Sphinx (38 page)

‘Maybe.’ The officer shouted at his men in Arabic, ordering them to turn the mattress over, then swung back to me. ‘Maybe you spy?’

The old blue-striped mattress fell to the floor in a cloud of dust, revealing two
Playboy
magazines, dated 1968, lying on the rusting base. The officer held them up accusingly. ‘Yours?’ he demanded.

‘Of course not!’ I snapped back in the most authoritative tone I could muster.

The officer burst out laughing, his two comrades joining him. Moustafa and I remained stony-faced. Displeased, the officer cracked his baton against the iron bed frame.

‘Is funny, no? Very funny.’

Moustafa joined in the laughter. I followed, my heart pounding as the officer flicked through the magazine pages. He stopped at a centrefold displaying a blonde grinning inanely above a pair of enormous pink-tipped breasts. Wearing a leather cowboy hat, she sat astride a saddle perched on a hay bale. He held the page up. The centrefold smiled out at me, her white teeth mockingly perfect next to the officer’s stained and irregular grin.

‘She your sister, no?’

The atmosphere thickened as the other men, instantly registering the extent of the insult, turned to me.

‘Careful,’ Moustafa said quietly in English. I remained silent. To defend myself might infuriate the officer further, yet not defending myself undermined my position. I knew he’d been instructed to arrest me, otherwise he wouldn’t be taking such liberties.

‘Or maybe you like boys?’ he went on. ‘I’m sorry for you if you do, my friend.’

This time no one dared laugh. I felt my hands curling into fists, the miner’s son readying himself for a brawl. But to resort to violence would be suicidal.

Sensing the danger, Moustafa stepped between us. ‘Officer, Mr Warnock is Egypt’s friend. He is employed by our government. There has been a mistake.’

‘No mistake. He is to be escorted back to Alexandria and interrogated.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘That is between Mr Warnock and my commanding officer, Colonel Hassan.’

Moustafa broke into a warm smile. ‘Colonel Khalid Hassan? From Mansoura?’

Flustered, the officer glanced from Moustafa to me. ‘The same. Why?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Then there is no problem. Khalid Hassan is a good friend of mine. We were at El-Orwa el-Woska together as children. He will be very unhappy when he hears you have arrested a friend of mine.’

‘We are not arresting him, we simply want to ask him a few questions.’

I stood frozen in the middle of the room. I’d never felt so vulnerable before. The thought of the hidden astrarium was not the least bit consoling, and, for a minute, I wondered whether this wouldn’t be my last day of freedom. I glanced over at Moustafa - his expression had turned from relieved to grim again, reflecting the fear in my own expression.

The officer shoved me towards the tea chest and the scattered clothes around it. ‘Collect your things - we go now.’

 

I looked up at the single barred window; the bluish light of dawn had just begun to thread its way through the night sky. I tried to measure the time since they had bundled me into the jail - at least twelve hours. During the short walk from the police jeep to the cell, I’d recognised the building from my previous interrogation: the police headquarters on Al Fateh Street in Alexandria. Behind its austere façade was a warren of small rooms that ran around an inner courtyard. The atmosphere was dank: the acrid smell of urine and carbolic soap, undercut by something else - the smell of fear.

They’d been questioning me for hours. The fluorescent light above blazed down; I felt as if it was burning actual stripes across my brain. If I concentrated, I imagined I could smell my soft grey matter frying like old bacon. I was beyond exhaustion and my thoughts reeled like a drunken boxer. The bruises on my face and back were testimony to the rough handling I’d experienced at the hands of the officer who had brought me in, but so far the investigating officer had focused only on the circumstances of Isabella’s death, reiterating over and over that the dive had been illegal and had taken place in a restricted military zone.

‘I told you before,’ I said wearily, ‘on the day she died - I had no idea the dive was illegal until we were actually on the boat. My wife hadn’t been entirely clear on the matter.’

‘She was lying to you, sir.’

The officer, a disarmingly polite man in his late forties, kept apologising to me; a ploy I’d fallen for until the questioning stretched into hours and I wasn’t allowed to rest or go to the toilet - deliberate tactics meant to humiliate me and break me down.

‘Okay, perhaps she lied to me - what does it matter? She drowned before we found anything.’

My head sank to my chest. All I wanted was to sleep; my eyes felt as if they had sunk into pits and my trouser legs were streaked with urine. Bizarre snippets of phrases kept popping into my head, along with lines from old pop songs - The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’; The Monkees’ ‘I’m A Believer’. Exhaustion and dehydration were sending me into a delirium peppered with moments of surprising clarity. Did they know about the existence of the astrarium? They must not have dared take me at the airport but had they managed to get into the first-class lounge? Had anyone else been detained? Hermes Hemiedes? Moustafa? Maybe even Francesca Brambilla, although I couldn’t imagine the matriarch tolerating such treatment.

‘Your wife worked with Faakhir Alsayla, a diver?’

I lifted my head and tried to focus on the officer’s gaze. His eyes swam around in circles, a swarm of deceptively compassionate brown irises. If only I could grab one and squeeze, I thought irrationally.

‘I don’t know that name,’ I lied.

‘So perhaps you know a Hermes Hemiedes?’ he persisted.

When I refused to reply, the interrogator nodded and one of the policemen flanking me hauled me to my feet. I caught sight of a man at the glass window of the door, staring in. His face was eerily familiar and through my fog I tried desperately to remember where I’d seen it before. It came to me in fragments. The current affairs show on television in London. Prince Majeed’s henchman. Omar’s companion.

Another policeman came in and told the officer that Mosry was waiting outside. The name seemed to sear the air like a hot coal. Wanting to memorise it, I held on to the sound, trying it out. Mosry. The officer nodded and Mosry entered the room. Instantly it was as if the temperature had dropped. There was a kind of acidic smell about the man. He stared at me, his eyes boring into my skull, and yet I couldn’t turn away. His lack of emotion was utterly terrifying, and the sense of extreme intelligence emanating from him was almost as frightening. I remembered an encounter with a warlord a few years previously in Angola, a man who recruited and butchered child soldiers. Now, for the second time in my life, I knew I was in the presence of evil. Despite my exhaustion a new fear clawed at my throat. The connection was increasingly clear. Omar-Mosry-Majeed. The astrarium. I couldn’t be sure, but I suspected their interest in the device was related to Sadat’s attempts to open Egypt up to the West, and possibly to President Carter’s attempt to negotiate peace in the region. All I knew was that to let the astrarium fall into their hands would be devastating.

The officer gave the newcomer a nod of nervous deference. I started to wonder whether I was going to survive the interrogation. Pulling up a chair, Mosry sat in the corner of the room, watching intently, a slight smile playing across his lips. It was hard not to start screaming.

The questions began again, with a new aggression. ‘Answer me!’ the officer barked, then slammed his fists on the desk.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said.

‘Perhaps this will help your memory.’ He reached into a file and pulled out a black-and-white photograph of Hermes and myself at Isabella’s funeral.

‘May I telephone the British Embassy?’ I asked. ‘As a British citizen I have rights . . .’

I’d forgotten how many times I’d made this request; it had become a collection of words I clung to like a raft, a means of keeping my fading sanity afloat. The actual words had stopped making any sense to me; they had become a medley of sounds strung together, at the end of which salvation seemed to beckon.

Ignoring me, the interrogator picked up a stubby pencil and drew on a piece of paper, which he shoved towards me. ‘Do you recognise this?’ It was a crude rendering of the Ba hieroglyph.

‘Of course, from my wife’s work. That’s Ba, the Ancient Egyptian soul-bird.’

‘A primitive symbol from a primitive culture - only the West romanticises such fairy tales. It is also the symbol for an organisation - an organisation that is illegal, Mr Warnock. Do you know this organisation?’

By now the room was beginning to spin. I had no strength to feel anything any more. ‘Can I sit down?’ I asked.

The officer looked towards Mosry as if waiting for an order. The other man nodded and the officer lunged at me, as if to hit me. At the last minute he punched the air and I fainted.

 

It was her perfume, a spiralling thread of musk and lemon that took me back to the first time I ever met her. If I opened my eyes, she would vanish; it was a magician’s trick, a sunspot, the dancing shadows on a lake. I breathed in deeply, wanting to stay basking in her presence no matter how illusory.

The tickling on my face continued, but I fought to stay asleep. I sensed that if I woke completely, pain would flood through my swollen legs and feet. I’d once read of a bereaved neurophysiologist who developed a hypothesis that the dead continued to exist in the way our memory imprinted our experience of them upon our brains. Not an endless loop of disjointed images but a real and ongoing discourse based on decades of observation, of ‘knowing’ that person. Was this what I was doing now? I didn’t care. I held out my hand, blind fingers touching warm flesh.

‘Isabella.’

Not a question, just naming the unnameable. She stood over me, her black eyes shining with that wry expression so achingly familiar, wearing the same clothes she’d worn that last evening before the dive.

‘Isabella.’

As if in answer, she reached out and touched the prison wall where graffiti was carved into the plaster in desperate scratches. Her fingers outlined the crude drawing of a fish, then a bull, and finally she pointed to a woman’s head crowned with writhing snakes.

‘The fish, the bull and the Medusa,’ I whispered, the images burning themselves into my memory.

Then, as she kissed me, I sank back into unconsciousness.

 

I woke with a jolt, my whole body a knot of twisting pain. The gaunt face of the guard came into focus as he rattled the keys above me, indicating that I was free to go.

As I sat up I turned to the cell wall. The graffiti had vanished.

Henries, the British consul, dealt with the infuriated prison official with icy politeness, then marched me out of the building. As soon as we were out of earshot, he told me that I was indebted to my assistant Moustafa Saheer who had informed him of my arrest and had arranged for a certain Colonel Hassan to pull some strings on my behalf to organise a release.

‘You do seem to be leaving an unpleasant trail of half-truths and accidental deaths, Oliver. God knows, losing one’s wife is a ghastly experience, but clearing up after you could become somewhat tiresome. I wouldn’t want you to become a DBS.’

‘A DBS?’

‘A Distressed British Subject - the poor dears can float around for decades. A bit like your unfortunate Australian friend Barry Douglas - another headache, but not mine, thank God. I suppose he was a DAS, a Distressed Australian Subject. What a dreadful thought.’

Henries’s car was parked along the street, a short distance from the prison entrance. His driver got out and opened the rear door for him.

‘Whatever you’re up to, stop it now,’ Henries told me forcefully. ‘I won’t be able to bail you out next time, no matter how many phone calls I have to field from the head of BP, Shell or whoever. Even oilmen like you are expendable when it comes to international affairs. You are on borrowed time, Oliver.’ He tapped his watch to emphasise the point.

The limousine drove off. I stood on the street, dazed from dehydration. A man stepped out from the shadow of a shop doorway and took me by the arm. I shook him off, then realised it was Hermes Hemiedes.

‘Come, my dear fellow, let me escort you to the safety of your villa,’ he said.

I pulled him back into the doorway. ‘How did you know about my arrest?’

‘It’s a small country. I had news of your arrival back in Cairo. Naturally, out of concern for yourself and the astrarium, I have been tracking your progress.’

‘Are you crazy? You shouldn’t be anywhere near here. They asked about you, they wanted to know if I knew you. What’s going on?’

‘The authorities have never approved of the kind of Egyptology in which I am involved. You must know by now that they felt the same way about Isabella.’