In this chapel that he knew so well, saints and angels could have been forgiven for not recognizing him. He had always entered, composed, silent, like a man who expects nothing from anyone. But that night was different. The uneven breath, the eyes looking in every corner, the trembling lips.
That night, Thaddeus di Blumagia was missing something. And maybe it was the first time he felt incomplete.
Sixtine was gone.
He may not have believed it, he may have scolded himself for not knowing she would come here to see him, he may have blamed this world for preventing them from living normal lives, but she had left.
She had come to get him, but he was too late.
24
Florence woke up deeply, desperately, irreversibly happy. Maybe she would have been more so if Max had stayed in bed with her. His early morning departure and the intoxicating smell he had left on the blue sofa allowed her to indulge in a moment of daydreaming.
The night before had been the most beautiful night of her life. She had been in love with Max since the very first day and she was looking forward to spending every moment with him. If possible, all the ones he had left.
After an hour, after long imaginary dialogues in front of the bathroom mirror, it was time to face the day and the most urgent problem. The BBC. There were still three new messages on her answering machine, including one from Human Resources. The tactics of the ostrich, far from allowing it to be forgotten, were about to cause its loss.
It had to be accepted that the supposed tunnel under Cheops had been a bad track from the beginning, and she had nothing to give away about Nefertiti either.
She’d go back to White City empty-handed, and it was gonna be hell.
Perhaps driven by unconscious optimism, she scanned the Internet one last time to find an answer to her prayers, which, against all expectations, she found on Yahoo News.
Dr. Cheryl Wood-Smith, curator at the Metropolitan Museum in charge of Egyptian Antiquities, had resigned. His replacement, Dr. Victor Ricciardi, curator of Greek antiquities, took his place with immediate effect. Mr. Frederick Montecito, in a press release, discussed the reasons for this abrupt resignation.
“Nefertiti represents an immense scientific challenge for researchers; at the same time, it is writing an important chapter in the 150-year history of our museum. It was therefore of paramount importance that the curator in charge could focus all his energy on this task. Dr. Wood-Smith expressed her desire to be able to devote herself to her family life and found for herself at that very moment, the two were not compatible. We respect this difficult decision made by Dr. Wood-Smith and thank her for her service to our museum over the past ten years. We are delighted to welcome Dr. Ricciardi, a respected colleague, who will now lead an entire team’s efforts to uncover the secrets of Egypt’s greatest queen.”
Dr. Wood-Smith declined our interview requests. Some sources speculate on the role in this resignation of the assassinations of Dr. Al-Shamy and his assistant Nasser Moswen, still under mysterious conditions, that have deeply affected the world of archeology.
The museum management has also specified that this change of staff does not affect in any way the opening date of Nefertiti’s major exhibition scheduled for next summer. An event that, according to the buzz it already generates around the world, promises to break all attendance records.
Definitely, a lucky day!
New boss at the Met, new opportunity for an outcast. It took Florence less than thirty seconds to find the phone number of Dr. Ricciardi’s office, and she quickly dialed the number.
“Sorry, Miss Monet – ”
“It’s Mornay, actually. Like Vivant Mornay, one of the first archeologists in Greece. Dr. Ricciardi should know him. He’s my great-”
“The Museum’s management has decided in agreement with Dr. Ricciardi not to communicate with the media before Nefertiti’s exhibition next year. No exceptions will be made. Even for the descendants of Vivant Mornay.”
Florence hung up in a wave of anger.
Media blackout. Yet she needed information, any information, to appease the BBC.
She re-read the article from Archeology Magazine again, and somehow Florence found something wrong with it. Wood-Smith dropped the remains of Egypt’s greatest queen to play mother after saying working on Nefertiti was the best day of her life.
Florence remembered seeing Wood-Smith at an archeology conference a few years earlier. She was awkward, the kind to come out of the restroom with a piece of her shirt still stuck in her pants, her hair disheveled, able to get lost in the straight corridors of the conference center – but totally, desperately invested in her work. It was hard to imagine Wood-Smith taking children to school on time. Or in pajamas.
Florence went through her contact list on her smartphone. Many of them worked at the Met, maybe they could share a rumor heard around the coffee machine. But she changed her mind and smiled at the idea that suddenly popped into her mind. If she wanted a rumor from the Met’s corridors, it was her big competitor to call. Egyptology was a tiny world where everyone knew each other – but no one wanted to sink their own ship.
Only the enemy would be happy to do it.
“Boston Museum of Fine Arts, how can I help you?”
Florence asked for one of the archivists from the Egyptian Antiquities Department. They had been drinking cocktails a few years earlier, and, of course, had become friends on Facebook. After a few jokes to lighten the mood, the journalist got to the heart of the matter.
“I heard something, but it would be so bad to tell you.”
“Oh, great Lucifer, inspire me.”
“I hear that dear Mrs. Wood-Smith has been talking a little too much.”
“To Archeology Mag?”
“Yep.”
“But she didn’t say anything! I reread the article ten times, except for the scarab on the wrong side, there’s nothing that I can use.”
“But sometimes, my dear Florence, a little is enough. Remember the vodka tonic at WSPC.”
Florence pouted as she thought of the bender she preferred to forget. “No kidding, wouldn’t she have talked to someone else?”
“Look, I’m just reporting what I heard in the smoking room. But if I were you, I wouldn’t get too excited. You know how they are at the Met. They want to manage their communication properly. There’s a huge exhibition coming up next year, they don’t want to throw anything or anyone to the sharks like you until they’re ready.”
“Meanwhile, the shark is drinking from the cup.”
The archivist continued with another joke about her drinking and Florence had a little trouble getting rid of him. However, once she hung up the phone, she had to face the facts. She had nothing to throw at her own sharks.
Gayle and the BBC.
His optimism had faded. She also wondered why Max had left so early. Wouldn’t he have liked to relax for a while with her? Her gaze dragged around the room and stopped on Max’s laptop.
The satellite image!
If there was no tunnel left, even an old ancient road, as long as it was on the Giza plateau, it was worth its weight in gold, right?
She picked up her phone and called him. No answer. Why didn’t he ever answer his phone when she called him?
She tapped on the edge of the desk contemplating her next move. She convinced herself that he wouldn’t blame her for doing what she was about to do, and sat down in front of his laptop, switching it on.
Hours of investigation together in London had given away his password, and she accessed his files without any problems.
While searching for the satellite image, she found a file called CHAMBER X, which contained a video file called “passage.mov”. She clicked on Play, and discovered, from beginning to end, the passage Max claimed did not exist.
25
It was time to meet with Naya, and Max was bent over his sketchbook in the restaurant of a Western hotel a few blocks from the house Charles rented. He needed to t
hink, to isolate himself for a moment from the strangeness of Cairo, the dusty books, the Moroccan wines, the queen of diamonds, the woman with pink hair and the electric storms.
Instead, he focused on his drawings.
At his feet lay his bag, its contents of the utmost importance to Naya. Money and contacts in London, passports – everything Naya needed to start her new life in England with Spidey.
If he intended to keep the promise made to Sixtine, he made a point of it to honor the one he made to Naya.
Despite dozens of sketches of Giza’s plan containing the tunnel, after twisting the perspectives to imagine it from above, below, behind and beyond the pyramid, Max still couldn’t understand how Room X had been sealed by a wall, if it looked like the other open rooms. Or, if it was unique, how Seth and Sixtine ended up in a dead-end room.
The problems were the same as in the horizontal corridor of the Queen’s Chamber: a block of several tons could not be brought in to block an exit. It must have been here already. But where?
There was another thing he couldn’t understand and that was the night he had spent with Florence. What place did she have in his life, on this unexpected night?
He would have wanted to put her somewhere in a rational equation, but she would escape as soon as he tried to understand her. So he put that strange thrill in a corner of his mind with the other things that were going nowhere, like questions from that night, where he came from and where he was going in life, death, love, etc.
Florence’s kisses were so magical and intense they created a new category in Max’s head.
Beautiful and unexpected.
For now, he had to forget about last night.
He checked the time again on the television, set on CNN. It was time to find Naya. He had so many questions to ask her. He packed his things and was about to leave the restaurant when he saw the Twin Towers picture screen on September 11.
The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center fell one after the other, in a moment that defined a whole era.
Even ten years later, the image had not lost its emotion and horror. Suddenly, two words appeared in Max’s mind.
Gradual collapse.
Gradual collapse, or the technical term used by engineers and architects, describing, among other things, the structural destruction of the World Trade Center towers. This was the principle similar to the falling of a house of cards. A first element collapsed, adding pressure on a second element which in turn collapsed and so on.
Progressive collapse.
In a flash, Max saw the ring, the stone lintels, the particular dimensions of the hollow in the ground and the sand against the wall. He hurried back to his table and took out his notebook. The cork block was not in the corridor.
It was in the ceiling.
The pen sketched a simple mechanism at high speed, and Max bit his lip in concentration. The ring could be connected to a metal rod that passed through the entire ceiling block and the empty space above it. It was to end in a kind of bunghole or trapdoor that blocked another upper level filled with sand. As the ring was pulled, the sand flowed at varying speeds through the space above the block, adding pressure to the stone lintels that held it up. When the weight of the sand reached an optimal level, the lintels gave way under pressure and the entire block went right down into the trough of the ground, sealing the chamber in precise joints. The lintel debris was then invisible from the room or hallway, crushed under the block in the hollow.
Max’s mind worked at a thousand miles an hour, but when his cell phone rang, he briefly glanced at it. It was Florence, but he didn’t have the heart to talk to her, so he put his phone on silent mode and instantly forgot about it.
What he saw in his mind at the end of the tunnel was the block that had sealed room X. If Seth had been killed in front of the doorway, the evidence was now lying under four tons of limestone. How long did it take for the OR to get down? A few seconds, a few minutes? Perhaps he would never know. But the murderer had to know that. Someone had to know the mechanism in detail – otherwise anyone pulling the ring could be crushed on the spot.
An Egyptologist had to have this information, for sure.
An Egyptologist like Al-Shamy.
Or an elder, like Naya’s grandfather.
“Oh dear. Naya,” Max muttered and glanced at the time.
He was late.
A few moments later, with the modern city behind him, he walked along the dirt streets near the dump, crossed the camel market and its hay pyramids, then arrived on the banks of the Nile. Women washed clothes and others baked flat bread in makeshift ovens. Finally, behind ruined huts, almost hidden by the tall grasses, he saw the small mosque along the river.
Its pretty architecture of arabesques and light arches, its pastel colors revived by the palm trees and flowering trees that surrounded it, it looked like a small jewelry box forgotten among the gray and ocher landscape of Cairo’s houses. A stone pontoon went down a few steps into the water of the Nile.
His meeting spot with Naya.
He sat on one of the steps and waited. He was at least fifteen minutes late, but he found it odd that she was still not there. He checked his phone, but she had not left him any messages.
However, Max was in such a triumphant mood that he didn’t worry too much. He watched the Nile flow, the feluccas dragging the pollution of Cairo and the great sun of Egypt under their veil. He listened to the roar of the city, the breeze in the trees, the lapping of the water, the singing of women in the distance.
At one point, he listened to a song that came from behind the tall grass. It no longer seemed like a song, but a sad, haunting lament.
Max stood from the steps and crossed the small dock that ran along the entire mosque. The noise grew louder as he continued along the dock, and his heart pounded in his chest. The crying was so desperate that it got into Max’s head, soon to become unforgettable.
At the edge of the river was Spidey, soaked in water and mud, his face split with blows, hunched over a pile of clothes, swelled by the water.
As Max approached him, his eyes widened and he stared down in horror.
It wasn’t a pile of wet clothes Spidey was crying over.
It was Naya’s lifeless body.
III
26
In the last thirty minutes, Florence had tried to call Max twenty-three times, to no avail.
She paced around the library like a lion in a cage, her heart on the edge of her lips, tears just behind her eyes. The video of the passage wasn’t the only one she had watched. There was also another one.
“Sixtine.mov”.
Max, her friend, her love, her Max, the one who was perfect, had lied to her.
Florence couldn’t believe her eyes when Sixtine was none other than Jessica Pryce.
Max had discovered the tunnel.
He knew Jessica Pryce.
He was in love with her.
This girl didn’t seem to understand all the love in Max’s words, Florence did. She had been dreaming of hearing those words since the day she met Max.
The problem was that he said them to her in his kisses, but he was telling them to someone else.
She was angry, heartbroken and in denial, refusing to believe what she had seen or heard, but it was right there in front of her. Her whole body, even in its smallest movements, carried the weight of this cruel fate. She would go through the “why” without ever finding an answer. And what an irony! Despite this immense pain, she couldn’t hate Max!
Worst of all, her love for him, despite his betrayal, seemed to be growing, even drunk with bitterness. For a moment, Florence found consolation in Max’s farewell with Sixtine, but the feeling was fleeting. The mere presence of such a lie at the heart of their relationship made everything fall apart. In the seconds that followed, she recalled how she too had failed to say that she had promised the BBC the images of the tunnel. But it was such a small lie! For his career! It didn’t matter!
But loving s
omeone else was huge.
Unforgivable.
After an hour, exhausted by this vertigo of questions and waiting for a call from Max which was not coming, Florence had crawled under her duvet and hid herself from everything.
Her father knocked on her room door, she called out that she was staying in bed. After a while, she heard him leave the house, but she stayed exactly where she was. She stared at the discolored ceiling moldings in silence and felt miserable. Then finally – after how long? An hour, a century? – she climbed out of bed and walked over to Max’s laptop, her jaw clenched.
Within minutes, she had successfully copied the “passage.mov” file on her computer and extracting a 30-second sequence in minimum quality. She also found the satellite image, of which she also made a copy.
Then without stopping, she wrote an email.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]
Subject: Re. URGENT: Nefertiti
Gayle,
Media blackout on Nefertiti show, but patience. Wood-Smith’s resignation fishy, got juicy gossip from the Boston Fine Arts Museum. I’m on it.
And I wasn’t bluffing about the tunnel under Cheops.
Here’s a little preview. Enjoy.
Florence
ATTACHMENTS: “passage30sec.mov”, “satellite.pdf”.
27
Max’s chest tightened, his arms dropped down to his sides and his knees buckled. He sank down onto the spongy ground near the water. He saw Naya’s face, her chin tilted up to the sky, raised eyebrows, mouth ajar. Her skin looked like porcelain, as if an artist had frozen her as she escaped to higher horizons. Grass tufts were tangled in her hair that wavered in the current, and braided a crown around her. Naya seemed so serene, as if she was whispering to Max, “Don’t be afraid,” but Max’s fear turned into even greater despair and anger than that found in the collapsed tunnel.
Sixtine- The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 41