Santos stepped back, not expecting such height, or bones so raw and sturdy. With his rough angles and boxer's jaw, the Jesuit looked built by a shipwright to withstand long voyages.
'Thomas.' De l'Orme was standing in the penumbra of a whaler's lamp, eyes shrouded behind small blackened spectacles. 'You're late. I was beginning to think the leopards must have gotten you. And now look, we've finished dinner without you.' Thomas advanced upon the spare banquet of fruits and vegetables and saw the tiny bones of a dove, the local delicacy. 'My taxi broke down,' he explained. 'The walk was longer than I expected.'
'You must be exhausted. I would have sent Santos to the city for you, but you told me you knew Java.'
Candles upon the sill backlit his bald skull with a buttery halo. Thomas heard a small, rattling noise at the window, like rupiah coins being thrown against the glass. Closer, he saw giant moths and sticklike insects, working furiously to get at the light.
'It's been a long time,' Thomas said.
'A very long time.' De l'Orme smiled. 'How many years? But now we are reunited.' Thomas looked about. It was a large room for a rural pastoran – the Dutch Catholic equivalent of a rectory – to offer a guest, even one as distinguished as de l'Orme. Thomas guessed one wall had been demolished to double de l'Orme's workspace. Mildly surprised, he noted the charts and tools and books. Except for a well-polished colonial-era secretary desk bursting with papers, the room did not look like de l'Orme at all.
There was the usual aggregation of temple statuary, fossils, and artifacts that every field ethnologist decorates 'home' with. But beneath that, anchoring these bits and pieces of daily finds, was an organizing principle that displayed de l'Orme, the genius, as much as his subject matter. De l'Orme was not particularly self-effacing, but neither was he the sort to occupy one entire shelf with his published poems and two-volume memoir and another with his yardage of monographs on kinship, paleoteleology, ethnic medicine, botany, comparative religions, et cetera. Nor would he have arranged, shrinelike and alone upon the uppermost shelf, his infamous La Matière du Coeur (The Matter of the Heart), his Marxist defense of Teilhard de Chardin's Socialist Le Coeur de la Matière. At the Pope's express demand, de Chardin had recanted, thus destroying his reputation among fellow scientists. De l'Orme had not recanted, forcing the Pope to expel his prodigal son into darkness. There could be only one explanation for this prideful show of works, Thomas decided: the lover. De l'Orme possibly did not know the books were set out.
'Of course I would find you here, a heretic among priests,' Thomas chastised his old friend. He waved a hand toward Santos. 'And in a state of sin. Or, tell me, is he one of us?'
'You see?' de l'Orme addressed Santos with a laugh. 'Blunt as pig iron, didn't I say? But don't let that fool you.'
Santos was not mollified. 'One of whom, if you please? One of you? Certainly not. I
am a scientist.'
So, thought Thomas, this proud fellow was not just another seeing-eye dog. De l'Orme had finally decided to take on a protégé. He searched the young man for a
second impression, and it was little better than the first. He wore long hair and a goatee and a fresh white peasant shirt. There was not even dirt beneath his nails.
De l'Orme went on chuckling. 'But Thomas is a scientist also,' he teased his young companion.
'So you say,' Santos retorted.
De l'Orme's grin vanished. 'I do say so,' he pronounced. 'A fine scientist. Seasoned. Proven. The Vatican is lucky to have him. As their science liaison, he brings the only credibility they have in the modern age.'
Thomas was not flattered by the defense. De l'Orme took personally the prejudice that a priest could not be a thinker in the natural world, for in defying the Church and renouncing the cloth, he had, in a sense, borne his Church out. And so he was speaking to his own tragedy.
Santos turned his head aside. In profile, his fashionable goatee was a flourish upon his exquisite Michelangelo chin. Like all of de l'Orme's acquisitions, he was so physically perfect you wondered if the blind man was really blind. Perhaps, Thomas reflected, beauty had a spirit all its own.
From far away, Thomas recognized the unearthly Indonesian music called gamelan. They said it took a lifetime to develop an appreciation for the five-note chords. Gamelan had never been soothing to him. It only made him uncomfortable. Java was not an easy place to drop in on like this.
'Forgive me,' he said, 'but my itinerary is compressed this time. They have me scheduled to fly out of Jakarta at five tomorrow afternoon. That means I must return to Yogya by dawn. And I've already wasted enough of our time by being so late.'
'We'll be up all night,' de l'Orme grumbled. 'You'd think they would allow two old men a little time to socialize.'
'Then we should drink one of these.' Thomas opened his satchel. 'But quickly.'
De l'Orme actually clapped his hands. 'The Chardonnay? My '62?' But he knew it would be. It always was. 'The corkscrew, Santos. Just wait until you taste this. And some gudeg for our vagabond. A local specialty, Thomas, jackfruit and chicken and tofu simmered in coconut milk...'
With a long-suffering look, Santos went off to find the corkscrew and warm the food. De l'Orme cradled two of three bottles Thomas carefully produced. 'Atlanta?'
'The Centers for Disease Control,' Thomas identified. 'There have been several new strains of virus reported in the Horn region...'
For the next hour, tended by Santos, the two men sat at the table and circled through their 'recent' adventures. In fact, they had not seen each other in seventeen years. Finally they came around to the work at hand.
'You're not supposed to be excavating down there,' Thomas said.
Santos was sitting to de l'Orme's right, and he leaned his elbows on the table. He had been waiting all evening for this. 'Surely you don't call this an excavation,' he said.
'Terrorists planted a bomb. We're merely passersby looking into an open wound.' Thomas dismissed the argument. 'Bordubur is off limits to all field archaeology now. These lower regions within the hillside were especially not to be disturbed. UNESCO mandated that none of the hidden footer wall was to be exposed or dismantled. The Indonesian government forbade any and all subsurface exploration. There were to be no trenches. No digging at all.'
'Pardon me, but again, we're not digging. A bomb went off. We're simply looking into the hole.'