The Labyrinth of Osiris (37 page)

Spot on the sixty-minute mark – not a second over – the solicitor called time. Clicking off the Dictaphone, she stood, crossed to the wall buzzer and rang for the guard. Kremenko lounged back and laid his arm across the top of his counsel’s empty chair.

‘It’s been a real pleasure, gentlemen,’ he grinned. ‘Or rather, ladies and
gentleman
.’

Another of those teasing looks at Zisky.

‘If there’s anything else I can help you with, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’ll be residing here for another few weeks, after which I expect to be back home again.’

He threw a glance at the solicitor, who wore the expression of someone who’d spent the last hour sitting on a cactus. She took a step back towards her chair, saw the position of Kremenko’s arm, remained standing. There was an uneasy silence, then the sound of approaching footsteps. Ben-Roi and Zisky stood, the lock clicked and the door swung open. Different guard this time.

‘You go carefully,’ said Kremenko, lifting a meaty, ring-covered hand and wiggling the fingers in farewell. ‘Don’t be strangers.’

Ben-Roi tried to come up with some caustic parting shot, something that would at least allow him to leave with his dignity intact, but couldn’t think of anything and, with a nod at Zisky, the two detectives made for the door. As they reached it, the guard stepping aside to let them through, Zisky suddenly swung back into the room.

‘Genady, what exactly is it you were doing for Barren Corporation?’

It was a punt to nowhere, like Ben-Roi’s earlier one about Vosgi coming from Armenia. Unlike Ben-Roi’s attempt, this one seemed to catch Kremenko unawares. It was only for the briefest of instants, just a second or two, but something about the widening of the pimp’s eyes, the slight tightening of his lips, showed the question had slipped under his guard and touched a nerve. He recovered himself almost immediately.

‘Oh I do like her,’ he chuckled. ‘Feisty little thing. And so pretty. If I
was
a pimp – which as we all know I’m not – I reckon she’d do some pretty good business for me.’

Grinning at Zisky, he lifted his arm, licked a fingertip and rubbed it up and down the tattooed vagina. It was all bravado. He was rattled. No question about it. Seriously rattled.

As they left the cell and headed back through the prison, Ben-Roi wrapped an arm round Zisky’s shoulders.

‘Good boy,’ he said.

E
GYPT

It was mid-afternoon when Khalifa arrived back in Luxor. At this hour most of the town’s population had been driven indoors by the heat, and the streets were unnaturally quiet and still. A group of old men were playing
siga
beside the dried-up fountain on the roundabout in front of the station,
shaals
draped over their heads against the sun. A caleche clopped its desultory way up and down Sharia al-Mahatta on the off-chance of picking up some custom. Otherwise the place was dead. He bought himself a carton of Easy Mouzoo – mango flavour – and, sitting on the station steps, made a couple of calls. Home first, to check on Zenab – she’d had an even worse night than usual and was currently asleep, watched over by Batah. Then to Mohammed Sariya at police headquarters. Chief Hassani was on the warpath apparently, screaming the place down about a rash of anonymous fly-posters that had appeared across town accusing the force of incompetence and corruption. Khalifa’s absence hadn’t even been noticed, let alone queried. Sadeq, it seemed, had not acted on his parting threat to contact Hassani. Yet.

‘Do me a favour, Mohammed,’ he said while he had him on the line. ‘If you get a moment, could you check up on a family from Old Qurna? Name of El-Badri. If any of them are still around they’d have been moved up to El-Tarif when the village got bulldozed.’

‘Anything in particular you want to know?’ asked Sariya.

‘This is going back a while, but there were three brothers and a sister. One of the brothers called Mohammed, the sister Iman. They’re all long dead, but I’d be interested to know if there are any surviving relatives. No great urgency. Just when you’ve got the time.’

Sariya said he’d get on the case and Khalifa rang off. For a minute he sat sipping his juice, watching as a Travco tourist coach lumbered its way round the roundabout, its occupants looking pale-faced and bored. Then, draining the carton and launching it into a bin, he stood and set off for the West Bank and the Valley of the Kings. If some anonymous fly-poster had had the decency to provide a distraction, he might as well take advantage of it.

‘Valley of the Kings’ is a misnomer. The ancient necropolis is neither the exclusive preserve of kings – it was also the final resting place of queens, princes, princesses, nobles and royal pets – nor is it a single valley. Rather, it comprises two branching
wadis
: the better-known East Valley, where are to be found all the main royal tombs including that of Tutankhamun, and the broader West Valley, or Valley of the Baboons, a much more desolate and less frequently visited burial corridor that splits from its more celebrated neighbour close to the latter’s entrance and heads off on its own meandering course into the hills.

Having crossed the river, Khalifa hitched a lift up to the coach park at the juncture of the two valleys. He stood a moment gazing at the huge hoarding that had been erected at the side of the road to publicize the new museum up in the East Valley. ‘Barren Corporation’, proclaimed the strapline. ‘Honouring Egypt’s Past, Promoting Egypt’s Future’. Then, flicking away his cigarette, he set off into the western branch of the necropolis.

In contrast to the perpetual tourist crush in its sister valley, this one was lifeless and deserted, a stark avenue of blinding-white limestone hemmed in by towering cliffs and heavy with the dense, smothering silence of the desert. There was a ramshackle caretaker’s residence on a bluff near the valley mouth and, a little further along its course, a more substantial domed building that had once been home to Egyptologist John Romer. Other than that, and a pair of corroded metal signs pointing out the tombs of Amenhotep lll and Akhenaten, there was nothing. Just rock, and dust, and the occasional swift skimming across the cliff faces. Had an ancient Egyptian been walking alongside Khalifa, they would have noticed little difference from how the valley had looked and felt in their own day.

It took him the best part of forty minutes to walk the
wadi
’s length, the heat slowing his pace. Eventually, just as he was starting to think that maybe he should have waited for a cooler part of the day, the track curved to the right and petered out in a deep natural amphitheatre curtained by rearing walls of rock. There was a wooden rest shelter, and, beside it, the entrance to the tomb of the Eighteenth-Dynasty vizier-turned-pharaoh Ay. A dusty Jawa motorbike was propped nearby, which was a relief – he would have hated to come all this way for no reason.

Descending the steps to the tomb’s open doorway, he put his head inside and called down the steeply sloping passage.

‘Professor Dufresne!’

No response.

‘Professor Dufresne! Are you there?’

Another silence. Then, from below, disembodied, like a voice from the underworld:

‘Yusuf Khalifa, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, it’s Mary!’

Khalifa smiled. ‘Yes, Professor.’

There was a faint echo of climbing footsteps and a head appeared far beneath, everything below the neck hidden by the corridor’s acute slope.

‘What the hell are you doing out here?’

‘I wanted to ask you a question.’

‘Sure must be an important one.’

‘Shall I come down?’

‘No, I was about to come up for air anyway. You thirsty?’

‘Very.’

‘You’re in luck. I’ve got a flask of cold
seer limoon
.’

Good old Mary Dufresne.

‘Give me a moment,’ she called, and disappeared back down the passage. Khalifa returned to the shade of the rest shelter. A few minutes went by, then there was some movement to his left and a figure emerged from the tomb entrance – tall, grey-haired, dressed in jeans, khaki shirt and with a white linen
shaal
wrapped around her neck. She gave a cheery wave and strode up the slope towards him, moving with surprising speed given that she must now be pushing ninety. Khalifa stood and the two of them shook hands.

‘How are you, you lovely man?’

‘I am well,
hamdulillah
. You?’

‘Pretty damn good, for an old crock. Zenab?’

‘She is . . . OK.’

The woman held his eyes. Then, sensing that he didn’t wish to pursue the line of conversation, gave his arm a friendly rub and lifted the flask she was holding.

‘Drink?’

‘I thought you would never ask.’

They sat and, unscrewing the flask’s lid, she poured him a cup and handed it over. She poured one for herself and they toasted each other.

‘Good to see you, Yusuf.’

‘You too,
ya doctora
.’

She shot him a look.

‘Mary,’ he corrected, overriding his natural tendency to formality when addressing his elders and betters. She gave an approving nod and sipped her lemon.

Mary Dufresne –
ya doctora amrekanaya
as she was known to everyone in Luxor – was a throwback. The last surviving link to a golden age of Egyptian archaeology. Her father, Alan Dufresne, had been a conservator at the Met and had come out in the late 1920s to work with the great Herbert Winlock. He’d brought his wife and daughter with him, and, apart from a brief stint back at Harvard studying for her doctorate, Mary had been here ever since. Winlock, Howard Carter, Flinders Petrie, John Pendlebury, Muhammad Goneim – she’d known them all. An exalted band of which she herself was a deserving member. Mary Dufresne was, by popular acclamation, the greatest archaeological draughtsman ever to have worked in Egypt. Even the notoriously arrogant Zahi Hawass was said to be in awe of her.

‘So how’s the work going?’ asked Khalifa, draining his lemon in one gulp and accepting a refill.

‘Slowly,’ she replied. ‘Which is how it should be going. The world’s getting way too fast for my liking.’

For the last decade Mary had been producing scale drawings of every painting and inscription in the West Valley. She’d been in the tomb of Ay for three of those ten years.

‘Looks like you needed that,’ she said as he again drained the cup in one long gulp.

‘It was a longer walk than I remembered.’

‘It’s like that in the summer. When the weather starts to cool it gets a lot shorter. Come December you could hop it.’

She smiled and filled his cup for a third time.

‘So what’s this mysterious question you wanted to ask?’

Khalifa took another appreciative sip – Mary made her own lemonade and managed to get just the right balance between the bitterness of the lemons and the sweetness of the cane sugar. Then, wiping his mouth, he laid the cup aside.

‘It’s about a man called Samuel Pinsker,’ he said. ‘An Englishman. Used to work out here. I was wondering if by any chance you remembered him.’

‘Samuel Pinsker.’ She drew the name out as if getting a feel for the sound of it. ‘My God, that’s a blast from the past.’

‘You do remember him?’

‘Vaguely. He disappeared when I was just a kid. They found his body back in the seventies. Fell down a shaft tomb up on the high
gebel
.’

Khalifa had already decided to keep the fact that Pinsker had been murdered to himself. Like Chief Sadeq had said, some narratives are best kept simple. Instead, he asked if she could remember anything about the man.

‘He spooked me, I certainly remember that,’ she said, swishing a hand to scatter the flies that were darting around the rim of her cup. ‘He used to wear this mask thing: little bitty eye-holes and a slit for a mouth. Made him look like some sort of . . . I don’t know, monster or ghoul or something.’

She gave another flick of her hand, finished her lemonade and screwed the cup back on to the flask.

‘Samuel Pinsker,’ she repeated. ‘What on earth makes you ask about him?’

‘The name cropped up in a case a friend of mine is working on. I said I’d try and find out a bit about him.’

He fired up a cigarette.

‘My friend’s Israeli,’ he added.

Dufresne’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.

‘How the hell does Samuel Pinsker relate to a police case in Israel?’

‘I was hoping you could tell me.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Yusuf, I don’t think I’m going to be much help here. I like to think I’m not going senile yet, but eighty years is a hell of a long time. I was only, what, six or seven when he went missing. Things tend to blur and fade.’

She pushed a hair out of her eye and sat back, crossing her legs and rearranging the
shaal
around her neck.

‘I do remember him roaring around on his motorbike,’ she said after a pause, ‘and also scaring the shit out of me in a temple once, excuse the language. No idea which temple it was, or what I was doing there. I just remember him coming out at me from behind a pillar. I had nightmares about it for weeks.’

‘Did he hurt you?’ asked Khalifa, thinking about the girl Pinsker had raped.

‘What, like molest me?’

Khalifa shrugged.

‘Certainly not that I recall. I just remember him suddenly appearing, me screaming and running away, and him following me in that horrible mask of his.’

She dipped her head, thinking, then looked up again, her expression apologetic.

‘That’s about it, I’m afraid. To be honest, I can’t even be sure if it actually happened like that. You know how memories twist themselves, get all tangled up. Watch out there.’

She motioned to the concrete bench where a large hornet had landed right beside Khalifa’s hand. It meandered about, then wafted itself up on to the rim of his cup. He prodded it away with the tip of his cigarette, drank the remaining lemonade and, standing, took the cup outside the shelter and placed it on a rock. The hornet followed.

‘Max knew him,’ she said as Khalifa resumed his seat.

‘Max?’

‘Legrange. French archaeologist. Pottery genius. Worked with Bruyere and Černý at Deir el-Medina.’