The Egyptologist Read online

  “Gentlemen,” I begin, “let’s for a moment put the question of money to one side so that—”

  “I never do that!” japes Kendall Mitchell, to his and Lathorp’s explosive glee. Kovacs coughs.

  “You sell yourself short, Mr. Mitchell. Let’s put the money aside for just a moment and consider what this expedition could bring you on top of financial reward. The history of Egypt carries us back to the very dawn of recorded human history, nearly 5000 years ago.”

  “Right you are. Back to Jesus Christ Himself.”

  “That certainly provides a context, Mr. Lathorp, and shows your aptitude for historical method, as it is wise to approach the past through familiar landmarks. But consider that Jesus was born 1922 years ago, and Atum-hadu reigned 1640 years before that, and Egypt in all its glory existed 1500 years before that, and one begins to sense the vast stretches of Time we are discussing.”

  “Of course,” agrees Lathorp. “Familiar landmarks.”

  “Now listen, Pushy,” Kendall chimes in, interrupting almost at once the careful presentation I had outlined. “I hear old Egypt’s tapped out. Nothing left under the sands. All the other big fellows nabbed the good stuff already. What do you have to say to that?”

  I ask them to open their prospecti to the page labelled “Odds of Success.” “I think it extremely unlikely. We know the names of several hundred ancient kings, and have found the tombs of only several dozen. There are expeditions uncovering extraordinary treasure right now, even as we speak, though the digging season is mostly ended for Egyptian summer. In the case of Atum-hadu, three fragments of his writings have been found in approximately the same area, yet no relics of his burial have ever appeared on any antiquities market. Which implies that his tomb is intact, luxuriously equipped, and in the Deir el Bahari region shown on this map.” I helped them open their prospecti to the map, which matched the larger version I had on an easel teetering in front of a large oil painting of Margaret holding a rabbit or a rabbit-fur muff.

  The men peered at the map, which gave me, in the claws of my recurrent personal curse, the opportunity to visit CCF’s Pharaonic water closet, where I strained under an untimely attack of explorer’s gut, which has tormented me ever since the War, dysentery a nasty little camp follower in Egypt.

  Upon my return, CCF was still squinting at the map, indecipherable lines and legends to him, but the others had broken into two distinct groups: Mitchell and Lathorp, giggling to each other over a copy (unsurprisingly open to Quatrain 42, “Atum-hadu Favours Four Acrobatic Sisters”) of Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt (Collins Amorous Literature, 1920; new edition through Harvard University Press expected, 1923); O’Toole and Kovacs sitting aside, saying nothing at all.

  “Jesus on fire, why won’t Harvard pay your way on this, eh, Pushy?” CCF himself enquired, and I knew he was not truly troubled by the question; he merely did not wish to appear too easily convinced in the eyes of his partners. “Caught screwing a Dean’s wife, were you?”

  I guided them to the individualised sketches I had included in their booklets on the “Personal Collections” page. “Now, gentlemen, do you want Harvard to own what I find? Do you want this to be the Harvard Collection of the Tomb of Atum-hadu? When the Lathorp Collection, the O’Toole Collection, the Kovacs Collection could fill your own homes with the gold of an Egyptian king and, after you are gone, carry on your name forever in the private wing of the museum of your choice? Know this: every museum in the country will be slavering to house your collection under your name in their museum forever, as I took the liberty of imagining in these sketches. And here we reach the key issue, gentlemen: the longevity of your names. This is something our friend Atum-hadu understood. If they speak of your name after you are dead, then you are not dead. Think hard about this. Your money can buy you precisely what Atum-hadu’s bought him, what every king of Egypt knew was the most valuable commodity he could possess: immortality. Now when the day comes, what are you going to leave behind? A department store? A construction company? A trust fund? A series of flimsy indictments filed by an envious attorney general? Or are you going to make your name live on forever, mankind’s ultimate prize?”

  “Now stop for just a moment, Perfesser.” Perhaps I have gone too far; everyone leans in to hear Heinz Kovacs’s whisper. “If I may just say. I did a little poking around, see, a little arkie-ology of my own. Like to know what’s what before I write whopping big cheques to English fruitcake explorers and pornographers.” (I will explain that misconception presently.) “Now my boy goes to Harvard, and his perfesser tells me your pharaoh didn’t even exist. So how’s that then?”

  I will admit that I suffered just then a pang of envy, nothing more, just a single throb, because as I stood amidst the Boston nouveaux riches and answered their inexperienced questions, I thought of Howard Carter, leisurely checking his bank balance in Cairo, then simply wiring his placid, noble sponsor back in England, demanding some handsome sum and waiting for his Cairo account to swell accordingly. I thought of Oskar Denninger, nicely outfitted by the plucky Weimar Republic, and of Giancarlo Buoncane pouring into the sands of the Sudan the quarterly profits of Cassini Distillatori, boozily willing to prime the pump as long as necessary until steaming gold geysered back out of that barren Sudanese earth. And I thought of my own “colleagues” at Harvard, taking time out from their busy schedules of miseducating undergraduates and confounding my work and meddling in my financial backing to go spend Harvard’s immortal endowment by fouling up the tombs of teensy priestlets.

  “Like anyone with vision, ambition, a sense of risk-taking, Mr. Kovacs, you understand what it means to be surrounded by small-minded enemies who hate you not because you hate them, or have wronged them, but because you ignore them, since they are too puny to be of interest to you. As the Internal Revenue Service or the Attorney General must seem to you, so do Professors ter Breuggen and Fleuriman seem to me, for it is they, I assume, who are the criminal befuddlers of your son. Gentlemen, I read Oriental languages and Egyptology at Oxford University. I pulled the writings of this king—this ‘imaginary’ king as Claes ter Breuggen would have it—with my own hands from out of the Egyptian earth. I believe only in what is real, as you gentlemen do. Now if I were to lay out before you the threads of scholarship, painstakingly gathered over decades and spun to their most tensile resiliency in my own work, if you were to pore over this abundant knowledge as I have, you would, in your simple common sense, laugh at the hairsplitting chatter rising from the sterile offices across the river, and you would say, as I read in the Boston Mercury recently that you said of the Attorney General, ‘Why don’t that boring little man stick with his own beeswax and leave Heinzie Kovacs to Heinzie Kovacs!’ and bravo, I thought, as I read that.”

  “Bravo, indeed,” chimed CCF. O’Toole filed his nails. “You see what I’m thinking here, JP?” CCF addressed O’Toole. “Answers everyone’s needs, seems to me. Pushy, tell ’em about what the tomb probably looks like.”

  When asking rich men for their money, be a little standoffish. They want to know that they will get their money back with interest, but they also want to see that you understand there is no guarantee they will. Even as you guarantee they will. They want you to be smarter than they are, but not in everything, and to acknowledge their superiority in matters of finance and “common sense.” They would like to display one or two insights into your expertise that have not occurred to you before. Any more than one or two, and they will think you a fool; any fewer, arrogant. They do not want you to ask for their money; they want you to present them with an opportunity and accept less of their investment than they are willing to make. Be dubious of their money, stress the risks even as you underplay the rewards. These, I am afraid, are the lessons any Egyptologist must master. Example:

  “Gentlemen. The tomb of Atum-hadu is probably a simple opening into the desert cliff face itself. Attending your walk into this covered arcade are illustrations of the events of Atum-hadu’s reign, and hieroglyph
s describing his glories and heartbreaks, invocations to the gods. Here, as you walk, the paintings tell a story, as if you were at the moving pictures: on your left, let us speculate, he leads his troops against the Hyksos invaders, or the secessionist would-be kings of the eastern delta, or black armies from the African south. On your right, you watch as he battles conspirators in his own court, impatient nobles who vie for his throne, while he serenely draws close to himself his trusted advisers (as you gentlemen are mine), and his queen, Her Beauty Astonishes the Sun. This much you and I see as we walk down the entry hall. Now through a small aperture we must crawl and we notice a smell unlike anything you have ever smelled before. I will not say it is immediately sweet or pleasant, but that is because it is unfamiliar—no, more than unfamiliar (which promises familiarity just ahead): it is permanently unique. You have never smelled this and never will again: it is the first whiff of air that has wafted undisturbed for 3500 years. I do not know if it will make you smile (as it does me) or will make you retch or will arouse you. Our eyes can scarcely open from the sting and the heat and . . . the glare. Yes, the glare, gentlemen: the uncertain light from our electric torches reflects back to us, magnified into blinding rays from gold and glass and ivory and beads and lapis lazuli and gold and gold and gold. Now shall we enter, you and I?”

  “I’m sold,” says Finneran.

  “As well you should be, sir. We know much of our host, Atum-hadu. We know from his writings the external pressures that shaped him, the persona he created to carry him through his career. We know of his overpowering appetites, which he could satisfy only for brief periods and with great difficulty. We know of the family that failed him, the queens and concubines who sustained him, the trusted Master of Largesse who was his greatest adviser, and there, before us, we see all of this. On the wall near the golden sarcophagus of our king we see the most intricate, delicate, erotic drawings of Atum-hadu’s amorous adventures, and figurines which, after the tomb was sealed, came to life to warm the king on his voyage to the underworld. And there, on a raised and ornate table, between gigantic statues of the gods Atum and Anubis, there it is: a complete copy of the Admonitions of Atum-hadu, the king’s writings, undeniably onymous at last, and on the walls, an even fuller description of the king’s life, of which it must be admitted—though the confession means we are now dragged kicking out of that entry arcade, past the blur of hieroglyphs, and returned here, to CCF’s drawing room—that we know very little for sure, and to feed my famished critics their paltry due: some have said Atum-hadu and his tomb are not only unknown but unknowable, as the king did not technically, literally, exist. Not true, of course, but daunting for the nervous investor or nervous explorer. Which is why neither of those types were invited here today.”

  And there followed a page-by-page examination of the prospectus booklets: “Odds of Success.” “Who Was Atum-hadu?” “The Tomb Paradox, General.” “The Tomb Paradox, Atum-hadu’s Case.” “The Role of Erotic Poetry in Atum-hadu’s Court.” “Evidence for Tomb Placement and Contents.” “Estimated Market Value of Selected Prospective Items.” “Maps of Egypt and Deir el Bahari.” “Personal Collections.” Not all of the Partners were awake for every section of our talk (the dozing J. P. O’Toole’s golden pencil, finding itself left to its own devices on its notebook, drew a series of minimalist waterfalls), but at least one of them was attentive for any given topic.

  “Let’s speak privately later, you and I and Heinzie, CC,” brogues O’Toole as he rises and stretches. Kovacs struggles to his feet, while Lathorp and Mitchell reach, as one man, towards the ottoman supporting the copy of Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt (Collins Amorous Literature, 1920).

  “No need to fight for them, boys.” I reach for my briefcase. “I have complimentary copies for everyone.”

  Sunset on the Bayview Nursing Home

  Sydney, Australia

  December 8, 1954

  Mr. Macy—

  I’m working as fast as I can now. You never know what tomorrow’s going to bring, if it brings anything at all. That’s lesson #1 in this residence. They took a fellow from my room this morning, all covered up nice and neat, with some bored-looking nephew spending a few of his precious minutes to sign for the body.

  July 1922. Inspector S. George Dahlquist, an ambitious officer, was more than happy to share his fond recollections, tales of Red bombers and thieving circuses. He was able to answer a few of my remaining questions about Paul Caldwell’s Australian life, but not all: from the moment our boy walked out of the restaurant with his heart cracked in pieces by his icy Red lady love until Boyd Hoyt talent-spotted him emptying pockets in a market square, I had nothing on him—two to three years where he was out of my view. And then, 1916, he’s tiptoeing on sawdust, reaching up towards the row of tempting wallets above him in the dark when Inspector Dahlquist leaps from the shadows, grabs the boy’s wrist, and nearly breaks it.

  Paul Caldwell’s at least twenty-three, knee-deep in elephant waste, sawdust, and the embraces of Emma Hoyt, when he’s arrested for picking the sparsely filled pockets of the audience while they sit in the semidark, their bums dangling over the backs of wooden benches, cheering for or against that evening’s penguin. Now, I know enough about how the police manage these things to know that Paul is likely shackled to a desk chair and then hit a bit and then given a large drink of water and then left a long while as the blood dries and then, when he needs a toilet quite badly indeed, in comes beefy Inspector Dahlquist, who says no one will vouch for Paul, Boyd Hoyt’s told the police he has no interest in Paul’s welfare, they might as well hang Paul high with a snapped neck as far as Hoyt’s concerned. “A skinny boy, your Mr. Caldwell, but he didn’t scare easy,” Dahlquist told me. “Eventually of course they all get frightened, except for the real murderous monsters, but this little bung held out a bit, kept his silence. At the beginning, I just wanted to hear what he could tell me about Hoyt, confirm he was picking those pockets on Hoyt’s orders to pay for the circus. I threatened him with long prison terms, which I might have been able to secure, depending on how many people came forward with complaints of larceny. But your Mr. Caldwell still kept quiet. Did Hoyt tell him to steal? Nothing. I described his life in prison to him. Nothing. I say the judge can decide to sentence him to the Army for his role in this lurk, and off he can go to help fight the Kaiser in a far-off field of France, have his head blown open for his trouble, and how did that sound to him? Nothing. ‘You been doing it with Hoyt’s wife, then? Because Mr. Hoyt, he’s a very angry old man. Hates you. Tells me you’re the rapist of his wife as well as a thief.’ But our Paul’s not reacting, not even whingeing, until very slowly, he turns to me and he says, ‘Can you send me to the Army if I help you?’ and I have to say I didn’t see what he meant, but clear as day he wanted something. So now our negotiations begin in earnest, I’m sure you can understand, Mr. Ferrell. We begin to speak in highly removed hypotheticals. What would I be able to arrange for him if he could tell me something extraordinary? Just what would he be able to tell me if I were to know a man who might be able to deliver such a solution? ‘So let’s see the merchandise, young Mr. Caldwell, and make it ace,’ I say. First, Paul says yes, Hoyt trained him to steal, forced him to steal, Paul kept only a small percentage of the take and the rest of the loot paid for the circus, fed the tigers. ‘Hoyt told me to do it, Hoyt took all of the money, and Hoyt’s the one who taught me how to pick a pocket and Hoyt Hoyt Hoyt.’ Interesting, I say, but not enough for the deal you’re asking for. All right, then, he says, and thinks silently for a minute. How about this: did I remember the Zipping Zivkovics? Two visiting star acrobats killed in a horrible accident during a performance of Hoyt’s circus last year? Well, what if Paul could prove that they had been murdered by Hoyt in order to inflate circus attendance, since people always came in droves when there was a chance of seeing accidental death? More interesting, I admitted, but still not enough to secure him the very special package he requested. He sat and looked at his feet for
a long while. I wondered if he was asleep, with his head hanging like that, or discouraged, or working up a whopper. But I waited, and I watched. Five minutes, ten minutes, I knew that every minute I kept quiet I was going to get a good one, if it wasn’t just fairy tales. I could see his lips moving, he’s thinking through something. And then he lifts his head and he looks me in the eye and says, cool as anything, ‘Would you do it for a conspiracy of violent Communist plotters in the heart of Sydney?’ Well, Mr. Ferrell, now he had my attention.

  “The agreement he wanted took some time to guarantee. It was a heavy order, but if what he said was true, it was worth it. I said I’m a man of my word, but this would take some time to explore, and he said, I remember it well, he said, ‘Take your time. World revolution and the destruction of all police power certainly isn’t worth hurrying for.’ And he laughed in my face.”

  The deal, Macy, was simple in principle, if a little complicated to execute. Paul wanted to be sent to join the Australian Imperial Force in Egypt, and he wanted it guaranteed that he would stay in Egypt for as long as the AIF was there. No Gallipoli, thanks, no Luxembourg, thanks. He would do his time in the AIF in Egypt and nowhere else. He told Dahlquist he could read Egyptian and knew the geography of the country as well as any Australian, and he’d learnt to ride a horse at Hoyt’s place. In exchange, well, the Barrys and their friends. Of course, he held on to those names a bit longer. He talked very generally of the things Dahlquist would find, until the copper, convinced, pleading national safety, pulled strings at Defence, and arranged it as his star informant desired, while Paul sat in Sydney gaol, kept away from all visitors. When the paperwork was real, only then did Paul speak in specifics. Bombs under floorboards. Lists of assassination targets. Names of conspirators. Child-napping stories. Incestuous librarians corrupting youth. “Of course not all this stuck, but I won’t complain,” the Inspector told me. “Caldwell kept his word, and so did I. He was on a transport ship within a week of the arrests. That would have been summer, say December 1916.”