself, for we are one and the same.' That fiend will have an unspoken, yet unassailable mastery over you until it is assimilated. It is only when you embrace that dark brother, that you can know true freedom."

  I absorbed the import of his words in a long silence.

  He continued. "So when you ask me if we are evil, I have no choice but to answer in the affirmative. I must answer so, for we are evil, even if we only have the capacity for it. The evil is latent within us. It lives and breathes in that twin fiend. Does that answer your question?"

  I nodded. "I think so. There is something I'm curious about."

  "What's that?"

  "Why did you take the pieces off the dead bodies at Latsei?"

  "Oh, dear Evan," he said with a sigh. "The answer is within your own question. They were dead, so what did it harm? Besides they had no idea of the jewelry’s value."

  "That doesn't make it right."

  He shook his head, disappointed. "Right or wrong is not the issue. I can live with it. That's my point." He finished the last of his wine in one long drink. "Let me ask you something. What would you do if a similar opportunity at fortune presented itself?"

  He asked the question knowing I couldn't answer. "I can't say. I'd have to be in the situation."

  "That's right, and that's the decision I made when I was in that situation."

  "Fair enough," I said, refilling both glasses.

  "It was the money from those artifacts that started all this," he said, looking around at the faces and landscapes on the walls. "It started me you might say. It allowed me to become what I am now. You know Evan there's something else you will come to know in time, and it goes back to what I said earlier. Life is not worth living unless you enjoy it, and unfortunately for most neophytes like yourself, amassed wealth is part of that. I don't have to tell you the difference money can make in your life, the way it sweetens it, the way it brings certain refinements into focus."

  "This certainly is refined," I said, looking around at the walls.

  "I told you this collection is my passion, what I didn't tell you was why."

  "Go ahead," I said.

  "All the pieces in this room have one thing in common, me. I commissioned all these works, and modeled in several of them. I've had at least one portrait done in each of my last six trips. That's the kind of refinement I could not live without," he said with the resolve of a confirmed addict.

  "What was there?" I asked, pointing to the blank rectangle on the wall behind me.

  "A portrait of me. Done by Jan Vermeer in 1670."

  "What happened to it?"

  "It was taken from me, stolen from my home in Amsterdam by the Nazis in 1940. These two pieces were in the house as well," he said, pointing them out on the wall, "but the SS Captain in charge took only the Vermeer. I searched for that one piece for five years, until the end of the war. Ramsay helped me and set an appointment with a Luftwaffe Colonel in Berlin to pick it up in the closing days of the fighting. The Nazis, as it turned out, hid a large portion of their plundered art in the tall anti-aircraft towers around Berlin.

  "The deal was ten thousand British pounds, Reich Marks were of course worthless by then, and a boat ride from Rostock to neutral Sweden for the Colonel in exchange for the Vermeer. I readied two hundred thousand pounds in hopes the Colonel was sitting on more stolen works. I even had a truck at the ready to cart off the cache I expected to find, but the Red Army beat me to him. I arrived in time to see them loading an eastbound truck with narrow crates. I sat huddled in a dense thicket nearby and watched them work, hoping to catch a glimpse of my portrait. Time after time the soldiers would reemerge from the open portal at the base of the ominous concrete tower carrying yet another narrow crate with a black eagle stenciled on the side. The Colonel's body lay at the base of the vacant spire, his powder blue airman's uniform darkened with blood. After an hour’s labor, they removed the last crate, closed the truck and retreated to the east.

  "It must have been another full hour before I ventured forth from my secluded vantage to inspect the scene. They had taken everything. I searched every corner of the simple structure in hopes of finding some lead to follow. Hours later, I found a manifest in handwritten German among the scattered papers littering the floor. It detailed everything that had been moved into the tower over the past 3 years, everything that I had seen being carted away in a mere hour. I wept as I read through the list. Evan, the contents of those crates made the collection in this room look like a show of freshman projects at a third rate art college. My portrait was on the list.

  "It took me twenty years to find it within the Soviet Union. It was in storage in the Hermitage along with all the other items on the German manifest."

  "Where is it now?" I asked.

  "In 1985 it was given by General Secretary Gorbachev to the Government of Italy along with several other pieces as a political offering. The Italians keep them leased out to various galleries around the world, though the dolts have it listed as doubtfully attributed to Vermeer."

  "Won't they sell it to you?"

  "No. I've made a generous offer each year for the past three years. They refused every time. I even left the last offer open, letting them put in whatever figure they wished, and still they were not interested. I never thought men could be so unreasonable," he said angrily.

  I could see that the idea of his money not being able to buy something was poignantly irritating to him. "Is that not contradictory to what you said about wealth sweetening life? After all, you said this is your passion, what keeps you going," I said, baiting him.

  "That's where you're mistaken my friend. It is precisely my wealth that will bring the portrait back into my possession."

  "How's that?"

  "I'm going to contract someone to steal it. My life will be sweetened, and the vehicle is still money, there's no two ways about it. Never underestimate the potential of kinetic money," he said laughing.

  "How much would it cost to have it stolen?"

  "I would go as high as two million American dollars."

  "That's a lot of money," I said, trying to match his cool demeanor.

  "That depends on your frame of reference," he said, fixing his eyes on me. "It's a reasonable price for a part of your own identity. You'd do the same thing in my place. It's just as you told my wife at dinner, you'd like to go back to Istanbul if you had the money. Do you remember saying that?"

  "Of course I remember, and I would go back if I had the money. I'd go back to Bulgaria as well. I understand what you're saying, what I don't get is your point."

  "The point is, that you must seize an opportunity when it comes, because it can last you several lifetimes. My situation with Bando at Latsei is a good example."

  Poppy's episode with Joubert was a good example too. "That's all well and good, but the world is a different place today. Those opportunities are harder to come by."

  Samas shook his head slowly from side to side. "Opportunity is everywhere Evan. It could be in this room with us right now. It could even be on the wall behind you," he said, staring at me.

  I turned to look at the blank spot. "Are you suggesting that I steal it for you?"

  He held up a hand in objection. "Don't put words in my mouth. I'm not suggesting anything. My situation is this: I've tried to be reasonable with the Italians about a purchase and now I am at the point that I must contract someone, for a handsome sum, to procure it, a sum that will ensure I have no dearth of aspirants. That in itself is opportunity. And since I am merely contracting services, it is of no importance whom I contract, provi
ded I have confidence in that person’s abilities. I have confidence in your abilities Evan, based on who and what you are, so I'm offering it to you first, as a gift. You don't have to answer now, just think about it. Think about what two million dollars could do for you now, and in the future."

  "I don't know what to say."

  "You don't have to say anything, just think about it. Listen," he said leaning forward. "I'm going to have this done regardless of your involvement, so don't worry about my end. You just think about whether or not you want to participate.

  "It's getting late Evan and I want to go to bed," he said, walking to the keypad next to the door. "Are you ready?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  He punched in the code and we both stepped through in one motion. "I'll see you in the morning Evan. Don't forget to use the mosquito netting, I'll have the windows open tonight," he said walking away.

  I entered my room and walked straight for the sliding door. The air outside was cool and the stars shown brilliantly in a sky as black as pitch. His offer struck me as generous after the initial shock had worn off, very generous. Two million could certainly sweeten anyone’s life, but there was something else it could do as well, something Poppy and Samas had both alluded to, perhaps without even knowing it. It could make me their equal.

  I was a guest in this house now, but in time the disparity in our positions could no longer be ignored. I would be looked upon as an inept younger brother, incapable of living up to my older sibling’s achievements. That's the funny thing about entering into a new group, you automatically find yourself in a new peerage. And if I were confirmed back in Zurich, I knew I'd find myself at the very bottom of it, looking up at everyone else.

  I walked back to the bed, parted the sheer netting, placed my roll of bills in a pile on the bed and counted it. After paying Henry, Leo at the Ohio Hotel, buying the methanol and new clothes, I had 3,817 dollars out of the original 5,000. Stacked up, it was about an inch high. Funny, it would have seemed a large amount of money two weeks ago. I began to see what Samas meant by frame of reference.