The Golden Elephant. Alex Archer

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      The crisp evening air felt good and smelled of roasting chestnuts. Annja was hungry, walking the summit of Montmartre with her hands jammed in her jacket pockets and her chin sunk into the collar. Over her left shoulder loomed the white domes of the Sacré Coeur Basilica. From somewhere in the middle distance skirled North African music. From nearer at hand came the thud and clank of what she considered mediocre techno music. The days of the Moulin Rouge and other noted, or notorious, cabarets were long gone. The fashionable night spots had long since migrated down across the river to the Left Bank and city center. Nowadays the area was given over to generic discos, artists’ studios and souvenir and antique shops, most of which were closed in the early evening.

      Annja had found a fairly deserted section of the windy, narrow streets winding gradually down the hill. That suited her mood.

      The one reference to the 1913 German expedition had been it. Not just for the book. For such as she’d been able to check of the University of Paris collection until they booted her out of the reading room at seven-thirty.

      The good news was that she now knew stories of a golden elephant statue in a vast lost temple emanated from a German expedition to Southeast Asia in 1913. The bad news was that wasn’t much to go on.

      It hadn’t been enough to lead to any more information, at least so far. The various archaeological reviews and journals from the period she had read stayed resolutely mute concerning any such expedition. She would have thought there’d be some mention.

      Walking along in air just too warm for her breath to be visible, with fallen dry leaves skittering before her like small frightened mammals, she wondered if chauvinism might have come into play. The Great War, as it was then naively known—and for a few years afterward, until an even greater one happened along—broke out a year or so after the expedition. Indeed, if it set forth in 1913 the expedition might well have still been in progress when the First World War began. And in 1913 the French were still grumpy over the Franco-Prussian War.

      So it struck her as possible that mention of German expeditions might’ve been embargoed in French journals. But scientists of the day still would have considered themselves above such political disputes, cataclysmic as they might be. Wars came and went—science endured. So the Germanophobe angle might mean much or little.

      I see two main possibilities, Annja told herself as she turned down a quaintly cobbled alley between steel-shuttered storefronts that reminded her of home in Brooklyn. One, that the expedition simply got lost in the shuffle of World War I. It was easy enough to see how that would happen.

      And two, she thought, the frown etching itself deeper into her forehead, that it was all just rumor.

      That made her bare her teeth in dismay. It was possible. Probable, even. Scientific anthropology and archaeology were rife with such speculations in the wake of Schliemann’s discovery of Troy—or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

      So the whole Golden Elephant yarn could just be hyperactive imagination.

      “There’s a third possibility,” she said quietly to herself. “Or make it a subset of the first possibility,” she said with a certain deliberateness. “That there was such an expedition—and the only mention of it that still exists anywhere on Earth is the sentence you read in that book today.”

      She knew that was an all-too-real likelihood. The priceless ceramic relics Schliemann had sent back to Berlin had been busted in some kind of grotesque drunken Prussian marriage ritual. The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt had been lost when the Allies bombed the museum where they were stored. Paris had famously been spared the ravages of WWII. But the expedition, of course, was German. That was not so good, from a preservation point of view. The whole country had been handled pretty roughly. And most artifacts went through Berlin—which, between relentless bombing and the Red Army’s European tour, had pretty much been destroyed.

      Every last journal or other scrap of writing relating to the 1913 expedition stood a really excellent chance of having been burned up, shelled to fine gray powder.

      She sighed again. “Great,” she said. She decided she’d give it at lest one more try in the University of Paris system. If that came up dry—

      From behind she heard a masculine voice call out, “There she is!”

       7

      Annja stopped. She set her mouth. She sensed at least two men behind her. She braced to run. Then from the shadowed brickwork arch of an entry into a small garden courtyard she hadn’t even noticed before, a third man strolled out into the starlight before her.

      She’d wandered, eyes wide open, into a classic trap.

      Annja scolded herself furiously. Walking around like that and not paying attention to your surroundings! she thought. Doing a perfect impression of a perfect victim. What were you thinking?