Restless Soul (16 page)

They came into Chiang Mai from the south in the middle of the night, and that’s where Annja stopped following the police car and took her own route.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Johnson was surprised and flustered.

“Taking a precaution,” she answered as she stepped on the gas. “Covering my bases. Just in case.” Just in case the questioning turned ugly when they discovered the slain smugglers. She wasn’t guilty of any wrongdoing…but this wasn’t her country and from experience she knew it was better to play it safe.

She took a left onto Charoen Prathet Road and sped up. On her right was the Mae Nam Ping, a wide dark strip of river that sparkled with the reflection of streetlights. She turned on Tha Phae Road and wove around a double-parked truck that was unloading boxes at a nightclub. She leaned forward and looked at the street signs, finding Tud-mai Road and swerving onto it, and ignoring the protests of Johnson, who tried to grab the wheel.

She slapped at his hand and squealed onto a side street, heading east now. The police car that had been following her turned on its lights and siren.

“Please let me have gotten these directions right. Please, please, please,” she mumbled.

“Where are we—”

“Going?” She picked up speed as she turned onto Wichayanond Road. “To number 387,” she said, spotting the series of buildings she was looking for and honking madly, driving through as the gates were opened. The trailing police car stopped on the street and turned off its siren.

The second phone call Annja had made in the lodge office was to the U.S. Consulate General in Chiang Mai. They’d provided a little advice—come to them as soon as possible—and they gave good directions. They said glowing things about Thai police, but cautioned that coming to the consulate first would be the best tactic.

She knew that this was the only United States consular presence outside of Bangkok. It had originally been a traditional consulate, but was upgraded to a consulate general more than two decades ago.

“Just in case,” she repeated, turning off the engine, reaching for her bag and sliding out.

Johnson smiled and gave her a tip of his hat. “Well played, Miss Creed.”

The consulate was the base for Department of State employees, some members of the U.S. Air Force, DEA officers and Peace Corps officials.

Pete Schwartz, aid to the consular chief, met her at the front door. Annja gestured that Johnson was welcome to join her.

They turned her captive over to the police officer on the street and promised to also give them the crates later.

The entry smelled wonderful, of oiled, polished wood and flowers that filled a massive crystal vase.

Consulate officials—and, with her permission, Johnson—occupied her for an hour, scanning the map from the truck glove box and the marks Annja had made on it. She sat in a padded straight-backed chair, declining the more comfortable-looking couch on which she suspected she would quickly nod off. Schwartz and the others rattled off one question after the next and took copious notes as she once more related everything that had happened in the past few days and described some of the treasures. Three men from the consulate hovered during the interview, one recording the proceedings.

“We have pictures—mug shots, in the American vernacular—and we’d really like you to come into the department and go through them,” Johnson said.

She got him to back off on that count until sometime later—when she could have a representative from the consulate with her.

“Hopefully, we’ll have those men in custody by then,” Johnson said. “The ones you said you tied up in the mountains.”

“You’ve sent someone up there, right?” Annja had been concerned about the ones she’d left in the cavern. “You told me on the ride over here that—”

“They are on their way…were on their way around the time we left your lodge, following the directions you provided. Slower going in the mountains at night, but I’m sure they made it some time ago if the directions are true.”

Finished with their questions—at least for the moment—Annja requested some time alone. She had a lot of things to do. They let her use a secretary’s desk in a small reception area on the first floor. The desk was polished oak, pitted in places and with rounded corners from being bumped through the years. The chair was much newer, an ergonomic chrome-and-leather design that Annja settled comfortably into.

I could sleep in this chair, she thought. And she would fall asleep if she didn’t concentrate on the task at hand. How long had it been since she’d gotten a little rest? She resisted the urge to look at a clock. Her broken wristwatch was in a trash can back at the lodge. She waited for a promised laptop and focused on the items on the desk. A coffee mug was stuffed with mechanical pencils, pens and fine-line markers. A black plastic-framed photograph showed a young man and a woman sitting on a bench—the secretary and her significant other, perhaps. A flat-panel monitor wasn’t hooked to anything—Pete had mentioned the computer being out for repair. A resin figurine of a pug dog with a shiny black nose gazed happily at her. Annja leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes.

Just for a minute, she told herself. I’ll just close them for a minute and maybe this headache will go away. Her temples throbbed, and her legs ached, but the pain wasn’t so bad that it prevented her from drifting off. She was roused by the harsh click of shoes against the tile floor.

“Miss Creed?” Peter Schwartz said.

She sat up straight.

“Here’s a computer you can use. We’re wireless here. The battery should have enough charge, but if you have any problems, just give me a holler and I’ll find the plug and an extension cord. I’ll be in my office.” Pete pointed to the open door behind her.

“Thanks, Pete. I’ll make a copy of everything for you. Provided there’s something salvageable to make a copy of.” She knew they’d access the computer when she was done, anyway, and retrieve whatever she sent and received. She didn’t care; she wasn’t doing anything illegal or questionable. She had no secrets surrounding this. They were probably watching her, too. A place like this would have cameras scattered throughout. And she could probably spot the cameras…if she cared.

“I’m interested in seeing pictures of this treasure you talked about.” He gave her a tired smile. “I suppose lots of people will be interested in that. Coffee? I’ve put a pot on.”

“Coffee? Definitely.” She nudged the only empty cup she spotted toward him. Annja opened up the laptop, a Toshiba with a good-size screen. Well used, the letters
J, F, T
and
H
were worn off. She was a touch typist and didn’t need them.

“You needn’t worry about all of this, Miss Creed. From what we can tell, you were the hero. Probably wouldn’t have had a problem going straight to the police department. But you were wise to take our advice and stop here first.”

“Just in case,” she said.

Pete grabbed the cup and walked away as the floor overhead creaked; people were walking around. Music filtered down the stairwell, a jazzy instrumental piece. After a moment she recognized Maynard Ferguson’s jazz-infused version of “Summertime.” She gingerly took her digital camera out of her pocket. Definitely ruined. Too much water, too much jostling around, and the bullet it had stopped had finished it for good.

She released a shallow breath, opened the catch and carefully extracted the memory card. “Please be good,” she said. She held it up to the light. It didn’t look damaged. “Here goes.” The card fit snugly in the appropriate laptop slot. Nothing happened for a moment, and she slumped forward and rested her chin in her hand. Then the screen blinked and a square appeared, asking if she wanted to download all the images, and if she wanted to delete them from the source when she was finished.

Yes to the first question, she clicked. No to the second.

The screen filled with postage-stamp-size images of her Thailand trip. The first were of the sky-blue bus she and Luartaro took to the lodge, then outside shots of their cabin and one of him picking at a local dish that room service had brought. She needed to call him—as soon as she sent some images of the skull bowl to the archaeology world. The next pictures were of the cave Zakkarat had taken them to, some dim because the lighting was so low and the shadows so deep. But several pictures of the teak coffins turned out remarkably well, showing the intricacies of the carving. Later pictures showed the ancient remains and the intact pots. Finally came the pictures of the treasure. Because the lighting was much brighter in that cavern, all of the shots looked good, though a few had hot spots where the flash bounced off the shiny gold.

“Summertime” ended and a new track began— “Conquistador,” a hard-driving, slightly shrieking piece that Ferguson had cowritten. Annja had a few of his CDs at her apartment in New York and was particularly fond of “Conquistador.” She had to concentrate on the pictures to keep herself from humming along.

“Buddha, Buddha, Buddha, crate, jewelry, Luartaro, skull bowl,” she said. She’d taken seven shots of the bowl from various angles, and these she enlarged and saved to a separate folder she created and dubbed “macabre bowl.” She intended to take more pictures of the skull-bowl shards when she acquired a new camera. But these pictures were more than adequate for what she needed to do right now.

Annja logged on to one of her favorite archaeology newsgroups. Several of the members had helped her ferret out information on this topic or that relic through the past few years. She suspected someone on her list would help with the skull bowl, too. But how soon that help would come was a proverbial crapshoot.

Minutes, maybe, if someone was online this very moment. Hours, or even a few days, if they were busily engaged in their own interests. She attached the photographs, along with a brief description of where they were found. Annja did not mention the golden treasure that had been found with it, but just before she hit Send, she added the dog tags—but not the names of the soldiers—and mentioned all the dried blood.

“Macabre bowl, indeed,” she said.

“Here’s that coffee.”

She’d been so intent on typing that she hadn’t heard Pete approach.

“No cream, sorry. None in my office. I usually take it black. But I have a few of these fake-cream packets.” He sat the mug to her side and scattered the packets near it. “Rose keeps sweetener in one of her drawers. Is that some of the treasure? A little misshapen, isn’t it?” He looked over her shoulder at the image of the skull bowl that took up most of the screen. “Ivory?”

“It was with the treasure,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s really part of it. Everything else was gold or bejeweled, or carved from jade or coral or ivory. This is part of a human skull.”

He wrinkled his nose and pointed back at his office. “You better make a couple of copies of all of that.”

“Just in case,” Annja repeated, slugging down the coffee and pushing the cup forward for a refill. “Do you have anything handy to eat?” Her stomach rumbled so loudly she suspected Pete heard it.

“I could poke through the kitchen. I’m sure I could find cream there, too. Or I have a box of Twinkies in my desk.”

“Twinkies would do nicely.” Annja salivated at the thought of sugar and empty calories. “And another cup or two or three of coffee.”

It’s not Vietnamese or Laotian, Benjamin Vaughan wrote. Or Thai, Chinese, Nipponese, Burmese. It’s not Asian at all.

Vaughan was a junior college history teacher from Baton Rouge who frequented the archaeology blogs and chat lists on the weekends and in the summer months, calling himself a “lurker,” but often contributing useful tidbits. He’d helped Annja in the past, but she hadn’t heard from him personally in more than a year. He must have been on the internet cruising through the chat lists when she’d sent the images and description of the skull bowl.

Lucky for her, she thought. She remembered Vaughan’s past information being reliable, though rambling.

It’s American, he continued in his private post to her. That container you found is American, most likely. At least, I’m pretty sure it is—American by way of Africa. From New Orleans, to be precise. But don’t quote me on that until I can take a hands-on look.

Surprised and intrigued, Annja read on, leaning close to the screen as if she might absorb the words better by a nearer proximity.

I saw something like your device—your container—two winter breaks ago in a museum in Florida, down by Orlando. They had a collection of shrunken heads, too, but the curators were going to put the heads in storage because a group of locals were picketing and had gotten the newspaper involved. They were up in arms about human remains being on public display. The Field Museum hid away its shrunken heads about the same time. Anyway, I found out that several months later the head curator in Florida packed up the heads and sent them to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum that had just opened in New York City, down by Times Square, where they’re a major attraction to this day. The museum claims to have one of the largest collections of shrunken heads in America. The heads are the last thing you see when you leave the building. One of the folks at the museum said it was so visitors would have a lasting impression of the place. I was at the Ripley’s museum, too, and saw them. That was just a few months ago when I was attending a conference in Manhattan for spring break. I don’t otherwise have an interest in shrunken heads. Couldn’t tell you how shrunken heads were made. Don’t especially want to know. I couldn’t care less about shrunken heads actually.

“You’re rambling, Benjamin.” Annja yawned and sipped at her coffee. It was a strong brew, but she wished it was even stronger and had a little more of an acrid bite to it. She really needed help staying awake.

Anyway, I was at the Florida museum two winter breaks past because of their Voodoo display, not because of the shrunken heads—which it was silly of the locals to protest against in the first place. You know that Voodoo is a special interest of mine. I have a cousin—a second cousin, actually—on my mother’s side of the family who considers herself a mambo, a Voodoo priestess. That’s not why I’m interested in Voodoo, though. I’m just interested.

He capitalized
voodoo,
giving it respect. Many of the literary sources she’d read through the years capitalized it, too—just like Baptist, Catholic and Lutheran were capitalized.

Annja skimmed through the next few paragraphs, marveling at how fast Vaughan must be able to type and post. Then she got through his ramblings and to the real attention-grabbing material.

Your container looks just like the one that the Florida museum displayed. The spitting image of it, in fact. I remember because it left one of those lasting impressions on me. I found it particularly grisly that they’d lumped it in with the Voodoo display. The skull’s not exactly Voodoo. Not true Voodoo, in any event.

Grisly
was the term Annja had used when she’d come upon the skull bowl, as there was something unsettling about the thing. She’d been raised in an orphanage in New Orleans, where voodoo was both a tourist concern and a religion. She’d learned quite a bit about voodoo and hoodoo, and had some friends who’d thoroughly embraced them.

Voodoo meant “God Creator” or “Great Spirit,” and could trace its roots back perhaps ten thousand years on the African continent. Those who really knew about it considered the sensationalized tales of human sacrifices and devil worship laughable and the stuff of bad movies. Practitioners believed voodoo was life affirming and spiritual, and she recalled reading that there were millions who practice it around the world today, though most notably in Africa, South America, Central America, the Caribbean islands and parts of the United States. Undeniably ancient, it had been labeled the “Cult of Ancestors,” and was tied closely to animistic spirits. She remembered Zakkarat mentioning that some of Northern Thailand’s hill tribes were animistic.

Annja had attended more than a few voodoo ceremonies in New Orleans, during her unescorted youthful adventures away from the orphanage. In the back of her mind she relived the music and colorful clothes. In one outing a tall woman went into a trance to communicate with the spirits of her dead relatives. In New Orleans Catholicism was mixed in with some of the voodoo ceremonies, and healing the mind and body was a central message.

Historically, voodoo spread from Africa in the 1500s as the slave trade blossomed. Tribesmen abducted into slavery from Africa’s west coast, now Gambia and Senegal all the way to the Congo, brought their religious beliefs with them. In the Caribbean islands, where they were forced to work on the plantations and their owners tried to turn them into Christians, they kept their faith and continued performing the ancient rituals in secret. The term
voodoo,
or
vodou
at the time, came from the African Dahomey tribe.

Annja knew that even in the present day voodoo practitioners believed in one supreme being that ruled over men’s and women’s families, love matters, justice, health, wealth, happiness, work and their ability to provide food for their children. Offerings were made as requests for help in a particular area, such as to improve hunting or harvesting. The practitioners’ ancestors were sought for protection and guidance through trances and spells, and more than half of the rites involved health or healing.

When slaves in the New World were threatened with death if they continued the old rites, they found a parallel in Catholicism and outwardly adopted that religion. Catholics prayed to saints, as voodoo believers sought the spirits of their ancestors—all to intercede in their favor to the supreme being, or one God.

But in all the time she’d been in New Orleans, she’d never come across something like the skull bowl.

New Orleans was perfect for voodoo to spread because of its mix of cultures—French, Spanish and Indian. Haitian immigrants were added to the meld of Africans who were brought to Louisiana via the slave trade.

The New Orleans rituals Annja had observed involved healing, pacifying the spirits of ancestors, reading dreams, creating potions, casting spells for protection and initiating new priests and priestesses. She’d been to more than she could remember, finding it all fascinating and far more interesting than schoolwork and chores.

Vaughan covered some of the history in his ramblings, unaware that Annja was well versed on the subject, and oblivious to her New Orleans roots.

On one of her forays away from the orphanage she had hopped on a Haunted Tour of New Orleans and visited Marie Laveau’s tomb. Annja performed the traditional wish spell, turning around three times in front of the voodoo queen’s grave and knocking three times on the tomb. She had wished to be adopted the next day by a nice family, and she left a hair ornament as an offering. The wish didn’t come true, and Annja had thought her offering not good enough. In later years Annja realized the wish spell was only a hook for tourists.

New Orleans was often referred to as the birthplace of Voodoo in America, Annja. Louisiana gained slaves from the French colonies of Martinique, Santa Domingo and Guadeloupe—which were considered thick with Voodoo. Haitians fled to New Orleans to add their beliefs. As it evolved, New Orleans Voodoo began to differ from practices in Africa and the Caribbean because it tended to put more emphasis on magic than religion, incorporating live snakes and thriving, as Voodoo was not suppressed in the States. Magical charms were prevalent, including gris-gris bags and Voodoo dolls,” he wrote.

The last time Annja visited New Orleans, an old friend told her that a little less than twenty percent of the population embraced voodoo and new churches had sprung up. Annja’s friend was involved with hoodoo, which incorporated spells and superstitions and included elements of the occult and witchcraft.

Your skull container might be Hoodoo, not Voodoo, Vaughan continued.

Now Annja stopped skimming and focused on each word. She took a gulp of coffee and held it in her mouth as she kept reading.

Or, more likely, it might be from some subgroup that became disenfranchised with Voodoo and created a dark offshoot as a way to punish their persecutors. It is dark, Annja, that thing you found…just like the one in the Florida museum. Those symbols on the outside, they’re a corruption of a traditional, ancient Voodoo spell. They incorporate the symbols for Kalfu, Papa Ghede and Legba.

Annja was familiar with the names. Papa Ghede was the
lwa
of death and resurrection; Legba was the keeper of the gate between the worlds of life and death, and he was considered the origin of life and regeneration; and Kalfu was Legba’s counterpart, the birther of darkness, and a dangerous
lwa,
or
loa
—a voodoo spirit.

The largest symbol on your container is a melding of the sun, the moon and a cross, the symbols of Legba, Kalfu and Papa Ghede, respectively. That’s why I think it came from New Orleans, because a few Voodoo-related cults that sprang up there in the late 1700s were known for corrupting traditional symbols and values. The cults were subsequently put down by the real Voodoo practitioners who considered their rivals malevolent and dangerous. I’d set your container at two hundred and twenty to two hundred and forty years old. Best guess without studying it firsthand. The container in the Florida museum was suspected to be that old.

She remembered that Papa Ghede was supposedly the first man who ever died in the world and that now he waited at the crossroads to escort the dying to the afterlife, a favorable counterpart to the striking and ominous Baron Samedi.

I want to study the symbols a little longer and do a little reading, but I believe the intent of the spell on your container is to trap the soul of a person, keeping it hidden from Kalfu, Legba and Papa Ghede. The person ensorcelled in effect never reaches the crossroads and dies for all eternity, experiencing the moment of his or her death over and over and never able to go beyond it. A horrendous torture…if such magical things are to be believed. Something intimate of the person—a finger, maybe, or a hank of hair—would have to be sealed inside. Very black magic.

Dog tags and blood would be intimate to a soldier, Annja thought.

I found the skull bowl in the mountains in Northern Thailand, Annja had written, believing it to be an Asian relic…not in her wildest imaginings to be something from New Orleans.

Amazing that such a thing got all the way over to a remote part of Thailand, Vaughan wrote in a second message. But then how do people get from one spot to the next—planes, trains, automobiles and ships. Maybe someone bought it at a flea market and sold it on eBay to a collector in Bangkok. Who knows? Are you going to bring it back to the States with you? I’d like to take a closer look. We could meet somewhere.

Annja didn’t reply to that last question, though she did email him an effusive thank-you note and told him the container had been broken and that she would stay in touch with him if she learned more about it.

The Ferguson CD ended and a classical piece started, a piano concerto that she guessed was Brahms. Annja groaned. She didn’t mind classical music, but at the moment she would have preferred something shrieking or at least livelier.

She looked at the business cards of the antiques dealers that she’d taken from the smugglers. Maybe the skull container had come to one of them. Maybe quite a bit of the treasure in the cavern had come through one or more of the antiques shops.

There were phone numbers on the back, different than the ones listed on the front with the business name and address. Annja downed the rest of the coffee and reached for two of the Twinkies Pete had dropped off. She ate them quickly, barely registering the taste and craving more. Then she stretched forward for the telephone.

But the next call wasn’t to one of the dealers, or to Luartaro. She glanced at the wall clock. It was 4:00 a.m., too early to disturb Luartaro or whoever was on duty at the lodge front desk. She dialed Doug Morrell and left a message on his voice mail.

“They’re called spirit caves,” she said. “They’re amazing, and I found one undisturbed, with real remains. None of the coffins previously discovered had any bodies in them.”

Annja took a deep breath, adopted her most persuasive voice and continued. “As for the monster rumored to be involved, I think you’ll be surprised at just how…grisly…it all is.”

She intended to start in on the antiques stores, calling the one in Chiang Mai first. But her body had other ideas. With the exception of the brief time she’d dozed after Doc had mended her leg, she’d been up for forty-eight hours. Annja slumped forward on the desk and fell asleep.