The Egyptologist (23 page)

Did Finneran think an Egyptian excavation was a safe investment? No, ha-ha,
of course not, not usually, but there were unique circumstances here, advantages:
"Trilipush found something during the War, with a friend of his, and it points
right to a very likely tomb. The details of it are complex. I can't say I understand
all the scholarly stuff. It's not like a treasure map, precisely, of course, you have to
know how to read the historical evidence, what have you, I don't claim to be a
scholar, but Trilipush explained it all and he more than convinced the group that,
as far as these things go, while there are never guarantees, everything points to a
fast and lucrative find."

Now all of this new information placed me in a bit of a predicament, you'll
notice if you stop thinking like his great-nephew for a minute and start thinking
like my assistant again, Macy. See, I knew enough to stop that wedding right then
and there: lies about Oxford, questions about military records, trouble with his
Harvard chief. And what would follow from dropping a bomb like that? Well,
here's a tip, Macy: it's never quite clear just who'll get blown up in situations like
this one. Think for a minute, because you should know how our business oper•
ates by now. First, I needed my questions answered, and I can't get answers from
an angry, panicked ex-father-in-law-to-be. Second, you and I are in a business that
works by the clock; we can't make a living selling
information;
we sell
time.
So,
later in this conversation, when we proposed to Mr. Finneran that he become our
new client, we set his expectations that a background investigation of his daugh•
ter's fiance would take some weeks. And, finally, information (and the time it
takes to collect it) only has value if the buyer will pay for it. If I started telling
Finneran the truth that day, he'd've seen me out the door in a rage. It was clear
to
me from day one that Finneran never wanted to hear anything
true
about his
Trilipush, and later events proved me correct in this. No, I saw plain that
Finneran would pay for
reassurance.
And a sensitive detective provides his clients
what they need and will pay for. Lesson from Ferrell: satisfied clients pay.

Finally, between you and me as men, Macy, I didn't want to cause any pain,
and that's the truth. It was clear that I was going to have to head off to Egypt to
get to the bottom of the Caldwell and Marlowe deaths anyway, and to interrogate
Trilipush about them. So I wanted an address and an itinerary for Trilipush, and
that was all. There was nothing to be gained that day by revealing word one
about English sodomists or fine young Australian men dead in the desert while
English captains who lied about their education turned up safe and sound in
Boston winning the hearts of incredibly beautiful young women and spending
honest men's money. No, I could be back on a boat, to Alexandria, in six days, and

I'd no interest in bothering your family any more than absolutely necessary to
have my information and to soothe your great-uncle's worries for a fee. Finneran
gave me Trilipush's address in Cairo, loaned me a copy of the expedition's in•
vestor prospectus to read while I was staying at the Parker House, and we shook
hands. I said I'd have a preliminary background report for him in a few days, per•
haps longer.

Do I wish your family's story ended there, Macy? Part of me does, that's the
truth. But it's hard. If I hadn't taken him on as a client, if I'd just walked out the
door, read the prospectus at my hotel, had a bellboy return it for me, set off for
New York the next day and Egypt five days later, what would've ended different?
It's a hard score to tally up for certain, no matter what everyone's recollections
say, and I'd sure like to read anything else you might've found after your aunt's
death, any letters or journals that'd help me understand what else you know
about all this. But one thing
is
certain: if your aunt had married Ralph Trilipush,

a lot of lives were going to be built on lies in that household, and that's worse than
anything. My actions prevented that. I'm proud of that. The fellow lucky enough
to marry your aunt Margaret certainly owes me some gratitude. And I'm sure,
after a while, she recalled my services fondly as well. I saved her, at a steep cost to
myself.

As it was, I was walking down the main hall, picking up my coat, when Mar•
garet interrupts us at the door, those little dogs weaving in between our ankles,
and she says she wants to offer me a lemonade, it's rude of Daddy to shove me out
the door without one, so she'll entertain me now and see me out after that. Her
father laughs, indulges her as easy as breathing, shakes my hand, and retreats to
his study, but leaves the door open.

Now, your aunt had three moods, if I may be honest. I grew to know her
pretty well over the nearly two months I stayed in Boston, conducting my inves•
tigations. I don't know what she might've told you over the years. I don't compli•
ment myself that I made a permanent impression on her, but at the time, I won't
say she was indifferent to me.

Three moods: afternoons, like the day I met her, she was a sharp one. She
could make you laugh, she could charm you, she could treat you like you were
someone fascinating, and of course, she was a rich young woman (or so it ap•
peared, I didn't yet see the plastered-over cracks in her father's world), and the at•
tentions of rich young women do feel nice; I know enough of human psychology
to know that's a pretty unbreakable law. That afternoon, she sat in front of the
fire with her little dogs, the three of them all curled up together on a sort of long

sofa across from me, and she says, "Now let's have a lemonade, and you can tell
me all about Australia, where everyone eats kangaroos, right?" And she gave me
such a little look, well, no one could've resisted that invitation. And while you
wouldn't've taken her pretended ignorance seriously, you would've taken her
very seriously as a woman, even though she was probably only twenty or a bit
more. How much could she've known of the world at twenty? Nothing, you'd
think. But then how'd she have such charm? The rich, the rich, the rich, even the
new ones. They have their ways. Of course, I'm singing to the choir, aren't I,
Macy?

She questioned me with a sly look in her eye, that afternoon, about my busi•
ness in the USA, and I told her very little, just asked if her beloved ever men•
tioned an Australian soldier named Paul Caldwell. No, she'd never heard the
name. I did tell her a bit about poor old Paul the Egypt lover, what life's like when
you're not born with every advantage, as she and Trilipush'd been. "Oh, Mr. Fer¬
rell, you are shaming me terribly," she said, pretending to look ashamed. "But
Daddy, you know, came over here with almost nothing, so it's not how you think
at all. We're really very simple people." She smiled, not simple at all, I'll never for•
get it. She had a way about her, that one did.

I asked her how she met Trilipush, how they came to be engaged, and did she
mind if I took notes.

"Oh, wonderful! Really, I wish
everyone
took notes when I spoke! Well, you
don't know Ralph? Oh, he's just
everything,
you know. The fellows I meet around
Boston, they're not made of the same stuff, honest. I've had a few of Daddy's man•
agers look at me a certain way, some of the higher-up boys at the store, and there
are some jazz men in a few of the places I go now and again, when Daddy and
Inge let me, and there are some of Daddy's business associates, J. P. O'Toole and
them, but Ralph, well, he's a whole other
world,
like out of storybooks for little
girls.
All my girlfriends say I must be pinching myself. He's an explorer, you know,
and from a family of explorers, and practically English nobility, but not the rich
kind, and his accent—I mean you have a lovely accent too, Harry, but different.

And he's all alone in the world, his parents have died and he was an only child,
but he had these wonderful friends at University in England, and one of them, his
best friend, got killed at the end of the War, and Ralph was so heartsick, he just
wanted to leave it all behind, even his country estate, which costs more money to
keep up than he's got, although he can always go back and open it up again if he
wants to, and we might end up living there for a bit after the wedding. Anyway,
after the War he came here to finish his book, which was a big hit, considering,

you know, that it's
history,
and then he started teaching at Harvard, which is the
college here, and quite the best one in all of America, and now he'd rather live in
America and write and teach, and after this expedition, he's going to
have pots
of
money, believe me, if you knew about this Egyptian stuff like Ralph does, you
have to know where to look, but gold is just
sitting
under the sand over there."

The fascinating thing about this little speech, Macy, was that while I didn't
doubt she thought it was true, she said it with such a tone, this little smile on her
lips, as if to say that none of it meant a
thing to
her, not as long as I was there with
her—not that I was so impressive, just that a part of her (afternoon) charm was
that she'd never make you think her own fiance mattered to her more than you,
whoever you were, sitting with her just then. Maybe it was only for me, of course,
and I'm sure I liked the idea that it was, at the time. She dazzled a bit, your aun•
tie.

I repeated my question: how'd she meet this hero of our time? In her version,
she had them engaged
before
the question of her father's money ever arose, before
the investment meeting, but she did know that Trilipush would please her father,
and her father strongly supported the engagement, even if she had some doubts
at the beginning.
She
had doubts? "Well, sure, I mean he is from a whole other
world, maybe a little Boston thing like me..." And here, I thought, in her false
modesty, she was skirting a hidden truth. I suspected she might've had some hes•
itations for
good
reason, something she could only sense but not yet say. I don't
compliment myself too much to say my presence helped her make comparisons,
but it was clear that if she talked enough to a fellow totally unlike Trilipush, she
might start realising a few things about how honest men reacted to her, and to
women in general. She added: "And I did Daddy a favour by bringing Ralph to his
club. I mean, I got to show him Ralph before one of the big museums funded
him."

Who was the poor, dead friend from the War? "Oh, yes, another archaeologist,
his best friend from Oxford. Get a load of this name, Harry: Captain Hugo St. John
Marlowe. Well, during the War, they were always taking leaves to go do their dig•
ging, and once he and Marlowe found this thing together—very mysterious name,
Fragment C—and they thought they could guess where a tomb would be as a re•
sult of it, a tomb just positively filled with gold and art. They were going to look for
the tomb together the next chance they could, but then Ralph got sent off to fight

in Turkey, which was just
awful,
while Marlowe had to stay in Egypt and wait,
which he did, of course, because they were best
chums
from Oxford, and blood
brothers, but for a while in Turkey, Ralph was separated from his men, and back in

Egypt they actually thought he was
dead,
and Ralph had to make it home practi•
cally alone, and when he finally made his way back to Egypt, well just a few days
before that, poor
Marlowe
had gone missing, but had left this Fragment C in his
tent, and Ralph took it for safekeeping, not knowing if Marlowe was alive or not,
and then when he had to accept that Marlowe was dead, Ralph just wanted to put
all the pain of the War behind him, so he brought Fragment C with him to
Boston, and that's what made his scholarly reputation and got him a job at Har•
vard, and— oh, just listen to me go on. You can imagine the effect of all these ad•
venture stories on a naive young Boston girl, Harry."

Indeed I could, but Margaret was simply not a naive young girl, and so I ac•
tually had a bit of trouble imagining the effect they had on her. Did she know she
was repeating something absolutely ludicrous? Did it not occur to her that the
story was filled with lies and impossibilities and probably hid two corpses in its
forged folds? People conveniently missing in Turkey and Egypt? Loyal friends
waiting for each other before trying to dig up and share pots of gold? Treasure
maps readily available in missing men's tents? Did she think I believed it? And,
Macy, I must stress that I didn't tell her anything of my suspicions. I was hon•
ourable to my clients and to the innocent. Judge me from this: I could've sold out
Trilipush a thousand times to your aunt, but I didn't.

But, for the record, here's what I was thinking, and pretty canny, if you ask me:
if indeed there was a hidden fortune in a hole that Marlowe and Trilipush had
found, it was looking more and more that Trilipush—impoverished landed gen•
try with forged academic records—had killed Marlowe for it and then escaped to
America while the heat died down. There he made enough of a showy reputation
for himself among the local gullibles to manipulate some money to go back and
dig up his treasure. And now, 1922, he plainly would
never
be coming back to
Boston from this second expedition. This girl had been used, her family money
taken on the strength of his English manner, and now he was done with her.
Aside from her money, what else
would
he want with her? He was certainly an in•
vert, like Marlowe and Quint, I knew that even then, before I'd met him. Then it
occurred to me: probably he'd been Marlowe's high-class fancy man
before
going
off to Egypt; probably Trilipush was Marlowe's discreetly kept amusement all the
way back at Oxford, not a student obviously, just living in Marlowe's world, tak•
ing Marlowe's money in exchange for illicit affections. That explained witnesses
to his presence there but no official record. Then Trilipush joins up for the War
with Marlowe in exchange for continued payments, and heads off to Egypt with
him, where they gallivant about in the English fashion. But then he gets sent to