Last Message Read online

  “Monsieur Halliday?”

  The man nearly jumped out of his wet suit and into the sea.

  “Mon dieu!” he cried. “You-you terrify me!” He put his hand over his heart. Or at least I think that was where it was. The gray hair on his chest was so thick that it was hard to tell. A bear would have been proud of such a coat. But he wasn’t built like a bruin. He was as skinny as a rail and the hair on his head was at least as impressive—or unimpressive—as his chest hair. It hung down almost to his nipples and looked like it hadn’t been combed in decades, although he immediately began tying it up in a knot, as if suddenly ready for action.

  He seemed to instantly forget that I’d scared him. He beamed at me. “Américain, oui?”

  “Oui.”

  “But you, monsieur, are not like all the rest?”

  “I—”

  “You want to find le location du poet du ciel, oui? You want to be near him?”

  “The poet of the sky? Saint-Exupéry? Oui.”

  “Ah!” He stood for a long time and just smiled broadly at me. I felt very uncomfortable. Then he took me into his arms and hugged me and wouldn’t let go. It was hard to know what to do. His behavior seemed very inappropriate. And yet somehow I feared nothing from this guy. For one thing, he was about half a foot shorter than me. His arms and legs were like matchsticks. I could snap him in half, if need be.

  “Peace,” I heard him say quietly.

  But suddenly he came out of the hug and was all action, making frantic motions, crying out to the boy (“Johnny!”) to let some of the hose loose and turn on various things, to bring my wet suit to me so I could get into it and offering instructions that I could barely understand, three-quarters French and one-quarter English.

  But as soon as I was wedged tightly behind him in the submersible, and we were underwater, I forgot all his weird ways. Our surroundings were stunningly beautiful and crystal clear, like being inside Finding Nemo, on the world’s largest 3-D screen, 360 degrees around and many feet deep. Awesome, brightly colored fish swam by. Some stopped to gawk at us. Sea plants waved in the water. I was absolutely blown away. Leon would have fit in this little sub with us easily. He’d love this. But this was the sort of thing he’d never get to do. We plunged lower and lower, and I could feel pressure in my chest. Then we started to move farther out to sea.

  Monsieur Halliday was very kind to me that day. When we got to the area that was obviously the crash site—obvious only because he said “Voilà!” and turned a light on and began flashing it around on the sea floor—he spent a great deal of time there. We moved back and forth over that half-mile area many, many times.

  “Le tombe du St. Ex!” he cried out more than once as tears rolled down his cheeks. It was indeed moving, though I wasn’t about to cry.

  But unfortunately what was most moving about it was a sense of absence, the sense that all traces of the great man and his plane were gone. The divers and oceanographers had picked the sea floor clean. And rocks? There were acres of them, most covered with algae and barnacles. They all looked the same.

  I stared like an eagle at every rock that came into sight, hoping to see one that could be Grandpa’s, but it was obvious that I was literally looking for something even more elusive than a needle in a haystack. Floating among all of that beauty, privileged and lucky to be there, in the very spot where the creator of The Little Prince died—and deeply moved by it—I could feel my heart sink, lower than the very depths we were in. I finally let Halliday take us back up to shore.

  All the way home, he went on and on, half in French and half in English, about how impressed he was at my interest in St. Ex, how moved he was to have shown it to me, how remarkable it was that I didn’t seem to want to leave the site and had insisted on seeing every inch of the floor with the searchlight.

  We got out and stripped off our suits, young Johnny still not saying a single word. Mr. Halliday was reluctant to take the stack of Euros I offered him but, in the end, accepted them and hugged me tightly again, tears in his eyes, and kissed me four times on each cheek. I was about to say goodbye, when he mentioned something that stopped me cold.

  “I wish, monsieur, that you could have…plongé avec nous…uh, dived with us on that important day. I had…mes mains…my hands on the pieces of the plane itself. I was just a…assistant…mais…I touch the things St. Ex touch. I even give Johnny here a—how do I say it?—gift…from the plane.”

  “A gift?”

  “We could not, you know, keep anything from the plane itself, mais…I found a rock in the cockpit.”

  “A rock?”

  “Oui. I turned it over, and underneath it was, uh, remarkable. It was un couleur un peu bizarre—”

  “Bizarre? It was…it was a strange color?” My heart began to pound.

  “Oui. It must have smashed through the cockpit window of the plane when it crashed. So it was not part of the plane but it had been inside it. I thought that was special, especially le couleur bizarre, so I give it to Johnny.”

  My head snapped over to butt-crack boy. I must have given him a strange look, because he actually stepped away from me. What if this rock hadn’t smashed through the cockpit window from the outside when the plane struck the bottom of the sea? What if it was already in the cockpit, carried there by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry?

  “Did it say anything?” I asked.

  Halliday looked a little alarmed. “Say anything? Dit quelque chose? Monsieur, it was a rock.”

  “Was there anything written on it?”

  He appeared relieved. “Mon ami,” he chuckled, “what a strange thing to say! It came in through the window! It had many algae sur le surface, no? And barnacles? Johnny was two year old, maybe three, but I just thought he would like le couleur, et—”

  “I want to see it. Now!”

  ELEVEN

  MESSAGE FROM THE SEA

  I had to wait for them to pack up the submersible, and it just about drove me nuts. It must have taken an hour. I wanted to scream.

  While I paced around, I wrote a long email to Vanessa. I told her all about being under the Mediterranean Sea, the beauty down there, the romance of seeking St. Ex’s crash site and the building excitement of this assignment. Then I texted Shirley, but by then the submersible was almost on the truck. Going well, was all I had time to say.

  We made our way to the Halliday’s home out on a nearby point, at the end of a dirt road far away from everyone else but with a nearly 360-degree view of the water. Just the two of them lived there. There wasn’t any sign of a female resident, believe me. It was a ramshackle wooden place that looked as if Mr. Halliday had whacked it together with a hammer and nails. It was probably worth about one-tenth of his submersible. The living quarters were tiny and cluttered with dirty clothing and dirty dishes and filled with a horrible smell I couldn’t identify. I counted five dogs and nine cats, and they seemed to have the run of the place. Attached to the house at the back was a lab of some sort, about three or four times the size of the living area. I could see microscopes and sea plants and fish skeletons on lab tables; a lovely odor was emanating from there too. I kept my distance.

  “Johnny!” cried Halliday. “Show Monsieur Murphy le rock.” But Johnny was slouching along with his earbuds in, listening to a thrash metal band that was growling out French lyrics like the lead singer was Satan’s PR guy. It was so loud that I could almost make out every word. (Les Américains and diable came out clear as a bell.) Halliday had to rip the buds from his ears and repeat himself. Johnny didn’t look pleased.

  The boy reluctantly led me to his little room, not much bigger than a walk-in closet and even more cluttered than the living area. I wasn’t even sure where his bed was at first, because it was under mounds of clothes and toys and video games and other electronic equipment. Other than the posters on the walls (of a bunch of hard-core bands I’d never heard of), the only items that weren’t mixed into this rubble was a laptop that formed the peak of the mountain on his bed and a
large flat-screen TV on a shelf. It was blaring when we came in.

  He began rummaging around in the piles. And as he worked, he actually said something, the very first words he’d uttered since I’d met him, spitting it out under his breath in a sort of snarl. “Américain,” he hissed. Then he muttered, “Capitaliste!” It was a pretty strange thing for a kid his age to say.

  Finally, he found what he was looking for. I could tell because he suddenly stopped moving and stood up. His back was to me. I stiffened. Then my hands started to tingle.

  When he turned, he was holding a rock a little larger than a man’s fist. It was mostly covered in barnacles and algae, but part of one side, probably the side on which it had rested in the cockpit, was an unusual pink and purple color; it actually glowed.

  I reached for it.

  But he pulled it back.

  “Money,” he said. He pronounced the word with barely the trace of an accent. He rubbed the thumb of his left hand against his index finger and smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant grin.

  I took out a few Euros and handed them to him. He snorted but snatched them. I reached out again, but again he pulled the rock back.

  “Just to look,” he said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me, butt-head,” I snapped, then instantly prayed that he didn’t understand.

  He gave me a funny look but did not hand over the rock. “Money,” he said again.

  I gave him a few more Euros and ripped the rock from his hands.

  “Hey!” he cried.

  I pulled it away, thrilled to have it in my grasp, wondering if this indeed was the rock my grandfather had carved and given to the one-and-only Antoine de Saint-Exupéry!

  There wasn’t a single word carved onto the glowing part, not that I could see. And the rest was just a mass of hardened green growth. At first, I felt like throwing it through the kid’s window. But then I had an idea. I marched out of the room—butt-crack boy in pursuit, cursing me in French—and headed for the lab. Mr. Halliday put himself between his kid and me, and that allowed me to slip into the lab, find a screwdriver, sit down and get to work.

  My hosts were soon looking on, the father standing slightly in front of the son to keep him from interfering.

  I started on the side of the rock that needed the least amount of work, the side that was partially clear. The rest of this bottom part was only covered in algae—no barnacles. I scrubbed it clean with a cloth. What appeared was more of the glowing surface of the rock, shining purple and pink. But there were no words carved into it either. With a sigh, I turned the whole rock over. Maybe this thing was just what Halliday thought it was: a big unusual stone that had smashed through the window of the cockpit when the plane crashed to the ocean floor. Maybe it had zero connection to St. Ex and Grandpa.

  I began grinding the thick wall of barnacles off this side. I worked until I had chipped a hole in that wall. Then I actually gasped. I saw something carved into the rock at the bottom of the hole I had created. I began working frantically. Soon a little word emerged…friend.

  I held the rock up to my face, my hands shaking so much that I dropped it with a thud, almost cracking the lab table.

  Halliday picked it up and stared down into the opening I had scraped in the barnacles. “Mon dieu! ” he cried. Scurrying away, he found an electric tool of some sort—it was hard to tell exactly what it was—and began buzzing the rest of the barnacles off the rock. Once he’d sheared them almost to the surface, the two of us picked up screwdrivers again and carefully chipped off the last bits. Le Punk stood beside us, still peeved.

  Another tiny word emerged and then another. Soon there were fifteen.

  I have made him my friend and now he is unique in all the world.

  I stood there with that rock in my hands, my mouth wide open, just staring at it. Halliday was moved too. He put his hand on my shoulder. Though he likely knew it was a sentence from The Little Prince, he had no idea what it meant to me. All the same, he was stunned. It was as if this item had appeared by magic, out of the ocean and into the plane of the soul of France. He looked at me as if I were a messenger from God.

  I turned to the boy, emptied my pockets of Euros, which he took with glee, and walked out the door, still almost in a trance.

  “Monsieur!” cried Halliday at the door. “Where are you going?”

  “I have a letter to read,” I said.

  That made little sense to him, of course, but he nodded. A messenger from God can do and say what he wants.

  3

  TWELVE

  THE THIRD ENVELOPE

  The minute I got back to my hotel, I put the rock in the suitcase with the painting and opened the third envelope. It wasn’t as thick as the other two. This is what it said:

  Dear Adam,

  Wow! You have reached the third level! If I am in any way conscious right now and aware of what is going on down (or up!) on earth, I am certain that I am dancing in the air.

  I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Grandpa.

  You are ready for the most difficult task of all. Read this and make your choice. Do not feel compelled to try it. In fact, I am reluctant to ask you. There is danger involved.

  Here it is.

  The Noels were not, as I mentioned in the first letter, a literate family. But like so many people (or peoples) who do not write, they loved to tell stories, believed in legends and had many superstitions. I remember Yvette throwing a pinch of salt over her shoulder at every meal because she was certain it would help her and her husband live long lives. And when they had had a great deal of wine, their stories would become more and more fantastic. During the month I was with them, they told me tales—using gestures, drawings and what little French I could grasp—of ghosts and giants who, they claimed, used to roam southern France long ago; and of lions and rhinoceroses that, in their imaginations, were the French beasts of bygone days.

  They also liked to talk about caves. I understood from them that many other people in the region did as well. The area they lived in, and more exactly the land to the north and northwest, was very hilly and rocky, actually mountainous in places, and prehistoric passages ran into and through these elevations. Jean’s stories often started in such caves and told of ferocious men with superhuman powers emerging from them to do extraordinary things. Those men, he said, had the power to create wonderful art. They were, Provençal folklore insists, the world’s first artists. They drew fabulous depictions of themselves and of animals on the walls inside their mountains. Jean’s yarns sometimes started from that artwork—stories of incredible beings stepping out from the stone and coming to life.

  He said that several ancient caves with drawings had been found in the past half century. But he was fond of predicting that THE cave, the GREAT cave, had yet to be discovered. In it, the world would see history’s oldest art—and when modern people viewed it, they would be astonished. This work, he often said, would be magical. It would show the world the meaning of life. He insisted that this was not a dream—one day such a place would actually be uncovered. The discoverer would be a local person, because they can almost “smell” the caves.

  I, of course, took what Jean said on these subjects with a pinch of salt even more substantial than what Yvette used to fling over her shoulder. In other words, I didn’t believe him.

  But when I returned home, I decided to read a little about French caves and learned that much of what he had been trying to tell me was true. In the early twentieth century, several remarkable caves had been located in France, all with ancient drawings on their walls. Perhaps the greatest was the Lascaux Cave, stumbled upon in 1940, just four years before I ended up with the Noels. It was situated just a few hours northwest of Arles. But no respected writer, no scholar, ever said anything about the great cave that contains “the meaning of life.”

  Until 1994.

  I distinctly remember the day I picked up a copy of the New York Times and read of the groundbreaking discovery of a new cave in southern France th
at had the worldwide science community stunned. It had been found by three local people, one named Chauvet, who had been walking along the side of some cliffs in a semi-mountainous area. It was near Vallon-Pont-d’Arc on the Ardèche River. I looked it up on a map. It was about an hour from the Noel farm.

  And as I read more about it, it began to fill me with a longing to see it. I don’t know why, but I started to believe that it might, somehow, contain the meaning of life.

  Inside the cave, accessed through a tiny hole, were the oldest drawings ever made by human beings. Scientists believed that this cave had been sealed for more than 20,000 years! Their tests showed that some of the art was as old as 32,000 years! It was mind-boggling. On the walls were depictions of animals that had lived there, and among them were lions and rhinoceroses.

  Of course, I wanted to go there immediately. But several things held me back. First, stupidly, I was always too busy. Secondly, just as (or perhaps even more) stupidly, I didn’t want to return to that area, near the Noels and the one great shame of my life. And most importantly, I couldn’t get into the Chauvet even if I went there. The Lascaux Cave had been open to the public for many years, and as a consequence, some of its drawings had been damaged and in some cases destroyed. Over the decades, scientists determined that it was the presence of human beings and specifically their breath that had been the cause. So it was decided that the Chauvet Cave should not be accessible to the general public. Only select scientists and a few academics and historians would ever be allowed into it.

  No one, other than that handful of people, has ever seen the drawings inside that marvelous place.

  Here, Adam, is your task, the most difficult task of your adventure…an impossible one, I think.