by Paul Sussman
They sat in silence for a moment and then the man called the boy in from outside.
'Mehmet, escort Dr Dravic back to his helicopter.'
Dravic stood, slowly, wincing at the stiffness in his legs, and moved towards the entrance, relieved to be getting out.
'I'll call as soon as I have news,' he said. 'I'll be in Luxor. If they turn up anywhere it'll be there.'
'Let us hope so. Everything here is ready. We can be across the border and set up within a matter of hours. All we need is to know where.'
The giant nodded and was about to step out of the tent when Sayf al-Tha'r's voice pulled him back.
'Find the missing piece, Dr Dravic. Opportunities such as this only come once in a lifetime. We must seize it while we have the chance. Find the piece.'
Dravic grunted and left. Two minutes later there was a whine and a roar as the helicopter took off and swung away across the desert.
Alone, Sayf al-Tha'r stood and went to a large chest at the back of the tent. Removing a key from his robe he undid the padlock on the front and heaved open the lid.
It shamed him to have to associate with Kufr like Dravic, but he had no choice. To cross the border himself was too risky. They were watching for him. Waiting. Always waiting. Soon, perhaps, when the fragment was found, but not yet. If he could have used someone else, anyone else, he would have, but Dravic alone possessed the qualifications and, more importantly, the lack of scruples. And so he relied on him. The filth of the earth, the dregs of humanity. The ways of Allah were indeed mysterious.
He bent down and, from the inky interior of the chest, as though from a pool, removed a small necklace. He raised it into a thin shaft of light and the object glittered. Gold. He shook it and the delicate tubes of which it was made tinkled musically. He replaced it and drew out other objects. A pair of sandals. A dagger. A finely worked breastplate, the leather straps still in place. A silver amulet in the shape of a cat. Each one he held up into the light, gazing at it, rapt.
There was no doubting they were genuine. Initially, when Dravic had first brought him news of the tomb, he had refused to believe it. It was too incredible. Too much to hope for. And Dravic had made mistakes before. His judgement in these matters was not always to be trusted.
Only when he had held the objects in his own hands as he was doing now, and looked at them with his own eyes, had he known for certain that they were real. That the tomb was what Dravic had claimed it was. That Allah had indeed smiled upon them. Smiled on them with the very fullness of his favour.
He returned the artefacts to their trunk and closed the lid, slipping the padlock back into its clasp and clicking it shut. In the distance he could still hear the thudding of the helicopter's rotors.
The tomb was just the start of it. And would be the end of it, too, if they didn't find the missing piece. Everything hinged on that. That was the fulcrum upon which their destiny balanced. The missing piece.
He left the tent, eyes narrowing slightly against the sun's glare but otherwise untroubled by the roasting heat. Skirting the camp, he made his way to the top of a low dune and gazed eastwards across the rolling hills of sand, a solitary black speck in the all-enveloping void. Somewhere out there, he thought. Somewhere in that immeasurable sea of burning emptiness. Somewhere. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it must have been like.
22
CAIRO
The ride up from Luxor took ten hours. The train was packed and Khalifa spent the journey wedged into the corner of a draughty carriage between a woman carrying a basket full of pigeons and an elderly man with a hacking cough. Despite the cramped surroundings and the asthmatic jolting of the train, he slept soundly the whole way, his jacket rolled up behind his head as a pillow, his feet resting on a large sack of dried dates. When he woke, a particularly violent lurch banging his head against the bars of the compartment window, he felt refreshed and well rested. He whispered his morning prayers, lit a cigarette and set about devouring the bread and goat's cheese Zenab had given him for the journey, sharing it with the elderly man beside him.
They hit the outskirts of Cairo just before six a.m. He wasn't due to meet Mohammed Tauba, the detective in charge of the Iqbar case, until nine, leaving him with almost three hours to kill. Rather than stay with the train all the way to the centre of Cairo, he instead got off at Giza and, coming out of the station, took a service taxi up to Nazlat al-Sammam, his old village.
It was only the third time he'd been back since he'd left thirteen years ago. As a child he had imagined he would live in the village for ever. After Ali's death, however, and that of his mother, which had come not long afterwards, the place no longer felt the same. Every street reminded him of how badly things had gone wrong, every house, every tree. He could not be there without feeling an overwhelming sense of emptiness and loss. And so he'd accepted the Luxor posting and moved away. His only other trips back had, appropriately, been for funerals.
He left the minibus at a busy crossroads and, glancing up at the pyramid of Cheops, half hidden behind a curtain of dawn mist, set off along a main road into the village, excited and nervous.
The place had changed since his childhood days. Then it had been a proper village – a smallish cluster of shops and houses scattered along the base of the Giza plateau, beneath the silent gaze of the Sphinx.
Now, with the growth of the tourist industry and the inexorable march of the city's western outskirts, it had lost much of its identity. The streets were lined with souvenir shops, and the old mud-brick dwellings had given way to an explosion of characterless concrete tenements. He wandered around for a while, gazing at the buildings, some familiar, most new, uncertain why he had come, just knowing that somehow he needed to see the old place again. He walked past his former home, or rather the site where his former home had once stood – it had long since been demolished and replaced with a four-storey concrete hotel – and looked in at the camel yard where he and his brother had worked as children. Every now and then he passed a familiar face and greetings were exchanged. The greetings were polite rather than warm, distant, cold even in some cases. Hardly surprising, given what had happened to Ali.
He stayed for perhaps an hour, feeling increasingly melancholy, wondering if he had made a mistake in coming, and then, glancing swiftly at his watch, walked out past the edge of the village onto the sands of the plateau. The sun was rising now and the mists were dissolving, the outline of the pyramids growing sharper by the minute. He stood looking at them for a while, then angled away to the left towards a walled cemetery clustered about the foot of a steep limestone scarp opposite the Sphinx.
The lower part of the cemetery was on flat ground, its ornate graves shaded by pine and eucalyptus trees. Closer to the scarp the land sloped upwards and the graves became simpler, drabber, with no greenery to shade them from the elements, like poor suburbs on the margins of a wealthy city.
It was to this part of the cemetery that Khalifa now climbed, weaving his way through a traffic jam of flat, rectangular tombs, until eventually he stopped near the top end of the enclosure, in front of a pair of simple graves, little more than crude slabs of rendered breeze-block, unadorned save for a rock cemented onto the top of each, and a couple of lines of fading Koranic verse painted onto their front end. The graves of his parents.
He gazed down at them and then, kneeling, kissed them, first his mother's, then his father's, whispering a prayer over each. He lingered a moment, head bowed, then stood again and, slowly, as if his legs had grown suddenly heavy, trudged further up the slope to the very top corner of the cemetery, where the enclosure wall was broken and tumbled and the ground was scattered with litter and goat droppings.
There was only one grave in this corner, pushed right up against the wall as though shunned by the other tombs. It was even simpler than his parents' burials, just an unadorned rectangle of cheap cement, with no inscriptions or Koranic verses. He remembered how he had had to plead with the cemetery authorities to allow i
t to be sited here; how he had made it with his own hands, late at night, when no-one from the village would see; how he had wept as he had worked. God, how he had wept.
He knelt down beside the grave and, bending forward, laid his cheek against its cool surface.
'Oh Ali,' he whispered. 'My brother, my life. Why? Why? Please, just tell me why?'
Mohammed Abd el-Tauba, the detective in charge of the Iqbar case, looked like a mummy. His skin was dry and parchment-like, his cheeks sunken, his mouth locked in a permanent rictus that was half smile, half grimace.
He worked out of a grimy office on Sharia Bur Sa'id, where he had a desk in the corner of a smoky room shared with four other officers. Khalifa arrived shortly after nine a.m. and, having exchanged pleasantries and drunk a glass of tea, the two of them got straight down to business.
'So you're interested in old man Iqbar,' said Tauba, grinding one cigarette into an already overflowing ashtray while puffing another into life.
'I think there might be a connection with a case we've got down in Luxor,' said Khalifa.
Tauba blew twin jets of smoke out of his nostrils. 'It's a bad business. We get our share of murders around here, but nothing like this. They butchered the poor old bastard.' He reached into a drawer and pulled out a file, tossing it across the desk. 'The pathologist's report. Multiple lacerations on the face, arms and torso. Burns too.'
'Cigar burns?'
Tauba grunted an affirmative.
'And the cuts?' asked Khalifa. 'What caused the cuts?'
'Strange,' said Tauba. 'The pathologist couldn't be sure. A metal object of some sort, but too clumsy for a knife. He thinks it might have been a trowel.'
'A trowel?'
'You know, like a builder's trowel. One of those ones they use for grouting, cementing in cracks, that sort of thing. It's there in the report.'
Khalifa opened the file and worked his way through it. The pictures of the old man slumped on the floor of his shop, and subsequently of his naked corpse laid out like a fish on the mortuary slab, made him grimace. The pathologist's comments were almost verbatim those used by Anwar in his report on Abu Nayar.
'Nature of instrument used to inflict aforesaid injuries uncertain,' it concluded in the abbreviated, dehumanizing language of all such documents. 'Pathology of lacerations inconsistent with knife-inflicted injury. Shape and angle of wound suggest culprit possibly trowel of some description, as used by builders, archaeologists, etc. although no conclusive evidence either way.'
Khalifa dwelt on the word 'archaeologists' for a moment before looking up at Tauba. 'Who found the body?'
'Shopkeeper next door. Got suspicious when Iqbar didn't show up for work. Tried the door, found it was open, went in and there he was, like in the photos.'
'And this was?'
'Saturday morning. God knows how the papers got hold of it so quickly. I reckon they commit half the crimes in Cairo themselves, just so they'll have something to write about.'
Khalifa smiled. 'Did Iqbar deal in antiquities?'
'Probably. They all do in his business, don't they. We haven't got a file on him, but that doesn't mean anything. We've only got the resources to deal with the big guys. When it's just a few objects we tend to let it go, otherwise we'd be filling every prison from here to Abu Simbel.'
Khalifa flicked through the report again, coming back to the word 'archaeologist'.
'You haven't heard of anything unusual coming onto the antiquities market lately, have you?'
'Unusual?'
'You know, valuable. Worth killing for.'
Tauba shrugged. 'Not that I can think of. There was some Greek guy exporting artefacts disguised as reproductions, but that was a couple of months ago. I can't think of anything more recent. Unless you count that business over at Saqqara.'
Khalifa glanced up. 'Saqqara?'
'Yesterday afternoon. An English couple got involved in a gunfight and then drove away in a stolen taxi. Apparently the girl had taken something out of one of the dig houses.'
He called across the room to one of his colleagues, an overweight man with heavy sweat stains beneath his armpits.
'Hey, Helmi! You've got a friend in the Giza force. What was the latest with that shooting at Saqqara?'
'Not much,' grunted Helmi, biting into a large cake. 'No-one seems to know what was going on, except that the girl had nicked something. A box of some sort.'
'Any idea who she was?' asked Khalifa.
Helmi pushed more cake into his mouth, treacle oozing around his lips and chin. 'The daughter of some archaeologist, apparently. One of the inspectors at the teftish recognized her. Murray or something.'
Murray, thought Khalifa. Murray. 'Not Mullray? Michael Mullray?'
'That's the one. Died a couple of days ago. Heart attack. The daughter found his body.'
Khalifa pulled his notebook from his pocket and a pen.
'So let me get this clear: the girl finds her father's body two days ago, then comes back yesterday and takes this thing from the dig house . . .'
'Their taxi driver thought they'd got it from one of the tombs,' said Helmi. 'He said they went out into the desert, got this thing like a pizza carton . . .'
'Trust you to get food into it, Helmi!' shouted one of his colleagues.
'Lick my arse, Aziz . . . got this box thing, came back, someone started shooting at them. But then the people in the village below said it was the bloke the girl was with who was doing the shooting. Like I said, no-one seems to know what the hell was going on.'
'Do we know who this man was?'
Helmi shook his head. Khalifa sat silent for a moment, thinking.
'Any chance I could talk to your friend at Giza?'
'Sure, but he won't tell you anything I haven't. And anyway, he's been moved off the case now. Al-Mukhabarat took over last night.'
'Secret service?' Khalifa sounded surprised.
'Apparently they want to keep the whole thing hush-hush. Bad publicity for Egypt and all that, what with a tourist being involved. It wasn't even on the news.'
Khalifa doodled in his notebook.
'Anyone else I could talk to?' he asked after a pause.
Helmi was brushing crumbs from his desk. 'I think there was some guy at the British embassy who knew the girl. Orts or something. Junior attaché. That's about all I know.'
Khalifa scribbled the name on his pad and put it away.
'You think there's a connection?' asked Tauba.
'No idea,' said Khalifa. 'I can't see any obvious link. It just feels . . .' He paused, and then, not bothering to finish the sentence, held up the Iqbar report. 'Can I get a copy of this?'
'Sure.'
'And I'd like to see the old man's shop. Is that possible?'
'No problem.'
Tauba rooted through his desk and produced an envelope. 'Address and keys. It's up in Khan al-Khalili. We've done all the fingerprints and forensics.'
He threw it over to Khalifa, who caught it and stood.
'I should be back in a couple of hours.'
'Take your time. I'll be here till late. I'm always bloody here till late.'
They shook hands and Khalifa started across the office. He had almost reached the door when Tauba called after him.
'Hey, I forgot to ask. Khalifa . . . your family's not from Nazlat al-Sammam, are they?'
A momentary pause.
'Port Said,' said Khalifa and disappeared into the corridor.
LUXOR
The biggest regret of Dravic's life, the only regret, in fact, was that he hadn't killed the girl. After fucking her he should have cut her throat and dumped her in a ditch somewhere. But he hadn't. He'd let her crawl away. And of course she'd crawled straight to the police and told them what he'd done and bang! That had been the end of his career.