The Reincarnationist

Chapter 7

The man sat in the leather chair, his hands resting on the arm pads, his fingers circling the smooth nail heads. Around and around the cold metal circles as if this one movement was enough to keep him occupied forever. His eyes were shut. The gold drapes were drawn, and the room’s rich decor was cloaked in darkness.

He was satisfied to sit and do nothing but wait. Long pauses in the plan didn’t bother him. Not after all this time. From the moment he’d first heard the legend of the Memory Stones he knew that one day whatever power they held would be his. Needed to be his. No price was too high and no effort was too great to find out about the past.

His past.

His present.

And so, too, his future.

The idea that the stones might work, that they could, in fact, enable people to remember their previous lives, was unbearably pleasurable to him. He fantasized about the stones the way other men fantasized about women. His daydreams about what would happen once they were in his possession elevated his blood pressure, took away his breath and made him feel weak and strong at the same time in an utterly satisfying way. And because he’d been taught to be disciplined, he gave in to the temptation of dreaming about them only when he felt he deserved the indulgence.

He deserved it now.

Were they emeralds? Sapphires the color of the night skies? Lapis? Obsidian? Were they rough? Polished? What would they feel like? Small and smooth? Larger? Like glass? Would they be luminescent? Or dull, ordinary-looking things that didn’t begin to suggest their power?

He didn’t mind waiting, but it seemed to him that he should have heard by now.

He had an appointment he had to keep. No, it was premature to worry. He wouldn’t contemplate any kind of failure. He disliked that he’d involved other people in his plan. No one you hired, no matter how much you paid them, was entirely trustworthy. Regardless of how well he’d tried to plan for the mistakes that could happen along the way, he was certain to have overlooked at least a few. He felt a new wave of anxiety start to build deep in his chest and took several deep breaths.

Relax. You ’ve reached this point. You’ll succeed.

But so much is at stake.

He picked up the well-worn book he’d been reading last night when his anticipation of what today would bring had kept him awake, Theosophy by the nineteenth-century philosopher Rudolf Steiner. There were always new books being published on the subject that mattered so much to him-he bought and read them all-but it was the thinkers of the past centuries whom he responded to and returned to so often: the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walt Whitman, Longfellow; the prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and so many more who engaged, reassured and aided him in amending and revising his own ever-evolving theories. They were his touchstones, these great minds that he could only know through their words. So many brilliant men and women who had believed what he believed.

He let the book fall open to the soft leather bookmark with his initials stamped on the cordovan in gold, at the beginning of a chapter titled “The Soul in the World of Souls after Death.” He’d underlined several paragraphs and he reread them now.

There follows after death a period for the human spirit in which the soul casts off its weakness for its physical existence in order then to behave in accordance with the laws of the world of the spirit and the soul alone, and to free the mind. It is to be expected that the longer the soul was bound to the physical the longer this period will last…

His right hand returned to the brass buttons on the chair. The metal was cool to the touch. There was not much he’d ever lusted after the way he craved these stones. Once he had them, oh, the knowledge he would gain. The mysteries he would solve. The history he could learn. And more than that.

He read the next paragraph, in which Steiner described how great a pain the soul suffered through its loss of physical gratification and how that condition would continue until the soul had learned to stop longing for things that only a human body could experience.

What would it be like to reach the level of not longing? A pure level of thought, of experiencing the oneness of the universe? The ultimate goal of being reincarnated?

He looked up from the page and over at the phone, as if willing the call to come. It was a simple burglary: the professor was elderly. He would be there alone. It was just a matter of overpowering him and taking the box. A child could accomplish it. And if a child could do it, an expert could certainly do it. And he was only hiring experts at every step of the way. The most expensive experts money could buy. For a treasure, for this treasure, was any price too high?

There was no reason to worry. The call would come when the job was done. The round brass buttons were warm once more. He moved his fingers over to the next two, relieved by the cold metal on his skin, and returned to the book.

Having reached this highest degree of sympathy with the rest of the world of the soul, the soul will dissolve in it, will become one with it…

If he had proof of past lives, actual reassurance of future lives, what would he do with the knowledge first? Not torture or punish; he had no desire to cause pain or sorrow. Find lost treasure? Discover truths that had been turned into lies through history? Yes, all that in time, but the first thing he would-

The sound startled him, although he was expecting it, and he jerked forward in the chair. As much as he wanted to, he didn’t pick up on the first ring. He put the bookmark back in the book and closed it. Listening to the second ring, he took a satisfying breath. He’d waited for this for so long.

Lifting the receiver, he held it up to his ear.

“Yes?”

“It’s done,” said the man in heavily accented Italian.

“You’ll proceed to the next step?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

He was ready to hang up, but the man spoke quickly. “There’s something I should tell you.”

He braced himself.

“We had a small accident, and-”

“No. Not on the phone. Report it through your contact.” He hung up and stood.

People were fools. He’d explained a dozen times how important it was that nothing revealing be discussed over the phone. Anyone could be listening. Besides, it didn’t matter if there’d been a small accident. Accidents happened, didn’t they? What mattered was that the stones were almost in his possession, at last.