The Deceit

by Knox, Tom

  ‘As this daughter lies down, yea, yea, Jesus Christ, Beth Betha, Yao Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloueiu—’

  Rothley pushed her head, he was pressing her into the crawlspace, into the dust and the darkness, under the floor. He was pushing on her body so she could fit under the floor; and now she was in, and he was putting the planks back over the space, and hammering nails, sealing the lid of her coffin, and as he did he called the words, still.

  ‘Gemas, Demas, Gemas, Demas.’

  Francoise trembled with fear and joy, she could not see anything except a few cracks of light; she was in her wooden tomb, and he was sealing it shut, and she was happy and all she could hear in the darkness, as she died, was his beautiful voice in the distance, the Jesus of Death, calling her, calling her …

  ‘God who has bound the heaven and has bound the earth, must bind the mouth of Francoise, that she may not be able to move her lips.’

  Francoise moved her lips, silently, repeating the words. It was nearly over now. The last nails were being driven in: she was in her womb of darkness. She fumbled to fill her mouth.

  ‘Lazarlai, Sabaoth, Eloim, take your daughter, bring her suffering, bind her silence, make her perfect. Zothooza, Thoitha, Zazzaoth, the saints of darkness, come at once, at once, at once. Amen.’

  24

  Dokki, Cairo, Egypt

  The Canadian soldier, Simon, twitched the curtains of their hotel room, gazing warily at the twilit street below. The cool of a January evening approached. His boss – leader – captain – whatever he was – called across.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nah. Quiet here. For the moment.’

  Callum nodded. ‘Good.’ He turned to face Ryan. ‘So, Harper, tell me again. Pretend I have the IQ of a spoon. Why can’t you just translate what you know, here and now, and tell us what the document says?’

  ‘Because …’ Ryan sighed, and looked at Helen, who sat on the bed drinking a Pepsi, her expression drawn, and unresponsive. Did he really have to go over this again? He’d already explained the problem three times, since they’d arrived in Cairo from Bubastis, ferried in Callum’s dusty four-wheel drive, before hunkering down here, in this anonymous hotel in this anonymous Cairo suburb.

  ‘You just want to film, don’t you?’ Callum pressed. ‘That’s why you want to actually go to these places, so you can make the movie, make money.’

  ‘Shakespeare wrote for money.’ Albert Hanna had returned from his trip to the bar in the lobby: he had fetched the drinks himself, as they didn’t want anyone to see the Sokar documents.

  Hanna sipped from his tumbler of Scotch, and continued. ‘It is quid pro quo, no? We have our motivation. And you have yours. You want to know what is in the papyrus. Ryan Harper is the one man who might be able to do it, now that poor Victor Sassoon has gone to the western hills. Therefore, let him do it his way. Because you need our help.’

  Ryan listened to the dialogue, impatiently. He still didn’t trust these ‘soldiers’; but the threat from the Israelis seemed clear enough. They had been kidnapped by Fate.

  Callum turned to Albert. ‘OK. Get it. Shakespeare wrote for cash. But Shakespeare didn’t have Mossad trying to shred his Coptic arse with clusterbombs.’

  ‘I’ve certainly never read that in the canonical biographies.’ Hanna moistened his lips with more Scotch. ‘Nonetheless the point is good, mon brave: if Ryan says he can’t decipher the papyrus without visiting the locales, then you surely have no choice. We must go.’

  ‘It’s like this,’ Ryan said, gesturing to the third sheet of the papyrus, ‘Macarius says here: “I went to Tell Amarna, the city of the Aten, and I saw the second something of Tutankhaten …” The something is illegible, or written in an even obscurer alphabet. What is he referring to – a stele maybe? Some column of hieroglyphs in a tomb? We need to go to Amarna and see. Look in the tombs.’

  Callum gazed at the walnut finish of his expensive pistol, which was lying on the coffee table next to the papyrus. The juxtaposition was significant. Ryan recognized the distinctive shape of the gun. A Korth. Very pricey – and very professional. Soldiers, definitely soldiers. Or mercenaries.

  ‘OK,’ Callum said. ‘OK. And this is just one example. Macarius does this several times, yeah?’

  Ryan nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. At Luxor. At Philae. Again and again. Indeed, this might be deliberate.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s possible he wrote the most significant remarks in code, or in some intractable alphabet which we have yet to crack, so that his deductions would be revealed only tothe initiated. Like here, see, there’s a passage in Greek – AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF – but it seems to make no sense at all. It is maybe some kind of riddle, or a spell, in code. It is deliberately obscure.’

  ‘Don’t get it.’

  Hanna sat in the largest chair, the tumbler of Scotch hanging from his hand. ‘Krafft-Ebing, the nineteenth-century German physician, wrote his groundbreaking work, Psychopathia Sexualis, in Latin so that the common reader wouldn’t be shocked by his accounts of men having sex with patent-leather boots. It is a leitmotif of literature: when the contents are very controversial or dangerous – encode.’

  ‘You’re saying the writer, whatsit, Macarius –’ Callum gestured at the document – ‘deliberately chose to be as obscure as possible because he didn’t want people to be able to easily follow his conclusions? So only a select few would be able to get what he was saying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s very annoying.’

  ‘Yes it is,’ Albert said. ‘But also tantalizing, and further indication that what we have here is a unique and maybe explosive document. Combustible!’

  Callum stood up, abruptly, and disappeared into the bathroom. For a few minutes the hotel room was silent, the only noise the faint murmur of the blond Brit talking on his mobile phone, apparently to some senior authority. This had already happened several times. Discreet phone calls, which produced a swift decision.

  Helen was still on the bed, cross-legged. Staring into space. Simon was at the window, anxiously alert and plucking at the curtain like a prurient neighbour.

  Callum returned, zipping his mobile into his jacket pocket.

  ‘All right,’ he said, sitting down. ‘We’ll do it your way. For now. There are some benefits: we keep moving. Less chance of us getting vaporized by a drone.’

  Hanna nodded. ‘Excellent decision.’

  Callum pressed the questions. ‘But where are we going? What’s the route?’

  Ryan sighed. He had a kind of plan: Cairo, then Amarna, and Luxor, then Aswan. North to South. Maybe. That seemed to be the path Macarius had taken, ascending to Upper Egypt, and the first Cataracts of the Nile. It made emotional sense, too: a journey along the Nile to its highest navigable reaches. But what exactly had Macarius seen, on that route?

  Ryan shrugged and admitted: ‘It’s not quite that simple. To say exactly where we are going, I mean.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, after Bubastis, the papyrus becomes even more obscure, verging on chaotic. It mentions baptism several times, and also Bastet, the cat goddess. Most of all, from this point on it mentions Moses. So we know he is important to the puzzle.’ He picked up his notebook and read: ‘Here Macarius cites the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote that Jews were a “detested race in Egypt”, because they were unclean, and they brought epidemics, and that’s why they were sent to the desert with Moses, and then on to Zion, where they instituted a new religion.’

  ‘OK. And?’

  ‘There are another half a dozen references to Moses on this page alone.’ Ryan laid a gentle finger on the document. ‘Here Macarius quotes the historian Manetho, who wrote an Egyptian chronicle under Ptolemy the Second. Manetho represented Moses as a rebellious Egyptian priest, and leader of a colony of lepers.’

  Hanna interrupted, ‘The idea that Moses was an Egyptian is not entirely startling, Freud made the same point; indeed Moses probably was Egyptian – the suffix mose i
s Egyptian, meaning son or child. As in Tutmose, the Pharaoh. Ptahmose. Rameses even. It is the same syllable.’

  ‘Acts Seven, Twenty-two.’ This time the interruption was Helen’s. She elaborated. ‘Moses is said to have been “versed in all the wisdom of Egypt”.’

  ‘So Moses is an Egyptian. Great.’ Callum sat forward, aggressive and taut. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Ryan confessed. ‘No one is sure. Historians argue to this day whether Moses even existed, or if there really was an Exodus of Jews from Egypt, in 2000 BC or 1500 BC or whenever. There is no archaeological evidence, though there is quite a lot of documentary evidence. But Macarius is clearly obsessed with the idea, and in particular with the idea that a new Jewish faith threatened the ancient Egyptian faith.’

  Finishing his Scotch, Hanna set the tumbler on the glass coffee table. The noise of glass on glass was jarring in the tense silence.

  Ryan mused, aloud, ‘You know, my guess is that Macarius must have first read some of the texts at the White Monastery in Sohag. Remember it was the greatest library in Egypt after the destruction of Alexandria, perhaps the greatest library in the world at that time. Therefore, something he found there must have inspired him, or troubled him enough that he undertook his journey. To find the real truth.’

  ‘Like us,’ said Helen.

  ‘Yes … I guess.’ Ryan was frustrated. Muscles taut. ‘But remember we only have some of the Sokar documents here. And we need to go to Luxor and Philae, and Amarna.’

  Callum raised a forceful hand. ‘Look. Just decide where we are going now. What’s our first stop?’

  Ryan looked closely at the papyrus. ‘According to Macarius, he says he next went to the place where “Moses was found”. He means the place by the Nile where the baby Moses in the basket was found by a Pharaoh’s daughter, somewhere in Lower Egypt, around here. He says this is the same place Jesus was washed as a baby, by the Virgin Mary, according to Coptic tradition. But I have no idea where: Coptic folklore isn’t my speciality.’

  ‘But it is mine,’ Hanna intervened, eyes glittering. ‘I know exactly where that is. Ben Ezra synagogue.’

  ‘The synagogue in Maadi? Coptic Cairo?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But that’s not by the river.’

  Hanna shook his head. ‘You forget, the Nile has retreated. The Romans built a watergate there, the so-called gate of Babylon: Coptic Cairo used to be on the riverbanks.’ He sat forward. ‘Coptic Cairo is one of the most lavishly historic quarters of the city, a walled city within the city dating back to ancient Egypt, when it was a suburb of ancient Memphis. More importantly, that little corner of Cairo has a remarkable plenitude of religious legends attached. There is a spring behind old Ben Ezra synagogue – itself inside the Coptic quarter – which is said to be simultaneously the place where baby Moses was found in his crib, where Jesus as a baby was baptized by his divine mother, during the Holy Family’s flight through Egypt, and where Jeremiah preached to the Jews. And it is also where the Virgin Mary took a ferry. I’ve no idea why. Perhaps she needed to do some shopping in Heliopolis? The point is, this place, this spring in particular, is intensely significant and it exudes mythology. Shall I continue?’

  ‘No.’

  Hanna smiled. ‘As you wish. But this is, without question, where we need to go. I suggest we do it at night.’

  ‘At night?’ Helen asked. ‘Will it not be closed? It is a walled area, as you said.’

  ‘The entire Coptic quarter has been shut for days.’ Hanna replied. ‘Because of the riots and troubles. The police are protecting it from our good neighbours theSalafists, who might otherwise be tempted to burn down the Hanging Church, and probably expectorate on the iconostasis.’

  ‘So if it’s shut down by the authorities,’ Callum said. ‘How the hell do we get in?’

  ‘I have a friend.’

  Ryan had expected this. Hanna had friends everywhere.

  Hanna explained. ‘But it will be dangerous. Less dangerous if we do it under cover of darkness – but dangerous nonetheless. But then, everything is dangerous now, is it not? The sons of Abraham might be drawing a bead on us this very minute.’

  Callum stood up. ‘We do it tonight. Midnight.’

  25

  Coptic Cairo

  A fine crescent moon rose above the tiny crucifix that adorned the dome of St Sergius. The symbolism was apt. Ryan stared around, sensing the danger. They were parked in a side street three minutes from the hushed white walls of Coptic Cairo.

  Despite the curfewed calm of these deserted streets – the disturbances were miles north – the place felt surrounded. Besieged and frightened in the darkness. And perhaps facing its final doom, after two thousand years of remarkable survival.

  Hanna pointed. ‘Here’s my contact.’

  Albert’s ‘friend’ was a Coptic youth of maybe fourteen or fifteen. The boy’s expression was mute and defensive – but he led them through the shadows to a decrepit wooden door, set low in the perimeter walls.

  ‘Hurry,’ said Callum. ‘Hurry up.’

  The boy fumbled nervily with an enormous set of keys. At last the door swung open and they slipped inside. Ryan stared around. The Coptic boy had brought them to a Christian graveyard behind the churches. Large marble angels stared at the crescent moon; columns and pilasters recessed down pathways; a faint scent of dead flowers perfumed the normal Cairo smells of sewage and pollution and cooking oil.

  Their protectors stopped inside the gate. Callum snapped an order: ‘You guys go. We’ll wait here. Do what you have to do. But do it quick.’

  Hunched low, Albert, Helen and Ryan followed the boy along a gravel path that slalomed between the tombs and mausoleum, to the old buildings of Coptic Cairo. Dead faces in monochrome photos, affixed to the more recent graves, stared at them in disappointment as they slunk past. Helen had her camera switched on, filming their progress. Ryan squinted ahead, trying to make out their direction. He’d been here once before, as a young man: he’d walked this labyrinth of ancient passages and cobbled lanes, bewildered but seduced; by night the ambience was more troubling.

  ‘Asre! Onzor!’

  The Coptic youth was beckoning them into the very deepest shadows, between two high old walls: presumably the walls of monasteries. The moonlight was just sufficient for them to follow his progress, beyond another corner, past a brace of grim and shuttered tourist shops, where a more modern church rose up abruptly. It had no doubt been erected on the footings of a previous church, which was built on a synagogue, which was built on a Roman temple of Mithras, which was built on an Egyptian temple of Isis …

  Ryan swooned a little in his thoughts as they approached this precipice of religious history, this vertiginous drop through time and faith. It was simultaneously marvellous and unnerving. Coptic Cairo was like an exposed fossil bed, showing the strata and the evolution: the fishes then the dinosaurs then the mammals. It gave him the same rhapsodic vertigo he’d felt in Saqqara, when he was happy, when he was a younger and better man, when his wife was pregnant, when they’d walked together in the sunset by the Djoser Pyramid, when they’d kissed—

  ‘Ryan!’

  It was Helen, grasping his shoulder.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m fine.’ But was he?

  ‘Let’s get this done.’

  They followed the boy once more until Albert pointed at a small but handsome stone building beyond a railing. ‘The synagogue of Ben Ezra.’

  The boy unlocked the railing; they crept quietly along the path and slipped inside the synagogue. Scratching a match into flame, the boy lit some candles, his hands shaking. Ryan picked up and carried his candle in its little candle-tray like a Victorian rector roused from sleep in his nightshirt.

  In the guttering candlelight he plodded the aisles, scrutinizing the bejewelled and evasive interior of Ben Ezra synagogue. The glow of his candle showed Ottoman carvings in cedarwood and marble, palmettos and lotus flowers, rich and sensuous a
nd distantly sad; the Jews of Cairo had gone, all the Jews of Egypt fled, making this more of a mausoleum than a living building.

  But why had Macarius come here?

  ‘Albert?’

  Hanna materialized from the shadows.

  ‘Albert, tell me, this place, the history, the synagogue.’

  ‘It is ninth century, but it is adapted from a church that is older, maybe eighth century.’

  ‘But our papyrus is probably sixth. So if he came here he didn’t see this.’

  Hanna nodded. ‘C’est vrai.’

  ‘Where is the spring, where Moses was found?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  The spring was behind the building. Outside, the candle in his hand guttered and died in a firm nocturnal breeze.

  Ryan stared down. The great and famous spring, the place on the Nile where Moses was found, where Jesus was washed, where Jeremiah preached – was now a gurgling manhole with an orange gardening hose coiled at the side, and plastic rubbish stuffed in the grille.

  Albert spoke. ‘You know … I believe there was an even earlier church here which was demolished, so the bulk of the, ah, most venerable antiquities, from that time, would now be found in the museum?’

  Ryan paused, and thought it through. This made sense. What should he do?

  Helen was inside the synagogue, still filming, but the lad was at the door, his face wrought with anxiety. Ryan brushed aside his own doubts, and asked the boy to open the museum door. He quailed visibly. Ryan insisted. The boy shook his head.

  Albert emerged like a genie from the gloom, flourishing a handful of dollars.

  In the silent movie of the moonlight, the boy’s smile was very white. ‘La moshkelah!’

  The museum was apparently barely three hundred metres away, at the ancient centre of Roman Cairo.