The Egyptologist (2 page)

Government's Antiquities Service; several score pages are on the letter•
head of the Service's Director-General. Finally, I have nearly filled one
very handsome Lett's
#46
Indian and Colonial Rough Diary, the pre•
ferred journals of British explorers whilst working in faraway heat and
sand, advancing knowledge at the risk of their very hides. Do not
worry: the pages torn from its back are none other than the pages of
this letter. Together the three documents compose the rough draft of
my indisputable masterwork,
Ralph M. Trilipush and the Discovery of the
Tomb of Atum-hadu.

Also, I am enclosing the letters you have sent me here, your words,
kind and cruel intermingled. Seven letters, two cables, and the cable I
sent you that was thrown in my face yesterday. And your father's ca•
bles to me.

I just replaced the stylus, my last but one. This is a lovely song.
I am trusting a boy to serve as my messenger to the post.

Over time, Margaret, there is erosion. Sands abrade, rubble ob•
scures, papyri crumble, paints decay. Some of this is, of course, de•
structive. But some erosion is clarifying, as it scours away false
resemblances, uncharacteristic lapses, confusing and inessential details.
If, in the course of writing my notes, I have made here and there a
wrong turn, misunderstood or badly described something I saw or
thought I saw, well, at the time one thinks, No matter, I shall edit when
I return home. And I shall. But, of course, should I be beaten to death
and shoved inside a gangly Earl's travelling trunk and then hacked to
pieces and my shreds lazily flipped overboard to peckish sharks, well,
then, a pity indeed that I did not edit my work when I had the chance.
I shall then need a brilliant and courageous redactor who can puff
away dusty speculation to reveal stark, cold, obsidian and alabaster
truth. You will provide that clarifying erosion.

We come to the crucial task I am entrusting to you, my muse¬
become-executrix. You are now the guardian-goddess of all that I have
accomplished. These writings are the story of my discovery, my trounc•
ing of doubters and self-doubt. I am entrusting to you nothing less than
my
immortality.
I am relying on you, despite everything, for whom else

do I have? If something should happen to my body, then you are now
responsible—by opening this package, by reading these words—to en•
sure that my name and the name of Atum-hadu never perish. It is the
least you can do for me, Margaret.

You will oversee the publication of this, my last work. Insist on a
large printing from a prestigious university press. Stamp your pretty
foot and demand shelf space in all major university libraries, as well as
with the major Egyptological museums in the USA, Britain, France,
Germany, Italy, and in Cairo. And the general public! Cover your ears,
Maggie! For there will be a clamour like no one has ever heard when
the news escapes. But hold them all at bay until you are ready. Do the
work as I am telling you, insist that the book be printed exactly as I
say, and give the vultures nothing else.

I do not have time to edit just at the moment; events are moving too
fast here. And we leave tomorrow. So I shall do it myself when I arrive
safely home, but, allow me to provide contingent guidance if events
should unwind elsewise.

For example, as I look at them now, certainly some of the early
sketches seem not to have been entirely complete. The eye plays tricks
in dim light, when one is hurried, but the final drawings are unques•
tionably precise, so those first efforts can go. And you will extract my
ongoing letter to you, my private or overly candid diary entries here
and there. What is only for you and what is for all the world fall away
from each other; the division is an easy one to see, if you are careful. I
was overeager as a diarist and as your correspondent at the beginning.
There is no need to publish anything about you and me, the parties and
the partnerships. I was excited, and for good reason, Margaret, as his•
tory will attest. And I see now also some stray meditation, releasing a
little scholarly steam here and there, my second guesses allowed some
room to stumble about only to suffocate in the open air. A careful read•
ing, I beg of you, a careful reading in private, careful editing, and then
find a typist (call Vernon Collins), use my illustrations from the note•
books, just the last group of them, when Atum-hadu's paradoxes were
all clear, and I at last understood what I was seeing.

If you must be my widow, M., then you will also be my wind. You
will gently erode away the inessential. I started crossing bits out just
now, but I do not have time, and I might cut into bone, so look here: I
shall make your work as simple as I can: the relevant material in order:
Kent, Oxford, the discovery of Fragment C with my friend, his tragic
end, you and I falling in love, your father's investment, Atum-hadu's
tomb in all its splendour, the insightful solution to his Tomb Paradox,
sealing up our find for a later return, your father and I heading home,
our unfortunate murder. Or not, of course. It could not be clearer.

Burn the rest as the marginalia of a scholar's early drafts.

The sunset here is unlike anything I have ever seen. The colour as
the sun melts into the changing desert cliffs—such colours do not exist
in Boston or Kent. These are the hills and cliffs where my life's story is
indelibly etched.

Last stylus. I do love this song.

If, Margaret, you are reading this letter, sobbing, horrified at your
double loss but girding yourself and your pen for the vital tasks ahead
of you, then I do not hesitate to accuse from here, before the commis•
sion of the dreadful crime itself, the maniacal Howard Carter, whose
name you may perhaps have heard in recent weeks, the half-mad, con•
genitally lucky bumbler who tripped over a stair and fell into the sus•
piciously well-preserved tomb of some minor XVIIIth-Dynasty

boy-kinglet named Trite-and-Common and who, in his crippling jeal•
ousy, has several times threatened my person in the past months, both
whilst sober and whilst intoxicated on a variety of local narcotic in•
halants. If I have neglected to note in my professional journals Carter's
unceasing attitude of hostility and barely contained violence towards
me, such delicacy is only a pained professional courtesy to a once-great
explorer, and is, moreover, an example of that certain bravura I have
always displayed and you have always admired. Thus I have ignored
his repeated threats to make me and my "noble patron, Mr. Chester
Crawford Finneran, disappear inexplicably." Obviously, should your
father and I not step off the
Crutoforo Colombo
in the port of New York,
you may be quite certain that we were done in by Carter or one of his

thugs, like his money-man, a lanky English Earl, whose mild manner
frays and scarcely covers a vicious character, stretch it though he does,
or by their hideous orange-haired confederate, whom you know only
too well.

Most beautiful Margaret, these months have not lacked in misun•
derstanding between us. But for all the harsh letters and harsher si•
lence you sent me, I know that your love for me remains just as my love
for you; there is nothing in this life that I value more highly than your
embrace. The gramophone recording has come to an end again and
now only wheezes in exhaustion.

That was my last stylus from the hundreds I brought with me. The
thought that I have seen you for the last time, that I shall never again
hold you, trembling in the breezes that dance through your ballroom
when the windows swing open to the garden, that the pallor of your
throat and the colour of your limbs will never again be revealed to me
seizes me so roughly that I can scarcely write now. I cannot bear the
thought that I shall never see you again. I cannot bear it. I cannot bear
that you will think of me as your father described me, not as I really
am, as I know you saw me, at the start. Please think of me at our happi•
est, when you were most proud of me, when you found the hero you
had so long been seeking, the only man you could imagine, when we
talked of the world at our feet. Please think of me like that, my darling
darling. I love you more than you can know, in ways you will never
imagine.

I will see you soon, my love.
Your Ralph

Sunset on the Bayview Nursing Home
Sydney, Australia

December 3, 1954
Dear Mr. Macy,

I am in receipt of your letter of the 13th November and I'm delighted to make
your acquaintance, if only by post. I'm sickened to hear of your lovely aunt Mar•
garet's passing. It's my dearest wish that she thought of me fondly now and again.
We met in times of crisis, high drama. You never forget those, I can tell you. She
was a beautiful, vibrant woman when I saved her back in '22. 1 never saw her
again after I brought to justice the man who caused her suffering.

I'm certainly most intrigued by your "small request to tap into [my] no doubt
excellent memory." True enough, sir, it is still excellent, and I'll make an extra ef•
fort to prove it to you. In my day, I was known for having perfect recall.

I might also add that you're no insignificant sleuth yourself to have tracked
me here to this hellhole of a pensioners' house, this human wastebin, thirty years
after the facts, young Mr. Macy. Should the investigative field ever interest you
professionally, I think you well-suited, and that's high praise, that is, coming from
me. Of course, maybe you're the sort of fellow who doesn't have to work at all, eh?
To answer your first question, which maybe was only politeness showing off
your breeding, even in a letter to a stranger, but nevertheless, the answer is: bored.
Bored nearly to death, thanks, which I suspect is the idea behind these places.
Drink up the last of our savings and then bore us to death to open up the narrow,
sagging bed and one of the few stinking pots to piss in, 'cause the next old fellow's

crossing his legs for it.

I can't tell you how pleased I am at your request to hear about my greatest case,
to help fill the blank spaces of your "private Macy family history." And you're in
luck: see, I brought very little with me to this damnable place, not one for fine
clothes or possessions, me, a simple man, always ready to move fast if circumstances
demanded, but when I saw for certain that I was heading here, I said to myself, 'Ter•
rell, you'll be a royal fool if you don't haul your files along and write down your case
histories in your many spare hours. It'll be a bright, shining warning to the criminal
types out there, a fine teaching tool for other detectives, and a gripping yarn for the
general reader." Which is why your letter pleases me so very much.

You want clear recollections? Well, I'm historical truth on two legs, I am, but
I need a fellow just like you if I'm going to stop sitting on these dynamite tales
and pop them into the public eye. I'm safe in assuming you know people in New
York publishing, yes? True-crime magazines maybe? Let's give that some think•
ing. I know you said you're only asking for "personal family history," but I'm too
close to the finish line to play fancy-dress games, Mr. Macy. I see where we can go
on this, and I think we've a winner. See, I kept notes, wrote everything out verba•
tim, as they say, just as soon as I could after interviews. We didn't have the ma•
chines they have now to make a taped recording, so we compensated. Young
detectives today with their magnetic recorders don't even know what they don't
know how to do anymore, but in our day, we had good memories and we wrote
fast. If I don't have every last word right here in front of me, well, I have a fine
memory of the sort of thing people said or meant to say, so I can reconstruct just
fine. It just needs colour, quotation marks, literary frills, typewriting. I'll provide
the heroics, you do the rest, eh?

Even if, at the end, some of it wasn't crystal clear to me, still I think this case
is my finest, so if you're ready to be my Mr. Watson, let's begin here, and after this
one, let's figure I've another dozen at least for us to pull together.

Now, you say you have documents which "may shed light on lingering ques•
tions" I might have, and that's a rich piece of bait to dangle in front of a bloke like
me. I am who I am, and even thirty years on, I'm curious to hear anything you'd
care to disclose. When you refer to finding Margaret's private papers after her
death, what does that include, I wonder. What did she say about me? She wasn't
above stretching the truth for a story, that one.

When I knew your family back in '22, you weren't even born yet, I don't sup•
pose. When did your aunt meet your uncle? You know, she was a little keen on
me, your aunt. She ever tell you this? I suppose not, and I'm sure your uncle was
an excellent fellow. But when I met her, she was engaged to that devilish toff
poofter explorer, and I think I seemed like just the thing to her—a man of unim•
peachable honour, always after the truth, putting the truth first always.

What even to call this case? Think about it: it started as an odd-duck inheri•
tance task, then it was a missing-person case with a dozen different clients, then
a double murder, a prenuptial background investigation, then a debt-collection
case, and suddenly quite a different double murder. With the imprisonment of
the damned Arab (I can't remember his name, oddly), we settled at least the final
crime, but much inside this coconut don't slosh when I shake it, even now. You