The Egyptologist (13 page)

O'Toole as he rises and stretches. Kovacs struggles to his feet, while
Lathorp and Mitchell reach, as one man, towards the ottoman support•
ing the copy of
Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt
(Collins Amorous Liter•
ature, 1920).

"No need to fight for them, boys." I reach for my briefcase. "I have
complimentary copies for everyone."

Sunset on the Bayview Nursing Home
Sydney, Australia

December 8, 1954
Mr. Macy—

I'm working as fast as I can now. You never know what tomorrow's going to
bring, if it brings anything at all. That's lesson #1 in this residence. They took a
fellow from my room this morning, all covered up nice and neat, with some bored-
looking nephew spending a few of his precious minutes to sign for the body.

July 1922. Inspector S. George Dahlquist, an ambitious officer, was more
than happy to share his fond recollections, tales of Red bombers and thieving cir•
cuses. He was able to answer a few of my remaining questions about Paul Cald•
well's Australian life, but not all: from the moment our boy walked out of the
restaurant with his heart cracked in pieces by his icy Red lady love until Boyd
Hoyt talent-spotted him emptying pockets in a market square, I had nothing on
him—two to three years where he was out of my view. And then, 1916, he's tip•
toeing on sawdust, reaching up towards the row of tempting wallets above him in
the dark when Inspector Dahlquist leaps from the shadows, grabs the boy's wrist,
and nearly breaks it.

Paul Caldwell's at least twenty-three, knee-deep in elephant waste, sawdust,
and the embraces of Emma Hoyt, when he's arrested for picking the sparsely
filled pockets of the audience while they sit in the semidark, their bums dangling
over the backs of wooden benches, cheering for or against that evening's penguin.
Now, I know enough about how the police manage these things to know that Paul
is likely shackled to a desk chair and then hit a bit and then given a large drink of
water and then left a long while as the blood dries and then, when he needs a toi•
let quite badly indeed, in comes beefy Inspector Dahlquist, who says no one will

vouch for Paul, Boyd Hoyt's told the police he has no interest in Paul's welfare,
they might as well hang Paul high with a snapped neck as far as Hoyt's con•
cerned. "A skinny boy, your Mr. Caldwell, but he didn't scare easy," Dahlquist told
me. "Eventually of course they all get frightened, except for the real murderous
monsters, but this little bung held out a bit, kept his silence. At the beginning, I
just wanted to hear what he could tell me about Hoyt, confirm he was picking
those pockets on Hoyt's orders to pay for the circus. I threatened him with long
prison terms, which I might have been able to secure, depending on how many
people came forward with complaints of larceny. But your Mr. Caldwell still kept
quiet. Did Hoyt tell him to steal? Nothing. I described his life in prison to him.

Nothing. I say the judge can decide to sentence him to the Army for his role in this
lurk, and off he can go to help fight the Kaiser in a far-off field of France, have his
head blown open for his trouble, and how did that sound to him? Nothing. 'You
been doing it with Hoyt's wife, then? Because Mr. Hoyt, he's a very angry old
man. Hates you. Tells me you're the rapist of his wife as well as a thief.' But our
Paul's not reacting, not even whingeing, until very slowly, he turns to me and he
says, 'Can you send me to the Army if I help you?' and I have to say I didn't see
what he meant, but clear as day he wanted something. So now our negotiations
begin in earnest, I'm sure you can understand, Mr. Ferrell. We begin to speak in
highly removed hypotheticals. What would I be able to arrange for him if he
could tell me something extraordinary? Just what would he be able to tell me if I
were to know a man who might be able to deliver such a solution? 'So let's see the
merchandise, young Mr. Caldwell, and make it ace,' I say. First, Paul says yes, Hoyt
trained him to steal, forced him to steal, Paul kept only a small percentage of the
take and the rest of the loot paid for the circus, fed the tigers. 'Hoyt told me to do
it, Hoyt took all of the money, and Hoyt's the one who taught me how to pick a
pocket and Hoyt Hoyt Hoyt.' Interesting, I say, but not enough for the deal you're
asking for. All right, then, he says, and thinks silently for a minute. How about
this: did I remember the Zipping Zivkovics? Two visiting star acrobats killed in a
horrible accident during a performance of Hoyt's circus last year? Well, what if
Paul could prove that they had been
murdered
by Hoyt in order to inflate circus
attendance, since people always came in droves when there was a chance of see•
ing accidental death? More interesting, I admitted, but still not enough to secure

him the very special package he requested. He sat and looked at his feet for a long
while. I wondered if he was asleep, with his head hanging like that, or discour•
aged, or working up a whopper. But I waited, and I watched. Five minutes, ten
minutes, I knew that every minute I kept quiet I was going to get a good one, if it

wasn't just fairy tales. I could see his lips moving, he's thinking through some•
thing. And then he lifts his head and he looks me in the eye and says, cool as any•
thing, 'Would you do it for a conspiracy of violent Communist plotters in the
heart of Sydney?' Well, Mr. Ferrell, now he had my attention.

"The agreement he wanted took some time to guarantee. It was a heavy order,
but if what he said was true, it was worth it. I said I'm a man of my word, but this
would take some time to explore, and he said, I remember it well, he said, 'Take
your time. World revolution and the destruction of all police power certainly isn't
worth hurrying for.' And he laughed in my face."

The deal, Macy, was simple in principle, if a little complicated to execute.
Paul wanted to be sent to join the Australian Imperial Force in Egypt, and he
wanted it guaranteed that he would
stay
in Egypt for as long as the AIF was there.
No Gallipoli, thanks, no Luxembourg, thanks. He would do his time in the AIF in
Egypt and nowhere else. He told Dahlquist he could read Egyptian and knew the
geography of the country as well as any Australian, and he'd learnt to ride a horse
at Hoyt's place. In exchange, well, the Barrys and their friends. Of course, he held
on to those names a bit longer. He talked very generally of the things Dahlquist
would find, until the copper, convinced, pleading national safety, pulled strings
at Defence, and arranged it as his star informant desired, while Paul sat in Sydney
gaol, kept away from all visitors. When the paperwork was real, only then did
Paul speak in specifics. Bombs under floorboards. Lists of assassination targets.
Names of conspirators. Child-napping stories. Incestuous librarians corrupting
youth. "Of course not all this stuck, but I won't complain," the Inspector told me.
"Caldwell kept his word, and so did I. He was on a transport ship within a week
of the arrests. That would have been summer, say December 1916."

If some of the newspapers made Dahlquist a hero in 16 and a fool in 17, well,
that didn't slow him down any. He stopped an anarchist bomber, and if the price
was a cloud of retractions and mumbled official apologies and cancelled trials,
that didn't bother him much.

Were you a military man, Macy, hero of Korea or some such? I was a bit too
old to spit fire and sign up for this Great War of ours. Down here, most of our
boys went off to show Jack the Turk a thing or two, the glory of us Aussies at Gal•
lipoli! To watch your insides stain a turquoise Turkish beach for the good of Ser•
bia, if I understand that one right—not for me, thanks, nor for Paul Caldwell,
either, as we now see. If you missed Suez and Jerusalem and Gallipoli, as he did,
then Egypt was a pretty safe spot by 17, when he would've arrived, but of course
he was going for love, not war. He'd found a way to do the unimaginable for a boy

from Sydney's slums: he was going to the land of his dreams. What he thought
he'd find there, I can't begin to say, and sure not worth dying for, if you ask me.
Better if he took the prison time, my advice with hindsight, at least he'd be alive
today.

By this time, July '22, I'd spent a few weeks tracking down Barnabas Davies's
long-lost Sydney heir, and I didn't really have much hope I could spin the case out
any farther. I'd have a nice, hefty payday for what'd been easy, safe work. I cabled
my long report to London, giving the good and the bad of Paul Caldwell. Thanks
to this last interview, if you squinted, we did have him working on behalf of the
Crown to stop the deadly tide of Communism in the Commonwealth. I men•
tioned (though admittedly downplayed) that he was likely deceased. There was,
however, the option, I wrote, of learning from his regimental mates and officers
something about his War record that might be interesting to Barnabas Davies. If
he'd been heroic, I advised, perhaps Davies's lawyers could retroactively change
the dead boy's name, maybe get him a medal or citation in the new name, if Bar•
nabas Davies felt like bribing the right people. And, for what it was worth, more
of a joke than anything, I proposed that my investigations into Caldwell's hero•
ism would most naturally lead me to England, where I should speak with the
family and colleagues of Captain Marlowe, with whom our boy had vanished,
and who had recommended the boy's promotions.

I expected London HQ would thank me, pay me, and that would be that. I
thought it possible they would pay me to write some guidance for some other
Tailor detective in England, preparing him to conduct the English interviews I
suggested. But four days later, I received a very surprising reply by cable:
AUTHO•
RISED
IMMEDIATE TRAVEL TO ENGLAND, EXPENSES TO DAVIES CASE. Now this was odd,

to say the least. Of course, I was more than happy at the news: see the world,
make some more money on a safe and interesting job. But why would such a
thing be done? Tailor Worldwide didn't lack for snoops in England. What it cost
to pay me and haul me around the globe was far more than any payment Bar•
nabas had authorised in the first place to convince Paul Caldwell into becoming
Paul Davies.

I mulled it over for two weeks waiting for the boat to leave Sydney, pondered
it hard while I was ill then bored to tears then ill again from Sydney to Melbourne
to Adelaide, Fremantle, Port Aden, Alexandria, Malta, and Liverpool, ill and con•
fused the whole trip (though, give old Davies his due, I travelled in the best style
available all the way to the end of this tale). I didn't understand it until I reached

England, the 12th of September, 1922, by which point it didn't matter. Turned
out to be the simplest thing in the world: Barnabas Davies wanted to meet all of
us detectives on his case, anyone who'd met the children or seen the women. I
made the trip to England to pursue the case, paid for all the way by Davies Ale,
because the old man wanted to know if Eulalie was well and shapely, wanted to
see my face when I talked about Paul. Of course by the time I arrived in London,
Davies was cold under the ground, and old Miklos Tailor was grinning ear to ear,
because the solicitors had just informed him that the Estate of Barnabas Davies
was going to pay for this investigation to reach its conclusions. I'd never met Mi•
klos Tailor until the day I walked into that office, but he embraced me, pinched
my cheek, welcomed another of his "brothers." He retired at the end of the Davies
case, you know, lived high off his inflated billings of the dead man's coffers for the
rest of his days.

And obviously, no expense was spared for his detectives on the case.
Davies
took priority over everything else, and whatever we asked for, we got two of. The
usual would-be divorces and adulterous this-and-that and suspected embezzlers
had to wait patiently because Tailor was going to make sure every last loose end of
this case was pursued, gathered, braided, and dipped in gold paint. The final re•
port he submitted to the solicitors, duly marked up and passed on to the executors
of the estate, ran to 2500 pages with photographs, individual biographies of the
multi-national bastards, transcripts of interviews with them, maps of their loca•
tions, letters of acceptance and name-change certificates, and on and on. You can
imagine the proportion of that report dedicated to the late Paul Caldwell.

More on that later. First though is our next interview. Say! What do you
think of that idea?
Our
interview, as in yours and mine, Macy! You could write
these up with you in a
participatory
role. You could be my Watson on the scene,
not just with the pen. Of course, not every scene, that wouldn't be realistic, and
we mustn't forget who's the main attraction here, no offence. But still, an assis•
tant, someone to ask me questions, to whom I can explain my reasoning and de•
ductions so the reader can follow along with some of the more twisty turns—this
has a nice ring to it. Let's see how it feels.

London had procured a little more information on Captain Marlowe, and
they'd arranged for me to pay the late Captain's parents a visit. First you and I ex•
amine the information they've dug up, a summary of various available military
records and the work of a couple of Tailor's local men snooping around to save
me time: