The Case of the Purloined Pyramid

by Sean McLachlan

  “Most kind of you. Ah!”

  Neumann’s eyes lit up with unaffected joy as he beheld Augustus’s collection. He went first to a shelf full of various fragments of inscriptions and examined them closely. After a few minutes, he shook his head and turned away in obvious disappointment before moving to a set of well-preserved alabaster canopic jars.

  “These are very fine.”

  “I saw you studying the inscriptions. Are you looking for anything in particular?”

  “Um, no. But these canopic jars would grace any collection. How much can I offer you for them? I can pay in British pounds. To carry such an amount in Egyptian pounds would require a suitcase.”

  Augustus named a figure and was surprised when Neumann agreed without haggling.

  “I’m glad to do business with you. I will draw the money from my bank tomorrow and return with a couple of workmen to pick up the pieces.”

  “I’ll have them packed and ready.”

  The man paused and studied the room.

  “This is a fine old house. Do you know the date of construction?”

  “No. In fact, no one seems to. I would say that it’s perhaps early Ottoman.”

  “Perhaps,” the German mused, “perhaps much older. The carving on the doorjamb, for example, although much eroded, looks to be from the time of the Bahri Dynasty, as does the mosque down the street.”

  “My specialty is more ancient than medieval.”

  “I see. Um, may I ask to use the restroom? Ah, um, a bit of indigestion. The local cuisine doesn’t agree with me.”

  “You’ll find it through the back hall on your left.”

  “Most kind, thank you.” The little man bowed and moved away.

  Augustus watched him go, feeling slightly uneasy. There was something strange about this fellow. He had seemed fascinated by the inscriptions and barely gave anything else a glance before deciding to buy the canopic jars almost at random. Then there was his unusual interest in the house. While Augustus at first had thought nothing of the man carrying a gun—a wise move in some parts of Cairo, after all—that combined with his behavior made him think twice.

  Courtesy made him hesitate. This man had just offered a considerable sum for the canopic jars. Should he really interrupt him while he was on the loo with a case of Sultan’s Revenge? He seemed an odd little fellow, and perhaps it was only that which made him appear suspicious.

  Augustus couldn’t shake a feeling of rising unease, however, and he had long since learned to trust his instincts. He walked to the doorway through which the man had disappeared, hesitated a final time, and then made his way to the water closet at the end of the hall, right next to a narrow spiral flight of servants’ stairs.

  The washroom door was closed, and he could see through the crack at the bottom of the door that the light was on. Quietly he moved up to the doorway and placed an ear against it. No sound came from within. He did, however, hear a faint click come from up the stairs. Augustus paused. The sound did not repeat.

  Narrowing his eyes and balling his hands into fists, Augustus tiptoed to the bottom of the stairs and peered upward. He had left a light on upstairs, but he could see no one in the narrow slice of the upstairs room visible from his vantage point. Another sound caught his ears, a faint scuff, as if of a shoe on the carpet he had placed in the room immediately above him.

  Augustus crept up the spiral staircase. It was of stone, and he had to take care that the hard soles of his shoes did not make any sound that could give him away.

  As he ascended and turned the corner, the room upstairs came into view through the arched doorway. This was one of his spare rooms, given over to a bookshelf of some of his lesser-used volumes and various pieces of drafting equipment. As Augustus suspected, Herr Neumann was in the room, but he seemed uninterested in any of the objects within.

  Instead, he was shining a small but powerful electric torch through some cracks in the masonry.

  Mystified, Augustus pulled back until he was all but hidden from view and watched as his visitor stared into the crack between two large stones, shook his head, and moved to another. At this one he seemed to find something more to his interest. His eyes widened, and his lips pulled back in a toothy grin. The man nodded and glanced at the stairway. Augustus ducked back out of sight. When he looked again, Neumann had crossed the room to a third crack between the stones and was shining his light in there. Once again he grinned.

  Nodding with evident satisfaction, he turned off his torch and put it in his pocket. Augustus noted it was a different pocket than the one where he had noticed a bulge he had interpreted as a gun. That pocket remained filled with something else. He had not mistaken the torch for a pistol.

  Augustus himself was unarmed. His own pistol lay in the drawer by his bed, and his other weapons were in a different room at the other end of the house. He had to take care.

  Guessing that Neumann would come back downstairs since his pretense of going to the washroom would soon run out of time, Augustus tiptoed down the staircase and moved to one side of the doorway at its bottom.

  An instant later, he heard Neumann walking down the steps.

  As soon as his figure appeared in the doorway, Augustus grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back.

  “Ow! Help! Oh, it’s you. What are you doing? Unhand me!”

  Augustus pinned Neumann against the wall, slapped aside his other hand as it reached for his pocket, and put his own hand inside it. He pulled out a small automatic and pocketed it.

  “Robbery! The police will hear of this!” Neumann bawled.

  “The police commandant is a personal friend, and he’ll be very interested to know what you were doing sneaking around my house.”

  “Nothing! I merely am an admirer of medieval Cairene architecture. This is quite an old house, one of the oldest private dwellings I’ve seen.”

  “If you wanted a tour, you could have asked for one. Instead you sneaked off and looked through the cracks in the masonry. Why?”

  Neumann’s cheek was pressed against the wall, his arm twisted painfully behind him, and yet he relaxed, his face taking on a confident air.

  “Do you read German, Sir Wall?”

  “I do. What of it?”

  “Since you are so fond of rifling through other people’s pockets, how about you take my wallet from my left pants pocket and examine its contents?”

  Curious, Augustus did as the man suggested. Flipping open the wallet, he saw an identity card that named the bearer as a member of the German diplomatic corps.

  Neumann grinned. “If you do not wish to be at the center of an international incident, I suggest you unhand me. Despite the recent misunderstanding between our two nations, my diplomatic immunity still holds, and molesting me in this fashion could get you into very deep trouble with the law, no matter how high your connections.”

  Augustus snarled and let the man go.

  “Get out of my house,” he ordered, shoving Neumann down the hallway.

  Neumann chuckled and extended a hand. “My pistol, please?”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  Neumann grinned over his shoulder at Augustus and walked into the front room. He glanced at the canopic jars.

  “You really do have excellent taste, Sir Wall. A pity I won’t be buying those.”

  “I wouldn’t sell them to you for all the tea in China.”

  “That will be ours too one day,” Neumann murmured, and strolled out the door.

  Once he was gone, Augustus locked the door and paced back and forth, deep in thought.

  What could he do? Should he call on Sir Russell and tell him what happened? No, that might make matters worse. Besides, what could he tell him? That an eccentric diplomat had been examining the cracks in his masonry? While that was odd and more than a little suspicious, it wasn’t illegal, while his manhandling of Neumann constituted assault. Then there was the little matter of stealing his gun. No, he couldn’t go to the police.

  Just w
hat was so interesting about those cracks, after all?

  Augustus retrieved his own torch and peered through the same cracks Neumann had. He saw nothing but dust and white limestone. He took a ruler and poked around a bit, but could find no hidden objects.

  Shrugging his shoulders, he got back to work. He’d check on Neumann and put out feelers with the people he knew.

  He stopped what he was doing. What people? He had virtually no friends in this city and had refused all invitations forthcoming to a new member of the cultured set of British Cairo.

  “And I thought I’d find some peace here,” Augustus grumbled, and got back to work.

  ***

  That night, a small shadow slipped into the alley behind Augustus Wall’s home. Padding through the refuse on bare feet, the shadow moved silently to a drainpipe on the back wall. The figure looked around, cocked an ear, and began to ascend.

  Faisal climbed quickly, silently, and with an experience and confidence beyond his brief years. The pipe ran up to a ledge that he could edge along to a window. It was locked, as he had suspected, but the stone frame made for a good handhold and foothold to ascend to another ledge, and then another windowsill.

  Within a minute, he had climbed over the lip of the rooftop terrace wall and dropped silently onto the tile. He peered around, aided by the light of a gibbous moon. Cairo’s rooftops were all more or less the same, although this was bigger than most. A few low benches stood to one side, covered by a trellis that in a normal home would have been interlaced with vines and surrounded by potted plants to give shade and cool breezes to the family. But this house had been abandoned for years, and the pots were all cracked, and the dry desert wind had blown the last shriveled vine away long ago.

  On the other side of the roof stood a small shed, which no doubt held nothing of value. Anything of worth the family had left behind up here would have been stolen long ago. Next to the shed, a string still hung suspended between a pair of poles on which to hang laundry.

  An open central area looked down on the courtyard. Moonlight shone on a fountain, the burbling water gleaming faintly. All the interior windows were shut and dark.

  Of real interest was a raised area on the other side of the roof. It sloped up and had a row of windows facing the north, the direction of the prevailing winds. Below, Faisal knew, would be the main sitting room. These windows brought the breeze into the house.

  As the night was warm but not hot, only one was open. That was all Faisal needed. He lifted himself up on the sill and peered down. The house was dark and silent within. The sitting room had a divan and a few chairs, plus some books scattered here and there.

  Faisal was twelve and small for his age. Life on the street had left him skinny but with a wiry strength, yet even so, he had trouble forcing himself through that narrow opening. Gritting his teeth and trying not to make any noise, he managed to worm his way through feet first, keeping a tight grip on the windowsill.

  Once through, he held there for a moment to catch his breath and then swung himself over to grab the lip of an arched doorway between the sitting room and a hallway. He was about to drop down when he noticed the stone was old and had easy holds for his fingers and toes along the side of the arch. Good. That meant he could climb up again if he wished. He could come and go through this house as he pleased.

  Once at the bottom, he paused. Jinn often took up residence in abandoned houses. Had the sheikh who had cleared out the snakes also cleared out the jinn?

  Faisal peered into the shadows, his eyes going wide and his heart beating fast as he imagined what might lurk in them. Jinn did not affect Europeans. Everybody knew that. The English and the French dug up the ancient places without harm and even kept the wrapped bodies of pharaohs in their houses. What if this house contained such things? It would be crawling with jinn!

  He should say a prayer to keep them away, if only he knew any. Osman ibn Akbar had tried to teach him, but he had never listened to the old beggar. Faisal tried to remember what the adults had said. But they were all day-to-day things, nothing especially to keep away spirits.

  No, the sheikh must have gotten rid of them, he tried to reassure himself as he walked through empty, darkened rooms, looking fretfully at every corner. Besides the sitting room, it appeared this entire floor was abandoned. The jinn liked abandoned places.

  But since the sheikh knew he was working for a European, would he have bothered? Wouldn’t he have left the jinn in the Englishman’s house, where they could do no harm, so they wouldn’t fly to another home and find some Muslims to bother?

  Faisal found the staircase leading down to the next floor and stopped. What was he doing here anyway? Hassan and his cousins waited outside, and if he didn’t go down to the ground floor and open the front door for them, they’d skin him alive. But he didn’t want the Englishman to get killed. When Hassan’s gang set upon them, the Englishman’s first instinct had been to protect him. No one ever did that for him. No one ever did anything for him. How could he betray the Englishman?

  No, he wouldn’t betray him. He’d wake the Englishman up and tell him everything. Maybe the man could get the colonial police to arrest Hassan and his cousins. Foreigners could get anybody arrested with a few words. The Englishman hadn’t done it at first because he thought Hassan would leave him alone. Now that that was obviously not going to work, the only thing to do was to go to the police. Well, the Englishman could go to the police. He wouldn’t dare go himself. They’d just beat him and send him on his way.

  Faisal moved down the stairs to the next floor. This one, at least, had furniture. The barren rooms upstairs had frightened him. These rooms gave him a little more confidence because they looked lived in. The Englishman was brave. Perhaps he had scared the jinn away.

  A low snoring led him to the right room. A few thin rays of moonlight shone through the slats in the window to illuminate the bedroom, with an open door leading to a bathroom beyond. The Englishman was barely visible as a dark lump on the bed. Moonlight gleamed on his strange mask and a glass bottle sitting on the nightstand.

  A half-forgotten scent tickled Faisal’s nostrils. He padded over to the bottle and sniffed, then wrinkled his nose in disgust.

  Alcohol. That was the one thing he remembered about his father—the stench of alcohol, usually followed by a slap. That had been years ago, before his father had disappeared, either dead in a gutter or in prison or simply gone. It didn’t matter. Faisal didn’t miss him.

  Faisal put his hands on his hips and glared at the dark form in the bed. It would serve the Englishman right to get murdered by Hassan and his crew, the drunkard. All he had to do was go down and unlock the door. They had even promised him a cut of the take.

  As soon as he thought it, Faisal felt guilty. He knew he couldn’t do it. The Englishman had tried to protect him.

  “Psst, Englishman,” Faisal whispered.

  He looked around nervously, worried that the jinn might hear. He noticed the cane the Englishman had used to prick Hassan leaning against one wall and grinned. That had been a good trick, pulling a sword out of a cane! Hassan had looked like a frightened monkey! That got Faisal giggling. He had giggled all day about it.

  “Hey, Englishman, wake up,” he said, louder this time.

  The man didn’t move. His snoring continued uninterrupted.

  Faisal scratched his head. Frustrated, he nudged the man, taking care not to look at his face. No response. He nudged him harder.

  Shaking his head in frustration, he looked back at the bottle. How much did he drink? Was he completely senseless?

  The boy squinted in the dim light. Something else sat on the nightstand. He picked it up and saw it was a little tin box. Inside he found a stick of dark material like kohl. He sniffed it, and it didn’t smell like anything he had ever smelled before. It was sticky and gave a little when he pressed it between his finger and thumb. With a shrug, he put it back down and picked up the bottle. To his surprise, he found it nearly full. Had the Eng
lishman gotten so drunk on so little? His father had been able to drain a bottle twice this size, but his father had been a giant, a monster of a man. No normal man could expect to match him when it came to drinking.

  Faisal moved over to the bathroom, poured the contents of the bottle down the sink, and replaced it on the nightstand.

  “Drinking is a sin, you silly Englishman. Even I know that. Now wake up!”

  Faisal thumped him on the shoulder. The man continued to snore.

  Raising his hands in exasperation, Faisal left the room. He’d just have to hide from Hassan tonight and warn the Englishman tomorrow.

  Normally he slept in a shack he and some of the other boys had made in an alley. It stank of cat’s piss and garbage, but with everyone crammed in there, it kept fairly warm even on the coldest nights. The problem was that Hassan knew of it and would search for him there.

  Better to go to his secret hiding place, the front entrance of the mosque of Sultan Hassan. The dead Hassan would protect him from the living one! The huge arched doorway gave shelter from the wind. Many beggars slept there, and the imam didn’t mind as long as they cleared out before dawn prayer, when hundreds of students from the four schools of Sunni Islam came to make their peace with God before starting their lessons. Faisal would have to get up even earlier than that in order to lead Osman ibn Akbar to prayer at the mosque on Ibn al-Nafis Street. The blind man usually got some bread and a coin or two every morning from the other worshippers and shared some of his food with Faisal. He’d have to take care that Hassan didn’t see him, but the son of a dog usually slept late. If Faisal left right after he got some bread from Osman ibn Akbar, he should be able to warn the Englishman before Hassan showed up.

  Then a thought came to him, a wonderful thought. The Englishman had promised to pay him if Faisal saved his life again. Didn’t leaving the house without opening it to Hassan and his cutthroats count as saving his life? He deserved a reward!

  Rubbing his hands with glee, he began to search the house. The jinn were all forgotten as he rummaged around the rooms. The bedroom and another room beside it were filled with objects that might be of value. Most would be hard for him to sell, though, like books and European clothes. Everyone would know they had been stolen. Faisal saw some strange things too, like a box with a circular plate attached to the top and a big cone sticking up next to it. He opened a leather case and found two tubes connected by a metal bar. The tubes had glass on either end.