The Labyrinth of Osiris (33 page)

Samuel Pinsker was a completely new name to him. Ben-Roi had provided links to a handful of internet references, but they had offered little beyond the fact that Pinsker was British, had been involved in archaeological work in the Theban Necropolis, had gone missing in 1931 and had suffered from some sort of chronic facial disfigurement. Even the dramatic discovery of his corpse in 1972, at the bottom of a remote shaft tomb way out in the western massif, seemed to have attracted only passing interest, most of it focused on lurid supposition as to the lonely, lingering death its owner must have endured. He had lived and worked in Egypt, and met his end in the hills above the Valley of the Kings – beyond that Khalifa could find no obvious tie-in with the case details Ben-Roi had furnished.

Egyptian police records had proved more informative. And, also, more intriguing.

The fact that there even
were
extant records had been a surprise. It had all happened a long time ago – a very long time, in the case of Pinsker’s disappearance – and Khalifa had half expected whatever case notes had once existed to have long since been lost or destroyed. Fortunately the Egyptian police’s fixation not simply with creating paperwork, but with hoarding it – usually so irksome to Khalifa – had in this instance worked in his favour. It had taken him a while to track down what he needed, but he’d eventually run it to ground the day before yesterday. Two batches of notes – one relating to the finding of Pinsker’s body, the other to his original disappearance – the pair of them bound together with string and tucked away on a shelf in a government storage facility down in Esna.

Moving carefully so as not to disturb the man praying on the floor, Khalifa lifted the plastic bag at his feet and pulled out the files.

The one from 1972 was by far the larger of the pair. Half of it was taken up with a wad of black-and-white photographs: of the tomb – a deep shaft with a simple rock-cut burial chamber opening off the bottom, of Pinsker’s mummified body in situ, of the body on a mortuary slab. There was a pathologist’s report, a detective’s report, statements from the couple who had discovered the corpse, even a report by a Dr Geoffrey Reeves, an expert in Theban tomb architecture, analysing the dimensions and cutting of the tomb and concluding it dated from the New Kingdom, almost certainly Eighteenth Dynasty. At the bottom of the pile, the last item in the folder, was a letter from a Mrs Yahudiya Aslani of the Egypt Jewish Welfare Committee. It agreed, in the absence of living relatives, to accept charge of Pinsker’s body for burial in Cairo’s Bassatine Cemetery. ‘Although unfortunately, due to financial constraints, we are unable to provide a headstone.’

The 1931 file – a real history piece, its eighty-year-old contents yellowed with age – was much sparser. Despite that, it was the one that had immediately drawn Khalifa’s attention.

There were statements from a number of people who’d known and associated with Pinsker, the longest and most detailed of them from a woman named Ommsaid Gumsan, the owner of the room Pinsker had been renting in Kom Lolah.

On the night of his disappearance, the Englishman had apparently only just returned to Luxor after an absence of almost three months – he often did that, she explained, disappeared for weeks on end before suddenly turning up again out of the blue, which was why she always insisted on rent in advance. She had heard his motorbike pulling up in the alley at the back of the house some time in the early hours. He hadn’t actually entered the building, and there had been no sign of him the following morning, although his motorbike had still been there, its rear panniers half unstrapped. Used to his erratic comings and goings, she would normally have paid it no mind. This morning, for reasons she couldn’t explain, she had had a presentiment of tragedy. She had spoken to her brother, who in turn had contacted the police. End of statement.

The other testimonies were briefer and less informative, although one man – a Mohammed el-Badri of Shaykh Abd al-Qurna – claimed to have seen Pinsker walking up into the hills swigging from a bottle, drunk as a skunk apparently. There was a photograph of the Englishman’s motorbike, a copy of a poster asking anyone with information to contact either the police or their village headman, a telegram from British High Commissioner Sir Percy Loraine urging the Luxor authorities to do everything in their power to locate Mr Pinsker.

All of which was perfectly interesting. The document that had really got Khalifa’s pulse racing, however, had been hidden away in a pocket right at the back of the file. A handwritten two-page letter from one of Pinsker’s archaeological colleagues, it had been accompanied by a thumbnail sketch of the missing man – a simple yet compelling image of a leather-coated figure with its face hidden behind some sort of mask – and signed with a name that, unlike Pinsker’s, was extremely familiar to Khalifa: Howard Carter.

Opening the file, he removed the letter and for the tenth time read through it, shuffling sideways as the elderly passenger finished his prayers and resumed his seat beside him.

Elwat el-Diban

Luxor

September 14, 1931

Dear Cptn. Suleiman,

Further to your enquiries concerning Mr. Samuel Pinsker, the following recollections may be of some assistance.

On the night of Mr. Pinsker’s disappearance, September 12, I had retired early following dinner with Mssrs. Newberry, Lucas, Callender and Burton.

Shortly before ten I was awakened by the sound of a motorbike approaching from the direction of Dra Abu el-Naga. Shortly thereafter there was a knock at my front door, accompanied by Mr. Pinsker’s voice. He appeared to be the worse for drink and was shouting incoherently, some tommyrot to the effect of ‘I’ve found it, Carter’, and ‘It’s miles long.’ The disturbance continued for several minutes, whereupon I called for him to leave and he departed. We did not communicate face to face.

Mr. Pinsker has been known to me for three years, and last year worked for a period with myself and Mr. Callender in reconsolidating the entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamun. I believe he has also advised Mr. Winlock at Deir el-Bahri, and Monsieur Chevrier at Karnak.

Although I did not appreciate being woken in that manner, I bear Mr. Pinsker no ill-will, and trust he will be found in good time, and in good health.

Should I be able to offer any further assistance etc.

Yours Faithfully,

Howard Carter.

‘
Tazkara
.’

Without looking up, Khalifa pulled out his police badge and flipped it open. The ticket inspector looked at it, grunted and moved on, leaving Khalifa staring down at the document, oblivious to the suspicious stares his badge had drawn from the surrounding passengers.

An original Carter letter – you didn’t come across those every day, especially one accompanied by a sketch in the great archaeologist’s hand. The references to other contemporary excavators made it doubly interesting, offering as it did a fleeting glimpse back into the golden age of Egyptian exploration and discovery. When Khalifa had alerted the curator of Carter House on the West Bank to the find, the man had practically leapt down the phone at him, so anxious was he to get his hands on it.

More than the letter’s historical significance, however, what really intrigued Khalifa were the words Pinsker had shouted during his visit to Carter’s residence on the night of his disappearance.
I’ve found it, Carter. It’s miles long.
What did that mean? What was ‘it’?

His immediate thought was that maybe Pinsker was referring to the tomb in which he had met his end – a hitherto unknown Eighteenth Dynasty shaft burial, even an empty one, would certainly have been cause for excitement. Perhaps Pinsker had found the shaft, descended to Carter’s house to boast of his discovery, then gone back up into the hills and, drunk, fallen into the hole. But then the Englishman had described the mysterious thing or place as ‘miles long’, which certainly didn’t tally with the modest single-chamber tomb of the police photographs. Drunken exaggeration? Possible, although again, ‘miles long’ seemed a strangely inappropriate choice of hyperbole. Khalifa had raised the issue with the curator of Carter House, but the man wasn’t able to help him – he hadn’t even heard of Samuel Pinsker. His old friend and mentor Professor Mohammed al-Habibi at the Cairo Museum
had
heard of him, but could shed no more light on the mystery. And Carter himself had been dead since 1939, so he wasn’t going to be offering any explanation.

I’ve found it, Carter. It’s miles long.

Was ‘it’ the tie-in with Ben-Roi’s case? The reason the dead journalist had been interested in Samuel Pinsker? Or just another wild-goose chase, like the whole Coptic well-poisoning scenario? He had no idea. There were other people he needed to talk to. Mary Dufresne, for one. She knew everything there was to know about that period.

That was going to have to wait, however. For the moment, he had other things on his mind. Giving the letter a final once-over, he slid it carefully back into its pocket, closed and tied the 1931 file and opened the one from 1972.

The letter about the Bassatine Cemetery had obviously caught his eye – if Pinsker had been Jewish that at least provided some vague link with Israel. It wasn’t that that was bugging him, however. He pulled out the wad of photographs and flicked through them until he came to one of the bottom of the tomb shaft: a dusty rectangle of chiselled stone half buried beneath a tangle of branches and twigs.

Branches and twigs. The branches and twigs didn’t make sense.

Which was why he was on his way to Qena. Because if the players from 1931 were all long dead and buried, some of those from 1972 were still around. Including Ibrahim Sadeq, former chief of the Luxor Police, and the man who had headed up the investigation into the discovery of Samuel Pinsker’s mummified corpse. Sadeq might be able to give him some answers.

He stared at the photo. Then, as the train rumbled past the smoking hulk of the Qena Paper Factory, returned it to the file and sat back. Further down the carriage a vendor was pushing his way through the crush of passengers, hefting a tray piled with strips of sugar cane, calling out for custom. A suited man waved him over, bought a piece, handed it to a boy sitting beside him. His son, Khalifa guessed, from the way the man curled an arm round the boy’s shoulders and drew him close. The boy snuggled against his father, crunched into the stem and held it up for the man to take a bite, the two of them blissfully unaware of the stupendous importance of such transient interactions. Khalifa watched them a moment, then wiped his eyes and looked away.

Every reminder was just such a struggle.

B
ETWEEN
J
ERUSALEM AND
T
EL
-A
VIV

Ben-Roi too was on the move, by car in his case, west again on Route 1, down through the Judaean Hills towards the coastal plain and the sea.

It had been a frustrating five days.

To say the investigation had stalled would be overly pessimistic, but it wasn’t exactly powering forward either. Inching, more like. And now that the press had got their teeth into the story – their initial reticence had turned out to be a temporary reprieve, the calm before the storm – the pressure to score a conviction had gone off the scale. Leah Shalev was being called in for twice-daily briefings with Commander Gal and Chief Superintendent Baum – not a comfortable experience, given that she had precious little to brief them on. Two days ago Baum had gone so far as to suggest she wasn’t up to such a high-profile case and maybe he should take over the running himself. To his credit Gal had stood by his investigator, although his support had come with a qualification: ‘I need movement on this, Leah, and I need it soon. You’ve got a week. If we’re still no closer by then we’re going to have to review the situation.’

All of which made for a fractious working atmosphere. Doubly so with the second Old City murder case – the
yeshiva
student stabbing – also treading water. In his nine years at the station, Ben-Roi had never known Kishle to feel so tense. The place was like a boiler about to explode. Frankly, he was glad to get away for the day.

He pumped the horn and pulled out to overtake an IDF road transporter ferrying a pair of Merkava tanks down to the coast. Once he was round it, he swung back into the middle lane, put in a quick call to Sarah on the hands-free – she’d been sick in the night, he wanted to make sure she was OK – and took a slurp of the tepid coffee he’d brought at a Paz station a few miles back. On
Kol Ha-Derekh
, Pulp’s ‘She’s Dead’ gave way to some American singer called Susan Tedeschi with a number entitled ‘Looking for Answers’. For God’s sake, even the bloody radio was on his case!

They were still pursuing a three-track investigation. Uri Pincas remained on the Russian and Hebron settler angle, his remit now widened to include all the other death threats Kleinberg had received over the years as a result of her journalism. Amos Namir continued to beaver away on the Armenian side of things, as well as getting the word out about the girl Vosgi, who obviously tied in with the Armenian stuff. Neither man was getting anywhere fast. Neither man was getting anywhere, period.

For his part, Ben-Roi was still picking his way through the tangled thicket of leads and counter-leads thrown up by Kleinberg’s more recent journalism. Sex-trafficking, Egypt, Barren, the Nemesis Agenda – all the pieces were still in play, although what exactly they were doing on the board, and how, if at all, they related to one another, he was no closer to finding out.