The Ephemera (17 page)

Sins of the Father

[co-written with Mark Roberts]

Sandor's final clue was a bottle of rain. I had trailed him across half the world, from Bucharest to Palo Alto, from Brisbane to Jakarta, to this village on the edge of the jungle. I had tried to guess his intent, like a haruspex, from the flotsam littering his wake—the credit trail, hotel bookings and phone calls; the hired 4x4 dumped at a private airfield in Monterrey, the bewildered girlfriend, abandoned in Basle. While his purpose remained a mystery, I had become increasingly certain of his destination, and knew it was imperative that I stop him reaching it.

Now, this bare hut: a low bed in the corner, a bowl and jug for washing. But no trace of my son. I gulped humid air to suppress a surge of panic, and forcibly reminded myself that I had built a career, a life, on my facility for clear thinking and decisive action. A beat passed, soft jungle sounds outside. The panic passed too. There is always one more thing to try.

Under the bedding I found maps, printouts and a metal case sporting a faded sticker. Global Weather Watch—the charity for whom Sandor had most recently been chasing weather systems. The case contained two rows of slender bottles pressed into a block of stiff foam. Each had a scrawled label. I held one up to the light for better examination. The liquid inside was clear, with a tint of amber, and I could see suspended in it particles of some dark material. I unstoppered the bottle, inhaled—and recoiled. The vapour flooded my nasal passages, a cold rush burning through my sinuses like menthol, leaving a delicate chemical sweetness. The shock of the odour appeared to induce some kind of synaesthetic episode. For a dizzying instant the smell transformed into a sound like the distant falling of heavy rain, and the walls of the hut seemed to recede unsteadily. I screwed my eyes shut, and sat on the bed until my head cleared sufficiently to trust my vision again.

Examining the label, I managed to discern a word, followed by a date and a set of co-ordinates.

Precipitation?
This aromatic liquid was rain? From where, Chernobyl?

Equally troubling was that I could not identify this as Sandor's handwriting. Did the P in
Precipitation
match those in
Happy Birthday, Papa
? He had stopped sending me birthday cards long ago. I dismissed that train of thought and re-focussed on the problem at hand. It was all the more urgent now. If Sandor had left these things behind it meant he had found what he was looking for.

I returned to the printouts and the maps. The co-ordinates marked in black biro tied up with those written on some of the bottles.

Footsteps behind me. "Where now?" asked Joshua.

I thrust a map into his hands, poked my finger at an X scored so melodramatically that the paper had ripped. "Take me here."

The ex-Ghurkha looked, jaw working his gum.

"That's difficult. It's a gorge, a hell-deep one. Reckon our best bet is to raft down over the falls." His black eyes met mine, held them steadily. "It's difficult," he repeated.

"Make it happen." When he did not depart I said, "There is something you wish to add?"

Softly, he said, "Fifty-fifty they didn't survive the descent." As if I hadn't comprehended what he was saying about the danger. I thought he knew me better than that.

I looked off into the jungle, regarding the wall of colour and shadow as I picked my shirt away from damp skin. "My son," I said, "has been participating in dangerous sports of one sort or another since he was twelve. Abseiling, caving, rafting, base-jumping—it seems he excels at them all. I don't expect him to fail. What concerns me is that he will succeed."

I did not elaborate, although Joshua deserved more. I felt his scrutiny for a moment longer before he left. Perhaps I should have told him the truth, given him the chance to walk away, but I was concerned only for Sandor, and in this forsaken place I needed Joshua's help. Besides, as it turned out, at that moment I had no better idea of the truth than he did.

I had fallen into a reverie. I came out of it when I noticed that the particular patch of shadowy foliage I had been staring at now contained a pair of bright eyes. They blinked lazily, and in one fluid motion a hairy, simian shape swung into view. I have never been fond of animals generally, but I particularly dislike apes and monkeys. No animal should be so close to human, and yet so alien. As I watched, the creature bared its teeth in an impudent grin. Then in a flurry of leaves it was gone.

There was nothing in it, of course, but the encounter seeded me with an unease that would linger for the rest of that evening. Later, sleepless in the livid darkness, I shivered despite the damp heat and, as I have done nightly all of my adult life, faced my fears.

I feared for my son. I had been, at best, a distant father. Sandor had grown up headstrong, constantly waging small rebellions, working his way through a string of paid tutors, but he had always been good-hearted. That he had, for some reason, now progressed to theft was not the problem. I feared because of the thing stolen. The stone torus I had liberated from the Durrant collection in Massachusetts. As I drifted off to sleep, I recalled acutely the comfortable weight of the torus in my hand: the seductive smoothness, greasy like soap but firm as granite. And I feared that Sandor had experienced that same repulsive attraction. It was a fear lacking any concrete rationale—this was only a piece of stone, after all—but inexplicable as it was, the fear was real, and it had grown in me the longer this search had gone on.

~

The journey to the gorge the following morning proved as unpleasant as I had feared. The heat and humidity may well have been tolerable, but the density of the foliage, the persistent attacks of insects, the unevenness of the ground made the going difficult. We travelled in resentful silence.

I expected things to get easier once we were on the river, but it was worse. For the greater part, we found ourselves exposed to an unrelenting sun, and I felt the skin at my temples and back of my neck grow tight and red. As our sturdy inflatable drifted out into the flow I wondered if Joshua had taken us to the correct river, but I should have known better than to doubt him. It wasn't long before the current began to tug more insistently. Soon I could make out the roar of white water up ahead.

"Are you ready, Mr. Weinhardt?" Joshua asked, half turning. Before I could reply, we hit the rapids. The boat pitched wildly, soaking us with spume. Over the next few minutes keeping ourselves afloat demanded such concentration that we were half over the edge of the falls before I was aware of it. There was an absurd weightless moment when the world was all spray and silent sky, during which I found time to be glad our kit was secured and watertight. Then we were falling towards a frothing pool, eighty feet below.

I had rehearsed the moment in my mind and had firmly decided to hold fast to the boat as we descended, but Joshua flung himself free of the vessel with a wild cry as it dropped over the lip of the falls. I experienced an instant of terrific indecision. Then, already feeling like I was flying, I kicked away from the dinghy and tumbled forwards.

I struck the water shoulder first with a thunderous slap. For what felt like minutes there was only the dark silence of the water and my heart beating hard in my aching chest. Part of me wondered what it would be like to drown, and considered that perhaps it would not be so bad to die like that, in a tranquil pool in Borneo. I was not afraid of death. I had faced that fear long ago, and the world had shown me much of it since. When I thought about death at all, I had begun secretly to find the idea of such release attractive. Something I had earned. But there would be no such peace for me now—not if it meant leaving my son in danger. With a tiny measure of reluctance I kicked against the water and rose towards the light, surfacing back in the roaring world of the waterfall.

Joshua had already reached the dinghy and was dragging it to the shore. I swam over and helped him, then the two of us hauled ourselves onto the rocky bank. When I suggested we rest there to dry out a little he nodded agreement, fishing some soggy gum out of a shirt pocket.

"Where to now?" I asked after we had secured the dinghy.

Joshua shrugged. "We are
here
," he said, "according to the map."

My gaze shifted to the dense forest, suddenly expecting to see eyes staring back. Many eyes. Of course, there were none.

"Come on," I muttered, annoyed with myself, and pushed off into the jungle.

~

The first hour after the falls was dispiriting. As we struggled along, keeping the churning of the river to our left, I became suffused with a sense of futility. Narrow as it was, the gorge was long and we could only search on one side of the river at a time. On top of that, our progress through the vegetation was slow.

Then we found Sandor's boat tucked into a quiet inlet. It was rigid, larger than our own and had been hitched to two trees with blue nylon ropes. A quick inspection revealed that the oars had been carefully stowed and a count of the helmets and jackets indicated that there were six in his party. At least he had come prepared.

My mood soared with an influx of hope. I felt that Sandor was just ahead, that we only had to follow his trail through the jungle to catch up with him. Except there was no trail. Only jungle. There was nothing for it but to continue as we had been.

When the light began to fail we forced our way inland in an effort to avoid the proliferate biting insects that clouded the air along the bank, and made camp. Darkness closed rapidly. By the time we had finished eating, our world had shrunk to a flickering blue circle of electric light. When, inevitably, the lamp began to attract a variety of winged things, large and small, we opted to retire to the tent and net ourselves securely in.

"Mr Weinhart—Andras—what's this all about?"

I lay back, staring upwards so that I would not have to meet Joshua's gaze—all too powerful in the enforced intimacy of the tent. The question surprised me, although it should not have. I had known Joshua since our army days and had had need of his specialist talents to aid my civilian enterprises on a number of occasions since. He was loyal, trustworthy and possessed of a certain cold efficiency, and although the military in him stifled the urge to voice the question, he asked it anyway. Perhaps he was as close to a friend as I had.

Eventually I said, "Sandor stole something. From me. From the collection. Ironic, don't you think?"

Ironic, because this was more than a simple act of childish rebellion. It was his ethical commentary on my profession. Plainly speaking, I have been called a thief—although, I prefer the term
facilitator
. People want things, they come to me and I arrange for those items to be provided. Whatever term was used, it did not sit well with my son. Ever since Sandor learned about what I do, he had assumed an obliquely antagonistic stance according to his own ethical code. The
stealing
—he made it sound so petty—he didn't mind if it was money or jewellery from the enfranchised few, but he became outraged if he discovered my contracts involved public museums and galleries. Robbing the people, he would say. Maybe this had something to do with devoting his energies to charities and his environmental studies, to joining archaeological expeditions, or digging wells for the poor residents of screwed-up little countries like the one to which I had now followed him.

My private collection was an eclectic assortment of pieces that had taken my eye over the years. Much of it was priceless, all of it hard won, and a fair proportion was dedicated to the practice of obscure and sometimes extreme religions. I had long been enthralled by man's inventiveness when it came to having a greater power to believe in, the lengths he would go to in the name of faith. The torus was something else altogether. If angels and devils bookend the visible spectrum of world religions, the piece that Sandor took from my collection was deep into the ultraviolet. I don't know what had attracted him to it but he could hardly have taken anything more—what? What was it about the thing that made my mouth immediately dry at the thought? You only had to look at it to know that it was dangerous. So
very
dangerous. But maybe that was the attraction after all. Perhaps, deep down I thought at the time—and here I freely add arrogance to my sins—there was something of the father in the son after all. I know now that notion could not have been further from the truth.

To Joshua I said, "It was a religious artefact. A round torus of orange stone. It would fit comfortably in the palm of your hand, or could conceivably have been designed to have a thong passed through it for wearing about the neck. Although the surface was worn almost smooth through repeated handling," I wiped my fingers reflexively on my shirt, "there remained faint evidence of writing. It was an unfamiliar script, mixing characters and pictograms. I quickly noticed that one symbolic grouping, suggesting a tower beneath a circle, seemed to have special significance. I was attempting to decipher this text when Sandor took it."

Joshua took a minute, reasoning what I'd said. "And this stone puts him in danger," he said.

It puts us all in danger
, I wanted to say, instinctively knowing this for the truth, but unable to rationalize it aloud. "I believe that the artefact was created on this island. I'd imagine that the makers would not take kindly to an outsider possessing one of their sacred objects."

"So, what's the boy's angle?" Joshua asked. "Why bring it back here?"

I had no answer for him. It might have occurred to Sandor to try and return what he saw as a cultural artefact to its rightful owners—I would have loved such a simple explanation—but he
could not have known
that I possessed it, let alone where the thing had originated. The only alternative I could imagine, I found terrifying. Until Sandor had taken the torus, I had made no connection between handling the unpleasant artefact and subsequently finding myself awake at three in the morning, dialling the number of my clandestine travel agent, suddenly inspired to make some trip or other. Now, I was trying to ignore the notion that whatever Sandor had
thought
was his purpose—the rain, everything—was irrelevant; that every choice, every synchronous connection of his journey had somehow been influenced by the stone itself. But that presumed some kind of
intelligence
—either of the stone or of some other agency.