The Mystery of Queen Nefertiti

by C T Cassana

  Almost without moving, she looked up at the ceiling in search of a motion detector or camera that might alert the security guards to their presence. In a few seconds she found both, although luckily she and her brother had not appeared within the operating range of either one.

  “There’s a camera over there, above the door,” she told her brother, seizing his arm to keep him from moving “And a motion detector there. We can’t go near the door or walk across the room or they’ll see us.”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Alright, let’s see whether the desk is around here,” said Lisa, passing the flashlight over the wall to her right.

  “Mind the camera,” Charlie warned her.

  “Relax,” replied Lisa, concentrating on what she was doing.

  “We should come back tomorrow and do the tour, like we did in Amarna,” suggested the boy. “When we see the desk, we’ll take the coordinates and come back at night without having to wander around.”

  “Well, now that we’re here, we might as well try. And if we don’t find it, we’ll do what you suggest. Let’s try the next room. Here are the coordinates.”

  Charlie entered them on the place annulus and they appeared in the adjacent room, where there were no security cameras but there was a motion detector. The room was furnished much more simply, without the ostentation or luxury of the empress’ bedroom.

  “Look! There it is!” said Lisa, pointing to a piece of furniture against the opposite wall beside the window.

  “We can’t walk over there or the detector will go off. We’ll have to use the cape.”

  “Can you do it? It must be around ten or maybe twelve feet away.”

  “Maybe,” replied Charlie, adjusting the dials on the place annulus. “I always work it out by sight.”

  Lisa looked at the red light of the detector.

  “Well, if you’re off target, they’ll catch us,” she said.

  “Lisa, this isn’t just guesswork, it’s science,” said her brother, putting his arms around her and turning the clasp on the bracelet.

  At once they appeared on the other side of the room, just a handspan away from the desk. Lisa turned around to check whether the detector light was flashing at the same speed as before or had picked up their presence.

  The red light flickered on and off normally. Everything was going smoothly; they appeared to be outside the detection range of the device.

  “Look, this is the molding,” said Lisa, passing the flashlight to her brother. “Shine the light on it while I look for the secret compartment.”

  The boy took the flashlight and pointed it at the molding that Bonaparte had described: the only one without a border of golden laurel leaves. His hand was trembling, revealing the nerves and tension that had been building up inside him.

  Lisa pulled out the piece carefully and slowly... so slowly that Charlie thought he would collapse from the suspense. Joined to the molding was a compartment resembling a very narrow drawer. Once she had pulled it out completely, she placed the compartment gently on the floor and they saw that inside it was completely empty.

  “He said it had a false bottom,” said Charlie, before disappointment set in.

  His sister nodded and then took out their Swiss army knife. Carefully she pulled out the blade and stuck the edge into the slit between one of the walls and the bottom of the compartment.

  “Be careful, Lisa. It’s an antique,” said her brother.

  At that moment, a thin wooden board popped up, revealing the real bottom of the narrow drawer. The children lifted it together very slowly and gingerly. In the last few months they had been through similar situations when they’d been searching for the cape or one of the annuli. But no discovery meant as much to them as the one they were on the verge of at that moment.

  “Tell me it’s there! Even if it isn’t!” gasped Charlie, covering up his eyes so he couldn’t see what was happening, just like he always did when he couldn’t bear a suspenseful scene in a movie.

  But his sister didn’t answer; she simply couldn’t.

  Charlie uncovered his face slowly, trying to ready himself for a huge disappointment. Then he saw Lisa holding the papyrus scroll in both hands and gazing at it in disbelief.

  “A cross, a woman, a river, three crosses, and another woman,” she muttered breathlessly. “The second papyrus scroll of Nefertiti. We’ve found it.”

  Charlie cleared his throat while he felt the excitement take him over.

  “So... how are we going to get Mum to find it?” he asked. “You have to admit, Joséphine was pretty good at hiding things.”

  “I think I know how to do it,” replied his sister, while she put the scroll back in its place, with the fine white cloth that covered it and the false bottom on top. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll come back tomorrow and put it somewhere else.”

  With the knife she made a few notches in the wood of the false bottom, right where she had stuck in the blade to prise it off. Then she moistened her finger with her tongue and subjected the marks she’d made to a quick but effective aging process. Finally, she put the compartment back in the desk, ensuring that one of the corners stuck out a fraction of an inch and the molding looked very slightly out of place.

  “Make a note of the coordinates in case we need to come back for it, and then let’s go home,” she told Charlie. “I’ll explain my idea later.”

  . . .

  The nurse made a hand signal to the man on the other side of the counter to indicate for him to wait while she answered the phone. At a big hospital like St. Thomas’ she saw all kinds of people, but this person had caught her attention in a matter of seconds. He couldn’t have been more than forty; he was good-looking, smartly dressed and spoke with an American accent.

  Without taking her eyes off him, she answered the questions of the colleague who had called on the phone in a brusque yet not impolite manner, making her authority clear at all times. Once this demonstration of force was done, she hung up the phone to attend to the attractive visitor.

  “Good afternoon,” she said in a curt tone with a cynical smile. “What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Jonas Walker,” began Max, “and I would like to see Dr. Price.”

  “Well I’m very sorry, but Dr. Price is not in the hospital,” replied the nurse, in a manner that suggested she wasn’t really very sorry at all.

  “I understood his shift began today at four p.m.,” retorted Max with an impassive expression.

  “We are not allowed to give out information on the hours of the medical staff,” said the nurse, still wearing her false smile.

  Max reached into one of his pockets and took out a card that identified him as an employee of the World Health Organization.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said firmly, but without raising his voice. “I am Dr. Walker, Director of the Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response Area of the World Health Organization. And I need to speak with Dr. Price.”

  At once the nurse’s tyrannical expression turned solicitous and obsequious.

  “The fact is, Dr. Walker,” she explained, “Dr. Price has had to leave urgently because his father had a fall.”

  “I hope it’s nothing serious. And you don’t know when he will return, do you?”

  “His family lives in Edinburgh, so he’ll be gone for several days, I’m afraid.”

  “I see.”

  “If you tell me what you need, perhaps I can help you,” the nurse offered, trying to compensate for her initial blunder with such a distinguished visitor.

  “Yes, of course,” answered Max, while he wrote down a phone number on a business card that matched the WHO credential he had shown her moments earlier. “Let me know when Dr. Price is back. I’ll be visiting other hospitals in the country, so call this cell number rather than my office number.”

  “I will, Dr. Walker,” said the woman, while Max turned to leave.

  . . .

  Lisa sat down in front of her mother’s computer
and prepared the documentation they were going to need. Then she made the agreed signal to her brother for the performance to begin.

  “You know what, Dad?” she began. “I’ve decided to do my assignment on Empress Joséphine and her influence on Napoleon’s life.”

  “Hmm... really?” replied Marcus while typing away quickly on his laptop.

  “I think I have enough background information to do a pretty comprehensive study. Would you like to see it?” asked Lisa.

  “Oh, yes, of course!” answered her father. “But just give me a little time to finish what I’m doing.”

  “How about you, Mum?” asked Lisa.

  “I’d love to see it! But I have to sort out these papers from the museum,” said Maggie, while she took out a folder filled with documents and sat down on the couch to put them in order. “When your father finishes, you can show both of us. Will that be alright, darling?”

  Lisa sat in silence, not knowing what to say. Perhaps it was because she wanted to reveal to them the hiding place where the papyrus scroll could be found, but she had certainly expected a more enthusiastic reaction from her parents.

  “Show it to me, Lisa,” said Charlie, winking at her to follow his lead. “Afterwards I know you three will all start talking and I won’t understand a thing.”

  Lisa gave him a look to suggest that his plan wouldn’t work, but her brother returned her skeptical expression with a confident smile.

  “Alright,” she agreed, indicating for him to sit down beside her in front of the computer. “I’ll give you a summary so that you won’t get bored.

  “You see,” Lisa began, “Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine de Beauharnais got married in 1796. It was his first marriage, but it was her second, because she’d been married before to Alexandre de Beauharnais, a noble who died in the French Revolution, who she had two children with.”

  Charlie opened his eyes wide. His sister had immersed herself fully in her role and appeared ready to bore him witless with an academic sermon on the life of Joséphine Bonaparte.

  “Hey, Lisa,” he interjected. “Don’t you have any pictures there?”

  Marcus smiled when he heard his son’s request, which left Lisa speechless.

  “You know, a picture is worth a thousand words,” argued the boy.

  “Oh, yes, of course!” replied his sister, as if she had suddenly remembered the real purpose of the conversation.

  But she couldn’t think how to thread so many purely anecdotal details together with important historical events in a way that could lead up to the papyrus scroll, and she sat staring at the computer for a moment. Finally, Charlie took hold of the mouse and began clicking on the images.

  “Let’s see how much you know,” he said airily. “This is Joséphine, right?”

  “Yes,” she replied, a little timidly in the face of her brother’s determination.

  “And this?” he asked.

  “Napoleon,” replied Lisa, feeling certain that her brother’s ploy was going to get them nowhere.

  “And this?”

  “Leticia Bonaparte, one of Napoleon’s sisters.”

  “And this one here?”

  “His mother,” replied Lisa. “She and Joséphine didn’t get along at all.”

  “I’m not surprised. She doesn’t look very friendly,” said the boy, closing the picture and clicking on another.

  Marcus and Maggie smiled at this remark.

  “And these pictures here?” asked Charlie, going through a series of photos in a row.

  “They’re from the expedition to Egypt that Napoleon organized,” explained his sister. “In addition to his army, he took a group of scholars, who went to study different things in the country.”

  “And this guy?” quizzed Charlie, cutting short his sister’s unnecessary explanations.

  “Vivant Denon,” answered Lisa, thinking that she would have left that picture for the end. “One of the scholars who went with Napoleon to Egypt.”

  “He looks a little old to take such a big journey,” remarked her brother.

  “He was,” replied Lisa, suddenly grasping the direction Charlie was trying to take. “But he was also a good friend of Joséphine’s, who by that time was married to Napoleon. So she convinced her husband to let Denon take part in the expedition to Egypt.”

  “You mean, this Denon guy got to go to Egypt because of his connections,” concluded Charlie, stressing his words so they would be perfectly clear. “He must have been pretty grateful to Joséphine.”

  “Well, it’s true that he got in by connections, but that doesn’t mean he was useless on the expedition,” said Lisa, emulating the conversation about Denon they’d had with Helen Rotherwick. “Actually, he did some really important things, like traveling with the French soldiers all over Egypt to visit the ancient ruins and monuments. In fact, he was the first scholar to go to Thebes,” she went on, emphasizing the name of the city where the papyrus scrolls of Nefertiti had been found.

  Charlie gave her a wink as a sign of approval. That would put their parents on the right track.

  “He was also the author of the first book on Egypt,” remarked Marcus, “a precursor to the Description of Egypt, a nine-volume collection dedicated exclusively to the country, which would be published a few years later.”

  “And he was also the director of the Napoleon Museum, known these days as the Louvre,” added Maggie.

  Their first attempt had failed, as their parents hadn’t seemed to grasp the significance of the friendship between Denon and Joséphine. However, it had at least served to prove that although they were busy, they were paying attention to everything the children were saying.

  “Besides being friends, Denon and Joséphine both shared a keen interest in Egyptian antiquities, and he used to give her advice when she would buy artworks,” Lisa went on, trying to redirect the conversation.

  “Joséphine liked Egyptian antiquities, did she?” asked Charlie, stressing every word.

  “Yes, at her château, Malmaison, she collected mummies and other things, like statuettes and papyrus scrolls. Look at this statue here. This is in the music room in the château,” she said, showing the statue that they believed Denon had given to Joséphine on his return to Egypt, along with the second papyrus scroll of Nefertiti.

  “Wow!” exclaimed the boy loudly, frustrated that his parents weren’t at all curious to see them.

  “Her fascination with Egypt extended to a lot of things that Joséphine had made, like jewels, furniture, dinner sets, decorations...” his sister continued. “I’ll show you a few.”

  Lisa grabbed the mouse and opened several images at once.

  “Napoleon’s Egyptian dinner service, which shows scenes from the Egyptian campaign.”

  “Look at all the hieroglyphics!” exclaimed Charlie. “They had no idea how to paint them! They’ve filled them with crosses, as if a cross was ancient Egyptian!”

  Marcus and Maggie both smiled at their son’s remark, although neither one bothered to correct him and explain that the symbol with a cross and a circle at its base represented the sound “nfr”.

  “This here is a watch of Joséphine’s,” said Lisa, her anxiety rising. “It’s got a typical scene of the Nile painted on it.”

  “And they put crosses on there too,” noted Charlie, without going so far as to reveal everything he knew about the connection with Saint Helena.

  “Egypt served as inspiration to decorate palaces, like the Egyptian room in the Villa San Martino,” Lisa continued.

  “Oh my God! Those paintings are so bad! Look how they painted that sphinx... And there are those hieroglyphics full of crosses again,” said Charlie, raising his voice a little, convinced that the moment had come to go for broke. “A cross, a woman, water, three crosses and a woman. What kind of symbols are those?”

  The children waited a moment before going on, desperately hoping that this unmistakable clue would get a reaction out of their parents. And before they knew it, both parents
had jumped from their seats and come up behind them to look at the computer screen.

  “Show me that room!” said Maggie, in a restrained voice.

  The series of symbols meant “the beauty of beauties”, the name used for Nefertiti on the papyrus scroll. And Maggie knew that it was too unique for it to be painted in exactly the same order by mere coincidence. It also made no sense that it would be in Bonaparte’s palace on Elba, unless the second papyrus scroll of Nefertiti had ended up among the French emperor’s belongings.

  “Show it to me, darling,” she asked again.

  But Lisa sensed that if she did so they would be lost, because as vital as that clue was, it didn’t in fact lead anywhere.

  “Just a minute, Mum. I’ll finish showing Charlie first, and then I’ll start from the beginning,” she replied, straining to appear calm. “First I want him to see the desk in Napoleon’s study. Look at the lions on the feet of the desk. They’re just like the ones on Joséphine’s desk. They took their inspiration from Egypt too, and from what I’ve read, in those days these kinds of desks often had secret compartments for hiding letters and other documents. Apparently, some are really hard to find.”

  Maggie listened to her daughter attentively, while trying to put together the series of details, coincidences and flukes she had heard her recount over the past few minutes. What until now had seemed mere anecdotes suddenly began to take on new meaning, and a new theory about the whereabouts of the scroll was taking shape in her mind.

  “Yes, but look at this desk, Lisa,” added Charlie. “It has a defect. Look closely. It’s like someone forgot to put the border on this molding here. All the others have it but this one doesn’t. And look at the inlay; it looks like the same hieroglyphics as before.”

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed Maggie, grabbing Marcus by the hand. “Enlarge the image, Lisa! Right there, on the inlay!”

  Lisa enlarged the image, but all the details were pixelated.

  “Wait a moment,” said the girl. “I saved the link to the page where I found the photo.”

  A few moments later, Joséphine’s desk appeared again on the screen, this time with a much higher resolution. Maggie took the mouse and enlarged the image to see the symbols while she held her breath.