‘I’m not sure. There’s no logical reason why it can’t be true, but it might just be a fanciful story. I’m a scientist so I’m open-minded. If we find evidence, then I’ll investigate and draw my own conclusions. Nothing has convinced me so far, although the Santorini theory has some merit.’
Ruby was distracted again, this time by distant shouts from soldiers on the other side of the palace and the crashes and bangs of their ‘tidying’. Orlando leaned forward, suddenly totally focused.
‘And what about the artefact that was found yesterday?’ he asked, his own enthusiasm for the subject shining uncontrollably through his body language and tone of voice. ‘I understand that the bodies inside may date back to the end of the Ice Age.’
‘Subject to confirmation by carbon dating. We can’t be sure yet,’ she answered, attempting a tone of professional detachment which entirely failed to remain in place long enough to stop her sounding like an excited schoolgirl when she added, ‘but the patina of the bones indicates a substantial age.’
Orlando smiled. He let the profundity of her comment sink in, enjoying their momentary connection with a lost antiquity.
‘I have some archaeological insights that I may choose to share with you. Join me here in an hour or so.’
‘And what if I decline?’ she said, trying not to exhibit her tussling feelings of flattery, annoyance, curiosity, and concern.
‘That is your choice, Ruby, but I know you will not decline me. You are a guest in my palace, but I have to insist that you do not leave until we are ready to return you to Tikal.’
‘Considering your men confiscated my wallet and passport this morning I’m not likely to get very far.’
‘Nevertheless, you should remain under my wing. For your own protection.’
‘Protection? Who from? You?’
Orlando pulled the sunglasses back over his eyes and looked away.
‘Can I help you?’
Ratty spun round, briefly forgetting that his head felt as if it was on fire. The shop assistant was short and curvaceous. Ratty was unsure if her facial expression – eyebrows raised, mouth open wide – was one of sympathy or infuriation. He had been lurking in a corner of her clothes store scratching his head maniacally, desperate for the burning to cease. Somehow his appearance and state of distress were enough for this young lady to be confident in addressing him in English.
‘Good afternoon,’ he replied.
‘Is your hair uncomfortable?’ she asked.
It was one of the most intimate questions a female had ever asked him. The condition of a gentleman’s thatch was the concern of himself and his barber, no one else. It was certainly not the business of an anonymous shop girl. And, to boot, a shop girl in an establishment where all the garments were already made, hung out on racks like pieces of meat for people to buy regardless of how well they might fit. No samples of raw cloth, no one to measure one’s inside leg, not a tailor in sight. He hadn’t even been offered a glass of champagne. Then he checked his instinctive reaction. He was in considerable pain. The black dye he had applied to his hair back in the hotel room – the first stage in his reinvention – was killing him. Perhaps there was something she could do. Ho hum, he decided, when in Rome ...
‘Gosh, well, now you mention it –’
Before he could finish explaining away his state of botheration he found himself being ushered towards the customer toilet at the rear of the shop. She bowed his sticky black head over the sink and began rinsing cold water over it. He stood still, back stiffly arched, unused to such rapid intimacy, unable to deny that the intensity of the burning sensation was decreasing. She started rubbing his head with the hand towel, then stood him up straight to take a look at him. He was not at his most elegant, but his new jet black hair was very imposing.
She rinsed her hands and led him back to the racks of clothes.
‘I say, thank you. The old frizzies feel much better now.’
‘Was that the first time you changed your hair colour?’
Another intimate question. This was edgy stuff, almost thrilling.
‘One is something of a novice in that department,’ he mumbled.
‘You must shampoo and rinse after a few minutes. Remember next time,’ she explained, calmly. ‘So what kind of clothes do you want? Looking for a change of image?’
She glanced at his tattered upper class English suit and gesticulated at the clothes on sale in her store. There were denim jeans of various shades of blue and black taking up an entire wall. Combat-style trousers with lots of useful-looking pockets were displayed in tints of green and brown. Leather jackets hung in regimental rows, gradually shrinking in size from one end to the other. Clumpy shoes adorned shelf after shelf. Every item was as far from Ratty’s current image as it was possible to be. It was what he knew he wanted, but, overwhelmed by the enormity of the change, Ratty merely nodded to the assistant. She understood and took his hand as she guided him through the metamorphosis that he hoped would fill him with the confidence to continue his odyssey.
* * *
Ruby walked down a wide, gaudily-decorated hall that ran along the rear of the palace. The inspiration for its rows of crystal chandeliers hanging from vaulted ceilings painted with Renaissance-style quasi-religious themes appeared to be The Hall of Mirrors at the French Palace of Versailles. Something had been lost in translation, however, as the effect was more Ikea than Louis XIV, and this aesthetic down-sampling was aggravated by the occasional splash of blood on the parquetry.
People worked at improvised desks, and the floor was littered with phone and electricity extension cables. At one end of the corridor, men were carrying television broadcasting equipment into a room, preparing for the presidential address to the part of the nation that could boast television sets or Internet access. In a feverish hothouse atmosphere, people came and went, but no one paid much attention to Ruby.
She considered the option of walking out of the door and seeking refuge at the British Embassy. Orlando’s subtle threats were probably meaningless, she convinced herself. She couldn’t see why he would bother to initiate reprisals against her if she left the palace. She was just an archaeologist, after all. There was nothing special about her. But then why had he gone to the trouble of luring her to this country with a false employment contract in the first place? There had to be something more profound about his reasoning. Something important for which he needed her. Was it possible that Orlando had had something to do with the theft of the clay tubes from the Sphinx? The more she considered the matter, the less unlikely it seemed. How else could he be certain that the tubes contained scrolls?
The world outside offered freedom, if she could make it to her Embassy, but if she chose that option she would never find out if the Sphinx scrolls were in Orlando’s possession. Nor would she get to study that incongruous piece of metalwork at Tikal that seemed to date back to the Stone Age. Working with Paulo Souza these past few weeks had not exactly been a pleasure, but he had never tried to harm her. She felt sure he would look out for her when she was sent back to Tikal. And if Orlando really needed her skills then she was in no real danger, she reassured herself.
She opted to stick around and search the palace for a likely location for the scrolls.
‘Excuse me,’ she said in her politest Spanish to a random stranger, a carpenter dressed in overalls tied at the middle with a jangling tool belt. He was the third person she’d approached, and so far no one had been able to help. ‘I’m an archaeologist working for the President. Can you tell me where I can find his private collection of antiquities?’
The carpenter looked her up and down before replying, ‘I saw some guys moving things into a room on this floor yesterday, along the corridor from the office with that dumb pool. Flight cases, books, maps. That sound like what you’re looking for?’
She thanked him and tried, unsuccessfully, to find her way back to the area of Orlando’s office, but a couple of wrong turns led her to a servants’ staircase – an unembellish
ed set of concrete steps down to the basement and up to the other floors. A door opened violently behind her, crashing against the wall and sending echoes ringing up the stairwell. In her panic at being somewhere that perhaps she shouldn’t, she scurried up one flight of steps to get out of the way. Looking down she saw six men enter. It appeared that the first two men were being held at gunpoint by the other four.
One of the men at gunpoint had a familiar face with an even more familiar pissed-off expression.
Matt.
She froze, forcing herself, despite a flurry of conflicting emotions – including relief that Matt was alive and sheer annoyance that this situation was interfering with her plan to find out if Orlando was hiding the stolen scrolls at the palace, to listen carefully to what they were saying and doing. The six men clattered downstairs to the basement where they opened and shut another door without any pretence at finesse, and all was silent. Ruby rushed down and waited for the soldiers to return. The men emerged less than a minute later.
‘Hi,’ said Ruby.
They peered at her suspiciously.
‘What?’ said one.
‘It’s very exciting. All this revolutionary ... stuff,’ she said, wondering if she was overdoing the wide-eyed female.
‘Are you lost?’ asked another.
‘No, just taking a break. Got a cigarette?’
The first soldier produced one from a battered pack and lit it for her. She held it to her lips with no intention of taking a drag. When the soldiers began to walk away, she stood up.
‘What goes on in there, then?’ She pointed down into the basement.
‘The basement.’
‘And those men?’
‘Criminals.’
‘What will happen to them?’
‘You ask many questions,’ said the first one. He pulled the cigarette from Ruby’s mouth and trod on it. ‘Smoking is bad for your health.’
The soldiers left her alone on the stairs. She found herself saying the word ‘justice’ in her head. It was one of the words she had overheard Orlando saying to the soldier who had interrupted their first meeting by the indoor pool. She recalled Orlando signing a document as he said it. She wondered what kind of justice existed here.
Turning swiftly on her heel, Ruby resumed her search for Orlando’s office, but now her priorities had shifted. The hunt for the scrolls would have to wait. She finally located the room and knocked on the door, the whiff of chlorine confirming that she was in the right place.
No answer. She pushed open the door. The room was empty. At its far end she could see the little bit of paper on the mahogany desk where the President had left it. She ran around the edge of the swimming pool towards the desk.
Her scream could be heard at the end of the corridor. It terminated only when the slide on the wet marble resulted in her falling beneath the warm, clear water. As she sank below the surface she regained a little self-control and opened her eyes, feeling the sting of the treated water. Instantly she noticed that the pool extended under the floor at the deep end. The small amount of air left in her lungs was enough to enable her to sit for just a few seconds beneath the overhang, from where she could see shadows moving in the room.
Ruby forced herself to control her bursting lungs a little longer.
The shadows disappeared. She hadn’t been spotted. She pushed hard to swim out from the sheltered recess and towards the water’s surface and took a deep, gargling breath.
Her vision was blurred and she blinked rapidly, scanning her surroundings as if through the shutter of an old cine camera. Orlando’s poolside office remained unoccupied. Clearly the staff had better things to do than to worry about wayward archaeologists.
This is an odd design for a pool, she thought. An underwater recess like that would be a nightmare to clean. She ducked below once more to take another look at it out of curiosity. It was almost like a submerged cave, and it continued into blackness. Highly peculiar.
Quietly easing herself out of the water, she helped herself to Orlando’s towel and stood dripping by his desk, the oddity of the pool design quickly forgotten. She wiped her wet hands and picked up the document that she had earlier witnessed Orlando signing.
Matt’s name was on it. Her knees weakened at the realisation that she held in her hand the authorisation for his execution.
She had made a bad call. She should have owned up to Matt’s presence in the artefact when she’d had the chance. No doubt he had managed to wind up his captors and aggravate the situation, knowing him as she did. How many times had she tried to explain to him that the aggressive techniques for getting your own way in New York don’t translate to the Third World? His short fuse was his own worst enemy. But this mess was something she could still resolve. She had the ear of the President. If she stayed on and performed well at Tikal, and if she wrote a report that made it clear that Matt had not caused any significant contamination of the artefact in which he was found, Orlando would be sure to grant her the small favour of setting Matt free.
She continued reading the document.
The execution was scheduled for tomorrow morning at ten.
Her eyes began to blur again, but this time it wasn’t an effect of the chlorinated water.
* * *
It was time to make the call. The mobile phone was almost fully charged, the signal was strong, the number was stored in its memory. The hand that selected the number and hit the dial button was Ratty’s, but it was not the same timid Ratty who had considered croquet an extreme sport, or the daft Ratty who thought wild boar was an appropriate dish to serve to a vegetarian friend. This was the hand of New Ratty. Ratty II, the sequel. Ratty Plus. He was Improved Ratty, Recycled Ratty, Ratty Reborn.
Frankly, Ratty didn’t know what he was or how to think of himself. As he stood on the street outside the clothes emporium with his phone to his ear, wearing everything he had just bought and with his old suit in a dumpster behind the store, he felt anonymous and mysterious. It was as if he were attending a masquerade ball, hidden behind a disguise. It gave him confidence knowing that he no longer stood out painfully in a crowd. He could move with the shadows, an incognito phantom.
No one passing him by would have thought him anything other than a streetwise, fashionable man. There was a hint of menace in his look, a touch of James Dean in his appearance. Everything he wore was black, from his newly-dyed hair down to his leather boots. The black Levi 501s were held up with a black leather belt secured by a heavy brass buckle. His black T-shirt fitted snugly beneath the black leather biker’s jacket, from which dangled some rather unnecessary tassel strips.
As his phone connected with that of Dr Otto, he felt a sense of empowerment, of invincibility.
Beep. Beep. Be –
‘Hello, Lord Ballashiels. So you have read my note?’
‘I, er, gosh, yes, er, right.’ Ratty took a deep breath. The sound of Otto’s voice had sent him into an incoherent, palpitating and perspiring mess. His confidence dissolved in the afternoon heat. This new image of his was going to take a little more work than he’d thought.
* * *
In the palace garden, carpenters toiled loudly to build a new structure from old timbers. The endless hammering clearly annoyed Orlando, who was unable to hold back from shooting unfriendly glances at the workers as he talked energetically into a cordless phone from his favourite garden chair. Ruby, her hair and outfit failing to dry in the intense subtropical humidity, waited a polite distance away until he finished his conversation, and then boldly pulled up a chair next to him. Orlando’s black looks instantly became a warm smile when he saw her. Willing herself to quell the surging crisis adrenaline in her body, she tried to pretend nothing had changed.
‘Why does the Tikal artefact fascinate you so much?’ she asked him with forced nonchalance.
‘Why don’t I ask you the same question?’
The hammering stopped, but was soon replaced by a more irritating scraping as the carpenters cleaned the mildew
from yet more lengths of damp timber. Ruby glanced at the construction, but so far it didn’t resemble anything in particular.
‘It’s been under the ground a long time,’ she said. ‘To me, whenever I discover a long-hidden object, it’s like looking through a window into a different world. The Tikal artefact is a window that no one has seen before, and I get the feeling that I’m seeing an ancient world that may have been pretty advanced. More so than perhaps we thought possible. And yet those bones inside it looked at least ten thousand years old. They lived and died in a civilisation that had man-made achievements and natural disasters just like our own, and yet utterly unlike our own, if that makes any sense.’
‘The mists of time clear when you look into them, Ruby. You sense the thunder of great cataclysm; you hear the screams of ancient people witnessing the end of their brief empire.’
Was now the time to plead for Matt’s life? Not yet – she was starting to connect with Orlando. Just a little closer and she’d be able to get what she wanted.
‘Tell me what you expected to find out when you were excavating the Sphinx, Ruby.’
‘You probably know there’s evidence to suggest that the Sphinx might be far older than people originally believed. Its pharaonic head has led Egyptologists to assume it was built by Pharaoh Cheops four thousand years ago, but it’s possible that Cheops only discovered the Sphinx with its original head at that time, possibly leonine, and had it re-carved in his own image. It could be that when Cheops found it, the Sphinx was already a decaying ancient monument.’
‘So you are saying that rather than the Sphinx marking the beginning of mankind as an advanced, technological race, it may actually mark the end of its first advanced period?’
‘The Sphinx was carved out of an outcrop of natural rock, so there’s no certain way of dating it, but geologists studying the erosion of the stone noticed that some of the fissures were vertical, caused by rain, rather than horizontal from wind and sand. And yet there hasn’t been a rainy climate on the Giza plateau for seven thousand years.’
‘Fascinating. Do go on.’
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 8
