The Last Secret Of The Temple

by Paul Sussman

  A line of blue flashing lights appeared ahead, cutting off his quarry's escape in that direction, forcing the man to clamber over a low retaining wall beside the path and double back on himself along the valley bottom. He was now below Ben-Roi and to his right, and, heaving himself over the wall, the detective bounded down a steep, grassy slope towards him. The man veered left, scrabbling up a rocky incline alongside the pyramid-roofed Tomb of Zechariah. Ben-Roi followed, feet scrabbling on the loose, sandy soil, hands tearing frantically at rocks and brambles and tufts of coarse grass, coughing and panting. He was by now almost at the end of his physical reserves, and halfway up the incline they gave out altogether, like a car suddenly running out of petrol, leaving him stranded, watching helplessly as the Palestinian continued upwards and disappeared above him.

  'Fuck,' he groaned. 'Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck.'

  He remained where he was for a moment, furiously sucking air deep down into his crumpled lungs, then, feebly, started upwards again, clambering over the top of the slope on all fours and collapsing in a heap at the foot of a twisted acacia tree. There was a burst of laughter.

  'Dear oh dear, Ben-Roi, my grandmother could run faster than that!'

  Feldman, the wiry detective with whom he had spoken earlier, was standing above him accompanied by four uniformed policeman, two of them holding the Palestinian in an arm lock. He reached out a hand, which Ben-Roi slapped away.

  'Lech zayen et ima shelcha. Go fuck your mother, Feldman.'

  He struggled to his feet and took a step forward so that he was in front of the Palestinian. The man was younger than he'd expected. His left eye was starting to swell and blacken, his lip was cut. Feldman nodded at the policemen holding him, who tightened their grip.

  'Go on,' he said, winking at Ben-Roi. 'You know you want to. We didn't see anything.'

  Ben-Roi glanced at Feldman, then back at the Palestinian. God, he'd love to do it. Smash the little bastard's face in. Show him what he thought of him. Of all his kind. He came forward another half step, fist clenching. As he did so a soft voice echoed in his ear, near yet at the same time immeasurably distant, accompanied by a fleeting vision of a woman's face, grey-eyed, beautiful. It lasted only a fraction of a second and then was gone, along with the voice. He gazed at the Palestinian, breathing heavily, then, touching his hand to the menorah around his neck, turned away and started back down the slope again.

  Behind him, Feldman shook his head. 'Poor Arieh,' he muttered. 'Poor stupid fucking Arieh.'

  EGYPT – BETWEEN LUXOR AND EDFU

  Khalifa swung out from behind the lorry, pulled past it and swung back in again, pumping the car horn throughout the manoeuvre. Away to his left a distant range of yellow hills undulated and swelled like a line of crumbling sandcastles; to his right, nearer, beyond a patchwork swathe of cane and banana fields, the Nile meandered its way slowly northwards, its surface black and smooth, like a band of polished metal. He lit a cigarette, pushed the accelerator to the floor and turned on the radio. Shaaban Abdel-Rehim blasted out, singing his hit song 'Ana Bakrah Israel' – 'I Hate Israel'. Khalifa listened for a moment, then changed to another station. A sign flashed past indicating it was sixty kilometres to Edfu.

  It was over a week since the body had been found at Malqata, and in that time he had managed to dig up almost no new information about the mysterious Piet Jansen. Admittedly he'd had to conduct his investigations surreptitiously behind Chief Hassani's back, coming into the office early, staying late, making a few snatched calls at lunchtime, fitting it in wherever he could around other police work. Even without these constraints, however, he doubted he would have uncovered a great deal more about his subject. Everything about Jansen's life, from the obsessive security at his villa to the complete lack of information about his past, seemed geared towards keeping that life private. More than private. Secret. Walled in. Inaccessible.

  He had applied for and been granted Egyptian citizenship in October 1945. That much at least Khalifa had found out from an old contact at the Interior Ministry. Thereafter he'd lived in Alexandria, running a moderately successful bookbinding business from a house on Sharia Amin Fikhry, before moving down to Luxor in March 1972, buying first his villa and then, seven months later, the hotel (changing its name to Menna-Ra from the more prosaic Hotel Good Welcome). His bank statements revealed that he was, if not well off, at least financially comfortable, while according to medical reports he suffered from piles, arthritis, bunions and angina, as well as advanced prostate cancer, which had been diagnosed in January 2005. His limp was the legacy of a car accident in 1982 that had shattered his right knee.

  There were a few other random pieces of information – Jansen was a regular user of the Egyptological library at Chicago House, a keen gardener, had no police record – but that was about it. When he had first come to Egypt, why and where from, and what, if any, his connection with Hannah Schlegel was – all remained lost in a fog of obscurity. Plenty of people knew him, it seemed, but, when pushed, nobody actually seemed to know anything about him. It was as if he didn't have a past, as if there was nothing below the surface. Even Carla Shaw's suggestion that he was originally from Holland had proved a dead end, the Dutch Embassy informing him that Piet Jansen was one of their country's most common names and that without a birth date or location it would be impossible to trace him.

  There had been just one potentially interesting lead, and that had come from the dead man's phone bill. Jansen hadn't made many calls, and most of those had been to the Menna-Ra. Only one other number, in Cairo, had figured with any degree of frequency on the bill – nine times in the last three months. Khalifa had checked it out with Egypt Telecom, thinking that it might be one of the friends Carla Shaw had mentioned when they'd interviewed her a week ago. Ultimately, however, this too had proved to be a red herring, the number belonging not to a private address but to a public payphone, in the El-Maadi district of the city.

  He had, in short, hardly moved forward at all. Which is why he was in the car now.

  He sped on, passing through small, ramshackle villages, the hills and river to either side sometimes pressing right up close to the road, sometimes veering away into the far distance as though startled by the speeding traffic. The sun was lifting to his left, floating up into the sky like an egg-yolk rising through boiling water, its growing heat causing the moist, alluvial earth of the cultivation to shimmer and steam like a baking cake.

  He hit Edfu thirty minutes later, crossing the Nile on the town's four-lane bridge and negotiating his way through its dusty, gridlocked streets before continuing south again, on the west bank of the river this time. Six kilometres on he pulled up beside a roadside stall to ask for directions. Two kilometres beyond that he turned left off the main highway onto a sandy track that wound its way through fields of onions and cabbages, occasionally plunging into dense groves of falak trees, before eventually petering out in front of an ornate, whitewashed house perched beside the river. The home of Ehab Ali Mahfouz, Khalifa's former boss, the man who had led the Schlegel investigation. He pulled up and switched off the engine.

  Coming here was a major gamble for Khalifa. Although he had retired from the force three years earlier, Mahfouz still wielded considerable influence. If he took offence at the visit he would only have to say the word for Khalifa to be busted straight down to constable and posted to some godforsaken station out in the middle of the Western Desert. That or be kicked out of the force altogether. If he wanted to get the case officially reopened, however – and he'd reached a point in his investigations where he could go no further working unofficially – it was a gamble Khalifa had no choice but to take. Chief Hassani wasn't going to help him. If he went over Hassani's head – to the district commissioner, say – it would snag him in a bureaucratic tangle that could take months to resolve. Mahfouz had the power to get things moving immediately. The question was, would he be prepared to wield that power? Khalifa didn't remember him as a man who liked to admit to mistakes.
/>   He drummed his fingers nervously on the steering wheel, then grabbed a typewritten report of his findings so far, got out and, crossing to the front door, rang the bell. There was a pause, then a sound of approaching footsteps. The door opened, revealing a dark-skinned, middle-aged woman dressed in black robes and tarha. The housekeeper, Khalifa guessed.

  'Sabah el-khayr' he said. 'I've come to see the chief inspector.'

  'Commander Mahfouz isn't seeing anyone at the moment,' said the woman, emphasizing the word 'commander', the rank with which Mahfouz had retired from the force.

  'If I could just have a few minutes. I've come all the way from Luxor. It's important.'

  'Do you have an appointment?'

  Khalifa admitted he didn't.

  'Then he won't see you.'

  She started to close the door, but Khalifa stepped into the narrowing gap.

  'Please tell him that Inspector Yusuf Khalifa is here,' he said firmly. 'Tell him it's urgent.'

  She glared at him angrily, then, ordering him to stay where he was, disappeared into the house.

  Khalifa leant against the doorframe and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. Despite his habitual run-ins with Hassani he wasn't an innately confrontational person, and situations like this didn't come easily to him. He found himself thinking of the time at university when he had contradicted a teacher in front of the whole class, told him he'd got some fact wrong, and the stomach-churning fear he had felt at holding up his hand and speaking out. It was the same fear he felt now – that of the poor man who has clawed his way up the ladder and is terrified of doing anything that might pitch him back down to where he has come from.

  He took another drag and, turning, stared out across the fields through which he'd just driven, watching as a distant, half-naked figure hacked at the earth with a touria, his body rising and falling with the slow, rhythmic precision of a clockwork toy.

  'What am I doing?' he thought to himself. 'What the hell am I doing?'

  The woman returned a couple of minutes later. He was half-expecting her to say Mahfouz did not wish to see him. As it was, she told him to extinguish his cigarette and, throwing him a look that said 'this is against my better judgement', ushered him into the cool interior of the house.

  'The commander's not well,' she explained tersely as they passed through a series of rooms towards the rear of the building. 'He only came out of hospital a fortnight ago. The doctor said he wasn't to be disturbed.'

  They came into a large, sunlit lounge with a tiled floor and an ornate chandelier hanging from the ceiling. On the far side a set of glass doors gave on to a flower-filled garden.

  'He's through there,' she said. 'I'll bring some tea. And no smoking.'

  She eyeballed Khalifa to make sure he had got the message, then turned and disappeared.

  For a moment he stood gazing up at a large framed photograph of Mahfouz shaking hands with President Mubarak, then stepped through the doors into the garden. Ahead, across an immaculately manicured lawn bordered by beds of pink and yellow roses, a small wooden platform jutted out into the river. On it, its back to him, sat a sun lounger shaded by a green and white striped parasol. He muttered a swift prayer and started forwards across the grass, reaching the jetty and ducking beneath the umbrella.

  'I was wondering when you'd come,' said a croaking voice. 'I've been expecting you for over a week now.'

  Mahfouz was lying propped up on pillows, one hand flopped across the lounger's arm rest, the other clutching a plastic oxygen mask from which a thick, intestine-like tube led down to a metal cylinder on the decking beneath him. Khalifa was shocked by the change in his appearance. The last time he had seen him, over five years ago, he had been a huge, broad-shouldered man, muscular and physically imposing, like a heavyweight wrestler (the Edfu Ox, they used to call him). Now he was barely recognizable, his body shrivelled and shrunken into something resembling a strip of worn leather, with a hollow, skull-like face and spindly, fleshless limbs. Most of his hair and teeth had gone, and his brown eyes, which Khalifa remembered as having been bright and fierce, had dulled to the colour of stagnant water. Beneath his white djellaba swelled the tell-tale bulge of a urostomy bag.

  'Not much of me left.' He chuckled mirthlessly, noting the expression on Khalifa's face. 'Bladder, bowel, one lung – all gone. I feel like an empty suitcase.'

  He started coughing and, raising the oxygen mask to his face, pressed a button on the front of it and sucked.

  'I'm sorry,' mumbled Khalifa. 'I didn't know.'

  Mahfouz shrugged weakly, drawing in oxygen, gazing at a tangled raft of ward-i-Nil drifting slowly by on the river. It was almost a minute before his breathing stabilized and he was able to lower the mask again, nodding Khalifa into a chair beside him.

  'I've got about a month,' he rasped. 'Two at the outside. With the morphine it's just about bearable.'

  Khalifa didn't know what to say.

  'I'm sorry,' he repeated.

  Mahfouz smiled humourlessly.

  'Punishment,' he wheezed. 'What goes around comes around.'

  Before Khalifa could ask what he meant, the housekeeper appeared carrying a tray with two glasses of tea on it. She laid it down on a low wooden table, plumped up her employer's pillows and, with a surly glance at Khalifa, departed again.

  'Omm Mohammed,' grunted Mahfouz. 'Miserable bitch, eh? Don't take it personally. She's the same with everyone.'

  He leant to one side and stretched out a trembling hand towards his tea. He couldn't reach it, and Khalifa had to pick up the glass and pass it across.

  'Mrs Mahfouz?' he asked, trying to make conversation.

  'Died. Last year.'

  Khalifa hung his head. He hadn't expected any of this. Mahfouz sipped his tea, peering at Khalifa over the top of the glass.

  'You're thinking you shouldn't have come, aren't you?' he wheezed, reading the detective's thoughts. 'That the old man's suffering enough. Why add to his problems?'

  Khalifa shrugged, staring down through the slats of the platform at the muddy water sliding past beneath.

  'You said you were expecting me,' he muttered after a brief silence.

  Mahfouz shrugged.

  'Hassani called. Told me what was going on. That you were nosing around the Schlegel case. If you were the Khalifa I remembered, I knew you'd come eventually.'

  He smiled to himself, the expression more pained than mirthful, and broke into a renewed fit of coughing, his glass shaking in his hand, droplets of tea splashing onto his djellaba. He motioned Khalifa to take the glass from him and, raising his mask, took another long, slow gulp of oxygen. The detective turned away and gazed out across the river. It was a glorious view – the blue-black water, the whispering reed beds, a lone felucca gliding past close to the opposite shore, its billowing sail pushing at the sky like a cheek on a pillow. Mahfouz noticed the direction of his gaze and dragged the mask aside.

  'My one consolation,' he croaked. 'At least I'll die with a nice view.'

  He replaced the mask and slumped back, gulping oxygen like a fish stranded on a mudbank. Khalifa took a sip of his own tea and started to reach for his cigarettes, then remembered what the housekeeper had told him about not smoking and clasped his hands in his lap instead. Back across the garden a bee-eater was fluttering over one of the rose-beds, peering down at the flowers beneath.

  Eventually, Mahfouz recovered sufficiently to remove the mask again. Khalifa leant forward and handed him the typewritten report.

  'I thought you ought to see this, sir.'

  Mahfouz took the report and, wincing as he adjusted his position, read slowly through it, turning the pages with trembling hands. When he came to the end he laid it aside and dropped his shrivelled head back onto his pillows.

  'I always suspected.'

  His voice was so quiet Khalifa thought he'd misheard him.

  'Sir?'

  'That it was Jansen who killed the old woman. I always suspected.'

  Khalifa sat staring at him, shocked.


  'Not what you were expecting, eh?' said Mahfouz with a weak chuckle.

  He turned his head slightly, looking across towards the far shore of the river where a herd of water buffalo had lumbered down to the water to drink, their bony hindquarters swaying pendulously from side to side. Khalifa reached up and rubbed his temples, trying to gather his thoughts. He felt as if a heavy wave had swept over him, choking and disorientating him.

  'You knew?' he managed to mumble.

  'Not for sure,' said Mahfouz. 'But the evidence certainly seemed to point that way. The hat, the walking stick, the house near Karnak. The feet-thing was interesting. I didn't know about that.'

  A small bulb of spittle had formed at the corner of his mouth and he wiped at it with the sleeve of his djellaba.

  'I knew him, you see. Jansen. Not well, but well enough. We both loved gardens. Belonged to the Horticultural Society. Used to go to the same meetings. Nasty man. Cold. Good with roses, though.' He was still trying to wipe away the glob of spit. 'When I saw the marks on Schlegel's body, heard the guard's story about a bird or whatever it was, it seemed a strange coincidence. Especially with Jansen's attitude towards the Jews, and his living so near to the murder scene. It was circumstantial, admittedly, but if we'd followed it up I'm sure we'd have got him.'