Silver Tomb (The Lazarus Longman Chronicles Book 2)

by P J Thorndyke

  They clambered down to the burning sand and picked their way through the detritus towards the other half of the gondola. They clambered into its broken end. The smoke-blackened corridor was horizontally level but pitched to one side as the vessel had rolled, making the long walk down its length a disorientating experience. What was stranger was the lack of light. The gas lamps were dead. The canopy of the balloon covered the majority of the shattered windows that could be glimpsed through the cabin doors hanging slack on their hinges.

  They made their way to the bridge, stumbling and feeling their way through the darkness, tripping over the occasional dead body. They drew their pistols just in case some Confederate—or worse—was lurking in one of the map rooms or cabins to the side.

  They found the bridge more or less as they had left it, with the bodies of the men they had shot tossed in new positions by the crash. The wind kept lifting the balloon up, bathing the bridge in occasional swathes of light, showing the gruesome scene in clearer detail. There was no sign of Lindholm.

  Every single window pane had been smashed. Lazarus walked over to the bank of shattered glass and peered down past the nose of the gondola at the wreckage that had been tossed out onto the sand below. By the light occasionally let in by the lifting of the canopy, he saw the mangled remains of Dr. Rutherford Lindholm.

  There was no doubt that he was dead. Aside from being hurled through the windows to land many feet below, his body was so lacerated by shards of glass that he couldn’t possibly be alive.

  “I’m sorry, Katarina,” Lazarus said as they gazed down on the man’s remains. “It looks like you’ll be returning to Moscow with bad news once again.”

  “I’d be more worried about what I was going to tell the British government if I were in your shoes, Longman,” she replied. “Look at this mess.”

  Lazarus had to agree. His future didn’t look bright if he returned to England. Perhaps they would believe that he had been killed in the crash? Yes, it wouldn’t be too hard to fake his own death. The wreckage all about was fine proof. But the details could wait until he had returned to Cairo. And to Eleanor.

  They didn’t bother to look for anybody who might be alive. It might have felt callous but for the realization that anybody or anything left on this airship would likely try to kill them.

  They picked through storerooms and put together a collection of items that would ensure their survival on the long walk back to Cairo; water canteens, food, medical supplies, a compass, guns and ammunition. Lazarus tore loose some strips of the balloon to use as a cover during the hottest parts of the day, when they would dig a hollow in the sand and try to sleep like Bedouins.

  Katarina fashioned some headdresses out of canvas which they tied on with electrical wire. Then, looking like a pair of futuristic Arabs, they set off east, where the tips of the pyramids, older than any country, would be the first sign that they were nearing civilization.

  The news of the CSS Scorpion II’s crash reached Cairo well before they did. The police, the British authorities and the army were so busy mounting expeditions and enquiries, and the public so mesmerized by this new astounding event in the newspapers, that the emergence from the desert of two Europeans—a man and a woman—filthy, bizarrely garbed and heavily armed, was barely noticed.

  They dispersed to their respective hotels and washed, ate ravenously and, in Lazarus’s case, knocked down several glasses of gin. He packed his things, placed his letter of resignation on top of his clothes in his portmanteau, paid his bill and departed for the Grand Continental where everybody he cared about in the world was currently residing.

  The Arab in the tarboosh at reception blinked in surprise at him when he asked to call up to Eleanor’s room. “But Miss Rousseau has already departed, effendi,” was his reply.

  “Departed? Is she out to dinner?”

  “No, effendi. She has paid her bill and left Cairo as far as I believe.”

  Lazarus refused to believe it and demanded to speak to the manager, who confirmed his employee’s statement, telling him that it was his understanding that Eleanor Rousseau had returned to France.

  Lazarus whirled away from the reception desk, his head swimming. This couldn’t be true! He wanted to run up to her room and burst in on her so that they could both laugh at the joke. But deep down he knew she wasn’t there. Deep down he knew that he had been betrayed. But what he couldn’t understand was why.

  Flinders was out at some appointment at the museum, so Lazarus had a drink in the bar with Katarina.

  “It would be callous of me to say ‘I told you so’ at a time like this,” she said after he told her what had happened.

  “But you’re going to say it anyway,” he replied, sipping his gin.

  “No. Only that I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Sorry that you couldn’t see straight. That you couldn’t see her for what she was.”

  “And what was that?”

  “She used you, Lazarus. Used her sex to lure you to do her bidding. Then, once you had helped her get her antiquities out of Cairo, she cast you aside.”

  “There has to be more to it than that.”

  Katarina sighed. “Lazarus, don’t start shining your lamp in corners and jumping at shadows. It’s not that hard to see...”

  “There are too many things left unexplained. Why did she want me to go after Lindholm, her ex-partner in crime? What is she planning to do with her fiancé, Henry Thackeray? He won’t give her up, even if I do. He won’t accept my failure to bring her home as an ending to the matter. That is why I must continue.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to Paris. I’m going to confront Eleanor and get some answers from her.”

  “Lazarus, for God’s sake, take your lumps and let it drop! You’ve nothing to gain by chasing her all around the world. It’s clear that she used you for her own ends. Don’t waste any more time or love on her.”

  “Who said anything about love?” Lazarus demanded. “Your mission may be at an end, but mine is still incomplete. Would you let the matter drop if acquiring your quarry was still within your grasp?”

  Katarina said nothing, but drank of the rest of her gin and gave him her ‘you’re not fooling anybody, least of all me’ look.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In which developments in Paris prove that the adventure is not yet over

  The trains from Marseille were notoriously slow. Lazarus arrived in the appropriately named Gare St. Lazare in Paris amidst billowing clouds of steam much later than he had intended. By the time he had booked himself into the Hôtel de France, it was well after dark. He did not eat but immediately set out towards Avenue de l’Opéra, which led to the Louvre.

  The Parisian skyline was grim and black against the boiling, charcoal sky. Carriages clattered by, carrying pale faces and black evening fashion to the opera, or more seedy destinations. The heaven and hell nightclubs springing up in Montmartre heralded the decadent end of days wits were coining the Fin de siècle—the end of the century. In a dark alley lit by a hissing gas lamp, Lazarus glimpsed a half torn-off poster promoting ‘The Fantastic Madame Babineaux, Woman of a Thousand Faces!’ at some establishment further downriver where the seedy gin houses and freak shows squatted on the muddy banks of the Seine.

  The Musée du Louvre had already closed to visitors for the night, but the attendant was still in the foyer. Lazarus questioned him in the best French he could muster about Mademoiselle Rousseau and where she might be reached.

  “Monsieur, you understand that I cannot simply give out Mademoiselle Rousseau’s address to anybody who asks for it,” the attendant said.

  “I appreciate that,” Lazarus began, “but I have come from England on very important business concerning her fiancé and I...”

  “I am not bound, of course, to conceal her being in this building at present,” said the Frenchman, clearly enjoying cutting him off with this revelation.

  “Is she?” Lazarus demanded impat
iently.

  “Assuredly. She has not left the Louvre since her return from Egypt. Her newly acquired artifacts were taken up to the Département des Antiquités Egyptiennes several days ago. Although she occasionally sends for coffee and food, her work keeps her thoroughly occupied.”

  “What work?” Lazarus asked.

  “Cataloguing the museum’s newest acquisitions, I imagine,” replied the attendant in a surprised voice. “Perhaps some restoration also, for her cases included a large quantity of scientific equipment, the manner of which I could not ascertain at a glance.”

  “Would you object to my going up and visiting her?” Lazarus asked, but this was far beyond the humble attendant’s area of responsibility and his question was answered by a non-committal shrug.

  After borrowing a lantern from the attendant, Lazarus lit it and ascended the stairs. The moonlight shone through the high windows on the second floor and cast its silvery wash on paintings, sculptures, vases and urns from every corner of the globe. Nearly every ancient civilization known to man was represented by the relics that peered out at him like ghosts; Persia, Athens, Rome, Carthage, Sumer and Babylon. He passed paintings done by the great European artists such as Murillo, Le Sueur, Watteau and Poussin. The sculptures of Michelangelo and Bernini, among others, seemed to come to life in the silver light.

  It was in the Département des Antiquités Egyptiennes that the shadows were the deepest. Here, shrouded in gloom as if sulking, were the relics of that great civilization torn from the burning sands by Napoleon, gathered like dead leaves by Drovetti and mustered by Mariette, dragged across the Mediterranean to the French capital for all the world to see. Gigantic stone pillars loomed like frozen deities, hulking sarcophagi glowered from the darkness and golden statues of forgotten gods and pharaohs glinted in the light from the gas lamp.

  Lazarus shivered as he passed the decayed forms of the mummies that peered from behind panes of glass, their rotten bandages and browned, wrinkled bodies frighteningly animated in the dim light, stirring memories within him of just how animated these things could become.

  The glow of a light was up ahead. Lazarus saw a woman’s form bent over a table, examining something. It was Eleanor. As he approached, he saw that the object of her examination was a mummy. He set down his lamp. She might have heard him coming or she might have expected him. Either way she showed no surprise.

  “Why did you run from me, Eleanor?” he asked her.

  She sighed and set down the instrument she was holding. “Did you follow me all the way to Paris to ask me that? Are you a foolish schoolboy with a crushed heart?”

  Lazarus gritted his teeth in the face of her frostiness. “So it was all an act designed to trap me. None of it was real. You used me.”

  “Yes, I used you,” she said in irritation. “Good lord, I would have thought that you could have worked that out for yourself without coming all the way to Paris to disturb me.”

  “Why? Just so you could get these items out of Egypt? I don’t believe that even you would go to such lengths for a museum’s wish list.”

  “Of course not. I lied to you about most things, my feelings for you above all. But one thing I was honest about was my devotion to Kiya and her memory. I needed to bring her here to be reunited with the things she called her own in her lifetime. The things that were stolen from her, defaced, smashed and left in the sand for millennia.”

  “Then it was you behind the murder of Petrie’s friend in Cairo. And it was you who stole the relief fragment from the Bulaq Museum.”

  “Yes. Not directly, of course.”

  “No. But you were the one who was in control of the mummies, not Dr. Lindholm.”

  “He allowed me to play with his toys. He didn’t share my interest in restoring Kiya’s name to her of course. It was all ‘the Confederacy this’ and ‘the defeat of the Union that’, but he was an easy man to control, as are all men. They’ll do anything for the scent of the forbidden flower. It wasn’t hard to use him as I used you.”

  “Used me to kill him, you mean. Yes, he’s dead. You used your two lapdogs against each other.”

  She smiled. “You understand at last. I thought I was killing two birds with one stone in sending you after him. I thought perhaps you might kill each other, more probably that you would survive, but by which time I would be long gone.”

  “And yet here I am.”

  “Yes, here you are.”

  He glanced down at the table. “What’s with the mummy? That’s not Kiya.”

  “No. When I said I meant to reunite Kiya with all of her possessions I really meant all of them. Including her husband.”

  “Then that’s…”

  “Amenhotep the Third, known as Akhenaten. When I found him in tomb KV55, I saw that they had used Kiya’s own coffin, stolen and defaced after her disgrace, and altered the hieroglyphics to show his name.” She indicated a coffin in an open glass case in the corner of the room. It sported a strange combination of a female Nubian wig and a long beard, clearly added on afterwards. The right eye and part of the gold forehead was visible, but the rest of the metal had been hacked away, revealing the brown wood beneath.

  Lazarus looked down at the shriveled mummy and the scientific apparatus scattered around it. “My God, you’re trying to bring him back to life!”

  “Kiya and her husband will be reunited at last; their love triumphant long after those who tried to keep them apart have rotted in their tombs!”

  It was now clear to Lazarus that he was dealing with a woman far madder than Dr. Lindholm had ever been. “But for God’s sake, Eleanor!” he exclaimed. “You won’t bring them back, not really! They won’t be like they were before, star-crossed lovers mooning all over each other! They’ll be monsters! Just like the hideous creatures Dr. Lindholm made! Unable to even walk without a ton of mechanical attachments!”

  Eleanor rolled her eyes at him. “You still don’t understand, do you?” She was suddenly startled by a light moving in the dim recesses of the rooms from whence Lazarus had come. She quickly turned down her lamp. “Who did you bring with you?” she demanded.

  “Nobody,” he replied, turning to see the glow of another lamp coming towards them like the headlight on a train.

  She barreled into him, knocking the lamp from his hands to smash on the floor. The room was plunged into darkness. He felt her flee from him and steadied himself, feeling suddenly alone in the blackness.

  He made for the distant light, hearing voices. Three figures had made their way to the landing. One was dressed in the uniform of a Parisian police officer. The other was Katarina. His surprise at this was quickly overshadowed by his shock at recognizing the third.

  “By God,” he mumbled as the light of the police officer’s lamp fell on his face.

  “And there you are,” said Henry Thackeray. “Still poking about in dark corners while others shoulder the burden?”

  “What are you doing here, Henry?” Lazarus asked. “And you, Katarina? What’s going on?”

  “I brought these men here,” said Katarina. “At first I intended to come alone. I followed you from Cairo on the next steamer and have kept a night behind you every step of the way.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s not important right now. I ran into Mr. Thackeray upon my arrival.”

  “I’ve been in Paris for some days now,” Thackeray said. “I received word that my fiancé had returned, having somehow slipped out of your grasp in Cairo. It wasn’t until I met Miss Mikolavna here that I learned the truth—that you and my Eleanor are romantically involved and that you had even been persuaded to abandon your duty for this illicit affair. Inspector Devaney is here to arrest you as a foreign spy. I, of course, know your real business and may be persuaded to have you deported to England where you will stand accused of deserting your post. Or I could just leave you to rot here in a Parisian cell. I haven’t quite decided.”

  Lazarus said nothing but made eyes at Katarina that would have burned her alive had
that been physically possible.

  “I’m sorry, Lazarus,” she said. “But I am still convinced that Rousseau played a far greater part in Dr. Lindholm’s designs than she lets on.”

  “And her personal betrayal of me only adds to her treachery,” said Thackeray. “But I will still make her mine, by force if necessary.”

  Lazarus ignored him. “You were right, Katarina, and it is I who am sorry. She did use me. It was her who sent that mummy after you in Cairo. She admitted that she used Lindholm’s creatures to steal the fragment from the museum and to murder that Egyptologist. Her mind is unhinged. She’s done it all for this Kiya woman. She’s mad.”

  “What Kiya woman?” Thackeray asked. “What nonsense have you got into your head this time? My fiancé’s only madness was in carrying on with you!”

  “Shut up!” said Lazarus. “You’re welcome to the bitch, but she’s a mad dog, I tell you! And dangerous! Her work here must be stopped else we’ll have another Dr. Lindholm on our hands right here in Paris.”

  “You sir, will answer for your offences!” Thackeray bellowed, drawing a Derringer from his pocket.

  Inspector Devaney, who was clearly struggling to keep up with the rapid exchange between the two old enemies, finally lost his patience and bellowed for them to halt. “I am in charge here, gentlemen! Monsieur Longman, I must ask you to come with me.” He jangled a pair of manacles in one hand.

  “Wait a minute, I beg you,” said Lazarus. “There is a deranged woman on this floor who is trying to reanimate a mummy. I believe, based on my previous experiences, which Miss Mikolavna here can attest to, that she will succeed.”

  “A mummy?” the inspector asked, his eyebrows raised.