‘Don’t drink it all at once,’ he said and Anderson laughed.
As they turned to go Anderson stopped them. ‘Professor,’ he said. ‘Be careful of the jungle. It bites.’
The professor and Lisa made their way along the corridor again to the canteen. Their talk with Anderson had made them all the more eager to find out all they could about the map and possibly even find the gold for themselves. They chatted casually about what might happen and their feet made short sharp tapping sounds on the floor. They passed the stairwell and headed off back into the refectory. Behind them a pair of deep brown eyes watched them from the level of the floor. As the professor and Lisa opened the door to the busy University restaurant, the eyes revealed themselves to belong to Kono, one of Tanaka’s men. He slowly and silently travelled up the stairs and made sure Lisa and the professor were out of sight before making his way along the corridor to the door that he had just seen them exiting from.
Anderson opened the door. ‘Have you forgotten it all already?’ he said, thinking that it was the professor at the door but his words were cut short by a hand to the throat that nearly lifted him off the ground. Kono barged his way in to the small room, knocking the small Saki bottle from the table.
Chapter Six
Fraser was standing in the professor’s office. He flicked through some of the books on the table — they were filled with black and white pictures of rock formations, crystalline diagrams and long-dead geologists. A clock ticked sonorously in the background and seemed to thicken the air with its gentle swaying rhythm. Fraser had been on his way home from the bank and had decided to call in on the professor. It had been a few days since he had heard from him or Lisa and he wondered how the story with the book was going. Slowly, he walked around the desk. Every now and then he would pick up a scrap of paper, read it, consider its meaning and place it exactly as he had found it on the desk. He hated the word snooping — what he was doing was reconnoitring. Glancing over his shoulder at the door, he opened the drawer and inside found a notebook with the words ‘Japanese Military’ written, he assumed, in the professor’s hand. He opened the book and read. It was just a series of names, but he recognised one of them, Yamashita. He had heard of Yamashita’s gold before, the secret network of underground tunnels which housed the spoils of war.
He read on but most of the writing seemed to be in some kind of code created by the professor — either that or his handwriting was so bad Fraser could not decipher it. He knew enough about the workings of the professor’s mind to understand that it would be privileged information indeed if he had gone to the extent of inventing a code to keep people from reading it. Fraser assumed that that professor had always known more about the book that he had been given than he was letting on. He thought to himself: ‘So that was the significance of the map, but the old fool doesn’t believe that, does he? He doesn’t believe in such fairy stories?’ He thought that it would be as well to keep the professor as close as possible. Suddenly, behind him he heard the professor and Lisa walking down the hallway. They talked excitedly about someone called Anderson and what they were going to do next. As the door burst open Fraser had just enough time to close the notebook and throw it in the drawer before banging it shut.
The professor and Lisa walked in. ‘Fraser!’ the professor started excitedly. ‘How good of you to come. We have exciting news concerning our map.’
‘Really?’ Fraser said, trying not to sound too interested. ‘I just dropped by, I was on my way home.’
‘It’s a good day for just walking,’ the professor replied. ‘Come, sit by the window and I will tell you everything. Lisa, go and get a coffee for Fraser, would you?’
Lisa looked offended. She was fine with being treated as her uncle’s unpaid servant but it was quite another thing to be asked to run around after others. She pursed her lips and stood still.
After about a minute of being ignored she turned and headed out of the door, thinking to herself that she really needed to assert herself in these situations as she made her way to the coffee machine in the canteen.
The professor told Fraser what they had learned that day, about Anderson and his knowledge of the map, about Amichi and Yamashita, about his talk with Lisa and about how they were considering finding the tunnels once and for all.
‘It’s odd, Fraser,’ the professor said. ‘But I feel I have a calling. For some weeks now I have been having these dreams — oh, they mean nothing, I know. I am an old man now. In my younger years I would have dismissed them as a glass of Saki or a piece of stuck salmon but now, now I’m older, I find I want to believe.’
‘In Yamashita’s gold?’
‘Yes, in that, but more than that, I think I want to believe in the spirits that draw me to it. Anderson called them the aswang and they are very powerful, so he says.’
‘But surely that’s just myth, professor. You can’t believe in it?’
The professor tapped the side of his head with a finger. ‘The more I learn,’ he said, ‘the less I seem to know. I have known a frog to escape from rock strata thousands of years old, just like that…’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Out of the rock as they drilled, its skin almost translucent, its bones as dry as the dust. Who put it there? Who enabled it to survive? God? Nature? Who knows? These are merely different words for the same thing. I am a man of science, but who owns the science?’
Fraser tipped back in his chair. ‘So what next?’ he asked.
The professor shrugged. ‘Who knows? Hire a plane, perhaps, make a trip to the Philippines?’
There was a knock at the door and the professor turned to look. However, as he did, it stopped. ‘Perhaps that’s something you could do, Fraser. Do you know anyone in the aviation business?’
Fraser thought. ‘I once knew an old pilot from Guam but he would be dead by now. He flew into Vietnam, nearly fried him. Not sure he would make a good choice, anyway.’
The knocking began again. ‘Lisa, come in!’ the professor said.
‘I know very little about planes, professor, I’m afraid. I flew over here and that’s about it. To tell you the truth it rather makes me feel sick just thinking about it. I was never a great flyer. I’ll tell you one day about my experience coming over here; it wasn’t a good start.’
The knocking at the door continued. It was a slow, insistent sound that seemed to permeate the room and be of just the right pitch to cause the professor the most aggravation. He placed his hands to his ears in a show of frustration that shocked Fraser. ‘OK, Lisa, I am coming,’ he shouted. ‘I am coming. If you could only put the cups down I could…’
He stopped in his tracks. The sight that greeted him as he opened the door would have stopped a lesser man’s heart. Suspended from the door jamb by his belt was Anderson, his face blue and his eyes open in a display of fearful death. As he swung, urine seeped out of his bladder, ran down his trouser leg and pooled on the floor below him and his corpse swung this way and that causing his foot to tap gently on the wooden panel of the door.
The professor raised a hand to his mouth as Lisa came along the corridor. As soon as she saw the body she screamed, dropped the cups of hot coffee on the floor and then stood unable to move, the only sound the slight creak of the leather of the belt brushing up against the door frame. Fraser came out to see what was occurring.
‘Professor, I just thought…’ His words were taken from him as he saw the body.
The professor looked at Fraser. ‘Anderson,’ he explained.