The Labyrinth of Osiris (43 page)

Khalifa didn’t understand.

‘Mustard gas,’ explained the Englishman. ‘First World War. Battle of Passchendaele. Pinsker was a sapper. He was leading a team digging underneath the German lines, the Boche cottoned on to it, sunk a counter-shaft, pumped a load of gas into the British tunnel. Burnt the poor bastards alive. Pinsker risked his life trying to plug the breach so the others could get out. Won a Victoria Cross for his trouble, although he suffered for it to the end of his days. He was in constant pain, apparently. Needed booze and morphine just to be able to function. A tragic figure, in many ways.’

Khalifa doubted the girl Pinsker raped would have seen it like that. He kept the thought to himself, not wanting to get bogged down in the details of the rape. Instead, pulling a photocopy from his pocket, he turned the conversation to the aspect of Pinsker’s story that really interested him: the Howard Carter letter.

‘I don’t suppose this means anything to you, does it?’ he asked, handing the photocopy across.

Girling returned his hat to his head, slipped on a pair of half-moon spectacles and read through the letter. His eyes widened the further he went.

‘Where on earth did you lay your hands on this?’ he asked when he reached the end, looking up.

‘It was in an old police file. I only discovered it a couple of days ago.’

‘I wish I’d known about it. I could have included it in my monograph. Extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.’

‘Have you any idea what it means? That bit about finding something.’

‘Well, obviously I can’t be a hundred per cent sure,’ said Girling, perusing the letter again, ‘but all things considered, I’d hazard good money he was referring to the Labyrinth of Osiris.’

The conviction with which he said this caught Khalifa off balance. He hadn’t been anticipating such a direct answer, had been expecting to have to put in more spadework. He edged forward, an expectant tingle chasing up his spine, everything that had been said up to that point forgotten.

‘What is this Laby-rin?’

‘Labyrin-
th
,’ corrected Girling. ‘One of two ancient Egyptian marvels upon which the Greeks conferred the name. The other, of course, being the Amenemhat lll mortuary complex at Hawwara. Although in my opinion the Osiris Labyrinth is by far the more interesting of the pair.’

‘It’s a tomb, this Laby-rin?’

‘No, no, no.’ Girling’s jowls wobbled as he shook his head. ‘It was a mine.
The
mine, actually. Principal gold source for the pharaohs of the New Kingdom.’

The tingle grew a whole lot stronger. According to the notes Ben-Roi had sent over, Rivka Kleinberg had been reading up on gold mines.

‘I’ve never even heard of it,’ said Khalifa.

‘Well, you probably wouldn’t have unless you had a particular interest in ancient Egyptian material technology. To be honest I didn’t know much about it myself till it cropped up in the research I was doing into Pinsker and I did some background reading on the subject. Put all the other gold mines in the shade, apparently. The Tutankhamun treasures, the Tell Basta hoard, the Ahhotep jewellery, the Djehuty burial – take a look at any of those and there’s a good chance you’re looking at gold mined from the Labyrinth. A veritable underground city, if you believe Herodotus.’

‘And Pinsker was looking for this mine?’

‘Certainly was,’ said Girling. ‘It seems to have become something of an obsession of his. I’ve no idea where he first heard about it, but pretty much from the moment he arrived in Egypt he was heading off on forays into the Eastern Desert trying to track it down. Which I suppose would figure, what with him being a mining engineer and all. There’s a letter of his in the Bracken Archive in Manchester – Joseph Bracken being a 1920s union activist, an old wartime chum of Pinsker’s – in which he goes on and on about the thing, about how amazing it would be to find it. Not so much because of the gold angle, but for the light the mine might shed on ancient working practices. In an age when every other bugger in Egypt was looking for pharaohs and treasure, Samuel Pinsker just wanted to know about the proletariat. A true disciple of Marx. Aha, the cavalry approaches!’

The waiter came up to them, balancing a tray on the tips of his fingers. He offloaded Girling’s Pimm’s and, although he hadn’t asked for it, a glass of iced water for Khalifa.

‘Bottoms up!’ trilled the Englishman, hoisting his drink to his lips and downing a third of it in one gulp, his fleshy throat wobbling and swelling like a pelican’s. Khalifa sipped his water, glad of it now that it was in his hand. There was a silence, then:

‘
So deep are its shafts, so numerous its galleries, so bewildering its complexity, that to step through its doorway is to be lost entirely and Daedalus himself would be confounded
.’

Girling took another hefty gulp and settled the glass on the curve of his belly.

‘That’s how Herodotus describes the Labyrinth,’ he said. ‘Or at least it’s a paraphrase of Herodotus – I can’t remember the passage verbatim. Apparently the place was so rich in gold you could slice chunks of it off the wall with a knife as though you were carving meat, and when you emerged into the sunlight – assuming you ever
did
emerge – your hair would be glittering as though it was on fire because of all the gold dust. Never one for understatement, our Herodotus.’

He chuckled and swirled a sprig of mint around what was left of the Pimm’s. Khalifa dragged off the last of his cigarette.

‘Of course it was only the Greeks who referred to it as a labyrinth,’ Girling added. ‘The Egyptians had no such concept. They knew it by the slightly more prosaic title
shemut net wesir
– the Passages of Osiris. Osiris obviously being the God of the Underworld.’

Shemut net wesir
did ring a bell, although only a vague one. Despite his fascination with his country’s past, ancient mining wasn’t an area of that past to which Khalifa had ever devoted much thought.

‘Herodotus is our only source for this mine?’ he asked.

‘No, no, it’s referenced in a number of different places,’ replied Girling, giving the mint sprig another swirl before pulling it out of the glass, leaning forward and slurping at it. ‘I certainly can’t claim to be an authority on the subject, but there’s definitely a passage about it in Diodorus Siculus. Describes how at its height the mine was being worked by upwards of ten thousand slave labourers and producing enough gold to outbalance an elephant on a set of scales. And I seem to remember there were some Agatharchides fragments as well. Plus the ancient Egyptian sources, which being ancient Egyptian sources are rather more cryptic and open to interpretation.’

He dropped the mint back in his glass, drained the last of the Pimm’s and, pulling out his handkerchief again, dabbed at his shirt and trousers, which were dotted with dribble marks. From the poolside a woman’s voice rang out demanding to know where Janine had put the Ambre Solaire. Out on the Nile a tourist launch was approaching, a sign on its roof bearing the not entirely in appropriate name
New Titanic
.

‘Of course there
are
those who poo-poo the whole thing,’ said Girling, again starting in without any prompt on Khalifa’s part. ‘Claim it’s all a myth. A sort of Egyptian Eldorado. Carter, for one, always dismissed the idea, although he tended to dismiss anything that might have overshadowed his own discovery. The texts are surprisingly consistent though, certainly by ancient standards, and I believe some new inscriptions have been turned up recently that add to the evidence. The obvious stumbling block being that no one’s ever actually found the damn thing. And now it seems someone has. Or at least did.’ He brandished the letter. ‘Extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.’

‘Do you think he was telling the truth?’ asked Khalifa.

‘I don’t see any reason why he’d lie about it. He was a brash northerner, not really given to flights of fantasy. If he said he found it, I’d take that at face value. Absolutely extraordinary. Would you mind if I took a copy of this?’

‘Please, keep it,’ said Khalifa. ‘I’ve got the original in my office.’

‘Much obliged. I really do think I should get working on that thing on Pinsker. Seems he’s even more interesting than I thought. A sort of Egyptological Mallory.’

Khalifa didn’t get the reference and didn’t pursue it. His mind was drifting, trying to work through the angles of why an Israeli journalist doing an article on sex-trafficking should have been interested in the discovery of an ancient Egyptian gold mine. It wasn’t his business to do so, it was Ben-Roi’s investigation, but he couldn’t help himself. Something about the case had hooked him. Hooked him in a way that nothing had done since . . .

‘Do we know anything else about this mine?’

‘Hmmn?’ Girling was reading the letter again, lost in his own thoughts.

‘The mine. Do we know anything else about it?’

‘Well, like I say, it’s not really my specialist field.’ The Englishman folded the letter and slipped it into his shirt pocket. ‘Always been more of a Graeco-Romanist myself. It was definitely big – all the sources agree on that. The daddy of all ancient Egyptian mines. And it seems to have been in use throughout the New Kingdom. Five-hundred-odd years’ worth of burrowing and tunnelling – if you think that even the deepest tombs in the Valley of the Kings only took about twenty years to dig, that gives you some idea of the possible scale of the place. All mined out in ancient times, of course, but even so, it would still be a huge discovery.’

‘And it was somewhere in the Eastern Desert,’ said Khalifa.

‘That’s where the sources seem to place it. Most ancient gold works were in that part of the world. There or in Nubia. Which of course comes from
nub
, the ancient Egyptian word for gold.’

He pulled out his handkerchief and started dabbing at his forehead again.

‘The people you should really be talking to are the Raissoulis,’ he said. ‘They’ve been tramping around that corner of Egypt for the last twenty years, know everything there is to know about ancient mining.’

Again, the name rang a vague bell with Khalifa.

‘Brother and sister?’

‘Exactly. Remarkable pair. Those new inscriptions I mentioned – I’m pretty certain it was the Raissoulis who turned them up. They’re the ones you need to speak to if you want to know more about the Labyrinth. Based at Cairo University, I believe.’

Khalifa made a mental note to get in touch with them. He threw out a few more questions, but Girling could add nothing to what he’d already told him, and with the Englishman starting to sneak glances at his watch, Khalifa thanked him for his help and brought the interview to a close.

‘I do hope I’m not rushing you,’ said Girling apologetically. ‘It’s just that I’m due to take a group over to the Avenue of the Sphinxes at five and time’s starting to get a little tight.’

Khalifa told him not to worry, he had everything he needed.

‘Jolly well done on the avenue, by the way,’ added Girling, levering himself out of his chair. ‘A remarkable achievement. Totally transformed the town. As a Luxorite you must be very proud.’

Khalifa didn’t respond to that, just gulped down his water and stood himself. For a brief instant his gaze snagged on a huge raft of
ward-i-nil
drifting down the centre of the river, a grey heron standing proud in the middle of it like a boatman guiding his craft.

Then, with a shake of the head, he fell into step beside the Englishman.

‘There was one other thing,’ he said as the two of them walked back across the deck. ‘When you were researching Pinsker, you didn’t come across any link between him and Israel, did you?’

The Englishman’s brows knitted. ‘Can’t immediately think of one. Israel didn’t even exist in Pinsker’s time. It was British Mandate Palestine in those days. Or was it UN Mandate Palestine? I can never remember. Either way, I’m pretty certain Pinsker never went there. He was actually rather sceptical about the whole Zionist thing. Although he
was
in Egypt, so it’s not impossible he popped up that way for a visit. If he did, I never heard about it.’

He reached the door into the ship, started to step through, then turned.

‘Hang on, there was a family member who moved out there. Sometime in the late thirties. A cousin or something. Very distant. Stayed a couple of years, then got disillusioned and went back to England. Can’t remember her name.’

He thought a moment, then gave an apologetic shrug and stepped inside. Khalifa stood where he was, watching as the clump of
ward-i-nil
drifted north on its journey to the sea, rotating slowly in the pull of the current. Then, firing up another Cleopatra, he followed Girling into the ship.

‘I must say it sounds an intriguing case,’ came the Englishman’s voice from the stairs ahead. ‘Ancient gold mines, disappearing archaeologists, mysteries in the Holy Land – sounds like the plot of a novel. I’d love to know what it’s all about.’

Khalifa pulled on his cigarette. ‘That makes two of us,’ he muttered.

J
ERUSALEM

Seven o’clock saw Ben-Roi and Leah Shalev sitting on the balcony of her apartment in Ramat Denya, sipping wine and gazing out at a fiery, blood-red sunset. From behind them came the muted clatter of pots as Shalev’s husband Benny busied himself with dinner. A small dog eyed them from the far corner of the balcony, a snuffling heap of hair that went by the unlikely name of Gorgeous.

‘So what do you make of it all?’ she asked.

‘The words “complete fucking balls-up” come to mind.’

‘That’s certainly one way of describing it.’

She propped her feet on the balcony rail and pushed, pivoting on the back legs of her chair. Apparently she’d screamed the station down when they’d brought Petrossian in that morning. Now she was back to her normal self – calm, collected, focused.

‘The old man’s certainly got questions to answer,’ she said. ‘He lied about his alibi. And the phone call doesn’t look good.’

The call was a new development. Amos Namir had spent the afternoon going through the archbishop’s phone records, and lo and behold he’d turned up an incoming from Kleinberg’s mobile. Three weeks before her death. Five-minute conversation.

‘When we saw him in the cathedral he claimed he didn’t know Kleinberg.’

‘We hadn’t identified her then.’

‘It’s still a direct link to the victim,’ she said. ‘And her name’s been all over the papers. He could have come forward. He’s dodgy. No question about it.’

‘You sound like you’re agreeing with Baum.’

‘The day I agree with Yitzhak Baum’s the day I hand in my badge. But Petrossian’s not on the level. And right at the moment he’s the strongest suspect we’ve got. The
only
suspect.’

Ben-Roi propped his own feet on the rail and took a sip of his wine. Barkan Chardonnay. Not his thing at all, but the Shalevs had been out of beer, and after everything else that had gone down that day, he’d needed a drink.

‘He’s an old man, Leah. You said it yourself.’

‘So suddenly there’s an age qualification? Amon Herzig wasn’t exactly a spring chicken.’

Herzig had been the first murder case they’d worked on together. Wife-killer. Front-page news. He’d been eighty-three.

‘Petrossian didn’t do it,’ insisted Ben-Roi. ‘You know that as well as I do. Whatever else he’s got going on – and he clearly
has
got something else going on – there’s no way he garrotted Rivka Kleinberg.’

‘So he knows who did and he’s protecting them.’

That was slightly more feasible, although Ben-Roi still couldn’t see it.

‘It doesn’t stack up, Leah. It just doesn’t stack up.’

‘So what does stack up?’ She looked across at him. ‘Tell me, Arieh, please. Because with the best will in the world, we’re ten days into this and you’ve not come up with any better suggestions.’

Fair point. Sex-trafficking, Vosgi, Barren, Egypt, Nemesis, Samuel Pinsker – in the end they were all just random brushstrokes, crossing over in places but never in such a way as to produce anything approaching a coherent picture. He was on the right track, he could feel it – feel it with every policing cell in his body – but being on the right track and having a viable case were two very different things.

‘I’m getting there,’ he said lamely.

‘I’m delighted for you. Unfortunately getting there’s not going to cut any ice with Baum. He wants Petrossian. And he’s standing at the head of a long queue.’

He frowned. ‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning the archbishop hasn’t exactly endeared himself over the years. He’s made some pretty inflammatory comments about the settlements, the Gaza blockade, city corruption. He’s got enemies in high places. A lot of enemies.’

‘You’re saying they’re going to pin it on him?’

‘What I’m saying is there are a lot of influential people who wouldn’t mind seeing him taken down a peg or two. We still abide by the rule of law in this country – just – and if the evidence isn’t there they’re not going to risk sending it to trial. But there’s a lot of pressure to find that evidence. And the archbishop isn’t doing himself any favours.’

Ben-Roi dropped his head back and rubbed his temples. It had been a long day. Another one.

‘What’s Chief Gal saying?’ he asked.

‘Not very much. Right now it’s Baum’s show.’

‘Is he going to hold him?’

Shalev shrugged. ‘The chief superintendent hasn’t deigned to take me into his confidence, but my guess is that unless he turns up something rock solid he won’t apply for an extension – the protests aren’t good publicity. He’ll keep him in for the full twenty-four, just to prove a point, then put him under house arrest.’

‘I need to talk to him.’

Something about the way her mouth curled told Ben-Roi that wasn’t going to be easy. Baum was guarding his golden goose. He dropped his feet and shunted his chair round so he was facing her directly.

‘It’s about the girl, Leah. Vosgi. She’s the key. I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but Vosgi’s the key. And something tells me Petrossian knows more about her than he’s letting on. I need to talk to him.’

From the kitchen Benny Shalev’s voice rang out, announcing that dinner was ready. His wife glanced over her shoulder, then dropped an arm and clicked her fingers. The dog came pattering along the balcony and leapt into her lap, making appreciative snuffling noises as she scratched behind its ears. For a moment she just sat there. Then, lifting the dog, she planted a kiss on its nose.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said. ‘I can’t promise anything more than that. And you need to tread carefully.
Very
carefully. Baum’s a spineless little prick, but he’s in with the right people. He can make a lot of trouble. Don’t go rubbing him up the wrong way. OK?’

Ben-Roi gave an amused grunt. ‘From what Zisky told me about this morning, you need to take a bit of your own advice.’

‘That was this morning,’ said Shalev. ‘Tomorrow morning I’m going in and kissing the chief superintendent’s arse. I’ve worked hard to get where I am and I’m not about to throw it all away.’

‘Even if it means getting the wrong man.’

She didn’t respond to that. Instead, lowering the dog to the floor, she drained her wine and stood. Ben-Roi did the same and they went back into the flat. Benny Shalev was bustling out of the kitchen with a large pot, followed by his youngest daughter Malka holding a pile of plates.

‘You staying, Arieh?’ he called. ‘There’s more than enough to go round.’

Ben-Roi thanked him, but said he needed to be getting on his way.

‘I’m taking Sarah out for dinner. I cooked her breakfast and feel I ought to make up for it.’

They slapped hands and Leah showed him to the front door.

‘Stay on it,’ she said as he stepped out on to the landing and hit the light-timer. ‘I’ll cover you, try to give you some space. But keep your head down. And tread carefully. I’ve got a bad feeling about this case.’

‘You said that before.’

‘I know. And the feeling’s getting worse.’

She hesitated. Then, coming up on tiptoe, she gave him a peck on the cheek. Five years they’d worked together, and she’d never done anything like that. The gesture seemed to take her as much by surprise as it did him. She blushed, and with a muttered, ‘Watch yourself, Arieh,’ closed the door. Ben-Roi only made it halfway down the stairs before the light-timer clicked off, plunging him into darkness.

L
UXOR

Straight after his meeting with Digby Girling, Khalifa had put in a call to Cairo University, hoping to find out some more about the Labyrinth of Osiris. The woman he’d spoken to – a secretary in the archaeology department – had confirmed that brother-and-sister team Hassan and Salma Raissouli were indeed the country’s foremost authorities on ancient gold-mining. Unfortunately they were currently doing fieldwork out in the middle of the Sinai and weren’t due back in Cairo for another three weeks. Khalifa had told her it was urgent and she’d agreed to try to contact them on their satellite phone, although she’d warned him communication was notoriously sporadic and it could be days before he got a response. He’d left it with her, gone home, helped Batah with dinner, got Yusuf to bed, then, seized by a sudden urge to experience what it was like to be a normal couple again, pulled Zenab out for an evening stroll around Luxor.

They hardly ever went out any more. Before Ali had died they’d done it all the time: across the river for dinner with Mahmoud at the Tutankhamun; into the souk for coffee and a
shisha
; down to Karnak for a nocturnal ramble around the deserted temple complex (one of the perks of having a police pass). These days it was as much as he could do to get her from one end of the flat to the other. Tonight, as she always did, she’d said she didn’t want to go, couldn’t face it, but he’d badgered her, and eventually she’d relented, sensing it was important to him. And to her too, in a way. So they’d linked arms and wandered back along Medina al-Minawra towards the centre of town, not really saying anything, threading through the evening crowds, stopping for a while to watch the revellers at a huge outdoor wedding before ending up in a small café opposite the Medina Club pleasure garden. Which was where they were sitting now.

‘More tea?’ he asked.

‘Thank you, no.’

Her voice was so quiet these days, barely audible.

‘A puff?’

He proffered the mouthpiece of the
shisha
he was smoking. She shook her head.

‘It’s
tufah
.’

Another shake.

‘You used to love
tufah
.’

A shrug this time. A donkey cart piled with gas canisters clattered past in front of them.

‘Maybe we should think about getting back,’ she said.

‘We’ve only just come out.’

‘I don’t like to leave the kids. You know how Yusuf wakes up, gets . . .’

Khalifa wrapped an arm round her shoulders. ‘The kids are fine, Zenab. Batah’s a big girl, she’s more than capable of minding her brother for a couple of hours. She’ll call if she needs us.’

He patted the mobile in his shirt pocket.

‘Let’s take some time for ourselves, eh? Try to enjoy the evening.’

It seemed like she was going to argue. Then, with a weak nod, she reached up a hand and linked her fingers into his.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s good for us to be out. It’s just that . . .’ She bit her lip.

‘I know,’ he said, drawing her close. ‘Believe me, Zenab, I know. But we have to try and get on with things.’

He squeezed her hand and puffed the
shisha
, exhaling a slow stream of apple-scented tobacco smoke. From the tables around them came the babble of conversation and the clack of dominoes; in the pleasure garden across the street, children were yelling as they bounced on giant trampolines and flew down slides.