The Shroud Key (15 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

As promised, Sameh is waiting for us at the bar. Two whiskeys also await us.

“I trust you found the little present I left for you on the desk?” he asks while sipping from a cold bottle of Cairo beer.

The bar is busy for so early in the morning. At least three men are bellied up to it, slow drinking beer and liquor. One is dressed in a bush jacket and heavy boots. He’s sporting long black hair that’s tied back in a ponytail. His skin is browned from the sun and covered in a sheen of desert sand, which tells me he hasn’t been in the city for very long. Another shorter, stockier man is dressed in light leather coat which is also weathered by the sun, like my own. He’s wearing a fedora that’s seen its fair share of desert sand and sun. Another, an Arab, is wearing a dark business suit, and he’s compulsively checking his smartphone. I’m keeping one eye on all three of them, the other on Sameh and Anya.

“Found it,” I answer Sameh. “All one-point-six pounds of it. Fully loaded.”

I hand one of the whiskeys to Anya. I lift mine.

“Cheers,” I say.

We drink.

“But this isn’t the time to celebrate,” I say, setting my empty glass back down on the bar. “We have an archaeologist to find.”

Anya sets her now empty glass back down on the bar.

“Where to?” Sameh asks, lifting his car keys from off the bar.

“I’ll let you know on the way,” I say, giving the three men another glance over my right shoulder before about-facing and making for the exit.

_ _ _

Driving.

Zipping our way in and out of a series of seemingly never-ending alleys. Until we come to a section of road located under a highway overpass. No space goes unutilized in Cairo, a city supporting a population larger than Los Angeles, but boasting only half the land. In this case, a bustling market has been created by the addition of the overpass. The market runs the entire length of highway construction.

I tell Sameh to stop outside a series of small shops that serve as the market’s unofficial entrance. The shops are nothing more than shacks that have been assembled out of scrap wood and tin.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, hopping out of the front shotgun seat.

“I’m coming,” Anya insists.

“Wait for me here,” I demand, closing the door, knowing that what lurks inside that maze of people, animals, food, and goods is danger. It’s easy to get lost inside this marketplace and even easier to be snatched up by someone who has their eye out for you.

I run off before she gets the chance to change my mind.

Disappearing into the crowd of gawkers and spice sellers, I enter into the marketplace. Barefoot men dressed in robes and head dresses hound me to enter into their stores to buy their spices or jewels. Hopeless barefoot cripples beg for coins. Pot-and-pan sellers take hold of my arm, try and force me to behold the workmanship on their metal cookware. Bread bakers pull thin little freshly baked loafs from the coal-fired ovens with long-handled paddles and deposit them onto blankets laid out on the road to cool. The black burka-wearing women line up obediently to purchase the bread for the mid-day meal. Further in are the rug and Egyptian cotton merchants. Not far up ahead of them, the knife and sword stores. Beyond them, the butcher shops, their windows filled with cow heads, newly amputated hoofs and extracted stomachs. The flies gather around the newly butchered meat and make their home in its congealed blood. The odor of the sun-baked meat is so rotten and pungent, I’m forced to breathe through my mouth and not my nose.

The shop I want is located on a less travelled walkway set perpendicular to this one. I hook a right at the corner and follow the less dense, awning-covered path until I come to a golden elephant. The elephant is as large as I am. Set beside it, is a wooden camel. The camel is also big and must weight five hundred pounds having been carved out of pure cypress over a century ago. In between the two animals is the shop entrance. I open the glass and wood door to the ping-ping-ping sound of a little brass bell that hangs off the door’s interior. The old fashioned bell serves as a kind of alarm. It rings whenever the door is opened or closed.

Closing the door behind me, I lock it. I grab hold of the wood sign that hangs from a nail embedded into the top of the door frame and turn it around so that the word CLOSED, stenciled in both English and Egyptian Arabic, faces the marketplace, while the word OPEN faces the shop’s insides.

“Can I help you?” comes a voice from far back in the shop’s interior.

The short, portly, gray-mustached shopkeeper emerges from a space filled to capacity with antique tables, chairs, marble statues of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, sarcophagi, mummies, coffins, mummified animals, half-moon shaped swords, gilded mirrors, and more. At first, he doesn’t know what to make of his open/closed sign. Until he spots the man who who’s messed with it.

He assumes an ear to ear smile that is about as unauthentic as half the unlicensed junk displayed inside a shop that passes itself off as a home for priceless Egyptian artifacts and antiquities for the discerning private collector.

“Chase Baker!” he shouts as if with joy. “Well why did you not tell me you were coming by for a visit? How long have you been back in the land of the living?”

He pulls out a white handkerchief and begins to wipe his brow.

I pull the 9mm from my pant waist, aim it at his head.

“You still have something that belongs to me, Amun.”

In my head I’m picturing the missing half mirror that’s identical to the half mirror housed inside my right pocket. A mirror that I dug up in the desert not far from here, but that Amun illegally purchased off one of my laborers after the boy lifted it from out of my tent one night while I was sleeping off a bender. Amun and I both know he purchased it for nothing from the laborer, but I have no way of getting it back from him short of shooting him in the head. And the punishment for a white westerner shooting a Muslim in the head in Cairo is not pleasant considering it will involve a long and drawn out torture which will climax with my public beheading.

Amun sports a thick black mustache and he is dressed in his usual white suit which is far too small for his middle-aged girth. He’s the type of man who would wear a bright red fez on his head if the fashion didn’t die out with the city’s modernization back in the late sixties and seventies. A modernization that has since faded and crumbled into history along with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and a tighter than tight rein on all things perceived as a threat to Islamic law.

“I assure you, Chase,” he says in a half whisper, “I would never be so bold as to acquire anything of yours without paying a fair price.” He smiles, wipes the sweat from his brow. “Anything else would be stealing.”

“Stealing is the perfect word for it,” I say, my pistol now aimed pointblank for his round belly. “But I might be willing to go easy on you if you give me some information.”

He shakes his head.

“Information? About what?”

Slowly, I begin making my way towards him, all the time roaming the goods on display with my eyes.

“There’s a dig going on in the desert outside the Giza Plateau. Probably to the west of it. Some wealthy members of the new regime might be sponsoring it. The lead archaeologist is a friend of mine. He was teaching in Florence for a while until suddenly … poof … he vanished into thin air. There’s some talk that he might have been kidnapped by said wealthy regime members, and that these men are willing to go to extreme measures to acquire a very rare artifact. An artifact that my friend has been searching for, for a good many years. Sound familiar?”

More wiping of the brow. More smiling.

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Digs are going on all the time. You know that, Chase. You’ve worked on many of them yourself. So did your father.” He issues me a brown-nosing smile. “You were one of the best sandhogs around. Until you traded in your shovel for a typewriter.”

I thumb back the hammer on the 9mm, raise my aim so that it’s pointing at his head.

“Maybe I can somehow convince you to think harder. I’m sure you keep a running tally of every single dig going on from Cairo to the Libyan border.”

He swallows something hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down inside his neck like a turkey about to face the hatchet.

“Well, it’s possible that knowledge of the dig you’re talking about has come to my attention.”

My eye catches something over his shoulder. Something displayed up on a shelf behind a long, glass case, like the kind jewelers use in their stores. It’s a box. A box carved out of sand stone, with a gabled top. It’s an ossuary. Like the kind Dr. Manion might dig up in his quest to find the bones of Christ. Dig up while a gun is pointing at the back of his head …

I wave the gun in the direction of the ossuary.

“That’s a nice piece you have up there. From my vantage point, I’d say that is an ossuary favored by first century Jews. Might be precisely the kind of thing my friend has been digging up out there in the desert.”

He forces another smile, shakes his head.

“Chase, you’re confusing me.”

The gun back on his head.

“Where’s the dig, Amun?”

He swallows again, and begins back-stepping towards the glass counter. He becomes startled when his fat back end hits the counter unexpectedly. Turning, he goes around to the business side of the counter and once more faces me.

“Tell me, Amun. Tell me now. My index finger is getting very, very heavy. I wouldn’t want it to suddenly drop down onto the trigger.”

He’s not bothering to wipe the sweat from his forehead now, allowing the streaks to run down his cheeks.

Using my good hand, I pull the map of the Giza Plateau and the desert beyond it from the interior pocket of my jacket. I lay it out onto the glass counter.

“Show me the location,” I press.

He hesitates.

I press the gun barrel hard against his forehead.

“Show me now.”

More swallowing, his heavy body trembling.

There’s a pencil/pen jar set out on the counter beside a pad of paper. The writing tools are for potential buyers who feel more comfortable and far less vulnerable haggling over price without the ambiguity of spoken language. I grab a pencil, put it into his hand.

“Use this.”

He holds the pencil in his hand and for a brief moment, just dangles it over the map.

“Now!” I shout, raising up my pistol, shooting a round into the old ceiling-mounted Casablanca fan that hangs from the ceiling. Shards of wood and plaster drop down onto the glass counter. But the shot serves to grab his undivided attention.

“Please,” he says, holding up his chubby hands in surrender. “You need not become violent.”

He presses the pencil down on an area that’s maybe twenty or twenty-five miles outside the Giza Plateau in the direction of Libya.

“Mark it,” I say, once more pressing the now smoking barrel against his moist forehead.

He makes an X and tosses the pencil.

Sometimes X does indeed mark the spot…

“Are you happy, Chase?” he begs, his voice so angry I fear he might cry. “Are you happy now that my life is in danger? You come here for a short time, demanding things from me that I am not at liberty to give you. That I don’t owe you. If certain members of the new government should find out about this, I am as good as dead. They will come for me in the night while you are sleeping peacefully in your bed in Florence. Or New York.”

“I’m hoping for New York, Amun. Hoping to see my daughter again. And I don’t give a shit if you live or die.” Manually thumbing back the pistol hammer. “Now while we’re at it, the mirror.”

“Please, Chase,” he cries. “We had an agreement. You asked me for information and I gave it to you. Please …”

“You also have the other half of my mirror and I want it back.”

A doors opens. Not a front door, but a door in back. Then the sound of footsteps. Heavy, thick-soled boot-steps. A glance over my shoulder reveals two men entering onto the floor. I recognize the men. They are two out of the three men who were drinking at the King’s Hotel bar just moments ago. The pony-tailed one wearing the bush jacket and the built one in the black leather jacket and fedora. Eyes wide, they come at me, drawing their side-arms.

“Now would be a good time to remove your weapon from my forehead, Chase,” Amun whispers gently, that sly smile having returned to his fat mustached face. “And while you’re at it, please get down on your knees and prepare yourself for a burial in the desert.”