by Paul Sussman
'Arminius,' said the woman, smiling. 'A childhood pet. Piet was always going on about him. Used to say he was the only real friend he'd ever had. The only person he'd ever really trusted. Talked about him like he was a human.' She paused, then added, 'He was a lonely man, I think. Unhappy. A lot of demons.'
They gazed up at the prints for a moment longer – two men operating a shaduf beside the Nile; a group of women selling vegetables inside the Bab Zuwela gateway of Cairo's Islamic quarter; a young boy in a tarboosh, staring at the camera and laughing – then crossed to the front door and stepped out onto the street. Two children scuttled past, wheeling a rubber tyre.
'There was one thing,' she said as they were about to walk away. 'It's probably not relevant, but Piet was extremely anti-semitic.'
She said this last word in English. Khalifa's eyes narrowed.
'What does this mean?'
'I don't know how you say it in Arabic. He was . . . ma habbish el-yehudi-een. He didn't like Jews.'
The detective's shoulders tensed slightly, imperceptibly, as though he had received a small electric shock, not enough to hurt him, just sufficient to make him feel uncomfortable.
'Go on.'
'There's not much to tell really. He never said anything in front of me. I overheard him a couple of times talking to other people, though – guests, local men. Awful stuff. How the only problem with the Holocaust was that they hadn't finished the job. How they ought to drop a nuclear bomb on Israel. I mean, I hate what's happening there as much as the next person, but this was sick stuff. Nasty.' She shrugged, fiddling with her earring. 'I guess I should have taken him to task about it, but then I figured he was old, and old people tend to have weird opinions. And anyway, I didn't want to get in a row and lose my job. Like I say, it's probably not relevant.'
Khalifa pulled out his cigarettes and lit one, inhaling deeply.
'Probably not,' he said. 'But thank you for mentioning it. If there's anything else we'll be in touch.'
He nodded a farewell and, turning, set off down the street, hands thrust into his pockets, forehead furrowed in thought. Sariya came up beside him.
'Can't say I disagree,' he said as they walked. 'About the Jews.'
Khalifa shot him a glance.
'You think the Holocaust was a good thing?'
'I don't think it even happened,' snorted Sariya. 'Israeli propaganda. They had a piece about it this week in al-Akhbar.'
'You believe that?'
Sariya shrugged. 'The sooner Israel is wiped off the map the better,' he said, sidestepping the question. 'What they're doing to the Palestinians . . . it's unforgivable. Butchering women and children.'
For a moment it seemed Khalifa was going to take issue with him. He decided against it, however, and, turning a corner at the end of the street, the two of them continued down towards the Nile in silence, the amplified wail of a muezzin ringing out behind them, summoning the faithful to evening prayer.
ISRAEL – THE DEAD SEA DESERT, OUTSIDE JERICHO
The man paced up and down beside the helicopter, puffing on a stubby cigar, his eyes flicking from the empty dirt road in front of him down to his watch and back again. It was dark, the only light coming from a rising three-quarter moon that bathed the desert in a buttery yellow glow, and silent too, so that the man's footsteps sounded unnaturally loud, grinding deep holes in the still night air. The shadows were too heavy to make out his appearance clearly, save that he was of medium height and very thin, with a hooked nose, a white yarmulke on his head and a livid, sickle-shaped scar slicing down his right cheek.
'Any idea how long?' came a voice from the cockpit of the helicopter.
'Soon,' replied the man. 'He'll be here soon.'
He continued pacing, drumming his palm nervously against his thigh, stopping every now and then to cock his head and listen. Five minutes passed, ten, then the faint sound of an engine insinuated itself into the night, accompanied a moment later by the crunch of tyres on gravel. The man moved out into the centre of the road, watching as a car gradually detached itself from the shapeless generality of shadows and bumped its way towards them, moving slowly, headlamps off.
It pulled up ten metres away and the driver got out. The man joined him, and together they went round to the rear of the vehicle, where the driver opened the boot. There was a groan and a rustle, and a figure clambered out into the night, clutching the driver's arm for support. Again it was too dark to make out much about him, other than the fact that he was younger than the cigar-smoker, with an unruly mop of dark hair and a checked keffiyeh wrapped around his neck.
'You're late,' said the older man. 'I was worried.'
The newcomer was taking deep gulps of air, raising his arms above his head to stretch out the stiffness.
'I have to be careful. If some of my people find out about this
He drew a finger across his throat, the movement accompanied by a sharp hissing sound, as of a knife slicing through meat. The cigar-smoker nodded and, laying an arm across the newcomer's shoulders, steered him towards the helicopter.
'I know,' he said quietly. 'We're walking a tightrope here.'
'I hope we can reach the other side.'
'We have to reach the other side. For all our sakes. Otherwise . . .'
He waved his cigar helplessly and the two of them disappeared into the helicopter, the desert echoing to the rising whine of its engines as the blades started to turn, slashing at the darkness.
LUXOR
The two policemen crossed the Nile on the local ferry, a hulking, rusty affair that ploughed through the water in a haze of diesel fumes and with much tooting of its horn. Sariya nibbled a packet of yellow termous beans; Khalifa sat gazing at the floodlit shell of Luxor Temple, lost in his own thoughts, his fake leather jacket zipped up to his chin against the evening chill. On the eastern shore they climbed a set of steps up onto the Corniche, where Khalifa asked his deputy for the keys to the dead man's house.
'You're going down there tonight?' asked Sariya, surprised.
'Thought I'd just have a quick look around. See if there's anything . . . unusual.'
Sariya's eyes narrowed. 'How do you mean?'
'Just . . . unusual. Come on, give me the keys.'
Shrugging, Sariya reached into his pocket and handed over the plastic bag with Jansen's keys in it. He then took out his notebook, tore off the page on which he had scribbled Jansen's address and handed that over too.
'You want me to come with you?'
'No, you get off home,' replied Khalifa, glancing down at the address before folding it and putting it in his pocket. 'I won't be long. Just need to check a few things. I'll see you at the station tomorrow.'
He clapped his deputy on the shoulder and, pushing him away along the Corniche, turned and flagged down a passing taxi. It swung into the kerb where the driver, a plump man with an imma wrapped around his head and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, reached behind him and opened the back door.
'Where to, inspector?' he asked. Like most Luxor cabbies he knew Khalifa personally, having been arrested by him at least once for driving without the proper documentation.
'Karnak,' said Khalifa. 'Just go straight down the Corniche. I'll tell you where to stop.'
They set off, heading north past the Mercure Hotel, Luxor Museum, the old hospital and Chicago House, weaving in and out of the traffic, the town's buildings gradually fragmenting into a scatter of ramshackle houses surrounded by swathes of scrub parkland. Five hundred metres past the town's northern fringes Khalifa signalled the driver to pull over, opposite a broad avenue of laurel and eucalyptus trees that led off to the right, towards the floodlit first pylon of Karnak Temple.
'You want me to wait?' asked the driver as Khalifa got out.
'Don't worry, I'll walk back.'
He reached into his pocket for money, but the driver waved him away.
'Forget it, inspector. I owe you.'
'How do you work that one out, Mahmoud? Last
time we met I arrested you for being out of date with your insurance.'
'True,' acknowledged the driver. 'But then I hadn't paid my road tax either, so I figure I got off lightly.'
He grinned, revealing two rows of uneven brown teeth, and, with a cheeky toot, swung the car around and disappeared back the way he had come.
Khalifa stood for a moment staring at the Nile, its surface glinting in the moonlight like a sheet of rippling grey silk, then turned and set off towards the temple entrance.
It took him ten minutes to reach the dead man's house, which sat in a secluded enclosure two hundred metres from the north-west corner of the temple complex, at the end of a rutted dirt track. A low, single-storey villa, surrounded by a tall, barred fence and half-hidden behind a screen of palm and mimosa trees, it harked back to the days before Luxor became a major tourist centre, when the only visitors were archaeologists or wealthy Europeans come to winter in the balmy climes of upper Egypt. A scraggy mist had risen from a nearby irrigation canal and wrapped itself around the base of the house, giving the place an eerie, haunted feel, as if it was floating just above the ground.
Khalifa gazed through the fence at the neatly tended flower beds, the heavily shuttered windows, the KHAAS! MAMNU' EL-DUKHUUL! PRIVATE! NO ENTRY! signs posted at regular intervals around the fence's circumference, then stepped up to the front gate and turned the handle. Locked. He pulled the dead man's keys from his pocket and, in the pale moonlight, tried them one by one until he found the right fit, swinging the gate open and crunching along a gravel path. As he climbed onto the building's front porch an animal of some sort, a cat or a fox, shot out of the shadows to his right, knocking over a rake and disappearing into a clump of bushes around the side of the house.
'Dammit!' he hissed, startled.
He lit a cigarette and fiddled with the keys, undoing the door's three heavy locks and stepping into the dark interior. He located a switch on the wall and turned on the lights.
He was in a large living room, wood-floored and scrupulously tidy, with four armchairs arranged around a circular brass coffee table in the centre, a sideboard with a television and telephone on it, and a bulky chaise-longue arranged against the right-hand wall. Opposite, a dark corridor led away towards the back of the house.
He gazed around for a while, familiarizing himself with his surroundings, then wandered over to the left-hand wall where a large oil painting of a craggy, snow-covered mountain hung above a rack of newspapers and magazines. He stared up at the painting, admiring it – he had never seen snow before, not real snow – then bent down and flicked through the contents of the rack. There were two al-Ahrams, an Egyptian Horticultural Society magazine and a bulletin from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. At the back was a copy of Time, its cover bearing photos of two men, one squat, heavy-set and bearded, the other thin and hawk-faced, with a livid scar arcing down his right cheek almost to the line of his chin. Khalifa pulled it out and read the headline: HAR-ZION AND MILAN: WHICH WAY FOR ISRAEL? by Layla al-Madani. He recognized the writer's name. Opening the magazine, he flipped through it to the relevant article, which was topped with a photo by-line of a young woman, beautiful, with short dark hair and large green eyes. He gazed at it for a moment, curiously compelled, then, with a shake of the head, closed the magazine, replaced it in the rack and set off to explore the rest of the house.
There were five further rooms: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a study and, at the rear of the building, a large kitchen. All were immaculately tidy, unnaturally so, as though no-one actually lived there, and in addition to thick shutters there were heavy brass security locks on all the windows. Khalifa went through them one by one, poking and prying, not really looking for anything in particular, just trying to get a feel for the place, for the man who had lived there.
He took the study first, a large room with a pair of metal filing cabinets in one corner, floor-to-ceiling bookcases along two of the walls and a large desk pushed up beneath the window. The filing cabinets were both locked, but he found the keys on the dead man's key-ring and opened them one after another. The first contained plastic envelopes full of business and legal documents. The second was a mini-library of photographic slides, hundreds upon hundreds of them, all neatly labelled and arranged in plastic sleeves, depicting, so far as he could make out, almost every major historical site in Egypt, from Tel el-Fara'in in the Delta right the way down to Wadi Haifa in northern Sudan.
He picked out a couple of the images at random and held them up to the light, squinting, recognizing the Temple of Seti I at Abydos, the rock tombs at Beni Hassan, the Precinct of Khonsu at Karnak. He stared at this last slide for over a minute, moving it towards and away from the light to get the focus sharp, a troubled furrow creasing his brow, before returning it to its sleeve, closing and relocking the cabinets and wandering across to one of the bookcases.
Its volumes were arranged alphabetically by author name and, with the exception of a couple of dictionaries and a small section on plants and gardening, were almost exclusively historical works, some popular history, most academic. A cursory skim across their spines revealed titles in Latin, French, English, German, Arabic and – surprisingly, given what the Shaw woman had said about Jansen's attitude towards Jews – Hebrew. Whatever else Jansen was, he was clearly extremely well read and educated.
'How did someone like you end up running a cheap hotel in Luxor?' Khalifa murmured to himself. 'What's your story, eh, Mr Jansen? And why all the security? What were you afraid of? What were you trying to hide?'
He remained in the study for a while, examining books and rifling through the desk drawers, then moved on to the bathroom, and then the two bedrooms, in the first of which, in a small cabinet beside the bed, he unearthed a pair of magazines – German, pornographic, with young boys on the front posing nude for the camera. He gazed at them, fascinated and repelled, then threw them back in the cabinet and slammed it shut.
He came to the kitchen last. Two further doors opened off this. One, secured with two mortise locks and a heavy steel bolt, led out on to a wooden veranda at the rear of the villa. The second door, which also had to be opened with a key from the dead man's ring, revealed a steep set of stairs descending into darkness. He started cautiously down them, the wooden steps creaking beneath his feet, the blackness slowly enveloping and disorientating him so that he was forced to keep his right hand against the cool stone wall to maintain his balance. At the bottom his fingertips brushed a chunky switch, which he flicked on.
It took him a second to register what he was looking at, then he gasped in astonishment.
'My God!'
Antiquities. Everywhere antiquities. On trestle tables arranged down the centre of the room, on shelves around the walls, in boxes and chests stacked in the corners. Hundreds upon hundreds of objects, each sealed in its own plastic bag, each accompanied by a neat, handwritten tag detailing what it was, where and when it had been found, and its estimated date.
'It's like a museum,' Khalifa whispered incredulously. 'His own private museum.'
For a moment he stood rooted to the spot, then stepped forward to the nearest of the tables, picking up a bag with a tiny wooden figure inside it. 'Shabti, KV39, East corridor fill,' read the accompanying card. 'Wood. No text or decoration. 18th Dynasty, probably Amenhotep I (c. 1525–1504 BC). Found March 3, 1982.' KV39 was a large, rubble-filled tomb in a fold of the hills above the Valley of the Kings, considered by many to be the final resting place of the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep I. It had never been properly excavated. Jansen had clearly been in there doing a bit of private digging of his own.
Khalifa replaced the figure and picked up another object. 'Fragment glazed floor tile, Amarna (Akhetaten), Northern palace. Papyrus reed design in green, yellow and blue. 18th Dynasty, reign of Akhenaten (c.1353–1335 BC). Found 12th November 1963.' It was a beautiful piece, if broken, the colours rich and vibrant, the painted papyrus reeds leaning slightly as if blowing in a gentle wind. Again, it seemed to have
been dug up by Jansen himself. Khalifa turned it over in his hand, shaking his head, then laid it down and wandered off around the rest of the cellar.
It was an extraordinary collection, mind-boggling, the result, judging from the accompanying tags, of over five decades' surreptitious – and illegal – scavenging. Some of the objects – a small faience hippopotamus; a beautifully decorated ostracon bearing the Theban triad of Amun, Mut and Khonsu – were extremely valuable. The majority, however, were either damaged or else so common as to be worth virtually nothing. The guiding principle seemed to be not so much the desire to amass rare or beautiful objects, but rather a simple joy in digging things up, recovering and labelling tiny shards of the past. It was, Khalifa thought to himself, the sort of collection he himself would have loved to own. A history lover's collection. An archaeologist's.
In the far corner he found a small iron safe, squat and chunky, with a dial and lever on the front. He tried turning the latter, but the door remained resolutely closed and after a minute or so he gave up and wandered off again.