The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  “Strangest thing, Mr. Trilipush. I try to understand your life story, what I’ve heard from your friends and admirers. I can’t follow it. I keep putting two and two together and stubbornly getting five. Now how do you explain that?”

  “Perhaps your maths tutor spent too much of your study time buggering you, ducks.”

  “Very good, and an interesting choice of verb, from what I hear of you.”

  “Are we almost through, Mr. Ferrell?”

  “Did Mr. Finneran find you last week?”

  “He did. How did you know he was here?”

  “Where’s Mr. Finneran today?”

  “We’re to meet later. He’s making arrangements for our departure Monday. We divided the errands.”

  “Departing Egypt? To points unknown?”

  “If you consider Boston unknown.”

  “You’re returning to Boston? What of Mr. Finneran’s outstanding debts?”

  “Everything Mr. Finneran does is outstanding, and in this case he has invested wisely, as have his partners.”

  “Oh, then congratulations are in order. You’ve had good luck on your excavation?”

  “Unparalleled. You will read about it all someday and tell your grandchildren that you met me once, and they will weep with wonder. They may even love you for it.”

  “Where’s the treasure now?”

  “ ‘Treasure’? That’s a charming term, you colonial imbecile. The artefacts and obzhaydarr and furniture and manuscripts and mummies are in the tomb, undergoing preservation.”

  “Might I have a tour of that tomb?”

  “You might, yes, as soon as it is opened to the public.”

  To draw him out of his defensive posture, I provoked with a lie, although very near the truth: “Beverly Quint says you and Marlowe were lovers.”

  He stared at me a moment, then continued unfazed. “I do not know Miss Quint, though she sounds charming, so I cannot imagine what would motivate her to make such a statement. I am beginning to have the impression that you are confusing me with someone else, Mr. Ferrell. Are we nearly finished?”

  Unfazed, yes, but you’ll admit that this is a peculiar response: he pretends not to know his old fancy friend Quint, when there is no reason to hide that. Don’t let it shake you: this sort of confusion appears often in climactic interrogations with holdout liars. They grow confused themselves, cannot remember which lies they’ve told to which people, so like children, they begin to throw dust all about. It’s crucial here that the detective hold tight to what he knows to be true. With Trilipush’s lies biting their own tails, I pressed harder: “Why’s there no mention of you at Oxford, Professor?”

  “I’ve no idea. I can only presume that you, like any number of easily impressed primitive peoples, smell great conspiracies in clerical errors.”

  “I see. Of course. Then can you explain to this primitive why Captain Marlowe’s parents, family of your dearest friend, say they’ve never met you?”

  And at last he was silenced. “They said that?”

  “They did, Mr. Trilipush. You even know their names?”

  “Of course. Priapus and Sappho. Are the old dears well?”

  “Yes. No. They’re named Hector and Regina.”

  “Are they? How odd.”

  “Why hasn’t the British War Office got a record on your military career?”

  “Haven’t they? Absentminded of them.”

  “Not at all, Trilipush. I believe your military record was expunged by the authorities, desperate to cover over yet another Wartime English crime.”

  “Crime?”

  He was infuriating even in his reduced and battered state, everything that is to be despised in the English. He was as visibly horrified by my presence as Marlowe’s father had been; he mocked me with his voice and accent as easily as Quint had; he was as uninterested in the harm he’d done in his life as old Barnabas Davies. I wanted to crush him, squeeze his throat. I was supposed to be impressed by him? By a stinking, matted beggar with one boot? They’re just men, Macy: killers, Englishmen, the rich: they’re just men.

  I approached from a different angle. “Who’s Paul Caldwell?”

  “I’ve never heard the name.”

  “He was an Australian soldier lost with Captain Marlowe.”

  “I have never quite understood the policeman’s tendency to ask questions only to answer them himself a moment later.”

  And then, Macy, I played my ace. I showed him, simply as a spur to conversation, Tailor HQ’s transcribed report from British military records (I believe I already sent you a copy of this, but reproduce it again for our readers):

  Captain Hugo St. John Marlowe left base camp at Cairo on 12 November, 1918, on four-day pass. Did not return on 16 November. Searches initiated 18 November revealed nothing. Interviews with officers, men, revealed nothing of significance. March 1919, natives appeared asking for reward, having found Capt. Marlowe’s identity disks and those of Corporal P. B. Caldwell (AIF), as well as an AIF Lee-Enfield .303 rifle. Natives reported finding these objects near Deir el Bahari. Renewed interviews revealed no knowledge of any relationship between Captain Marlowe and Corporal Caldwell, though AIF records show Capt. Marlowe twice took unusual step of recommending promotions for Caldwell to Capt. T. J. Leahy (AIF), Caldwell’s company commander.

  He looked up, pushed the sheet back to me. “And?”

  “What happened to those two men, Professor?”

  Watch him rise to the bait, Macy: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ferrell, listen to me once and for all: I did not return to Egypt—surely, surely you know this, you clever little man—until December 1918. And you want me to explain your scribbled document? How could I? But fine. You purport to be a detective, so use your head, Ferrell. I can think of a hundred explanations for something as vague as this without breaking a sweat.”

  “A hundred? Really? I can hardly believe it, Professor.” I could hear his pride, the creative criminal’s pride, and this—I felt it—would be his downfall.

  “Simplest thing in the world. One: captain and corporal go off, as you would plainly have it, for a romantic four-day weekend in the wilderness, celebrating the Armistice with a lovers’ retreat. They requisition a motorcycle and sidecar, and zip their way south, where they begin to lay out a picnic, strum guitars, recite Shelley, peel grapes. However, it is only a few hours since the Armistice, and some enemy troops have not heard the happy news or some bandits cannot be bothered to care. Captain and corporal find themselves not in amorous embrace but surrounded by enemies, and the captain draws his Webley revolver. He tells his lover to run. Corporal heads for the motorcycle, hears three shots in quick succession, turns to see the mob of blood-maddened Arabs tearing the captain to pieces, and in his fear, he cannot start the cycle. The devils pull him down as well, drag him off to torture him. His identity disks and rifle are left behind. Fits your facts, yes? Again? Fine. Two: the captain is in love with an Arab girl, decides to throw everything away for her—family, country, career, Church of England—to become her Arab husband. He takes his dearest friend, this New Zealandish private—”

  “Australian corporal.”

  “—this Os-try-lee-un cor-prill to be his manservant. They stage their own disappearances and now all live together not two miles from here, husband, wife, three children, and Aussie manservant. You can go find them right now, if you are smart enough to track them. They left their dead meat tickets in the open and hoped some idiot would presume them dead. You are that idiot. Again? Very well, three, and this one pitched to your taste: the impoverished Australian corporal was blackmailing the English captain, who was a sodomite. The English captain decided to end his compromised position by murdering his tormentor. So he invited the Aussie corporal out to the desert to show and share with him some valuable archaeological find. Over hill after hill he led him to a secluded spot. ‘Here is where I happen to know we should dig,’ he says. When the unsuspecting Aussie boy had his back turned and was pulling some digging tool out o
f the motorcycle’s saddlebag, the captain drew his Webley. The corporal caught sight of this reflected in the motorcycle’s gas tank, which pathetically, he had polished to impress the Englishman. There the captain’s distorted reflection made him resemble an insect with an enormous thorax, tiny little limbs, and a revolver. The corporal, just a harmless would-be archaeologist, secretly drew his combat knife and turned. The laughing captain told the poor boy he was going to kill him to end the blackmail and then would dig up the promised archaeological find all by himself. The captain even had the audacity to tell the boy not to take this news badly, suggested to the poor fellow that he would be kind enough to report the death as heroic so that the corporal would have posthumous awards and pensions for his impoverished family Down Under. This was nearly convincing to the corporal, as a matter of fact, but in the end he did not believe the captain would make good on the promise, so he jumped him in preemptive self-defence. In the struggle, the captain shot the corporal just as the corporal stabbed the captain, and they both fell, quite dead. Bandits stole their uniforms, motorcycle, and belongings. Are you getting all this in your notes? Should I speak more slowly? Jackals dragged the bodies off to a cave and ate them. Metal identity disks are not digestible or valuable and were left in the desert. More, Ferrell, my dwarf red monkey? Number four: the captain, in his counterintelligence work, discovered that the corporal was passing secrets to the Turks. Confronting the corporal with this shocking discovery, the captain moved to arrest him, when all at once a British aeroplane flying overhead, mistaking the altercation for a—”

  And on and on he blathered, and at least six more fanciful tales followed. I tried to interrupt, but he wouldn’t allow anything to disrupt his performance: “Wait a moment, Detective. I am only getting started. You see, all of these possibilities, none verifiable or controvertible, fit your little document, and I am only beginning to stretch my muscles. Textual evidence can contain a vast quantity of pits and distortions, like a gramophone disk left in the sun. There’s hardly a written report on any past event that can explain anything. We know nothing of the past, not truly, from any single document, but you have travelled the world, Ferrell, learning nothing, raping my reputation in certain corners, and attempting to squire my fiancée, based on that piece of paper!?” But, Macy! He’d made his fatal error! Did you see it? If he truly knew nothing of the missing men, if he’d truly come back to camp a month after their disappearance, then how did he—in his array of truth-obscuring hypotheses—guess that young Paul Caldwell was “a would-be archaeologist”? Nothing in the military record would’ve shown that; I only knew it from my interviews in Australia. Oh yes, our Mr. Trilipush was caught. I pounced, and we had our moment in the sun, Macy, to make our dramatic declaration and watch the wall of lies crumble:

  “The truth, Trilipush, in my experience is very simple and often hidden in plain view, marked by the usual signposts of motivation: lust, greed, hatred, envy. So I suggest you calm down now and listen to what I know. To what I know, Professor, not to what I can imagine. In early November 1918, perhaps earlier, Captain Marlowe’s invert lover and treasure-hunting partner, the impoverished gentleman Captain Trilipush, returns to Egypt from a battle in Turkey, in which he was presumed killed. He doesn’t report himself to his superiors but merely lurks about, letting the British command think he’s dead. In his lurking, he discovers that, during his Turkish absence, his fancy man has taken a young Australian corporal to be his archaeological research assistant, and how did you guess that, Professor? Well, the spurned and angry Trilipush assumes, wrongly, that Marlowe and Caldwell are also lovers, and he secretly follows the two men south to the desert when they take a four-day leave to go looking for archaeological treasure, guided by the mysterious Fragment C. Oh yes, I know all about your treasure map, Professor, don’t interrupt. The two innocent men arrive unawares at the spot near the treasure they seek, but before they can even begin their digging, who should appear but the ghostly Trilipush? ‘What? Are you here?’ stammers Marlowe to the surprising returnee. ‘Silence, you unfaithful wretch!’ shrieks the wailing, weeping Trilipush, maddened by jealousy and greed and heartbreak. Using his own Webley, he kills them both, captain and corporal, the ex-lover and the innocent Australian boy. He buries the bodies but accidentally drops their identity disks and the Aussie’s rifle, then simply drives off on their motorcycle, stealing their treasure map, this Fragment C that would tell him where to return when the heat had let up and he could safely come to dig for the loot. Some months later, he turns up in the USA, weeping crocodile tears for the loss of his great friend, pretending to know nothing of Caldwell, and makes his name as a scholar of the very king whose treasure-filled tomb Marlowe and Caldwell were searching for the day you slaughtered them in cold blood. So certain of your hideous victory, you even mock the family of one of your victims, sending the poor grieving parents a copy of your pornographic work, grotesquely dedicated to your murdered lover, calling them by the private, perverted nicknames you and their invert son had invented for them. In Boston, securing work through false academic pretence and a financier through equally false romantic pretence—”

  “Wait a moment—you believe I killed Paul Caldwell?” he asked, infuriating me, as he was several minutes behind the flow of my discourse.

  “Don’t interrupt, Trilipush. You secured a job at Harvard by claiming to have attended Oxford, which you did not. Oh, you were there, I know, a sodomite socialite in Oxford’s shady little underworld, a scandalous influence on a circle of young inverts who continue to sing of you to this day, and you were living off of Marlowe’s money, paid to be his kept man, but you weren’t a student, received no degrees, earned no right to a post at Harvard. Arriving in Boston, looking around for an easy target, you pretended to love Margaret Finneran, but only to win her father’s money. With that money you set off for Egypt, having no intention of ever returning to Boston after you found your treasure, and you began to excavate in the precise spot where Paul Caldwell and Hugo Marlowe disappeared, a remarkable coincidence, you’ll agree. Well, soon thereafter, that same potential father-in-law, realising his error of judgement, acquiesces to his daughter’s wise, independent decision to break off your engagement. Maddened by this slight to your overweening criminal pride, suspecting that Finneran has understood your plan, and intending to make it impossible for him to pursue you and the gold, you attempt to ruin Finneran’s reputation with a series of slanderous cables. Instead, he boldly pursues you, finds you at your dig, where you and he make a corrupt bargain: the two of you divide up your ill-gotten gains into two large heaps. Finneran intends to secretly stash most of his in Maltese banks on his way home on the Cristoforo Colombo, apologetically bringing back to Boston only just enough to pay off his debts, but not enough to share the find’s true dividends with his double-crossed partners. In exchange for your silence at his treachery, and much to your sodomist relief, he will allow you to sail off to points unknown with a larger share of the gold than you are actually due, and he will tell Margaret to forget you, that you fell in love with an Egyptian girl. In reality, you will be off, most likely to refurbish dilapidated Trilipush Hall with your bloodstained Egyp-tian treasure, stolen from, in turn, Marlowe, Caldwell, and now J. P. O’Toole. Oh, no, I don’t believe for a moment you’re returning to Boston, Trilipush. Neither you nor Finneran could afford that.”

  The effect was extraordinary, Macy. He sat, stock-still, staring fish-eyed at me as if I’d struck him a blow. That’s what the truth feels like to a liar, Macy. I understood everything at this moment, understood all there was to know of our Mr. Trilipush.

  But here was our only weakness: without the bodies, what physical proof did I have? Nothing. So I quickly followed up my position of strength and made my move: if Trilipush refused to come with me at once to make his confession to the British or Australian consul, I had no choice but to have the local police use dogs to dig up the entire area to find Caldwell’s and Marlowe’s bodies. This alarmed him, and though he s
puttered about damage to ancient tombs and whatnot, it was plain that his fear was more than scholarly. I had him. I knew it and he knew it. All that remained was the endgame. “Nothing lasts forever, Trilipush,” I concluded, leaning back. “Your move, mate.”

  He decided to stall. He insulted me, reasserted his innocence, told me he was armed. Finally, he negotiated: he promised he’d be on the boat to Cairo on Monday, I could confirm the reservation that instant. And he would force Finneran to join him in answering any questions I wanted in front of any magistrate I chose when they reached Cairo. I could even walk him off the boat in manacles, if I wished. “But for now, Mr. Ferrell, my wondrous nemesis, I have preparations to attend to for the great voyage.” He hobbled off, leaving me to pay for his drink. I was not concerned, as at once I signalled my Egyptian watchers to follow him, and they leapt into well-orchestrated action, spreading out, blending in, manoeuvring as I’d taught them. I went at once and booked myself on his boat to Cairo, and from there moved directly to the police station. The prospect of the police and dogs had visibly frightened him, and I meant to hold his feet to the fire. I’d no intention of letting him slide away in the coming forty-eight hours.