Sphinx Page 7

  A man gestured to me from the other side of the marquee. Francesca had pointed him out to me disdainfully earlier on. It was Cecilia’s husband, Carlos. He was at least ten years her senior and wore the uniform of the wealthy European: panama hat, linen suit, loafers and gold cufflinks that caught the sunlight. Excusing myself, I got up from my chair and walked over to him. He shook my hand, introducing himself. Then, taking my arm in a familiar manner, he guided me behind a marquee, out of sight.

  ‘Here, my friend, some grappa from the village I grew up in.’ He pushed a silver hip flask into my hand.

  I unscrewed the top and took a long, grateful swig. The alcohol burned my throat and seared through to the top of my head, but it obliterated the moment, which was what I wanted.

  ‘I am sincerely sorry we meet in such circumstances. These Brambilla women - before you know it they have swallowed your balls. Cecilia loved her daughter, you have to understand that.’

  ‘She had an odd way of showing it,’ I replied. I tried to remember what line of manufacturing Carlos was in, but failed to do so in the fog of tranquillisers and grappa.

  ‘It is far more complicated than you or I know, my friend. When Paolo died the grandparents insisted on keeping the child. That Giovanni, he was a crazy man, obsessed with the mystical. He could hypnotise people, like snakes can. If you ask me, all the Brambillas are crazy. As for Francesca, she is still angry with Isabella’s father for dying so young.’

  I nodded, slightly doubtful, but thanked him for the grappa and returned to my seat. Francesca gave me a disapproving glare, but she was preoccupied with the Italian guests and couldn’t reprimand me further.

  I was dismayed to see that my first English-speaking visitor was Amelia Lynhurst. I had first met her at a cocktail party at the British Consulate. The English middle-aged Egyptologist was famous for dressing in a tweed twinset even in the full summer heat, much to the amusement of the Arabic members of the prestigious Smouha Polo Club who had created a betting ring around these legendary appearances. And I always had the impression that she was frozen in another era, as if the post-war Kensington of the late 1940s she’d left had stayed preserved in aspic - gas meters, rationing, dingy flat and fog all waiting, suspended in time, for her return. At that first encounter she’d launched into a passionate monologue about oil exploration destroying the natural world - or Gaia, as she insisted on calling it, to my great irritation. She had also attempted to cross-examine me about Isabella’s research, and I’d found myself taking an uncharacteristically intense dislike to her. She seemed hungry for new information, perhaps for a thesis that would re-establish her ruined reputation. Whatever her intention, I didn’t trust her.

  ‘I’m surprised to see you here, Miss Lynhurst.’ I failed to keep ambivalence out of my voice.

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t expect me,’ she replied. ‘But please understand, I had a great fondness for your wife, particularly during our time together at Oxford.’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘In relation to other, more pressing matters, I hope you understand the implications of harbouring an undeclared antiquity, particularly one of such spiritual value. This country is in the throes of a delicate resurrection and these are perilous times. Such an antiquity has powers that you, a man of prosaic interests, could never understand. Others, however, do. If the wrong people were to get hold of such a device, it could prove very dangerous indeed.’

  Startled by her directness I felt myself become defensive. Had Isabella been correct in her suspicion that Amelia Lynhurst had known how close she was to finding the astrarium? I decided it would be wise to feign naivety.

  ‘Oh, we always kept our work very separate,’ I replied casually.

  Amelia looked sceptical. ‘Oliver, if you need my help in any way, you must visit at any time. I’m not sure whether Isabella had a true idea of the value of the object she was researching . . .’

  Her voice faltered and she glanced over my shoulder. I was surprised to see what I thought was a glimmer of fear in her eyes. I turned to see Hermes Hemiedes coming towards me, followed by the priest who had conducted the funeral.

  ‘I really must leave now.’ Amelia pressed her hand into mine, then walked away.

  Hermes stepped onto the podium, an ironic smile playing over his thin lips. ‘Such women are dangerous because they never appear so,’ he remarked as we both watched Amelia leave the tent.

  ‘Oliver, Isabella’s death is a profound loss.’

  He embraced me and I was enveloped by a wave of musk and the scent of the cologne he was wearing - a sharp green tone undercut with a darker shade. In my heightened emotional state, it smelled like the aroma of physical decay. I pulled back, stiffly self-conscious.

  ‘Thank you. I know Isabella respected you greatly, which was rare for her.’

  He laughed - a hyena’s bark. My eyes fastened on a curious pendant around his neck: a silver depiction of Thoth, the baboon moon god whom the Ancient Egyptians believed gave hieroglyphs to mankind on behalf of Ra.

  ‘The very bright can be very arrogant,’ Hermes said. ‘I helped make her who she was: uncompromising.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  He moved closer, enveloping me in that nauseating aroma again. ‘If Isabella did indeed find the astrarium, you should know that the device is very valuable to a lot of people, all of them far less scrupulous than myself.’

  He pulled a card from his breast pocket and slipped it into my hand. ‘If you respect the ambitions of your dear wife you will visit me sooner rather than later. Dusk is the best time.’

  I glanced at the address, recognising it as the old Arab quarter to the west of the city. When I looked up again, the Egyptologist was making his way through the mourners, his slightly uncoordinated stride parting the crowd. I wondered briefly what he would make of the coroner’s revelation.

  Now tired of the event, I decided to leave too. I stood, but was prevented from stepping down from the podium by Francesca’s hand on my wrist.

  ‘Oliver, you cannot leave now.’

  ‘I can and I will,’ I told her. ‘It’s time I began my own mourning.’

  I had never been so defiant with the old woman and she didn’t try to dissuade me.

  I was amazed to find that it was near nightfall. A hantour, a small horse-drawn cart, was waiting outside the Brambilla villa. The driver, a rake-thin middle-aged man in traditional clothes, was leaning up against the villa wall and smoking. He threw away his cigarette and stood upright when he saw me.

  ‘Please, get in,’ he said quietly but with authority.

  Wanting to walk, I waved him off.

  ‘No, for you it is free. Please, Monsieur Warnock, I insist.’

  I hesitated, wondering whether he was a member of the secret police, but there was a dignity to his stance and something in his open pleading face that made me trust him. Foolish, maybe, but exhaustion and grief had made me weary. I got in and asked him to take me back to the villa at Roushdy.

  We drove through the narrow lanes of the city. The air was fragrant after the recent rain and the soft clip-clopping of hooves lulled me into a gentle trance. The sense of motion postponing the terrible loneliness I knew awaited me back in the villa, confronted with remnants of my life with Isabella.

  The cart slowed alongside a low archway that seemed to lead into a darkened courtyard. A man wearing a headscarf that covered most of his face suddenly hauled himself into the cart. He was carrying a bag over his shoulder. I reared back, jolted out of my reverie. To my immense relief, Faakhir’s face emerged from under the dark blue cloth.

  ‘Say nothing,’ he whispered. ‘The astrarium is in the bag by your feet. I promised Isabella that I would deliver it safely to you. She said you’d know what to do with it. Oliver, guard the astrarium with your life. I don’t know exactly what its powers are, but there are people out there who believe they can use it to destroy everything we have worked for in this country - political stability, peace, an economic future . . . and worse.’


  With a clatter of wheels we pulled up outside the villa.

  Framed in an upstairs window was the lonely silhouette of Ibrihim, switching the lights on ready for my return.

  ‘You must take the astrarium to your friend Barry Douglas. You can trust him. He will be able to open the container and carbon-date the astrarium to tell you what exactly it is. This you must do - for Isabella. You know I loved her too.’

  I grabbed his arm. ‘Why are you risking your life, Faakhir? Who do you work for?’

  Smiling enigmatically he shook off my hand. ‘Stay safe, my friend.’

  He leaped out of the cart to disappear into the shadows.

  7

  I had arranged to meet Barry Douglas at the Spitfire, a small bar just off the Sharia Saad Zaghloul - one of the main avenues in Rue de l’Ancienne Bourse. Established in the 1930s, it had been popular with the Allied troops posted in Alexandria during the Second World War. The proprietor - an Anglophile - had proudly installed a small plaster bust of Winston Churchill draped by a Union Jack in the window. Inside, it was perpetual twilight. This was one of Barry’s favourite haunts.

  Barry Douglas had quickly become one of my friends as well as Isabella’s; I was attracted to his maverick sensibility and classic Australian intolerance for bullshit. We shared a strong disdain for pretence and class-related snobbery. What I didn’t share was his love of all things mystical and spiritual, a characteristic he had in common with Isabella.

  I hesitated at the bar’s doorway. When I’d arranged this meeting with Barry I hadn’t had the courage to tell him about Isabella’s death. Each time I had to tell someone the news it was like living through the drowning all over again and I dreaded that sensation of being swept back into the moment. Besides, I told myself, he was bound to have heard - news tended to sweep through Alexandria like wild-fire. Steeling myself, I stepped inside. On the walls hung a gallery of old photographs, dusty black-and-white shots of smiling young men in khaki, arms around each other, hamming it up for the camera - Brits, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, the occasional Scotsman in a tam-o’-shanter. Some of them looked like children in ill-fitting uniforms: narrow adolescent shoulders lost in jackets; huge rabbit eyes staring out across time, tiny beads of fear buried in the centre of their pupils and defying the wide smile beneath. It couldn’t have been easy defending a territory that many locals regarded as stolen anyhow; dealing with an ambivalent Arabic community not to mention the Italian-Alexandrians - people like Isabella’s father - some of whom had already left to fight with Mussolini or the Germans.

  Glancing around, I couldn’t see Barry, so I sat at the bar and ordered myself a Bloody Mary. I looked at the photos and couldn’t help wondering how many of those young soldiers were now lying in the El Alamein war cemetery. There were seven thousand tombstones there, stretching out in frightening monotony - the most poignant of them marked seven unknown soldiers, five unknown soldiers and so on. Comrades blown apart, then thrown together in unimaginably macabre embraces.

  ‘Christ, you’re a bloody sorry sight.’ Barry Douglas’s unmistakably Australian voice boomed across the bar. He pulled up a bar stool beside me and attempted to perch his massive body on the seat. ‘Fucking stools are made for midgets. Aziz!’ He yelled at the proprietor who was busy wiping glasses. ‘When are you going to get some decent fucking chairs?’

  Aziz shrugged, humouring the Australian, who, I knew, was a dedicated regular.

  Barry turned back to me. ‘At least the beer’s cold. How are yer, mate?’ He wrapped a huge arm around me and pulled me into a bear hug.

  I turned my face away, terrified my reserve might break down. And it might have if I hadn’t been momentarily overwhelmed by the combined smell of Brut aftershave, stale sweat and hashish emanating from Barry’s ancient leather jacket. He released me to wipe a tear away.

  ‘That was some tragic funeral. Hate them myself. When I go to join the great Buddha in the sky I want my physical remains cooked up in some delicious cordon-bleu stew so my molecules are recycled in a meaningful way.’

  That was the trouble with Barry: you never knew if he was being serious or not.

  ‘You were there?’ I asked. I must have been sleepwalking through the whole ceremony. I hadn’t seen him.

  ‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I was right at the back, getting stoned. Didn’t want to upset the natives.’ He blew his nose into a large embroidered handkerchief. ‘At least the Catholics put on a good show, unlike the Proddies. You can’t have a decent burial without some decent bloody ritual. But Isabella? It wasn’t her time.’ He thumped the bar to emphasise his point. ‘It wasn’t her fucking time!’

  A furtive couple in the corner looked up from their tête-àtête, a lone Cypriot sailor turned to stare, and a stray cat bolted from under one of the tables. The bar-music tape clicked over and a Kinks track filled the sudden silence - the incongruous youthful yearnings of another world.

  Without prompting, Aziz slammed down a glass of beer in front of the Australian.

  Barry Douglas was one of those rare individuals whose flamboyance and maverick attitudes worked like an electric shock - his childlike sense of the absurd was both liberating and infectious. Forty-five, he stood at six foot three, weighed twenty stone, and had a tangled mane of steel-blonde hair and a matching beard that made him look like some Viking god. His skin, permanently sunburnt, had the wrinkled deeply tanned look of the Caucasian in Africa. When drunk he looked and behaved like an outraged bull, but when sober he was capable of charming even the most unapproachable women. The local Arabs loved him, and he had lived in Alexandria for so long that they regarded him as a lucky talisman. His clashes with the municipal police were legendary, but even they tolerated his regular escapades with affection. An avid diver and surfer, Barry claimed to have grown up more in the ocean than out. He described his occupation as ‘marine expert’, though expert on what exactly was never clear. I’d always thought treasure hunter a more appropriate description, but the longer I knew Barry the more he revealed himself to have extraordinary talents in the most surprising areas.

  He’d left Australia in the late 1950s and ended up on the coast of California by the early 1960s, where he’d become involved in some of the early LSD experiments conducted at Berkeley. This had led to a complete revision of all Barry’s ambitions. He abandoned academia for adventure and managed to land a job as a diver with Jacques Cousteau, which began his infatuation with shipwrecks. Dissolute as he was when he wasn’t on a quest, once he started the hunt he became dangerously focused - a real shark. According to Isabella, the Australian was one of the best restorers of gold, silver or bronze ancient artefacts around and his phenomenal ability to carbon-date wood accurately was legendary within the archaeological community.

  After his stint with Cousteau, Barry had continued to work his way around the world and had finally settled in Alexandria. A self-declared sexual compulsive, he was as capable of monogamy as a buck hare and regarded marriage as an abhorrent and outdated institution. Although this hadn’t prevented him marrying three times: once to a Hindu, once to a Thai Buddhist and once to a Muslim, all disastrously.

  ‘I loved Isabella, you know.’ He took a few deep draughts of beer and stared at me. ‘I know you’re English, but for Christ’s sake, Oliver, show some emotion. You’re freaking me out.’

  I glanced down at my wedding band. ‘Can’t, not yet. But I suppose in a few days I’ll break down into a blubbering mess.’

  Barry’s stare drilled into me, his grey-blue irises swimming in a sea of broken capillaries. ‘You do realise,’ he said, drawing in the air a circle that encompassed the bar, the customers, Aziz in the corner reaching for a cigarette, ‘that all this is an illusion, this quantum foam of particles, matter, bodies, neurons. She’s still with you, in your—’

  A wave of anger swept through me. I didn’t want his sympathy. ‘Cut the bullshit, Barry. I’m an atheist, remember? I haven’t got some nice little spiritual fairy
tale to fall back on.’

  ‘I’m not talking bullshit. You can’t really think that all we are is mortal flesh and blood? The Ancient Egyptians had it right. There’s a whole world beyond this perceived reality we’re experiencing right now. I know - I’ve been a witness to the cosmos.’

  ‘Too many illegal substances, if you ask me.’

  Defiant, Barry held up his lager. ‘Hey, maybe you’re right! Maybe old Barry’s grey matter is just a little too fried. But I’ve met guys with thrice my IQ, physicists, who’d agree with me. Still doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t Isabella’s time.’

  He drained the glass. Following his cue, I finished my own drink and ordered another round.

  ‘You know I was with her when she drowned. I tried to save her . . .’

  ‘Mate, there was no way anyone knew that tremor was going to hit. No way - underwater earthquakes happen all the time. Anyhow, what the hell was she doing diving in the bay? That’s strictly no-go. Let me guess: you guys are both MI5 and you were combing the seabed for military secrets.’

  Aziz leaned over. ‘Don’t joke, my friend. In Alexandria, even the snakes have ears.’

  ‘Yeah? And the mice have cocks.’ Barry, miming paranoid, looked under the table, then over the counter.

  Ignoring the Australian’s bravado, I lowered my voice. ‘They’ve already interrogated me about the dive - for twenty-four hours straight. In the end, the oil company phoned the British consul who bailed me out.’

  ‘Bloody bastards, no respect for the grieving.’ Barry’s tone changed, serious now. ‘But Isabella was onto something, wasn’t she?’

  I looked over to Aziz, who was busying himself out of earshot with some glasses - a deliberate retreat, I suspected. I turned back to Barry.

  ‘She did find something. An object she was convinced was historically important.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I need you to carbon-date whatever wood you can find. I think the artefact inside is bronze. At least, that’s what Isabella thought.’ Faakhir’s last words flashed through my mind. I’d taken the bag home but hadn’t got much further than pulling out the steel tube containing the astrarium. ‘I can hardly bear looking at it, Barry, it’s just history to me. None of it means a thing - not set against her life.’