The Eye of Ra Page 5

  Finally, I got up, stepped out on to the balcony, and looked at the silent black slick of the Nile, illuminated by a mixture of moonlight and sodium light. A tourist gharry was parked beneath my balcony, its blinkered horse champing the barseem which the driver had spread across the pavement. The driver, dressed in a wide-sleeved Fellah’s gallabiyya, saw me looking: ‘You want ride, mister?’ he called out in English, ‘I take you nice ladies!’ I grinned. Cairenes were irrepressible, I thought. They had been conquered by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Mamluks, Turks, French, British, and God knew who else, but their spirit had remained, a deeply embedded subversiveness hidden under a show of conformity. They called their city ‘The Mother of the World’. In the dank, cold days in England I thought I’d never return to Egypt. Now I felt a sudden surge of gratitude to Julian, who had brought me back to the country of my birth, and bequeathed me a reason to remain.

  At sunrise I slipped out of the hotel and hired the gharry-man to take me to Khan al-Khalili, for a look at Julian’s flat. The Corniche was almost empty at that hour, the sun no more than a gleam of redness on a furl of cloud over the Eastern Desert. The gharry creaked through streets like chasms and rifts and valleys, a confusion of designs — romantic, art-deco, Islamic, Turkish, rococo and baroque. We clipped past tenements with rounded balconies and protruding dormer windows, past great urban chateaux blackened by generations of traffic-fumes, their walls a pattern of striations where the dark plaster had fallen away like dead skin to reveal yellowing plaster beneath. Soon we’d left the main thoroughfares behind and entered the sprawling maze of the Khan. It was the place where camel caravans from the Sahara had reached Cairo since medieval times, and still remained a world within itself, a world with its own laws, its own customs and its own traditions. Slowly the streets became narrower as if we were travelling up the tributaries of a great stream, and we were among the smell of shawarma grilling on charcoal, of roast fish, fresh horse-dung, apple-tobacco and mint-tea from honeycombs of tea-stalls. Here there were whole streets of workshops caked with oil and soot, from which came the fizz of welding torches and the desperate hammering of metals. There were entire alleys full of poultry, where thousands of chickens, ducks and turkeys squawked and gobbled inside wire cages. There were streets of sawyers where you heard the scuff of saws and smelt sandalwood and cedar, streets of goldsmiths, silversmiths, shoemakers, spice-merchants. We lurched along alleys that can’t have changed much since Turkish times, past moresco arches that seemed to open into hidden recesses, past the stone buttresses of ancient mosques, past gnarled doors and crumbling staircases. The alleys were already pullulating with people wearing thick gallabiyyas and woollen hats against the morning cool. I left the gharry and walked along The Muski, elbowing my way through the crowds. Someone shouted Taalak!’ in my ear, and I jumped to avoid a caravan of donkeys, their pack-saddles laden with sand, clicking past, driven by a sour-faced Fellah in a black gallabiyya who periodically whacked the last donkey on the bony rump with a knotted pole. There was a constant stream of bicycles weighed down with enormous loads of fresh fish, or fruit in plastic crates, creaking donkey-carts piled high with disks of bread. I saw one cyclist disappearing into the crowd with a vast tray of bread-loaves actually balanced on his head.

  Almost opposite the door of Julian’s house, a hunchback was selling cooked sweet potatoes from a mobile oven, a contraption of spouts and chimneys so grotesque that it might have been designed by a Surrealist. The man speared a potato with a toasting fork and held it up for my inspection, ‘Very fresh! Very nice!’ he grinned. I noticed that he had curly red hair beneath his pointed skullcap, green eyes and freckles — an unusual combination for an Egyptian. The peasants still believed that men with features like his were the descendants of medieval crusaders, and knew secrets of witchcraft and sorcery. I shook my head, stepped over to the gnarled wooden door and rang the bell. After a few minutes I heard the sound of heavy feet on stairs, and the scut of bolts being drawn. The door was opened by a middle-aged man with a pot belly, and arms like hams under a faded Arab shirt. I didn’t recognise him from my last visit to the place more than two years ago. The man looked at me with bulging eyes as he wiped greasy hands on his gallabiyya. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded.

  ‘I want to see Dr Cranwell’s flat.’

  ‘Dr Cranwell is dead. Found dead at the pyramids yesterday.’

  ‘I know. I was his friend. I’d like to look at his flat.’

  The ghaffir cocked his head slightly to one side and watched me closely as if he could scarcely believe the impertinence of the request. ‘What for?’ he enquired.

  ‘That’s my business.’

  ‘You won’t find anything, not papers or anything like that. The police were here yesterday — went over every corner of the place. They took away everything. “Evidence”, they said it was.’

  That was a surprise. Why were the police looking for ‘evidence’ when Hammoudi had insisted that Julian’s death was a simple heart attack?

  ‘Who was in charge?’ I asked.

  ‘Big detective from the Mukhabaraat, the Special Investigations Department. Tall man with a southern accent — might have been a Copt. He left strict instructions not to let anyone in.

  ‘It would be worth your while.’ I said, holding up a fifty Egyptian pound note.

  The doorman looked at the money hungrily, but shook his head. ‘It’s more than my life’s worth to go against the Mukhabaraat. I couldn’t do it, not even for fifty Egyptian pounds.’

  I took more notes out of my wallet. ‘Not even for seventy?’ I enquired.

  ‘Not even seventy. I’m an honest man. It wouldn’t be right — you might be a thief or something!’

  ‘Do I look like a thief? I was Dr Cranwell’s best friend.’

  ‘How do I know that? I can’t do it, by God; I’m an honest man.’

  ‘Not for eighty pounds?’

  ‘Absolutely not: what do you take me for?’

  ‘What about ninety?’

  ‘The very idea of it!’

  ‘Ninety-five?’

  ‘Make it a hundred.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘And don’t take anything away — more than my life’s worth if the police come back.’

  I closed the door and followed the ghaffir’s great haunches as he waddled upstairs. The flat opened off the landing; so did the doorman’s quarters, from the door of which came a miasma of oil fumes and the cabbagey odour of boilingfuul. The man produced a key, unlocked the flat door and held his fat hand out. I slapped five twenties into it. The ghaffir put the cash away quickly. ‘I’m telling you now,’ he said, ‘you won’t find anything. So it’s no good asking for the money back later.’

  I stepped inside and looked around the small study. It was exactly as I remembered it — a cosy, almost Victorian, parlour: open fireplace with a broad mantelpiece on which stood some mementoes: copies of ushabti figures of Ramses II and Amenhotep III, a miniature sphinx, a statuette of the cat goddess Bastet, together with Julian’s walnut rack of pipes and a jar of his favourite tobacco mixture — pipe smoking had been another hobby we’d shared. In the grate there was a brass coal-scuttle and poker-set, and a pair of velvet-upholstered chairs with claw-and-ball wooden legs stood by the hearth. There was a threadbare Persian carpet on the parquet floor, a carved mahogany drinks cabinet, containing half a dozen bottles of Scotch, Vodka and Brandy. An ancient T V stood on a low table near by, next to an old-fashioned black telephone and a set of directories. David Roberts’s 1830’s prints of Karnak and the Valley of the Kings decorated the wall, together with framed antique posters advertising Cook’s Nile Cruises. Along the lower part of the wall ran fitted shelves containing Julian’s collection of books on Egypt. There were editions by Wendorf and Schild on the Western Desert, by Breasted on history, and Howard Carter’s three-volume work The Tomb of Tutankhamen. I also noticed works on Akhnaton by Redford and Aldred, and Petrie’s 1894 report on Amarna. I knelt down to examine them, and came acro
ss a dozen more titles on Akhnaton, some of them with the label of a well-known second-hand bookshop stuck inside the cover. These works were recently acquired, I realised — a new direction for Julian; the Julian I’d known had shown very little interest in the 18th Dynasty.

  In the corner of the room stood a once-elegant Louis Quinze scroll-top writing desk which had been smashed open by the police and was now virtually empty, its shallow drawers gaping sadly. ‘Didn’t Dr Cranwell have a computer?’ I asked the ghaffir, who was standing at the door rattling the keys uncertainly in the pocket of his gallabiyya.

  ‘Police took it,’ he said.

  The kitchen was even less yielding than the study: crockery, pots and pans, a cupboard full of tinned food — Heinz Baked Beans, soup, tomato ketchup, a row of little bottles containing spices. A gas-ring and a cylinder, a blackened kettle, plastic jars of sugar, tea and dried milk. In the bedroom, there was a single pinewood bed, a bedside table, a cheap rug on a lino floor, a print of the pyramids. I opened the drawer of the bedside table; it was empty of anything but pens, pencils, a Chinese flashlight. No diary, no notes, not a single sheet of paper. I had a quick look round the tiny bathroom, and examined the built-in airing cupboard — sheets, blankets carefully folded. A small wardrobe in the passage contained safari shirts, pants, socks and tweed jackets, but no sign of any documents. ‘I told you,’ the doorman said, triumphantly. I returned to the sitting room, and picked up the telephone receiver: there was no dialling tone. I replaced it and pulled on the plaited nylon lead, following it carefully along the parquet to the wall junction, where it had been neatly severed with a knife. I glanced at the ghaffir, who was watching intently. ‘Did you know about this?’

  ‘Aiwa. I thought it was funny the phone didn’t ring, and I checked it and found it like that.’

  ‘How long has it been like this?’

  ‘Two or three days.’

  ‘Was it working last Tuesday...three days ago?’

  ‘I can’t be sure, it might have been. That would have been the day he got the visitors. He quite often had visitors, of course, and a lot of them were unsavoury — hyenas, they were: low-life characters, gangsters, criminals. Dr Cranwell seemed to like them, but he was mad as a hatter anyway. That night there were two of them. It was already dark when they came, and I was a bit annoyed because they let themselves in without knocking. God knows how they did it; Dr Cranwell must have given them a key. Anyway, I heard them shouting — really going at each other hammer and tongs. Only I couldn’t understand; it sounded foreign. Then they went quiet and they all left together. I looked out through the crack in my door and saw them from behind. The men were dressed in long black suits and big black hats — you know, like Hassidic Jews — but they weren’t Hassidics because they had no sidelocks. Their hats were pulled down, shadowing their faces, so I couldn’t make them out properly, but as they turned to go down the stairs I saw one of them in the light. It gave me quite a shock, I can tell you! I only saw him for a fraction of a second, mind, but his eyes looked yellow like a cat’s eyes, with slits, not pupils. A demon, by God! Set me shaking it did! I almost ran out after them, but I thought they might be Jinns and I was too scared. Dr Cranwell looked a bit shaken too, but he never shouted at me, so I guessed he wanted me to mind my own business. I never saw him again.’

  ‘Did you tell the police this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you any idea where Dr Cranwell went after he left here?’

  ‘God knows. He never told me his movements. Hadn’t been here in a week before that night. Only used this place when he was in Cairo, but most of the time he was out in the sticks. Always gallivanting off somewhere, and when he was here he was hardly ever sober. Mad as a rabid dog that man was.’

  I took a last glance around the room, and began to sniff audibly: ‘Have you left something cooking?’ I asked.

  ‘My God, the fuul!’ the ghaffir exclaimed, and he rushed out.

  I stepped over to the ruined Louis Quinze desk, knelt down, and felt carefully underneath for the catch which opened the secret compartment. ‘If there’s anything I want only you to find,’ Julian once told me, ‘I’ll leave it here.’ That must have been five years ago. It was a long shot, but it was worth a try.

  My finger found the catch, and the compartment slid down into my hand with a click. ‘Yes!’ I hissed to myself. The wooden drawer was nine inches deep, but it contained only a packet of ten computer diskettes and fresh photocopies of two newspaper cuttings, neatly folded. I put the diskettes in the pocket of my jacket and glanced quickly at the two photocopies. One consisted of a very old newspaper photograph and the other of a page from a more recent article. The photograph showed two mustachioed men in dark suits. One of them, wearing a shapeless slouch-hat, was smoking rakishly and pointing to a grey blur which seemed to be the front page of a newspaper. The other man, hatless and wearing a black bow-tie, was looking on ruefully. In the back-ground, holding the newspaper, it appeared, was a third figure, whose features were indistinct. Very close to the figures, someone had drawn the ancient-Egyptian hieroglyph for the ibis-headed god, Thoth. The faces of the two men in focus were vaguely familiar, and I unfolded the caption which had been tucked underneath: ‘Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon,’ it read. ‘Valley of the Kings. February 16th, 1923.’ I turned it over and on the back, written in Julian’s spidery handwriting, was the name ‘Nikolai Kolpos — Dealer in Antiquities’, and the address of a shop in Khan al-Khalili. The second photocopy consisted of a page torn from the Herald Tribune dated December 1981 — almost sixty years after the first — a piece about the Space Shuttle Columbia’s 1981 flight, entitled ‘Trouble with SIRA’ by a well-known American science journalist. Another Thoth hieroglyph had been carefully drawn against the headline.

  There were footsteps outside. I stuffed the copies hastily into my jacket and pushed the compartment closed, just as the doorman appeared. ‘I was having a last look at the cabinet,’ I said. ‘You were right, there’s nothing here.’

  The hunchback was still at his sweet-potato machine when I closed the door. As soon as I saw him, he waggled his forked sweet potato at me, and beckoned me with his left hand. ‘Had trouble with Abu Kirsh?’ he rasped. I chuckled; ‘Abu Kirsh’ meant ‘Father of the Belly’, and it was the perfect nickname for Julian’s watchman. The hunchback beckoned me closer, and as I leaned towards him, I smelled cooked sweet potato and garlic breath.

  ‘He isn’t dead, you know,’ the hunchback whispered.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘The Englishman! I saw him yesterday. They said he was dead, but I saw him come back here yesterday night, and let himself in, God strike me down dead if I lie! His face was white as a sheet, and you should have seen the look on his face. You’d think he’d bumped into Satan himself!’ The man nodded sagely and his eyes burned into me for a second before he looked away, waving his fragrant sweet potato under the nose of the next customer.

  7

  A bold of light shot through Doc’s dining room window, illuminating the two photocopies unfolded on the green baize cloth of her large oak table. ‘Ah, the god Thoth,’ Doc said, leaning over the two texts with a map-lens, ‘An old amico of mine, aka Tehuti, I believe. He was one of the oldest of the ancient Egyptian gods, usually depicted as a man with the head of an ibis, though sometimes as an ape. They called him “The Measurer of Time”, and it was Thoth who was supposed to have invented numbers and introduced science, calculation, astronomy, magic, medicine, music and writing to ancient Egyptian civilisation. He was also supposed to be the one who recorded the moral weight of the deceased’s heart after death. How did I do, darling?’

  ‘Full marks!’ I said.

  ‘The first question,’ Doc said, ‘is: why should Julian have drawn the hieroglyph for Thoth on the cuttings?’

  ‘That’s got to be a message to me,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t write my name on them in case they were found, but he knew Thoth was one of the central figures in my thesis on the
origin of Egyptian civilisation, and writing the Thoth hieroglyph on them was just like saying “Hey, Ross, look at this!”’

  Doc examined the picture gravely with her lens. ‘Have you noticed their faces?’ she said. Tarnarvon seems pleased: he’s looking directly at the camera, smirking like the cat who got the cream. Carter seems annoyed, as if Carnarvon were doing something he disagreed with. There seems to be a third figure in the background — the one holding the newspaper — but you can’t make out if it’s a man or a woman.’

  ‘I’d give my right arm to read that headline.’

  ‘Ask and it shall be given, oh my liege. These days there exist such miracles as computer-enhanced imaging.’

  ‘Is it that good?’

  ‘I can’t promise anything. I mean, this is a photocopy and I’ll bet even the original wasn’t exactly razor sharp. It’ll take time, though. My computer’s out of the ark, I don’t have scanning facilities, but I can get it done.’

  ‘Did you have a glance at those diskettes?’

  ‘I’ve had a quick butcher’s. Full of all sorts of wondrous fare.’

  ‘What about the name Nikolai Kolpos?’

  ‘I’ve met Kolpos — plump little Greek fellow with a bald head and hair like a tonsure; he looks like a Trappist monk. He owns a shop in the bazaar, “Osiris Emporium” or some such dull name; you know, the type that sells stone models of the pyramids and copies of statues of Ramses II. I’d call him a third-rate dealer in bric-a-brac.’

  ‘Was he a friend of Julian’s?’

  ‘Yes. For some reason they were thick as thieves. I don’t know why. Kolpos isn’t on Julian’s wavelength in any shape or form. In fact a little bird told me that our Mr Kolpos is not altogether squeaky clean in all his dealings.’