Sphinx (22 page)

I opened my eyes and found, to my relief, that I’d stayed dreaming. Isabella stared back at me, her eyes filled with that dark violet I had lost myself in so many times. Smiling, she lowered herself down onto me. The touch of her skin almost threw me into consciousness. It felt indisputably real - the warmth, the velvet moisture, the intimacy of her scent.

In wonder, I reached up, threading my fingers through that thick veil of hair, the familiarity of touch quickening. Her lips caught my lower lip, the promise of other caresses silently mirrored in the lovemaking of our mouths; a kiss that sprung open all the memories of our earlier embraces. The first weeks of our courtship, when we would make love all night, then stumble around the markets of Calcutta drunk with exhaustion; when just the smell of her hair would make me hard, her voice whispering out all our future plans, spinning patterns against those tropical nights. This and every other moment ran through my mind like the patterns of a kaleidoscope, but by now her mouth had started to travel down my chest, her long cool fingers as real as the taste of her, her lips a tight band of heat throwing tremors down my thighs.

Suddenly the memory of her death reverberated through me like one of the subterranean explosions I’d choreographed.

It was well after midday when I woke. The sun was a crimson prickling against my eyeballs, forcing the lids open. I lay there in that delicious non-state like an amoeba, happy for a time, until a burning sensation across my shoulders threw me into full consciousness. I sat up and reached behind me to touch my smarting skin. My fingers were sticky with blood.

I got up and walked over to the mirror: four deep scratches ran across my shoulders. I touched them - it felt as if I’d caught my back on a row of pins or nails. Then I remembered the dream, the lovemaking with Isabella. I studied the marks again, but they seemed too closely spaced for fingernails.

I flung back the covers on the bed; the bottom sheet was spotted with blood. Several long black hairs lay on the pillow. I picked one up and wound it around my finger. Isabella’s? It was a crazy thought. But part of me wanted it to have belonged to her, for the dream to have been real. Just then I noticed a tiny brown feather halfway down the mattress. I lifted it and blew it across the bed. Could it have come from one of the pillows?

The miniature doorway chiselled into Isabella’s gravestone came to my mind. I went to the library and looked up Nectanebo II in one of Isabella’s reference books. Some of the information I’d gleaned from Hermes and from Amelia Lynhurst’s thesis was there, along with a photograph of the Pharaoh’s empty sarcophagus and a sidebar with information about it. It was now housed in the British Museum. I studied the photograph again, looking vainly for new clues. I noticed the sidebar was credited to Hugh Wollington of the British Museum. Hugh Wollington. Presumably the man was an Egyptologist but I couldn’t remember Isabella ever mentioning him. Perhaps he’d be able to give me more information about the astrarium. Moses, Ramses III, Nectanebo, Banafrit and Cleopatra were all linked to the astrarium. Maybe Hugh Wollington had more information about how they were connected and maybe he knew whether there was any correlation between the hieroglyphs inscribed on the astrarium and those on Nectanebo’s sarcophagus. I didn’t yet know quite how to ask without showing him the astrarium itself but maybe I could work out a way en route. I was gripped with a growing excitement. I hadn’t been home in a long time. This might be what I needed to gain some perspective alongside new information, and a trip to England might get me away from the clutches of those looking for the astrarium. An image of a helmeted face on a motorcycle suddenly sprang up in my mind, followed quickly by those of Omar and his sinister sidekick. It would be good to be free of this constant paranoia of being followed. But, almost as importantly, going to England would allow me to see my father and Gareth for the first time since Isabella’s drowning. At the thought, a wave of desire to be with family and in familiar surroundings engulfed me.

I was interrupted by a knocking at the front door. Carefully, I looked through the peephole: a youth of about sixteen waited on the other side. I recognised him from the offices of the Alexandrian Oil Company.

‘From Mr Fartime,’ he told me, handing me a note as I opened the door.

 

The garish modern decor of the Alexandrian Oil Company’s headquarters on Sherif Street reflected Mr Fartime’s personal dilemma. He regarded himself as a twentieth-century entrepreneur trapped in a nineteenth-century paradigm that barely creaked along. He’d done his utmost to defuse the classical proportions of the office with oddly inappropriate modern furniture, but he hadn’t been able to apply the same modernisation to the organisation of the company and was constantly bombarding me with long anecdotes about the antiquated bureaucracy he was forced to work within.

As I entered his office, Mr Fartime struggled out of the white leather chair he’d been sitting in, a copy of
Time
magazine still in his hand. I noticed the cover featured a smiling Noam Chomsky. Before I had a chance to wonder what Mr Fartime made of the American activist, he’d tossed the magazine onto his desk and was reaching out to shake my hand.

‘Thank you for coming so quickly, Oliver. Again, my condolences on your terrible loss . . .’

‘Thank you,’ I replied, reflecting that the last time Mr Fartime had seen Isabella had been at a dinner party during which they’d argued over the ecological merits of the Aswan dam. Fortunately the dispute had been interrupted when the hostess - a well-to-do Syrian-Egyptian socialite with many connections to the European community - had lost a microphone concealed in her low-cut evening dress. She was leaning across the table to make a point when the device fell out and landed in the soup tureen. The American ambassador had fished the microphone out and remarked, ‘If you must spy, Madame Abdallah, allow us the honour of supplying you with the latest technology. Our Soviet friends tend to be a little clunky in the design department.’ At which the whole table had burst into laughter. But although the evening had ended up on a light note, I remember being acutely aware of the fact that every guest must have left wondering whether their safety in Egypt had been compromised by some unfavourable remark they’d let slip about the regime.

I sat down opposite Mr Fartime, wondering if he too was recalling the occasion.

He indicated my beard. ‘My friend, have you joined my more religious brothers?’ he joked - a reference to the bearded Muslims who had started to appear more often in the Westernised city recently.

I smiled. ‘No, no new-found faith. I’ve just been too busy to shave.’

‘I understand. I trust the additional security at the villa is to your liking?’ he went on. ‘I was concerned by the unduly rough treatment you received at the hands of our esteemed police force after your wife’s demise. The Alexandrian Oil Company may be a government institution but we like to look after our consultants, especially our “Diviner”. I promise that from now on we will be better hosts.’

Mr Fartime’s English was a quaint mixture of Victorian phrasing and Arabic proverbs. Despite Isabella’s reservations about his politics, I had always liked the man. Nevertheless, I watched his face carefully now. Were his comments a way of assessing my response to the police interrogation? Perhaps even an attempt to find out whether Isabella had discovered anything during that final dive?

‘The extra guard does make the place feel more secure,’ I replied carefully, ‘so thank you. But I’m sure this isn’t the reason you called me in so urgently. Is everything all right at the field?’

‘More than all right. The drilling rates are holding up nicely. Diviner indeed. No, this is a personal matter.’

I shifted in my seat, a little nervous now, racking my mind for memories of any transgression I might have committed.

‘I have received some news of your younger sibling Gareth,’ he said quickly.

I sat up. The last phone conversation I’d had with my brother came back to me: the broken words, his sudden weeping at the end. Ever since my mother’s death, my brother had become more isolated, despite the entourage that hung around him. Then there was his addiction - the self-aggrandising that came with amphetamine use, the manic phone calls. And, in the throes of these depressions, Gareth had always turned to Isabella for emotional guidance, a lifeline now cut off.

‘He hasn’t—’

‘He is alive, fear not,’ Mr Fartime cut in. ‘His female friend rang the office this morning looking for you. Your brother has taken a turn for the worse, as they would say in England. His friend seems to think you should return to England as soon as possible to provide some guidance. She was most insistent - a rather strong-willed young woman.’

Mr Fartime’s smile was entirely without irony and I sensed that his concern was genuine. Gareth had mentioned a girlfriend on the phone, Zoë, but I’d never met her. At least she sounded responsible, I thought. I’d been concerned that Isabella’s death would cause Gareth to relapse and the promise I’d made to her to look after him reverberated now in my mind.

As if reading my thoughts, Mr Fartime leaned across the desk. ‘I had a brother too, once. He was ten years younger. I lost him in the 1973 war. There are many things I would have done differently if I had been given the chance, and knowing my brother better would have been one.’ He paused, a little embarrassed at venturing into such intimate terrain. ‘Go to him, Oliver. The company is happy to give you four weeks. The field can spare you and, given your own personal circumstances, it is the least we can do.’

There was another awkward pause as he stared down at his shoes. ‘I knew your wife’s father, you know. My father worked as his manager at the cotton mill - before 1956, naturally. ’

‘Naturally,’ I repeated, surprised once again by how entangled Alexandrian society was.

‘We trust that you will return at the end of those four weeks, Oliver. There is more work to be done at Abu Rudeis, and after that minor earthquake . . .’

He coughed politely, embarrassed that he’d had to refer to the tremor that had killed Isabella. The memory of the sphinx tumbling down to the sea floor flooded my mind. I quickly shut it out, not wanting to think about it here.

‘The fault line reached as far as the oilfield?’ I asked instead, genuinely surprised. ‘I thought it was an underwater tremor. Why wasn’t I told?’

‘The well was undamaged, and you had enough trouble to deal with at that time.’ Mr Fartime coughed again.

‘I’ll be back by early June, I promise. The reservoir is my project too, don’t forget.’

‘I will keep the villa vacant for you,’ he said, with a nod. Pushing back his chair, he hauled his large frame upright and shook my hand again. ‘Tell me, what was your wife really looking for during that dive?’

The question came so out of left field that I struggled to retain my composure. I thought quickly. ‘A rare fish,’ I said. ‘You must remember what an ecologist she was?’

Mr Fartime chuckled. ‘Alas, I’m afraid I do.’

 

When I returned to the villa I found Ibrihim waving an ancient pistol around wildly as he berated the new guard in loud and abusive Arabic. Behind them a broken kitchen window was visible. As soon as Ibrihim saw me his face fell.

‘Monsieur Oliver, you must tell this lazy dog of a guard that he cannot fall asleep on the job! Otherwise we will all be murdered in our sleep! Praise Allah, nothing has been stolen from the villa this time. Next time we might not be so lucky. Please, you have authority.’ He dragged me over to the sheepish guard. Questioning the man, I found out that the villa had been broken into while Ibrihim was visiting the mosque. The guard, who had indeed fallen asleep, had been woken up by the sound of breaking glass and had managed to chase off a youth. I tried to get a further description of the youth, but it was already evening and the guard hadn’t got a clear view of the intruder’s face. But he was sure he’d been wearing a gun. No ordinary thief, then. As I stared up at the high iron gates I wondered how the intruder had managed to scale them and climb over the spikes at the top. Certainly the surrounding brick walls were too high to climb. The irrational idea that he might have flown over flickered through my mind. I dismissed it instantly, horrified at my own mental fragility. Undeniably, though, any sense of safety within those four walls was gone and I was determined to get out of Egypt before my pursuers caught up with me - or before I lost my mind completely.

As soon as the others had gone back into the house, I walked around to the back and checked on the astrarium. Its burial site appeared undisturbed, the soil untouched, but now there was no way I could leave it buried there.

I spent the next day organising my trip back to London. Throwing myself into packing was a way of distracting myself from my growing anxiety about leaving Isabella’s grave behind. I couldn’t help feeling that I was abandoning her, but I needed to see Gareth. I was worried about the call that had been made to Mr Fartime and the uneasy feeling that Gareth’s addiction had begun to consume him played on my conscience. Suddenly, an idea occurred to me. Perhaps Isabella had told Gareth a little more about the astrarium when she’d asked him to produce the drawing? I crossed the room to the shelf and pulled out the paper hidden at the back. If anything, he might be able to solve the cipher. He’d always been brilliant at puzzles. I pushed the paper deep into the inside pocket of my backpack.