Delaney threw open the door to the booth. “What happened?” he said, as Simone cried, “Are you all right?”
Waving away the smoke and stench, Lucas stumbled out. Delaney slammed the door behind him and, patting his back, said, “Take slow breaths. Slow breaths.”
Lucas tried to do it, but his throat burned from some chemical in the celluloid stock, or maybe the extinguisher foam. His one good eye was streaming tears. When he was finally able to get his wind and straighten up, he saw that the immediate alarm was fading from his burly colleague’s face, but taking its place was the shock he had felt at watching the film.
“At least I know what that guy at Fort Dix was talking about,” Delaney said.
Lucas, still unable to speak, simply nodded. Simone appeared with a paper cup of water.
“Drink this.”
He took it gratefully.
“You sure the fire’s out in there?” Delaney said.
“See for yourself,” Lucas croaked.
Delaney had barely cracked the door open when Simone jumped back—“Look out!” she cried. A flock of gray mice scampered out, scattering to all corners of the auditorium. Sauntering out behind them, unalarmed and unafraid, a fat brown rat sniffed the fresh air with twitching whiskers and tail. Delaney tried to stomp on it, but missed, and the rat adroitly ducked under the auditorium chairs.
“Time to call in an exterminator,” Delaney said.
Lucas, raising his bleary vision to Simone, saw that she was clutching something concealed beneath her blouse, just as she had at the opening of the ossuary. The look on her face, however, perfectly confirmed his own thoughts.
There wasn’t an exterminator on earth equipped to deal with what was happening here.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“The paratroopers have landed,” the voice on the radio said, “and all around me, they’re freeing themselves from their chutes.”
Dr. Rashid leaned forward, hanging on every word. Tonight’s broadcast was coming all the way from Holland, where soldiers from the 101st Airborne had been dispatched to capture the bridges along the Dutch/Belgian border.
“There’s a full moon tonight, and the chutes are blowing across the farms and fields that surround us.” There was both urgency and trepidation in the reporter’s tone. “Make no mistake, this is still dangerous ground.”
These broadcasts from the war in Europe routinely held millions of listeners captive, and this one was no exception; there was an immediacy to the reports, an on-the-scene aspect that most of the other newsmen, bound to desks in Washington — or to telex machines in New York — could not touch. Knowing that the reporter was actually there, risking his neck along with the soldiers whose dangerous missions he was reporting on, lent the broadcasts both credibility and nerve-wracking suspense.
Rashid put his blue folder to one side, untied his shoes — bending over was getting harder on his back all the time — and summoned up another volley of coughs. As the broadcast continued, he began to undress. His daughter had escorted him up to their suite and then gone off to see that fellow Lucas; it was only natural, and at least the man had already done his service and come back in one piece, or nearly one. No matter what came of it, she wouldn’t wind up a war widow. There was that.
He regretted getting so worked up in the taproom. It never did any good to let your passions cloud your arguments. And he knew what he sounded like. Like most of the others in his field — even his own daughter — he had started out as a strict empiricist, unwilling even to listen to the babblings of monks and mullahs, priests and so-called prophets. Scriptures, of any sort or origin, were nothing more than ancillary tools to help him in his scholarly research.
But time, enhanced by experience, had altered his views. Too often he had felt the inexpressible presence of something greater, too often he had had to discount his own intuitions. Like the physicists, whose theories and discoveries he did his best to understand and follow, there were things he could not account for, things that he was forever having to rejigger his philosophy in order to accommodate. Even Einstein’s theory of relativity, from what he could fathom of it, did not square with some of the more recent revelations of something else called quantum mechanics. Apparently, on the atomic level, it was impossible to pinpoint a particle’s velocity and location at the same time, without altering one or the other in the process. It was precisely that sort of slippery and irrational problem he had encountered in his own work. He was trying to mix fact and faith, science and sorcery, into one palatable, if volatile, brew.
If only he had before him more time to unravel the mysteries of the ossuary, but his health was failing — far more precipitously than he ever let on to his daughter — and his fondest hope now was to live long enough to see Simone safely ensconced in a tenured university position in a world that had, at long last, found peace again.
“We’re strung out now along the banks of a canal that cuts across the fields. Every eye and every ear is on alert for Nazi snipers who might be lying in wait.”
Rashid turned the radio volume higher as he went into the bathroom, where he pushed the shower curtain to one side and started the hot water running. He leaned his cane up against the door, then finished undressing. In the medicine chest, he found, and took, the nightly pills for his heart, then put his hand under the faucet to test the water temperature. He would say that much for the Nassau Inn — they might not welcome guests of the wrong skin color (oh, he hadn’t missed that insult at the reception desk), but their boiler was a good one. The steam building up in the room already was soothing his sore throat.
“There’s a body floating by me in the canal,” the reporter said, solemnly. “It’s not one of ours, though. He’s still got his helmet on. His arms and legs are spread out wide like he’s about to make an angel in the snow.”
Turning off the water, and holding onto the edge of the claw-footed tub, Rashid eased one leg into the water, and then the other. With one hand bracing himself against the white tile wall, he sat down, dipped a bar of soap in the water and lathered his face and shoulders. Then he settled back, with the nape of his neck resting comfortably on the lip of the tub. The bunched-up shower curtain obscured his view through the open door, but did nothing to hinder his ability to hear the radio.
“The moonlight is glinting off the white arms of a windmill not far away. Under normal circumstances, this would be a beautiful sight on an equally beautiful night.”
Over the broadcast, Rashid thought he heard the front door to their suite being opened. Is she back already? he thought with relief.
“Simone?” he called out, but there was no answer.
“This, however, is not a normal night,” the reporter said, keeping his voice low.
There was a slight but sudden draft, and Rashid called out again, “I’m in the tub. Please turn the radio down and close the bathroom door now.”
Still there was still no reply. He must have been wrong. Closing his eyes, he concentrated again on the broadcast.
“Wait — did you hear that?” the reporter said. “Off in the distance?”
Rashid thought he smelled something, like damp sod, and opened his eyes. As he did so, the light in the front room winked out.
“It was a rifle shot.”
Why had the light gone off? Was there an electrical short? No, that couldn’t be the reason. The radio was still working.
The draft grew stronger, as did the odor.
“Simone?” he tried one more time. A fleeting shadow appeared just outside the door, but whoever was casting it clung to one side, the side Rashid could not see past the plastic shower curtain.