The Jungle of-8 Read online

  “I wish to know more of your amazing arsenal,” the ambassador said as he and Khenbish dismounted. It wasn’t common practice for the general himself to take part in the slaughter, and the ambassador had no desire to see what was happening on the other side of the wall.

  “I will introduce you to my alchemist. He can explain both in greater detail than I. For me it is enough that they work.” An aide handed him a bone-porcelain cup of strong tea.

  As they started off toward the copse of trees where camp servants and staff waited to treat any wounded from the battle, the ambassador mused that there were so many remarkable things that he’d witnessed during his years roaming this strange nation. Some things he would never reveal, like the intimacies he’d enjoyed with some of the Khan’s concubines. And some things he would never discuss because they were just too bizarre to be believed. Like the Great Wall—it had the height and breadth of a five-story stone building and yet it stretched from horizon to horizon and beyond. It alone dwarfed every bit of Roman engineering that lay across Europe. There were the rocklike bones of dragons he’d been shown in the central desert, skulls as big as wine barrels, with teeth like daggers and femurs as tall as a man. And then there was what he saw today: a device capable of throwing light intense enough to blind a man.

  For his own sake he wanted to know how this weapon operated—Khenbish had mentioned a crystal of some sort—but he knew that this was one more mystery he would take to his grave.

  Marco Polo strode alongside the general, unsure that his fellow Venetians would believe even the more banal stories he could tell about his travels in China.

  1

  BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND

  FOUR MONTHS AGO

  WILLIAM CANTOR HAD SNEEZED INTO THE MICROPHONE before he knew he was about to. The need hit him that hard, and he didn’t have the chance to turn his head away. The phlegm the sneeze had discharged into his nasal passages had to be snorted back, and that amplified sniff echoed through the nearly deserted meeting room.

  “Sorry,” he said miserably and coughed, covering his mouth and turning away so as to show the ten-odd people here for his lecture that he wasn’t a complete philistine. “As an American I knew at Christ Church College said”—that’s right, you rubes, I went to Oxford—“I can shake a hand, I can shake a leg, but I sure can’t shake this cold.”

  The response from the crowd might have been polite laughter or, most likely, a muted cough.

  God, how he hated these lectures, the ones in annex buildings or village libraries, where the only attendees were pensioners with no interest in the subject but nothing better to do with their afternoons. Worse than those, actually, were the ones in cities such as Birmingham, so blighted that the sun never seemed to shine, and the people in the room were just here to get warmed up before heading out to panhandle or line up at soup kitchens. He had counted ten attendees before taking the lectern and no fewer than fourteen overcoats. He imagined a string of rusted shopping carts, overladened with detritus, in the library car park.

  “ ‘I have not told half of what I saw.’” A much better opening line than spraying the microphone with bogies, Cantor thought ruefully. Still, he had goals, and one never knew, maybe the bundledup woman toward the back of the fluorescent-lit room was secretly J. K. Rowling in mufti. “These were the last words uttered by the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo upon his deathbed.

  “We know from his legendary book, The Travels of Marco Polo, dictated to Rustichello da Pisa while both languished in a Genoese prison, that Polo, along with his father, Niccolò, and uncle, Maffeo”—the names tripped off Cantor’s tongue despite his head cold, this being far from the first time he had given this particular talk—“that he made many incredible discoveries and beheld many amazing sights.”

  There was a disturbance at the back of the room as a newcomer entered from the library’s brutalist-style reading room. Metal folding chairs creaked as a few people turned to see who had come to hear the speech, probably assuming it was a homeless buddy coming in from Chamberlain Square.

  The man wore a cashmere overcoat that nearly swept the floor over a dark suit, dark shirt, and a matching dark tie. Tall and big, he gave an apologetic wave and took a seat in back before Cantor could see his features. This looked promising, the cash-strapped scholar thought. At least this bloke was wearing clothes that hadn’t already been discarded a few times.

  Cantor paused long enough for the gentleman to settle. If this was a potential financial backer, he might as well start licking the guy’s boots now.

  “Even in his day, Polo’s Travels sparked debate. People simply didn’t believe he had seen and done all that he claimed. They couldn’t look past their own prejudices to believe that there was another separate civilization that could rival or even surpass the European states. Later, a glaring omission arose. Simply stated, for all his years in China, and all that he wrote of that distant land, he never once mentioned its greatest achievement, its most iconic image.

  “You see, at no point in his dictations to Rustichello da Pisa did he ever mention China’s Great Wall. That would be like a modern tourist saying they’ve been to London but not seen the Eye. Wait. That hideous Ferris wheel may be something a savvy traveler would want to forget.” Cantor paused for laughter. Got more coughing. “Ah yes, then, his failure to mention the Great Wall, which is just a short distance from Beijing, where Polo spent so much time, led his detractors to discount his entire tale.

  “But what if fault lies not with the dic-ta-tor but the dic-ta-tee.” Here he had planned to make a play on words and mention the despotic Genoese doge who had imprisoned Polo and the scribe, Rustichello, but decided against it. “Little is known about the man Polo dictated his story to while they served time in a Genoese prison cell following Polo’s capture at the Battle of Curzola. Rustichello himself had been captured some fourteen years earlier after the pivotal Battle of Meloria, which marked the beginning of the decline of the Pisan city-state.

  “Rustichello was, to put it in today’s vernacular, a romance writer who’d gained some measure of success prior to his being taken prisoner. Think of him as the Jackie Collins of his day. That would give him a strong insight into what would capture the imagination of his reading audience and what would be seen as too fantastic to believe.

  “With that in mind, I see him not only as the man wielding the pen that put Polo’s story to paper but as his editor as well, a man who could perhaps blunt some of Polo’s more controversial discoveries in order to give the manuscript more mass appeal. Medieval noblemen—and that’s almost exclusively who writers wrote for at the time—wouldn’t appreciate that China rivaled them and in many cases surpassed their achievements in the fields of medicine, engineering, social administration, and especially warfare.”

  Cantor paused a moment. Expressions on the faces of his audience ranged from asleep to slack-jawed indifference. So long as they were out of the freezing rain pounding the central English city, they didn’t much care what he said. He wished he could see the man in the dark suit, but he was hidden behind a tall homeless fellow who slept in an almost perfectly erect posture.

  “It was with this thought in mind—that perhaps Rustichello took notes during their long confinement that were edited out of the final draft of Travels and that those notes would account for some of the lapses in Polo’s story that have vexed future scholars and made them question the validity of the entire book—that I come to you today.” The line sounded clunky to Cantor’s ear too, but he was trying to come off as learned, and all his dons at Oxford spoke in run-on sentences that could fill a page or more.

  “I believe,” he continued, “that somewhere in the world exist those notes, those bits of Polo’s story that couldn’t get past the medieval censor—that was the Vatican—and would have raised too much doubt among the contemporary readership. Since leaving Christ Church”—no sense admitting that he hadn’t graduated—“I have searched across Italy and into France for a hint of such a boo
k. And finally, six months ago, I believe I found it.”

  Did Black Suit stir at this news? It seemed to Cantor that the shadow at the back of the room shifted position slightly. He felt like a fisherman who senses that first nibble on the end of his line. Now he had to set the hook before reeling in his prize.

  “I was given access to the sales records of a small antiquarian bookshop in an even smaller town in Italy that has been in business since 1884. They have a record of selling a copy of Rustichello’s seminal work, Roman de Roi Artus, in 1908. Included with the book of Arthurian legend was a folio of loose pages.

  “At this time, Edwardian English families were exploring Italy in order to broaden themselves. Think of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View.” To most of this lot it should be Cardboard Box with a Cellophane Window, but Cantor knew he was really playing to an audience of one. “Like any tourist, these travelers brought back souvenirs. Furniture, statuary, just about anything they could get their hands on that would remind them of Lombardy or Tuscany. One particular family fancied books and returned with veritable trunkloads of them, enough to fill a library about the size of this room floor to ceiling. Some of the volumes dated back to a century before Polo was even born. It is this family who acquired the Rustichello works.

  “For a fee, I was granted limited access to their library.” Five hundred pounds for an afternoon, Cantor recalled bitterly. He recalled most things bitterly these days. The current library’s owner was a right miserable git who, knowing Cantor’s desperation to see the library, wasn’t above capitalizing on the scholarly interest of a thirty-year-old researcher.

  Cantor had scraped together only enough for a single visit, but it had been enough. And that was what he was really doing here today, and for the past few months. He had no interest in enlightening dowagers and the homeless. He was hoping to find a patron who would help him fund his research. The folio’s owner had expressed in no uncertain terms that he would not sell it, but he would be willing to allow Cantor access, at five hundred pounds per day.

  The young academic was sure that once he published his research, pressure from historical societies would force the owner to, if not donate, at least let a major university authenticate Rustichello’s work and thus cement Cantor’s reputation and hopefully his fortune as well.

  “The text is written in typical medieval French, my specialty along with Italian from the same era. I managed to translate only a small portion since I only discovered it toward the end of my sojourn in the library, but what I read is mind-boggling. It is the description of a battle Polo witnessed in 1281 where a general named Khenbish obliterated his enemies using gunpowder, which Polo had never seen used in such a way, and a most remarkable device that utilized a special crystal to channel sunlight into a focused beam, much like a modern laser.”

  Cantor paused once again. Dark Suit had gotten to his feet and skulked from the library annex room, his long overcoat dancing around his ankles like an obsidian cape. Cantor cursed under his breath. He’d failed to set the hook, had in fact scared the fish out of the water entirely. He looked dejectedly at the unshaven and sullen faces arrayed against him. What was the point of continuing? They no more wanted to hear his nasal monotone than he wanted to deliver it.

  “Ah, thank you very much. Were there any questions?” He was taken aback when a spidery hand went up. The woman had the scrunched face of one of those dolls made of nylon stockings. “Yes?”

  “Can you spare some change?”

  Cantor grabbed up his briefcase, tossed his worn mackintosh over his arm, and strode out to a chorus of hoarse cackles.

  Darkness had fallen completely when he stepped through the library’s doors. The impersonal expanse of Chamberlain Square was hemmed in by the concrete monstrosity of the library on one side, the three-story classical Counsel House on another, and by the Greek temple-like Town Hall on a third. In the middle was the monument to Joseph Chamberlain, who’d been someone or another in this dreary city. To Cantor, the structure looked like thieves had made off with an entire Gothic cathedral and left behind the top sixty or so feet of one of its spires.

  If the city fathers had intended to design a less harmonious space architecturally, he couldn’t see how.

  Maybe throw in the odd zeppelin shed, he thought uncharitably, or an Eastern Orthodox onion-domed church.

  The rain had slowed to a cold drizzle, and though Cantor raised his collar, icy water found its way down the back of his neck. He longed for a warm shower and a hot toddy, and for his sore nose to stop leaking.

  His battered Volkswagen was parked over on Newhall Street, and he had just turned onto Colmore Row when the driver’s-side window of a sleek Jaguar sedan whispered down.

  “Dr. Cantor, might I have a word?” The voice was cultured, with a continental accent—French, German, maybe Swiss, which to Cantor sounded like a combination of the two.

  “Ah, I don’t have my doctorate yet,” he stammered when he recognized the black shirt and tie of Dark Suit sitting behind the wheel of the luxury sedan.

  “No matter, you gave a compelling speech. I would have stayed for the rest, but I received a call I couldn’t ignore. Please, just a few moments, is all I ask.”

  “It’s raining.” Bending to peer into the car sent a spike of pain through Cantor’s strained sinuses.

  “Not in here.” The man smiled, or at least his lips parted and his teeth were revealed. “I can drive you to your car.”

  Cantor looked up the street. There was no one about and his car was five blocks away. “Okay.”

  He stepped around the long sloping bonnet and heard the electronic lock disengage for the passenger seat. He slid into the supple leather. In the glow of the dash lights, the sedan’s considerable woodwork shimmered.

  The stranger slipped the car into gear and eased it from its parking space. The Jag was so smooth that Cantor hadn’t realized the engine had been running.

  “An associate of mine heard the lecture you gave last week in Coventry and was intrigued enough to tell me about it. I had to hear for myself.”

  “I’m sorry, you are?”

  “Oh. My apologies. Tony Forsythe.” They shook hands awkwardly since Forsythe had to reach under his left arm so as to not release the steering wheel.

  “And what’s your interest in Marco Polo, Mr. Forsythe?” Cantor asked.

  He got an odd vibe from the man. He was around forty and had plain, unexceptional features, yet thick dark hair that was so dense it could have been a toupee. Still, there was something else. Cantor realized what it was. His hands had been large and callused. His grip hadn’t been overly forceful, but Forsythe’s hand had practically swallowed Cantor’s. In his experience, men in £1,000 overcoats and £60,000 cars didn’t have calluses.

  “I’m a dabbler in history, you might say, and I’m interested in this folio and its contents.”

  William Cantor had looked for a fish, but he had the sudden feeling he’d nabbed a shark. “Um, I’m down Newhall.”

  “Yes, I know,” Forsythe said, which rather bothered Cantor, but the stranger added, “Have you there in a jiff. You mentioned the folio’s owner had no interest in selling, correct?”

  “Yes, the man’s loaded. I think he asked me to pay to see his library just to get under my skin.”

  “But no price was discussed?”

  “Ah, no. It was all I could do to come up with the five hundred quid to see the damned thing for a day.”

  “Pity,” Forsythe said almost to himself. “A simple cash transaction would have been preferable.”

  To Cantor’s relief, the Jag made the left-hand turn onto Newhall.

  Forsythe glanced at him for a second. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me the gentleman’s name?”

  “I, ah, I don’t think that would be in my best interest, now would it?”

  “Oh, but it would, friend William. It is most certainly in your best interest.”

  The Jaguar suddenly leapt forward under har
d acceleration. Cantor got a fleeting glimpse of his blue VW Polo as they raced past. “What the bloody hell do you—”

  The arm of a person who’d been lying flat and unseen in the spacious rear seat snaked around Cantor’s neck with the strength of an anaconda, choking the words in his throat. A sharp jab to the neck, a strange metallic taste in his mouth, and three seconds later William Cantor slumped over in drug-induced unconsciousness.

  With his parents long dead from an accident on the M1 and no siblings or a girlfriend, it wasn’t until his landlord knocked on the door to his tiny one-room flat a month later that anyone knew Cantor had gone missing. The handful of presentations he’d planned had been courteously postponed by a person claiming his identity. It would be another several days before a missing persons report was matched with the headless and handless corpse found floating in the North Sea of the fishing town of Grimsby about that same time.

  There were two things on which all the police involved agreed. The DNA found in Cantor’s apartment matched that of the body fished from the water. The second was that before the man died he’d been tortured so severely that death would have been a blessed relief.

  Because Cantor kept all his notes on the Rustichello Folio in his briefcase, which was never recovered, there was one more crime the authorities never realized was related to his disappearance. There had been a botched break-in of a Hampshire estate down in the southern part of the country near a town called Beaulieu. It happened two days after the last confirmed Cantor appearance. Forensic reconstruction showed that the burglars had been surprised by the widower owner during the robbery, bashed him over the head with a jimmy bar left on the scene—no prints—and fled in panic, not even bothering to take the pillowcases stuffed with sterling silverware they’d already gathered.