Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

  “Easy, old son. This ain’t no beer can.”

  “Let me try.”

  “No, hold on. I’m not even budging it. You come on over to my side. Maybe if we both try.” The second thief stands behind the first, gets a grip on the long handle as if he were holding a rope in a tug of war. “When I give the signal, push in and up.”

  “Wait up,” the young one says, “I better wipe my hands first. They’re all slippery from that Pharaoh grease. Okay. What we really need is a block and tackle.”

  “We ain’t got any damn block and tackle.”

  “What’s this stuff?”

  “I don’t know—yellow quartzite probably. You set? Push…in and up.”

  “No good. It’s like trying to drive a spike with your bare hands.”

  “Get the mallet.”

  “Are you kidding? It’d take months to chisel a hole in that thing with the mallet. Why don’t you give it a karate chop?”

  “Shut up. Give me a minute to think.”

  The boy, satirically deferential, retires to a throne chair from which he first removes a small ivory casket. He puts it on the floor and props his feet on it. “I don’t know,” he says, “we’ve already got more than I ever bargained for. There must be half a million bucks worth of junk right in this casket I’m resting my tootsies on. Why don’t we just grab what we can and scarper?”

  But if the first thief has even heard him he gives no indication. He is walking around the sarcophagus, touching it here, tapping it there, looking for invisible levers. He is the complete cynic who has trained himself all his life to think in an idiom of Achilles vulnerabilities. He simply does not trust walls. He has a cryptographer’s imagination. In his fingers there is a touch for weak link like a blind man’s for Braille. He is a piano tuner of a man who in some other age or different circumstances might have found the Northwest Passage or the source of the Mississippi. He makes his slow, halting circuit of the sarcophagus. “It’s bonded solid,” he says.

  “Yeah,” says the second tomb robber, “I could have told you that. Let’s scarper, mate.”

  “But it’s still on its original platform.”

  “Its original platform.”

  “Look down here. See? The nine inches at the bottom are gilded wood. They must have moved the thing in on rollers, then pulled the rollers out and left it.”

  “No shit,” the kid says wearily, “so that’s how they did it. The pyramids, now that’s some engineering feat. I mean when you think of the unsophisticated equipment they had. And all the patience…”

  “We brought a file. Get the file.” The second tomb robber rises lazily, pokes around in the small pile of tools, finds the file and hands it without interest to the older man. “Bring that torch, hold it down here so’s I can see. I want to study the paint…Yes…No, a little closer. Watch it, don’t singe me…Yeah, see there, where the gilt bunches like badly hung wallpaper? That’s the fault line. That’s where the wood’s rotting. Where’s that mallet? All right.”

  And he drives the file into the dead center of the dead wood, where it sinks like a knife into tender meat. Stretched out on the floor and working at arm’s length, he chips away like a sculptor at the rotting wood. But the file is only a foot long, the sarcophagus wide as a car. He sends the blunt end of the crowbar in after it, pounding at the boxcar connections, trusting as always in the mushy physics by which he lives, the leading edge of the file to be deflected by whatever is hard in there and drawn to whatever is soft. He calls for the second tomb robber’s crowbar and fits its blunt end to the protruding wedge of his own. He works in this way for more than an hour—a file, an iron, an iron, the ka’s shepherd’s crook and the mallet—and is almost through to the other side, but not quite, when he runs out of tools.

  “Now what?” the kid asks.

  “The bunghole. Bleed me a quart of that stuff. Fetch it in one of those vases.”

  The older robber takes the substance and butters it along the leading edge of the platform. From time to time, to annul the smell, he has the kid wipe his face with a handkerchief that has been drenched in perfume from the first waterskin. “Now. Clear away anything that can burn. Get the torch.” He offers fire to the soaked wood; slowly it scorches, and the gilt blisters like a toasted cheese sandwich, and finally the fire takes hold. The front third of the platform is burning. The smell is horrible. “All right. The tunnel I’ve made inside the platform should act as a fire-brake.” He pulls the shepherd’s crook gingerly out of the odd train he has made and quickly substitutes the mallet, shoving it in as far as he can. “Go get the flail out of the double’s fist. You should be able to unscrew it. Good. Stand here behind the sarcophagus with me. We’ll watch the fire. When it burns through to the tools we’ll shove. The front should tip forward fifteen to eighteen inches. That’s a tremendous weight. Maybe the shock will jar the goddamn lid loose. Even if it don’t, we’ll have gravity working for us. We’ll worry it like a loose tooth. All right, when I say shove I want you to push up so hard your palms come out your wrists.”

  The second robber stands by Neith, the first by Selkit watching the flames crawling along the bottom of the platform like fungus, and at exactly the right moment he yells “Shove!” and puts all his weight into it. “I said shove, you lousy skyver, shove.” And now they both put all they have into it and the massive sarcophagus falls forward the full eighteen inches, making a sound of metal slamming stone. The shock is all the older man could have wished, for the Phoenician can see the thick lid actually stretch, bounce in some irreparable way that sets off tremors in the stone seam that start at the far ends of the lid and meet each other in a ragged, barely visible line. A crack. Hairline but enough, more than enough for this genius, this Columbus of breakage and entrance who would go through it as if it were a door or gate, whose very nature partakes of something like the quality of gas. He puts his crook down and looks up. “Whatever can I have been thinking of?” he asks abstractedly. “We don’t need these toys. Reach in there, mate, and pull our tools out.”

  “They’ll be hot.”

  “Nah, the breeze cooled ’em off when this big mother fell forward.”

  The young robber fishes the tools out carefully and the older one picks up his crowbar and mallet. “See? The fire’s about burned itself out,” he says. “Better let me work at this for a while, kid.” Sure enough, he goes—this man who has lived life like a key—for the seal’s jugular, playing that hairline crack, driving his mallet and crowbar like a poolsharp, playing the angles, putting actual English on his strokes.

  “I think it’s coming,” the younger man says, and gets up from the throne where he has been resting and takes up his tools. Together they pry and pull and probe and shove, wordless as movers negotiating furniture around the bends in stairs. The lid is loose, and then it’s off.

  The Phoenician moves away from the wall and comes up behind them. There is no glitter of gold and jewels, only a sort of opaque mass.

  “It’s empty,” the second tomb robber shouts.

  “No,” says the first. “Those are the palls. You don’t know shit about death, kid. Those are just the linen palls. It’s Death’s hope chest in there, sonny. Here, look.” He stirs the palls and reveals a coffin shaped not like a man so much as some trophy of a man, tight and stern and scowling as an Academy Award. Its skin is a tattoo of hieroglyph and chevron. In the dim light the mummiform coffin gives the appearance of someone fat dressed in unflattering swatches of chain mail. Its surfaces break up the light of the torch held down to investigate, disperse it in weird blue and gold tints on the faces of the robbers.

  “Pay dirt,” the second tomb robber proclaims after a pause.

  “Nah,” says the older thief, “it’s wood. You don’t know wood from Shinola.” He appears to feel around the side of the coffin with his fingers and apparently presses some button or lever which triggers a springlock, popping the coffin open like a lady’s compact. Another mummiform coffin is revealed in hand-in-glove
relation to the first.

  “The five hundred hats of Bartholomew Cubbins!” says the young tomb robber. He places his hands on the tiled, golden scales of the second coffin, palming its lumpy contours as if he were copping a feel.

  “That’s just gold-plated wood,” the first robber murmurs, “inlaid with glass paste.”

  So, the Phoenician thinks, not only a mind like a key but a geologist as well. A tailor’s affinity for fabric; there’s Geiger in him, some litmus vision.

  Now the older thief feels around the edges of this coffin, his chin raised and an expression on his face as if he is judging the taste of his food. He is exactly like the attendant in a filling station whose fingers seek a clasp which will raise the hood of your car. He finds it, and the lid of the second coffin snaps into the contours of the first.

  The kid tomb robber laughs. “It ain’t any Pharaoh’s mummy at all, it’s a nest of fucking matrioshka dolls.”

  “Pay dirt,” the first tomb robber says. “That’s gold, my old son, nothing but gold.”

  “Did you ever?” The boy whistles.

  “It’s useless to us. We couldn’t even lift it.” Nevertheless their eyes travel up the long horizontal shell of the dead king—this priceless golden Easter egg of a Pharaoh which seems to float in its sarcophagus as in a bathtub—taking in each detail, its crossed arms and big golden gloves that grasp the shepherd’s crook and flail, Pharaoh’s and Osiris’ carrot and stick, its great head in three dimensions like some coin of ultimate denomination. They study the weird sphinxy headdress, oddly like hair turbaned in wrapped bath towel. Its open eyes seem not blind so much as distracted, as though its pupils, large and black as handballs, witness something going on extraordinarily high in the sky. Its sweet lips look as if they taste their own goldenness.

  “Okay,” the older man says, “here we go, then,” and again he touches something, and the last veil groans marginally upward, its great weight lying on it like gravity. “Lift, lift,” the first thief commands, “get the crowbar in, get some leverage. Now prop the lid with your bar. A little more. That’s got it. There.” The mummy itself, exposed now, lies under the final raised lid as under some gold tent protected from sun, and the Phoenician and the kid see what they have come for: the Pharaoh’s funerary mask which has been placed over the head and shoulders of the mummy just as Anubis’ jackal’s head had been fitted onto his human body. For all the delicately wrought human features of the mask, the mummy is mysteriously bestialized by it.

  They stare at the fantastic face, prefigured in each of its protective coffins but only as a paper silhouette prefigures flesh. They have not been prepared for this; all they can do is stare. They are looking at Egypt’s most precious materials—gold, lapis lazuli, faïence, quartz and chalcedony. The Phoenician himself cannot take his eyes from the raised lapis lazuli brows that describe an arc from the nose almost to the ears, or from the lapis lazuli lined eyes like the unjoined halves of spectacles. He peers closely at the eyes themselves, stares at the canthi where the angles of the upper and lower lids meet, at the red wattles at the outer and inner edges there, the queer caruncles of God.

  The second tomb robber looks at the vulture and cobra, symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt, which seem to grow out of the Pharaoh’s forehead, rising spectacularly, ribbed and thick and aloft as the underedge of erections.

  The first tomb robber gazes at the long blue faïence beard that looks like a plaited hocky stick. “All right,” he says, breaking the spell, “let’s get to work.”

  He takes up a position behind the mummy, and for all his previous delicacy now grabs hold of the mask with both hands and pulls at it roughly. It comes off like a saddle. He puts it down, takes a knife and slashes the bandages.

  “Hey, man,” says the second tomb robber, “don’t do that.”

  The first tomb robber lays the knife in the coffin and tears at the bandages with both hands, opening the Pharaoh like a package. The cloth squeals apart and he plunges his hands inside and pulls out necklaces, gold rings, bracelets, fingerstalls, a scarab brooch, golden pectorals, a spilled piñata of Tiffany implement. “He was gay,” he laughs. “This was no king; this was a fucking queen.” He reaches inside once more, gropes and brings out a bandaged parcel, holding it up, rapidly unwinding it, tumbling the linen strips like a fisherman dealing line. It is the Pharaoh’s natron-dried, embalmed heart. He raises it above his head. “What a good boy am I!” he shouts, and shoves the heart into his garments with the rest of the jewelry. “Now, mate, now we scarper!”

  “Hoy,” says the other.

  It is too late. Perhaps the noise of the sarcophagus slamming to the floor had alerted them, or the pounding on the coffin seals, or the older man’s shouts, or maybe they’d been tipped off, but when the thieves gathered their booty and made for the antechamber the flics were already there, out of breath—they’d been running and, not knowing the way as expertly as the first tomb robber, stumbling—but in sufficient numbers to put escape or even struggle out of the question. The Phoenician looks around for officials, and everywhere among the men shouting orders at each other and pressing forward to get a better look at the haul or to inspect the damage he thinks he can make them out. There are chief inspectors, priests (part clergyman and part guard assigned to protect the tomb), higher-ups, ministers and deputies from the court, important civilians who sat in the highest councils—all the grace and favored, singers, guests, even popular athletes.

  It is what he expected. It is a big bust, and his only worry is that harm might come to the tomb robbers through some dumb grandstand play by one of these social commandos before they can be safely hustled out of there. “Hoy,” he shouts in the confusion, “let’s play this one by the books, men. It’s too big to blow in the heat of anger.”

  He needn’t have worried. Obviously acting under the highest orders, the police were almost rougher with the spectators than with the suspects. Quickly they collected the evidence, organized the crowd and marshaled them all out of there. They even thought to leave a detail behind until the shrine could be put back together and resealed.

  The arrest was swift and correct. A brief announcement was made to the public and the prisoners were put under special guard. The Phoenician requested that he be permitted to stay with them, but, as he anticipated, this was out of the question. They did permit him to remain in the building where the men were being held, however, a concession that came as something of a surprise. He offered money to the jailer who had told him he would be allowed to stay, but it was politely turned down.

  In the morning a guard shook him gently awake on the bench where he had sacked out, and even offered him coffee. “Nice day for a hanging,” the fellow said by way of small talk.

  “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” the Phoenician answered. “Say, are there many people around?”

  “Outside, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “The town’s packed. You can’t get a room. Everybody’s very excited.”

  “What’s their mood? Are they upset, are they likely to turn ugly?”

  “No, I don’t think so. They’re leaving this one strictly to the government.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “Well,” said the guard, “you ain’t seen what the government can do when it’s worked up.”

  On the surface, at least, the arraignment was as proper as the arrest. The judge—the Phoenician, circulating, heard talk that he was a fair man—listened impassively to the charges and then requested that the prisoners, Oyp and Glyp, stand.

  The Phoenician was astonished. So accustomed had he become to seeing them in their disguises, to recognizing them under their dyed hair, through their patiently grown mustaches and beards and behind their surgical alterations and new postures (Glyp had even trained himself to be left-handed), to discounting the red herrings of their changed diction and the falsetto of their acquired tenor, that he had not known them in their reverted states. He had to laugh. If they’d been
snakes they’d have bit me, he thought. I’ll be a goddamn purloined letter. Of course it had been dark in the tomb, and most of the time he’d been more interested in what they were doing than in them, and of course they’d been under a good deal of pressure so that their speech rhythms had become those he’d never have anticipated—the iambs and dactyls of action and assault being different in kind from those of evasion—but still and all he was amazed that he’d had no clue at all, not the slightest suspicion, and so their identities staggered him. He was so breathless that when the time came for him to speak he was able to do so only with the most supreme effort, and even then only after the tipstaff, seeing his distress, had brought him a glass of water.

  “Your Honor,” he said, “I’m Alexander Main, and I wish to go bail for these two.”

  “There is no question of bail, Mr. Main,” the judge said gently.

  “There’s always a question of bail, Your Honor,” he said respectfully. “I appreciate that in the circumstances the bond will necessarily be a high one, but whatever it is I will pay it. I think I can assure the Court, too, that whatever date is fixed upon for the prisoners’ appearance they will be here.”

  “There is no question of bail, Mr. Main.”

  “Your Honor,” he pleaded, “look at these men. They aren’t master criminals. They’re ordinary. They’re banal men. The state hasn’t argued in its charges that they’ve conspired with others to do this thing, or that they acted as agents, or even that they had contacts with or commitments from known fences in their misadventure. Fortunately, no one was killed or even hurt in their abortive attempt. Also, all the property’s been recovered; it’s been checked against the catalogs and it’s all there. Luckily, those pieces which were damaged were the least valuable pieces in the tomb, and I’ve been given to understand that even these are subject to restoration. I’m told that the cloth-of-gold is even now being dry-cleaned.” He paused. “In short, sir,” he said slyly, “I think that all we’re faced with here is a case of a couple of second-story blokes in under their heads.”