The Lost Army Of Cambyses

by Paul Sussman

'Not that I know of.'

  'Was he involved in anything illegal? Drugs? Antiquities?'

  'How would I know?'

  'Because everyone around here knows everything about everyone else. Come on, no games.'

  The man scratched his chin and sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. Outside the workers had started to sing, a folk tune, one man taking the verse, the others joining in for the chorus.

  'Not drugs,' he said after a long pause. 'He wasn't involved with drugs.'

  'But antiquities?'

  The man shrugged.

  'What about antiquities?' pressed Khalifa. 'Did he deal?'

  'Odds and ends, maybe.'

  'What sort of odds and ends?'

  'Nothing much. A few shabtis, some scarabs. Everybody deals, for God's sake. It's no big thing.'

  'It's illegal.'

  'It's survival.'

  Khalifa ground out his cigarette in an ashtray. 'Anything valuable?' he asked.

  The shop owner shrugged and, leaning forward, turned on the television. 'Nothing that would be worth killing him for,' he said. A game show flickered onto the black-and-white screen. He sat staring at it. After a long pause, he sighed. 'There were rumours.'

  'Rumours?'

  'That he'd found something.'

  'What?'

  'God knows. A tomb. Something big.' The man leaned forward and adjusted the volume. 'But then there are always rumours, aren't there? Every week someone finds a new Tutankhamun. Who knows which ones are true?'

  'Was this one true?'

  The shopkeeper shrugged. 'Maybe, maybe not. I don't get involved. I have a good business and that's all I'm interested in.'

  He fell silent, concentrating on the game show. Outside the men were still singing, the clank and thud of their tools echoing dully in the still afternoon air. When the man spoke his voice was low, almost a whisper.

  'Three days ago Nayar bought his mother a television set and a new fridge. That's a lot of money for a man who has no job. Draw your own conclusions.' He burst out laughing. 'Look at him,' he cried, pointing at a contestant who had just answered a question incorrectly. 'What an idiot!'

  There was something forced about his laughter. His hands, the detective noticed, were trembling.

  Khalifa had always been fascinated by the history of his country. He remembered as a child standing on the roof of their house watching the sunrise over the pyramids. Other children in his village had taken the monuments for granted, but not Khalifa. For him there had always been something magical about them, great triangles looming through the morning mist, doorways to a different time and world. Growing up beside them had given him an insatiable desire to learn more about the past.

  It was a desire he had shared with his brother Ali, who if anything had been even more fanatical in his passion for history, offering as it did a sanctuary from the crushing hardships of his daily life. Each night he would return home from work, exhausted and filthy, and having bathed and eaten, would sit himself down in a corner of the room and immerse himself in one of his archaeology books. He had amassed quite a collection – some borrowed from the local mosque school, most probably stolen – and the young Khalifa had loved nothing more than to sit beside him while he read aloud by the light of a flickering candle.

  'Tell me about Rasses, Ali,' he would cry, nuzzling into his brother's shoulder.

  'Ramesses,' Ali would laugh, correcting him. 'Well, there was once a great king called Ramesses the Second, and he was the most powerful man in the whole wide world, with a golden chariot and a crown made of diamonds . . .'

  How lucky they were to be Egyptian, Khalifa had thought. What other country on earth possessed such a wealth of fabulous stories to pass down to its children? Thank you, Allah, for letting me be born in this wonderful land!

  The two of them had carried out mini-excavations up on the Giza plateau, digging up stones and old bits of pottery, imagining themselves to be famous archaeologists. Once, shortly after their father's death, they had discovered a small limestone pharaoh's head close to the base of the Sphinx and Khalifa had been speechless with excitement, thinking that here for once was something truly ancient and valuable. Only years later had he discovered that Ali had buried it there himself to take his little brother's mind off the loss of their father.

  They had hitched rides south to Saqqara and Dhashur and Abusir, and into the middle of Cairo, where they had cheated their way into the Museum of Antiquities by insinuating themselves into visiting school parties. To this day he could walk round the entire museum in his head, so well had he come to know it from those surreptitious childhood excursions. On one such visit they had been befriended by an elderly academic, Professor al-Habibi. Touched by their youthful enthusiasm, the professor had shown them around the collection, pointing things out, encouraging their interest. Years later, when Khalifa won a place at university to read ancient history, the same Professor al-Habibi had become his tutor.

  Yes, he loved the past. There was something mystical about it, something glittering, a chain of gold stretching all the way back to the dawn of time. He loved it for its colour and its enormity, and the way it somehow made the present appear so much richer.

  Mainly, however, he loved it because Ali had loved it. It was something special they had shared: a joint heart from which they had both drawn strength and life. In time their hands reached out and touched, still, even though Ali was dead and gone. The ancient world was for Khalifa, above all, an affirmation of his love for his lost sibling.

  'Who were the kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty?' Ali used to ask him, testing.

  'Ahmose,' Khalifa would recite slowly, 'Amenhotep one, Tuthmosis one and two, Hatshepsut, Tuthmosis three, Amenhotep two, Tuthmosis four, Amenhotep three, Akhenaten, urn . . . um . . . oh I always forget this one . . . urn . . . oh . . .'

  'Smenkhkare,' Ali would tell him.

  'Dammit! I knew that! Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb.'

  'Learn, Yusuf! Learn and grow!'

  Good days.

  It took him a while to find Nayar's house. It was hidden away behind a cluster of other dwellings, halfway up a hill and backing onto a row of pits that had once held ancient burials, but were now full of mouldering rubbish. An emaciated goat was tethered outside, its ribs showing through its skin like the bars of a xylophone.

  He knocked on the door, which after a brief pause was opened by a small woman with bright green eyes.

  She was young, no older than her mid-twenties, and must have been pretty once. Like so many fellaha women, however, the exertions of child-bearing and the hardships of daily life had made her old before her time. Her left cheek, Khalifa noticed, showed signs of bruising.

  'I'm sorry to disturb you,' he said gently, showing her his badge. 'I've . . .' He paused, searching for the right words. He'd done this sort of thing many times before but had never got used to it. He remembered how his own mother had reacted when they had brought news of his father's death, how she had collapsed and torn at her hair, wailing like a wounded animal. He hated the idea of causing that sort of pain.

  'What?' said the woman. 'Drunk again, is he?'

  'May I come in?'

  She shrugged and turned back into the house, leading him into the main room, where two little girls were playing together on the bare concrete floor. It was cool and dark inside, like a cave, with no furniture apart from a sofa running along one wall and a television standing on a table in the corner. A new television, Khalifa noticed.

  'Well?'

  'I'm afraid I have some bad news,' said the detective. 'Your husband, he's . . .'

  'Been arrested?'

  Khalifa bit his lip.

  'Dead.'

  For a moment she just stared at him, then sat down heavily on the sofa, covering her face with her hands. He presumed she was weeping and took a step forward to comfort her. Only as he came close did he realize that the muffled grunts coming from between her fingers were not sobs at all, but laughter.

 
'Fatma, Iman,' she said, beckoning the two girls to her. 'Something wonderful has happened.'

  11

  CAIRO

  Having finished at the embassy Tara wanted to go to her father's apartment to look through his belongings.

  He had kept few possessions with him during his four-month season at Saqqara – a change of clothes, a couple of notebooks, a camera. Most of his things had stayed in the Cairo flat. Here he had his diaries, his slides, his clothes, various artefacts the Egyptian authorities had allowed him to keep. And, of course, his books, of which he had a vast collection, several thousand volumes, all individually bound in leather, the result of a lifetime of collecting. 'With books,' he used to say, 'even the poorest hovel in the world is transformed into a palace. They make everything seem so much more bearable.'

  Oates offered to take her in the car, but the apartment was only a few minutes' walk away and, anyway, she felt like being alone for a while. He phoned ahead to make sure the concierge had a spare set of keys, drew her a map of how to get there and escorted her to the front gates.

  'Call when you get back to the hotel,' he said. 'And as I mentioned before, try not to stay out after dark. Especially after this river-boat thing.'

  He smiled and disappeared back into the embassy.

  It was by now late afternoon and the sinking sun was casting dappled patterns across the uneven pavement. She gazed around her, taking in the police emplacements along the embassy wall, a beggar squatting at the roadside, a man pulling a cart piled high with watermelons and then, glancing down at the map, set off.

  Oates had explained that this part of Cairo was known as Garden City and as she navigated her way through a maze of leafy avenues she realized why. It was quieter and more sedate than the rest of the metropolis, a faded remnant of the colonial era, with large dusty villas and everywhere trees and flowering shrubs – hibiscus, oleander, jasmine, purple jacaranda. The air echoed to the twitter of birds and was heavy with the scent of mown grass and orange blossom. There seemed to be few people around, just a couple of women pushing prams and the odd suited executive. Many of the villas had limousines parked in front of them and policemen stationed at their front doors.

  She walked for about ten minutes before she reached Sharia Ahmed Pasha, on the corner of which stood her father's apartment block, a turn-of-the-century building with huge windows and intricate iron-work balconies. Once it must have been a cheerful shade of yellow. Now its exterior was grey with dust and grime.

  She went up the front steps and pushed open the door, stepping into a cool marble foyer. To one side, sitting behind a desk, was an old man, presumably the concierge. She approached, and after a confused conversation conducted in sign language, managed to convey who she was and why she had come. Muttering, the man came to his feet, removed a set of keys from a drawer and shuffled over to a cage lift in the corner, pulling back the doors and ushering her in.

  The apartment was on the third floor at the end of a silent, gloomy corridor. They stopped in front of the door and the concierge fiddled with the keys, trying three in the lock before he found the right one.

  'Thank you,' said Tara as he opened the door.

  He remained where he was.

  'Thank you,' she repeated.

  Still he showed no sign of moving. There was an embarrassed silence and then, realizing what was expected, she fished out her purse and handed him a couple of notes. He looked at them, grunted and shuffled away down the corridor, leaving the keys in the door. She waited till he had gone, and then turned and stepped into the apartment, taking the keys and closing the door behind her.

  She was in a dark, wood-floored vestibule, off which opened five rooms – a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen and two others, both piled high with books. All the windows were closed and shuttered, giving the place a musty, abandoned feel. For the briefest moment she thought she could sense a lingering odour of cigar smoke, but it was too intangible for her to be sure and after sniffing the air a couple of times she dismissed it. Probably just polish or something, she thought.

  She went through into the main room, switching on the light as she went. There were books and papers everywhere, piles of them, like drifts of leaves. The walls were hung with pictures of excavations and monuments; in the far corner sat a dusty cabinet full of cracked earthenware pots and faience shabtis. There were no plants.

  Like somewhere that's been preserved for posterity, she thought. To show how people lived in a different time.

  She wandered around, picking things up, peering into drawers, seeking out her father. She found one of his diaries from the early 1960s, when he had been excavating in the Sudan, his small, precise writing interspersed with fading pencil drawings of the objects he had been unearthing. In one of the rooms she discovered some of the books he'd written – Life in the Necropolis: Excavations at Saqqara, 1955–85; From Snofru to Shepseskaf – Essays on the Fourth Dynasty; The Tomb of Mentu-Nefer; Kingship and Disorder in the First Intermediate Period. She flicked through a photo album – pictures of a large sandy trench which, as the album progressed, got deeper and deeper until, on the last pages, the outlines of what looked like a stone wall began to emerge. There seemed to be nothing in the apartment but his work. Nothing that spoke of warmth or love or feeling. Nothing of the present.

  Then just as she was starting to feel oppressed by the place, two surprises. Beside her father's bed – hard, narrow, like a prison cot – she found a photograph of her parents on their wedding day, her father laughing, a white rose in his buttonhole.

  And in the dusty cabinet in the living room, wedged between two earthenware pots, a child's drawing of an angel, the edges of its wings marked out with silver glitter. She had made it years ago at nursery school, for Christmas. Her father must have kept it all this time. She took it out, turned it over and read on the back, in her spidery child's writing: 'For my daddy'.

  She stared at it for a moment and then, suddenly, uncontrollably, began to cry, slumping down onto a chair, her body racked with sobs.

  'Oh Dad,' she choked. 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'

  Later, when the tears had slowed, she collected the photo from the bedroom and put it in her knapsack, along with the drawing. She also took a photograph of her father standing beside a large stone sarcophagus, flanked by two Egyptian workmen. (She remembered him explaining to her as a child that the word 'sarcophagus' came from the Greek for 'flesh eater', an image that had so disturbed her she had been unable to sleep that night.)

  She was just debating whether to take a couple of his books as well when the phone rang. She paused, uncertain whether or not to answer it. After a moment she decided she ought to and went through into the living room, hurrying over to the desk on the far side, where the phone was sitting on top of a pile of manuscripts. Just as she reached it the answering machine clicked on and suddenly the room was full of her father's voice.

  'Hello, this is Michael Mullray. I'm away until the first week in December so please don't leave a message. You can either call me on my return or, if it's university business, contact the faculty direct on 7943967. Thank you. Goodbye.'

  She stopped, startled by the sound, as though a part of her father was not properly dead but remained suspended in some sort of electronic limbo, neither in this world nor fully departed from it. By the time she had regained her senses the machine had beeped and started recording.

  At first she thought the caller had hung up, for there was no voice from the other end of the line. Then she caught the faintest hiss of susurration, no more than a rumour of breath, and realized the caller was still there, just not speaking. She took a step towards the phone and reached out, but then snatched her hand away again. Still he didn't hang up – she knew instinctively it was a man – just waited, breathing, listening, as if he knew she was in the apartment and wanted her to know that he knew. The silence seemed to go on for an age before eventually there was a click and the metallic whirr of the machine resetting itself. She stood frozen for a m
oment and then, gathering up her things, hurried out of the flat, slamming and locking the door behind her. She felt suddenly menaced by the building: the gloomy interior, the creaking lift, the silence. She moved quickly down the corridor, wanting to get out. Halfway along something caught her eye, a large beetle sitting on the clean marble floor. She slowed to look at it, only to discover it wasn't a beetle at all but a heavy nub of grey cigar ash, thick as a backgammon counter. She began to run.