The Pyramid Prophecy

by Caroline Vermalle

  As the detective stepped out of the bright sunshine and into the dome-roofed house, his eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloom. There was just one room, and its windows were veiled by tattered orange drapes.

  “Franklin Hunter. Ha! I have been waiting for this moment,” said a voice etched by long years and too much cheap tobacco.

  Franklin managed to make out the form of a frail old man in an oversize grey robe, sitting in the middle of what looked to be a souvenir shop, long lost to the patter of bargaining tourists.

  “Trust me, me too,” Franklin began to reply, but his answer was stifled by the clang of a bell that the old man struck with surprising force.

  Immediately, two young men, shabby and filthy, came into the room and stood sentry either side of Franklin, their demeanor both urgent and threatening. The ex-FBI agent scanned the exits of the room, the men's garments, and spotted their poorly concealed daggers. The counterfeiters he had encountered so far had been harmless, often welcoming and at worst quietly suspicious.

  “I'm looking for Paolo Dingli,” Franklin said, his voice even and calm.

  “Are you interested in copies of Tutankhamen's mask?” the old man asked in a mock high-pitched voice.

  “Just one in particular,” Franklin said.

  “Which one… in particular?” the old man asked, his eyes twinkling with amusement.

  “The one at the Cairo Museum.”

  The old man smiled to reveal an incomplete set of brown, tobacco-stained teeth.

  “A client of mine is willing to pay much for a piece by this artist,” Franklin said. In the course of his career, he had come to learn that these craftsmen enjoyed being flattered almost as much as they detested to be called 'forgers'.

  “How much?” asked the old man, the twinkle gone and suddenly serious.

  “I only talk money with the artist,” Franklin replied, watching the two henchmen for any sudden movements.

  “The artist does not like being disturbed,” the old man said shrugging his shoulders.

  Franklin could not help being disconcerted by the man’s piercing, unwavering gaze. Carefully, he pulled from his pocket a thousand-dollar bundle of one hundred dollar bills. He sensed the young men either side of him shift in their sandals, suddenly restless. But the old man had not batted so much as an eyelash.

  This was not good.

  Franklin could sense that something was off; he just couldn’t pinpoint the precise source of his unease.

  “This is only a down payment.” Franklin took a note from the bundle and handed it to the old man. “A gesture of good faith so that you can tell me where to find the artist.”

  The old man did not move to accept the bill. “I'll tell you where he is, but only if you answer one question correctly.”

  He cleared his voice and then carefully pronounced his words, as if speaking to a class of inattentive children. “What is the detail that makes you certain that the mask of the Egyptian Museum is a fake?”

  The detective swallowed.

  “Mr. Hunter, there is only one answer.”

  Franklin began to flip through in his mind the hundreds of clichés pinned on his room’s wall. Several flies buzzed and darted through the orange-tinted murk. One of them came to rest in the corner of the eye of a bust of Pharaoh, searching for any sign of moisture. But everything was dry, except for the bill in Franklin's palm, soaking up his perspiration.

  “Last chance,” the old man chuckled. “The right answer, or you leave and the money stays.” He took a deep breath and began to repeat his riddle, “How can you be sure–”

  “I can’t be sure,” Franklin said brusquely, knowing it was futile.

  Quiet descended on the room. Even the flies seemed silenced. The young men looked from the old man to Franklin, ready to pounce. But a crooked smile creased the face of the old man who exclaimed, “Of course you can’t be sure! It’s perfect! And why is it perfect? Because it’s the Scultore who created it. And who is the Scultore? It is me!”

  Still cackling, he got up, took the soggy hundred dollar bill and then handed it to one of the men. He then dismissed them from the room with a wave of the hand and gestured for Franklin to follow him. They crossed a courtyard where small children were chasing each other, kicking up clouds of dust. The old man opened the door to an old shed, where sun-bleached panels of wood were stored alongside lengths of ancient-looking timber.

  Fragments of sarcophagi, thought Franklin.

  On a workbench, an old wooden statuette, obviously a work in progress: the figure was depicted with a typical Egyptian headdress, arms raised and an erect phallus. Franklin smiled. Despite his age, Paolo “The Scultore” Dingli was still full of imagination.

  The corner of the workshop served as part laboratory, and part kitchen. It was covered with a layer of debris that could have accumulated over several decades or even centuries, but a new coffeemaker was humming. Franklin scarcely noticed the old, green-tiled sink.

  “So, what do you think of my luxurious studio? Worthy of my clients, the world's greatest museums.” Dingli chuckled at his own joke and did not wait for Franklin’s reply, “I don’t worry, true riches await me elsewhere. I will have a special palace in heaven, the Scultore guarantees it!”

  Franklin accepted the drink offered to him. Despite the dubious cleanliness of the cups, he had to concede that the coffee was superb.

  “My grandfather was an Italian – from Brindisi,” explained the old man. Franklin could have guessed: ‘Scultore’ was Italian for ‘sculptor’. “He settled here in 1926 as a restorer of antiques, specializing in wooden pieces. My father was a scalpellino, working only in stone. So I did a little bit of everything, you see. These days, I'm working more with wood but…” He waved his hand about, as if nothing had much important these days.

  “Drink your coffee and tell me more about your client.”

  “Forgive me, I wish no disrespect”, said Franklin, “but how can I be certain that Tutankhamen's mask was by your hand?”

  “Ah, of course.” The Scultore smiled slyly. “The word of forgers is not worth what it once was, is it? And yet, my friend, and this time it is I who wish no disrespect to you, we are the most honest of all the players in this game. It is the ones who sell our works that do the deceiving.”

  Franklin smiled and raised his cup in silent agreement.

  “Anyway, Tutankhamen. I told you there was only one answer to my question, and you gave me the one that pleases me most. But putting an old man’s vanity to one side for just a moment, I have to confess that, well, there is a difference. Nobody has noticed it, and yet, the Scultore could tell you with one eye closed, at night, even from behind a veil, which is which.” He drained his cup before exclaiming out loud, “Even that old fox, Al-Shamy, was fooled!”

  “It was Al-Shamy that placed the order?” Franklin asked, incredulous.

  “Of course! And when I gave it to him, it happened right here. Where you are now, right here!” The old forger was reliving his moment of triumph and Franklin was in no rush to bring him back to the present. “I remember that he brought a bunch of things: a magnifying glass, some tools, and some complicated-looking measuring gizmos. I tell you, and this is no word of a lie, he spent at least an hour trying to find some inconsistency so that he could show how clever he was. Well, he’s not as good as the Scultore! He found nothing. Niente, my friend! Ha! The greatest deceptions are also the simplest. People are always looking for the complicated, the tiny, the marginal.”

  Franklin couldn’t help but admire Dingli. His artistry was founded as much in his ability to read people as it was to fake precious objects.

  “A child could have seen it! Ha!” The Scultore seemed lost in his own memories for a while, staring at his coffee, an amused smile on his leathery face.

  “Why did Al-Shamy ask you?”

  “Al-Shamy is a curious kind of scoundrel,” Dingli exclaimed. If he could, he’d only put fakes on display in his museum. He would keep all the genui
ne articles in an impregnable bunker, just for himself and some handpicked cronies. He hates the public, the plebs, the tourists – but he likes their cash, so he’s stuck. He told me that Tutankhamen's funerary mask was to be taken to an international exhibition, but that it was too risky to send the actual piece and that, anyway, its true place was here, in Egypt, yada yada yada. He’s got a hell of a grudge against the British and the Americans. And the Germans too, come to think of it – and don’t get him started on the French. Anyway, he was in a rush. What he paid me for my work was a pittance, but he made a big deal and said that what I was doing was in the service of Egypt, so who was I to quibble over a few dollars when the fate of the nation’s soul was at stake?” Dingli shook his head melodramatically.

  “You agreed?”

  “Well, you know how it is. My youngest son had a little trouble with the police, so part of the deal was to make that go away. Everyone was happy.”

  “Hassan most of all, I guess,” Franklin muttered darkly. “How long did it take?”

  “Two weeks, not a day more,” Dingli said proudly.

  Franklin turned it over in his mind. It all fit. The museum had been closed for twenty days. “Two weeks? That’s pretty fast.”

  “The Scultore is not bound by the same rules as other men. And of course, when you have the genuine article right in front of you, it does help things along.”

  Franklin stared at the old man in disbelief, “The genuine article? But when did you finish the fake? What day?”

  “I couldn’t tell you exactly the day... When was it now? Time passes too quickly. But perhaps that is to be expected when works at bending time itself.” He continued to stare at the half-finished forgery, before finally saying wistfully, “It was almost thirty years ago.”

  He got up with difficulty and went to the sink, above which was hung a frame whose glass was dirty with dust. Beneath the glass was a newspaper clipping containing a photo faded by years and sunlight, with a caption declaring, Queen Elizabeth of England looks on in admiration at the funerary mask of Tutankhamen at the British Museum. The date was from 1982.

  “That’s my Tutankhamen,” said the old man, pride and nostalgia twinkling in his watery eyes. Franklin’s gaze drifted from the frame to the sink, and in an instant, something inside him clicked.

  The green tiles.

  The same as in the background of the photo he had been shown in Miami. The picture was poor and grainy, but clear enough. Had the so-called sellers somehow come by an older picture taken here by Dingli and then passed it off as something more recent? Had they simply heard the story of the cache of antiquities discovered in Berlin and then designed a plausible scenario that went with it?

  Whatever their motives, Franklin had fallen right into their trap. Suddenly, all the work done over two years began to fall apart. His hope of redemption, which moments before had seemed within reach, was now left stranded on the cracked enamel of a dirty sink. He had sacrificed so much to follow in the footsteps of this treasure, body and soul. Soul, especially.

  Somewhere in the background of Franklin’s inner turmoil, Dingli was still speaking, “My mask was at the Met in New York, then in Berlin, in Rome, he toured the world of the greatest museums. It was quite something.”

  “Do you know if he was in the Egyptian Museum these last months, by any chance, your Tutankhamen?” Franklin asked with a sigh, or the last gasp of a drowning man.

  The Scultore looked puzzled.

  “Do you think he was there? Al-Shamy, he doesn’t tell me anything. We haven’t spoken for years. I don’t like the company he keeps.”

  But Franklin was barely listening anymore. His elbows propped on his thighs, his head in his hands, he was struggling to contain the wave of despair and exhaustion ravaging his head.

  “There is no client, is there?” the Scultore asked softly.

  “And yet, you helped me anyway,” Franklin replied stoically, handing him another note from the bundle.

  Dingli took the money and considered it for a long while. “Our time is almost over, Mr Hunter. The game is reaching its end and it is we who are the relics now. Relics that stand in the way of progress. No one wants to hear what we have to say.”

  Franklin stood up and ran his fingers through his hair, feeling the dust and sweat that seemed to cling to him like a second skin. It was time to leave, but where would he go if there was nothing left to find? The mask from Room X was more than likely a fake after all, an embellishment to add drama to Moswen's illicit visits, just as the police had said. The looters who raided the police station had simply removed the proof.

  Franklin had made a living from not trusting in the appearance of things, and yet, sometimes the simple truth was that there was no ‘deep’ truth, no conspiracy to be unearthed; things were just as they seemed. If he had learned to accept that earlier, perhaps his life might have turned out differently.

  He handed his empty cup back to Dingli, “One more for the road?”

  The old man smiled and reached to take the cup, but Franklin held on for the briefest of moments, catching the eye of his host. “But before I go, tell me your secret, Scultore. From one relic to another.”

  The forger took the cup and shook his head, smiling his gap-toothed smile. He busied himself making the fragrant concoction, giving nothing away. When the coffee was poured, he passed the refilled cup to his guest; this time, it was he who held on a moment longer.

  “Blue,” he said with quiet pride.

  “Blue?”

  “It is the blue glass paste. You see, the original is an imitation of–”

  “Lapis lazuli,” Franklin interrupted, “And yours is not?”

  “I see you know your craft, Mr. Hunter. Come.”

  Franklin followed him into a small part of the workshop that was sectioned off from the rest. A shed within a shed, it was cluttered and enclosed on all sides by makeshift walls with no openings save for the door they used to enter. The old man closed the door, and they were into total darkness until Franklin heard the rasping mechanical click of a switch that illuminated a single, pale, bulb hanging from the ceiling. Dingli lifted a burlap sheet off the floor to reveal dozens of pots of all sizes. Some contained paint or paste, while others contained powder or what looked to be shards of broken glass. But what they all had in common, was their color.

  “Which of these is the Egyptian blue?” Dingli asked, the mischievous smile returning once again to his saggy features.

  Franklin scrutinized all the pots. Even though he mentally discounted those that veered too much toward turquoise, dark blue or purple, there were still a dozen or so that could have been a match for the color he knew from studying the mask. Taking a guess, he timidly pointed to one of the pots.

  Dingli smiled and then turned off the light. Franklin heard a series of scrapes and then was blinded by bright light. What Franklin had thought was one wall of the shed, was actually a large hinged shutter that swung outwards to bathe them in sunlight. After letting his eyes adjust, Franklin looked at the pots again. Their colors had changed, and he was no longer sure he had made the right choice. He was on the verge of choosing another when the light changed again. Dingli pulled on a chord to unfurl a roll of the same faded orange fabric from the room where he first encountered the old man. As it fell across the open shutter, it cast the now familiar orange light over the contents of the shed.

  Franklin threw his hands in the air in frustration, much to the Dingli’s delight.

  “The famous blue used by the ancient Egyptians to simulate the appearance of lapis lazuli is made from a glass paste based on calcium silicate copper and does indeed originate in Egypt.” Dingli picked up one of the pots and passed it to Franklin.

  “But the blue of my Tutankhamen,” he continued, rummaging amongst the pots, “began its journey in Jodhpur, India and only around the time of Pliny the Elder did it begin to be exported to the Roman Empire. My indigo.”

  Dingli handed Franklin a second pot and he could se
e at once that, under the orange light, it was slightly more purple. When Dingli pulled back the fabric, allowing the light to once more return to its natural state, Franklin looked down and saw that the contents of the two pots that he held in his hands now looked identical.

  “Take it from an old man like me,” Dingli said, putting away his pots, “Man has forgotten how to see. Instead, humanity walks with blinkers. We are so obsessed with looking to the future or back to the past that no time is taken to observe the present. Even artists are often blinded by what they call their 'vision'.”

  Dingli led Franklin out of the shed and back towards the central part of the workshop, “But through our craft, we have come to know how to appreciate the immense treasures that we already have, which are here, right now. It is ironic that we are called forgers because, in the end, we are the only ones who look closely at the real thing. If there is one thing that you should remember from old Scultore, then it is this: beauty is everywhere, just take the time to appreciate the miracle.”

  Franklin followed Dingli back across the courtyard which was now deserted, the children no longer playing and the dust no longer billowing in the wake of their games. As they reached his car, Franklin held out the rest of the bundle of notes, closing the old man’s hand around it when he refused to take it.

  “Scultore,” Franklin said as the old man protested, “it is only a fraction of the compensation that is due to the greatest forger of Egyptian antiquities.”

  The old man smiled thankfully and took the money, “Oh you know we fools like compliments. But no, Mr. Hunter, please. I am old and suffer from many ailments, but thankfully vanity has not yet clouded my mind. The Scultore did a good job once, but…,” and an impish twinkle appeared in his eyes as he looked over his shoulder before lowering his voice to a conspiratorial murmur, “there is only one who is truly worthy of that mantle. Only one great artist, who could be said to exceed even the masters of ancient Egypt, and whose work, in its own right, should be celebrated for centuries to come.”