Tales of River City

by Frank Zafiro

  “That’s fine,” I said. Then I frowned. “But I forgot my bag in the van. I’ll just grab it if ye don’t mind?”

  Suspicion darkened his face. “What bag?”

  “My handbag,” I said. “With woman things, ye know? My ID, too. I’ll be needing it.”

  He turned to Number Two. “Did ye see a bag in the van?”

  The lantern-jawed man thought a moment. Then he nodded. “I think so.”

  Captain returned his gaze to me, still suspicious. “Hurry it, then. And he goes with ye.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll only be a second.”

  I turned and walked toward the van, hoping that Captain wasn’t bright enough to ask for the keys before I got close enough to run for it. Number Two’s heavy footsteps fell in several paces behind me.

  By my best estimate, once I made my move, I had less than two seconds. All of my life came down to those brief seconds. I took a long, lingering breath. I could smell the sea salt on the air. In that moment, it was the most beautiful scent I’d ever experienced.

  I slipped my hand into my pocket and prepared the ignition key, gripping it tightly between my thumb and forefinger.

  I heard Number Two’s steady footfalls behind me. Quieter still, I could hear the wind moving lightly through the treetops and the thick grass of the meadow.

  At the van, I swung open the driver’s door and tossed the bag of money onto the passenger’s side. Then I vaulted into the driver’s seat. I slammed the door shut and hit the lock.

  Number Two was at the window immediately. He clawed at the door handle, pulling at the door. The van rocked wildly as I jammed the key into the ignition and turned it.

  The engine turned over, caught and failed.

  Number Two raised his meaty palm in the air.

  I realized I’d let go of the ignition key too soon. I cranked it again. The engine caught and roared to life. I gunned the accelerator.

  Number Two’s open hand crashed into the window, shattering it.

  I suppressed a scream. I jerked it into gear and punched the gas. The van lurched forward. Number Two’s clutching hands swept past me. He grasped at my shoulder but only grazed me with the tips of his fingers.

  I pointed the van on the road toward the lighthouse.

  I gripped the wheel and drove.

  Headlights sprang to life in the rearview mirror.

  I clenched my jaw.

  A few moments later, those lights glared at me at my rear bumper, hounding me.

  Just lead them to the Inspector. And ye get yer new life.

  The road turned sharply to the right and dropped onto the coastal road. I made the acute turn and headed for the lighthouse, less than a kilometer away. Like a fox chasing a rabbit, Captain and Number Two barreled after me in the car.

  I allowed myself to smile.

  That was when they hit me.

  The van jumped and lurched from the force of it. I struggled with the wheel and managed to keep it straight. They were only trying to scare me. That was all. Bump into the little girl and make her so scared that she stops.

  Well, I wasn’t going to stop. And with Ahwere on board, the van outweighed the car. A little bump wasn’t going to—

  The bump came again, this time near my rear wheel. The car didn’t pull away. I wondered for a moment if our bumpers were locked.

  Then my world began to spin.

  I struggled to right the van, but couldn’t. The screech of rubber tires on the asphalt filled the air and then there was silence.

  I felt my stomach fall out from under me.

  Fear lanced through my limbs.

  They’d pushed me right off the edge of the road.

  I was falling. Falling into the –

  The splash created a deep woofing sound and then there was blackness.

  I am dead.

  But I could hear the glugging rush of water as it found its way into the van.

  And I felt the warm trickle of blood on my forehead.

  No, I’m still alive.

  But sinking into the ocean!

  The chilly water was up to my waist already. The brackish smell of salt filled the air inside the van. Dim yellow spears of light from the headlights gave me the only reference point in the world. I reached for the seatbelt and felt nothing. I hadn’t strapped myself in.

  Okay. How to get out?

  I fumbled around for the door handle and found it. I pulled on it and drove my shoulder into the door. It didn’t budge.

  Still locked?

  I scrambled for the lock and located the small nub. I pulled it up until I felt a definite click. Then I felt around for the door handle again. Once I found it, I pulled on it and used my shoulder to push against the door.

  No movement.

  The water! I wouldn’t be able to open the door until the inside of the van filled with water.

  I glanced around in the near darkness of the van’s interior. I couldn’t see my handbag or the bag full of money. Ahwere’s casket was barely a dull shadow behind me.

  Water continued to rush in through the shattered window.

  The headlights flickered once, then winked out.

  The window. Of course.

  I tilted my head back and sucked in a deep breath of air from near the top of the cabin. Without pausing, I dropped below the cold waters. I kept my eyes open, though I couldn’t see anything in the darkness. I felt around for the steering wheel and when I’d located it, I pulled myself toward it. From there, I made my best guess at the open window. As I slid through the opening, I felt my shoulder catch a corner. A jolt of pain shot down my arm, but I adjusted and kicked forward. There was a slice at my knee as I passed through the opening, followed by a trickle of warmth, but I ignored it.

  Once free of the van, I paddled and kicked toward the surface. When my head broke through, I took several deep breaths of fresh air.

  Small, wavering lights combed the surface of the water nearby.

  They must have had torches with them. Goddamn soldiers. Always prepared.

  I glanced left and right, choosing a point on the shoreline. Then I took a deep breath and went under again.

  Deep breath by deep breath, I made way to the shore. I don’t believe that their damnable torch lights ever swept over me while I was above water. The further I got from the crash point, the less I worried they’d see me.

  Of course, they’d be looking for me later. They all would. Niall and his crew. The IRA. The Peelers. All of them.

  Eventually, I stayed above water, drawing in ragged breaths and stroking relentlessly toward the shoreline. My shoulder ached. My head throbbed. My muscles ached.

  I stared ahead and stroked.

  Behind me, Ahwere sank into the bay along with all my money and my old self.

  Before me lay the shore line. Beyond that shore was Canada. My uncle Terry. A new life.

  My muscles burned like melting rubber.

  I stroked forward.

  No Worse Curse

  “I’m still not quite sure why ye called me,” I told Dex.

  He didn’t sigh or show any sign of impatience. His voice had an excited edge to it. “I called you, Sean, because you’re the only one I can trust. And I need your help.”

  We drove in silence for another kilometer. I tried to organize everything he’d told me over the phone and failed. “Run it past me again, lad.”

  Dex glanced at me, his eyes alive and gleaming with enthusiasm. “It’s simple. What don’t you understand?”

  “The whole entire thing. Go over it again.”

  This time he did sigh. “Okay, it’s like this. You know my graduate work involves a history of lesser English lords, right?”

  “They’re all lesser in my book, the rotters.”

  Dex ignored my comment. “So my emphasis has been on the Hunt family, particularly Lord Randal Hunt. His family has opened up their estate to me, all their papers, everything.”

  “Of course they have. Anything to get written up like a prop
er English lord by some Yank scholar.”

  “Yeah,” Dex admitted, “I’m sure they like the attention. But I don’t care why they did it, just that they have.”

  I shrugged.

  Dex signaled and pulled onto the main road through town. “Anyway, I’ve been working out there all summer, going through the library and the storage rooms. It’s been pretty boring, to tell the truth. But I kept on.”

  “Gotta get that degree, aye?”

  “That’s part of it. But there’s more. Randal was an amateur archeologist. He spent most of the family fortune traipsing around the world, sponsoring different digs. In the early 1930s, he was in Egypt.”

  I yawned. “So what?”

  “So,” Dex said, “rumor has it that he found a burial chamber while he was there.”

  “Rumor, is it?”

  Dex nodded. “Yeah. It was all hush-hush. He was on a dig for months, then suddenly disappeared one night. Two weeks later, he’s back in England, declaring the dig a bust, just like all the others.”

  “Sounds like an eejit,” I said. I was beginning to think the same of Dex. For a Yank, he’d been an all right drinking mate at the pub most of the summer, even if he was a wee bit too serious for his own good. But now he was waking me up in the middle of the night to give me a history lesson about some English noble that I couldn’t have cared less about. I didn’t like that, not at all. Only me boys in Sinn Fein ought to be waking a man up in the middle of the night.

  “Maybe not,” Dex said. “Everyone thought he was crazy, that’s for sure. But I think he was crazy like a fox.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The dig wasn’t a total bust. They did find a burial chamber. In Egypt.”

  I thought about Brian and Niall probably having a pint and closing down the pub. I’d rather be there, that was for sure. “Fire enough arrows in enough directions, sooner or later, ye hit a target, lad.”

  “Well, they did. But the tomb was empty. The Egyptian Antiquities Commission secured the site. It was a burial sepulcher for a consort to Thutmose II. Her name was Ahwere. It was just a hole in the wall, really, compared to the Pharaoh’s tomb. But apparently he loved her enough to preserve her for the afterlife.”

  I smiled. “A woman can do that to a man.”

  He nodded and went on. “Lord Hunt said that grave robbers got to the find centuries ago. The Egyptian authorities accused him of being the grave robber. They thought he gathered up all of the burial items and high-tailed it out of Egypt.”

  “Sounds just like an Englishman. Rapers and pillagers, all.”

  “Maybe, but they could never prove it. They searched his family estate outside London and found nothing. Scotland Yard even did an investigation, along with Interpol. Eventually, the searched the estate here in Ireland, too. They didn’t find anything.”

  “Big surprise,” I said. “Feckin’ Peelers couldn’t find their own arse with both hands and map.”

  A large smile spread across Dex’s face. “I found it.”

  I blinked. “Ye what?”

  He glanced at me, beaming. “He did steal that mummy and everything in the tomb. And I think I found where he stashed it.”

  “How do ye know that?”

  “I figured it out,” Dex said. “It doesn’t matter how. You wouldn’t understand, anyway.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “So now I’m the eejit?” I asked him in a low, flat voice.

  Dex winced slightly. “No. Sorry, that’s not what I meant.”

  “It’s what ye said.”

  “It’s not like that, though,” he insisted, his tone apologetic. “It took me months to figure it out and I’m not sure even I have all the answers yet.”

  He glanced at me side-long. I studied his face in the shadows of the car. I wondered what game he was playing. “If ye don’t have it figured out yet, what the hell are we doing here?”

  “It had to do with a passage from Howard Carter’s biography,” he explained. “He’s the one who found King Tut’s tomb. When he looked into the crypt through a hole in the wall, one of his assistants asked him what he could see inside. He replied, ‘Wonderful things.’ Key phrases on that page were underlined. It was a cryptogram. I took the phrases and cross-referenced it with other books, even the ones about the supposed curses—”

  I raised my hand. “Leave it. So you found his little pet mummy. So what?”

  Dex’s eyes widened. “So what? Sean, do you know what a mummy is worth?”

  “Not a pile of shite.”

  He shook his head. “No, no, no. It’s worth millions.”

  “No, it’s not,” I corrected him. “It’s worth what ye can sell it for. And there’s no way ye can sell a mummy. Not in today’s world. It’s like trying to sell a Picasso or a Rembrandt. Too high profile. All the museums are on alert. All ye’d get is grabbed up and tossed in some English jail. Or worse, an Egyptian one.”

  “If you stole a mummy today and then tried to sell it, you’re right.” Dex signaled and turned off the main road onto Hunt Lane. “But no one is looking for this consort. Ahwere is almost forgotten to history. The Egyptians gave up looking seventy years ago. There’s no scrutiny.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “And,” he added, “there’s always a private collector out there who’d be willing to buy a mummy.”

  I thought about it. He was right. The goddamn Yank was right.

  “Where did ye hide it?” I asked him.

  His face fell. “Well, I don’t exactly have it yet.”

  “What?”

  “It’s okay. I know where it is. At least, I’m pretty sure.”

  I punched his arm. Hard.

  He yelped. “What was that for?”

  “Ye woke me up in the middle of the night to go on a wild goose chase?”

  He pulled the car up to Hunt Manor and parked near the servants’ entrance. “It’s not a wild goose chase,” he said petulantly, rubbing his arm where I’d hit him. “And I woke you up because I need your help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Help digging,” he said. “And probably some help carrying things out to the car.”

  “Ye needed some manual labor, is all?”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s more than that. I was hoping that you could help me find a buyer.”

  I stared at the bespectacled Yank. “You’re the bleedin’ scholar, lad. I’d think ye’d be able to locate someone interested.”

  He squirmed in the driver’s seat. “I thought that maybe with your connections—”

  “What connections?”

  “With Sinn Fein,” he said.

  I resisted the desire to slap him. “Do ye realize that ye can get a fella in a lot of trouble by saying something like that? It’s a fine lucky thing that there’s just the two of us in the car here.”

  He swallowed. “I didn’t think you’d mind me mentioning it. I mean, you whisper about it sometimes when we’re at the pub having a drink.”

  “Jaysus, lad!” I shook my head in wonder. “The pub’s a safe place. Only patriots there.”

  “Oh.”

  “And those connections aren’t criminal,” I said. “It’s not the Mafia that ye’ve got there in America. We’re a political cause, lad. We’re patriots and freedom fighters, not criminals. We’re underground to avoid persecution at the hands of the English, not to sell drugs or steal things.”

  “Sorry.” He hung his head. “Like I said, you’re the only one I could trust.”

  I sighed. “Ah, don’t be little baby about it. I’ll help. But it’ll have to be an even split.”

  “Of course.” He smiled, delighted. “Half and half.”

  I shook my head. “No. Three ways.”

  “Three?”

  I nodded. “Aye, three. Ye. Me. And the cause.”

  He pursed his lips, apparently doing the math. “Okay,” he finally agreed. “Fair enough.”

  I clapped him on the arm. He winced.

  “Let’s go ge
t a mummy, then,” I said.

  “One more thing,” Dex said quietly.

  “What?”

  “There’s supposed to be a curse.”

  “Ah, of course. Always a curse.” I shook my head, focused on what I would do with my share of the money. What me boys would do. We might reverse Michael Collins’ folly and take back the whole of Ireland with that kind of money! “Look, ye’re not going to frighten me with some scary talk about curses.”

  “It probably is just talk. But there’s been a startling amount of coincidence regarding unexplained death where Ahwere’s grave robbers are concerned.”

  I sighed. “Lay it on me, then. Who died?”

  “All of them.”

  “Come again?”

  He nodded. “Everyone on the expedition died within three years.”

  “How?”

  “A variety of ways,” Dex said with a shrug. “One was murdered. One committed suicide. Three died of disease. Another went missing.”

  I waved my hand. “Bah. Coincidence. Like ye said.”

  “Randal was the last to go. He had a terrible bout of pneumonia.”

  “Nothing frightening about that.”

  “In July?”

  My eyebrows shot up. “All right, that’s a little strange. But this was seventy years ago. People weren’t as healthy.”

  “I agree.”

  “So ye don’t think there’s a curse?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe in curses.”

  I rolled my eyes in exasperation. “Then why are we even having this conversation?”

  “It’s part of the history of the whole thing. I thought you should know.”

  I muttered a curse in Old Irish.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “I said now I know. Can we go get the mummy now?”

  “Sure.”

  We got out of the car. Dex led me to an outbuilding, where he used his key to enter. “Grab that,” he said, pointing to a pick.

  I did as he asked. “Don’t ye want a spade as well? I thought we were digging a hole.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s buried. I think it’s behind a wall.”

  Now I knew why he called me. It wasn’t just my connection to the resistance. Dex would struggle to carry the pick for any distance, much less swing it. He needed my muscle, plain and simple. Under normal circumstances, that’d likely piss me off, but tonight I shrugged it off. A pile of mummy money and a free Ireland were more important.