The Deceit

by Knox, Tom

  Harper quietly cussed himself. No need for self-pity. He liked his work, the charity and the teaching. He was lucky, in a way.

  ‘Two hundred and fifty years.’

  He was startled by another student answering. It was the cool one with the Italian heritage, Melini.

  ‘That’s the answer, isn’t it, Mr Harper? America has been a political reality, a nation, a country, almost two hundred and fifty years. Since 1776. Right?’

  Neale shook his head. ‘But the Pilgrim Fathers came in 1620, so that’s like, nearly four hundred. You could say America began then, no?’

  Lopez looked up from her smartphone. ‘Whoa! Racist much? You’re saying America has only existed since the first Caucasians were there? Since Columbus? Where, like, did the Navajo live in 1200, then, fracking limbo?’

  At least this was zesty, at least they were engaging; but the argument was going entirely the wrong way. Ryan raised a hand. ‘OK. Guys. Let’s say America has been a political entity, in the European sense, for about three hundred years. Can we agree on that? Well, from beginning to end, ancient Egypt lasted approximately –’ he paused, for effect – ‘ten times as long. Excluding more primitive cultures like the Badarian, the first true Egyptian civilisation began in 3200 BC.’

  ‘But half a billion mummies?’

  ‘I’m getting there! Remember, most ancient Egyptians would have sought some kind of mummification if they could, such was their obsession with making it to the afterlife. And of course mummification is not hard out here: the desert naturally mummifies bodies, it is so dry. That is probably, in fact, how the ritual began, in about 3200 BC, when the First Dynasty Egyptians realized that human corpses were curiously preserved by great aridity.’

  Lopez was toying with her phone again. Or maybe she was checking his sums. He fought the desire to compare her feisty beauty to his wife’s, or even his dead daughter – would she have looked like this? He banished the thought and continued, ‘You don’t need a calculator to do the equations. Let’s say Egyptians died at the rate of a hundred and fifty thousand a year, which is about right for a population of three million on average, with a life expectancy of twenty or so. Take a hundred and fifty thousand deaths a year and multiply it by more than three thousand years and you get … at least four hundred and fifty million dead. That is to say, half a billion mummies. Some estimates go even higher.’ He pointed at the western cliffs, behind which the sun was reluctantly declining. ‘Basically, when you walk on Egyptian soil, you are walking on the dust of the dead.’

  Lopez looked up. ‘Eww.’

  Harper laughed. ‘Yes. Maybe I won’t mention the way we have used human and animal mummies in the past: as fertiliser, medicine, machine oil, pigment and fuel.’

  ‘Medicine?’

  ‘OK, we’re done, guys.’ Harper liked to end the day with a question hanging in the air. Politely he dismissed the tiny study group, who seemed just a bit too keen to get back to their rented apartments and have a clandestine beer. But then he shrugged. So what? Good for them. They were young.

  Ryan’s walk home was agreeable in the cooling twilight: this was his favourite hour of the day. Boys played football under ragged, sun-bleached posters of a long-deposed president. Little girls skipped happily next to their mothers, carrying wicker shopping baskets way too big for their tiny hands; their mothers were shrouded entirely in black niqabs.

  And of course the old men with the white keffiyehs were smoking their shisha pipes outside the dusty tea-house. One or two raised a hand or an eyebrow in greeting, as Ryan keyed his latch. But then he saw an even more familiar face. It was Hassan, sitting outside on the terrace.

  Ryan waved hello. ‘Hassan. Ahlan! I’ll be down in a minute.’

  His apartment was welcomingly cool and dark. As he splashed water on his face, Ryan considered Hassan. Their revolving lives.

  There was a time when Hassan Elgammal had been Ryan’s assistant: a keen young student aiding the rising young American Egyptologist. Now, fifteen years later, Hassan was in charge of all Egyptian antiquities in the Abydos region, and he was therefore, by a distance, Ryan’s superior.

  Ryan didn’t much care about this inversion in their roles. Ambition had left him when his wife had died in childbirth. It had literally flown his soul, like the living spirit – the ka – that fled the corpse of an ancient Egyptian when they died. And when he had finally given up his Egyptological career altogether, and taken on the charity job, he had felt a sincere moral relief.

  His employers – the Abydos Project – were dedicated to saving Egyptian antiquities, such as the Abydos temple complex, from flooding and decay. This meant that Ryan spent his days giving something back to Egyptians, rather than always taking stuff away, as Westerners had done for centuries. That was a good feeling.

  And Ryan also enjoyed the sheer physical labour: he often spent entire days down there in the Oseirion with the Egyptian workers, rebuilding walls, shifting rubble, digging new drainage canals; toiling in the Egyptian sun, like a mindless slave building a pyramid. Then in the evening he quenched a mighty thirst with sweet hibiscus juice. And he slept soundly. And didn’t dream. And the days went by. And the years went by.

  Towelling his hands dry, Ryan descended the stairs, opened the door, and took a seat besides Hassan. His friend’s affable face was grave, yet also excited. ‘They found him, Ryan.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘A goatherd found the body yesterday. Your old tutor Sassoon. In the desert, north of Sohag.’

  Ryan blinked. Emotion surged.

  Hassan added, ‘And they say he was found with a bag. Of documents.’

  12

  Middle Egypt

  Ryan resisted the idea, at first.

  ‘What has it got to do with me?’ He shook his head. ‘I work for you guys now, I’m not an Egyptologist. That was a decade ago.’

  ‘Please.’ Hassan gently raised a hand in protest. ‘You have done enough here. At least take some proper time off, a month at least, three months better.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘When did you last have a holiday?’

  Ryan watched the café owner drop a glass of tea on their table. The smell of apple shisha hung in the frowzy air. ‘Six years ago.’

  Hassan smiled. ‘Exactly. This is too much: you have done Egypt great service. We owe you money! And really –’ another languid gesture – ‘are you going to spend the rest of your life carrying bricks, like a peasant? Is this all that is left? Sassoon was your great friend.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you know the rumours of what he found.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Everyone in Egyptology, anyone remotely connected to Egyptology, had heard or read these rumours. Ryan’s heart had secretly raced at the notion. The Sokar Hoard! And then, the absurd thought had occurred: what if he, Ryan Harper, found the Sokar Hoard once again, and deciphered it? Of course he had crushed this outbreak of ambition as soon as it was born; but here was his boss telling him to seize the moment.

  Again, Hassan smiled. His dark suit looked expensive on the terrace of the shabby Tetisheri tea-house; Ryan’s jeans were still covered in dust.

  ‘So. Ryan. Please will you go? I will make the arrangements. Give you letters. Holiday pay. Go now. Go and find the Hoard. Go and be an Egyptologist again.’

  ‘Hassan—’

  ‘This is an order! I am your boss, Ryan. Remember I can have you shot at dawn, under the temple of Nectanebo, if you disobey.’

  This was a joke, of course. But there was a steeliness in Hassan’s voice. And the sternness of the order was answered by a corresponding yearning in Ryan to obey. He wanted to go: maybe there was still a scientist inside him, despite the calluses on his hands and the sand in his sun-bleached hair.

  Hassan pressed his point. ‘There is no teaching work here any more. Maybe even the charity will have to close, because of the disturbances.’

  ‘Really?’

  Hassan frowned, heavily. ‘Really. It is
very bad, very bad …’ He sighed. ‘But at least I can help a friend come to his senses. Your dear wife would have wanted you to do this. To be the Ryan Harper she knew, once more. After ten years, I think, it is time. No?’

  The moment was tense. Ryan drank his tea, and said nothing, and watched the moon rise over the Temple of Seti. He remembered Rhiannon. Her fever, the last days, the terrifying and inundating sadness. Maybe it was time to let this go.

  The moon stared at him. Shocked at his decision. But the decision felt entirely right.

  He took leave of absence that very night, hastily packing a bag, then jogging straight to the teeming Abydos railway station.

  Time was strictly limited. Ryan was very aware that others would be on the trail. He had to get to Nazlet as quickly as possible. But quickly as possible was not an Egyptian state of mind.

  The ticket queue was full of sweating men in djellabas, all shouting angrily at the narrow-eyed man behind the cracked-glass reservations window. The man behind the glass was dispensing his tickets with a reluctant and painful slowness, as if they were his personal inheritance of Treasury bonds. Harper growled with impatience. They’d found the body of Victor Sassoon!

  Sassoon was his old tutor, his mentor, a man Harper had once admired and revered: the great Jewish scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the greatest men in his field. What had happened that he should be found dead, alone, in a cave? What could have driven him to do that? To walk into the wilderness, alone, two months ago? Poor Victor.

  It had to have been something extraordinary to invoke such a response. That meant the bag found with Sassoon’s body must contain the Sokar Hoard, the great cache: the cache Victor had illegally bought in his final days of life, or so the lurid rumours had it. Sassoon had, it seemed, read these documents, then killed himself. Or been murdered. Why? What had Sassoon retrieved at the White Monastery? What was in those texts?

  The mysteries were arousing, energizing, tantalizing. They pumped the blood in Harper’s heart. Hassan was right. All these years the keen and ambitious scientist in Ryan Harper hadn’t entirely gone away, but had merely slumbered. And now the long-buried Egyptologist was being resurrected.

  If Ryan could find the Sokar Hoard, then he would have done something with the scholarly skills he had disregarded for a decade. Something amazing.

  Did you hear about old Ryan Harper? Oh, he found the Sokar Hoard.

  Ryan Harper?

  ‘Effendi!’

  ‘Maljadeed!’

  The queue in front of him seemed to be getting longer as half of Abydos barged in. Harper resisted the urge to punch his way to the kiosk. But it was hard. Trying to buy a ticket in an Egyptian railway station was always a hassle – like trying to change nationality during a hurricane – and he knew he had to exercise patience. But he couldn’t exercise patience tonight of all nights. The next Sohag train – the last Sohag train of the day – was leaving in fifteen minutes.

  ‘La – ibqa!’

  ‘Jagal – almaderah – incheb!’

  What could he do instead? He crunched the equations, frantically. Perhaps he could hire a car and driver and just take the road? But no. That might be possible by day, but at night – not a chance. Security was tightening up and down the Nile; a Westerner in a cab without a very special permit would be immediately halted at the edge of town and summarily returned whence he came – that or detained and questioned. Or worse.

  No, a train was the only way to get to Sohag tonight. Then he could head on to Nazlet tomorrow. And he needed to get there tonight. Because, if the reports of Sassoon’s body being rediscovered had reached Abydos, then they would have reached elsewhere, too; and other people would have reached precisely the same conclusion.

  ‘Haiwan!’

  ‘La! La!’

  There were men apparently fighting at the front of the queue.

  Harper abandoned any hope of getting a ticket in time. Instead he reached in the zipped pocket of his fleecy climber’s jacket – the desert night was cool, even down here in southern Egypt – and pulled out a wad of US dollars. Baksheesh might just work where patience was exhausted. He had to try, or his quest would be finished before it began.

  Ryan sauntered over to the concrete arch that led onto the platforms. Like almost every official threshold in Egypt it was barred by an airport-style detector, a boxy doorway of metal: a detector that served no purpose as it wasn’t plugged in.

  But the security guard was real enough. He eyed Harper. ‘Men fethlek? Aiwa? Tick-et!’

  The voice was curt; this was far from promising. But Harper had no choice. Subtly as he could, he offered a twenty-buck note – a day’s wage – to the security guard, folded between his fingers.

  The guard glanced for a moment at the money, then clasped the cash with a practised grace, like a concierge at the Carlyle, and ushered Ryan through.

  He was on the platform. Now the train.

  There!

  The train was pulling out. Barging past some smoking soldiers, he reached for the receding metal handle, but it slipped from his grasp.

  Now the train was really grinding into life – and speeding up. He wasn’t going to make it; but this was the last train of the night so he had to make it! Breaking into a sprint, he jumped and tried again, and at the edge of his strength he grabbed the escaping handle, swung himself violently in through the open door, and with all the strength of a decade of carrying rocks, somehow tugged himself and his rucksack safely inside.

  He was in the train. He was in. He’d done it! There was an advantage to being a peasant who hodded mud bricks in the sun. It made you fit and strong.

  The Nileside express hooted merrily, as if in appreciation of Ryan’s gymnastic achievement. Then it accelerated out of Abydos, past a straggling Muslim cemetery, past the last neon-lit minarets, spearing the darkness, and then the cooler air told him he was inthe Nilotic countryside.

  For two hours he stood in the vestibule between the toilet and the broken carriage door, waiting, nervously, for the collector, dollars for baksheesh in hand. Yet the collector didn’t even show up.

  The chaos of Egypt could sometimes be beneficial.

  Only the tea-boy interrupted the rattling journey down the Nile valley, carrying a silver tray of little glasses as he patrolled the carriages, calling out, ‘Shay, shay, shay!’

  Harper bought a cup of black tea, heavily sugared.

  ‘Sefr, men fadlak …’

  Gratefully, he sank the tea, then chased it with mineral water, as he opened his notebook and examined the scribbled document that Hassan had given him before he’d departed Abydos. The name was written in Latin letters as well as Arabic:

  MOHAMMAD KHATTAB.

  The head of police in Nazlet, and a cousin of Hassan’s. The fact he was related to Hassan came as no surprise to Ryan. Everyone who ascended through the bureaucracy of provincial Egypt – from the police to the army to the civil service – did so because they were related in some complex manner to someone else.

  ‘Shukran.’ He handed the tea-glass back to the tea-boy, who had returned to collect the empties. The drained glasses chinked on their steel tray as the train switchbacked, closing in on Sohag. The boy steadied himself, and his tray, and pressed on.

  ‘Shay! Shay! Shay!’

  Harper looked at the note again. The rest of it was in Arabic, which he could barely read, even though he spoke it pretty well. But Harper knew the contents: Hassan had already explained. It told the director of the Nazlet police that Ryan was mightily important and a great friend of Egypt, and Hassan of Abydos would be lavishly grateful if any assistance could be offered to his VIP American acquaintance.

  Exactly what that assistance might be, how the hell he was going to get his hands on the Sokar documents, and how he was going to stop others from doing the same, Ryan did not know. But he was going to give it his best shot. His last shot. Late in the day, he’d been offered a break and he was going to take it. For his wife. For Victor. But mainly for
himself. After ten years of giving everything to Egypt, a little selfish ambition was excusable. Wasn’t it?

  The train hooted in the dark, and this was accompanied by the squeal of its brakes: the dusty yellow stain in the midnight sky confirmed that Sohag was near. He’d made it as quickly as he could in the circumstances. Would this be the crucial factor?

  Quite possibly. The body of his old tutor had only been discovered yesterday. Harper might just be the first person on the scene with a real sense of what treasures could be contained in the bag found on Sassoon’s body.

  A row of shuttered shops flickered under dirty streetlights. The train clattered, and then halted, with a juddering wrench.

  The station forecourt was chaotic. This time Ryan gave up any pretence at politeness and shunted his way through the mêlée. And as soon as he reached the street, he accepted the first offer of a cab – Jayed! – chucked his rucksack in the back seat, and sat in the front, like an Egyptian, alongside the driver.

  Another half a mile brought them to the biggest hotel in town: an ugly concrete tower that loomed over the elegant eternity of the Nile in a forbidding manner. As he checked in, Ryan wondered if Sassoon had stayed here, during his final nights alive on this earth.

  The night passed fitfully. Barges hooted on the Nile. His room smelled of toilet but the toilet smelled of woodsmoke. He tried to sleep but had bad dreams, for the first time in years. Dreams of his dead wife mixed with dreams of dogs, headless dogs, running down canal towpaths. Endless, sweaty, malarial dreams that made Ryan all too ready for morning: he rose before his alarm.

  As the first pink intimation of day tinted the horizon he was already dressed and hailing another taxi.

  The drive to Nazlet took several hours. By the time he reached the impossibly rural remoteness of the desolate town on the very edge of very serious desert, it was noon and fiercely hot. Dogs lay whimpering in the shade of the biblical palm trees.

  He had to find the police station.

  A handsome youth in a clean djellaba, riding a Japanese dirt-bike, was negotiating his way down the rutted road, avoiding heaps of camel dung. Ryan waved him over. The lad pulled up and stared, in blatant astonishment, at a Western face. Presumably Nazlet saw very few Euro-American visitors: maybe none. This was about as remote as settlements got on the frontiers of Middle and Upper Egypt.