Nelson Demille: The Quest

“Good question.” He whispered, “Why are we stopped, Frank?”

Purcell said nothing. He started the engine and threw the Jeep into gear. The four-wheel-drive dug into the track and they lurched forward. He moved the Jeep faster and the bouncing became rougher. Mercado held on to his seat. In the back, Vivian uncurled her slender body and sat up, grabbing on to whatever she could find in the dark.

They drove on for a few minutes. Suddenly, Purcell yanked the wheel to the right, and the Jeep crashed through a thicket of high brush and broke into a clearing.

Vivian said, “What the hell are you doing? Frank?”

In the middle of the clearing, gleaming white in the full-risen moon, were the ruins of an Italian mineral bath spa. A strange, anomalous legacy from the Italian occupation, the spa was built in ancient Roman style and sat crumbling like some Caesar’s bath in another time and place.

Purcell pointed the Jeep toward the largest of the buildings and accelerated. The stuccoed structure grew bigger as the vehicle bounced across the field of high grass.

The Jeep hit the broad front steps of the building, found traction, and climbed. It sailed between two fluted columns, across the smooth stone portico, and through the front opening, coming to rest in the center of the main lobby of what had been the hotel part of the spa. Purcell cut the engine and headlights. Night creatures became quiet, then started their senseless, cacophonous noises again.

The moon shone blue-white through the destroyed vaulted ceiling and lit the pseudo-Roman chamber with an ethereal glow. Huge crumbling frescoes of classical bath scenes adorned every wall. Purcell wiped his face with his sweating palm.

Mercado caught his breath. “What was that all about?”

Purcell shrugged.

Vivian regained her composure and laughed mockingly from the back of the Jeep. “I think the brave man just lost his nerve in the dark jungle.” Her accent was mostly British with a mixture of exotic pronunciations. Mercado had told him that her mother tongue was unknown and her ancestry was equally obscure, though she carried a Swiss passport with the surname of Smith. “A woman of mystery,” Mercado had said to Purcell, who’d replied, “They’re all a mystery.”

Mercado jumped from the Jeep and stretched. “We’re out of the jungle, but not out of the woods.” Mercado’s own voice had that curious mid-Atlantic accent, common to people who have traveled between the British Isles and North America all their lives. His mother was English and his father a Spaniard-thus the surname-though he’d spent most of his youth in boarding schools in Switzerland, and spoke French, German, and Italian like a native.

Frank Purcell cupped a cigarette in his hand and lit it. In the glow of the match he looked older than his thirty-odd years. Lines worked their way around his mouth and his brown-black eyes. Gray was sprinkled through his shaggy black hair and he looked tired. He slumped back in his seat and exhaled a long stream of smoke. “What is this place, exactly?”

Mercado was pacing around over the mosaic floor of the huge lobby. “Roman baths. What do they look like, old man?”

“Roman baths.”

“Well, there you are, then. Bloody Fascists built them as part of their civilizing mission back in ’36. I did a story on them, as I recall. You’ll find them in the most unlikely places. Come on, then. If the mineral springs are still flowing, we’ll have a nice bath.”

Purcell stepped stiffly out of the Jeep. “Keep your voice lower, Henry.”

“Can’t very well keep it low if I’m over here and you’re over there, can I, Frank? Come along. Let’s explore.”

Vivian joined Mercado at the entrance of a colonnade that led to an interior courtyard. Purcell walked slowly over the rubble-strewn floor. Five years in Indochina as a war correspondent had expunged any fascination he might have once had for ruins. The last ruins he had gone out of his way to see were the ancient city of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and that side trip had cost him a year in a Khmer Rouge prison camp. That year would remain a very big part of his life. He’d lost there, among other things, any illusions he might have had about his fellow man.

He joined Mercado and Vivian as they walked slowly down the moonlit colonnade. A statue of Neptune with upraised trident stood in the middle of the walkway and they had to go around him. The colonnade made a ninety-degree turn, and as they rounded the corner they could hear the gentle lapping of water.

“We’re in luck,” said Mercado. “I can smell the sulphur. The baths should be up ahead.”

Vivian stepped onto a low marble bench and peered across the courtyard. “Yes, I see the steam. There, behind those trees.”

They walked across the courtyard toward a line of eucalyptus trees. The large expanse, once paved in white stone, was overgrown with lichens and grass. A two-faced Janus rose up out of a thicket of hedges and projected a monstrous moonshadow through which they passed quickly. The courtyard was surrounded by the colonnade, and vines had grown over most of the columns. Broken statuary of Roman gods and goddesses dotted the yard. The impression was of one of those fantasy paintings of Rome as it may have looked in the Dark Ages, with shepherds and flocks passing through great columned imperial buildings overgrown with vegetation.

They walked by a dry fountain in a melancholy garden and passed between two eucalyptus trees. In front of them was a stone balustrade that led to a curved staircase, and they descended the crumbling steps. At the bottom was a pool about forty meters square. Sulphurous fumes made the air almost unbreathable.

They approached the pool. It looked black, but the moon touched its gently moving ripples with highlights. A huge stone fish spit a never-ending supply of mineral water into the ever-demanding pool. The sound of the falling water echoed off the bathhouse on the far side of the pool.

“It stinks,” announced Purcell.

“Oh,” said Mercado. “You Yanks. Everything must smell like underarm deodorant to you. These baths are an ancient European tradition. These and the roads are the only good things Mussolini did for this country.”

“The roads stink, too,” said Purcell, stretching his muscular frame.

Vivian had peeled off her khakis. She stood naked at the edge of the pool, her milk-white skin shining in the moonlight, like fine, rubbed alabaster.

Purcell regarded her for a few seconds. In the three-day cross-country jaunt out of Addis Ababa, he had seen her naked at every bath stop. At first he was taken aback by her lack of modesty, but she had insisted on being treated with no special considerations.

Mercado sat on a mossy marble bench and began to pull off his boots. Purcell sat next to him, his eyes darting toward Vivian from time to time. He reckoned her age at no more than twenty-five, so she had been only about sixteen when he was stepping off the plane into the maelstrom that was Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport in 1965. He felt old in her presence. Who was she? he wondered. Her features were mostly Caucasian and her skin was like milk, but her eyes were definitely almonds and her jet black hair was long, straight, and thick like an East Asian, or maybe a Native American. But those almond eyes-they were dark green. Purcell wondered if such a combination was genetically possible.

Vivian held up her arms and inhaled the fumes. “It does stink, though, Henry.”

“It’s refreshing and salubrious. Breathe it in.”

She breathed. “Graviora quaedam sunt remedia periculis.”

Purcell stared at Vivian. There was no mistaking that that was Latin. This was a new language in Vivian’s repertoire. He asked Mercado, “What did she say?”