The Egyptologist Read online

  But then, I reckoned again, Mr. Macy, and a canny and dramatic moment it was, as you and our readers shall see. Why close this case? I could spin away heaps of hours trying to get details of Paul Caldwell’s life and military service to send back to his proud papa. True, no heir to give money to, probably, but “missing” isn’t quite “dead,” so why not see what I could find? And if he was dead, maybe he was a war hero, and he could be renamed posthumously, become brave Paul Davies, gallant martyr of the Ardennes, so the fat, dying brewer would buy himself a nice dead hero-son, and what was that worth on his chart, and who picked up the cash legacy for it? My mind was moving fast, the old game was afoot, and the final tab in London was going to pay for a nice holiday.

  Now I had to pull strings to get a squiz at Caldwell’s military dossier. It was locked up tight in Melbourne, not even families were allowed to see the files. Still can’t today. Even Davies in London as next of kin would be allowed only a short letter declaring death and final rank. But if it’s detection you want, Mr. Macy, you need a network of helpful individuals. With that, simplest thing in the world: bloke owes me a favour, knows another bloke who manages some girls in Melbourne, and one of them worked for a man who knew a bloke working in the office of the historian at Defence and that bloke owed the first man a favour, or the first man would mention to Defence that the second bloke had been spending intimate time with this or that inappropriate (not to say outright Aboriginal) girl, and a little money (billable as a Barnabas Davies expense, no question) moved (shrinking as it went) down along this long line of nameless but helpful individuals, and some scribbled notes made their way back along it, and now it’s the 7th of July, when I copy the notes neatly into my file and add my own first questions, all of which reads, verbatim:

  Paul Caldwell. Born 1890 (Tommy said 1893). Volunteered for infantry (why?) October 1916, with determination made (by whom?) that his service be limited entirely to Egypt for as long as AIF has presence there, due to special knowledge and circumstances (which?). Entered as private (if he had special knowledge, why only private?). Dispatched to infantry at Tel el Kebir, Egypt. Promoted twice and cited for distinctive service twice with commendatory letter included in file from Brit. Capt. H. S. Marlowe. (Why a British captain bothering with an Aussie digger?) Missing while on leave, 12 November 1918. Natives far south at Deir el Bahari (500 miles away from his camp), subsequently discover Caldwell’s rifle, identity disks of Caldwell and aforementioned Marlowe. (A pommy officer and a digger on leave together?) Rank at end of service: corporal. Missing status changed to Dead in final records closing, June 29, 1919.

  Because he was a British officer, Captain Marlowe’s file was conveniently located in London, so we have to be satisfied with this for now, my good Watson. Now, the questions I jotted down in my notes that day are only a few of what should occur to a clear-eyed investigator presented with this synopsis. I’ll leave it to you to try to count up the puzzles hidden in those hundred and eight words, because they breed fast, the little rabbits. Here’s a gift, though, in case your history’s not too strong: the War ended on the 11th of November, 1918, the day before Paul vanished.

  One more item from the boy’s file: “Next of kin: Mrs. Emma Hoyt, in care of Flipping Hoyt Brothers Entertainment, Ltd., Sydney.” So much for Eulalie Caldwell and brother Tommy; no wonder they’d had to hear the news from a third party: they weren’t mentioned when Paul enlisted. Kin seems to have been a complicated question for our boy. I’d have to ask the lawyers: might his Davies inheritance belong to this new next of kin, if Paul Caldwell was dead and somehow retroactively rechristened Paul Davies?

  Good morning, Mr. Macy! Shall we continue? Good.

  Of course I remembered the Flipping Hoyt Brothers Circus—but first, I hear impatient Mr. Macy whingeing, “What’s this ripping yarn got to do with my poor mistreated auntie and vanished great-uncle?” Everything, Mr. Macy, everything. Patience. Have some faith in your storyteller, eh?

  Now then, of course I remembered the Flipping Hoyt Brothers Circus, but I was surprised to find it still in existence when I went enquiring after Emma Hoyt at the circus’s ticket booth, the 8th of July, 1922.

  “She’s about to go on,” says the bald, shirtless, moustached man at the booth. “She’s available for admirers after the performance, but here’s a tip, mate: she’ll be more likely to talk to you if she knows you saw her show.”

  “It’s on now?” I asked, looking around the field surrounding us and the sagging yellow tent, three or four people milling about some caravans.

  “Starts in five minutes. You’re a lucky man.” I paid for a front-row seat, and the bald man emerged to tear the ticket he’d just sold me, then showed me to my place, pulling the canvas shut behind us. I counted the audience: I was one of eight, though there were empty benches and risers and a row of large divans with tables, seats for 300 or some. My usher sat me, then continued down the empty aisle, stepped over the flaking red wooden wall in front of me, opened a gate in the high metal fence circling the sandy pit, locked the gate behind him, and picked up a megaphone. His red velvet trousers were white at the seat. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he yelled, walking in circles, looking high over my head at long-ago crowds.

  His opening remarks finished, he unwound his whip and lifted a hatch at the back of the cage. Three monstrous tigers slunk in. Our bald man lazily attended to making them leap over each other, roll on their backs, spring through a metal ring, all of which they performed sluggishly but with sudden bursts of snarling rebellion, which the whip didn’t shut up too quickly. For his finale, he had the tigers lie down, not without resistance, and he opened the hatch at the back of the cage again. There, dramatically lit from behind, was a strange little profile, and then in waddled a penguin. The bird circled the prone tigers once, promenaded up and down their backs, and then “logrolled” them, walking in place on their bellies as the tigers rolled underneath him. Finally, the penguin stepped off, took a turn of the ring for applause, and approached the three tigers to kiss each of them on the nose (previously sprayed with herring scent, no doubt). The children gasped and laughed. It was a neat display, I’d imagine. When it worked.

  Today, though, the third cat had had enough: as the fish-stinking kiss brushed his twitching, whiskered muzzle, there was a blur of orange-and-black paw and the penguin looked down at the three red stripes on his white breast with the surprise of a rich man who’s spilled claret on his evening shirt. He raised his beaked head, astonished. He looked to the lazy tiger keeper who’d trained him, talked him into this twice-daily escapade, and was himself stunned at the tiger’s break in discipline, and now was raising his whip and shouting at the cat, but too late. The paw flashed again, and the suddenly headless penguin rocked in place but didn’t tip over, because the cat’s other paw was pinning the flipper feet to the sand. The tiger was about to enjoy the snack he’d just uncorked when he felt the lash bite his back, and he turned with a roar on the man who’d both whipped and fed him since his tiger-cub days. “You don’t snarl at me, boy-o!” shouted my ticket vendor, flogging with a fury. Only now did the two children in the audience realise the penguin whose antics they’d just been admiring wasn’t well, as its head, beady-eyed and baffled, had come to rest on the red wooden wall a few rows in front of them.

  For reasons Mrs. Hoyt later explained to me as a matter of discipline for the beasts and safety to their master, the cats were required to perform their entire routine again, without fail, before they could be allowed out of the cage for their meat reward. While the two children sobbed and their parents told them, “Now, now, it’s all just a trick,” the tigers, growling and irritable, reviewed their tasks and swatted at their man. Again the leaping, the rolling, the springing through rings. Again they all lay down facing forward. Again the back hatch lifted. Again a dramatic silhouette of a plump, banana-nosed fellow. And again a trained penguin waddled in, expecting to win applause and a fresh fish. What this second penguin thought as it passed the decapitated,
dusty football of its colleague I cannot say. “No! No! Fly away!” called the little boy to my left.

  I only mention this scene, Mr. Macy, to illustrate the state of the circus by 1922, for I then watched two middle-aged Chinese contortionists twist themselves into the most peculiar shapes, to audience discomfort. I watched a single, spangled trapeze man swing listlessly for a spell before just dropping onto his net and from there to the ground, taking off his costume even as he was walking away. All through it, a visibly disheartened man of sixty played an out-of-tune upright piano. From time to time he murmured with a pained seriousness at the frightened children, “Ah, the circus! It’s magical, just magical.”

  “He is classically trained, you know. He used to conduct our ten-piece orchestra, in Paul’s day,” Paul Caldwell’s chosen next of kin, Emma Hoyt, later told me, her face drooping. Her business was at its very end, of course. I think she held on to it another week, but I’d witnessed the death throes of the Flipping Hoyt Brothers Circus. “In better days,” she started most of her sentences, or “When my husband, Boyd, was alive,” or most interesting, “Paul would have hated to see things end like this.”

  A woman of forty-five or so, and not without her charms, she was still dressed like a major in some brightly coloured army, her hair blond and compressed under her red, cylindrical hat. She lit cigarette after cigarette, but didn’t smoke them. Her private caravan smelled of perfume, her performing dogs, wild animal dung.

  She was eager to talk about Paul Caldwell. I told her she might have inherited some money from him, but she scolded me: “That’s impossible. He’s only missing.” My notes are easily enough compiled for you, more or less as they must’ve been said. (Do you think we should present polished stories with long speeches, or just the fragments of my notes? The latter is more “real,” I suppose, but the reader wants to feel it’s happening to him, if you see what I mean, Macy.)

  “So many difficult memories are stirred to life by your visit, Mr. Ferrell. Paul was the most wonderful thing ever to happen to this circus, his love of what we did here. I thought of him every day, far away at war, fighting for just this, for the magic of our circus. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, I know the Germans have fine circuses, too, but I’m sure the Kaiser was no enthusiast. We free people appreciate things his kind could never tolerate.

  “I wrote Paul when Boyd was called to his reward, told him I would do everything to keep his circus ready for him. It was his for the taking, if he wanted, after the War. He could have turned it around. Such devotion.

  “Of course, you’ll want to be hearing about the beginning. Paul came to us when he was nineteen or twenty. Boyd discovered him, said he had extraordinary natural talent. He had spotted Paul down in the market and followed him a bit, clandestinely, watched him doing it. Then he pretended to walk in front of Paul, unaware, pretended to bend over and tie his shoe, and when he stood up again, he just grabbed Paul’s wrist and took back his wallet. Of course, for a while, Boyd pretended to be a copper, you understand, to put a scare up Paul. But then Boyd sat off to the side, pointed to people to see if Paul could do it on demand. Boyd was excited when he brought him back to our camp that day. And what a beautiful boy he was, and intelligent as anyone I had ever known. He had been a librarian, as I am sure you know.

  “And that instant when Boyd led him to us! You see a face light up sometimes in surroundings like ours, Mr. Ferrell. Something quite intoxicating washes over certain people. Paul was like a little boy. He wanted to touch all the animals, even the tigers. That was the thing about him that charmed one, you see. He knew so very much about a few things, smart as anything, but he also did not know the simplest things. He wandered around the camp. He walked inside the tent, and I followed him. He gazed up at the tied-back trapezes, at all the seats. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a circus, Paul Caldwell? Would you like a job with us?’ You’ve never seen such a happy face, and so handsome. ‘The circus?’ He asked me if I knew of some Italian strongman, some performer he had heard of once. ‘The circus,’ he kept whispering, like he had landed on the moon. I knew just how he felt.”

  “And when did he become your lover, Mrs. Hoyt?”

  “I was married to Boyd, Mr. Ferrell.”

  “But I’ve the impression Mr. Hoyt was much older.”

  “Boyd was a clown, you know. I mean, professionally, by trade. He could make you laugh so. He would do his ‘shame face,’ when, for example, he was caught trying to steal a man’s necktie, and he would close his eyes in this long blink and shrug like he was a bad, bad, naughty clown, and people just loved it. People loved him. Off the sawdust he was rather colder.

  “Boyd had Paul clean out the cages, sell tickets, seat people. That was necessary, of course, seating people. That let him put those who carried their wallets in their trousers on the elevated seats so he could reach up from below during the show. He performed a few times, a shocking magic and drama act for the evening performances. Boyd thought we should try more sophisticated fare, so to open the show after the entr’acte, Paul would come out dressed as a jungle explorer and do a sort of pantomime where he pretended to fight off attackers, five of the bigger fellows done up as jungle blacks. They’d get the better of him, tie him down, and then one of them brought out a snake. Nothing dangerous, just one of the bigger pythons, and they circled round him and danced a bit and waved the snake about and they bent over him, so the audience couldn’t see what was happening, but we’d released the power of their imaginations! Then off ran the black villains, one of them hiding the snake in his gown, so the audience couldn’t see it, they just saw Paul tied down, writhing in torment, you understand, and he struggles and pulls one of his arms free, and then tears at his chest, he opens his shirt and . . . and his chest bursts open and out comes the head of the snake! Oh, it was a horrible sight, and women would faint, and the lights went out, and when they came up, Paul took his bow. He had to do it then, before the call at the end, so people would know he was alive and well. We used to play for such crowds, before Boyd’s stupidity. And Paul brought in so much money. He could put purses back, after they’d been half-emptied, you see, so we rarely had complaints.

  “Boyd thought like you, though. He was so certain this little boy was my lover. And so he just spent his days down with the tigers, tossing them their meat with a nasty face. But what did he think would happen? That the police would take Paul away from me on Boyd’s word but not tell the public that, at Flipping Hoyt, thieves prowl under the seats?

  “They arrested him during the show, without a fuss, I didn’t even know it happened. The first sign was when the native snake-men had to make up some dance with each other, and then just wandered off with the snake while the crowd looked confused and checked their watches, and then Wang and Songchuck were up the pole, twisting on top of each other. ‘What do you reckon has become of Paul?’ I asked Boyd after the show, and he just smoked and looked at me strangely. And I knew. ‘What did you do to him?’ I was afraid he had done something horrible with the tigers. ‘You vile old man, what did you do?’ He wouldn’t speak to me, and it was days before I found Paul, but then the police wouldn’t let me see him. I kept at them for weeks, knocking every day on the door of this brutish inspector. But they wouldn’t let me see him. And then, one day, weeks had passed, they told me he was gone, off to the War to avoid prison.”

  “You wrote to him when your husband died.”

  “That was 1917. Also to say I hadn’t betrayed him, that it wasn’t me who’d turned him in. I was so afraid he blamed me. I didn’t know where to send the letter. I just sent it to the Department of Defence. I never heard a thing, until I had the notification he was missing. He put me down as next of kin, you see. At that moment, finally, I knew he was not angry with me, that he loved me still. And at that same moment, I was told I’d lost him.

  “Still, I thought I should find his real family. I went to that horrid librarian, Paul had told me all about her. They had been, oh, intimate, you see, not his first love
, more the case of an older woman taking advantage of a poor boy in need. But she at least would know where to find his blood relations. Later, I had a second letter from Defence saying they changed him from Missing to Dead, but they didn’t have a body or anything, it seemed just for filing. I so want him to find the circus just as he left it . . . that poor penguin . . .”

  Mr. Macy, our story today ends with a circus lady sobbing for her dead lover and her dead circus and a dead bird. I waited for a bit to see if she’d pull herself together, but after a few minutes, the end was nowhere in sight, so I went on my way.

  Two or three days later, I had a letter:

  Mr. Ferrell. Your visit yesterday was a tonic for a tired woman. You would set my mind at ease with any definitive information you unearth as to Paul’s Destiny. I should like to engage you, if that is how these matters are handled. If you should find him alive and if he is staying away from us, amidst the Missing, for reasons of his own, please assure him that I did not Betray him, would never, and that I love him. If he is gone forever, please let me know what became of him. There is little left for me here. I will go anywhere for him—please tell him that. I am soon to become a tiger vendor, at least temporarily, and after that, I cannot say.