The Deceit

14

They didn’t even get in a car.

The policeman just walked him five hundred metres up the road, to a large office tiled white and blue. What was happening? Why was he being arrested? Was this the police station? Ryan gazed around, repressing his panic.

The place was certainly governmental — one of the few buildings in this broiled and dusty town not made of mud brick and straw.

Inside the stuffy office were three more Egyptian cops, irritable and tired. The men were sweating in the afternoon heat and waving at the sandflies. A non-dusty oblong on the otherwise dusty wall showed where the latest portrait of the lately deposed president must have hung until very recently.

A cop invited him to sit. The police didn’t seem that hostile. More dutiful. But dutiful could easily turn to vengeful with the Egyptian security forces. And they weren’t averse to beating up the odd foreigner.

Ryan steeled himself.

They questioned him for two hours. What was he doing here? How did he get here? Why come to a place like Nazlet Khater? Why did he speak good Arabic? Did he have a permit to travel? Ryan knew his best hope of avoiding a much nastier complication was honesty, or something close to it. So he was honest. Almost.

‘I am an Egyptologist, an American academic. I live in Abydos; here is my passport. I am an old friend of Victor Sassoon, and I heard that his body had been found. I do not have a permit to travel, but I only travel by day …’

But it wasn’t his answers the saved him from further harassment: it was Hassan’s letter.

When he produced it, the senior policeman read the contents and broke into a wary smile.

‘Ah, Hassan Elgammal. A great friend. I know his father.’

He handed back the letter, and nodded, with a faint expression of apology. ‘We have had a lot of trouble here. Many people wanted to find this Victor Sassoon, I do not know why. Anyway, his body is already buried, in accordance with Islamic law, so you have no further need to concern yourself.’

Every part of Ryan’s soul was yearning to ask: what about the Sokar documents? What was found with the body? But he knew he couldn’t do that: this would only provoke their suspicion once again, and then their wary acceptance of his story would certainly revert to something much nastier.

Taking Egyptian antiquities unlawfully was a serious offence, in any circumstances: the Sokar documents technically belonged to the Egyptian people and the Egyptian state. The police could put him in jail for years if he confessed what he was really doing, without any kind of permission. It would be like admitting intent to steal the golden death mask of Tutankhamun.

Ryan felt defeated. The entire exercise had been valueless. Now he could go back to hodding his bricks in the Oseirion, back to the life of a Pharaonic slave. But something in him rebelled at the idea: Hassan had been right, Ryan had done enough labouring now. He wanted to be a scholar again. To be the Egyptologist he was. To think. Use his brain.

The police officer stiffly gestured: ‘You can wait in here for a while, then we will take you to the buses and you can go home.’

A door was opened to a side room. Two other people were sitting on bare chairs therein. A white woman in her late twenties, and a light-skinned Egyptian. Both looked weary and bored; both gave him a brief glance, then looked away, staring at the floor, or at the barred and grimy window.

What was a Western woman doing here? Ryan had no time to find out, or even ask a question. Minutes later, a fifth policeman entered the room. He escorted them silently out into the blinding sun, with their bags. The woman had a hefty rucksack, like a backpacker. They were squeezed into a police car, which rattled down the muddy road, to a bare and windy square. Dented minibuses waited here. Egypt’s rural public transport. The policeman gestured at one empty bus.

‘These will take you to Tahta. From there you can get a train.’

The police car drove off. The light-skinned Egyptian looked nervously around, then immediately climbed on board the minibus.

Ryan was about to follow when the woman spoke, very quietly. ‘You’re Ryan Harper. The Egyptologist. You knew Sassoon.’

He paused, almost frightened. She continued.

‘I’ve seen you in photos. With him. I know a lot about Victor Sassoon.’ Her English was perfect but she had a definite accent: Dutch, or German. A blonde European woman in Nazlet who knew who he was: what the hell?

Now she lifted two stiff fingers to her mouth like a boy pretending to blow smoke from the muzzle of a gun. As if to say: Wait, be quiet, listen, say nothing.

He said nothing. She spoke again. ‘You came looking for something, didn’t you?’

The wind whirled across the sandy square. The place was deserted, apart from a stooped old woman in black shrouds, walking in the shadows towards a little shop. Ryan nodded and replied, very quietly, ‘Yes.’

The young woman’s face was expressionless. She seemed to be assessing him. ‘I have something you need to see, later. We can talk later. In the town.’

He climbed on the minibus, and calmed himself as best he could.

The journey was staccato and uncomfortable. The road to Tahta passed endless little villages identical in their poverty: the repetition was like an hallucination, as if Egypt had hired a handful of extras on the cheap to appear in every scene. There was the wall-eyed man sitting on a stool smoking shisha outside a tea-house, there was the dog with three legs dragging itself towards a reeking heap of rubbish. And there they were again.

Through it all the European woman texted messages from her phone. Occasionally she made, or took, furtive calls, whispering and inaudible. Glancing at Ryan as if she was deciding something.

What did this woman have? What was going on?

‘Tahta!’

The minibus had drawn to a halt in a nondescript square with a perimeter of tea-houses with shishas, and a blue Co-op gas station, trailing a queue of rusty taxis. Everyone climbed off, dragging their bags. Ryan looked around. The sun was going down, turning the eastern cliffs, fifteen kilometres away, to mauve. The city of Tahta was straggled along the Nile valley.

The light-skinned Egyptian disappeared at once. The other passengers dispersed. Soon it was just him and the woman.

Abruptly, she extended a hand. ‘Helen Fassbinder.’

Perplexed, Ryan shook her hand.

For the first time, she allowed herself a small and anxious smile. ‘You must have questions.’

‘Just a few million. Nothing too demanding.’

‘Come. Let us have tea.’

The Dutch or German accent was definitely there: come — komm. Brusque and forthright.

His curiosity burned.

Ryan followed as Helen led them to the dirtiest possible tea-house at the corner of the square. Despite its impoverished exterior, it was busy with men smoking nargilehs, sipping thick sweet coffee from small dirty cups, playing sheshbesh, arguing. Some of them glanced at the Western couple, then returned to their games and caffeinated debates. Obviously Tahta still got a few tourists, thanks to its train station: tourists heading south for Abydos and Luxor, or north to Coptic sites, like the Monastery of the Bones.

Helen ordered tea for them both in clumsy Arabic, the tea-boy looking almost paralytically fascinated at the idea of a woman ordering for a man. Or maybe it was her hair that astonished him. The boy kept looking at her unveiled blonde hair. Stealing glances at it, rapt with repressed desire.

Helen was apparently either oblivious, or very accustomed, to the effect she was having on the boy. ‘Let me tell you my story. Yes?’

Ryan disguised his urgent curiosity. He nodded calmly.

Between brief and rapid sips of tea, she told him she was a German film-maker, freelance; she lived in London, or sometimes Berlin. Or sometimes she just travelled. She made documentaries by herself, with her own camera. Just her and a camera. Her living was precarious, but exhilarating.

‘Sometimes I get lucky, sell a film. To German TV or the BBC or America. That feeds me for a while. I made a documentary two years back about Gilles de Rais. The First Serial Killer. You have heard of it?’

‘Sorry. No.’

‘A medieval mystery, a Frenchman who was a murderer. I tried to solve it. I did not. But at least I sold it. My movies try to answer historical or modern puzzles.’

‘What were you doing in Egypt?’

‘I think you can guess. You are beginning to guess? No?’

‘Am I?’

‘I was in Egypt making a film about Tutankhamun. It was not so good. Boring. But then I heard about Victor Sassoon.’ She sipped her tea. ‘I heard about his disappearance, and all the other rumours. This was much more exciting for me. A great possibility, a real modern mystery. What did he find in the desert? The Sokar Hoard? Why did he disappear? Walk off into the wilderness? So for these last weeks I have been tracing his steps across Egypt. Cairo. The Red Sea. Nazlet.’

Ryan stared into the deep red tea in his glass; then he looked into her clear blue German eyes. ‘But how do you know who I am?’

‘I began with lots and lots of research. I did not sleep for days! Learning everything I could. In a lot of Cairo internet cafés.’ Her smile was very brief. ‘I now know many things about Sassoon. Who he taught, who he knew, who he met. You were one of his more famous pupils when he taught at UCL. What happened to you? You used to be famous, then, pfft!’

The question was so direct it was beyond rudeness. Maybe it was just Teutonic and efficient? Ryan shook his head. ‘Something happened. It doesn’t matter. Tell me more about … Nazlet.’

Helen Fassbinder paused, and looked past him at the doorway and the street, and Ryan took the opportunity to assess her. She was beautiful, but in a very severe way; indeed it was so severe her beauty bordered on plainness. Her blonde hair was too-tightly tied back, her blue shirt was stainless, despite the rigours of the day. Her black jeans were quite immaculate. But there was also a real nervousness there, a vulnerability, a flaw in the ice-blue of her eyes.

‘I came to Nazlet and stayed for three weeks. I rented a house. A hovel. I rented a motorbike. I scoured the desert, I made a friend. But of course it was impossible. The desert is too big.’

A text pinged on her mobile phone. She broke off the conversation and read it, without apology. A wordless nod. Then she looked back at Ryan. Blue eyes fierce, judging him. ‘Then a Bedu, a camel herder, came into town, from the western desert.’

Ryan nodded. The old trading routes, from oases like Kharga and Farafra, often made shortcuts straight across the wilderness. Modern Egypt had long since abandoned such three-thousand-year-old thoroughfares but Bedouin would still use them.

‘The Bedu man was bubbling. Gossiping. He told everyone in Nazlet that he had found a body, a white man, in a cave. Apparently his dog had wandered off, into the cave. The Bedu followed. Found the body. I knew it had to be Sassoon. A body wearing Western clothes? Of course it was Sassoon.’

‘And he had a bag with him?’

Helen didn’t answer. ‘I made my move immediately. I knew that as soon as the news spread, the police would come. Treasure hunters. Journalists. I paid the Bedu to come with me, two hundred dollars. We got another motorbike. He led me into the desert, and I found Sassoon. Lying there, in the cave. He had already begun to mummify.’

A tiny ripple of emotion made Ryan bite his words away. Helen’s voice softened, just for a moment. ‘I am sorry. He was your friend?’

Ryan Harper fought the sadness.

‘Victor Sassoon wasn’t just my friend, he was an exemplar. The amazing work he did on the Dead Sea Scrolls, they were an inspiration to me, one of the reasons I took up Egyptology. He was maybe the greatest scholar of ancient Semitic and Egyptian languages. And he was … generous with his time, a great man — it’s difficult to explain …’

The softening in her voice disappeared. ‘So your friend Sassoon could understand the Sokar documents? And maybe you can too.’

Ryan’s excitement returned. He leaned forward, urgent. ‘What did you find in the cave?’

She paused. Then she hauled her rucksack onto her lap. And answered plainly, ‘The Sokar Hoard.’