The Egyptologist (11 page)

velopment, a transfer of love. Did I make a mistake? Obviously. I should have
told him his love was not hopeless, or that I loved him, and perhaps I
should
have
loved him, on his terms, just for a bit, until he could grow out of it, become a good
man and a good Communist, both of which were certainly in him, and both of
which our world desperately needs, Mr. Ferrell.

"I never saw him again, of course, but once. A few years later, Ronnie told me
Paul was in a circus, and we went and watched some infantile foolishness, sat far
away where he wouldn't see us. Then, in 1916, of course, he did what he did, ru•
ining the lives of a few dozen dedicated heroes. And in 1917, when he could have
been at our side, celebrating the greatest event in human history, he was instead
off fighting a war of German noblemen against English bankers, and in 1918 he
died for it, making the world safe for capital. And that is the sordid story, Mr. Fer•
rell. Tell anyone who cares to hear it. I never had the opportunity in this little de•
mocracy of ours to tell anyone at all, and the police and the newspapers chose to
tell their own fairy tales instead."

You can believe, Macy, that there's more to it than that. Ronald explained the
events of 1916, as far as he knew them, and which the enclosed newspaper clip•
pings describe fairly, though Red Ron of course called them dishonest. "There
was a night of arrests," he told me, stamping out his cigarette. "World events were
heating up—the War, the Russians—and we were right in the middle of it, and
the authorities were a little overwrought. One of our meetings was broken up,
and we were taken to gaol, roughed up a bit. I was worried for Cass, because I lost
sight of her right at the beginning and she was taken away by a different route.
Now it wasn't a crime to talk about Communism—Australia wasn't as far gone as
the USA—but conspiring to overthrow the Government, well, that's something
else. Of course we weren't doing any such thing. But the police said they'd found
explosives and the addresses of politicians and policemen that we were targetting
for assassination, and we had been
corrupting
youth, and Cass and I had a pecu•
liar sort of unmentionable brother-sister relationship." Ronald mildly denies it:
"Now I ask you, Ferrell, we weren't madmen. Organising strikes, encouraging re•
sistance, fighting against the proposed War conscription, showing up the corrupt
state for what it is—all that was our line. But this police inspector Dahlquist tells
the newspapers he's broken up a ring of Communist child-kidnapping assassins.
Pictures of us with our names, and pictures of the
very
old explosives he's found
under the floorboards under the cot in the room where you-know-who had lived
for years. That's when I knew who had done this to us, even if I hadn't heard from
him in ages, even if Cassie tried to deny it, telling me I was confused by my emo-

tions. Not a bit of it: the rotter had spun a story for the police, and if you ask me,
it was all just a love letter to Cass, just his way of saying he still thought she was
the best girl in the whole world, six years after she'd broken what we were sup•
posed to believe was his heart." A dozen of them spent a month in prison, and
one of their number lingers there still, the one who actually procured and stored
the explosives. "God knows why," claimed Ron. "And of course the damn things
were never used, just sat under a floor for a half dozen years. Cassie and I, we
weren't even
leaders
in the movement, you know, Ferrell. We were just idealistic
people. Cassie still is. I've had my fill of it." So spoke the schoolmaster become
barman, talking to me out back behind the pub where he was working in '22, one
of the few places that would employ him.

The police had their bomber, but they'd also overreached, taken in a lot of
people like the Barrys who hid behind laws saying they could think and say what
they liked, and in the end there wasn't much to argue before a jury, and the child-
napping charges were rather too risky a thing for public courts, especially when
Eulalie Caldwell's meant to be your star witness and silver-tongued, troublesome
Catherine Barry's prepared to defend herself with talk of Christian charity. Be
that as it may, society had the comfort of seeing the Barrys dispatched from their
posts of public trust. A bit of actual proletarian labour no bad thing for such peo•
ple. In 1922, in her cramped room, she was still singing about Comrade Lenin's
immortal accomplishments that would ring through history forever, and from
where you and I sit, Macy, it's hard to say she didn't back a winner, even if he was
a devilish one.

So we say farewell to the Barrys, July 10 and 11, 1922. Ronald returns to wip•
ing down the bar. Catherine primly shakes my hand as if I'm poison, goes back
outside to trim the stems of customers' roses. They curse Paul Caldwell and the
upright Inspector Dahlquist when they should curse their own arrogance. (I
didn't remind them of that, of course, as Ronald had engaged me to find Paul if
he was alive. Looking for an address of a man who's dead, that's an undemanding
way to earn one's daily wages, I'll admit.)

I won an audience with Inspector S. George Dahlquist the next day, to under•
stand the relation between the arrest of Caldwell at the circus and the arrests of
the Barrys, both of which he had conducted.

Macy, I slept strangely last night, I can tell you. I worked on my tale for you from
early yesterday morning until late at night, and even when I wasn't writing, I was

rereading the speeches I was re-creating, my old notes, and the newspaper clip•
pings from 1916 I had from Ronald, some of them perhaps a bit strong ("Brother
and Sister Reds Imprisoned Our Children," for example, and "Public Library Har•
bours Bolshie Bombers"). There's one I found oddly moving, to be honest, from
the
Herald,
where the head of the library declares the system to be a loyal de•
fender of the Commonwealth and claims it's now completely free of treasonous
elements, and Catherine Barry, recently fired, is named by the paper as an exam•
ple of the malignant virus at work, gnawing at the foundations of democratic so•
ciety in the most surprising places. It certainly was all true. It was even stirring, a
bit, in its defence of our common principles, and yet something seems missing,
when I read it now.

I dreamt of Catherine Barry last night, could even smell her in the dream,
which smells a sight better than this place at night, Mr. Macy-Up-in-Your-
Mansion-in-New-York. She didn't say anything to me, wasn't angry, didn't fly or
transmit messages from the beyond. She just sat across from me patiently,
smoothed her skirts, smiled, cleared her throat, kept looking at me from her chair,
and I knew she was waiting for me to say something, though I'm damned if I can
think what it was. She'd raise her eyebrows, laugh a little at my puzzled silence,
shrug, lean back in her chair, cross her hands on her lap, and just stare at me, with
that wicked little half smile, seemed to say that she had all the time in the world
to wait and see if I was going to say the right thing. She sat there forever¬forever,
because in the dream I knew it was never going to stop.

Off this goes to you, then, and I'll set to work on Dahlquist and my trip to En•
gland.

Yrs,
Ferrell

Thursday, 12 October, 1922

To Margaret:
It is just dawn. You are with me always here. I shall
carry you back such gifts from this expedition. You will of course be
swimming in ancient gold, you will of course share in my fame, you will
of course marry me in circumstances to make your howling, jealous
girlfriends scratch out their own eyes immediately after the ceremony.

But I think also you deserve to have your own journal of our long sepa•
ration, a journal of my love alongside and interwoven with the journal
of my work; the two are too tightly bound together to be unwound
now, in the heat of action. There will, in a few months, be this long
journal-letter to you, to add to the posted letters you will receive

(weeks after I send them, unfortunately), and to compare to that letter
everyone will have,
Ralph M. Trilipush and the Discovery of the Tomb of
Atum-hadu,
by Ralph M. Trilipush. Some of my entry yesterday is des•
tined for you, not for them, I see now. I see, too, that your father de•
serves some polish in the published version of these journals, and you
can trust that I shall perform that service for you.

A discussion of the financing of modern Egyptological expeditions:
As for
implore,
per Kendall Mitchell's witty lyrics, I feel it is not inap•
propriate, nor uninteresting to general readers, to describe something

of how archaeological expeditions are financed.
Imploring,
I hope it goes
without saying, has nothing to do with it. And while I am as eager as
you, dear Reader, to proceed to our exploration itself, I am also hesi•
tant to bring you along with me until you are qualified to understand
the context of the events that will befall us out there in the desert.

Join me, therefore, in the first of a series of investor meetings with
Boston art connoisseurs and men of finance, June of this year, in the
drawing room of Chester Crawford Finneran, who has invited me to
his luxurious (and Luxorous) town house, where he has gathered some
friends to ask me questions. And though I would have wed his daugh•
ter without this money, and I could have financed this expedition else•
where, still he was offering his money, and if only as a gesture to the
woman I love, I gave him and his friends this opportunity to be the
financiers of an unprecedented expedition.

CCF's drawing room is decorated—per American fashions just
now—in so much Egyptian and faux-Pharaonic decor that Kendall
Mitchell claims he is starting to feel "asphinxiated." The joke would
normally fall on irritable ears, but CCF has wisely arranged for so
much "iced tea" that everyone is beginning to feel very much at their
ease. I am addressing CCF, Mitchell, Roger Lathorp, Julius Padraig

O'Toole, and Heinz Kovacs. Lathorp is the owner of an enormously
profitable construction firm of some sort. The last two guests have been
very vaguely introduced, financial partners of CCF's in other ventures.
They say very little, though Kovacs has a ferocious cough loud enough
to end all conversation in the room whenever it strikes. When he
speaks, on the other hand, his voice is so quiet that everyone (even
O'Toole immediately to his left) must lean towards him. Kovacs's eyes
run almost constantly, the result of some infection, and he uses several
different pocket kerchiefs in the course of our meeting, tossing each
saturated, monogrammed silken cloth in turn into the gaping black
mouth of CCF's Rameses-colossus rubbish bin. O'Toole, an Irishman

of undefined occupation, spends much of the meeting filing his nails
and occasionally making notes with a tiny golden pencil in a small
leather book. They, all of them, wear their money on their clothes and
shoes. Scholars they are not, admittedly, but their passion for art is be•
yond question. There is a downside in dealing with institutions such as
certain leading museums, and often private investment offers unique
benefits to the explorer.

"Gentlemen," I begin, "let's for a moment put the question of money
to one side so that— "

"I never do that!" japes Kendall Mitchell, to his and Lathorp's ex•
plosive glee. Kovacs coughs.

"You sell yourself short, Mr. Mitchell. Let's put the money aside for
just a moment and consider what this expedition could bring you on
top of financial reward. The history of Egypt carries us back to the
very dawn of recorded human history, nearly 5000 years ago."

"Right you are. Back to Jesus Christ Himself."

"That certainly provides a context, Mr. Lathorp, and shows your
aptitude for historical method, as it is wise to approach the past
through familiar landmarks. But consider that Jesus was born 1922
years ago, and Atum-hadu reigned 1640 years before that, and Egypt
in all its glory existed 1500 years before
that,
and one begins to sense
the vast stretches of Time we are discussing."

"Of course," agrees Lathorp. "Familiar landmarks."