In this mood he showered, not bothering to close the stall, careless of the water he deflected against the mirrors and walls, of the puddles he made on the tiled floor. Private, possessed by his privacy. In this mood rubs himself dry with the enormous bath towel and leaves it crumpled in a heap beneath the sink, takes one by one the pins from his new pajamas, their odor of freshness like the smell of health, their new resins like a pollen of haberdash. He draws the drapes, touching them, feeling their heavy, opaque lining, pulling them so tight that it might be a half-hour beyond dusk instead of barely four o’clock. He goes to the door to leave his shoes in the corridor for the porter to polish, already anticipating the morning when he will hook them in like a croupier. He removes the bedspread, tosses it in a corner, feels the cool bleached sheets, white as letterhead, the soft blanket. He sleeps. I sleep. He dreams. I dream.
4.
He smells the gold before he sees it, a vague, involuntary pinch of nostrils, some pepper reflex. He feels the gold before he sees it, coarse-grained as the friction strip on a matchbook. He tastes the gold, warm, faintly curried, greasy as magnets, drawing his tongue like a poultice, carbonating his saliva. He hears the gold, its hum of precious engined molecules, its rare hiss just beyond range. It must be all around him. Its heaviness thickens the air, himself, stranding his stance, sucking at his legs and feet like ground beside a precipice.
He hears noises, hopes it is animals, knows it is men. No one has actually said anything. (It is this silence which is so minatory. Animals, forgetting themselves, would chatter.) He hears—what? Exploration. The silences presiding decision. Then a stone shoved against, the pressure of a shoulder against a wall, its resettling like elastic relaxing to its neutral length. Then taps, randomly scientific, reasoned, and shortly abandoned, a fury of the indiscriminate and something giving way, some rolled stone blossoming sesame; the source of the sounds abruptly shift, ventriloquized, higher, further off. But he takes no comfort from this, for if the noises are now more different, they are more regular too, the scuffle gone out of them, and he hears…footsteps. And their proximity again adjusts.
He knows where he is—in some payload of labyrinth, maze’s choice darkmeat like the eye of a hurricane—and that he is subterranean, in some architectonic cul-de-sac, an archipelago of walls and red-herringed ectopic space. He pictures the stone baffles and barricades, the inverted, earthen, conical screw of tunnel, wedges and bottlenecks and groins of space, all the false spurs, all the difficult dark. And through it all he hears them, now far, now near, unraveling the puzzle of place as if they were walking along a map, taking no confidence when momentarily he thinks he hears them where he has heard them moments before. Soon they are close enough for him to distinguish their tools, their levers and scrapers and mallets and spades, and to hear, too, in the aftermath of their progress, a queer dragged rustling. Then hears seals popping, stone scraped, wooden beams lifted and shoved back along grooves, some final hammering and the adjustment of stone tumblers in some huge lock. It is as if he hides in a hollow—the linchpin center, say, of a cube puzzle on a counter in a drugstore.
He sees their light before he sees them, refracted, rolling off the walls like a sand dune, breaking like a wave, caught, confirming as it comes the gold surfaces he had smelled, felt, tasted and heard before he had seen. He calls out, “Don’t hurt me. I’m your bondsman.” They keep coming. They are here.
In addition to the dish of blazing oil one of them carries, they have brought torches, and these they now ignite, planting them in standards already there. The torches mitigate the gloom, but it is the contents of the chamber which dispel it, laserizing the light, unfurling it like flags in wind and flinging down impression in a brilliant tattoo.
“Can you see anything?” one asks.
“Yes,” says the other, “wonderful things.”
Their first impression is aesthetic, then, the Phoenician thinks. He stands beside the tomb robbers, sharing their awe. It gives him a queer feeling. No criminal himself, this is the first time he has ever been tempted. He’s a little nauseous. Yet he is thrilled, privileged; something stupendous is about to happen. This is what he sees:
First the giant sarcophagus, the carniverous stone high as a man and long and wide as a car, a goddess in nude profile at each corner—Isis, Nepthys, Neith and Selkit—their arms spread like traffic cops’, their hands almost touching, death’s and state’s holy ring-a-rosy, an electric net of intersecting wings stretched like necklaces between them. Articulated tiers of carefully wrought scales and feathers hang from their armpits and along their outstretched arms, and bloom behind their breasts and cunts and asses like webs. Hieratic columns are etched behind these like sums in a foreign mathematics. The Phoenician squints but cannot read them, can make out only water fowl and horse, owl and implement, musical instruments, boat and bowl and fish and wheat, and an incoherent zigzag of joined m’s like an illegible signature or a level lightning. He is furious with himself. This is how he has felt staring into museum cases.
There is architecture on the walls, chemistry, astronomy. White Osiris sits on a throne in the air beneath a high hat like a bowling pin. Anubis, the black-headed jackal, stands behind him, resting a red, avuncular hand on his shoulder while bird-faced Horus looks on. Two of the gods trail hairdos like the comb of a cock.
One thief points to a wall; the other walks up to it and rubs his hand along a gilt bas-relief of two figures, a man and a woman, who sit in profile on a couch. The man clutches a sheath of arrows in his hand like a batter in a batter’s box, the woman a small fan of arrowheads. The tomb robber fondles the woman’s headdress.
“Geez,” says this perfectly ordinary, human young man, no ghoul or monster but only one of the locals seen everywhere around Thebes and Karnak and Luxor these days, with none of the vandal’s malice or nonconformist’s zeal, out of work perhaps, for these are hard times, the slaves getting all the plum jobs, having the construction trades sewn up—and welcome to it, too, he thinks. The Phoenician notices something funny with one of the man’s hands. It’s clear he can be no apprentice to an artisan, and to judge from his sharp, cheap, city clothes there is nothing of the farmer about him. “It’s like it was knit right there on the wall or something.”
“Come on, don’t stand there gawping or I’ll have your guts for garters. We’ve got work to do,” says the first, an older man, the pro in the outfit, the Phoenician thinks, down from played out Giza or Saqqara probably, or Heliopolis, lured by rumors of these new untapped fields in the south—maybe an escaped slave’s drunken tale, confirmed by a primitive, illiterate map drawn by the slave himself, who may even have been killed for it, for this one looks a tough customer. Yet there’s something dedicated about him as well. Tough as he is, he was just as taken aback by that first sight of the tomb, his dry runs through the reamed ruins of Imhotep’s masterpiece or his posed tourist attitudes at the sites of the crumbling mastabas not having prepared him for anything like this.
No. All he’d been truly prepared for (treasure being merely a concept to one who’d stood in plenty of treasure houses but had seen no treasure, or seen it only piecemeal, behind ropes in public rooms or flashing by quickly in a parade, or seen it only as a proposal, looking over a shoulder at the draftsman’s roughs and sketches on a drawing board; real collective treasure, a Pharaoh’s fortune, being just something one has heard of in rumors, third- and fourth-hand accounts that lost detail and sank deeper into wild myth each time they passed from mouth to mouth, as geography is merely a concept to one who has never traveled) were the architect’s mazes and torils and culs-de-sac, the dim blind alleys and traps and suckers’ avenues that led nowhere and kept him busy till the sun came up and the hired priests that guarded the tombs were flashed into wakefulness. Such impediments had turned him into the scout or hunter or Indian he was preparing himself to become by forcing him to discriminate between the real spoor and the counterfeit, testing himself in each of Lower Egypt’s violated pyramids, han
ging back, then straying from the rest of his party who rushed forward with the guide to view the now empty storerooms and holy chambers and chapels where the Pharaoh’s painted double stood in mimic life in the picture-book rooms viewing his faded family album, fooled into feasting on images of food, hunting cartoon deer and fishing cartoon fish from cartoon rivers, copulating with cartoons and waiting for the dead man’s soul to invade the ka’s body like a virus. (And perhaps it could have happened, except that the tomb robbers always got there first, breaking the chain of expectation, spoiling eternity with the fierce needs of the present.) Hanging back from the rest of his party to wander those useless funhouse corridors and minefield spaces, an illiterate who has trained himself to read a stone’s insincerity, a musician of structure with perfect pitch for the false note, who fell to this place like water guided by gravity or a magnetized needle ignoring every direction but north.
“We’ll do the amphoras first,” the older tomb robber says.
“The amphoras?”
“Those big alabaster jugs. Come on, have you got the water-skins?” The rustling I heard, thinks the Phoenician. “All right, give them here. Tip it. Careful, careful, you’re spilling it.” The Phoenician smells the precious perfumes, sees a glowing prism on the floor of the tomb, a puddle of spilled perfume reflecting light from the burning torches. It smells of the colors themselves, of red and yellow and blue and all the declensions of the spectrum, and is trampled by the first thief’s sandals so that it looks as if he is standing in a broken, burning nimbus. “Tip it back. I’ll get the other waterskin ready.”
“Why mess with this stuff? It’ll only weigh us down. Let’s just take what we came for and clear off.”
“I’m the one who decides what we came for. You’re just the bearer. What do you know about the traders in Rosetta and Avaris? A Pharaoh’s unguents and liquors, that’s what’s wanted. Tip the other one.”
“This one’s heavy. It’s too heavy.”
“Get your back into it. Shove, shove. Heave ho.”
“It’s too heavy, I tell you.”
“Here, hold the skin. I’ll try. Woof, you’re right; it is heavy. All right, we’ll just have to go into it. Hand me the iron bar. Give me the mallet. I’ll tap this fucker like a maple tree.” The older thief kneels and fixes the sharp end of the bar halfway down the length of the tall cask. “Move that standard over,” he snaps, “I can’t see what the hell I’m doing.”
The second thief moves a candelabra of torches to within a yard of the kneeling tomb robber. Behind the sarcophagus a wall shines suddenly, and the Phoenician can see a panel decorated with the twelve sacred baboons of the night. They sit on their brown, swollen genitals as on basketballs, decorous and pacific as ladies on seats in public toilets. Silver furred over their blue bodies and silver banged above their long doggy profiles, they contemplate symbols that look like the detached slides of slide trombones. There are black squares, brown, brown and black moons like slivers of overturned melon, silhouettes of thick cleavers, pairs of pillars in the same black and brown alternatives, a mysterious geometric alphabet, dark herons, one-legged chiaroscuro runners and odd wingless fowl that float in long vertical columns like figures in strange bankbooks.
What’s going on here, the Phoenician wonders, for whom fine print and subordinate legal clause, loophole and condition and contractual exigency are as clear and straightforward as the exit signs on superhighways. Then he sees the fine translucent alabaster vessel with its gorgeous banded layers—teeth and checks and regiments of painted slaves, friezes of pumpkin and rows of something like nails in colors he has never seen and does not recognize but which remind him of vast latitudes of campaign ribbon. It is here, just beneath the first buxom curve of the high jug, that the first tomb robber means to make the puncture.
“Spread the lip on that skin wide as you can. Here, stand right here, we want to catch as much of this gism as we can. I’ll try to do the hole clean but the goddamn thing may shatter. Whatever happens don’t let the flame anywhere near this shit or we’ll go up like sunshine.”
The Phoenician moves against a wall, his back, he imagines, grazing the strange painted symbols. He feels an odd warmth through the cloth of his shirt. Is it brown craftsmen in white kilts preparing funerary furniture, sawing wood, one man holding the piece steady while the other leans toward him awkwardly, his saw extended like the bow of a cello? Long-eared Anubis in his jackal’s head bending over the mummy on its couch, touching the chest, making the embalmist’s final adjustments like someone straightening a pal’s tie? Osiris, fastidious as a hostess, checking the offerings on the dead man’s table, the decoy food and painted drink? The wailing, grieving women of the house, their breasts bared, arms raised in a semaphore of grief, dust on their heads and in the limp springs of their hair? His flesh takes their electric impression.
“Get ready to catch the juice. It’ll come out like high tide.”
He makes one deft, powerful stroke. The thick shaft goes in neat as a needle, but he was wrong to have worried about the flow. The amber liquid, whatever it is, is viscous, slow and thick as glue. It comes in measured plops, filling the chamber with a sweet sick smell, the odor of vital essence, a human butter lined with brine and the scraped, rendered slimes and marrows. A Pharoah’s liquors indeed, stuff of his godhead, ejaculatory final ethers. The Phoenician and the two tomb robbers reel and sway in a sort of instant drunkenness that sobers as it stuns.
“Wow,” says the kid, “those Rosetta and Avaris traders must be cuckoo. Who’d want this crap around?”
The older man giggles. “Collectors, man. Souvenir hounds. First editioners. That lot.”
“One sip and you’re dead.”
“They don’t drink it, fool; it ain’t any aperitif. They put it in their cellars with the rest of the hard stuff.” He dips his finger into it and holds it under his nose for a second. “A very good dynasty. Yech.” He wipes his hand off on his clothes. “There, that’s enough, close the skin, plug it. I’ve got to stuff something into this bunghole or the smell will put us out.” Closest to the source, the older tomb robber starts to gag. “Quick, get me a rag, a strip of that weave. Over there. On top of that chest in the treasury. Hurry up, will you?”
“That’s no rag. That’s cloth-of-gold. That’s priceless.”
“I’m puking my guts out and the connoisseur here gives me an estimate. Stand aside, I’ll get it myself.” He gropes toward the chest, stumbles over a low couch, blunders momentarily against the brake on a golden chariot which skitters across the floor and crashes into a wall. Recovering his balance he rips the cloth from the top of the chest, knocking a gilded alabaster statuette of the king to the stone floor and shattering it.
“You got good moves,” the other tomb robber says. “Jesus.”
“Forget it. Just plug that hole so we can get to work.” The young tomb robber shrugs, crumples the cloth and stuffs it into the amphora’s open wound. It protrudes from the hole, a golden run of gut. The Phoenician thinks of the gold weave sopping up the Pharaoh’s sublime jams and gravies, an inside-out alchemy that turns gold to dressing. But the smell is stanched and the air clears. What little lies uncollected on the floor is defused when the second tomb robber thinks to pour some of the perfume from the first waterskin over it. “You didn’t use too much, did you?” the older thief asks.
“A couple drops. We can fill her up again from the first whatdoyoucallit, amphora.”
“Okay. Go ahead, pour. Hold it, that’s got it. Good man. Here, set these skins in the antechamber where we can pick them up again when we leave.” They seem pleased to discover that they can cooperate. With a lift of his chin the second tomb robber indicates a gold life sign like a giant key ring that lies on a funerary chair. The older man nods, the kid scoops it up to place with the waterskins in the antechamber, and then both of them simultaneously rub their hands together. They are giddy with greed, high on their mutual visions of untapped plunder, their initial reserve and caution t
urned by their preliminary success. They know that they are already rich men. They move through the tomb expansively, magnanimous as high rollers.
“The crowbars?” the second tomb robber suggests.
“Crowbars it is,” says the first. “No, not that. Use this.” He strides up to the sculpted, life-size double and wrenches the shepherd’s crook from where it rests like a riding crop on a ledge of hip and along a rail of upturned palm.
“That’s class,” the second says. “Is it real gold, you think?”
“Thirty three thousand-karat.”
They start the short stroll to the sarcophagus, but their initial jauntiness fades as they approach. They come up to it much as they might to a living Pharaoh, tentative, as if each hides behind his own presence, concentrating, queerly chaste, made innocent by the magnitude of the violence they are about to do.
They move silently toward opposite ends and silently raise their tools to the sealed lid. The older man seeks a purchase for the flat wedge of his crowbar, tilts at the seam experimentally, pumping in brief arcs as he would prime a tire jack. It slips out and the second thief swears.
Searches & Seizures Page 10
