by Will Adams
BACK AT AUGUSTIN’S APARTMENT, Knox sat on the couch and tried to kill time. It wasn’t easy. Tintin was bad enough once. He paced around the sitting room, went out onto the balcony. It seemed forever before the sun set. And still no sign of Augustin. The phone rang at seven thirty, but Knox dared not answer, letting the answering machine chug out its message. “It’s me,” shouted Augustin, loud music thumping in the background along with raucous laughter and the clinking of glasses and bottles. “Pick up, will you.”
Knox did so. “Where the hell are you? You said you’d be back hours ago.”
“Listen, my friend,” replied Augustin. “A difficult situation at work.”
“Work?” asked Knox dryly.
“I need you to call that photographer girl for me. Gaille Dumas. The one from the Vicomte. Explain to her that I’m in the middle of a crisis; I’m putting out fires.”
“She’s in town all on her own,” protested Knox. “You can’t stand her up.”
“Exactly,” agreed Augustin. “That’s why I need you to do it for me. After all, if she hears this noise, maybe she’ll wonder if I’m telling her the complete truth.”
“Why don’t you ask her to join you?”
“I have plans. You know that Beatrice I mentioned?”
“For Christ’s sake! Do your own dirty work.”
“I’m asking as a friend, Daniel. How was it you put it? Yes. I’m in trouble. I need help.”
“Okay,” sighed Knox. “Leave it to me.”
“Thanks.”
“And good luck with your crisis,” said Knox venomously. He picked up the phone directory and flipped through it for the Vicomte Hotel. He felt bad for the girl, and vicariously guilty. He was puritanical about such things, he supposed. When you asked a girl out, particularly one who so evidently hankered for company, you showed up. The shadow of a long evening stretched out ahead of him. No one to talk to, nothing to read, nothing to watch on TV. Sod it, he thought. Sod Hassan and his thugs. He needed to stay hidden, but Alexandria was a vast city, and its streets offered the cover of crowds. He went into Augustin’s room for a clean shirt and a baseball cap. Then he went down to the street and hailed a cab.
IBRAHIM COULDN’T GET COMFORTABLE at home that evening. His upper arm itched from where the nurse had taken blood for his HLA test, and he kept thinking of that poor girl’s wide brown eyes. He kept thinking of her predicament, her courage. In the end, he couldn’t sit at home anymore. He went through to his study and plucked a book down from the shelves, one from which his father had read to him as a child. Then he went out to his car.
Mohammed’s apartment was on the ninth floor, but the elevators were broken. When Ibrahim finally made it up the stairs, he had to put his hands on his knees a minute, and wheezed for breath. What an effort it must be with an invalid child! It made him think about his own privileged childhood and education, everything made easy by his father’s wealth. He heard, inside, the suppressed rancor of a married couple on whom too much strain has been placed, trying not to let their beloved child overhear. He felt embarrassed suddenly, an intruder. He was about to walk away again when the door opened unexpectedly and a woman emerged, a scarf over her hair, dressed formally as if off on a visit. She looked as startled to see him as he was to see her. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing here?”
“Excuse me,” he said, flustered. “I have something for Mohammed.”
“What?”
“Just a book.” He pulled it from the bag. “For his daughter. Your daughter.”
The woman looked at Ibrahim in bewilderment. “This is for Layla?”
“Yes.”
“But… who are you?”
“My name is Ibrahim.”
“The archaeologist?”
“Yes.”
She bit her lower lip thoughtfully. Then she went back inside her flat. “Mohammed,” she said. “Come here. Your archaeologist friend is visiting.”
Mohammed appeared from a side room, ducking his head beneath the low lintel. “Yes?” he asked anxiously. “Is there a problem at the site?”
“No,” said Ibrahim, showing a bit more of the book. “It’s just… my father used to read to me from this. I thought maybe you and your daughter . . .” He opened the book and flipped through the pages, showing off the gorgeous illustrations inside: pictures of Alexander from history and myth.
“It’s beautiful,” gaped Mohammed. He glanced at his wife, who hesitated then nodded. “Layla’s been talking about you all evening,” said Mohammed, coming to grasp Ibrahim by the elbow. “I know it would mean a great deal to her if you gave it to her yourself.”
ALEXANDRIA WAS USUALLY one of the most welcoming of Egyptian cities, but the tensions between the West and the Arab world had reached here, too, and Knox took a cool nod from a young Egyptian man out with his woman as he paid his taxi driver on the street outside Gaille’s hotel. Normally, he would have shrugged it off, but with Hassan to worry about, it preyed on his mind. All these people. How could he tell which ones were dangerous? The ones who smiled, the ones who scowled?
Like many of the city’s cheaper hotels, Gaille’s was on the top two floors. The old lift rattled and shook as it ascended past floors of gloom and darkness. He pulled back the mesh door and stepped out. Behind the reception desk, the balding middle-aged concierge was talking with a young bearded man. They both looked at Knox without even trying to hide their disdain. “Yes?” asked the concierge.
“Gaille, please,” said Knox.
“The Frenchwoman?”
“Yes.”
“And you are?”
Knox had to think for a moment to remember the name Augustin had given him. “Mark,” he said. “Mark Edwards.”
“Sit, please.” The concierge turned back to his friend, picking up their conversation again. Knox sat in a blue armchair, white fluff leaking from the tattered upholstery. A minute went by. Still the concierge made no effort to alert Gaille. Another minute passed. The two men were chatting away, not looking his way, their contempt clear. Knox had no wish to make himself conspicuous, but there came a point when doing nothing would be more memorable than doing something, so he stood up, brushed fluff from his trousers, went back over to reception. “Call her for me,” he said.
“In a minute.”
He put his hand on the counter. “Call her,” he said. “Now.”
The concierge scowled but picked up his phone and dialed her extension. A phone tinkled dully down the hall. “You have a visitor,” he told her. He put the phone back down and resumed his conversation with his friend without a word to Knox.
Another minute passed. A door opened and closed. Footsteps hurried on the hard wooden floorboards. Gaille appeared around a corner, wearing sneakers, faded jeans, and a baggy black sweatshirt. “Mark,” she frowned. “What are you doing here?”
“Augustin couldn’t make it, I’m afraid. Crisis at work. I hope you don’t mind a last-minute substitute.”
“Not at all.” She looked down at her dowdy clothes, pulled a face. “Are we going anywhere fancy?” she asked.
“You look fine,” Knox assured her. “You look gorgeous.”
“Thanks.” She smiled shyly. “Then shall we just go? I’m starving.”
He ushered her inside the elevator. The concierge and his bearded friend glared as he slammed closed the mesh door a little more vehemently than necessary. It was dim and tight inside; two people was all it could comfortably take. They stood shoulder to shoulder as it clanked slowly down six floors. “Charming man,” he muttered once they were out of earshot.
“My guy in Tanta was even worse, would you believe?” said Gaille. “He gave me those looks—you know, as if he held women to blame for every evil in the history of the world. I felt like asking him, why run a hotel? Why not run a YMCA or something? Just nice young boys.”
Knox laughed and hauled open the door again as they reached the ground floor. “You like seafood?”
“I love seafoo
d.”
“There’s this restaurant I used to visit a lot. I haven’t been there for a while, but I thought we might give it a try.”
“That sounds great. You know Alexandria well, then?”
“I used to.” Down the hotel’s front steps, he steered Gaille away from the bustling and carnival-like Sharia Nabi Daniel, along a quieter road. With Hassan on his tail, he needed to stay in the shadows. He kept looking around, sensing eyes on him, people frowning, taking a second look. In the darkness behind, a man in pale blue robes was talking quietly but urgently on his cell phone, darting glances his way.
“Are you all right?” asked Gaille. “Is something the matter?”
“No,” he said. “Forgive me. Just a little distracted.” They came to a fork in the road, a minaret on its corner, giving him the opportunity to cover his jitters with conversation. “The Attarine Mosque,” he said, pointing it out. “Did you know that that’s where they found what might be the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great?”
“No.”
“It was your man Napoleon,” Knox explained. “He had his people scour Egypt for treasures. Anyway, they found this huge breccia sarcophagus covered in hieroglyphics, which no one could decipher back then but which the locals swore blind had been Alexander’s. Alexander was Napoleon’s hero, so he decided to be buried in it himself and ordered it back to France. But it got diverted to the British Museum instead, where it’s now on show near the Rosetta Stone.”
“I’ll look out for it.”
The man was still the same distance behind, talking earnestly on his cell phone. Knox felt his anxiety increase. He steered Gaille down a narrow side road to see if that would dislodge him. “Of course,” he said, “when hieroglyphics were finally cracked, it turned out that it wasn’t Alexander’s sarcophagus at all, but Nectanebo the Second’s.”
“Ah.”
He glanced around once more, but the road was clear. “Exactly,” he said, allowing himself to relax a little. “Nothing annoys a Brit more than being sold a pup by the natives. And no one even considered that there might be a glimmer of truth to the story. After all, Ptolemy would surely never have put Alexander the Great in the cast-off sarcophagus of some fugitive pharaoh like Nectanebo, would he?”
“It does seem unlikely.”
“Exactly. Do you know much about Nectanebo?”
Gaille shrugged. “A little.”
“The last native Egyptian pharaoh. He defeated the Persians in battle and commissioned lots of new buildings, including a temple in Saqqara, city of the dead for Memphis, Egypt’s capital at the time.”
“I’m not completely ignorant, you know. I do know Saqqara.”
“He also commissioned this sarcophagus,” grinned Knox, “though he never got to use it. The Persians came back, and Nectanebo had to flee. So, when Ptolemy took Egypt twenty years later and needed somewhere to keep Alexander’s body while he built him a proper mausoleum in Alexandria, Nectanebo’s temple and sarcophagus were both lying empty.”
“You’re suggesting he used them as a stopgap?”
The man who had been following them earlier suddenly appeared ahead of them, still talking quietly but earnestly on his phone. He glanced their way and immediately dropped his eyes. Knox steered Gaille down a side alley, prompting her to frown at him. He quickly regretted his choice. The alley was deserted and dark, and their footsteps rang and echoed on the pavement, emphasizing just how alone they were. And when he glanced around, he saw the man entering the alley behind them.
“What is it?” asked Gaille. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Knox, taking her arm and hurrying her along. “Just hungry, that’s all.”
She frowned, unconvinced, but let it go. “You were telling me about the sarcophagus,” she prompted.
“Yes.” He glanced back and was relieved to see that they had put some distance between themselves and their tail. “Ptolemy certainly needed a stopgap. I mean, it was several decades before he transferred Alexander to Alexandria. And it would explain how the sarcophagus came to be here. I mean, you should see this thing. It’s a beast. But perfect for protecting Alexander’s body in transit.”
“It makes sense from an Egyptian point of view, too,” agreed Gaille. “You know they believed Alexander to be the son of Nectanebo the Second?”
Knox frowned. “You don’t mean that old Alexander Romance story?” The Alexander Romance had been a runaway best-seller of ancient times, a book of half-truths, exaggerations, and lies about Alexander, including a story that Nectanebo II had visited the Macedonian court, where he seduced Philip’s wife, Olympias, and fathered Alexander.
“It’s more than that. When Alexander beat the Persians at Issus, he didn’t just make himself de facto ruler of Egypt. To Egyptian eyes, it proved he was Nectanebo’s legitimate successor. Did you know that one of his Egyptian throne names was ‘he who drives out the foreigners,’ just like Nectanebo?”
“Hey!” protested Knox. “I thought you said you didn’t know anything about Nectanebo?”
“I said I knew a little,” smiled Gaille.
“So you think the Alexander Romance story is credible, then?” he asked, steering her to the right, taking another look back as he did so. Their tail was still there—closer, if anything. And then two men walked around the corner ahead. Knox readied himself to run. But the two men kept on walking, paying no attention to Knox or their tail.
“Well, obviously it’s not true,” said Gaille. “Nectanebo never went anywhere near Greece. But I can certainly believe that such a story gained currency among the Egyptians. Maybe Alexander even encouraged it. He was incredibly skilled at winning hearts and minds. I’ve always thought that was one reason he visited Siwa. I mean, everyone assumes that he went because the Oracle of Ammon was so revered by the Greeks. But the Egyptians revered it, too, and had for centuries. Did you know that all the Twenty-Eighth Dynasty pharaohs traveled to Siwa to be acknowledged, and that they were all depicted with rams’ horns, too, just like Alexander?”
They finally emerged onto the Corniche. A breaker crashed against the rocks, spraying spume over the high wall, leaving the road shining black. Knox glanced around again to see their tail put his phone away in his pocket then look anxiously all around him. “Is that right?” asked Knox.
Gaille nodded vigorously. “The Egyptians were sticklers for legitimacy in their pharaohs. Alexander succeeded Nectanebo, so in a sense, of course he was his son. The story about Nectanebo sleeping with his mother was just a convenient way of explaining it.” She smiled apologetically. “Anyway, enough shop. Where’s this restaurant of yours?”
“Just up here.” He glanced around a final time. Their tail was advancing with a broad smile on a dark-haired woman and two young children, picking them up, laughing joyfully as he spun them around. Knox breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing but paranoia. Then he reminded himself sternly that just because it had proved benign this time didn’t mean he could afford to relax.
They reached the restaurant, a plush place overlooking the waterfront. Gaille looked at Knox in horror, then down at her shabby clothes. “But you told me it wasn’t fancy!” she protested.
“It isn’t. And you look beautiful.”
She pursed her lips, as if she thought he was lying, even though he wasn’t. She had the kind of looks he had always found irresistible, shining with gentleness and intelligence. She said, “I only put on these horrid things because I didn’t want to give your friend Augustin any encouragement. If I’d known it’d be you . . .”
A grin spread across Knox’s face. “Are you saying you do want to give me encouragement?”
“That’s not what I meant at all.” Gaille blushed furiously. “I only meant that I think I can trust you.”
“Oh,” said Knox gloomily, opening the door for her, ushering her inside. “Trustworthy. That’s almost as bad as being nice.”
“Worse,” smiled Gaille. “Much worse.”
They climbed a flight of sta
irs to the dining area. “Avoid anything freshwater,” he advised, helping her to a seat with a view out over the Eastern Harbor. “The lakes around here, it’s a miracle anything survives in them. But the seafood will be good.”
“Duly noted.”
He flapped out a napkin as he sat. “So how’s your photography going?”
“Not bad. Better than I expected, if I’m honest.” She leaned forward over the table, eager to confide. “I’m not actually a photographer at all, you know.”
“No?”
“I’m a papyrologist, really. The camera just helps me reassemble fragments. You can do amazing things with the software these days.”
“So how did you get this job, then?”
“My boss volunteered me.”
“Ah, Elena. Very kind of her. So you’re working with her in the Delta, yes?”
“Yes.”
“What on?”
“An old settlement,” she enthused. “We’ve found traces of city walls and dwellings and cemeteries. Everything from Old Kingdom up to Early Ptolemaic.”
“Wow. What’s the place?”
“Oh.” She looked hesitant suddenly, aware she’d said too much. “We haven’t made a definitive identification yet.”
“You must have some idea.”
“I can’t talk about it,” said Gaille. “Elena made us all sign agreements.”
“Come on. I won’t tell a soul, I swear. And you just said I was trust-worthy.”
“I can’t. Honestly.”
“Give me a clue, then. Just one clue.”
“Please. I really can’t.”
“Of course you can. You want to. You know you do.”
She pulled a face. “Have you ever heard the expression, ‘putting your head in the wolf’s mouth’? That’s like crossing Elena. You don’t do it twice, trust me.”
“Fine,” grumbled Knox. “So how come you’re working for her? I mean, it’s a Greek excavation, isn’t it? You don’t strike me as particularly Greek.”
“Elena’s expert fell ill and she needed a replacement. Someone gave her my name. You know what it’s like.”