by Paul Sussman
'How can you tell? It looks absolutely genuine.'
Habibi laughed. 'You'd be amazed how skilled these forgers are. Not just with the artwork but with the materials too. They have ways of ageing the ink and the papyrus to make them look thousands of years old. It's an exceptional talent. A shame they use it to hoodwink people.'
He reached for the sherry bottle and refilled his glass.
'But how did you know?' asked Khalifa again. 'What gives it away?'
As before, the sherry disappeared in one gulp.
'Well, there are various tests you can do. Carbon-14 on the papyrus strands. Microscopic analysis of the ink. In this case, however, I didn't have to call in the scientists. I could see just by examining it. Go on, take another look.'
Khalifa bent over the papyrus again and surveyed it through the magnifying glass. Look as he might, however, he could find nothing to suggest it was anything other than the real thing.
'It's got me fooled,' he said, straightening and handing the glass back to the professor. 'It's absolutely perfect.'
'Exactly! And that's how you can tell. Look at any ancient Egyptian manuscript, inscription, wall painting – they're never perfect. There's always at least one tiny blemish: a drip of ink, a misaligned hieroglyph, a figure facing the wrong way. However minute, you can find at least one mistake. But not on the forgeries. They're always faultless. And that's what gives them away. They're just too good. The ancients were never that precise. It's the attention to detail that lets the forgers down.'
He leaned across Khalifa and, picking up the papyrus, scrunched it into a ball and threw it in the bin. He then lumbered back round the desk and sat down heavily in his old leather chair, pulling a briar pipe from a shelf behind him, filling it with tobacco and lighting it. Khalifa lit a cigarette of his own and, reaching into his pocket, removed the bundle of artefacts in their cloth wrapping and laid it on the desk in front of Habibi.
'OK,' he smiled. 'Now it's your turn. What can you tell me about these?'
Habibi looked up at him through wafts of blue pipe smoke and, an intrigued grin on his face, undid the bundle. Before him lay the seven objects Khalifa had found in Iqbar's shop. The professor leaned forward and ran his wrinkled hands over them, gently, lovingly, as though trying to reassure them, win their confidence.
'Interesting,' he said. 'Very interesting. Where are they from?'
'That's for you to tell me,' said Khalifa.
Habibi chuckled and returned his attention to the objects. He switched on the lamp beside him and picked up the magnifying glass. One by one he lifted the artefacts and examined them, swivelling them back and forth in the light, bringing them right up to his face, his bloodshot eye swelling and receding in the thickness of the glass. The office echoed to the rasping of his breath.
'Well?' asked Khalifa after almost five minutes had elapsed.
Habibi laid down the shabti he was looking at and sat back. His pipe had gone out and he spent another minute slowly refilling and lighting it. He was relishing the moment, like someone who has been asked to identify a particularly rare wine and, after careful tasting, is quietly confident he knows what it is.
'Persian occupation,' he said eventually.
Khalifa raised his eyebrows. 'Persian occupation?'
'That's right.'
There was a brief pause.
'First or second?'
Habibi chuckled. 'A ruthless examiner! He lets me get away with nothing. First, I'd say, although I couldn't give you a precise date. Some time between 525 and 404 BC. The shabtis, however, would seem to be a little later.'
'Later?'
'Second Persian probably, although they might possibly be Thirtieth Dynasty. Objects like that are almost impossible to tie down to a specific date, especially very simple ones like these without any legend or inscription. There are no obvious stylistic indications. You just have to go on feel.'
'And these feel Second Persian?'
'Or Thirtieth Dynasty.'
Khalifa was silent for a moment, thinking. 'Are they genuine?'
'Oh yes,' replied Habibi. 'No doubt about that. They're all real.'
He took a deep puff on his pipe. Somewhere beneath them a tannoy system announced that the museum was closing in ten minutes.
'Anything else?' asked Khalifa.
'Depends what you want to know. The terracotta ointment jar probably belonged to a soldier. We have several of the same type. They seem to have been standard military issue of that period. The dagger too suggests a military connection. You can see here, the blade's notched and worn, so it wasn't just ceremonial or votive, it was actually used. The pectoral is interesting. It's high status. Better quality than the other stuff.'
'Which tells you what?'
'Well,' mused the professor, sucking on his pipe, 'either it came from a different source from the other items, or else the person who owned the ointment jar and dagger enjoyed a dramatic improvement in their fortunes.'
Khalifa laughed. 'You should have joined the police. With those powers of deduction you'd be a chief inspector by now.'
'Maybe.' Habibi waved his pipe dismissively. 'But then I could be talking complete rubbish. That's the thing about working with the ancient past. You can put forward any crackpot theory you like – no-one's ever going to prove you wrong. It's all interpretation.'
He reached for the sherry bottle and poured himself a third glass. This time, however, he didn't down it in one, just sipped slowly.
'So tell me, Yusuf. Where are they from?'
Khalifa sucked out the last from his cigarette and ground it into the ashtray.
'Luxor, I think. From a new tomb.'
Habibi nodded slowly. 'Something to do with a case you're working on?'
It was Khalifa's turn to nod.
'I won't ask you for the details.'
'Probably best not to.'
Habibi picked up a pen from his desk and prodded at the bowl of his pipe, tamping down the ash. Another announcement drifted up from below. They sat in silence for a while.
'It's to do with Ali, isn't it?' said Habibi eventually.
'Sorry?'
'The case, these objects – it's to do with Ali?'
'What makes you . . .'
'I can read it in your face, Yusuf. In your voice. You don't spend your life studying dead people without learning a little bit about living ones as well. I can see it, Yusuf. This is about your brother.'
Khalifa said nothing. The professor came to his feet and walked slowly around the desk. He passed behind the detective, and for a moment Khalifa thought he was going to a bookcase on the far side of the room. Then he felt the professor's hand on his shoulder. Despite the man's age, the grip was still firm.
'Arwa and I . . .' the professor started, his voice unsteady. 'When you and Ali first appeared in our lives . . .'
He stopped mid-sentence. Khalifa turned and took the old man's hand in his.
'I know,' he said quietly.
'Just be careful, Yusuf. That's all I ask. Just be careful.'
They remained like that for a moment and then Habibi broke away and moved back to his chair.
'Let's have another look at these things, shall we?' he said, trying to sound cheerful. 'See what else we can tell you. Where did I put that damned magnifying glass?'
26
LUXOR
Omar showed them to a simple room on the upper level of his house, with a rough concrete floor and no glass in the window. While his wife and eldest daughter brought in cushions and sheets, his three other children lingered in the doorway, staring at the new arrivals. The youngest of them, a boy, seemed fascinated by Tara's hair. She lifted him up and he rolled a strand of it around his knuckles, whispering something to his mother.
'What did he say?' she asked.
'That it feels like a horse's tail,' said Omar.
'So much for conditioner.' She smiled, tweaking the boy's nose and putting him down again. She found something curiously comforting about ha
ving the family around her, as though they formed an invisible barrier of warmth and innocence between her and the outside world. Once he'd made sure they were comfortable Omar ushered the others from the room.
'I will go out now and see what I can find,' he said. 'In the meantime, this is your home. You will be safe here. In Luxor, at least, the name of el-Farouk still offers some protection.'
When he had gone they showered and climbed up onto the flat roof of the house, where washing was hanging on a line and a mound of red-brown dates lay drying on a sheet. They gazed at the Theban Hills for a while, rearing above them like a great brown wave, then turned and looked eastwards towards the river. Smoke was rising from fields where farmers were burning off the stubble of their harvested maize and sugar cane; a cart piled high with straw moved slowly across their line of sight, pulled by a team of water buffalo. A pair of white egrets swooped low along the surface of a muddy canal; a group of children was playing on top of a mound of earth, throwing sticks at a dog chained below. From somewhere far off came the soft putter of an irrigation pump.
'I feel we ought to be doing something,' she said after a long silence.
'Like what?'
'I don't know. It just seems wrong to come all this way and then simply stand around taking in the view. After what's happened.'
'There's not much we can do, Tara. At least not till Omar gets back. Our next move depends on what he finds out.'
'I know, I know. But I feel powerless just waiting. Like we're at the mercy of events. My father's dead. People are trying to kill us. I want to do something. Find some answers.'
He reached out and touched her shoulder. 'I know how you feel. I'm just as frustrated. But our hands are tied.'
They stood in silence for a while watching an old man lead a camel down the road beneath them. Daniel turned towards the hills again, eyes flicking back and forth across the undulating wall of rock, lost in thought. Suddenly, as if coming to a decision, he took her hand and pulled her back towards the stairs.
'Come on. It might not solve all our problems but at least it'll give us something to do.'
'Where are we going?'
'There.' He pointed to a flat ridge running like a blade across the top of the hills. 'There's no better place in Egypt to watch the sunset.'
They started down the stairs.
'And you'd better bring the box with you,' he said.
'Why? Are you worried Omar might steal it?'
'No. I just don't want him killed because of it. It's our problem, Tara. We should keep it with us.'
It took them the best part of an hour to reach the top of the ridge, following first a set of concrete steps and then, when these petered out, a steep, dusty path that zigzagged its way upwards before eventually carrying them through a narrow gully and out onto the summit of the hills. It had been a hard climb and by the end of it they were both drenched in sweat. They stood for a moment catching their breath, then Daniel sat down on a large rock and lit a cheroot, tapping his fingers on his thigh as if waiting for someone. Tara removed her knapsack and clambered up above him, awed by the extraordinary views: the setting sun, huge and red, a vast jewel suspended against the turquoise sky; the distant silver ribbon of the Nile, shimmering in the afternoon haze; the endless rippling hills, silent and empty and mysterious.
'They call this peak el-Qurn,' said Daniel, 'the horn. From most directions it just looks like a ridge running across the top of the hills. If you view it from the north, however, from the Valley of the Kings, it's shaped like a pyramid. The ancient Egyptians called it Dehenet. The brow. It's the reason they first chose the valley as a burial ground.'
'It's so peaceful,' said Tara.
'They thought the same three and a half thousand years ago. The peak was sacred to the goddess Meret-Seger: "She who loves Silence".'
He came to his feet, glancing briefly back down the way they had come before climbing up beside her.
'Look there,' he said, pointing, 'that rectangular enclosure, there, to the right: that's Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramesses III. One of the most beautiful monuments in Egypt. And then over there, where those palm trees are, that's Omar's house. Do you see it?'
She peered downwards, following the line of his finger. 'I think so.'
'And then, if you move to the left, where that road is, the one going down to the river, those are the Colossi of Memnon. And if you keep going to the left' – he leaned into her so that their cheeks were practically touching – 'to where that complex of buildings is, that's the Ramesseum, Ramesses II's mortuary temple.'
She could feel his breath against her ear and leaned back a little, looking up at him. There was something troubled in his eyes, a reflection of some inner disturbance.
'What?' she asked.
'I . . .' He paused, unable to find the words. His eyes dropped.
'What, Daniel?'
'I wanted to . . .'
There was a sudden scrabbling noise behind them. They swung round and there, framed by the sides of the gully up which they had climbed a few minutes earlier, was a wild, unkempt-looking face with sunken cheeks and haunted, bloodshot eyes.
'For Christ's sake,' muttered Daniel.
'Hello please, hello please!' gabbled the newcomer, heaving himself a little further up the gully to reveal a djellaba so torn and tattered it was a miracle it held together at all. 'Wait, wait, wait, I show you something very good. Here, here, see.'
Coming out onto the top of the ridge he hurried over to them and extended a skeletal hand, in which he was holding a large scarab carved in black stone.
'I see you come up,' he jabbered. 'Very long way. Very long. Here, look, look, best workmanship. Very, very good how much you give me.'
'La,' said Daniel, shaking his head. 'Mish del-wa'tee. Not now.'
'Quality, quality! Please, how much you give.'
'Ana mish aayiz. I don't want it.'
'Price, price. Give price. Twenty Egyptian pounds. So cheap.'
'La,' repeated Daniel, his voice harsh. 'Ana mish aayiz.'
'Fifteen. Ten.'
Daniel shook his head.
'Antika,' said the man, lowering his voice. 'I have antika. You want look. Very good. Very real.'
'La,' said Daniel firmly. 'Imshi. Go away.'
The man was getting desperate. He pawed at their feet.
'Good people. Good people. Try understand. No money, no food, starve, starve, like dog.' He threw his head back and let out a sudden, ear-splitting howl. 'See,' he jabbered. 'I am dog. Not man. Dog. Animal. Dog.' Another howl.
'Khalas!' growled Daniel. 'Enough!'
He reached into his pocket and pulled out some notes, which he handed to the man, who took them, his sobs giving way to a wide, brown-toothed smile. He broke into a clumsy jig, hopping around the mountain top.
'Good man good man good man,' he sang. 'My friend so very good to me.' He looked up at Tara as he gambolled beneath her. 'Beautiful lady, you want see tombs? You want see Hatshepsut? Kings Valley. Queens Valley. Special tombs. Secret tombs. I be guide. Very cheap.'