The Lost Army of Cambyses (27 page)

Initially, when Dravic had first brought him news

of the tomb, he had refused to believe it. It was too

incredible. Too much to hope for. And Dravic had

made mistakes before. His judgement in these

matters was not always to be trusted.

Only when he had held the objects in his own

hands as he was doing now, and looked at them

with his own eyes, had he known for certain that

they were real. That the tomb was what Dravic

had claimed it was. That Allah had indeed smiled

upon them. Smiled on them with the very fullness

of his favour.

He returned the artefacts to their trunk and

closed the lid, slipping the padlock back into its

clasp and clicking it shut. In the distance he could

227

still hear the thudding of the helicopter's rotors.

The tomb was just the start of it. And would be

the end of it, too, if they didn't find the missing

piece. Everything hinged on that. That was the

fulcrum upon which their destiny balanced. The

missing piece.

He left the tent, eyes narrowing slightly against

the sun's glare but otherwise untroubled by the

roasting heat. Skirting the camp, he made his way

to the top of a low dune and gazed eastwards

across the rolling hills of sand, a solitary black

speck in the all-enveloping void. Somewhere out

there, he thought. Somewhere in that immeasur-

able sea of burning emptiness. Somewhere. He

closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it must

have been like.

228

22

CAIRO

The ride up from Luxor took ten hours. The train

was packed and Khalifa spent the journey wedged

into the corner of a draughty carriage between a

woman carrying a basket full of pigeons and an

elderly man with a hacking cough. Despite the

cramped surroundings and the asthmatic jolting of

the train, he slept soundly the whole way, his

jacket rolled up behind his head as a pillow,

his feet resting on a large sack of dried dates.

When he woke, a particularly violent lurch bang-

ing his head against the bars of the compartment

window, he felt refreshed and well rested. He

whispered his morning prayers, lit a cigarette and

set about devouring the bread and goat's cheese

Zenab had given him for the journey, sharing it

with the elderly man beside him.

They hit the outskirts of Cairo just before six

a.m. He wasn't due to meet Mohammed Tauba,

the detective in charge of the Iqbar case, until nine,

leaving him with almost three hours to kill. Rather

229

than stay with the train all the way to the centre of

Cairo, he instead got off at Giza and, coming out

of the station, took a service taxi up to Nazlat al-

Sammam, his old village.

It was only the third time he'd been back since

he'd left thirteen years ago. As a child he had

imagined he would live in the village for ever.

After Ali's death, however, and that of his mother,

which had come not long afterwards, the place no

longer felt the same. Every street reminded him of

how badly things had gone wrong, every house,

every tree. He could not be there without feeling

an overwhelming sense of emptiness and loss. And

so he'd accepted the Luxor posting and moved

away. His only other trips back had, appropri-

ately, been for funerals.

He left the minibus at a busy crossroads and,

glancing up at the pyramid of Cheops, half hidden

behind a curtain of dawn mist, set off along a

main road into the village, excited and nervous.

The place had changed since his childhood days.

Then it had been a proper village – a smallish

cluster of shops and houses scattered along the

base of the Giza plateau, beneath the silent gaze of

the Sphinx.

Now, with the growth of the tourist industry

and the inexorable march of the city's western out-

skirts, it had lost much of its identity. The streets

were lined with souvenir shops, and the old mud-

brick dwellings had given way to an explosion of

characterless concrete tenements. He wandered

around for a while, gazing at the buildings, some

familiar, most new, uncertain why he had come,

just knowing that somehow he needed to see the

230

old place again. He walked past his former home,

or rather the site where his former home had once

stood – it had long since been demolished and

replaced with a four-storey concrete hotel – and

looked in at the camel yard where he and his

brother had worked as children. Every now and

then he passed a familiar face and greetings were

exchanged. The greetings were polite rather than

warm, distant, cold even in some cases. Hardly

surprising, given what had happened to Ali.

He stayed for perhaps an hour, feeling increas-

ingly melancholy, wondering if he had made a

mistake in coming, and then, glancing swiftly at

his watch, walked out past the edge of the village

onto the sands of the plateau. The sun was rising

now and the mists were dissolving, the outline of the

pyramids growing sharper by the minute. He stood

looking at them for a while, then angled away to the

left towards a walled cemetery clustered about the

foot of a steep limestone scarp opposite the Sphinx.

The lower part of the cemetery was on flat

ground, its ornate graves shaded by pine and

eucalyptus trees. Closer to the scarp the land

sloped upwards and the graves became simpler,

drabber, with no greenery to shade them from the

elements, like poor suburbs on the margins of a

wealthy city.

It was to this part of the cemetery that Khalifa

now climbed, weaving his way through a traffic

jam of flat, rectangular tombs, until eventually he

stopped near the top end of the enclosure, in front

of a pair of simple graves, little more than crude

slabs of rendered breeze-block, unadorned save

for a rock cemented onto the top of each, and a

231

couple of lines of fading Koranic verse painted

onto their front end. The graves of his parents.

He gazed down at them and then, kneeling,

kissed them, first his mother's, then his father's,

whispering a prayer over each. He lingered a

moment, head bowed, then stood again and,

slowly, as if his legs had grown suddenly heavy,

trudged further up the slope to the very top corner

of the cemetery, where the enclosure wall was

broken and tumbled and the ground was scattered

with litter and goat droppings.

There was only one grave in this corner, pushed

right up against the wall as though shunned by the

other tombs. It was even simpler than his parents'

burials, just an unadorned rectangle of cheap

cement, with no inscriptions or Koranic verses. He

remembered how he had had to plead with the

cemetery authorities to allow it to be sited here;

how he had made it with his own hands, late at

night, when no-one from the village would see;

how he had wept as he had worked. God, how he

had wept.

He knelt down beside the grave and, bending

forward, laid his cheek against its cool surface.

'Oh Ali,' he whispered. 'My brother, my life.

Why? Why? Please, just tell me why?'

Mohammed Abd el-Tauba, the detective in charge

of the Iqbar case, looked like a mummy. His skin

was dry and parchment-like, his cheeks sunken,

his mouth locked in a permanent rictus that was

half smile, half grimace.

He worked out of a grimy office on Sharia Bur

Sa'id, where he had a desk in the corner of a

232

smoky room shared with four other officers.

Khalifa arrived shortly after nine a.m. and, having

exchanged pleasantries and drunk a glass of tea,

the two of them got straight down to business.

'So you're interested in old man Iqbar,' said

Tauba, grinding one cigarette into an already

overflowing ashtray while puffing another into

life.

'I think there might be a connection with a case

we've got down in Luxor,' said Khalifa.

Tauba blew twin jets of smoke out of his

nostrils. 'It's a bad business. We get our share of

murders around here, but nothing like this. They

butchered the poor old bastard.' He reached into

a drawer and pulled out a file, tossing it across the

desk. 'The pathologist's report. Multiple lacerations

on the face, arms and torso. Burns too.'

'Cigar burns?'

Tauba grunted an affirmative.

'And the cuts?' asked Khalifa. 'What caused the

cuts?'

'Strange,' said Tauba. 'The pathologist couldn't

be sure. A metal object of some sort, but too

clumsy for a knife. He thinks it might have been a

trowel.'

'A trowel?'

'You know, like a builder's trowel. One of those

ones they use for grouting, cementing in cracks,

that sort of thing. It's there in the report.'

Khalifa opened the file and worked his way

through it. The pictures of the old man slumped

on the floor of his shop, and subsequently of his

naked corpse laid out like a fish on the mortuary

slab, made him grimace. The pathologist's

233

comments were almost verbatim those used by

Anwar in his report on Abu Nayar.

'Nature of instrument used to inflict aforesaid

injuries uncertain,' it concluded in the abbrevi-

ated, dehumanizing language of all such

documents. 'Pathology of lacerations inconsistent

with knife-inflicted injury. Shape and angle of

wound suggest culprit possibly trowel of some

description, as used by builders, archaeologists,

etc. although no conclusive evidence either way.'

Khalifa dwelt on the word 'archaeologists' for a

moment before looking up at Tauba. 'Who found

the body?'

'Shopkeeper next door. Got suspicious when

Iqbar didn't show up for work. Tried the door,

found it was open, went in and there he was, like

in the photos.'

'And this was?'

'Saturday morning. God knows how the papers

got hold of it so quickly. I reckon they commit half

the crimes in Cairo themselves, just so they'll have

something to write about.'

Khalifa smiled. 'Did Iqbar deal in antiquities?'

'Probably. They all do in his business, don't

they. We haven't got a file on him, but that doesn't

mean anything. We've only got the resources to

deal with the big guys. When it's just a few objects

we tend to let it go, otherwise we'd be filling every

prison from here to Abu Simbel.'

Khalifa flicked through the report again,

coming back to the word 'archaeologist'.

'You haven't heard of anything unusual coming

onto the antiquities market lately, have you?'

'Unusual?'

234

'You know, valuable. Worth killing for.'

Tauba shrugged. 'Not that I can think of. There

was some Greek guy exporting artefacts disguised

as reproductions, but that was a couple of months

ago. I can't think of anything more recent. Unless

you count that business over at Saqqara.'

Khalifa glanced up. 'Saqqara?'

'Yesterday afternoon. An English couple got

involved in a gunfight and then drove away in a

stolen taxi. Apparently the girl had taken some-

thing out of one of the dig houses.'

He called across the room to one of his

colleagues, an overweight man with heavy sweat

stains beneath his armpits.

'Hey, Helmi! You've got a friend in the Giza

force. What was the latest with that shooting at

Saqqara?'

'Not much,' grunted Helmi, biting into a large

cake. 'No-one seems to know what was going on,

except that the girl had nicked something. A box

of some sort.'

'Any idea who she was?' asked Khalifa.

Helmi pushed more cake into his mouth, treacle

oozing around his lips and chin. 'The daughter of

some archaeologist, apparently. One of the in-

spectors at the
teftish
recognized her. Murray or

something.'

Murray, thought Khalifa. Murray. 'Not

Mullray? Michael Mullray?'

'That's the one. Died a couple of days ago.

Heart attack. The daughter found his body.'

Khalifa pulled his notebook from his pocket

and a pen.

'So let me get this clear: the girl finds her father's

235

body two days ago, then comes back yesterday

and takes this thing from the dig house . . .'

'Their taxi driver thought they'd got it from one

of the tombs,' said Helmi. 'He said they went out

into the desert, got this thing like a pizza carton . . .'

'Trust you to get food into it, Helmi!' shouted

one of his colleagues.

'Lick my arse, Aziz . . . got this box thing, came

back, someone started shooting at them. But then

the people in the village below said it was the

bloke the girl was with who was doing the shoot-

ing. Like I said, no-one seems to know what the

hell was going on.'

'Do we know who this man was?'