The Egyptologist (5 page)

him, talked him into this twice-daily escapade, and was himself stunned at the
tiger's break in discipline, and now was raising his whip and shouting at the cat,
but too late. The paw flashed again, and the suddenly headless penguin rocked in
place but didn't tip over, because the cat's other paw was pinning the flipper feet
to the sand. The tiger was about to enjoy the snack he'd just uncorked when he
felt the lash bite his back, and he turned with a roar on the man who'd both
whipped and fed him since his tiger-cub days. "You don't snarl at me, boy-ol"
shouted my ticket vendor, flogging with a fury. Only now did the two children in
the audience realise the penguin whose antics they'd just been admiring wasn't
well, as its head, beady-eyed and baffled, had come to rest on the red wooden wall
a few rows in front of them.

For reasons Mrs. Hoyt later explained to me as a matter of discipline for the
beasts and safety to their master, the cats were required to perform their entire
routine again, without fail, before they could be allowed out of the cage for their
meat reward. While the two children sobbed and their parents told them, "Now,
now, it's all just a trick," the tigers, growling and irritable, reviewed their tasks
and swatted at their man. Again the leaping, the rolling, the springing through
rings. Again they all lay down facing forward. Again the back hatch lifted. Again
a dramatic silhouette of a plump, banana-nosed fellow. And again a trained pen•
guin waddled in, expecting to win applause and a fresh fish. What this second
penguin thought as it passed the decapitated, dusty football of its colleague I can•
not say. "No! No! Fly away!" called the little boy to my left.

I only mention this scene, Mr. Macy, to illustrate the state of the circus by
1922, for I then watched two middle-aged Chinese contortionists twist them•
selves into the most peculiar shapes, to audience discomfort. I watched a single,
spangled trapeze man swing listlessly for a spell before just dropping onto his net
and from there to the ground, taking off his costume even as he was walking
away. All through it, a visibly disheartened man of sixty played an out-of-tune up•
right piano. From time to time he murmured with a pained seriousness at the
frightened children, "Ah, the circus! It's magical, just magical."

"He is classically trained, you know. He used to conduct our ten-piece orchestra,
in Paul's day," Paul Caldwell's chosen next of kin, Emma Hoyt, later told me, her face
drooping. Her business was at its very end, of course. I think she held on to it an•
other week, but I'd witnessed the death throes of the Flipping Hoyt Brothers Circus.
"In better days," she started most of her sentences, or "When my husband, Boyd,
was alive," or most interesting, "Paul would have hated to see things end like this."

A woman of forty-five or so, and not without her charms, she was still dressed
like a major in some brightly coloured army, her hair blond and compressed
under her red, cylindrical hat. She lit cigarette after cigarette, but didn't smoke
them. Her private caravan smelled of perfume, her performing dogs, wild animal
dung.

She was eager to talk about Paul Caldwell. I told her she might have inherited
some money from him, but she scolded me: "That's impossible. He's only miss•
ing." My notes are easily enough compiled for you, more or less as they must've
been said. (Do you think we should present polished stories with long speeches,
or just the fragments of my notes? The latter is more "real," I suppose, but the
reader wants to feel it's happening to him, if you see what I mean, Macy.)

"So many difficult memories are stirred to life by your visit, Mr. Ferrell. Paul
was the most wonderful thing ever to happen to this circus, his love of what we
did here. I thought of him every day, far away at war, fighting for just this, for the
magic of our circus. Oh, don't misunderstand me, I know the Germans have fine
circuses, too, but I'm sure the Kaiser was no enthusiast. We free people appreciate
things his kind could never tolerate.

"I wrote Paul when Boyd was called to his reward, told him I would do every•
thing to keep his circus ready for him. It was his for the taking, if he wanted, after
the War. He could have turned it around. Such devotion.

"Of course, you'll want to be hearing about the beginning. Paul came to us
when he was nineteen or twenty. Boyd discovered him, said he had extraordinary
natural talent. He had spotted Paul down in the market and followed him a bit,
clandestinely, watched him doing it. Then he pretended to walk in front of Paul,
unaware, pretended to bend over and tie his shoe, and when he stood up again, he
just grabbed Paul's wrist and took back his wallet. Of course, for a while, Boyd
pretended to be a copper, you understand, to put a scare up Paul. But then
Boyd sat off to the side, pointed to people to see if Paul could do it on demand.
Boyd was excited when he brought him back to our camp that day. And what a
beautiful boy he was, and intelligent as anyone I had ever known. He had been a
librarian, as I am sure you know.

"And that instant when Boyd led him to usl You see a face light up sometimes
in surroundings like ours, Mr. Ferrell. Something quite intoxicating washes over
certain people. Paul was like a little boy. He wanted to touch all the animals, even
the tigers. That was the thing about him that charmed one, you see. He knew so
very much about a few things, smart as anything, but he also did not know the
simplest things. He wandered around the camp. He walked inside the tent, and I

followed him. He gazed up at the tied-back trapezes, at all the seats. 'Haven't you
ever seen a circus, Paul Caldwell? Would you like a job with us?' You've never
seen such a happy face, and so handsome. 'The circus?' He asked me if I knew of
some Italian strongman, some performer he had heard of once. 'The circus,' he
kept whispering, like he had landed on the moon. I knew just how he felt."

"And when did he become your lover, Mrs. Hoyt?"
"I was married to Boyd, Mr. Ferrell."

"But I've the impression Mr. Hoyt was much older."

"Boyd was a clown, you know. I mean, professionally, by trade. He could
make you laugh so. He would do his 'shame face,' when, for example, he was
caught trying to steal a man's necktie, and he would close his eyes in this long
blink and shrug like he was a bad, bad, naughty clown, and people just loved it.
People loved him. Off the sawdust he was rather colder.

"Boyd had Paul clean out the cages, sell tickets, seat people. That was neces•
sary, of course, seating people. That let him put those who carried their wallets in
their trousers on the elevated seats so he could reach up from below during the
show. He performed a few times, a shocking magic and drama act for the evening
performances. Boyd thought we should try more sophisticated fare, so to open
the show after the entr'acte, Paul would come out dressed as a jungle explorer and
do a sort of pantomime where he pretended to fight off attackers, five of the big•
ger fellows done up as jungle blacks. They'd get the better of him, tie him down,
and then one of them brought out a snake. Nothing dangerous, just one of the
bigger pythons, and they circled round him and danced a bit and waved the
snake about and they bent over him, so the audience couldn't see what was hap•
pening, but we'd released the power of their imaginations! Then off ran the black
villains, one of them hiding the snake in his gown, so the audience couldn't see it,
they just saw Paul tied down, writhing in torment, you understand, and he strug•
gles and pulls one of his arms free, and then tears at his chest, he opens his shirt
and... and his chest bursts open and out comes the head of the snake! Oh, it was
a horrible sight, and women would faint, and the lights went out, and when they
came up, Paul took his bow. He had to do it then, before the call at the end, so peo•
ple would know he was alive and well. We used to play for such crowds, before
Boyd's stupidity. And Paul brought in so much money. He could put purses back,
after they'd been half-emptied, you see, so we rarely had complaints.

"Boyd thought like you, though. He was so certain this little boy was my lover.

And so he just spent his days down with the tigers, tossing them their meat with
a nasty face. But what did he think would happen? That the police would take

Paul away from me on Boyd's word but not tell the public that, at Flipping Hoyt,
thieves prowl under the seats?

"They arrested him during the show, without a fuss, I didn't even know it
happened. The first sign was when the native snake-men had to make up some
dance with each other, and then just wandered off with the snake while the crowd
looked confused and checked their watches, and then Wang and Songchuck were
up the pole, twisting on top of each other. 'What do you reckon has become of
Paul?' I asked Boyd after the show, and he just smoked and looked at me
strangely. And I knew. 'What did you do to him?' I was afraid he had done some•
thing horrible with the tigers. 'You vile old man, what did you do?' He wouldn't
speak to me, and it was days before I found Paul, but then the police wouldn't let
me see him. I kept at them for weeks, knocking every day on the door of this
brutish inspector. But they wouldn't let me see him. And then, one day, weeks
had passed, they told me he was gone, off to the War to avoid prison."

"You wrote to him when your husband died."

"That was 1917. Also to say I hadn't betrayed him, that it wasn't me who'd
turned him in. I was so afraid he blamed me. I didn't know where to send the let•
ter. I just sent it to the Department of Defence. I never heard a thing, until I had
the notification he was missing. He put me down as next of kin, you see. At that
moment, finally, I knew he was not angry with me, that he loved me still. And at
that same moment, I was told I'd lost him.

"Still, I thought I should find his real family. I went to that horrid librarian,
Paul had told me all about her. They had been, oh,
intimate,
you see, not his first
love,
more the case of an older woman taking advantage of a poor boy in need.
But she at least would know where to find his blood relations. Later, I had a sec•
ond letter from Defence saying they changed him from Missing to Dead, but they
didn't have a body or anything, it seemed just for filing. I so want him to find the
circus just as he left it... that poor penguin..."

Mr. Macy, our story today ends with a circus lady sobbing for her dead lover
and her dead circus and a dead bird. I waited for a bit to see if she'd pull herself to•
gether, but after a few minutes, the end was nowhere in sight, so I went on my way.

Two or three days later, I had a letter:

Mr. Ferrell. Your visit yesterday was a tonic for a tired woman. You
would set my mind at ease with any definitive information you unearth
as to Paul's Destiny. I should like to engage you, if that is how these mat•
ters are handled. If you should find him alive and if he is staying away

from us, amidst the Missing, for reasons of his own, please assure him
that I did not Betray him, would never, and that I love him. If he is gone
forever, please let me know what became of him. There is little left for me
here. I will go anywhere for him—please tell him that. I am soon to be•
come a tiger vendor, at least temporarily, and after that, I cannot say.

With that, Mr. Macy, I had a third client on this same case!

But what did I have of Paul (Caldwell) Davies to present to London? Well, un•
fortunately, crime. That would probably affect Davies's final settlement nega•
tively. And his volunteer enthusiasm for the War, it now seemed, may have been
a product of circumstance, the Australian Imperial Force being more inviting
than penal labour.

But I also had two new leads: Inspector Dahlquist, who'd arrested Paul Cald•
well and sent him off to die in Egypt rather than rot in prison, and Miss Cather•
ine Barry, the librarian who'd turned up in our tale twice so far, Paul's first lover.
The Davies Case was fast becoming a lucrative use of my time.

Which reminds me. I'll send you what I've written so far, so as not to delay
your progress speaking to publishers. I will, while awaiting your reply by Air
Mail, continue to transcribe my notes and letters.

I am your humble correspondent,
Harold Ferrell,

Private enquiries (retired)

Tuesday, 10 October, 1922.
Hotel of the Sphinx, Cairo

Journal:
Arrival in Cairo via rail from Alexandria. Set to work im•
mediately. Have scheduled five days in Cairo for logistics and back•
ground writing prior to heading south to site.

Book notes:
To begin at its proper beginning, the completed book
must have a frontispiece, protected by a transparent onion-skin over•
lay.
Frontispiece:
"The Royal Cartouche of King Atum-hadu, final king
of Egypt's Middle Kingdom, XIIIth Dynasty, 1660-1630 B.C." Assume
only scholarly readership? No—clarify for general readers that a car-