Firebird Page 8

  ‘It’s relevant after all — Ibram was a member of the Giza Millennium Committee.’

  Daisy grunted. She and I had worked together well with Fawzi — fallen into the good-cop-bad-cop routine without even exchanging a word. But now she was wondering how far could you really trust an ex-street kid — especially one who still carried a razor sharp stiletto up his sleeve.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘I’ll chance it.’

  ‘Good. Ten o’clock, at the Great Pyramid. I’ll wait for you there.’

  The boulevard to the city centre was a stream of headlights and streetlights like strings of pearls stretching into the night. As Daisy pulled out of the arched gate of the hotel, I saw a woman in dark Bedouin robes standing in the orange glow of a streetlamp. She was unusually tall and wore a slitted vampire-like mask whose pattern was somehow familiar. ‘Stop!’ I yelled at Daisy. She looked around in alarm and stepped hard on the brakes. I wound the window down, but was just in time to see the robed figure melting away into the deepest shadows. ‘Did you see that?’ I asked.

  ‘See what?’ Daisy said.

  9

  The Giza Plateau was almost as deserted as it had been the previous day. Standing on the western side of the promontory overlooking the desert, I noticed a roil of dust on the western horizon that could only be an approaching sandstorm — the one the experts had predicted would strike tomorrow. Like I said, I’ve never had much time for experts — I’d told Hammoudi it’d be here today, and here it was, right on cue. It would hit Giza in about ninety minutes, I calculated, and I didn’t want to be on the plateau when it did.

  As I waited for Daisy I walked around the base of the Great Pyramid, scenting the familiar chalk and flint smell of the desert, with that trace of fire ash that heralded the simoom. I passed the old museum rest house — a half derelict building in red sandstone standing at the eastern corner of the Great Pyramid — and saw that a boom style crane sprouted from its yard. I watched the crane operator climbing up the steel ladder to his cab as deftly as a gecko. He seemed to know his job, but all the same I wouldn’t have envied him up there when the storm broke. I wondered what a crane was doing in the rest house yard anyway. Actually, the place hadn’t been a rest house or a museum in years — it was a base and guard post for the Tourism and Antiquities Police. Today, besides the crane, there seemed to be a lot of activity there — minivans, cars, squads of policemen coming and going through the broken down gates. I leaned on the railings of one of the excavated boat pits nearby to watch what was going on and suddenly realized that the police squads weren’t police at all. They wore black uniforms like the police all right, but they were much smarter than the ordinary blackjackets, and in place of black berets with scarlet stripes, wore the royal blue berets of the Guwat az-Zaiqa — the Lightning Force — Egypt’s elite army commandos.

  I watched the dust haze gathering on the horizon, and breathed in the bittersweet desert scents. I narrowed my eyes and let my memories unwind for a moment. Out there I could see only sand, but inside I saw figures on the landscape — figures that were tiny pools of dark, like scarab beetles, at home in the bigness. There were other smells — camels, woodsmoke, uncured hide, and sour milk, oiled leatherwork, jerked meat. I felt a longing so intense that it almost doubled me over, and I saw a younger me out there, in a jibba and head cloth, dyed the colour of the desert, struggling across dunes and drum sand with a caravan of camels on our way to find grazing at the Jilf. There were four boys with me, all younger than I was, and if we’d been more experienced we’d have known a big ghibli was on its way. I remembered how we’d looked at each other when the earth started to shake like Set was beating on it with a hammer, and Ali had whispered, ‘Raul’s Drum.’

  It had come with terrifying speed, running at us like some giant invisible creature in vortices of dust thousands of feet high, creasing into us like a shockwave and almost bowling the animals over. We’d jumped off their backs and couched them, squatting in their lee with our head cloths over our faces. I knew we couldn’t go on doing that — ghiblis could blow for days, even weeks, and if we tried to stay where we were we’d be parchment within forty eight hours. I don’t know how I found the nerve, but I forced myself back in the saddle and turned my camel into the eye of the storm. ‘Come on!’ I said. ‘Get back on your camels! Let’s go!’ I still don’t know exactly what happened. It seemed like a barrier burst in my mind, spilling out all kinds of things I didn’t know were there. It was like rays of sunlight bursting through a gap in dark cloud. Somehow I had a map in my head, or rather part of me was in a place where tracks from the past, tracks into the future, merged into one. For two days and two nights we trekked through a terrifying wasteland of noise, where demons ripped at our senses, where visibility varied only from black to grey. But always there was a brilliant light on the edge of my inner vision, a beacon whose strength never faltered. When we arrived in the camp, so dehydrated we couldn’t speak, the Old Man hadn’t even seemed surprised about what I’d done. I always suspected afterwards that he’d set it up as a test — sent me and the boys out into the khala, knowing a ghibli was on the way. Still, after that I was always known among the tribe as Nawayr — ‘The Little Light’.

  ‘Hey!’ Daisy’s voice shouted in my ear. ‘Anybody there?’ I blinked rapidly to dispel the memory, and saw her standing in front of me. Today she wore dark glasses, a loose fitting red and blue cotton kaftan and jeans. Her braided hair had been coiled up and pinned under an elegant panama hat, and she wore flat, thick soled shoes. She swung her Gucci handbag easily from her left shoulder, with the flap unfastened. ‘Okaaay!’ she said, whipping off her glasses and craning her neck at the Great Pyramid, whose peak towered more than four hundred feet above us. I wasn’t looking at the pyramid, though, but at something that struck me then as far more wonderful — Daisy’s profile. The slim hips and neatly curved breasts looked perfect, and I had to clench my teeth to control a waft of desire that ran through me like a tsunami. ‘I’ve seen pictures of this thing so many times,’ Daisy said. ‘I thought it could never live up to them, but I was wrong. Now that is really something!’

  And she was really something else, I thought. You can look at a woman, even find her attractive, but it takes a little time before it sinks in that she’s just about the most beautiful creature you’ve ever seen. I smiled back at her, yearning for her, knowing there was no chance. Upper crust girls like Daisy didn’t go for ex-street kids like me. She was the sort of woman that as an urchin in Aswan I’d always dreamed of having, but knew I never could. She was about as high above me as the Great Pyramid itself. ‘You know there are more than 2.3 million blocks of stone in that heap?’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘Each one of them weighing about two tons or more. Some weigh as much as eighty tons.’

  ‘That’s incredible.’

  ‘You’ve got it. The whole thing’s unbelievably accurate, too. The length of the base is 756 feet but the maximum difference in length among the four sides is only one and three quarter inches. It’s almost completely level — less than a one inch variation in the whole base. That’s more accurate than most modern buildings — the kind of precision that even today you only find in machine shops. In the past it was a whole lot more impressive than it is now, because it was encased in brilliant white limestone that was stripped off later, and the whole place was surrounded by a twenty five foot wall. There was only one way of getting inside the compound — through a temple that’s disappeared.’

  ‘What about the apex?’ Daisy asked, craning back again and shading her eyes. ‘It looks kind of flat to me.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s a mystery,’ I said, ‘there obviously was a capstone there, but it’s gone AWOL. No one knows what happened to it. They reckon it might have been covered in gold.’

  ‘Wow! And to think the Pharaoh Khufu built this thing just as a tombstone! Now that’s what you call megalomania!’

  ‘Who said Khufu built it?’ I asked. ‘And who says it was a tombstone?’

&
nbsp; ‘Come on — it’s well known.’

  ‘It’s what the experts say, sure,’ I grunted. ‘But personally I’ve never had a lot of time for experts. They make out they’re dealing in truth, but actually they’re dealing in theories. Somebody once told me that the pyramids are actually older than they say, and when you think of it, if the Pharaoh Khufu did throw up this pile of rocks, why doesn’t he or anyone else ever mention the fact? I mean, tombstones are supposed to have names on them, aren’t they? These ancient Gyp bigshots weren’t known for being backward at coming forwards, and believe me they usually laid it on with a trowel. But this guy’s name isn’t mentioned anywhere on the pyramid, inside or out. In fact, there isn’t a single piece of sound evidence that links Khufu with it.’

  ‘Isn’t the Sphinx supposed to have the face of Khufu’s son, Khafre?’

  ‘Tell you what, you look at the Sphinx’s face and then swear to me you can make positive ID of anybody at all. A couple of years back a New York Police Department artist who was an expert at doing facial reconstructions did a job on the Sphinx comparing the face to a statue known to be Khafre. His conclusion was that there was no resemblance at all.’

  ‘OK, Mister Smart Aleck, if Khufu didn’t build the Great Pyramid, who did?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I just have this feeling that it’s older than they say and that it couldn’t have been a tomb. The ancient Egyptians built tombs to a pattern, and it doesn’t fit. It’s an oopart.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An oopart — “out of place artefact” — what they used to call an anachronism.’

  ‘Hey, look, what difference does it make, anyway? I mean what’s so all fired important whether this thing is a tomb or not?’

  ‘Flip the question round the other way. Why is the establishment so goddamn insistent that it was a tomb, and that it was built by Khufu? Why do they assert that they know all the answers, when there isn’t one real shred of evidence to support their case?’

  ‘Where did you get all this stuff from, Sammy? I don’t believe they taught you this on any antiquities police course.’

  She was watching me speculatively now, and I knew I had to make some sort of response, no matter how lame. ‘Like I said, somebody I once knew told me that there’s a lot more to ancient Egyptian history than the so called experts want to believe.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Just somebody I knew and respected. Why? Can’t a cop have views different from the establishment?’

  ‘Cops exist to support the status quo. I just can’t work out why a guy like you is a cop.’

  ‘What about you? Oh, I forgot. Duty to the Star Spangled Banner wasn’t it?’

  We walked around to the southern side of the pyramid, from where we could see the second and third pyramids bathed in light, and beyond them the desert, flowing on and on until it merged with a smoky horizon. Daisy gazed around, her blue eyes shining, entranced. ‘Can we go inside?’ she asked.

  ‘Why not? Wouldn’t be much fun if we didn’t.’

  We walked along the base of the pyramid, our hands skimming the great hewn stones that were visibly warped by time. A muffled woman sitting in the lee of one massive block offered us bottles of cola from a steel bucket. There was a sudden buffet of wind, which sent a flurry of wrappers, crushed cardboard packets and flimsy plastic bags across our vision, and a waft of unexpected cold. Daisy shivered.

  ‘Sandstorm coming,’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t be here for an hour or so, though, and we’ll be long gone.’

  ‘How does a street rat like you get to be an expert on sandstorms?’ Daisy asked, holding her head to one side in mock suspicion.

  ‘I’m not an expert,’ I said, ‘I just have intuition.’

  I pointed to the broken aperture, about twenty feet up the pyramid’s wall, where a lone black jacket stood on guard with an automatic slung round his neck. Thirty feet higher there was an even larger orifice through which giant corbelled blocks could be seen. ‘The higher one’s the main entrance,’ I said. ‘There probably always was a door there, right back to when the place was built, but when the Arabs tried to smash their way into the place in the ninth century they missed it, which suggests it was invisible to the outside. The lower, smaller entrance is the place they forced their way in. They only found the real door later when they stumbled on the passage that led away from it. Now, why would a tomb need a door? The ancient Gyps sealed their tombs for eternity, but a door suggests they wanted to mosey in and out. Why not just block it up for good?’

  ‘But wasn’t there a sarcophagus inside?’

  ‘They found a thing that looked like a sarcophagus, sure, but there was nothing in it. It was just a big stone box — in a different context, it could have been anything.’

  We climbed the twisting concrete steps that led us up the side of the pyramid to the platform where the guard waited. Close up, though, I saw that he wasn’t an ordinary policeman, but another trooper of the Lightning Force — smartly turned out in black jacket and royal blue beret. He wore skiing glasses over a sharp moustache and carried a Heckler and Koch rifle that looked new. ‘You can’t go in,’ he said as we passed the top step, ‘It’s closed.’

  I drew out my ID . ‘Lieutenant Rashid,’ I said, ‘SID .’

  The trooper weighed up my jeans and sweatshirt and frowned blankly. He paused, then gave me a brisk salute. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘my orders are that no one’s to go in, not even SID . The place is completely out of bounds.’

  ‘What are you Blue Berets doing on the job? This is Antiquities Police turf.’

  ‘Special assignment duty,’ the trooper growled.

  ‘What the hell is going on in there?’ Daisy demanded.

  ‘Renovations,’ the Blue Beret replied, ‘for the millennium celebrations. They’re trying to clean it out a bit, improve the air supply, that kind of thing. There’s going to be a big knees-up here. They tell me they’re even going to put a new capstone on the thing — a golden one — and it’s going to be lowered by helicopter.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, ‘I read about this. It’s caused a lot of controversy. Last month a member of the President’s Advisory Council called Sekina Fuad declared they shouldn’t be messing around with antiquities.’

  The Blue Beret shrugged, shifted his feet and tapped the stock of his rifle impatiently. ‘It’s closed,’ he said again. Seeing we would get nowhere, we turned and walked down the stairs.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I should have remembered about this.’

  ‘Just my luck,’ Daisy said, ‘it’s not the same without seeing the King’s Chamber and all those things you read about.’

  ‘Bloody millennium celebrations,’ I said.

  ‘Well so much for the vacation. Have you been in touch with the Great Hammoudi this morning?’

  ‘Yeah, I talked to him. He was livid about Van Helsing sequestering evidence, but a bit mollified that we got the briefcase. I passed the map and the report over to him for safekeeping.’

  ‘What else did he have to say?’

  ‘Records drew a blank on Monod and Firebird too, but there’s a small lead on the Sanusi amulet. He traced a member of the Sanusi family in Cairo — name of Doctor Sid’Ahmad as-Sanusi, a direct descendant of the Brotherhood’s founder. Address in Khan al-Khalili.’

  ‘Near the crime scene, then. Interesting.’

  ‘Well, maybe. But Hammoudi says Sid’Ahmad’s completely legit — no record of contacts with the Militants. In fact, he’s a highly respected and quite well known Egyptologist. Hammoudi just thought he might be able to give us some background on the origin of the amulet.’

  ‘OK, let’s go talk to him.’

  As we moved back along the base of the pyramid I sniffed the air. ‘It’s coming,’ I said, ‘and when it hits it’s going to be a Mother.’

  ‘That’s all we needed.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  As we walked past the old museum rest house, I glanced up to see the crane operator in
his box high above us. The boom was already swaying in the breeze and its lifting arm swinging slightly, its machinery clanking as it drew up its tackle. A broken wall encircled the museum building, and two mean looking Blue Berets wearing dark shades were on guard at the open gate. As we passed, I glimpsed activity in the yard — dozens of Blue Berets and some civilians in flint grey overalls talking excitedly and milling round a big wooden crate. Curious, I halted to watch as the crane’s boom swung overhead in a 180 degree arc, stopped, and began to lower its tackle. Just then, the Lightning Force goons at the gate advanced towards us menacingly, shouting ‘Move on, there!’ A second before I shifted, I caught a fleeting glimpse of one of the overall clad civilians in the yard as the man turned sideways to watch the descending gear. For a split moment I could have sworn I was looking at the half simian profile of Jan Van Helsing.

  10

  The storm chased us all the way down the Pyramids Road to the Nile, and by the time we were crossing the bridge the sky had turned an angry ochre red and currents of sand were streaking down the centre of the carriageway. Khan al-Khalili was protected against the storm by the massed buildings in the city centre, but the light was as dim as dusk, and the alleys were full of long shadows that seemed distorted and unnatural. To get to the address Hammoudi had given us we had to pass through tunnels clogged with rubble and effluent old newspapers, flimsy supermarket bags that rustled like trapped birds, flattened milk cartons, empty cigarette packs. The buildings seemed to have been created in one continuous organic mass, and a lot of them were lopsided, leaning on each other like invalids. Liquid ran in trickles down the teetering masonry, forming sordid pools in the dirt. Flea bitten cats darted about underfoot, beggars lurched from doorway to doorway, and streetwalkers congregated under the saracenic arches, leaning languidly in the half light, puffing water pipes spiked with hash. From the outside it was impossible to tell how big Sanusi’s house was. There were no windows at eye level, only small iron grates placed too high for anyone to see through without a ladder. Above them I glimpsed a bunch of upper floors with projecting balconies supported by quarried blocks. The door looked as though it had been made to resist a siege. It was heavy teak, weathered almost colourless, perforated by huge brass studs and decorated by a symmetrical flower design with the words Al-Khalig, al-Baaq — ‘The Creator, the Everlasting’ — carved inside. There was a huge iron lock and a rusty knocker, which to my surprise seemed to be an effigy of a huge serpent — an odd contrast to the Islamic inscription. I tried the knocker and found it jammed so I rapped on the coarse wood with my knuckles. A moment later it creaked open to reveal a tall, almost cadaverous figure in a long grey gallabiyya, whose gaunt face was lit up weirdly from below by the beams of an oil—lamp hanging from his long fingers. His unkempt beard reached almost to his chest, but failed to cover an Adam’s apple almost the size of a marabou stork’s pouch. His bushy eyebrows were knitted together over piercing eyes — encased in half moon glasses — and a hooked kedge of nose, which gave him the look of an ayatollah after a bad day’s haranguing.