by Mike Ashley
“You’ll do, beetle,” he mouthed at it, put it in his pocket and went back upstairs.
He waited until after the performance the following evening to take it to her, watching from a cafe table as the audience strolled out into the sunshine. With his new sense of mission, the men seemed to him to have a nasty glossiness to their faces as if they’d feasted on sticky cakes. A few minutes later the black-robed man and his assistant came out too and walked away up the street. Within seconds Tutty was across the road, through the curtain and into the back room. She was rolling up her bandages, just like the night before, and looked scared when she recognized him.
“There, I’ve got him.”
He put the scarab down in a nest of jumbled bandages on the table. She gave a little scream.
“It’s just like his.” He blessed his luck, but then heart scarabs weren’t especially rare. She put out her hand to touch it, then looked up at him. “What happens now?”
“Pick it up.”
She picked it up, biting her lower lip with sharp little blue-white teeth. The look on her face, half-scared, half-trusting, went to his heart. He realized that simply bringing it to her wasn’t enough. The other Englishman had used some mumbo-jumbo ceremony to put the curse on and he must do the same. While he was desperately trying to think of something she gave him his cue.
“Do I have to lie down?”
She didn’t say it in a coquettish way but humbly, like patient to doctor. He nodded, struck dumb, and followed her to the room where the performances were given. She got up on the trestle table and lay back, arranging her swathes of dyed muslin neatly round her legs, then clasped the scarab to her breast with both hands. Tutty stood by the table, throat dry, struggling for words. He knew not a syllable of Egyptian but then the bogus priest almost certainly didn’t either. Anything would do as long as it sounded foreign. A dim memory of prep school days came to his rescue. “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.” She gave a little shudder of satisfaction and closed her eyes.
Tutty wasn’t missed because dinner tended to be an irregular meal at his father’s house and that night didn’t happen at all. The professor was out somewhere and Thomas dined off dates and lemonade in the study, while getting on with the task of cross-indexing recent finds – pitifully few of them and not especially interesting, but it had to be done. He’d worked through a couple of columns of them and had gone to the window for some air when he heard the rumbling of cart wheels in the street below and the foreman’s voice, telling the driver to be careful. This surprised him because the professor had said nothing about new discoveries. He went outside and saw the cart drawn up by the house and the professor and foreman standing in the back of it, staring at something wrapped in reed matting. Heart bounding with hope, he called out to them.
“Ah, Thomas, come and look at this.”
He clambered into the back of the cart. The thing under the matting was the right shape for a mummy case and the professor looked unusually pleased with himself. With his eyes on Thomas, he signed to the foreman to uncover it. Blue and gold glinted in the low sun. A royal, impassive mask stared up with a rearing cobra over its forehead. Thomas took a step forward, lifted the painted lid and registered the smell of the emptiness inside.
“Modern pine. It’s a fake.”
He stared at the professor, wondering for an instant if anger had sent the man insane, but found a grin on the piratical face.
“Of course it is. We’ve just bought it in the bazaar. Not a very expert fake, but it will serve its purpose.”
Later, still labouring over the cross-indexing, Thomas heard the cart lumbering away.
Tutty chanted his way through all the tags he could remember from Caesar’s Gallic Wars then, because the girl still hadn’t moved, launched himself on Arma virumque cano and the next dozen or so lines of Aeneid I, filling in the gaps with irregular Latin verbs. When even those failed him he took a deep breath and intoned as sonerously as he could manage Te absolvo. Nunc dimittis servum tuum in pace, hoping that she didn’t happen to be a Roman Catholic. She sensed at least the finality in his voice, opened her eyes and sat up.
“Is it done?”
He nodded, exhausted. She sat there for a while, still clasping the scarab to her breast, like a bird staring at the open cage door and not knowing what to do with freedom. Then a smile spread across her face. She raised her arms, slid off the table and did a wild little dance round the room chanting, “Free, free, free,” muslin drapes flying back from her knees and calves. Tutty’s feeling of happiness and rare achievement was stronger even than desire. He wouldn’t have traded it for all the wisdom of all the kingdoms of Egypt. Her dance took her to the curtain between door and street. She twitched at it, looked out. Then, “Oh.” She dropped the curtain, froze.
“Not another rabid dog, is it?” Tutty asked.
She shook her head. “It’s him. The priest. The one who put the curse on me.”
He went past her, looked out through the gap between curtain and doorframe.
“Him, you mean? The tall one in the panama?”
A tall, over-elegant man in a white linen suit and panama stood so close that if Tutty had shouted to him he’d have heard. He was in his late thirties or early forties with a pale, oval face with gold-framed glasses and a little pointed black beard. He wore an assortment of antique rings on his fingers and carried a black cane topped with the silver hawkshead of the god Horus. He was standing there reading a note, smiling to himself.
“He’s come to get me.” She was shrinking against the wall. “He knows what you’ve done and he’s come to put the curse back on me.”
“No, of course he’s not.” Anger at seeing all his good work ruined made Tutty resourceful. “We’re stronger than he is. You can put a curse on him instead.”
“I can? How?”
“Just put the beetle between your hands and say what you want to happen to him. Or you don’t even have to say it, just think it. But quickly before he goes.”
The man was folding up the note, tucking it away in his pocket with dandyish care so as not to spoil the line of the jacket. The girl stood motionless, eyes shut, and hands in prayer position at her chest with the black scarab between them. She was gripping it so hard that anything less tough than basalt might have cracked. The man flicked a piece of straw off his shoe with the end of his ebony cane, took a slim gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and consulted it. Then he turned and walked away, in no hurry.
“He’s going,” Tutty told her. “Have you cursed him?”
She nodded, eyes huge and greedy, and came to stand beside him. They watched as the pale back receded down the street then blurred into the red-gold dusk. Then suddenly she put her arms round Tutty, pressed her mouth against his. He was so surprised that he didn’t start to return the kiss until it was too late and she took her arms away.
“I’m ever so grateful. Really, I’m ever so grateful. Can I keep the beetle?”
“Of course.” Then, seeing the excitement on her face, it occurred to him to ask her. “So what did you curse him with?”
She looked at him, as if he should have known the answer. “Death, of course. I cursed him with death.”
She wouldn’t go away with him at once. She said she had things she must do. If he wanted he could come back later, much later when it was dark. Feminine stuff to pack, he supposed. She must have clothes other than blue beads and gold muslin. Although it would have been a more satisfying end to his drama to whisk her away at once, at least the delay gave him time to think. He did his thinking walking round the city, first the crowded bazaar with the lamps lit outside the stalls and smells of spiced meat everywhere, then to the river bank and the slanting masts of the moored feluccas against a white sky. The night was hot and heavy, with distant lightning flickering towards the Nile delta, palm fronds hissing against each other like cockroaches in a faint breeze. The toughest question was how to explain her to his father. If he followed his original plan o
f escorting her home to England, even though the two of them would be travelling as chastely as sister and brother – or very nearly - the professor would have to know and couldn’t be expected to like it.
After hours of walking, and many cups of coffee in small cafes, he decided that it was late enough to go and fetch her. The best thing would be to put her up at a hotel for the night then go home and face the music. With that settled, he walked quite jauntily back through the city towards the white cube of the house, thinking he’d like another chance to manage the kiss better, with some warning next time. He watched from across the road in case the brute had come back, but saw no sign of activity so crossed and pulled the curtain a little aside.
“Hello. I’m back.”
It came to him that he didn’t even know her name. There was a scuffling in the back room, a little light coming through. He got to the doorway in two strides.
“Hey, stop that.”
His first thought was that the brute had come back after all and was trying to throttle her. It was only when his eyes adjusted to the lamplight that he saw what he’d interrupted. She was wearing normal clothes, a pink dress, a straw hat with a ribbon but the hat was disarranged because when he came in she’d had her arms round the flute player and the two of them were kissing with a confidence and enthusiasm that showed it wasn’t the first time. At his shout they sprang apart, but not very far.
“What’s going on?” He wished, even as he said it, that he didn’t sound so much like a village constable, but what was a chap supposed to say?
“This is Lou. He’s French.”
She said it quite defiantly in her little voice, as if that explained everything. The lad – no more than 17 or 18 surely – stood there smiling at her. In normal clothes, he was even better-looking than in his flute-player’s robes, hair dark and curling, eyes wide, lashes long and thick as a calf’s. Lebanese-French, Tutty thought, or Syrian-French. Not that it mattered.
“Well, we’re not taking him too.”
“Lou and I are going away together,” she said.
There was a new confidence about her. He noticed a bulge under the bodice of her dress. She saw his eyes going to it and pulled out a little linen bag, hastily cobbled together.
“We’ve wanted to for weeks, only I couldn’t because of the curse. Now I’ve got the beetle, it’s all right.”
She popped it back inside her dress.
“Where are you going?”
Her forehead wrinkled. “Where the river comes out to the sea. Alex . . .”
“Alexandria,” the boy said obligingly, probably catching onto one of the few words he understood. “I play, she dance.”
His fingers mimed flute playing while his body imitated her sinuous dance movements.
“But you can’t go back to that.”
“Why not? Specially now we don’t have to give all the takings to that bastard. There’s more money in the Alex place, from the sailors.”
“What about your parents?”
“What?” She stared. He might as well have been speaking Latin again.
“Won’t they want you back?”
She laughed, a harsh little sound. “You’re joking. They chucked me out when I was thirteen.” Then, as if to get away from the memory, “Come on, Lou. Time we were going.”
She moved towards the door. The flute player picked up a small bag and followed. Bemused, Tutty stood aside for her. She swept past then turned back suddenly, put her arms round his neck and kissed him again, taking him as much by surprise as before.
“Thank you. I’ll never forget you. Thank you for the beetle.”
Then the curtain flapped and they were gone.
It was past midnight and several drinks later when Tutty turned for home at last. He thought, on the whole, that he’d probably made a bit of an idiot of himself, but not too much of an idiot when all was said and done. And it had been a difficult situation. She wasn’t the kind of girl his kind of chap married. Even if it hadn’t been for all the other reasons against it, the memory of her small, hard voice, I cursed him with death, placed her in a different and harsher world than his own. At least now there wasn’t a lot of explaining to be done to his father – unless he missed the scarab. On that score, there were no guarantees. In the usual confusion of his father’s study it could be months or years before that happened. On the other hand, if he suddenly wanted it to illustrate some point or other, there’d be no peace for the household until it was found. If so, he’d just have to confess and give him some suitably edited version of the story. Still, he couldn’t help being apprehensive as he approached the house. By then, his father and Thomas should be in bed. He decided to go in through the side door from the little yard to save waking up the servants. It was annoying, in his tired and nervy state, to find the yard blocked by his father’s expedition cart, drawn up practically touching the house wall. To squeeze past it he had to put a foot on its back step, which brought his eyes level with the thing in the cart.
He screamed. He’d seen mummies before, all too many of them, all his life. But none like this. None with bandages so fresh and white, standing out from the shadows of the mummy case and practically glowing in the dark. None with an oval face as white as the bandages and fresh as if it had died that day. None with a bristling black beard. Never, in all kinds and conditions of mummies, one that wore gold framed glasses. A voice was screaming in his head and screaming out of his head, not caring who heard.
“We cursed him. We cursed him and he’s come back to me.”
His father was there almost at once, fully dressed and wide awake. He got Tutty inside and up to his study, fending off inquiries from the rest of the household, ordering them sharply to go back to bed and stay there. With the study lamp lit and the dancing Bastets wavering over the wall, Tutty poured out his whole story.
“I never believed any of the curse stories. I know you didn’t either. But she cursed him – she meant it, with the black scarab – and now he’s come to my doorstep. A mummy, you see. He made her into a mummy – so when she cursed him – I didn’t believe it, you see, but I did it – so it made him into a mummy instead and . . . oh, God.”
He sipped the brandy his father had poured for him and shivered. The professor waited. After a while Tutty said, “I suppose he really is dead.’
“Oh, yes, he’s really dead.”
Tutty hung his head. The professor didn’t speak for a while, roving round his study. Then, at last: “What scarab did you say you took.”
“The black one, the heart scarab.”
The professor laughed. “After all these years, you still can’t tell a fake.”
“What?” Tutty’s head swung up.
“A fake. The bazaars are full of them. I bought one so that I could show my students the differences between a bazaar souvenir and the real thing. Your death-cursing scarab was hacked out a few weeks ago by a ham-fisted faker with a cold chisel. It’s no more a real scarab than you’re a real Pharaoh.”
“But the curse?”
“From Caesar’s Gallic Wars? My dear boy, if that’s the best you can do with an expensive education, I should have had you apprenticed to a plumber.”
“But he’s dead. He’s out there wrapped up in a mummy case and he’s dead.”
“Yes, but it’s nothing to do with you. This was meant to be kept secret so I want your promise not to tell anybody else, but at least it will set your mind at rest from this nonsense. Your promise?”
Tutty nodded.
“The man out there was a dealer in Egyptian artefacts. He had certain other businesses as well, hence that degrading peep-show you attended. He died today. Because of his interests, some of his associates thought it appropriate that he should be buried in the old Egyptian manner – or at least as close to it as modern sensibilities permit. For instance, no attempt was made to hook his brain out through his nostrils.”
Tutty groaned and spluttered brandy.
“It was done with some secre
cy, so as not to offend the bureaucratic meddlers,” the professor said. “Later tonight, his body will be transported along the Nile towards its final resting place. I’m sure nobody could wish a more appropriate ending for him than that.”
“He was a rotter,” Tutty murmured.
“You may be right. If so, he won’t be the first man to be more honoured in death than his life deserved. Now, my boy, drink up and go to bed. Tomorrow we’ll talk. It may be time to think of sending you back to England.”
“Oh, yes, please.”
Almost a prayer. The professor helped Tutty to his feet, watched his unsteady progress across the study and the door closing behind him. Idly he picked up a few assorted scarabs from under his papers and arranged them in a row. He would miss the heart scarab, which had been a good example of its kind, and assuredly no fake. If a man were inclined to superstition – which of course he wasn’t – he might even think it had played some part in ending the career of a man who had defiled the old gods. But there were too many things to be done before morning. First, the little bags of gold coins to be sorted out for the foreman’s friends, who had done their job efficiently, wrapped and delivered the goods precisely as ordered. Then, with their help, the mummy case must be lidded, straw-swathed and carted with its contents to the waiting felucca that would carry it as quickly as possible downriver to the docks. One other thing – the job the professor had been thinking about when his son screamed from the yard – was filling in the delivery label. The dead man had two particular customers, both rich and secretive collectors, both – in the professor’s view – richly deserving what he had to send. New York or Hamburg? He smiled, enjoying the luxury of hesitation, his hand unconsciously rearranging the line of scarabs.