The Egyptologist (42 page)
installed through the whole place." The whole place? Yes, indeed: yes•
terday Carter, Lord Carnarvon, and Milord's daughter, Lady Some•
thing, and some Inspector from Antiquities burrowed to the end of
their rubbish tunnel and found another door, behind which (damn their
speed—they must be recklessly hammering the things down) is quite a
scene, evidently, though the natives are much too pleased with knowing
something to reveal it easily. If the blacks are to be trusted, little King
Tut-ankh-Amen, missing these 3200 years, has turned up bearing stat•
ues, gold, chariots, jewels, vases, thrones, couches, clothing,
manikins—no end of treasures, says one of the chattier workers. Imag•
ine, I say to him, taking him by the shoulders, what a truly
significant
king at the
end
of a dynasty carrying
everything
with him into his tomb
might reveal! He is understandably astounded at the prospect, as the
whole world will be.
Of course with a Lord Carnarvon bankrolling you, rather than the
idiot prince of American shopkeepers, events oil themselves, but as an
unhappy fellow I once knew used to say
ad nauseam,
"The rich will al•
ways make it easy for the rich; the working man who wants to do it on
his own has to fight."
By the time I found Carter in this carnival, he was locking a
wooden grille at the base of his stairs and he was escorting his guests —
rich and malleable father and daughter—up the sixteen sacred steps.
His tie and jacket, his moustaches trimmed—always dapper, our
Carter. Look how he carries himself at this moment, as he closes and
locks the tomb which has so far—
do far
—outshone my own. Look at his
style as he guides his dim-witted patrons up and away from what they
scarcely comprehend. He lets them glimpse their winnings, but not
muck up the works. Look at his trouble-free, effortless mastery of his
site, his men, his patrons, even his own excitement. Surely he has dis•
covered more than most men do in a career, and even as he greets me,
he neither gloats nor hides, seems not to imply anything at all. "Ah,
Trilipush," he says as he steps to the top of the staircase. "Trilipush,
yes, of course."
"Carter! What news, old boy?"
"Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn, allow me to present Professor Trili•
push. He is the translator of the putative [sic] king Atum-hadu, some•
thing of an Egyptian scholar, and currently visiting the country, seeing
the sights of Thebes."
Two soggy handshakes follow. The Earl is a fop of the lanky, good-
natured, imbecilic variety, too big to be a lapdog, too stupid to be a gar•
den ornament. He walks and talks with a limp and a lisp, products of a
motoring accident. "Excellent, excellent," he says, "must read up on
your work. Fascinating, those apocryphal ones."
"Not quite suitable for Lady Evelyn," interjects Carter.
Carter wears a homburg and carries a walking stick, not unlike my
own. The moustaches must take effort: trimming, wax, whatnot. "So,
great marvels underground?" I ask. "Might one get a professional look-
see!
"Oh, you are a colleague. You can well imagine how unstable things
are down there right now."
"Curse talk," mutters His Gimpiness, out of the blue, as Carter
marches us to the perimeter of the site. "The natives are all buzzing
with rumours of spells and curses, wonderful stuff. All agog with talk
of Tut protected by evil magic. Marvellous, don't you agree, to live with
such potent belief? Makes one think we lack something—" But by then
someone was calling for Carter and he was unable to chat, which I well
understood, a fellow in that first moment of excitement, far be it from
me to get in his way.
The bank is not yet aware of a new letter of credit.
Poste restante
is overflowing with letters. Rent due on Villa Trilipush
1 December. Invoices from the Hotel of the Sphinx for suite during
November as well as for the sheets, towels, robes that they lent me.
I returned to the villa for tedious but necessary task of examining
the accounts books and budgets, perhaps cutting some expenses.
Strange, but Finneran's fumbling of a simple task (and Margaret's fail•
ure to apply pressure to him) have resulted in
me
resembling
him,
ob•
sessed with money, which the gentleman of course knows to ignore as
an element of life's background, like plumbing. But this, as my father
used to say, is invariably wha t results when good blood marries bad: a
counteraction.
Rent, men' s salaries for last week that Ahmed wa s so eloquent
about. I will need also to hire a new team. I wor k late, planning,
rechecking the accounts, redrafting budgets. The money is not there. It
is extraordinary that Carter has had such luck
now,
after all those years
wandering about.
He comes to my villa just before I go to sleep. He apologises for in•
truding, all smiles and excuses, seems a bit embarrassed, declines a
drink. "Simply came to tell yo u how much I admire you r work," he
says. "Your brilliant translations, analysis. Couldn' t be prouder than to
call yo u brother. My little tomb is something of a tribute to yo u and
you r persistence. Easy pickings, really, a target like Tut, nothing but
road signs all the way, tomb practically uncovered itself, but, Ralph —
may I call yo u Ralph? —you are in
terra
very
incognita,
very
mysterioso
and profound, can' t quite say I'd be able to do i t myself, wouldn' t kno w
how. Also, oh, yes, also wanted to tell yo u Lady Evelyn asked after you
in a very curious manner whe n we parted this evening. Told her yo u
were engaged to be married in America to an heiress, and her face just
fell, old boy, just fell, sad to see. Pity, too—the girl's worth about all the
tea in China, and her dad, well, he's good to have on you r side, the Earl
is, holds about 36,000 acres. You should fall in love with Lady Evelyn,
i f yo u wan t my opinion."
"If only love were so easy," I call after him as he disappears into the
night.
Tuesday, 28 November, 1922
Cable from CCF : CARTER NOT ON YOUR TEAM? PAPERS ARE FULL OF
HIM —HE IS NOT YOURS? CATALOG OUR FIND AT ONCE. IS CARTER AC•
CEPTING INVESTMENT? ADVISE.
There is a disturbing moment whe n yo u han d the boy the cable
reply slip and instinctively expect him to answer it, whe n of course he
is only a mute conduit. It is like shouting into a deaf and deafening
wind. And yet one can hear a distant echo, read something in the boy's
blank face: CCF is done with me. In the end, trusting others always
leads to this, always. Yet you are always surprised by those who snort
after grubby self-interest and will spend anything for it, will spend
love, will abandon you to any risk if it saves them even an instant's
trouble.
On the difficulty of trusting one's financial backers:
"Professor
Trilipush," I remember him saying, just after the other investors had
left our June meeting, "if you would have one more moment for me, it
would be much appreciated." I remarked his sudden politeness, as no
matter what you think of Chester Crawford Finneran,
gentlemanly
does
not usually jump to mind. "I'm wonderin' if you could gimme yer opin•
ion of my personal collection." His tiny, agate eyes wandered just over
my shoulder, and his cigar tip flared and faded. "I know there'll be piles
of gold in our Pharaoh's grave, mummies and everything, as you de•
scribed so elegantly just now to the fellows. But I'd like to show you
other aspects, those fine arts, plastic arts, sculptural and graphical, al•
though maybe less likely to show up in museum collections due to de•
bate over interpretation. More of interest to a private collector. As I
know you know. More functional." On and on dithered this mono•
logue, and I nodded noncommittally. "You of all men, of any scholar,
will surely understand." Finneran picked at an invisible thread near his
waist.
He led me into his study and stood at the bookshelf behind his desk,
from which he repeatedly half-withdrew and then replaced one volume,
rocking it on the bottom edge of its spine as if he were unable to decide
whether he wanted to remove it. Leaving it, sighing in his increasing
discomfort, he turned to me and crossed his arms. "It's simply a ques•
tion, see, of your, your, uh . . ." He reached up to stroke his thick mous•
taches and mutton chops, but those still existed only in the portrait of
him hanging on his study wall. He followed my eyes to the picture.
"You always been clean-shaven? I can't get used to it." He put his
smouldering cigar, glowing and askew like a lightning-startled tree
trunk, in an ashtray and returned to pushing and pulling that same
book halfway off the shelf. He called on Jesus to perform a specific ac•
tion on a particular Boston-Irish carpenter. He pushed and pulled the
book with frantic energy, over and over again, cursing.
"What's the book, CCF?"
"Milking mother of Christ, I will roast him alive," he mumbled,
rocking it madly back and forth.
"Hello, Daddy. Is your meeting over?" She had appeared unheard
behind us. "Hello, Ralphie. How'd you make out with Boston's pluto•
crats?"
"My lovely darling," I say. "You are a sight of unimaginable beauty."
"We're busy. Scram," snarls the ever-engaging master of the house,
crouching now and rounding his gorilla rear for our delectation, for
when I turned back from her I found CCF on his knees, tipping his
head, browsing a lower shelf, well below the book he had been massag•
ing when she interrupted.
"A rose of the finest colour," I continued, "the walking fragrance of
springtime." And she was that day, damn everything, and healthy, too.
I should have turned on my heel, ignored my monstrous patron and his
driving urges, and simply swept her up there and then. I could have
taken her off right then, ended all this right where it mattered most,
forgotten all the rest of this and just won her as my wife. No, no, she
would never have had me, not then, not without a victory. But she was
clean and clear that day. She will be still, if I can somehow win the
chance to be back with her, successful somehow.
"I'm sorry for the interruption, Perfesser," says Finneran and sum•
mons Inge to pull Margaret out of the room and haul her around the
Garden for some fresh air. The moment the oak door shut on his den he
was back on his feet, furiously tipping that first book up and down
again. An instant later there was a scratching at the locked door that
provoked in Finneran a sort of spasm in his back and cheek. "Christ's
kidneys and spleen!" he shouted, or some such Celto-Catholic non•
sense, and vaulted past me to open the door, but it was only one of
Margaret's spaniels, who paid dearly for the interruption.
"Finally!" he bellowed, after returning to his hypnotic task, as the
bookshelf emitted an audible click and moved a fraction of an inch, dis•
lodged by some spring mechanism under that sluggish book. Finneran
put his shoulder to one edge of the bookcase and turned the whole six-
shelf structure on its centre axis, opening it enough for him to squeeze
his girth through. He beckoned me to follow. With the portal closed
again behind us (apparently relying on that same untrustworthy spring
to release us someday), he switched on a row of electric lights.
"Perfesser, the Finneran Collection of Fine Art," he intoned, waving
grandly at the glass cases and racks of portfolios in the brick-lined en•
closure in which we stood. "Perfesser, great civilisations have, as I'm
sure yer aware ... " And on and on wheezed the justifying drone, the
text of which I need not write here, since it varies so little from one to
another member of his pitiful community. Finneran's loot was not bad,
of type, and quite varied, though he had miscalculated embarrassingly
when he assumed my work with Atum-hadu had any relationship to
this hodgepodge. He adjusted the focus of the small electric lamps that
lit from above the six or eight glass cases, each holding eight or ten
pieces: stone Incan crocodiles grinning as they unfurled themselves
over Guatemalan virgins; Ming dynasty urns, blue on white, the un•
robed emperor squatting on concubines, ortolans performing nonculi¬
nary stuffing functions; multi-limbed bronze Hindu goddesses
engorged, engaged, entwined; a slab of what appeared to be ivory or
bleached wood crowded every which 'way with carved pictures of
huskie dogs, seal flippers, fur-ringed faces grinning in closed-eye rap•
ture. "Inuit. The Eskimo people of Greenland," commented the mad
curator. "On whalebone." And then we were examining the leather
portfolios, each embossed, bless his knotted heart, with the words THE
FINNERAN COLLECTION. "Works on paper," he declared as he deli•
cately revealed his treasures: first a series of Georgian engravings of
roast-beef-cheeked, periwigged scowlers examining the scullery staff
for personal ailments; then: "Japanese. Woodcuts," and his inkspot
eyes examined me as he flipped slowly through a series of ornate prints
that told the story of a samurai and the village women who served him,
much sheathing and unsheathing of swords, grasping of topknots, et
