Sphinx

by T. S. Learner

  I breathed a sigh of relief, then returned to my search, more desperate now. I knew he must have carbon-dated the device in the laboratory, but where could he have hidden it?

  Further along the bench a Pyrex beaker was suspended over a Bunsen burner. I lifted the beaker and sniffed - inside were tiny charred fragments of charcoal. Apart from the flakes of wood on the file and a tiny amount of dark dust - ground wood, I assumed - in the mortar, there was no sign of the astrarium or its wooden case. Ten minutes later, I had to give up, my heart heavy in my chest. Whoever had killed Barry now had the astrarium, the artefact that Isabella and Barry had died for and had given into my trust.

  After making sure the front-door lock clicked behind me, I walked down to Madame Tibishrani’s apartment. She answered my knock with rosary beads clutched between her fingers.

  ‘Well, did you make your peace?’ she asked me.

  ‘Not entirely. Has there been a funeral yet?’

  ‘Mon Dieu, I wish. But no, the poor man is still in the city morgue. They are waiting for the Australian consul, apparently - there is a small problem locating Barry’s nearest living relative. Although there has been no problem with living ex-wives. Apparently, all three have been informed of his death, and all are claiming that they are still married to him. Barry was such a romantic.’ I left hastily before the landlady began weeping again.

  The nearest working phone line I knew of was at the Alexandrian Oil Company office. I went straight there. After practising my Australian accent, I rang the central police station and told them that I was a relative of Barry’s ringing from Australia and that I was after further details of the circumstances of his death. The officer investigating the case told me politely but firmly that as drugs had been found in Barry’s body, they had dismissed the case as accidental suicide, a drug overdose, but his body was still in the morgue awaiting collection. Apparently, one of his long-lost wives had claimed the body but hadn’t yet shown up. When I asked about the ransacking of the apartment, the officer laughed and told me that drug addicts were known for their wild parties. As I put the telephone down I had the distinct impression someone had provided the financial incentive for the investigation to be closed down prematurely. Were Barry’s killers part of a bigger and more powerful network than I imagined? The idea set a chill running down my spine. Egypt was not a place where you’d want to be up against the authorities. Nonetheless, I decided to visit the morgue to see if I could find out more about Isabella’s missing organs, but also to try and catch a glimpse of Barry’s corpse. Maybe there’d be a clue or a hint. And at least it would give me a chance to say goodbye.

  11

  The morgue was located to the west of the city, in the old Turkish quarter. On the way there I’d almost been sure that the taxi I was travelling in was being followed, but just when I was about to tell my driver to take a deliberately confusing detour, the small red Fiat trailing us had peeled off into another laneway, disappearing from sight. I arrived at the grand nineteenth-century building trying to convince myself that my fear wasn’t real, that I’d begun to slip into paranoia. It wasn’t working.

  At the sweeping marble reception desk I asked to speak to Demetriou al-Masri, the coroner who had approached me at Isabella’s funeral. The sour-faced man behind the desk told me with ill-concealed relish that Wednesday was Mr al-Masri’s day off and that I should come back tomorrow. Quietly I explained that I was here to see the body of a dear friend. The thirty Egyptian dollars offered under the table seemed to soften his attitude. He called over a youth lounging against a wall and instructed him to take me to ‘the European’.

  The room was freezing. The sound of a generator battling to maintain the sub-zero temperature filled the room, adding to the sensation that I was now standing in a strange antechamber that had some unspeakable ritualistic function. A chemical smell of embalming fluid pricked at my nostrils and sent vague fingers of fear fluttering across the back of my scalp. This was where the new guests were kept, the youth informed me, grinning: the drowned, victims of road accidents, or beggars found curled up in doorways. Each corpse had its own plinth of marble, and one could make a guess at the age and shape of them from the silhouettes of the bodies that were all covered by grimy white sheets; I couldn’t help wondering if Isabella’s corpse had lain on one of them. Irrationally, I found myself imagining how cold the marble must have been against her skin, and how if I’d been there I could have swept her up in my arms and wrapped a blanket around her to warm her.

  The mortuary attendant pulled the sheet off Barry’s corpse. The mane of tangled hair made him look like some majestic statue of Neptune in repose, the white-grey pallor turning his flesh to alabaster. The eyes were open and filmed with a whitish-blue sheen, his chin was unshaven, his cheeks sucked back to the skull in death. In his chest was a huge T-shaped wound - a crude incision that ran from his belly button up to the centre of the collarbone, as if they’d peeled back the chest cavity - roughly stitched with black thread. I assumed they had carried out an autopsy to confirm the cause of death. To see him so still was shocking. Leaning across, I closed his eyes.

  The attendant, noticing my emotional reaction, nodded respectfully and left to have a cigarette in the corridor.

  The refrigerated air sank into my bones. I shivered, then glanced down at Barry’s feet; they were bony, the veins a topography of congealed life stopped mid-pulse. I looked back at his huge barrel chest and the skin below it that hung grey and slack. I kneeled, retching.

  Mastering my revulsion, I stood and examined his body for signs that might illuminate the real cause of death. I lifted his beard: under the tangled mass of grey and blond hair was a thin purple bruise. My breath caught in my throat. I’d seen this once before in Nigeria, on the body of a field worker left propped up on a fence around a well - murdered as a warning to the oil company I was contracted to at the time. Barry had been garrotted. I glanced at his arm and the puncture mark left by a needle - the stigmata of the addict. Whoever had killed him had injected him with heroin after his death to make it look like an overdose. My guess was that they had tortured him to find out where he’d hidden the astrarium. Maybe they hadn’t meant to kill him, but he’d died anyway.

  I was furious. ‘You were never a junkie and you did not commit suicide.’ My angry voice bounced off the shiny white tiles.

  Tenderly, I tucked Barry’s arm up against his body. As I did so I noticed a greenish-blue colour staining his fingernails and fingertips. I knew that colour - I’d seen it underwater, during dives. Algae.

  It took an hour to get back to Barry’s apartment through the traffic along the Sharia Saad Zaghloul. As the cab sat there, sandwiched between an open truck full of exhausted-looking soldiers and an hantour, I felt someone’s stare burning through the window. I turned and met the gaze of a man sitting at a table outside a café. I reeled back in shock when I recognised the scarred face of Omar, the supposed official who had accompanied us on the dive for the astrarium. The sight of him transported me instantly back to the boat and, momentarily, I was paralysed by a surge of grief. I stared at him, unable to look away.

  The truck in front of us accelerated and my driver was quick to follow suit. We swung into a side lane and away from Omar. Relieved, I promised the driver triple the fare if he went as fast as he could. We reached the Corniche fifteen minutes later.

  I raced back up to Madame Tibishrani’s floor and persuaded her to lend me the keys for one last time. Moments later I was inside Barry’s apartment.

  I pressed my face up against the fish tank, the cool glass humming under my skin. On the bottom stood a kitsch statue of Jesus, his feet buried in gravel and his painted eyes turned beatifically towards heaven. He was framed by a stream of silvery bubbles that bounced up behind him through a pump concealed in a plastic treasure chest. Next to this little ensemble was a Richard Nixon doll entwined with a plastic mermaid who appeared to be fellating him - a classic example of Barry’s deeply irreverent humour. Then I not
iced what I hadn’t seen before: the metal edge of something half-buried at the back of the slope of gravel. An angel fish, fins rippling like the wings of a hummingbird, swam down and began nibbling at some algae growing on the edge of the object. I immediately recognised the colour of the algae from Barry’s fingertips. I peered closer. Between the waving waterweed and the bubbles of the air pumps, part of a smallish box was visible, about the size of an eighteenth-century mantelpiece clock. Despite a thin layer of algae, I could see the serrated edges of two discs. So that was why Barry’s killer, or indeed myself, hadn’t found it. It looked as if it had been in the aquarium for months, indiscernible from the other marine ornaments.

  Transfixed, I switched on a reading lamp and hauled it over to the tank, pointing the light directly at the object. Instantly, thin lines of glittering bronze were illuminated - a tiny inscription written across one of the discs.

  ‘Barry, you clever bastard,’ I announced. I turned to make sure that all the blinds were pulled down, then plunged my hands into the tank.

  Back at the villa, I asked Ibrihim to bolt the front gate, then stood quietly in the shadow of the gates for a moment, waiting to see if I’d been followed. I was both nervous and excited, weak from the adrenalin surge I’d experienced in Barry’s apartment. The weight of the astrarium in the rucksack across my back felt ridiculously light for an object of such extraordinary impact and although the drive back had been uneventful I’d been edgy, feeling myself watched from every corner. The quiet residential road we lived on appeared empty except for a thin Arab youth who was lounging against the wall of the villa opposite, staring blankly across at us. I was just about to confront him when Ibrihim pulled me back. Apparently, he was the mentally handicapped son of a local gardener.

  I took the astrarium up to my bedroom again - it seemed the safest and most private place in the villa. Even then I found myself bolting the bedroom door. I pulled the blinds down. I lifted the device out of the backpack and sat down, drinking in the sudden silence. I’d been determined to be neither fearful nor too reverent. I failed miserably. Out of its container the astrarium was far smaller and more innocuous-looking than I’d imagined - dirty and sodden, it certainly didn’t look like the powerful weapon that Isabella and Faakhir had described. But there was an undeniable mystery about it and, because Isabella had talked about this the day we’d met, I almost felt that it brought some of her presence back to me. This was hers, in life and in death.

  As Barry had said, the metal resembled an alloy - bronzy in colour but slightly grainy and sparkling, almost as if it had been mixed with diamonds or something flinty. It reminded me of one of the rare-earth metals. Intrigued by the way it glinted in the lamplight I couldn’t help myself. Holding my breath, I ran my finger across the surface, focusing on the silvery, slightly coarse texture. I had seen a metal like this before - samarium, which had strong magnetic properties, particularly when combined with cobalt. As such metals were hard to mine for - even today - I couldn’t imagine how the Ancient Egyptians would have had the technology, never mind the expertise, to refine such ores. Still, I knew they had been fascinated by metallurgy. Isabella once told me that the Ancient Egyptians believed the natural chemical changes in such metals to be so magical that through them a lowborn fellah’s destiny could be transformed into that of the most powerful pharaoh - a kind of ancient alchemy. I’d found this idea intriguing, particularly when I discovered that they had developed a use for magnetic iron ore derived from meteorites and tektite glass in their ritual instruments and had considered such iron ores to be sacred. Could the astrarium be made from a similar metal? My study was interrupted by a flurry of shouting outside. Throwing a scarf over the device I rushed to the window and peered down through the shutters. Outside, Ibrihim appeared to be arguing with the man who delivered our heating oil. I listened intently; they were fighting over a bill. I dropped the shutter and returned to the desk, my heart still thumping from fear.

  When I examined the astrarium more closely, it appeared to be a series of cogs built around three main discs, their faces visible through a peephole in the top of the box. There was a main pivotal rod that provided the central axis for the cogs and discs, finishing in what looked like a keyhole at the front. Presumably, one inserted a key or some similar device to start up the mechanism. There were inscriptions in various languages engraved on both the discs and on the body of the astrarium itself; some in hieroglyphs, the others I did not recognise. But the whole appearance of the instrument seemed familiar to me. Fear, and the trepidation of the explorer - the same feeling I got when solving a particularly complicated piece of geological substructure - had began to creep up from the base of my spine.

  I suddenly remembered Gareth’s drawing of the astrarium and ran to Isabella’s desk to search for it. I found it and placed it next to the device. It was uncanny how closely they resembled one another, except that the actual device was larger and more complex than they had envisaged. I looked at the cipher written at the bottom of the drawing, then peered again at the inscriptions on the astrarium. With a shock, I realised that the first two symbols of the hieroglyphic inscription matched Gareth’s lettering. Excitement rushed through me and I caught my breath; I had never really believed it but Isabella had been right. This was it. This was the actual astrarium she had been searching for all those years.

  Two small balls - one gold, the other darkened silver - jutted out from behind one of the discs: the Sun and the Moon, I guessed. There were five other smaller copper balls - probably the five planets visible to the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. It reminded me of a miniature orrery. It was almost inconceivable to think it might be more than two thousand years old. I peered into the central chamber, where, with the aid of a torch, I could just about make out the two magnets that Barry had mentioned. Each sat on its own axis. What would it take to set them into motion?

  I returned to Isabella’s desk. The ghost of her presence hung in the air. I remembered her sitting there in the lamplight that last night, pensive as she studied the illustration of the astrarium, her long fingers trailing along the edge of the paper. For a moment I allowed myself to remember the scene, seeing her again, naked, her hair spilling down her back. It felt inconceivable that I would never be with her again, and yet here in my hand was the one thing she’d been searching for, the ultimate achievement that she had died for. I stared down at her desk, lost in thought. Then, my thoughts suspended in the stilled air, I remembered something else. That small gesture, almost invisible, the slipping of something under the ink blotter. I broke open the desk lock. Atop a pile of papers sat an envelope, my name written on it in Isabella’s distinctively neat hand. Staring down, grief clutched at my chest. I fell back into the chair, waiting for it to pass.

  I propped the envelope up against the lamp stand, stalling the moment of opening it and glancing at the papers it had been lying on. On top of the pile was a yellowed document with the title Nectanebo’s Priestess and the Pharaoh’s Ba. The author was Amelia Lynhurst. This had to be the thesis that Isabella had told me about, the one that had finally discredited the Egyptologist.

  I forced myself to look back at the sealed envelope that had my name on the front. Why hadn’t Isabella trusted me more? Why had she held back about the significance of the astrarium, the danger involved in finding it? She’d trusted Faakhir with the truth but not me. Had I been so unapproachable, so cynical, so disbelieving?

  Resolved to face whatever she had to say to me from beyond the grave, I opened the envelope quickly. Under my fingertips the expensive notepaper felt like silk, like her skin. A trace of her distinctive scent - a mixture of musk and jasmine - was faintly discernible. Closing my eyes, it was easy to imagine her heavy hair brushing across the paper, leaving its own olfactory signature.

  13th May 1977

  Alexandria

  Oliver, forgive me, I’ve never been completely honest with you. All those years ago, Ahmos Khafre did not only tell me my death
date; he also told me I might have been able to save my own life if I discovered the astrarium in time.

  My love, there are people I know who will guide you. But the astrarium has a mind of its own. It will lead you to them, if you let it. As I write I hear your voice chastising me for such superstitious beliefs, but the world I grew up in had no borders between magic and myth, the living gods and the dead. Through them I have been a witness, and through you I thought I would escape them. I will always love you.

  Isabella

  ‘Don’t you dare try to give meaning to a pointless death, Isabella!’ I shouted, swept up by sudden rage. ‘No one could have predicted that earth tremor. No one! Not even me!’

  I punched the cushion on the chair, anger and frustration pounding through me, and the fabric ripped, sending feathers flying up into the air. They floated back down to the floor like lazy snow, covering the envelope at my feet.

  The call to afternoon prayer sounded: haunting and melodious. Time was passing. I walked over to the balcony window. Below I could see a gardener pruning a magnolia tree. The simple intent of his gestures seemed so real against the extraordinary events that had begun to shape my choices. Yes, I was intrigued, but rational instincts told me to stay away. And yet, there was Isabella, her hands outstretched, asking me to carry on. I worried that she had never confided fully in me because she feared I wouldn’t have believed her. If I had been less scornful of her ‘voodoo’, taken her seriously, could I have saved her? This would be my way of pursuing Isabella’s quest and, in some ways, absolving myself of the guilt that I now felt about not supporting her in the past. Out of nowhere the image of Barry’s clouded eyes appeared like a warning. Determined to jolt myself out of a sense of growing dread I opened the doors and shutters and shouted down to Ibrihim, instructing him to bring me some lunch. Then I picked up Amelia Lynhurst’s thesis.