Pierce frowned: “Who left it open?”
“Maybe Grover,” Conway said.
“Didn’t stir all night,” Lord Grover said, coming up in his pyjamas. He looked at the snakes. “Nasty buggers, I must say.”
“What about Barnaby?” Pierce asked.
“He was with me,” Conway said. “He slept like a log. In fact, I got up to make myself a drink because I couldn’t sleep. He snores.”
“Then who left the tent open?”
The question hung in the air. They all shook their heads.
The German girl with Lord Grover came running up in her nightgown. She took one look at the cobras and fainted on the spot, never uttering a word.
“And how is the Mr. Nikos?” Iskander asked.
“Well, thank you,” Barnaby said.
“I see him?”
“He is working now. Up in the tombs.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
Hamid Iskander had arrived at noon in the black Land Rover. As usual, he displayed his own peculiar variety of polite suspicion. Barnaby had tried to divert him, showing him the two dead cobras.
“They did not taste you?” Iskander asked, his face grave.
“No.”
“Very nice.”
He hesitated then, and seemed embarrassed. Finally, he said, “I will take.”
“The cobras?” Barnaby was surprised.
“Yes please.”
“Be my guest. But why do you want them?” Again, Iskander hesitated. “Some peoples will like them.”
“But who?”
“In the bazaar.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They are…some things.”
Curiosity overcame Barnaby. Although he knew Iskander was proud of his English, he said, “Explain in Arabic.”
Iskander, looking both hurt and relieved, explained that apothecaries ground up certain parts of the cobra, particularly the fangs and the eyes, and sold them. They supposedly cured infertility and impotence.
“Makes you strong,” he said, indicating graphically. “You can last all night, and all day, and all night. Ten women, twenty women, it does not matter.”
“Remarkable.”
Hamid Iskander now looked rather embarrassed. “Mafeesh keteer fuloos,” he explained. He did not have much money.
“You cannot pay,” Barnaby said, bowing slightly. “It is our gift to you.”
“Mutta shakker.”
“It is our pleasure.”
“My humble thanks.”
Barnaby had thought that the gift of cobras would put Iskander off his guard, but he was wrong. The Arab made a complete inspection of the camp and noticed that Nikos was not there.
“He comes back soon, for the lunch?”
“Probably,” Barnaby said.
“Yes.”
At that moment, Lisa came up and dutifully extended her hand for his sloppy kiss.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Are you very beautiful on today?”
Lisa looked startled. “Yes.”
“Yes. Thank you. I too am pleased.”
He stood smiling, hopping back and forth, doing a private nervous dance. “It is to see you so well again.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes?”
Oh my God, Lisa thought.
The most remarkable thing about the countryside was its monotony. It never changed. Each village was like the last; each water wheel, driven by a patient buffalo, was like every other. The colors, the dusty brown and green and pale reds of the cliffs, never changed. And the sunlight was overpowering.
Nikos kept a hood over his head and tried to sit in the shadow of the sail. The sun was merciless. He had passed Komombo at midday, a silent town, the people huddled away from the heat. There were few boats on the river at this time of day; heat shimmered up from the surface of the water, distorting the image of the single white sail farther downstream.
For him, this was a dangerous time. The Nile shifted its course almost daily. The only way to avoid sandbars was to follow the local traffic, which knew where the water was shallow. Now, virtually alone on the river, with nobody to go forward and check depths with a dipstick, he felt vulnerable. Often, he felt the boat scrape bottom, but thus far, he had never run aground. He was very lucky.
Earlier in the day, along the water’s edge, he saw women in black coming down to draw water and carry it back in balanced jugs to their villages. Skinny donkeys, ribs protruding, also carried jugs. They were driven by shouting young boys. An occasional camel was brought to the shore to drink.
But now, everybody was home, resting, waiting for the sun to begin to drop.
He listened as the bow rippled through the water.
In another day, he would arrive in Luxor. He reached into his pocket and felt the small blue square he would pin to the sail and raise when he came within sight of the Theban hills. That way, people in the camp would know he had made the trip safely.
A very Greek signal, he thought.
“Hey,” Pierce said. “Watch your hands.”
Lisa was looking through the Polaroid pictures they had taken of the tomb. Several rolls had been shot, in color and black-and-white.
“Why?”
“You shouldn’t touch those without gloves.”
“Oh.”
He took a cloth and wiped the prints she had handled. “Hate to see you in jail,” he said.
“Why Robert that’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me all day.”
She was smiling. He kissed her nose. “Nice nose,” he said. “Nice eyes, nice mouth.”
Giggling: “Robert.”
He stepped back and reached into his pocket. “Okay, I’ll buy you. Good teeth? Let’s see.”
She opened her mouth but shut it quickly, teasing him.
“Not bad. Good housekeeper, strong. How much do you cost?”
“I’m very reasonable.”
“Oh, I know that. But how much do you cost?”
“Ten million dollars.”
He frowned. His share of the money. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about that.”
“All right, let’s not. When is Nikos coming?”
“Probably tomorrow, if all goes well.”
Iskander left that afternoon, dragging his cobras after him. They worked hard in the tomb during the night. The chests of jewels and solid gold artifacts were packed carefully in cardboard boxes and loaded into the Land Rover. They chose well. “Probably five million dollars of stuff right here,” Pierce said.
“More,” Barnaby said. “Much, much more.”
Pierce was irritated. “Sorry you decided to get involved?”
“No,” Barnaby said, “of course not. It’s just—”
“You can think about your reluctance,” Pierce said, “when you’re sitting by the pool of your new home, in the mountains somewhere, in some country, surrounded by adoring women. You can think it all over then. You’ll have time, because you’ll be rich.”
“All right,” Barnaby said.
Pierce picked up a gilt wood cane. The handle was carved in the shape of a man, an Assyrian, to judge from the features and the squared-off beard. He looked at it and tried to imagine the power of the king, the strength of his armies, the wealth of his treasures—the tomb could only be a sample.
He held the cane in his hand and leaned on it. After three hundred centuries, it held firmly.
And then, abruptly, it snapped.
11. Return to Cairo
A PERFECT NIGHT, DEAD silence under a pale quarter moon. With headlights doused, the Land Rover rumbled up to the muddy shore and ground to a halt. They got out and heard the water lapping quietly.
Nikos had beached the boat earlier in the evening. He was waiting for them now, smoking. Pierce got out and gave him a sandwich.
“Lisa thought you might want this,” he said.
“She was right,” he said, biting into it.
“I thought you might want this,” Lor
d Grover said, passing him a bottle of brandy.
“God!” He gulped noisily, then set the bottle aside. “Metaxa! Where did you find it?”
“Athens. I picked it up on my way back.”
Nikos drank again.
“How was your trip?” Pierce asked.
“Dull.”
“Trouble finding a boat?”
Nikos thought of the boy, and the scarab. He shrugged. “No.”
“Good. We’d better load up now, before somebody sees us.”
There were seven large cardboard boxes, all heavy. It took them nearly half an hour to load them into the felucca, which creaked and groaned with each new weight. Pierce threw a ragged blanket over the lot and stood back from the shore.
“I guess that’s it. Take it easy out there—those boxes are worth a lot of money.”
Nikos nodded and passed the brandy back to Grover.
“Keep it. You’ll need it.”
Nikos waved: “See you in Cairo.”
“Look,” Grover said, “do you want a gun?”
“No. What would I do with it?”
“Shoot somebody,” Grover said.
“Blood depresses me.”
“How long to Cairo?” Pierce asked.
“Ten days, perhaps twelve.”
“You remember the plan?”
“I remember.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
They pushed the boat off the shore and watched as the sail was hoisted, a dead gray in the moonlight. Nikos waved a final time.
They returned to the Land Rover.
For Nikos, the days passed with quiet uniformity. Nothing happened, nothing changed. His felucca drifted gently down the river, past the large towns of Qus and Qena and the smaller villages, Khuzam, Shanhur, Danfiq, Abnud. He passed the desert, which began abruptly where the vegetation ended, and he passed the chanting workers in the fields. The harvest of sugarcane, cotton, barley, and wheat had begun, in anticipation of the June flooding. It was a time of intense activity, though he hardly noticed it. The landscape seemed to absorb the petty efforts of men without difficulty.
Farther downstream, river traffic increased. The boats were larger and broader of beam; the sailors called them naggars. Loaded down until the gunwales were mere inches above the water, they frequently ran aground, an event accompanied by wild arguments on board and much shouting.
At night, Nikos always stopped. He wanted to remain fresh for his sailing in the day; it would never do to sink with all the treasure aboard. As the sun went down, he would watch the sailors, agile as apes, climb their masts and furl the sails in the twilight.
When he went to sleep, he propped his feet up on the boxes of gold. It gave him a good feeling. He forgot the scarab.
In camp, the five days preceding their return to Cairo were quiet ones. They spent their time packing and talking; Barnaby regaled them with stories of the pharaohs, anecdotes of love and war, honesty and greed. His supply seemed endless, his memory infallible.
“You know,” he said one night, “there were graverobbers in antiquity, and they were caught.”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Conway said.
“It’s actually very interesting.”
“Were they hung?”
“No.”
“Drawn and quartered?”
“No.”
“Drowned? Burned at the stake?”
“No.”
“Did they get away?”
“Yes, apparently.”
“Tell me the whole story.”
“Well,” Barnaby said, “there was a man named Peser, the mayor of Eastern Thebes, who lived during the 20th Dynasty, during the reign of Ramses IX. He had a rival, Pewero, and he discovered that Pewero had been robbing tombs—ten royal tombs, to be exact. So Peser reported this to the governor of the region, and the governor sent a formal investigating committee across the river to the necropolis to look into the charges.
“It seems, however, that the committee was rigged. They decided that only one tomb had been robbed, not ten; a special protest demonstration against Peser’s unfounded allegations was arranged. Pewero got off scot-free. Some think the governor himself had been getting a cut of the plunder.”
“Sounds modern,” Conway said. “Maybe there’s hope for us yet.”
“But that’s not the end. Peser was so angry that he threatened to go directly to Ramses with his complaint. The governor got very upset at this—it was a breach of normal bureaucratic channels—and so he put Peser on trial. He was convicted of perjury, poor fellow.”
“More and more modern,” Conway said.
“Of course, not all tomb-robbers got away with it. A few years later, eight fellows were hauled up for stripping the mummies of a pharaoh and his wife.”
“And what happened to them?” Pierce asked.
“They were poor men, you see,” Barnaby said. “A stonecutter, a slave, a peasant, a water-carrier.”
“No influence, you mean,” Conway said.
“Afraid so.”
“Heads rolled?”
“Heads rolled.”
Conway turned to Pierce: “How much influence have we got?”
“Not enough.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say. Always a kind and cheerful word.”
“Tell me,” Pierce said, “how were these tomb-robbers caught?”
Barnaby smiled.
“We don’t know that. The story doesn’t say.”
The night before they went to Cairo, they visited the tomb a final time. Barnaby chose an object suitable for the museum officials—a mirror with a solid gold handle inscribed with the name of the king, Meketenre.
As they were leaving the tomb, Conway stopped in the outermost chamber.
“Just a minute.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Uh, give me the crowbar, will you?”
“What for?” Pierce asked.
“Just give it to me, will you?”
Pierce handed it to him. Conway quickly pried up the trapdoor and looked down at the jumbled bodies of slaves in the chamber beneath.
“What’re you doing?”
“I’m saying good-bye, that’s what. Anything wrong with that?”
Pierce could not tell, for once, whether he was joking or not.
A moment later, Conway jumped down into the room. He walked around the shriveled corpses.
“Do you suppose they believed in all this?” he asked, glancing up at Barnaby. “This whole religious bit?”
“Probably,” Barnaby said. “Some of the tomb-builders were very dedicated.”
“I hope so.” He looked at the bodies. “I hope you fellas were dedicated. If you were, it’s okay. You’re entitled to your beliefs. Maybe you thought you were doing a good thing out here, right?” He smiled. “And maybe you didn’t.”
He bent over and picked up the skull of a body that had completely decomposed, except for the skeleton. “Pardon me,” he said, lifting the skull free of the backbone.
“Now you see, that didn’t hurt a bit.”
He looked up at Pierce and held the skull up in his hand. The sockets were hollow, the nose a black opening, the toothy jaw leering.
“You want to know about the last tomb?” he asked Pierce. “I’ll tell you.”
He tapped the white cranium.
“That’s the last tomb, man. Right there, and you’re buried there all your life. You can’t ever escape it.”
There was silence in the room above. Barnaby and Pierce looked at each other uncomfortably.
Finally Barnaby laughed. “What’s he talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Pierce said.
It was late when they returned to the camp. They decided to have a nightcap and walked over to the supply tent.
As they approached it, a figure darted out and ran across the desert in the moonlight. They could see his flapping robes.
“Hey!”
Conway took
off after him.
“The pictures,” Pierce said. “The pictures of the tomb are in the supply tent.”
He was thinking furiously. If the man had seen the pictures, he would have to be killed. There was no other way.
Conway caught up to him and tackled him.
Pierce went into the supply tent and looked at the small strongbox they used for storage and for the pictures. It had not been tampered with—at least, it did not appear so.
He looked quickly around. Nothing else seemed disturbed. The liquor was all there.
He went back outside. Conway was leading him back. In the dark, they saw that he was an Arab, a thin man with a large moustache, gangly, quaking with fear. His eyes were wide, pleading.
“Here’s the boy,” Conway said. “I didn’t have any trouble catching up with him, because he was all burdened down with this.” He threw two objects down onto the sand.
“What are they?”
“Have a look,” Conway said.
Pierce looked: two cans of soup.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all,” Conway said.
“Christ.”
Pierce looked at Barnaby. “Talk to him. Tell him he’d better explain himself, or he’ll be floating facedown in the Nile tomorrow morning. Scare the hell out of him.”
Barnaby spoke rapidly in Arabic. The man said nothing. His tongue hung out, like a dog. Barnaby spoke sharply, and the man replied haltingly.
“He is from a village to the north, toward Quamula. He says he has heard it is easy to steal food here. Several others have done it, at night. He says he has never been here.”
“If we were feeding the region, we’d have noticed it,” Pierce said. “He’s lying.”
Barnaby spoke again, harshly. The man groaned, then answered.
Barnaby practically snarled at him. The man quavered and fell to his knees.
“What’s going on?”
“He admits he is the only one. He admits he was here last week.”
Then Pierce remembered: the cobras.
“What did he take then?”
A rapid question and a halting answer.
“Beans.”
Pierce felt suddenly tired.
“Tell him to get up. Tell him we’ll give him another can of soup if he’ll get up and leave us alone.”
The man got up cautiously, holding the two cans in his hinds. His eyes flicked around the three men.