The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus

by Sean McLachlan

  “Of course it isn’t magic, you silly Englishman.”

  “Oh, you’ve finally stopped believing in magic?”

  “Europeans can’t do magic. That’s why they have so many machines.”

  “This isn’t a machine.”

  “Well, it’s not magic, so of course its a machine!”

  “Perhaps it would be best just to show you.”

  “Show me?”

  “I have an appointment I am most eager to break, and since I wanted to reward you anyway, I can kill two birds with one stone.”

  “We’re going to hunt birds? It’s night time, you silly Englishman!”

  “No, I’m going to take you to those moving pictures I told you about. I was supposed to meet Sir Thomas and Cordelia for drinks at the Windsor. A few broken engagements might cool her interest, and as I said you deserve it.”

  Faisal leaped in the air and spun around. Then he paused.

  “Is Moustafa coming?”

  “No, he went back home to Giza for the evening.”

  Good.

  The moving pictures were kept inside a big building on one of the main streets. Faisal felt nervous because there were a lot of Europeans and rich Egyptians on the street, plus a lot of fine shops that he wouldn’t dare go near if he were alone. When the Englishman went up to a little window next to the front door, he spoke in English to the man sitting behind it. The man behind the window was Egyptian, dressed in a fine red uniform with gold braiding, and he looked at Faisal with open contempt. Faisal was wearing his old jellaba because he had been begging earlier and you couldn’t do that in a new jellaba. His had planned to put on his new one to show off to Mina but he hadn’t changed yet.

  The man at the window said something back to the Englishman. Faisal didn’t understand his words, but he understood the meaning well enough.

  “Why do you want to bring someone like him in here? People like him don’t deserve moving pictures.”

  That’s what the man behind the window was saying.

  Faisal slumped his shoulders. He should have known they wouldn’t let him in.

  The Englishman started getting angry, and he kept repeating the name, “Russell Pasha.”

  That had an effect on the man behind the window. He took the Englishman’s money and gave him two little pieces of paper.

  The Englishman turned to Faisal. “We can go in.”

  Faisal still felt nervous, but not so nervous that he forgot to stick his tongue out at the man behind the window when the Englishman turned his back.

  At the door another man in an identical uniform took the pieces of paper and ripped them in half. Faisal groaned. So they had decided not to let them in after all! But then the Englishman motioned for him to enter. The Englishman didn’t seem worried at all that the man in the uniform had ripped up their papers. He sure was brave.

  As they passed through the door, Faisal stopped and stared. They had entered a big room with green carpet on the floor and pictures on the walls. One was of a man in a ship holding a sword. Another showed some men in big hats riding horses and carrying pistols. Another showed a man and woman who looked like they were about to kiss. The pictures all had big words above them and smaller ones below them. Some of the words were in the European language, while others he recognized as Arabic. He couldn’t read any of them, of course, but the pictures were interesting.

  He stared at the one with the men on horseback. They were European and rode through a desert. That must be one of the deserts in Europe. He stood in front of it for a minute.

  “When do they start to move?” Faisal asked.

  The Englishman motioned to a door at the end of the hall. “They move in here.”

  They entered a big room with long rows of chairs. At the front of the room hung a large white sheet, and below and to one side of the sheet stood a strange musical instrument from Europe called a piano. About half the seats were taken by a mixture of Europeans and Egyptians who dressed like Europeans. The Englishman and Faisal found a couple of seats near the front and sat. A European man sitting in the same row took one look at Faisal and moved to another seat further away.

  “Am I allowed to be here?” Faisal asked in a whisper.

  “You are because I say so.”

  Faisal grinned. The Englishman pointed behind them at a hole in the back wall with a funny machine in it. It had a big glass eye and some wheels behind it. An Egyptian man was fiddling with the wheels.

  “That’s the projector,” the Englishman explained. “That’s where the moving pictures come from.”

  “Then why are the seats all facing away from it? You Europeans always get everything backwards!”

  The Englishman smiled. “It makes the moving pictures appear on the screen in front of us.”

  Faisal scratched his head. That didn’t make sense, but the Europeans had machines that could fly and go under the water, so why not a machine that could turn a white sheet into a picture?

  “When does it start?” he asked, looking around.

  “Soon.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Soon. Sit still.”

  After a few minutes, with Faisal asking the Englishman several more times when it was going to start, an old European man sat down at the piano. The lights switched off and Faisal heard a strange rattling coming from the projector. Faisal jumped a little as the sheet suddenly lit up and the piano began to play.

  Some words in English appeared on the sheet. Faisal peeked back and saw the projector was shining a bright ray of light toward the sheet, like a really big lantern.

  “Eyes front,” the Englishman said.

  Faisal gasped as a picture appeared on the sheet. It showed the inside of a restaurant, all black and white like normal photographs but this one really did move just like the Englishman said it would!

  Faisal was surprised to see that the waiter in the restaurant was a European. Faisal had never heard of a European being a waiter before. He figured that even in Europe the waiters were Egyptian.

  He was a funny looking European, though. He had a little square moustache and a round hat too small for his head. He wore a sloppy shirt that hung out of his baggy pants and he waddled around the restaurant with his feet splayed out.

  The waiter cleared an empty table of dirty dishes, then waddled over to where a man was still eating and took his dish too. The diner started waving his hands in the air and shouting, but of course Faisal couldn’t hear him because even Europeans couldn’t make a picture talk. The funny waiter shrugged and dumped the old food from all the other plates onto the man’s plate.

  Faisal giggled. Then the waiter went into the restaurant’s basement where they had a bakery. There were Europeans working down there too. A man kneaded a huge bowl of dough and the waiter with the funny square moustache waddled over to help him. The two got in each other’s way and the baker kicked the funny waiter in the rear. Faisal laughed. The waiter kicked the baker back, and soon they started throwing big globs of dough at each other. The man at the piano picked up speed and the music kept time with the two Europeans running around throwing things at each other. Another baker came to stop the fight and they threw him in the bowl of dough.

  Faisal laughed and slapped the arm of his chair and drummed his feet on the floor. For once no one told him to be quiet. They couldn’t hear him anyway, because the whole audience was laughing—Egyptians, Europeans, everyone. Even the Englishman laughed from time to time, and he hardly ever laughed.

  Faisal laughed so long and hard his eyes teared up and his chest started to hurt. Just when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, the pictures stopped moving, the piano fell silent, and the lights came back on.

  Faisal wiped his eyes, still giggling. He remembered the fight with the dough and started laughing again. Then there was the time the man with the funny moustache dropped a sack of grain on the baker and squashed him. And the time the funny man got covered in dough and pushed his head up through it like a hippopot
amus rising out of the water. After a time, Faisal was able to control himself.

  “So what do you think?” the Englishman asked.

  “That was great!” Faisal sprang to his feet. “I have to go tell my friends.”

  “Don’t run off. There’s more.”

  “More?” Faisal couldn’t believe his luck.

  “Yes, the projectionist is only changing the reel.”

  Faisal had no idea what the Englishman had just said, but if he promised more, that was good enough. He sat back down.

  “So you liked it?” the Englishman asked.

  “Oh yes. It made me a bit sad, though.”

  “Sad? You were splitting your sides the entire time.”

  “I mean sad for Tariq ibn Nagy. Once everyone starts coming to these moving pictures, no one will want to look inside his box anymore.”

  “Hmm, I suppose you’re right.”

  “Cigarettes! Peanuts! Cigarettes! Peanuts!” A man in a dark red jellaba and matching tarboosh walked up the aisle, calling out his wares that he held in a big tray hanging from a strap around his neck. Augustus called him over.

  “Some peanuts for the boy.”

  Faisal grinned. “How did you know I was hungry?”

  “Because you’re always hungry.” The Englishman handed him a bag of peanuts.

  Faisal took the peanuts and looked at them. Then he looked at the Englishman, who was lighting a cigarette.

  “Eat up, Chief Mohammed,” the Englishman said.

  Faisal almost told him then. He almost told him about the little house he had made on the Englishman’s roof, and how he had hired himself as the Englishman’s bodyguard. He wanted to tell the Englishman that he didn’t really live alone like he thought he did but had someone protecting him from jinn and thieves and all the other dangers.

  But he sensed that to do so might be pushing his luck. Faisal didn’t get much luck, and it would be wise not to get greedy with it.

  “You got quiet all of a sudden,” the Englishman said.

  “I, um, I was wondering what happens next.”

  “More fun.”

  Faisal pushed his bag of peanuts toward the Englishman.

  “Want one?”

  “Thank you.”

  The piano player returned to his seat, the lights went down, and the projector came to life. The man with the little moustache appeared and caused more chaos in the bakery. Soon Faisal and the Englishman started laughing once more.

  Historical Note

  While the main characters and story in this novel are fiction, the historical background is as accurate as I could make it. The events of the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 unfolded as they are portrayed here, from the arrest of the independence leaders who were pressuring the British Empire to make good on its promises, to the mass protests and their bloody suppression. This was a key moment in modern Egyptian history and marks the beginnings of an effective independence movement, one that would see completion in the following generation.

  A couple of the minor characters are also real, such as Sir Thomas Russell Pasha, Commandant of the Cairo Police. His racist and arrogant attitudes toward the “natives” in my novel are sadly all too accurate. In fact, I think I might have gone a bit easy on him. His personal correspondence from this period makes for appalling reading.

  Another real figure is that of Heinrich Schäfer. I am glad to say he finally did finish his Principles of Egyptian Art which, while a weighty academic tome, is still one of the most thorough introductions to understanding the art of ancient Egypt almost a hundred years after it was written.

  Besides Schäfer’s Principles of Egyptian Art, two other excellent books that helped with researching this novel are, Grand Hotels of Egypt in the Golden Age of Travel and On the Nile in the Golden Age of Travel, both by Andrew Humphreys. I also relied on William Edward Lane’s classic study, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and the 1929 edition of the Baedeker’s Guide to Egypt and the Sudan.

  Marcus Simaika was an important leader in the Cairo’s Coptic community at this time. He founded the Coptic Museum, which still exists today. With the blessings of the Coptic Pope Cyril, he scoured the monasteries and churches of Egypt for old artifacts and manuscripts to add to the museum’s collection. Now, a hundred years later, the Coptic Museum is one of the most interesting sights in Cairo, with an impressive collection tracing the history of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. The Nilometer is another historic landmark and worth a trip to al-Rawdah island.

  The Apaches are real as well. This Parisian street gang started in the 1880s, taking their name from the famous Native American tribe that was still defying the United States government at that time. The Apache gang survived for more than a generation, committing a string of daring robberies that showed a mixture of bravery, panache, and brutality. Putting the chief of police of Paris in an Old Kingdom sarcophagus would have appealed to their anarchist sensibilities.

  The sarcophagus that mysteriously appears in Augustus’s showroom is based on one in the Cairo Museum. This Old Kingdom artifact has accession number 48078 if you wish to look it up in the Cairo Museum’s collections catalog. Several other artifacts described in the novel are part of the collection as well. One of the benefits of being a writer is that you get to wander around the Cairo Museum looking at ancient Egyptian art and call it “work”!

  The Charlie Chaplin film that so entertained Faisal is called Dough and Dynamite and came out in 1916. It was playing on my Egyptair flight as I went to Cairo to research this book. Thanks to the airline, I got to start my research early!

  Tariq ibn Nagy’s magical box is based on one I saw in the Ethnographic Museum in Cairo. In the days before movies became common, Egyptian children were thrilled to watch shows created with pictures and dolls illuminated by differently colored lights, narrated by expert storytellers who once entertained the public on street corners and cafés. Sadly, Faisal’s prediction that movies would put people like Tariq ibn Nagy out of business came true, and no storyteller with a magic box has entertained Cairo’s children for many years.

  The Ethnographic Museum is one of the overlooked delights of Cairo, filled with everyday items and costumes from Cairo’s past. In the toy section is the paper bird Faisal gives to Mina. If you want to see the museum, you’re in for a bit of work. Located just off Tahrir Square, the building complex where the Ethnographic Museum is located was turned into a police base after the famous protests of 2011. The museum remains open, but to get inside you have to show your passport, walk through a metal detector, sit for some time surrounded by burly policemen, and then get escorted to the museum by a cop carrying a machine gun. No one is going to rob the Ethnographic Museum of its treasures!

  Unless, of course, the Apaches return to Cairo. Or the jinn …

  About the Author

  Sean McLachlan worked for ten years as an archaeologist in Israel, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and the United States before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of numerous fiction and nonfiction books, which are listed on the following pages. When he’s not writing, he enjoys hiking, reading, traveling, and, most of all, teaching his son about the world. He divides his time between Madrid, Oxford, and Cairo.

  To find out more about Sean’s work and travels, visit him at his blog and feel free to friend him on Goodreads, Twitter, and Facebook.

  You might also enjoy his newsletter, Sean’s Travels and Tales, which comes out every one or two months. Each issue features a short story, a travel article, a coupon for a free or discounted book, and updates on future projects. You can subscribe using this link - http://eepurl.com/bJfiDn. Your email will not be shared with anyone else.

  Fiction by Sean McLachlan

  Tangier Bank Heist: An Interzone Mystery

  Right after the war, Tangier was the craziest town in North Africa. Everything was for sale and the price was cheap. The perverts came for the flesh. The addicts came for the drugs. A whole army of hustlers and grifters came for th
e loose laws and free flow of cash and contraband.

  So why was I here? Because it was the only place that would have me. Besides, it was a great place to be a detective. You got cases like in no other place I’d ever been, and I’d been all over. Cases you couldn’t believe ever happened. Like when I had to track down the guy who stole the bank.

  No, he didn’t rob the bank, he stole it.

  Here’s how it happened . . .

  Available in electronic edition! Print edition coming soon!

  The Case of the Purloined Pyramid

  (The Masked Man of Cairo Book One)

  An ancient mystery. A modern murder.

  Sir Augustus Wall, a horribly mutilated veteran of the Great War, has left Europe behind to open an antiquities shop in Cairo. But Europe’s troubles follow him as a priceless inscription is stolen and those who know its secrets start turning up dead. Teaming up with Egyptology expert Moustafa Ghani, and Faisal, an irritating street urchin he just can't shake, Sir Wall must unravel an ancient secret and face his own dark past.

  Available in electronic and print editions!

  The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus

  (The Masked Man of Cairo Book Two)

  An Old Kingdom coffin. A body from yesterday.

  Sir Augustus Wall had seen a lot of death. From the fields of Flanders to the alleys of Cairo, he’d solved several murders and sent many men to their grave. But he’s never had a body delivered to his antiquities shop encased in a 5,000 year-old coffin.

  Soon he finds himself fighting a vicious street gang bent on causing national mayhem while his assistant, Moustafa Ghani, faces his own enemies in the form of colonial powers determined to ruin him. Throughout all this runs the street urchin Faisal. Ignored as usual, dismissed as usual, he has the most important fight of all.

  Available in electronic edition! Print edition coming soon!

  Radio Hope (Toxic World Book One)