The Egyptologist (59 page)

"A hundred? Really? I can hardly believe it, Professor." I could hear his pride,
the creative criminal's pride, and this—I felt it—would be his downfall.

"Simplest thing in the world. One: captain and corporal go off, as you would
plainly have it, for a
romantic
four-day weekend in the wilderness, celebrating the
Armistice with a lovers' retreat. They requisition a motorcycle and sidecar, and
zip their way south, where they begin to lay out a picnic, strum guitars, recite
Shelley, peel grapes. However, it is only a few hours since the Armistice, and some
enemy troops have not heard the happy news or some bandits cannot be both•
ered to care. Captain and corporal find themselves not in amorous embrace but
surrounded by enemies, and the captain draws his Webley revolver. He tells his
lover to run. Corporal heads for the motorcycle, hears three shots in quick suc•
cession, turns to see the mob of blood-maddened Arabs tearing the captain to
pieces, and in his fear, he cannot start the cycle. The devils pull him down as well,
drag him off to torture him. His identity disks and rifle are left behind. Fits your
facts, yes? Again? Fine. Two: the captain is in love with an Arab girl, decides to
throw everything away for her—family, country, career, Church of England—to
become her Arab husband. He takes his dearest friend, this New Zealandish pri•
vate—"

"Australian corporal."

"—this Os-try-lee-un cor-prill to be his manservant. They stage their own dis•
appearances and now all live together not two miles from here, husband, wife,
three children, and Aussie manservant. You can go find them right now, if you are
smart enough to track them. They left their dead meat tickets in the open and
hoped some idiot would presume them dead. You are that idiot. Again? Very
well, three, and this one pitched to your taste: the impoverished Australian cor•
poral was blackmailing the English captain, who was a sodomite. The English
captain decided to end his compromised position by murdering his tormentor.
So he invited the Aussie corporal out to the desert to show and share with him
some valuable archaeological find. Over hill after hill he led him to a secluded
spot. 'Here is where I happen to know we should dig,' he says. When the unsus•
pecting Aussie boy had his back turned and was pulling some digging tool out of
the motorcycle's saddlebag, the captain drew his Webley. The corporal caught
sight of this reflected in the motorcycle's gas tank, which pathetically, he had pol•
ished to impress the Englishman. There the captain's distorted reflection made
him resemble an insect with an enormous thorax, tiny little limbs, and a revolver.
The corporal, just a harmless would-be archaeologist, secretly drew his combat
knife and turned. The laughing captain told the poor boy he was going to kill him

to end the blackmail and then would dig up the promised archaeological find all
by himself. The captain even had the audacity to tell the boy not to take this news
badly, suggested to the poor fellow that he would be kind enough to report the
death as heroic so that the corporal would have posthumous awards and pen•
sions for his impoverished family Down Under. This was nearly convincing to the
corporal, as a matter of fact, but in the end he did not believe the captain would
make good on the promise, so he jumped him in preemptive self-defence. In the
struggle, the captain shot the corporal just as the corporal stabbed the captain,
and they both fell, quite dead. Bandits stole their uniforms, motorcycle, and be•
longings. Are you getting all this in your notes? Should I speak more slowly? Jack•
als dragged the bodies off to a cave and ate them. Metal identity disks are not
digestible or valuable and were left in the desert. More, Ferrell, my dwarf red
monkey? Number four: the captain, in his counterintelligence work, discovered
that the corporal was passing secrets to the Turks. Confronting the corporal with
this shocking discovery, the captain moved to arrest him, when all at once a
British aeroplane flying overhead, mistaking the altercation for a—"

And on and on he blathered, and at least six more fanciful tales followed. I
tried to interrupt, but he wouldn't allow anything to disrupt his performance:
"Wait a moment, Detective. I am only getting started. You see, all of these possi•
bilities, none verifiable or controvertible, fit your little document, and I am only
beginning to stretch my muscles. Textual evidence can contain a vast quantity of
pits and distortions, like a gramophone disk left in the sun. There's hardly a writ•
ten report on
any
past event that can explain
anything.
We know nothing of the
past, not truly, from any
single
document, but you have travelled the world, Fer•
rell, learning nothing, raping my reputation in certain corners, and attempting to
squire my fiancee, based on
that piece of paper!?"
But, Macy! He'd made his fatal
error! Did you see it? If he truly knew nothing of the missing men, if he'd truly
come back to camp a month after their disappearance, then how did he—in his
array of truth-obscuring hypotheses—guess that young Paul Caldwell was
"a
would-be archaeologist"?
Nothing in the military record would've shown that; I
only knew it from my interviews in Australia. Oh yes, our Mr. Trilipush was
caught. I pounced, and we had our moment in the sun, Macy, to make our dra•
matic declaration and watch the wall of lies crumble:

"The truth, Trilipush, in my experience is very simple and often hidden in
plain view, marked by the usual signposts of motivation: lust, greed, hatred, envy.
So I suggest you calm down now and listen to what I know. To what I
know,
Pro•
fessor, not to what I can imagine. In early
November
1918, perhaps earlier, Captain

Marlowe's invert lover and treasure-hunting partner, the impoverished gentle•
man Captain Trilipush, returns to Egypt from a battle in Turkey, in which he was
presumed killed. He doesn't report himself to his superiors but merely lurks
about, letting the British command think he's dead. In his lurking, he discovers
that, during his Turkish absence, his fancy man has taken a young Australian cor•
poral to be his archaeological research assistant, and how
did
you guess
that,
Pro•
fessor? Well, the spurned and angry Trilipush assumes, wrongly, that Marlowe
and Caldwell are also lovers, and he secretly follows the two men south to the
desert when they take a four-day leave to go looking for archaeological treasure,
guided by the mysterious Fragment C. Oh yes, I know all about your treasure
map, Professor, don't interrupt. The two innocent men arrive unawares at the
spot near the treasure they seek, but before they can even begin their digging,
who should appear but the ghostly Trilipush? 'What? Are you here?' stammers
Marlowe to the surprising returnee. 'Silence, you unfaithful wretch!' shrieks the
wailing, weeping Trilipush, maddened by jealousy and greed and heartbreak.
Using his own Webley, he kills them both, captain and corporal, the ex-lover and
the innocent Australian boy. He buries the bodies but accidentally drops their
identity disks and the Aussie's rifle, then simply drives off on their motorcycle,
stealing their treasure map, this Fragment C that would tell him where to return
when the heat had let up and he could safely come to dig for the loot. Some
months later, he turns up in the USA, weeping crocodile tears for the loss of his
great friend, pretending to know nothing of Caldwell, and makes his name as a
scholar of the very king whose treasure-filled tomb Marlowe and Caldwell were
searching for the day you slaughtered them in cold blood. So certain of your
hideous victory, you even mock the family of one of your victims, sending the
poor grieving parents a copy of your pornographic work, grotesquely dedicated
to your murdered lover, calling them by the private, perverted nicknames you
and their invert son had invented for them. In Boston, securing work through
false academic pretence and a financier through equally false romantic pre•
tence—"

"Wait a moment—you believe I killed Paul Caldwell?" he asked, infuriating
me, as he was several minutes behind the flow of my discourse.

"Don't interrupt, Trilipush. You secured a job at Harvard by claiming to have
attended Oxford, which you did not. Oh, you were there, I know, a sodomite so•
cialite in Oxford's shady little underworld, a scandalous influence on a circle of
young inverts who continue to sing of you to this day, and you were living off of
Marlowe's money, paid to be his kept man, but you weren't a student, received no

degrees, earned no right to a post at Harvard. Arriving in Boston, looking around
for an easy target, you pretended to love Margaret Finneran, but only to win her
father's money. With that money you set off for Egypt, having no intention of
ever returning to Boston after you found your treasure, and you began to excavate
in the
precise spot
where Paul Caldwell and Hugo Marlowe disappeared, a re•
markable coincidence, you'll agree. Well, soon thereafter, that same potential
father-in-law, realising his error of judgement, acquiesces to his daughter's wise,
independent decision to break off your engagement. Maddened by this slight to
your overweening criminal pride, suspecting that Finneran has understood your
plan, and intending to make it impossible for him to pursue you and the gold,
you attempt to ruin Finneran's reputation with a series of slanderous cables. In•
stead, he boldly pursues you, finds you at your dig, where you and he make a cor•
rupt bargain: the two of you divide up your ill-gotten gains into two large heaps.
Finneran intends to secretly stash most of his in Maltese banks on his way home
on the
Cristoforo Colombo,
apologetically bringing back to Boston only just
enough to pay off his debts, but not enough to share the find's
true
dividends
with his double-crossed partners. In exchange for your silence at his treachery,
and much to your sodomist relief, he will allow you to sail off to points unknown
with a larger share of the gold than you are actually due, and he will tell Margaret
to forget you, that you fell in love with an Egyptian girl. In reality, you will be off,
most likely to refurbish dilapidated Trilipush Hall with your bloodstained Egyp•
tian treasure, stolen from, in turn, Marlowe, Caldwell, and now J. P. O'Toole. Oh,
no, I don't believe for a moment you're returning to Boston, Trilipush. Neither
you nor Finneran could afford that."

The effect was extraordinary, Macy. He sat, stock-still, staring fish-eyed at me
as if I'd struck him a blow. That's what the truth feels like to a liar, Macy. I un•
derstood everything at this moment, understood all there was to know of our Mr.
Trilipush.

But here was our only weakness: without the bodies, what physical proof did
I have? Nothing. So I quickly followed up my position of strength and made my
move: if Trilipush refused to come with me
at once
to make his confession to the
British or Australian consul, I had no choice but to have the local police use dogs
to dig up the entire area to find Caldwell's and Marlowe's bodies. This alarmed
him, and though he sputtered about damage to ancient tombs and whatnot, it
was plain that his fear was more than scholarly. I had him. I knew it and he knew
it. All that remained was the endgame. "Nothing lasts forever, Trilipush," I con•
cluded, leaning back. "Your move, mate."

He decided to stall. He insulted me, reasserted his innocence, told me he was
armed. Finally, he negotiated: he promised he'd be on the boat to Cairo on Mon•
day, I could confirm the reservation that instant. And he would force Finneran to
join him in answering any questions I wanted in front of any magistrate I chose
when they reached Cairo. I could even walk him off the boat in manacles, if I
wished. "But for now, Mr. Ferrell, my wondrous nemesis, I have preparations to
attend to for the great voyage." He hobbled off, leaving me to pay for his drink. I
was not concerned, as at once I signalled my Egyptian watchers to follow him,
and they leapt into well-orchestrated action, spreading out, blending in,
manoeuvring as I'd taught them. I went at once and booked myself on his boat to
Cairo, and from there moved directly to the police station. The prospect of the po•
lice and dogs had visibly frightened him, and I meant to hold his feet to the fire.
I'd no intention of letting him slide away in the coming forty-eight hours.

(Saturday, 30 December, 1922, continued)

I am back from my errands in town, my Margaret, and for the life
of me I cannot understand why you and CCF did not show this lunatic
the door at once. Thanks to his dust kicking, immediate clarification is
now in order.

It happened thus: I hobbled over to the post, where nothing awaited
me, but as I left, at least a half dozen little boys followed me out, their
number growing as I walked down the street. Some of them pretended
to hide and follow me secretly, but these were hardly serious efforts.

Whenever I looked at them over my shoulder, they would giggle and
stare at the sky or their feet. I wandered aimlessly for a while, and
never with fewer than six or eight of the monkeys trailing behind.
(They tried to follow me back to the tomb tonight, just now, but I sim•
ply gave them some of your father's money to go away,
imshee igaree,
which they happily did, waving good-bye to me when I stepped onto
the ferry. I hired one of them, however, to come back tomorrow to run
last-minute errands for me and your father before our departure, post
my papers to you for safekeeping, carry away a few things we do not
need anymore.)