The Egyptologist (58 page)

But that red-haired fellow is lurking about again, and CCF and I
watch as he loses interest, again some 200 yards down the path from
us. The strangest sort of pursuer—inefficient, purposeless, but still
clumsily menacing my work. He is utterly unrelated to anything impor•
tant, but he seems devotedly intent on being in my way. At last he put•
ters off, and CCF sends me to run our errands.

On the afternoon of the 30th our patience is rewarded at last, Macy! I'm back
at my hotel after again staking out Trilipush's excavation site across the river to
no avail. And now, all at once, Trilipush moves from invisible to omnipresent.
The riverboat office calls: reservations were made just now for Trilipush and
Finneran on the boat north to Cairo for Monday, the 1st of January. A wire is de•
livered to me from Cairo: they've received word at the Hotel of the Sphinx to ex•
pect Messrs. F and T for the evening of January 2nd. And then a knock on the
door: one of my little Luxor bandits, his palm out. "Bock Sheesh," he says, the
local greeting. "Bock Sheesh," I reply. "What news?" His palm remained out•
stretched. Of course: as soon as his hand had been suitably weighed down with
money, its connecting pulley system opened his mouth: Trilipush had come to
the post office an hour before, had received nothing and sent nothing, and he was
now sitting not thirty feet from my very hotel!

I ran after the boy down the stairs, out into the blinding sun, and across the
street. I hid behind a palm tree. My heart was beating hard. Any moment now I
would at last meet the devil who'd slaughtered the Australian boy and the En•
glish officer, the swine who'd broken the heart of that wondrous girl, your aunt. I
recalled a picture of him she'd shown me, his arm round Marlowe's shoulder.
Trilipush had looked an ordinary man with sandy hair, but with something
greedy and immoral around the mouth and eyes. I looked now where the boy was
pointing, but I saw no Trilipush. "There, he is there." The boy pointed again to a
bearded man in native garb, staring at a drink at a shaded cafe table. "You're cer•
tain?" "Certain, yes. The man at the post said. I follow him here. He takes drink, I
go to you."

And here we were, Macy, after all this time, racing so many thousands of
miles across the globe, probing events of years before, chasing the dreams and
nightmares of so many clients, often not even knowing myself that this man here

was the man I was seeking,
this
was the man whose crimes would become famous
only three decades later thanks to you and me right now.

"Mr. Trilipush, I presume?" I stood before him with the sun behind me, a
tried and true method to disorient an interrogatee.

He looked up. "Ah, the dogged Mr. Ferrell. I'm a busy man. I've only a few
minutes for a drink. Join me if you must, but do let's be brief about it." The effect
was astonishing, Macy, I confess it. The brilliance of criminals must never be de•
nied, otherwise it's the detective's pride getting the better of him, you see. And he
was
clever: he'd known me, a total stranger, at a glance, God knows how, and
hadn't shown the slightest surprise that I was standing before him in the middle
of Egypt, and had recognised him, considering.

For he looked horrible. Whatever he'd once been—in the spring of their
fraudulent affair, when he'd wooed Margaret with smoke and mirrors—she never
would've wanted this filthy thing, that's certain. He was dressed in a torn robe,
dirt-stained and spattered with blood and tied with bits of rope knotted together,
and he wore a single, broken boot, his other foot just a mass of crusted, yellowing
bandages. His beard and hair were matted, and his face was tanned unevenly, and
simply covered with dirt elsewhere, and one of his eyes was blackened and
swollen, and his cheek and forehead bruised and cut quite badly. I nearly pitied
him, Macy, but then I was put in mind of the filthy home where a promising
young Aussie boy had grown up, the same boy murdered by this pom sitting in
front of me. And my pity vanished.

My God, how he stank, Macy. He stank of rot, of tombs, of his own filth, I
don't know. Probably of his ghastly, bootless leg. At the end of our talk, when he
stood and hobbled away, he was practically a one-legged man. Yet, for all this hor•
ror, most maddening of all, most certain to eliminate any trace of pity I might
possibly have felt for him, he still spoke as if he were completely unaware of his
appearance, with all the dismissive bite and insane, unjustifiable snobbery of the
English upper classes, all that distaste for real people, the generations of con•
gealed hatred he'd been born with in his blood, that made him feel superior to the
rest of us. You could hear what this stinking criminal thought of us Aussies: that
pom bastard voice that makes colonials act like servants and servants act like
blacks and blacks pick up rifles and revolt. And of course there was absolutely
that something extra in his manner: the peculiar singsong of the invert, although
it was greatly subdued, no doubt from the habit of hiding his nature.

The questions crowded my head, and I had to take a moment to organise my
thoughts, so I told him to order me a beer, which he did in the local lingo. And

then I plunged in, asking questions as they occurred to me, all my clients' inter•
ests mixed up, and the criminal answered each one so rapidly that I knew he'd
been prepared for me. Finneran had betrayed me to this filthy wreck, no question.
There must've been heaps of gold, that was sure.

Now recall my position as I circled Trilipush: I couldn't hope he'd quickly
confess to the killings, reveal the whereabouts of the bodies. Four years on, he was
too set in his lies, relying on the passage of time, the weakness of pressing physi•
cal evidence. No, instead I had to provoke him, like a bull, until in his anger he
wrote his crimes on his face. Snares had to be laid, and in my words (transcribed
only a few hours later, so I don't doubt their accuracy for an instant), you'll see
those snares tightening around our hare. Note that I do not hesitate to transcribe
his every insult and verbal charge at me: you must see in them his thrashing
against the hook setting deeper in his lip. His arrogance undoes him, so I include
every word, no matter what he throws at me. You must understand, as a man of
the investigative sciences, that I extracted my own feelings from the proceedings,
allowed him to fire off at shadows. A good lesson for you, Macy: the detective
uses his own hollowed-out form as bait, makes of himself a tarman against which
the criminal rages, ensnaring himself in the process.

"Strangest thing, Mr. Trilipush. I try to understand your life story, what I've
heard from your friends and admirers. I can't follow it. I keep putting two and
two together and stubbornly getting five. Now how do you explain that?"

"Perhaps your maths tutor spent too much of your study time buggering you,
ducks."

"Very good, and an interesting choice of verb, from what I hear of you."
"Are we almost through, Mr. Ferrell?"

"Did Mr. Finneran find you last week?"
"He did. How did you know he was here?"
"Where's Mr. Finneran today?"

"We're to meet later. He's making arrangements for our departure Monday.

We divided the errands."

"Departing Egypt? To points unknown?"
"If you consider Boston unknown."

"You're returning to Boston? What of Mr. Finneran's outstanding debts?"
"Everything Mr. Finneran does is outstanding, and in this case he has in•

vested wisely, as have his partners."

"Oh, then congratulations are in order. You've had good luck on your excava•
tion?"

"Unparalleled. You will read about it all someday and tell your grandchildren
that you met me once, and they will weep with wonder. They may even love you
for it."

"Where's the treasure now?"

" 'Treasure'? That's a charming term, you colonial imbecile. The
artefacts
and
obzhaydarr
and
furniture
and
manuscripts
and
mummies
are in the tomb, under•
going preservation."

"Might I have a tour of that tomb?"

"You might, yes, as soon as it is opened to the public."

To draw him out of his defensive posture, I provoked with a lie, although very
near the truth: "Beverly Quint says you and Marlowe were lovers."

He stared at me a moment, then continued unfazed. "I do not know Miss
Quint, though she sounds charming, so I cannot imagine what would motivate
her to make such a statement. I am beginning to have the impression that you are
confusing me with someone else, Mr. Ferrell. Are we nearly finished?"

Unfazed, yes, but you'll admit that this is a peculiar response: he pretends not
to know his old fancy friend Quint, when there is no reason to hide that. Don't let
it shake you: this sort of confusion appears often in climactic interrogations with
holdout liars. They grow confused themselves, cannot remember which lies
they've told to which people, so like children, they begin to throw dust all about.
It's crucial here that the detective hold tight to what he knows to be true. With
Trilipush's lies biting their own tails, I pressed harder: "Why's there no mention
of you at Oxford, Professor?"

"I've no idea. I can only presume that you, like any number of easily im•
pressed primitive peoples, smell great conspiracies in clerical errors."

"I see. Of course. Then can you explain to this primitive why Captain Mar•
lowe's parents, family of your dearest friend, say they've never met you?"

And at last he was silenced. "They said that?"

"They did, Mr. Trilipush. You even know their names?"
"Of course. Priapus and Sappho. Are the old dears well?"
"Yes. No. They're named Hector and Regina."

"Are they? How odd."

"Why hasn't the British War Office got a record on your military career?"
"Haven't they? Absentminded of them."

"Not at all, Trilipush. I believe your military record was expunged by the au•
thorities, desperate to cover over yet another Wartime English crime."

"Crime?"

He was infuriating even in his reduced and battered state, everything that is
to be despised in the English. He was as visibly horrified by my presence as Mar•
lowe's father had been; he mocked me with his voice and accent as easily as Quint
had; he was as uninterested in the harm he'd done in his life as old Barnabas
Davies. I wanted to crush him, squeeze his throat. I was supposed to be im•
pressed by
him?
By a stinking, matted beggar with one boot? They're just men,
Macy: killers, Englishmen, the rich: they're just men.

I approached from a different angle. "Who's Paul Caldwell?"
"I've never heard the name."

"He was an Australian soldier lost with Captain Marlowe."

"I have never quite understood the policeman's tendency to ask questions
only to answer them himself a moment later."

And then, Macy, I played my ace. I showed him, simply as a spur to conversa•
tion, Tailor HQ's transcribed report from British military records (I believe I al•
ready sent you a copy of this, but reproduce it again for our readers):

Captain Hugo St. John Marlowe left base camp at Cairo on 12 No•
vember, 1918, on four-day pass. Did not return on 16 November.
Searches initiated 18 November revealed nothing. Interviews with offi•
cers, men, revealed nothing of significance. March 1919, natives ap•
peared asking for reward, having found Capt. Marlowe's identity disks
and those of Corporal P. B. Caldwell (AIF), as well as an AIF Lee-Enfield

.303 rifle. Natives reported finding these objects near Deir el Bahari.
Renewed interviews revealed no knowledge of any relationship be•
tween Captain Marlowe and Corporal Caldwell, though AIF records
show Capt. Marlowe twice took unusual step of recommending promo•
tions for Caldwell to Capt. T. J. Leahy (AIF), Caldwell's company com•
mander.

He looked up, pushed the sheet back to me. "And?"
"What happened to those two men, Professor?"

Watch him rise to the bait, Macy: "Oh, for Christ's sake, Ferrell, listen to me
once and for all: I did not return to Egypt—surely, surely you know this, you
clever little man—until December 1918. And you want me to explain your scrib•
bled document? How could I? But fine. You purport to be a detective, so use your
head, Ferrell. I can think of a hundred explanations for something as vague as this
without breaking a sweat."