Sphinx (10 page)

I hesitated at the bar’s doorway. When I’d arranged this meeting with Barry I hadn’t had the courage to tell him about Isabella’s death. Each time I had to tell someone the news it was like living through the drowning all over again and I dreaded that sensation of being swept back into the moment. Besides, I told myself, he was bound to have heard - news tended to sweep through Alexandria like wild-fire. Steeling myself, I stepped inside. On the walls hung a gallery of old photographs, dusty black-and-white shots of smiling young men in khaki, arms around each other, hamming it up for the camera - Brits, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, the occasional Scotsman in a tam-o’-shanter. Some of them looked like children in ill-fitting uniforms: narrow adolescent shoulders lost in jackets; huge rabbit eyes staring out across time, tiny beads of fear buried in the centre of their pupils and defying the wide smile beneath. It couldn’t have been easy defending a territory that many locals regarded as stolen anyhow; dealing with an ambivalent Arabic community not to mention the Italian-Alexandrians - people like Isabella’s father - some of whom had already left to fight with Mussolini or the Germans.

Glancing around, I couldn’t see Barry, so I sat at the bar and ordered myself a Bloody Mary. I looked at the photos and couldn’t help wondering how many of those young soldiers were now lying in the El Alamein war cemetery. There were seven thousand tombstones there, stretching out in frightening monotony - the most poignant of them marked seven unknown soldiers, five unknown soldiers and so on. Comrades blown apart, then thrown together in unimaginably macabre embraces.

‘Christ, you’re a bloody sorry sight.’ Barry Douglas’s unmistakably Australian voice boomed across the bar. He pulled up a bar stool beside me and attempted to perch his massive body on the seat. ‘Fucking stools are made for midgets. Aziz!’ He yelled at the proprietor who was busy wiping glasses. ‘When are you going to get some decent fucking chairs?’

Aziz shrugged, humouring the Australian, who, I knew, was a dedicated regular.

Barry turned back to me. ‘At least the beer’s cold. How are yer, mate?’ He wrapped a huge arm around me and pulled me into a bear hug.

I turned my face away, terrified my reserve might break down. And it might have if I hadn’t been momentarily overwhelmed by the combined smell of Brut aftershave, stale sweat and hashish emanating from Barry’s ancient leather jacket. He released me to wipe a tear away.

‘That was some tragic funeral. Hate them myself. When I go to join the great Buddha in the sky I want my physical remains cooked up in some delicious cordon-bleu stew so my molecules are recycled in a meaningful way.’

That was the trouble with Barry: you never knew if he was being serious or not.

‘You were there?’ I asked. I must have been sleepwalking through the whole ceremony. I hadn’t seen him.

‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I was right at the back, getting stoned. Didn’t want to upset the natives.’ He blew his nose into a large embroidered handkerchief. ‘At least the Catholics put on a good show, unlike the Proddies. You can’t have a decent burial without some decent bloody ritual. But Isabella? It wasn’t her time.’ He thumped the bar to emphasise his point. ‘It wasn’t her fucking time!’

A furtive couple in the corner looked up from their tête-àtête, a lone Cypriot sailor turned to stare, and a stray cat bolted from under one of the tables. The bar-music tape clicked over and a Kinks track filled the sudden silence - the incongruous youthful yearnings of another world.

Without prompting, Aziz slammed down a glass of beer in front of the Australian.

Barry Douglas was one of those rare individuals whose flamboyance and maverick attitudes worked like an electric shock - his childlike sense of the absurd was both liberating and infectious. Forty-five, he stood at six foot three, weighed twenty stone, and had a tangled mane of steel-blonde hair and a matching beard that made him look like some Viking god. His skin, permanently sunburnt, had the wrinkled deeply tanned look of the Caucasian in Africa. When drunk he looked and behaved like an outraged bull, but when sober he was capable of charming even the most unapproachable women. The local Arabs loved him, and he had lived in Alexandria for so long that they regarded him as a lucky talisman. His clashes with the municipal police were legendary, but even they tolerated his regular escapades with affection. An avid diver and surfer, Barry claimed to have grown up more in the ocean than out. He described his occupation as ‘marine expert’, though expert on what exactly was never clear. I’d always thought treasure hunter a more appropriate description, but the longer I knew Barry the more he revealed himself to have extraordinary talents in the most surprising areas.

He’d left Australia in the late 1950s and ended up on the coast of California by the early 1960s, where he’d become involved in some of the early LSD experiments conducted at Berkeley. This had led to a complete revision of all Barry’s ambitions. He abandoned academia for adventure and managed to land a job as a diver with Jacques Cousteau, which began his infatuation with shipwrecks. Dissolute as he was when he wasn’t on a quest, once he started the hunt he became dangerously focused - a real shark. According to Isabella, the Australian was one of the best restorers of gold, silver or bronze ancient artefacts around and his phenomenal ability to carbon-date wood accurately was legendary within the archaeological community.

After his stint with Cousteau, Barry had continued to work his way around the world and had finally settled in Alexandria. A self-declared sexual compulsive, he was as capable of monogamy as a buck hare and regarded marriage as an abhorrent and outdated institution. Although this hadn’t prevented him marrying three times: once to a Hindu, once to a Thai Buddhist and once to a Muslim, all disastrously.

‘I loved Isabella, you know.’ He took a few deep draughts of beer and stared at me. ‘I know you’re English, but for Christ’s sake, Oliver, show some emotion. You’re freaking me out.’

I glanced down at my wedding band. ‘Can’t, not yet. But I suppose in a few days I’ll break down into a blubbering mess.’

Barry’s stare drilled into me, his grey-blue irises swimming in a sea of broken capillaries. ‘You do realise,’ he said, drawing in the air a circle that encompassed the bar, the customers, Aziz in the corner reaching for a cigarette, ‘that all this is an illusion, this quantum foam of particles, matter, bodies, neurons. She’s still with you, in your—’

A wave of anger swept through me. I didn’t want his sympathy. ‘Cut the bullshit, Barry. I’m an atheist, remember? I haven’t got some nice little spiritual fairy tale to fall back on.’

‘I’m not talking bullshit. You can’t really think that all we are is mortal flesh and blood? The Ancient Egyptians had it right. There’s a whole world beyond this perceived reality we’re experiencing right now. I know - I’ve been a witness to the cosmos.’

‘Too many illegal substances, if you ask me.’

Defiant, Barry held up his lager. ‘Hey, maybe you’re right! Maybe old Barry’s grey matter is just a little too fried. But I’ve met guys with thrice my IQ, physicists, who’d agree with me. Still doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t Isabella’s time.’

He drained the glass. Following his cue, I finished my own drink and ordered another round.

‘You know I was with her when she drowned. I tried to save her . . .’

‘Mate, there was no way anyone knew that tremor was going to hit. No way - underwater earthquakes happen all the time. Anyhow, what the hell was she doing diving in the bay? That’s strictly no-go. Let me guess: you guys are both MI5 and you were combing the seabed for military secrets.’

Aziz leaned over. ‘Don’t joke, my friend. In Alexandria, even the snakes have ears.’

‘Yeah? And the mice have cocks.’ Barry, miming paranoid, looked under the table, then over the counter.

Ignoring the Australian’s bravado, I lowered my voice. ‘They’ve already interrogated me about the dive - for twenty-four hours straight. In the end, the oil company phoned the British consul who bailed me out.’

‘Bloody bastards, no respect for the grieving.’ Barry’s tone changed, serious now. ‘But Isabella was onto something, wasn’t she?’

I looked over to Aziz, who was busying himself out of earshot with some glasses - a deliberate retreat, I suspected. I turned back to Barry.

‘She did find something. An object she was convinced was historically important.’

‘And?’

‘I need you to carbon-date whatever wood you can find. I think the artefact inside is bronze. At least, that’s what Isabella thought.’ Faakhir’s last words flashed through my mind. I’d taken the bag home but hadn’t got much further than pulling out the steel tube containing the astrarium. ‘I can hardly bear looking at it, Barry, it’s just history to me. None of it means a thing - not set against her life.’

 

Barry must have driven the company car back to the villa - I was certainly too drunk to do so. The lights were all off except for a small lantern burning on the first floor. Ibrihim had stayed up, I noted appreciatively as I staggered to the front door. In those first few days I’d overheard him weeping behind the door of his small room. He had retreated into a formal reticence since Isabella’s drowning, as if death, after entering the house, was an important guest who had to be treated with special reverence. The housekeeper had covered all the mirrors, and had given away a small kitten Isabella had adopted, claiming it would be bad luck to keep the animal.

As I fumbled drunkenly with the keys, Ibrihim opened the front door. A practising Muslim, he strongly disapproved of drinking. He frowned as I stumbled into the hallway, Barry catching me before I fell.

‘Monsieur Warnock is stricken with grief,’ the Australian explained solemnly, before belching.

Ibrihim winced in disgust at the stench of alcohol coming from my clothes. ‘Indeed,’ he replied, regaining his composure. ‘I have heard that strong coffee is beneficial for such grief. Shall I make some?’

‘Excellent idea,’ I answered, hoping I wasn’t slurring my words. ‘My friend and I will take it in the drawing room.’

Barry followed me into the large room and whistled as I switched on the lights.

‘Geez, I can never get over how luxurious this place is. Get used to this shit and it’ll be the beginning of your moral demise, not to mention your socialist credentials.’

‘What socialist credentials?’ I slurred.

‘Mate, Isabella dobbed you in.’

‘I was a student - I only joined the illustrious Socialist Party of the once-Great Britain so I could get laid. All I wanted was to get out of my parents’ two-up, two-down and avoid going down the mine. And I succeeded - so shoot me,’ I concluded, a little more defensively than I’d intended.

‘Oh, c’mon, you’re a runner - like me.’

Barry grabbed a First World War British helmet that sat ceremoniously on a sideboard, placed it on his head at a rakish angle and started goose-stepping across the parquet floor.

‘You think that if you stop, all your past - your shitty childhood, fucked-up love affairs, compromised ethics and your working-class background - will catch up with you in some catastrophic collision. Bang, bang, you’re dead.’

‘Something like that.’ I sat on the floor, suddenly overwhelmed by the events of the day; the funeral, the wake as well as the bizarre encounter at the cemetery. ‘Barry, I’m too bloody drunk and miserable to philosophise.’

Mercurial as ever, the Australian’s mood changed instantly. He replaced the helmet and helped me to my feet.

‘Right, then, mate - lead me to the golden calf.’

 

I unlocked the door to the bedroom. We didn’t usually lock doors in the villa but Faakhir’s urgent warnings had somehow penetrated the fog in my mind. It was the least I could do. The steel tube sat in the middle of the bedroom floor where I’d left it earlier, still oozing mud and sea water onto the carpet. Crouching down, Barry tapped against the tube’s side.

‘Still in there, is it?’

‘According to the metal detector. It’s some kind of nautical instrument - at least, that’s what Isabella believed. She also mentioned some kind of wooden casing.’

‘Nautical instrument? What era are we talking?’

I hesitated. I guess if I hadn’t been drunk I mightn’t have been so candid, but Barry’s face seemed so open, his ruffled blond hair standing up like the quills of an outraged porcupine.

‘Ptolemaic, I think - Cleopatra’s time.’ I knew Isabella had traced it back to Cleopatra, but I wasn’t sure if the device was supposed to be even older. I wished now that I’d listened more closely to Isabella’s sometimes tangled explanations.

Barry’s eyes narrowed. ‘Impossible. Nautical instruments don’t date back that far.’

‘I thought you were the one always going on about how we limit ourselves through our conventional perceptions and expectations.’

‘The quote is “the expectations of our perceptions”, you pissed bastard. Mate, you’re holding out on me - what exactly did Isabella think she’d found?’

‘Some kind of astrarium with supposedly supernatural properties.’

Barry’s eyebrows shot up.

‘According to Isabella,’ I added quickly.

‘Excellent - that clears up a lot of bloody things. Oliver, I know you’re a cynic but let’s look at the Ancient Egyptians’ comprehension of magic. It was inseparably entwined with religious worship and intellectual pursuit. For example, Isis was known as “Great in Magic”, having been told the secret name of the Sun-God. The god Thoth - god of the written word - was also a god of magic. Thoth’s task was to classify the creations of the superior deities - Osiris, Horus, Ptah, Amon and Ra. This gave him tremendous power.’ Barry relished any opportunity to talk about the Ancient Egyptians and he was clearly in his element. ‘Any self-respecting magician - like myself, for example - would have a well-stocked library; magicians were expected to read every holy word, comma and tome of Thoth’s, the idea being that the knowledge would make them as powerful as the god himself. I’m telling you, the concepts were far more bloody sophisticated than the history books make out, and maybe, just maybe, the buggers were right.’