The Eye of Ra Read online

  She wore a loose cotton blouse and pants and as she squeezed me I could feel the bearish bulk of her body. She’d lost a bit of weight, perhaps, but she still looked like a trainee sumo-wrestler who would knock you down for tuppence. In the days when she’d taught judo at the British Embassy, it had been a brave man indeed who’d been ready to square up to Doc.

  ‘Did you find Julian?’ she asked.

  ‘Julian’s dead, Doc.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. No. I don’t believe it. Where?’

  ‘On the Giza plateau right plonk under the Great Pyramid. A couple of Fellahs came across the body at sunrise and reported it to the police. They found his passport on him and phoned the Consulate. The Consul let me know first thing.’

  ‘God, Jamie,’ Doc said, shaking her head in disbelief, ‘God, I’m dreadfully sorry.’

  I nodded and glanced around at the vast, austere apartment with its statuettes and dark draperies, its corners full of purple shadows, its computer hardware and its overstuffed bookshelves lining every wall. Evelyn ‘Doc’ Barrington had been a real doctor in a far-off, antediluvian era, but at some stage she’d been recruited by the British Secret Intelligence Service, M I 6. Years ago, she’d been the mainstay of their Cairo office, an accomplished investigator and inquisitor who spoke fluent Arabic and knew everyone and everything that went on in the city. That was until her husband Ronnie, also MI6, had died in a motor accident. Murdered, Doc always claimed. Their son David had been at university in the States at the time and hardly ever visited, and Ronnie was all Doc had. She’d taken it very hard, broken down for a while, and suffered fits of melancholy and paranoia, manifested in a tendency to see conspiracies everywhere. Doc had become a liability to the office, or so rumour had it. They’d given her counselling, helped her back to normal, but she’d never been returned to the active list.

  I’d first met Doc not long after Ronnie died. I think it was the loneliness that had made her put out feelers for a lodger. Anyway, I’d heard about the room through the British Embassy. Of course I couldn’t spend all my time at Doc’s because I was often out up country on digs, but it had been very convenient to have a comfortable room and a warm welcome whenever I got back. I was more than happy to spend boozy evenings with her over grilled Nile perch or shrimps and a couple of bottles of local wine, listening to Umm Kalthum or Fairuz, and talking remorselessly. Conversations with Doc were a feast of quite a different order from the ones I enjoyed with Julian. She and I were alike — precise, analytical, intense, but my range of knowledge was pygmy-sized compared with hers. We would debate anything and everything: philosophy, politics and history, French literature, Italian wine, ancient Greek ceramics, pre-Islamic Arabic verse. Often, Doc would simply rattle on while I listened, entranced by the new world that she’d just opened up for me. Doc looked like a cross between a gone-to-seed English rose and a bulldog with attitude: a big woman, as tall as me, with close-cropped hair that suited the sensuous face. There was a touch of something almost Mongolian about its broadness and flatness, the high cheekbones, intense dark eyes, full lips. Doc could look ferocious, but actually she was very up front and warm blooded, and I liked her the more for that. Her mother was Italian, a Roman — ‘the wrong half of Italy’, Doc used to say, not without pride — and her father British. She’d been brought up in Uganda, though, where her people owned some kind of plantation. Wattle, I think. Anyway, those nights had been oases of pleasure for me and slowly we’d grown attached to each other. David, Doc’s son, was more or less lost to her; he’d dropped out of university and become some sort of hippie. ‘Sod never even came to Ronnie’s funeral,’ she would tell me mournfully after a few drinks. ‘That was just about the end for me.’ I noticed, though, that David’s photo still featured on her desk. As time went on, I felt Doc pressing me into the role David had vacated. There were little tell-tale things like always making sure I had a clean shirt, always getting in the food I liked, tut-tutting if I came in late or had too much to drink, giving me maternal advice about girls. Our relationship had never been an equal one, but I’d accepted that. Doc was bossy and opinionated and sometimes, with a hangover, a bully and a martinet, but she was a woman who knew everything, a hundred degree-proof intellect that cut through problems like a knife.

  The flat reeked of tobacco smoke, despite the open balcony and the creaking fans. I saw that Doc had been working at her desk on an Apple computer when I arrived: files and booklets were scattered across the Persian carpet and an ash-tray full of cigarette butts stood on the bare floor. Doc ushered me to the balcony where there were two wicker chairs and a low wooden table. Tumblers and a half-full bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label already stood on the table. I sat down and took in the view: the massed buildings of central Cairo across the Nile, the great monoliths of hotels with their windows blazing sunlight like whirls of fire. The growl and honk of traffic was more distant from here. I watched a convoy of black barges moving down the Nile as silently as a camel caravan. Doc eased gracefully into a chair, folded her legs, and picked up the whisky bottle: ‘Time for a little snifter, I think, don’t you, darling?’ she said. Nothing had changed, I thought. Any time was time for a little snifter as far as Doc was concerned. It didn’t require the death of an old friend to bring out the Scotch. She poured two fingers of whisky into my glass and into hers and added ice from a carafe. ‘Cheers!’ she said, dismally. I took a gulp, feeling the rich liquid burning in my throat. I coughed.

  ‘Jamie, it’s ghastly,’ she said. ‘Really awful.’

  ‘The pathologist swore he’d dropped dead of a heart attack on a stroll round the necropolis,’ I said, ‘but Julian wasn’t the kind of guy who went to the pyramids for an afternoon out. I mean, he knew every stone of the bloody place and lost interest in it years ago. I got the feeling they wanted to sweep the whole thing under the carpet in double-quick time. The word “terrorism” was mooted obliquely.’

  ‘It makes sense, Jamie. They get the jitters when there’s any sniff of the dreaded “T” word. You can’t blame them when the entire economy rests on tourism. Couldn’t handle another trauma like the Groppi’s blast. When some poor bugger gets his leg shredded, it’s not exactly brilliant P R. If there’s anything guaranteed to put off tourists it’s violent death or permanent mutilation, and no tourists means no hotel trade, empty restaurants and tea-shops, no fares for the cabbies, no souvenir-trade, no jobs, no nothing. Luxor and Aswan would just fold up. The Groppi’s fiasco cost the government about fifty million, they reckon.’ She paused, sipped her drink and stared at me appraisingly. ‘Why? Was there anything suspicious?’

  ‘My nose tells me something’s not kosher. I mean, Julian looked like shit, as if he’d pegged out in absolute agony or terror or both, but no one heard or saw anything. They put the time of death at late afternoon; just the time when the place is jam-packed, yet no one sees a blind thing till first light today.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘And there was another thing. Eight sets of tracks round the body, but none of them his.’

  ‘Couldn’t the breeze have obliterated them?’

  ‘Wasn’t a breath of it last night. All the tracks around him were intact.’

  ‘That’s weird!’

  ‘I thought so too. Yet the investigator’s all for wrapping it up as misadventure.’

  ‘They try to sell you any crock of shit, darling. They tried to tell me Ronnie’s death was an accident. Going too fast, they said, and when the tyre burst he hit the brakes too quickly. I ask you! Ronnie? He used to drive the Monte Carlo!’

  I sighed. I’d heard the story before.

  Doc lit a Rothmans with a silver pocket lighter, inhaled, and expelled the smoke across the balcony. ‘Who was the investigator?’ she enquired.

  ‘Guy called Hammoudi, a big bruiser, built like a brick shit-house. Copt, I think.’

  ‘Oh, my giddy aunts.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Never had the pleasure, but Hammoudi’s one of those guys
whose name makes grown men wet their pants. He’s Mukhabaraat — SID branch — and don’t be misled by the beef. He might look like Mr Plod, but the guy’s got a mind like a stiletto. A bloody one, I should add. Used to be a parachute sergeant in the Yemen in the sixties. Led a patrol called the “Night Butchers”. They used to go out at night behind enemy lines, slit royalists’ throats and come back with their cocks as souvenirs. He’s no chicken either — been cited for bravery umpteen times. Hammoudi used to report to a Major called Rasim, a very slippery customer with contacts in the underworld. Looks like a mafioso himself. Rasim’s more of a desk man, though. It’s Hammoudi who does the foot-slogging.’

  We sipped our whisky in silence, and I studied the buildings of Cairo, the new, modern Cairo that had sprung up in the last decade out of the old squalor.

  ‘Thing is, Doc,’ I sighed, ‘I mean if I’d got here a bit quicker Julian might still be alive.’

  ‘Don’t, Jamie,’ Doc said. ‘You always blame yourself in situations like this. It’s a natural reaction. I felt the same way when Ronnie died. Anyway, you got here like a bat out of hell. I doubt if anyone could have done it quicker unless they were beamed across.’

  ‘No, but I’m just thinking that if I’d accepted Julian’s offer I’d have been here anyway.’

  ‘He told me he was ready to take you on as his private assistant. Why didn’t you accept it?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’d got obsessed with the Zerzura Project, which wasn’t what you’d call mainstream Egyptology at all.’

  ‘Yeah, Jules was absolutely sold on the legend of the Lost Oasis, wasn’t he.’

  ‘He thought it was more than a legend. Used to point out ad nauseam that it’s mentioned in medieval manuscripts like al-Khalidi’s Book of Lost Treasures. He was convinced that out there in the Western Desert he’d find a lost city, just as the medieval stories said. He collected all the accounts, everything that was written or told about the place, and when people laughed, he used to call them Philistines and cite Schliemann, who discovered the site of ancient Troy. Jules and I were so different. He fed on dreams and symbols and insights like some kind of modern bloody witch-doctor, and it worked — at least it sometimes did. I always prided myself on cold logic, Occam’s Razor. Now they call me “irrational”. Can you believe how things turn out!’

  ‘Perhaps you weren’t so fundamentally different after all.’

  ‘Maybe. If I had the time over I’d have accepted his offer. See, there was more to it than Zerzura. I knew he didn’t really need me as an assistant. What he needed was a friend, a kind of surrogate son he’d never had. You knew Julian; he was a difficult man. Suffered terrible mood-swings: one day scintillating and brilliant and the next so far down in the dumps that he could hardly speak.’

  ‘That’s why he never got hitched, not because he was a woman-hater or queer like they said; he just knew no woman would put up with it.’

  ‘Right. He needed a friend to sort of look after him. He didn’t really give a shit what I thought about the Zerzura Project, he just wanted me for myself, and the fact is, under it all I knew it, and I let him down.’

  ‘It’s all water under the bridge now.’

  ‘Doc, Julian was missing for three days. Where was he?’

  ‘Elementary, Jamie. Either he’d been kidnapped or he was hiding.’

  ‘When he phoned me in London he said someone was trying to kill him: “These devils killed George Herbert, Orde Wingate and Tutankhamen,” he said.’

  ‘That’s preposterous.’

  ‘Absolutely. Tut died in about 1300 BC, yet three days ago Julian announces quite sincerely he’s in danger from someone — or something — that killed both Tut and two twentieth-century Englishmen!’

  ‘Steady on. Herbert wasn’t English. If that’s George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, he was Welsh. Snooty Welsh, but Welsh all the same.’

  ‘In any case he wasn’t murdered...died of a scorpion sting.’

  ‘Cause of death was officially given as an “infected mosquito bite”, if I remember rightly. You know he and Carter had been digging for thirty years for Tut, but the poor bugger never lived to see the mummy after all those years of searching and all that dosh he’d shelled out. Died in 1923, not long after they opened the sarcophagus, here in Cairo, actually, at the Grand Continental, which was considered very swish then; a dump now, of course. Some odd things happened when he died, they reckon: all the lights in the city went out in the same moment, and at home in England his pet terrier suddenly rolled over and croaked.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘In the case of the city lights, it happens to be well authenticated. I’ve seen the actual report submitted to Allenby, who was High Commissioner in Cairo then, stating that an official inquiry had failed to find out why all the lights in the city had cut at that time. Don’t know about the mutt, but his son, Lord Porchester, used to tell that story, apparently.’

  ‘All right. But scorpion or mosquito, Carnarvon still died a natural death.’

  ‘Yes, but there was another oddity. Apparently the fatal mosquito bite was on his left cheek. And guess what? There was a flaw in the gold of Tutankhamen’s funerary mask in the same place. Not only that, when the mummy was unwrapped in 1925, it had a wound in exactly the same place!’

  ‘Good story, Doc.’

  ‘OK, probably a coincidence. But isn’t it pretty clear that Tut was zapped?’

  ‘It’s not absolutely certain. There was a wound on his skull, but it was partly healed. And then there’s the third party Julian mentioned, Orde Wingate; he seems to have no connection with the others at all.’

  ‘All I know about Wingate is that he was a gung-ho guerrilla — sort of poor man’s T.E. Lawrence of the Second World War. Restored Haile Selassie to his throne in Ethiopia, and led the Chindits in Burma. Offhand, though, I can’t think of any link between Wingate and Carnarvon, or Wingate and Tutankhamen.’

  I finished my whisky. Doc poured us both another. I took my pipe and pouch of tobacco from an inside pocket. I spent ten minutes cleaning it, filling it and lighting it, while Doc watched with approval. ‘Still puffing that dirty old thing,’ she said. ‘Always liked to watch a man smoke a pipe. So relaxing.’

  I filled my mouth with smoke and then blew it out in a ragged circle.

  ‘What else did Julian say?’ Doc asked.

  ‘Said he’d come across something important. Didn’t say what it was, but he did add something that struck me as wacky. Said he reckoned “they” — whoever “they” were — were after the “Akhnaton ushabtis”.’

  ‘What’s so wacky about that? I mean, ushabtis are common enough. Aren’t they statuettes meant to represent Osiris?’

  ‘In a way yes, but since Egyptian pharaohs were supposed to be incarnations of Osiris, the ushabtis were actually miniature effigies of the pharaoh in whose tomb they were placed. The idea was that if the pharaoh was dragooned into any menial task in the underworld - building the levee against the Nile flood, or shifting sand from east to west were the favourite ones — the ushabti would sweat it out on his behalf. There were more than four hundred of them in Tut’s tomb, all different, one for every day of the year, plus “supervisors”.’

  ‘How come there are no Akhnaton ushabtis then? I’d lay a fiver I’ve actually seen one.’

  ‘Akhnaton is the only major pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty whose mummy hasn’t yet turned up. He reigned for seventeen years and was probably Tut’s father or father-in-law, maybe both. They cut an official tomb for him at Amarna, but there was no trace of the mummy and no evidence his body had ever been there. Ushabtis were always placed in tombs; no Akhnaton tomb means no Akhnaton ushabtis.’

  ‘Unless they’re fakes.’

  ‘That’s one possibility. The other is that someone found Akhnaton’s tomb and isn’t telling.’

  ‘Unless we’re dealing with an instance of Julian’s periodical bullshit. I mean Julian was a wonderful man, darling. I l
oved him. But he used to come out with the most appalling shit occasionally.’

  ‘Julian had wild ideas. People took the piss, me and you included, but ninety per cent of the time he turned out to be right. However you look at it, Doc, you’ve got to admit there’s a bad smell about this.’

  ‘Steady on. You sound like you’re developing intuition in your old age. Isn’t that what you always took the piss out of Julian about?’

  ‘Maybe I’m just getting wiser.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. But one thing’s certain: Julian’s as dead as a bloody doornail. Chapter closed. Brilliant Egyptologist found dead by Great Pyramid. Fitting headline, don’t you think?’

  I looked up and saw tears welling down Doc’s face. ‘Sorry, darling,’ she said, ‘only I can’t help thinking about how they got Ronnie. Now Julian. They always seem to take the best, somehow.’

  6

  I went back to Shepheard’s Hotel on the Nile Corniche. I might have stayed at Doc’s; my old room was free, and Doc was willing, but for tonight, anyway, I wanted to be alone. I’d always chosen Shepheard’s when I was stuck for a room in Cairo, because it was where my father had stayed as a young officer in the Int. Corps during the war, and I always remembered the sepia-tinted photo of it in his album when I was a boy. It took me a long time to work out that his Shepheard’s and the one I stayed at were entirely different places. My room was on the first floor overlooking the Nile, and as I lay on the bed the night sounds of the city crawled in, the constant grating of gears, the clop of gharries, pedestrians shouting to one another. I tossed and turned restlessly. Sleep eluded me. When I closed my eyes I was overwhelmed by images of Julian’s dead face.