The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  I bought both the house and the bike with the money I inherited from my father when he died of cancer in 1990. Actually, he left me well provided for — my grandfather was what you might call a self-made man, who founded an empire on Starlight Soap. He was the son of a Liverpool docker with nothing but a basic education and a genius for making money and, I suppose, making soap. He ended up selling the business for a tidy sum, retired to an estate in Dorset and spent the rest of his life pretending to be a country squire. My father didn’t exactly squander the money, but he used it to do the things he wanted to do and inevitably it was whittled down. While he left me enough to have avoided working at all if I hadn’t felt like it, the great fortune my grandfather bequeathed was gone.

  I tabbed up the path feeling as though I was shifting a hundred-pound rucksack, aiming only to throw myself in an armchair, light my pipe, pour myself a stiff whisky and catch the evening news on TV. As soon as I opened the door I heard the answering-machine bleep. I didn’t rush to play it back. Actually, my attention was distracted by a picture postcard of Brighton pier standing on the table by the telephone. I turned it over and found the note scrawled in Monica’s almost indecipherable hand: ‘Dear Jamie, Came to get the rest of my things,’ it read. ‘Have taken everything and am leaving the keys. So this is goodbye. Love Monica.’

  I looked around for the keys, but they weren’t there. This must have been about the fourth ‘So this is goodbye’ note I’d had from Monica in a month. It was like the story of Mustafa’s old shoes — every time you thought you’d heard the last of them, they kept on turning up. I suppose I should have had the locks changed, but somehow I’d never got round to it. Monica was a minor annoyance, like a mosquito in the ear; that’s more or less all she’d been for most of our six-month relationship. It was entirely my fault, of course. She was as stunningly pretty as she was cerebrally vacant, and I’d fallen for the beauty trap. Maybe I just hadn’t given her enough attention. I should have been more suspicious of those late nights ‘clubbing with the girls’ when she arrived home in the wee small hours and tiptoed to bed. As it was I didn’t even think about it until she told me she’d been seeing someone else. I really believe she thought I’d get jealous and possessive, but I didn’t. I just laughed and threw her out. That had been a month ago, and since then she’d phoned, left messages, and let herself in ‘for the last time’ more times than I could count.

  I swore, tore up the card, flung it in the waste-paper basket and made a bee-line for the drinks cabinet. It wasn’t until I’d tossed off a large Scotch that I became aware of the answering-machine again. They deliberately program them with a sound that’s so irritating you have to do something about it. I was tempted just to switch it off. It would probably be Monica, I thought, ringing to say she’d forgotten to leave the keys, and when could she come round again. Instead I assumed a mental posture of absolute complacency and pressed the play button. It wasn’t Monica, it was Julian Cranwell.

  His voice cut through my assumed attitude like a knife. ‘Ross,’ he said, ‘it’s me, Julian. If you’re there pick up the receiver, if you’re not get back to me pronto. Listen, I’ve come across something — something important.’

  There was a shakiness about his voice that I’d never heard before.

  ‘I can’t go into it now,’ he said, ‘but believe me, I’m in deep shit. I don’t know how much time I’ve got. Jesus Christ, I think they’re coming right now. Ross, you’ve got to help me. These devils are dangerous. They killed George Herbert, Orde Wingate and Tutankhamen! I think it’s the Akhnaton ushabtis they’re after...

  The line went dead — fizzles of static burning across the emptiness.

  For a moment I think I just stood there stunned. Then I pulled off my glasses, rubbed them slowly on my sleeve and took three deep breaths. I hadn’t heard from Julian in six months, and now this. Out of the blue. I checked the message timer: ‘Seven fifty-two,’ the automatic voice said: almost half an hour ago, eight minutes before ten in Egypt.

  I grabbed the phone and punched through the number to Julian’s flat in Cairo. I heard the engaged tone and hung up straight away. I hit the digits again. Still no reply. Again and again I tried, bashing the keys down, getting more and more frustrated. In the end I punched through to the international operator and gave him the number. There was a pause, and the polite male voice came back, ‘I’m sorry. That number appears to be out of service.’ I slammed the phone down and tried again. This time there was a whining tone, as if the line had been disconnected.

  I replayed the tape on the answering-machine, and as I listened I felt a surge of anxiety for Julian Cranwell that wasn’t altogether unfamiliar. Crises hadn’t been rare in his life, and I’d often been the one called in to deal with them. Yet I’d never complained. That was how Julian was. It was his undisciplined, neurotic side that made him such a brilliant Egyptologist. Like that celebrated time he’d sprung out of bed one morning at Luxor declaring that he’d had a dream about a lost pharaonic temple at Bahriyya in the Western Desert. Rude scoffs from all the experts. No major archaeological sites had ever been found in the area, it was pointed out. Julian ignored them. He took a jeep, a barrel of petrol, two jerrycans of water and a carton of Scotch, slung in his surveying equipment, and with me as assistant, drove off to Bahriyya oasis. Within a week we’d sunk not only the Scotch but also a six-foot trench revealing the girdle wall of a temple dating back to 2000 BC — a temple dedicated to the god Ptah. It turned out to be one of the most important finds of the decade. Julian’s ecstatic jig the night we found it was something I’ve never forgotten.

  Anyway, I owed Julian. In spite of his erratic nature, he’d always been loyal to me. He’d stuck his neck out for me when they gave me the heave-ho from the Egyptian Antiquities Service — he’d actually had the nerve to accuse the director of ‘intellectual fascism’, even at the risk of losing his own job, while the others turned their backs cravenly and minded their own business. When the EAS stuck to its guns, Julian offered to take me on as his private assistant. ‘I’ll pay you out of my own pocket,’ he said, ‘the bastards can’t stop me doing that!’ It was sour grapes that prevented me from taking him up on it. I came back home — inasmuch as England is really home — and tried to follow up my research, but my heart wasn’t in it; I’m a fieldman to the core, and my sense of purpose had somehow deserted me. Any attraction the country had seemed to offer, even running the Gold Wing, had quickly palled. My few attempts with women had reached their climax in Monica. I regretted the decision to return. I found my work at the museum boring, and no one wanted to listen to my theories. At first I’d just caught myself hanging round the Egyptian exhibition more and more frequently. Time after time I’d tagged along with the guided tours, even if they were in Japanese, just as an excuse to look at the exhibits. In the end I’d spent long periods staring out of the window thinking of Egypt, completely absorbed, until one of my colleagues came and yelled, ‘Ross!’ right in my ear. Most of all I wondered what had happened to the Siriun Stela, and why I’d come across no references to it in the literature. There was unfinished business in Egypt. For months, in fact, I’d been looking for an excuse to go back. And this was it. I mulled over Julian’s message all night, and the more I turned it over, the more apprehensive I became. This wasn’t like Julian. The Julian I knew was fearless to the point of bravado. I had a bad feeling from the start, and by the time the light was creeping through the window I felt thoroughly alarmed. Later that morning I handed in my notice to the BM. I locked the Gold Wing in the house, cleaned out my current account at Barclays, and flew to Cairo the same day.

  2 CAIRO

  It took me three days to find Julian, and then it certainly wasn’t the fond reunion I’d imagined. He wasn’t at his flat. I found out that much from Doc Barrington, an old friend of mine who knew him well. She’d been phoning him for a couple of days, she said, and the line seemed to have been disconnected. In the end she’d sent a man round who’d been told by the
ghaffir that he hadn’t been home for some time. I rang the office of the Antiquities Service and a brusque secretary said he was supposed to be at his dig at Siwa, but when I phoned, the site foreman said he hadn’t seen him in a week. Finally I dropped in at the British Embassy in Garden City and asked to talk to the Consul. They made me sign a form, asked for my passport and let me wait for half an hour in a room among battered old copies of The Times and Country Life. The wall was covered in a corkboard on which were pinned photos of missing persons. Julian’s wasn’t among them, I noticed. Finally, they showed me behind the glass booths to a white-walled room with an opaque window, where I was introduced to the British Consul, Melvin Renner.

  Renner looked like a man playing out a fantasy of what he thought a British Consul should be — an image that belonged to the colonial era. He wore a white blazer, white ducks, club tie, monogrammed shirt, and I’d have bet money there was a panama hat hanging on a hook somewhere near by. He was a lightly built, athletic-looking man in his late twenties — the kind that runs with the Hash House Harriers every Monday and boasts about it ad nauseam in the bar afterwards. You might have said he was an entrant for some Mister-Middle-England contest — cornflower-blue eyes and a long fringe of straw-coloured hair which he kept on flicking out of his face, and he spoke with an Oxford accent that was almost certainly assumed. He looked me up and down, and his eyes lingered on my earring. He didn’t ask me to sit, so I sat down anyway.

  ‘Mr Ross?’ he said, examining my passport. ‘So you’re after Dr Cranwell, are you?’

  ‘He’s missing,’ I said. ‘He phoned me in London three days ago scared stiff, saying his life was in danger. Now he’s vanished.’

  ‘Men like Dr Cranwell don’t just vanish, Mr Ross,’ Renner said, flicking aside his wayward lock languidly. ‘Not even in Egypt.’

  ‘OK, where is he then?’

  ‘He could be anywhere — taken off with a Ghawazi dancing-girl, gone on some crazy jaunt into the Western Desert, maybe even stashed himself in one of those tombs he’s always turning up.

  ‘You know Julian, then.’

  He gritted his teeth theatrically, then grinned. ‘I have had the pleasure, and I must say nothing that man could do would surprise me. Between you and me, he’s hardly the full pack of cards. That’s why I’m inclined to believe you’re on a wild-goose chase, Mr Ross.’

  I sighed. It was indiscreet of him to have said so, but I had to admit he was right about Julian. ‘Well back to the streets, then,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry not to be more help,’ he said, beaming to show he didn’t really give a damn, ‘just leave your name and phone number at the reception and I’ll let you know if something does come up. But knowing old Cranners, I wouldn’t bank on it.’

  The next morning I was woken at daybreak by a telephone bell that bored into my head like a drill-bit. I slapped on my glasses, grabbed the receiver, and found myself talking to Renner.

  ‘Isn’t this a bit early?’ I groaned.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ross,’ he said. His voice sounded less well-oiled and more sombre this morning and I noticed it had clicked a couple of degrees down the social scale. ‘I was wrong about Dr Cranwell. Something has come up. His body was found on the Giza plateau at first light this morning. The police identified him from his passport.’

  3

  When I got there it was still quite early, and you could feel the latent heat swelling out of the desert — a heat that would lay the city flat under its weight by high noon. In the raw sun the pyramids looked like three ceremonial blades presented to the heavens, and already there were groups of tourists in shorts and sunhats patrolling the necropolis wearing cameras and expressions of awe. Julian’s body had been found almost within the shadow of the Great Pyramid, but now it lay at the very apex of the shadow, as if the wedge of darkness was a giant arrow pointing at the broken thing in the sand beneath. From the top of the pyramid, I thought, the knot of police officers gathering around the dead man would have appeared like a squad of black ants on the edge of an amber infinity: the Western Desert — Ament — the ancient Egyptian Country of the Dead.

  The detective from the Investigation Department had thrown expanding circles of black-jackets around the corpse, with bayonets fixed. I suppose they’d been ordered to keep the tourists’ noses out, but I managed to slip through them magically by repeating, ‘Ana sadiq al-mayyit!’ — ‘I’m a friend of the dead!’ — which cleared a swathe like some secret password. An oblong area had been sealed off with white tape on sticks pushed into the sand, and in the centre of it lay Julian’s body, fully clothed. No blood. No apparent sign of injury. The left leg was slightly raised, the sole of his desert boot resting squarely in the sand. His clothes — khaki slacks and blue cotton shirt — looked untorn, but his bulky torso was twisted sideways and the arms flung back as if at the moment of death he’d been trying to stave off a blow. It was the look on his face, though, that really gave me the shivers. I mean, you could hardly tell it was Julian at all. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, the black pupils contracted to specks, the lips drawn back from bared teeth in a rictus of primeval fear.

  The detective was tall for an Egyptian — a seventeen-stone bruiser, six-foot-three, broad-shouldered, with a domed forehead, a cropped sliver of moustache and ferret-like black eyes. His suit was too small for him, showing off his torpedo-like figure, and the jacket hung open revealing the handle of a Ruger .44 Magnum revolver protruding from his waistband. A giant’s weapon, I thought. When he looked at me I recognised bafflement in his eyes. That wasn’t unusual. He was asking himself the same question that people in Egypt always asked themselves about me: is he one of us or one of them?

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked, at last.

  ‘I’m a friend of the dead.’

  ‘Well, stay on that side of the line. I shall personally flay alive anyone who crosses the line before the tracker’s done his work.’

  He turned to a plum-faced uniformed sergeant and a gaggle of assistants at his elbow. ‘Where is the bloody tracker?’ he demanded.

  A frail man in a black suit, with a long, sour face was nudged forward. The big detective shook his head in derision. ‘Oh, Lord, save us,’ he sneered. ‘Last time I looked, that was the pathologist. Don’t they teach you anything at the Academy? First we have the photographer, then the tracker, then the pathologist. You dunderheads couldn’t organise an orgy in a bordello!’

  The sergeant beckoned and an old Bedouin sheikh, dressed in a ragged jibba of russet-coloured cloth and a lump of shamagh, sidled out of the crowd. He placed a hard brown hand on the young sergeant’s shoulder, and spoke to him in a low voice. Even before I noticed the earring, I recognised him from the cut of his jibba and headcloth as a Hazmi, one of the despised ‘Ghosts of the Desert’ — despised, but regarded with awe even by the so-called ‘noble’ Bedouin for their almost supernatural ability as trackers. It was the earring that clinched it, though — like me, the tracker was wearing a tiny silver ring on the upper fold of his right ear. All Hawazim boys have their upper right ears pierced at circumcision. The silver ring — the Hawazim call it fidwa — is a kind of recognition symbol of the tribe, but it’s also a personal seal, because each one is different. The old man’s face reminded me of my childhood, of the unkempt elfish figures smelling of milk and dust and goatskin that drifted like phantoms through my earliest years.

  The Hazmi finished talking. The sergeant turned to the big detective. ‘He claims Jinns have done it, Captain Hammoudi,’ he said, smirking. ‘He won’t go near the body.’

  A slight flush warmed the big man’s cheeks. His eyes narrowed to black dots. Suddenly his massive, lanky frame jerked and a long arm slashed out with incredible speed, catching the old Hazmi with an open hand across the side of the face. There was a sickening slap of flesh that made me wince. The old man staggered forwards momentarily, then regained his balance. He glared defiantly at the detective, rubbing his livid cheek, and I saw his right hand linger momentari
ly against his left sleeve, where I knew the small but razor-sharp Hawazim khanjar would be concealed. Then he straightened, turned and walked away with perfect dignity. ‘Your mother!’ the captain spat after him. ‘We have trained staff, modern equipment and proper procedures for investigation, and your solution to our problem is that he was killed by an evil spirit! Oh Mary and Jesus preserve us, we’re still in the bloody dark ages.’

  I could quite happily have punched him. I whipped off my glasses, wiped them solemnly on my shirt, took several more gulps of air and then replaced them carefully, squinting at the scuffed and churned-loose sand around Julian’s body, forcing myself to concentrate. There were eight sets of footprints. Two sets were Fellahs’ tracks, probably belonging to a father and son who’d been taking produce to the market by donkey and who’d come across the body. The donkey’s tracks were cut deep, indicating that it was fully laden and on its way to market. Two sets of tracks belonged to Bedouin — I’d have bet camel-men who gave tourists rides at the pyramids. They were easy to spot — they didn’t often wear shoes and their soles were calloused from walking about on hot stones and sand all their lives. I saw four sets of tracks belonging to policemen, three of them to the Tourist Police who’d probably been first on the scene. They wore hobnailed boots — they’d have been nearer at hand than the regular police, and the fact that they’d trailed round and round the body aimlessly showed they weren’t used to the procedure at a crime scene. Then, last of all, came Hammoudi’s — the tracks of a big man, size eleven or twelve. City shoes, used to hard streets. A very determined stride, straight up to the body. No squeamishness there. This was a man quite accustomed to seeing gruesome things. None of these tracks was made by a killer. They belonged to people who were clearly reacting to the body they found in the sand. I was tempted to tell Hammoudi so, but I divined from his aggressive glare that my intrusion wouldn’t be welcomed.