LLA KAHINA AND SEBASTIAN LAUX STOOD BY A STONE WALL WITH the O. G., a little apart from the other mourners among the tilted headstones in the graveyard at the Harbor. It was very early in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, and a wind that smelled of winter howled in the surrounding forest. The moss beneath their feet was brittle with frost. The gravestones of the Hubbards and Christophers had been planted in rings, one for each generation. Christopher and Martha stood in the center among the elongated shadows thrown by the barely risen northern sun, holding the funeral urn between them. Christopher removed the lid and the wind stirrred David Patchen’s ashes. There were no prayers, no stone engraved with his favorite verse from Housman, no eulogy by the O. G.; everyone knew that the deceased hated ceremony.
“It’s very strange,” Lla Kahina said, “but I never saw this man, never.”
“In life, you mean, or in the cards?” Sebastian asked.
“Not in either. What did he look like?”
Stephanie gave them a surprised look. They were not whispering. Sebastian, taking Meryem’s arm in his, drew her closer. “The truthful answer,” he said, “is ‘like a corpse.’ Tall, thin, limping, mournful, with a scarred face and a crippled arm. He was wounded in the war, almost mortally.”
Martha and Christopher tipped the urn and shook it. At first Patchen’s ashes were a little too heavy for the wind, but after a short delay they ascended in a fluttering cloud before breaking apart, as it seemed, molecule by molecule, and disappearing into swirling air.
“You say he was almost killed in the war?” Lla Kahina said. “That explains it. Sometimes people die before they die. He must have had some debt to pay and remained in this life to pay it.”
Although he had not seen her since the summer of 1939, Sebastian knew from the tone of her voice that she thought that Patchen’s long-ago escape from death explained everything. Maybe it did; he was willing to think so. The beaky, shrunken Meryem standing beside him now was the same Meryem who had been able to see through mountains and across the deeps of time when he first loved her; she knew things that were too simple for others to understand. As if she had read Sebastian’s thoughts, Zarah smiled at him across the concentric, weatherworn headstones.
The O. G. thought Zarah was smiling at him. “Lovely young woman,” he said in a hearty voice, grinning back with his healthy square old teeth. “David did right to do what he did for her.”
Lla Kahina gave him a questioning look. “What was that?”
“Died to save her life,” the O. G. said. “You didn’t know?”
“No. I told you, he was invisible to me.”
“You weren’t the only one,” the O. G. said. “Anyway, it was about time somebody died for a Christopher instead of the other way around.” He signed, lost in his own memories. “Circles within circles,” he said. “I first laid eyes on David right here, on this very spot, when we buried Hubbard Christopher. That must have been forty years ago, wasn’t it, Sebastian?”
“Nineteen hundred and forty-eight,” said Sebastian, who never forgot a number.
They turned to go, each old man holding one of Meryem’s arms to assist her over the rough path that led down through the overgrown pasture to the Harbor, which lay with smoking chimneys in the vale below.
At Thanksgiving breakfast the O. G. made a toast in ale that included Patchen: “Absent friends.” Nothing more than that was said about him. Under the rules of marriage and friendship and the laws of the United States of America, no one present, not even the O. G., was free to discuss in the presence of others secrets they knew about the deceased. In his last operation Patchen had achieved what he wanted. The White House had already announced that the Outfit had been irreparably compromised by the capture of its last Director, and that it must be replaced by a new intelligence service that could operate in a world in which there would be no deadly enemies, only the disappointed, the disillusioned, and the deluded. This string of evocative words beginning with “d” was Patrick Graham’s invention; Graham had coined the phrase while announcing not just the death of the Outfit but the dawn of a new era. He suggested in his wrap-up remarks from the White House (at the O. G.’s confidential suggestion, the President had given him an exclusive interview in which he had revealed his thoughts about the future of American espionage and intelligence) that the future might see a world without secrets in which Americans and Russians, Israelis and Arabs, Hindus and Moslems, Christians and Communists worked hand in hand on earth as they were already doing in outer space. Both activities, after all, were intelligence missions, searches for pure knowledge as opposed to the pathological appetite for secrets that had driven the Outfit throughout its short, anti-democratic, maddeningly obscure history. (“Jeepers Ned!” responded the O. G., watching at home, among his souvenirs.)
After breakfast Martha said goodbye; she had to catch a plane for Guatemala.
“Will you be back?” Christopher asked.
“Oh, quite soon,” Martha said. “I’m only going to say goodbye to my Indians.”
“After all these years?”
“There’s no reason to go back. The children will all be gone soon; the guerrillas keep coming back for more. Maybe they’ve got a Zarah of their own. David would be so happy that our Zarah did the great thing for the Ja’wabi that she was born to do.”
“Do you think he believed in such things?”
“Everyone does, inwardly. Doesn’t thee?”
Her unwavering eyes looked deep into Christopher’s. He kissed her, gently, on both cheeks.
“Of course I do,” he said.
Soon after Martha departed Christopher got out the treasure map and marked the square to be searched this year. There were very few left. Only he and Zarah and Lori went on the treasure hunt; everyone else except Stephanie was too old, and she did not believe that the treasure existed.
It was Lori who found the ledge with the letter “T” carved on it. It was only a few paces from the fallen maple that had concealed the Mahican burial ground. Christopher had walked past it many times without seeing it, and Lori had only noticed it because the angle of the light was exactly right. The “T” was not printed but carved in script, like a note of music, so it mimicked the natural cracks in the granite.
Christopher took a compass sighting while Zarah and Lori stretched a cord thirty-five paces straight north from the ledge. Kneeling in a circle, they dug into the soft forest floor with their hands and sharp stones. They uncovered a rusted log chain about eighteen inches below the surface. “That’s from the apple tree split by lightning,” said Lori, who knew her Harbor lore. “The treasure chest will be more than three feet down, below the frost level.”
They found it at four feet, a tin box inside another tin box. Within the second box were mad Eleazer Stickles’s treasures: a handful of gold pieces, a locket containing a picture of his wife, a letter to posterity confessing the murder of her lover and of the innocent man who hanged for the crime.
There was something else in the box, something that did not belong there: a title page torn from a rag-paper copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel published forty years after Stickles died. A row of numbers was written across it in pencil with the date abbreviated below in the European style, 27.XI.47—the day that Wolkowicz found the Mahican burial ground.
“What is it?” Lori asked.
“A book code,” Christopher said. “Go down to the house and tell them the news, and bring back Tom Sawyer from the library. We’ll meet you in the graveyard.”
It was the right book; the title page was missing. Sitting on the stone wall, Christopher looked up the pages and the letters of the alphabet corresponding to the scribbled numerals and decoded Wolkowicz’s message: KILROY WUZ HERE.
Christopher laughed out loud. Tears rose in Zarah’s eyes. The wind roared inside the forest. A wedge of Canada geese, wintering against nature on some Berkshire pond where city people gave them food, flew overhead. Lori pressed her cheek against her father’s and gestured for her sister to do the same. All three joined hands, and in the rapturous, slightly hoarse voice that filled Christopher’s heart with love and his mind with memories, the little girl recited the lines he had taught her in the only language that lions understand:
Lion, Lion, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?