Tom Foran Clark

"Man overboard!” Emery cried out -- or rather tried to cry out -- when he saw golden Jack slip from the rails -- or step off, or leap -- whatever it was. It happened so fast -- in an instant. Jack flew. He hit the water hard. Emery felt sure he was a goner. “Somebody!,“ Emery meant to yell, but only a choked, hoarse gasp came out. He looked imploringly at Rita. "Man overboard,” Emery attempted once more, weakly.

"Good one, Jack!" Rita shouted. Her chestnut face turned still darker color, filling up with blood. She would later tell Emery she'd been furious with Jack not for his plunging into the water, but for his plunging into the water exactly when she’d turned with Emery toward him to share her momentous announcement -- Jack had pre-empted her big moment.

The boat tilted once more as passengers rushed to the place at the side of the vessel where Jack had jumped. People crowded around us to see. There was Jack, in the ocean, splashing merrily. “Look!” someone cried. “There he is! Someone help him! He’s upside-down!”

“He iss upside-down, but he iss not falling offerboard,” Dieter insisted, looking now even blanker, whiter than before. Jack, far from drowning, was swimming. “He iss an expert schwimmer,” Dieter pointed out.

Almost leisurely, Jack was making brisk headway toward the shore of Spain with his very able backstroke. “Rita! Dieter!” he called out, “Meet me at the hostel!”

“Ach! Of course I must carry him his tings,” Dieter complained.

The captain was stern. He strolled up with great dignity of demeanor and purpose -- neat, in white, clean-cut, sun-tanned -- obviously posing, wanting to appear seaworthy, capable, professional. What was the story on this young man who had jumped overboard?

Rita explained that Jack had his passport with him, and that he had chosen to swim to shore. The captain, in a hurry, said he’d notify officials and let them deal with it. Then he went back to the business of guiding the boat in.

Once off the boat, they took a taxi from the bustling port straight to the youth hostel, the Albergue Juvenil, on the Barriada El Pelayo. Rita took Emery by the elbow and steered him to the desk. “This is Richard Mark Emery,” she announced to the clerk. “Has any mail arrived here for him?” In fact, two envelopes awaited Emery.

One of the two letters was from Pike, postmarked Lawrence, Massachusetts. Emery read it aloud. "I’m on my way! I’ll see you in Madrid, meet you at the airport” -- he gave the flight details -- “and if Rita, Jack, and Dieter are ready, we’ll head for St. James right away. And if they’re not ready, still we’ll head for St. James.”

The other envelope had been sent by Hafida Kethouna from Taza, Morocco. This Emery read to himself. Roughly translated from the French, the note informed him that her beloved brother, Abdallah, had been hit by a truck while riding Emery's bike and, "with Allah’s blessings," he'd died instantly.

Feeling feint, Emery headed for a nearby couch and sat down. Rita sat down next to him. “You’ll be okay,” she soothed him. “You’ll be fine.” Now Jack showed up at the Albergue, wearing brightly colored Andalusian garb, and sat down on the other side of Emery on the couch. “Are you somebody I know?” Jack asked. “I’ll go check on Dieter,” Rita said, taking her things with her. “You look familiar,” Jack said, “Were you in Morocco? Oh yeah, now I remember. You were on the boat. Why are you crying? Why aren’t you saying anything?”

Jack looked like an extra in a pirate movie -- this washed ashore, buoyant, swashbuckling Jack. Emery was going to answer him, but then Dieter returned to the lobby calling out, “Ach, vee ver chust going to look for you at the police station!” Rita was right behind Dieter, excitedly revealing the news, “That’s Emery.”

“You are Emery?” Jack said, astonished. “Wow! Sorry I didn’t stay to talk with you on the boat. Oh well, time doesn’t go backwards. Here we are. It’s amazing to see that you exist. This is not something we figured was going to happen. For all we knew, you were a figment of Pike’s dog-gone imagination. We couldn’t tell what was true or even possible from what was whacko coming out of that guy’s mouth."

“Emery,” Rita said, again sitting down next to him, brushing the tears from his cheeks, “we’d like to take you out to dinner. Go put your stuff away and wash up. We’ll go to a taverna for some beer and tapas. Does that sound good to you?”

Emery put on the freshest clothes he had and walked with the three of them to a tavern nearby -- noisy, harshly lighted, filled with a bluish haze of smoke. Everybody was yelling -- a rowdy bunch. Dieter, white as a sheet, was shaking. He looked like he’d walked not only into the wrong room, but into the wrong life. “Don’t worry about a thing, Dieter,” Jack reassured him. “We made it this far, right? What can happen now?”

They took a little table in a corner. The revelers, intent on their pleasure, paid no attention to them. The four spoke in whispers, drinking beer and spearing, with toothpicks, exotically cooked appetizers called tapas -- olives, cheeses, blood sausage, cow stomach, goat balls, pig tongue, sardines, squid, baby octopus, and on and on. “Don’t think about it,” Jack advised. “Just dig in.” His snappy little sayings and reassurances had an almost paralyzing power. He also had this penetrating gaze, as if he’d borrowed his eyes from some eastern guru for the purpose of looking deeper than he was.

“That Pike -- what a guy!” Jack reminisced. “We never figured we’d actually meet you,” he said again to Emery. “Like that was going to happen. So much of what that guy was saying just seemed whacko. You get the picture? That was one gone guy.”

“He vass a character,” Dieter volunteered.

“He was almost dead,” Rita stated plainly, peering deep into Emery's eyes. ““He had nothing. He was in rags. We were startled when we learned he was an American and not some wild, doped-up, insect-eating, unwashed Moroccan Berber, beggar, or leper. Closer inspection revealed he was covered with dust. He’d been robbed and beaten just about senseless, but the things he said to us made sense -- at least made sense to me. We took him to dinner -- we wined and dined him -- and he told us his tale. It was Jack who made the connection,” Rita paused meaningfully.

“The connection?”

“Yes, the connection to George Borrow.”

“George Borrow?”

“The writer,” Jack said. “The Gypsies of Spain.”

“I’d never heard of him,” Rita went on. “But Jack had read The Gypsies of Spain and also this other book by him called The Bible in Spain. Borrow sold New Testaments. Along the way, he met a man who sold oranges, like a kid with a lemonade stand, to weary travelers on a busy thoroughfare where pilgrims made their way to Santiago, the town of St. James. He stood in the shade of his booth by a river running through lush meadows in the hills just out of Madrid. They called him ‘Narangero’ -- the man who sells oranges.”

“Murcian oranges -- Townsend told us.”

“Arlen Townsend. Yes, Pike told us all about him. And about you. Jack in turn told him and us all about George Borrow and the Narengo and the thieves who robbed him --exactly like the Narengo in the story that Townsend told Pike. The parallels between the two stories were unmistakable. Jack was excited. Pike was flabbergasted.”

“I can imagine.”

“Well, wait,” Jack said. “It just gets curiouser and curiouser.”

“The thing is,” Rita went on, “the whole story Borrow was telling -- to get to the point -- is this: the Narengo had a map and a book that had belonged to a Swiss pilgrim who went by the name, in Spain, of Senor Don Benito Mol, an energetic white-haired old man that sounded like the twin brother of Arlen Townsend, only with a big sombrero on his head. The Swiss had introduced himself: ‘I am Benedict Mol, a past soldier, now a soap-boiler, at your service.’ He’d been in Spain for forty-five years.”

“Did he have a wife and children?”

“Yes, in Minorca. He’d married a woman there, by whom he had two children. His wife died mysteriously, and his children vanished.”

“Just like Townsend,” Emery said. “The treasure hunter went to Italy?” he conjectured.

“No. He stayed in Spain. He was mad to get his hands on the treasure -- what he called the ‘mighty schatz’ -- somewhere in or near the church of Saint James of Compostella. He thought of the schatz day and night. ‘No one else but me,’ he’d told George Borrow, ‘ knows of its existence’.”

“Pike must have fallen out of his chair when he heard all this!”

“He did, in fact. He was totally discombobulated -- on top of being forlorn and skinny and ragged. We offered to take him with us to our hotel to let him take a shower, but he refused. ‘No time, ‘ he said mysteriously. He showed us his map and book from Arlen Townsend in Assissi. He made us promise to keep the papers safe. He pressed them on us and said he had some unfinished business to settle. He’d meet us in Madrid. That was over four months ago. We never saw him again. We looked everywhere and asked around, but he’d just disappeared. We went to the police and they were just weird: ‘Pike ees hees name? You are heees friends? You will be wise to ask no more of heem’ -- and so on.”

“He had obviously stepped into some very deep shit,” Jack offered.

“We realized Pike was in deep in some very big trouble and decided the best we could do was to keep our promise to him and get on with it -- to go to Spain.”

“You decided three months ago? Why are you only now entering Spain?“

“Well, that’s the thing. Pike vanished, and we moved on. We traveled north. We got to Tangiers. Then we were ourselves abducted!”

“Somebody wanted the map!”

“Well, no. They didn’t know about it, and they didn’t want to know about it, and they didn’t even care that we insisted we had some urgent business to attend to because of it. We were waylaid four months. We were palace prisoners -- hard to believe -- but that’s what happened. Jack and Dieter were actually put in a dungeon -- they can tell you their story. I only know that I was held against my will -- initially -- and then my will changed."

“Vile vee ver chained town, starfing, she vass eating grapes and chees and drinkink vine,” Dieter bitterly remembered.

“I think I was drugged. It was beautiful. I fell in love with the charismatic kidnapper who’d taken us prisoner in the first place. Abdul Husein. I tried to resist him, but he was very charming, very suave. First I thought he was going to rape me and, next thing I knew, I was gladly offering myself to him. I was obviously drugged or put under a curse or spell.”

“Tell me about it,” Emery said, remembering Pike’s succumbing.

“Well, yes -- I will,” Rita said. “The thing is that George Borrow, in The Bible in Spain, told of his character, the Benedict Mol, and of how when his wife had died he’d resolved to leave Minorca and go straight to Saint James. But, on reaching Madrid, he’d fallen into the hands of a Basque woman who’d persuaded him to live with her, just as the man whose hands I fell into persuaded me to stay in Tangiers. Talk about magical power. She had him, just as Abdul Husein in Tangiers had me. I could relate so well to his story! Here was the would-be treasure-hunter, now stuck in Madrid, living in both fear and bliss with his lady friend -- who wasn’t about to let him go. She cast a spell on him and said if he deserted her -- if he even thought of trying to get away -- she’d cast a second and a worse spell, which would cling to him forever. He told Borrow, ‘Gott sei dank -- thank God -- she is in the hospital and it is expected she will die.’

“As for me,” Rita continued, “I was lost in the spell that was on me in Tangiers. There was no way in this world I wanted to get out of that. It was just bliss. I’m sorry to say it, but Jack and Dieter fell away from my thoughts. As for Pike and his map and treasure hunt -- completely forgotten. There was no treasure in the world I could have wanted except to go on being Abdul’s slave. To him, I was the treasure all men seek -- I loved that. Was I spellbound! I was his ‘Goddess,' his 'earthly garden of delights.’ For him, I would have been happy to be just a pair of scissors. I know you don’t want to know, but I was eager every morning of every day to get up, just glad of any chance I might have to be near him, to be touched by him. It was heaven! When Jack and Dieter escaped and came to save me, I resisted. Why would I leave? I was lounging on silk cushions, softly singing, cradling Abdul's head at my breast, feeding him goat’s cheese, purple grapes, and golden wine. I know, I know. You don’t want to hear about that. Nobody wants to hear about that.”