No, Maudie, go ahead and ask it anyway. It's better to say some things outright and not just hint at them, even when we know the answers.
She stared at the floor.
All right. . . . Last night I saw Stern. We went out to the desert and we sat up all night near the pyramids, and he talked as if it were all over and he even said it was the last night of his life. I tried to tell him we don't know things like that, but he said he knew it anyway, and then at dawn he took a photograph of me out there with my camera, so I'd have. . . . But Joe, is it true? Is it all over for Stern?
Joe nodded. . . . Yes.
You mean he's finished, just like that, and there's no way to . . . no chance at all?
Not with what's happened. No.
Oh, I didn't want to believe him. It's so hard to imagine with someone like Stern who has always been there and always managed to come back. Somehow you just never think . . .
Joe took her hands.
But how does he know? she asked. How does he know that?
I guess it's just always been that way with Stern. There's no explanation for it. He just knows things, that's all.
Oh my, I feel lost. . . .
Maudie, try to hear me, I need your help. I want to see him and there's no time. I came all this way to see him and find out about him and there's almost no time left, so can you help me do that? It may mean trouble with the people you work for, because of the Monks, serious trouble even. But can you do that for me anyway, for Stern's sake, for all of us?
Maud hung her head. Her voice was far away.
. . . I can get a message to him.
Where is he now? Do you know?
Maud turned and gazed at the shuttered window. Thin lines of sunlight framed its solid darkness.
Out there, she whispered. Out there dressed as a beggar in some nameless city where he's always been.
He tried so hard to find his holy place and he never did, but he never stopped believing in it, Joe, and something terrible has happened now. He's out there alone and he thinks he's failed. He sees his life as so many ruins around him and he thinks it's come to nothing, and all the pain and suffering were for nothing.
He's wearing a beggar's rags and he's not afraid, but he's lonely and defeated and he shouldn't feel that way. . . . Oh Joe. Oh my.
Maud pushed away her tears.
Last night he said so many things he'd never said before. Some of them I already knew without him having to tell me, but some of them I didn't. And now he's out there thinking he's failed and there was nothing I could do to convince him it isn't so. I felt completely helpless. Stern, of all people. Stern. He's done so much for others and now he feels nothing means anything to him. . . .
Oh Joe, make him see. Let him see. Don't let him die feeling this way. . . .
Maud jumped to her feet.
Wait, I'll get the lemonade. The little things have to go on . . . they have to, otherwise it's too much.
***
After he had left, Maud sat looking at the thin gold-colored bracelet on her wrist, turning it around and around and thinking how strange life was, how contradictory. For the thin bracelet reminded her of the trade Bernini was learning, repairing watches, and the time told by watches was something Bernini didn't even believe in, dwelling as he did in another kind of time where the hour of the day was only to be found in one's heart.
And she wondered as well what this gift from her son might mean now, coming when it did. Could it be that this simple little band was to be the final memento of all the many worlds she had known with Stern, with Joe?
Maud alone in the half-light turning the little bracelet and pondering the meaning of love in its long ago beginnings. . . . A miracle to be cherished above all others . . . to be found only to be lost and lost again through the years.
-18-
Crypt/Mirror
Old Menelik's spacious crypt from antiquity, hidden away beneath a public garden beside the Nile.
A secret and soundless vault unearthed by the great Egyptologist early in the course of his brilliant career of anonymous discovery in the nineteenth century. Later chosen by the former slave and graffiti expert as his retirement home, when he finally decided to forsake sunlight altogether and go underground once and for all, permanently on principle.
In the middle of the crypt the massive stone sarcophagus that had once belonged to Cheops' mother, its roomy cork-lined interior having served for many years as old Menelik's cozy bedroom in retirement, after he had abandoned the elegant pharaonic society he had sought in his youth and had set himself up on a heap of pillows in the evening of life, to sip tea in his sarcophagus and nibble an occasional madeleine in the comforting stillness, to ruminate and recall stray words from over the years. A soothing womb of refuge that had quite naturally evolved into old Menelik's tomb in the end, its enormous stone lid now firmly lowered into place for what might well be eternity.
On the far side of the crypt a small manual printing press, until recently the clandestine work corner of the melancholy Ahmad, former master forger and reigning night clerk of an obscure way station known as the Hotel Babylon, a run-down lodging whose Hanging Gardens had already been in an advanced state of decay at least as far back as the turn of the century, when its sordid rooms had always been available for balmy interludes in the unhurried darkness of Old Cairo, rentable by the half-hour without reservations on anyone's part.
Save for the printing press, the crypt exactly the same as it had been in old Menelik's day. In another corner a handsome harpsichord which had once been played by Little Alice.
Here and there clusters of stately Victorian garden furniture, its paint flaking away, originally Sherwood Forest green. The furniture consisting entirely of sturdy park benches, monstrously heavy and all but immovable due to the solid cast-iron slats binding their undersides in unbending Victorian decorum.
These park benches arranged so visitors could circulate with ease when Menelik had held his open tomb every Sunday, as he used to say, sitting upright and alert in his huge stone bed while entertaining friends at his famous weekly musicales.
Everywhere on the walls of the crypt the exquisite hieroglyphs and pharaonic wall paintings that testified to old Menelik's unparalleled success as a social figure in other ages.
On the park bench next to Joe lay the book Liffy had been in the habit of reading in the crypt on quiet afternoons. Buber, thought Joe. A wonderful old crank who actually believes man and God should talk together. No wonder Liffy used to like to slip away from the mayhem aboveground and have a little quiet discussion down here, why not? Never was much good for his people, that mayhem up there.
Joe looked down at the thick wad of forged foreign currency he was holding in his hand. He had picked up the money at random from the neat piles stacked along the walls of the vault, crisp counterfeit bills left over from Ahmad's last run On the printing press, uncounted sums of Bulgarian leva and Rumanian bani and Turkish paras, all of it apparently worth something somewhere.
The Balkans, thought Joe. Always was a confusing concept, as Alice says, and its money is just as confusing as the rest of it. What's one to make of leva and bani in the end? Or for that matter, of paras above all?
He studied the money, aware that something about it wasn't quite right.
Coins, he thought all at once. In real Balkan life this money was never issued in anything but coins, but here's Ahmad turning it out as paper money. Surely the old poet must have had a strong sense of private reality to be able to forge coins as bills, even if they are Balkan bills.
Joe stuffed the money into his pocket and moved uncomfortably around on the hard park bench, his attention drawn to the crude sign hanging over the iron door at the entrance to the crypt.
THE PANORAMA HAS MOVED.
It was an old sign clumsily painted, a slab of whitewashed wood with uneven block letters in green, badly faded by years of exposure to powerful sunlight. Where had the sign come from and why had old Menelik seen f
it to hang it over the door of his retirement home? What memories had it held for the greatest archeologist and subterranean graffiti specialist of the nineteenth century?
Joe frowned.
There's something sad about that sign, he thought. Something ciphered too, I would imagine. Surely it's no mere slip of stray sentiment adrift in the gloom, considering what this place has meant to so many people. Of course things would tend to be cryptic in a crypt, that's only to be expected. But all the same I'll wager that sign has a hidden message to it. It would have to down here in old Menelik's mausoleum of stoned coincidences, as Ahmad used to call it, quoting his father who had lapsed into a heavy use of hashish toward the end.
THE PANORAMA HAS MOVED.
Mysterious graffiti, thought Joe, and what might its origins be? Pharaonic? Nilotic? A Biblical writing on the wall after the manner of mene, mene, tekel, upharsin?
Who knows? thought Joe. Best to ask Stern about it when he shows up. When in doubt about a sign faded by sunlight deep in a crypt underground, best to ask a master cryptographer what's really going on, as some old Cairo saying must have it.
Joe turned uneasily. A sound seemed to have come from the corner where the small printing press stood
. . . metal rubbing lightly against metal . . . a soft crunching noise.
Impossible, he thought, gripping the arm of his park bench. Yet a part of the machinery in the corner seemed to be moving, almost as if the manual press were preparing to crank through a cycle.
My God, he thought, of course that's impossible, and steady there, I can't go losing my bloody mind now. These antique shadows are playing tricks on me
But then he jumped, startled, unable to believe it. The small hand-driven printing press was actually beginning to turn over. Meshed parts were moving methodically in some kind of inscrutable order, up and down and sideways, backward and around and in. There was a loud groan and then the machine clattered noisily, cranking out a slip of paper. The paper fluttered and floated down to the floor.
Message from the past, thought Joe, leaping to his feet and rushing over to snatch up the slip of paper . . .
a Greek banknote newly printed. One hundred drachmas. The ink was still wet.
Joe whirled where he stood, taking in the crypt at a glance. The thick iron door was still solidly locked, the massive stone lid was still on the sarcophagus and as so often in life, everything seemed still the same when it wasn't.
THE PANORAMA HAS MOVED.
Joe spun around, peering in every direction. Oh help, he shouted silently, turning over the strange banknote in his hand only to find there was a different currency printed on its other side. . . Albanian money. Ten thousand leks.
Ha, he thought. Inflation in the Balkans as usual and so much for classical Greek values too. They've gone to the Albanians like everything else we once admired. Just nothing's worth what it used to be and that's a fact in this world. . . .
Joe jumped, became rigid. Deep laughter was booming through the crypt, great surges of rolling laughter.
A hand was reaching out of a hole in the wall behind the press, stealthily removing block after block of stone and widening the hole, methodically pushing the blocks aside and stacking them up on the floor.
After a moment a ghostly head emerged from the blackness, an apparition in the age-old rags of a mummy. Without warning the ghostly head jerked back to reveal a dusty masklike face staring directly up at Joe, fierce dark eyes glittering in the dimness, beneath them the third eye of a gun barrel pointed at Joe's head.
Joe's mouth fell open. The revolver disappeared. The ghostly figure crawled forward and then all at once there was Stern standing in front of him, laughing and dusting off his tattered Arab cloak, laughing and laughing and shaking his great dark head.
. . . sorry about that, Joe. I didn't mean to scare you.
Joe hopped up and down.
How's that, Stern? Didn't mean to, you say? Well do you always go around cranking off counterfeit money when you break into a tomb? Just in case you have to pay your way in eternity?
. . . a mistake, said Stern, throwing back his head, laughing. . . . I was groping around and my hand happened to fall on the printing press handle.
Happened to fall, you say? Well after seven years in the desert I just happened to drop in down here to say hello, so hello, you stranger.
Joe laughed too and they embraced, hugging each other.
***
They sat on a park bench near the huge stone sarcophagus. Stern sniffed the bottle of arak in his hands and passed it to Joe.
The honor's yours, you must be thirsty. There's an Arab saying that nothing quickens a man's thirst like seven years in the wilderness.
Joe smiled and took the bottle, admiring it. When Stern had begun rummaging around in the crannies of Ahmad's little printing press, poking into its recesses and finally holding up the bottle in triumph, it hadn't surprised Joe particularly. Somehow it was the kind of thing he would have expected of Stern. An unlikely act in an unlikely place.
Joe glanced sideways at Stern.
Strikes you as a scene you've come across before, does it? Two down-and-out tramps sharing a bottle on a park bench?
Stern smiled.
What happened to that wondrous thirst?
Right. It's got me in its grip.
Joe drank. He turned his head and coughed.
My God that's strong stuff, Stern. But it helps a printing press think more clearly, you say?
Stern laughed.
Ahmad was very fond of his old printing press and he always claimed arak was the best solvent for cleaning counterfeit type.
And I don't doubt it for a moment, said Joe. It's a first-rate solvent for all kinds of things, brains being one and Balkan reality another. But aren't you the tricky one now? Imagine just sneaking in here through a secret passageway like a regular tomb robber on the prowl.
Stern took a drink from the bottle. He lit a cigarette and a smoke ring floated up over the sarcophagus.
I was afraid the front entrance might be watched. It seemed wiser to come in the back way.
Tricky, all right. Has that secret passageway always been there? From the time when the tomb was built, I mean?
No, Menelik had it put in as an emergency exit. But from the looks of it, I don't think he or anyone else has ever used it.
Right, dusty as dusty and the very past itself. It's just that I didn't know there was another exit of any kind down here, and that's what scared me.
Stern moved, shifting his weight.
But isn't there always another exit, Joe, if you look for it hard enough?
Joe whistled softly. He pretended to make a face.
And there you go, Stern, starting up first thing. You are tricky, you know that? As long as I can remember you've been saying things that arrive or leave more ways than one. It's not that you're ambiguous really, it's more a matter of searching out different paths in your quiet undercover way. That and keeping your eye all the while on more than one lodestar up there in the unfathomable deep. I suppose it must be a habit you picked up in the business you keep.
Stern's dusty face softened.
And which business is that, Joe?
Right you are, and that's exactly what I meant. Which business among the many and how's a body to know which one is being referred to?
Joe laughed happily, more relaxed than he had been in weeks despite the circumstances. They drank and talked about the past, passing the bottle back and forth, recalling the years since they had seen one another in Jerusalem. There had been letters back and forth during those years, but inevitably much that had been left unsaid by both of them. On Stern's part, because so many of his concerns could never be committed to paper, and for Joe, because many of his experiences in Arizona weren't of the kind that could be readily described in letters. The conversation could have gone on much longer and Stern seemed reluctant to have it end, but there was so much Joe wanted to know he finally interrupted their t
alk by standing and sitting down again. He took a drink from the bottle.
Stern? Can you spare one of those awful Arab cigarettes you carry?
Stern handed him the packet. Joe lit one and coughed.
Wretched, same as always. Tears the lungs right out of a man. They always were the worst.
Stern watched him. Joe glanced at Stern's scarred thumb and looked away.
What is it? asked Stern.
I was thinking about last night at the Hotel Babylon, and this morning at Cohen's Optiks. I assume you know all about that.
Stern shifted his weight. He spoke slowly, haltingly, and there was a calmness in his manner that bothered Joe.
You mean Ahmad? . . . Yes, I know about that, and I know about David. . . .
Stern moved again, a ponderous motion.
I wanted to see Anna, he said quietly, but I knew I couldn't. David was such a wonderful young man, so much the way his father used to be. He always reminded me of his father. And Ahmad, well, we go back a long way. Ahmad was one of the first people I met in Cairo, along with Belle and Alice and David's father. They were all Menelik's friends to begin with. . . .
Stern was gazing at the sarcophagus in front of them, thoughtful, somber. Joe waited for him to continue but he didn't.
Silence, thought Joe. Dead whispers as he slips. Better a roar of outrage than that, better anything than deafening quiet. He's just too cool and calm by half and I don't like it. Silence is the enemy here tonight.
Ahmad and David were Bletchley's doing, I take it, said Joe.
Stern nodded.
So what's next then? asked Joe.
Stern moved, hesitated. He looked at Joe for a long moment and when at last he spoke his voice was matter-of-fact.
Next? Well let's see. How much do you know?
Most of it, I think. About Enigma anyway.
Well that's most of it now. At least it's the part that counts.
So?
So Bletchley will do what it's right for him to do. He's fighting evil, after all, the Nazi madness in the human soul
And so?
And so I'm next, said Stern.
Nile Shadows jq-3 Page 36
