The Lost Army of Cambyses (12 page)

'I want to ask you a couple of questions. About

your workers.'

'Is this about insurance?'

'It's not about insurance and it's not about

licences. We're looking for a missing person.' He

pulled a photograph from his pocket and held it

up. 'Recognize this tattoo?'

The man took the photo and stared at it.

'Well?'

'Maybe.'

'What do you mean, maybe? You either recog-

nize it or you don't.'

'Yes, OK, I recognize it.'

At last, thought Khalifa. 'One of your workers?'

'Until I sacked him a week ago, yes. Why, is he

in trouble?'

'You could say that. He's dead.'

The man stared down at the photo.

'Murdered,' added Khalifa. 'We found his body

in the river yesterday.'

There was a pause and then the man handed the

photo back and turned away. 'You'd better come

through.'

They passed through a bead curtain into a large

room at the back of the shop. There was a low bed

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against one wall, a television on a stand and a

table laid for lunch with bread and onions and

a slab of cheese. Above the bed hung a sepia

photograph of an old bearded man in a fez and

djellaba – an ancestor of the shop owner, Khalifa

presumed – with beside it a framed print of the

first
sura
of the Koran. An open door led onto a

yard where more men were working. The shop

owner kicked the door shut.

'His name was Abu Nayar,' he said, turning

towards Khalifa. 'He worked here for about a

year. He was a good craftsman, but a drinker.

Used to come in late, not concentrate on his work.

Always trouble.'

'Know where he lived?'

'Old Qurna. Up by the tomb of Rekhmire.'

'Family?'

'A wife and two kids. Girls. He treated the

woman like a dog. Beat her. You know.'

Khalifa pulled on his cigarette, gazing at a

painted limestone bust in the corner, a copy of the

famous Nefertiti head in the Berlin museum. He'd

always wanted to see the original, ever since as a

child he'd stared at its likeness in the windows of

craft shops in Giza and Cairo. He doubted he ever

would see it, though. He could no more afford a trip

to Berlin than he could a balloon ride over the Valley

of the Kings. He turned back to the shop owner.

'This Abu Nayar, did he have any enemies that you

know of? Anyone who bore him a grudge?'

'Where do you want me to start? He owed

money left, right and centre, insulted everyone,

got into fights. I can think of fifty people who'd

want him dead. A hundred.'

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'Anyone in particular? Any blood feuds?'

'Not that I know of.'

'Was he involved in anything illegal? Drugs?

Antiquities?'

'How would I know?'

'Because everyone around here knows every-

thing about everyone else. Come on, no games.'

The man scratched his chin and sat down

heavily on the edge of the bed. Outside the

workers had started to sing, a folk tune, one man

taking the verse, the others joining in for the

chorus.

'Not drugs,' he said after a long pause. 'He

wasn't involved with drugs.'

'But antiquities?'

The man shrugged.

'What about antiquities?' pressed Khalifa. 'Did

he deal?'

'Odds and ends, maybe.'

'What sort of odds and ends?'

'Nothing much. A few
shabtis,
some scarabs.

Everybody deals, for God's sake. It's no big thing.'

'It's illegal.'

'It's survival.'

Khalifa ground out his cigarette in an ashtray.

'Anything valuable?' he asked.

The shop owner shrugged and, leaning forward,

turned on the television. 'Nothing that would be

worth killing him for,' he said. A game show

flickered onto the black-and-white screen. He sat

staring at it. After a long pause, he sighed. 'There

were rumours.'

'Rumours?'

'That he'd found something.'

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'What?'

'God knows. A tomb. Something big.' The man

leaned forward and adjusted the volume. 'But then

there are always rumours, aren't there? Every

week someone finds a new Tutankhamun. Who

knows which ones are true?'

'Was this one true?'

The shopkeeper shrugged. 'Maybe, maybe not.

I don't get involved. I have a good business and

that's all I'm interested in.'

He fell silent, concentrating on the game show.

Outside the men were still singing, the clank and

thud of their tools echoing dully in the still after-

noon air. When the man spoke his voice was low,

almost a whisper.

'Three days ago Nayar bought his mother a tele-

vision set and a new fridge. That's a lot of money

for a man who has no job. Draw your own con-

clusions.' He burst out laughing. 'Look at him,' he

cried, pointing at a contestant who had just

answered a question incorrectly. 'What an idiot!'

There was something forced about his

laughter. His hands, the detective noticed, were

trembling.

Khalifa had always been fascinated by the history

of his country. He remembered as a child standing

on the roof of their house watching the sunrise

over the pyramids. Other children in his village

had taken the monuments for granted, but not

Khalifa. For him there had always been something

magical about them, great triangles looming

through the morning mist, doorways to a different

time and world. Growing up beside them had

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given him an insatiable desire to learn more about

the past.

It was a desire he had shared with his brother Ali,

who if anything had been even more fanatical in his

passion for history, offering as it did a sanctuary

from the crushing hardships of his daily life. Each

night he would return home from work, exhausted

and filthy, and having bathed and eaten, would

sit himself down in a corner of the room and

immerse himself in one of his archaeology books.

He had amassed quite a collection – some borrowed

from the local mosque school, most probably stolen

– and the young Khalifa had loved nothing more

than to sit beside him while he read aloud by the

light of a flickering candle.

'Tell me about Rasses, Ali,' he would cry,

nuzzling into his brother's shoulder.

'Ramesses,' Ali would laugh, correcting him.

'Well, there was once a great king called Ramesses

the Second, and he was the most powerful man

in the whole wide world, with a golden chariot

and a crown made of diamonds . . .'

How lucky they were to be Egyptian, Khalifa

had thought. What other country on earth

possessed such a wealth of fabulous stories to pass

down to its children? Thank you, Allah, for letting

me be born in this wonderful land!

The two of them had carried out mini-

excavations up on the Giza plateau, digging up

stones and old bits of pottery, imagining them-

selves to be famous archaeologists. Once, shortly

after their father's death, they had discovered a

small limestone pharaoh's head close to the base

of the Sphinx and Khalifa had been speechless

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with excitement, thinking that here for once was

something truly ancient and valuable. Only years

later had he discovered that Ali had buried it there

himself to take his little brother's mind off the loss

of their father.

They had hitched rides south to Saqqara and

Dhashur and Abusir, and into the middle of Cairo,

where they had cheated their way into the

Museum of Antiquities by insinuating themselves

into visiting school parties. To this day he could

walk round the entire museum in his head, so well

had he come to know it from those surreptitious

childhood excursions. On one such visit they had

been befriended by an elderly academic, Professor

al-Habibi. Touched by their youthful enthusiasm,

the professor had shown them around the

collection, pointing things out, encouraging their

interest. Years later, when Khalifa won a place at

university to read ancient history, the same

Professor al-Habibi had become his tutor.

Yes, he loved the past. There was something

mystical about it, something glittering, a chain of

gold stretching all the way back to the dawn

of time. He loved it for its colour and its enormity,

and the way it somehow made the present appear

so much richer.

Mainly, however, he loved it because Ali had

loved it. It was something special they had shared:

a joint heart from which they had both drawn

strength and life. In time their hands reached out

and touched, still, even though Ali was dead and

gone. The ancient world was for Khalifa,

above all, an affirmation of his love for his lost

sibling.

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'Who were the kings of the Eighteenth

Dynasty?' Ali used to ask him, testing.

'Ahmose,' Khalifa would recite slowly,

'Amenhotep one, Tuthmosis one and two,

Hatshepsut, Tuthmosis three, Amenhotep two,

Tuthmosis four, Amenhotep three, Akhenaten, urn

. . . um . . . oh I always forget this one . . . urn . . .

oh . . .'

'Smenkhkare,' Ali would tell him.

'Dammit! I knew that! Smenkhkare,

Tutankhamun, Ay, Horemheb.'

'Learn, Yusuf! Learn and grow!'

Good days.

It took him a while to find Nayar's house. It was

hidden away behind a cluster of other dwellings,

halfway up a hill and backing onto a row of pits

that had once held ancient burials, but were now

full of mouldering rubbish. An emaciated goat

was tethered outside, its ribs showing through its

skin like the bars of a xylophone.

He knocked on the door, which after a brief

pause was opened by a small woman with bright

green eyes.

She was young, no older than her mid-twenties,

and must have been pretty once. Like so many

fellaha
women, however, the exertions of child-

bearing and the hardships of daily life had made

her old before her time. Her left cheek, Khalifa

noticed, showed signs of bruising.

'I'm sorry to disturb you,' he said gently, show-

ing her his badge. 'I've . . .' He paused, searching

for the right words. He'd done this sort of thing

many times before but had never got used to it. He

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remembered how his own mother had reacted

when they had brought news of his father's death,

how she had collapsed and torn at her hair, wail-

ing like a wounded animal. He hated the idea of

causing that sort of pain.

'What?' said the woman. 'Drunk again, is he?'

'May I come in?'

She shrugged and turned back into the house,

leading him into the main room, where two little

girls were playing together on the bare concrete

floor. It was cool and dark inside, like a cave, with

no furniture apart from a sofa running along one

wall and a television standing on a table in the

corner. A new television, Khalifa noticed.

'Well?'

'I'm afraid I have some bad news,' said the

detective. 'Your husband, he's . . .'

'Been arrested?'

Khalifa bit his lip.

'Dead.'

For a moment she just stared at him, then sat

down heavily on the sofa, covering her face with

her hands. He presumed she was weeping and

took a step forward to comfort her. Only as he

came close did he realize that the muffled grunts

coming from between her fingers were not sobs at

all, but laughter.

'Fatma, Iman,' she said, beckoning the two girls

to her. 'Something wonderful has happened.'

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11

CAIRO

Having finished at the embassy Tara wanted to go

to her father's apartment to look through his

belongings.

He had kept few possessions with him during

his four-month season at Saqqara – a change of

clothes, a couple of notebooks, a camera. Most of

his things had stayed in the Cairo flat.

Here he had his diaries, his slides, his clothes,

various artefacts the Egyptian authorities had

allowed him to keep. And, of course, his books, of

which he had a vast collection, several thousand

volumes, all individually bound in leather, the

result of a lifetime of collecting. 'With books,' he

used to say, 'even the poorest hovel in the world is

transformed into a palace. They make everything

seem so much more bearable.'

Oates offered to take her in the car, but the

apartment was only a few minutes' walk away

and, anyway, she felt like being alone for a while.

He phoned ahead to make sure the concierge had

105

a spare set of keys, drew her a map of how to get

there and escorted her to the front gates.

'Call when you get back to the hotel,' he said.

'And as I mentioned before, try not to stay out

after dark. Especially after this river-boat thing.'

He smiled and disappeared back into the

embassy.