The Deceit

29

Another concrete room. How many anonymous, rancid, badly drained concrete rooms could be found, just like this, across Egypt? How many pungent little hovels redolent of stunted ambitions? Tens of millions of Egyptian people lived in houses that weren’t much better. Many were probably worse.

Ryan sighed. No wonder this country was breeding religious fundamentalism. God was the only hope in a country of the hopeless. Yahweh, Allah, the Lord God Almighty: He was the only light in the dark.

And yet, could he blame them? Sometimes Ryan envied the Egyptians — the Copts or the Muslims — the ardour of their faith. The great solace they possessed. Because he too wanted to believe. He too wanted to think that Rhiannon and their daughter were waiting, in the fields of God, amidst the flowers; waiting for him to come home. He wanted to dive into the clean waters of illogic, the cleansing and purifying absurdity, like a young man yearning for war.

But he couldn’t make the leap.

Ryan gazed around the police holding cell. Albert Hanna was now being interviewed: he and Helen had already had an hour each of questioning, a questioning which in truth had been less than rigorous, probably just obligatory box-ticking, before the police sheepishly made their request for the inevitable and hefty bribe.

So the cops didn’t want to kill them. They were just desperate, like everyone else in the Egyptian tourist industry: used to augmenting their pitiful salaries with tips and backhanders from the millions on the Tutankhamun tour buses, the Hurghada day trips, the bloated Nile cruise boats, now all empty.

Yet the questioning, however desultory, had still left Ryan shaken. Because the police had asked him the most unsettling questions of all: ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you making a film? What is the point? Why risk your life? Egypt is dangerous now. Go home.’

In the hurtling drama of the preceding days, this most important query had somehow gone astray. But now, sitting here, Ryan had plenty of time to focus on it. Why was he doing all this? He’d virtually abandoned his job, he was indeed risking his life, he was trying to solve an ancient puzzle that might, in the end, turn out to be no puzzle at all: just the ravings of a sixth-century Coptic Gnostic, or some delirious monk. A circuitous maze with no exit.

Like life.

‘Helen. Why the hell are we doing this?’

She said nothing. She was sitting across the cell, her knees up and her head rested on them. Sleeping? She was wearing a long black shirt over black jeans, and those somehow always-immaculate walking boots. Blonde in black. Ryan stifled any incipient feelings of desire. It was ridiculous. He was ten years older than her. She barely smiled at him.

Though she had been smiling more of late.

No. She was a young, striking woman with the brightest of futures: sharp, determined and talented. And sleeping.

Ryan sat back and stared at the ceiling. His mind went back to the papyrus. The Greek word-riddle, or spell: AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF. It was next to the famous line from the Book of Revelation: Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

Was the secret in the Sokar Hoard a spell for summoning the Devil? A spell that worked? Was it connected to the fragments of Abra-Melin magic?

‘You are doing it because you want to be famous.’

Helen had spoken. Now she spoke again. ‘You are doing this because you want the fame. And because, right now, you are a little disappointed in life. Because you are nearly forty and you think this could be your last big chance.’

This was possibly too much truth. ‘Ah, OK.’

But Helen wasn’t done. She stared at him with her cold Nordic eyes and went on, ‘You have no family, no children, nothing. Why not try and solve this amazing puzzle? Why not take a risk? What else is life for, if you do not dare, if you do not try and achieve something? Otherwise, it is just golf.’

He matched her unblinking gaze with his own. ‘You think it’s just vanity then. Male vanity.’

‘No.’ She stood up and crossed the cell, and sat on the same concrete bench as him. Close enough that he could almost identify her perfume. ‘Without vanity, the desire for fame,’ she said, ‘where would we be? Why did men volunteer to fly to the moon? Because they wanted glory, and fame. Why did Columbus sail to America? Risk his life, sailing into nowhere? Because he did it for fame.’

‘And gold.’

‘It is human to seek glory, Ryan. And besides, you were a brilliant Egyptologist. And still are. You can still do this, Ryan. You can do this. You are halfway there already, you are thinking better, working better. Carve your name on the marble of history like Michelangelo signing his Pieta in St Peter’s. Ryan Harper did this.’

He was struck dumb, for a second. Helen was rarely this loquacious. ‘You’ve been assessing my work?’

‘I watch you a lot.’ She paused. ‘I like watching you. I think the way you saved the kid in Sohag was brave. You are brave and sometimes, sometimes you are quite handsome, in a sort of slightly rusted way, like a nice old car.’

‘You’re teasing me now, Helen. Stop.’

‘Am I?’ She laughed, gently. ‘Really? I do not think I am. I like watching you, and working with you. And I am bored of being alone, Ryan, being stuck in my own head. Thinking about my sister, feeling guilty.’ She was sitting very close now. ‘This will sound insane, but the last few days have been some of the happier days of my life. I have never been less alone than I am right now.’

‘Helen?’

She stared at him. Defiant. Smiling.

‘You should kiss me, Ryan. If it goes wrong, we shall say it was rape. After all, we are in a police station.’

Her face was near. Her beauty was close. He reached for her. And paused for a moment. And then he kissed her.

It was an awkward kiss, an amateurish kiss, the kiss of two people who had been alone for a long time. But she came back for a second, and this next kiss was better.

She smiled again. ‘That was good. But I am not going to sleep with you. At least not here. The concrete is too hard.’

He stared at her, perplexed. And aroused. ‘You know … you’re a little unnerving.’

‘Am I?’ She stood up, backed away and crossed the floor to sit down on the opposite bench.

He asked, ‘So why are you doing this?’

‘I told you, because I want to be a success like my sister.’ Her smile had faded. ‘To make my parents proud of me as they were of her. To make them happier. I hate their sadness, their loss.’

‘So it’s just a different kind of fame, in a way.’

Her nod was accepting. ‘Yes, of course.’

This time Ryan smiled, with something like gladness. They had kissed! — and it felt wholly correct. Perhaps, at last, the past was slipping away. ‘But the—’

Their conversation was stilled by the door opening. Albert Hanna stood in the doorway, next to a tall policeman.

‘We’re free to go,’ he said. ‘The police captain is a Copt, and a seventh cousin. I have therefore spent another thousand American dollars to oil the wheels: the utility of the greenback remains undimmed. We are still, of course, in grave danger. So we need to move. Aren’t we meant to be, ah, crossing the river?’

‘Sorry?

‘We have a rendezvous, do we not? The Valley of the Nobles, the next destination on the Macarius papyrus. Now we can make that rendezvous.’

Albert Hanna had rescued them; but his expression was morbid. Why? Helen and Ryan swapped glances, gathered their meagre possessions, and exited the police building. Ryan waited until they were out in the sun of the Luxor afternoon and sitting discreetly in the shadows of a tea-house, across from the Luxor temple, before he asked the obvious question. ‘What is so wrong? What’s happened?’

Albert gazed at him, quite distantly, and for once did not smooth his black and devilish little goatee.

‘The police captain is an intelligent man. He studied in America. He is highly educated. He is not credulous. He is sympathique. He told me about the Zabaleen. He has friends in Coptic Cairo and he has heard reports, troubling rumours. The Zabaleen suicides, the self-harming, the strange behaviour we have witnessed — the young man in Sohag, the man in the cemetery — these are not isolated events.’

‘And?’

‘It is all quite violent and bizarre. There have been reports of Zabaleen …’ He shuddered, visibly. ‘Biting themselves. Self-mutilating their hands, their fingers, their faces. And there have been more murders.’

Helen frowned. ‘It is some mental disease? Or a mass hysteria? What?’

Albert gazed at the avenue of sphinxes, smiling their feline smiles in the afternoon sun, serene and inscrutable. ‘The story going around Cairo is that the Zabaleen have been bewitched by some archaic black magic, which has now been resurrected. The wilder rumours blame Wasef Qulta for bringing the Sokar Hoard to Moqqatam, the Hoard, with all its ancient spells. It seems the documents we carry with us, every day, may be the true and terrifying source of all this evil.’

Albert fell silent. A tourist caleche clip-clopped past them, chinkling and gangling. And entirely empty. Like a ghost of itself.