The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  ‘You mean black-market trafficking in antiquities?’

  ‘That’s where the real money is. Of course, I might be talking out of my hat, but one thing is for certain: Kolpos has more going for him than that little shop.’

  ‘You don’t think Julian was mixed up in flogging antikas?’

  ‘Who knows, darling? I mean, I had Julian down as a completely straight eccentric — if you know what I mean. He never kept pieces for himself, not even for sentimental reasons; you know that better than anyone. But just lately — since you left — he started hanging round with the oddest crowd, people you wouldn’t want to meet at night in a dark alley.’

  ‘His ghaffir called them hyenas.’

  ‘That’s not far off it. I still find it hard to swallow that Julian was into anything shady, though. For a time I thought it was Kolpos’s girl he was interested in.’

  ‘He has a daughter?’

  ‘No. Elena Anasis is his assistant. She’s half Greek, but had a bad time with her pa in Alexandria and legged it to Cairo. She took up with Kolpos, who looked after her, and gave her a job as his assistant. I thought Julian might have a thing for her, which would explain his friendship with Kolpos, but when I saw her I couldn’t believe it. She’s one of those girls who could have been a model — beautiful dark hair, classic Mediterranean features, great legs. And she’s about twenty-five — Julian was fifty-four, and not exactly an oil-painting, after all. You never can tell of course, but on the surface, anyway, Julian and Elena just didn’t make sense. It had to be something else, some business he and Kolpos were engaged in.’

  ‘I think I should have a word with Mr Kolpos.’

  ‘Definitely. What about this other copy: the Space Shuttle business? That seems to have no link to anything.’

  I picked up the article and read it again:

  A serious fire at the Pasadena offices of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory yesterday was the most recent of a series of incidents which has marred the success of the Shuttle Imaging Radar, SIR-A, deployed on the space shuttle Columbia’s last test flight, STS-2. The radar, which formed part of NASA’s Office of Space and Terrestrial Applications payload (OSTA-l), was designed first to acquire radar images of several different geologic regions and second, to assess the shuttle as a scientific platform for the observation of earth.

  The unmanned orbital flight which left Houston on November 12th went badly wrong only an hour after take-off when a fault in the computer navigation system nudged the shuttle off course and sent it spinning around the earth on a different trajectory. Instead of the series of sites NASA had selected to be photographed by SIR-A, the radar snapped a sequence of unscheduled sites, including the Western Desert of Egypt. The test flight was shortened from 4 days to 21/2 days as a result of the malfunction, though JP L officials claimed that the experiment had achieved all of its goals, collecting 10 million square kilometres of imagery on a film which runs for eight hours.

  After the flight, the mile-long film was analysed by a top geo-physicist from the California Institute of Technology, Lynne Regis, who announced that the radar had penetrated almost a hundred feet below the land surface and disclosed some previously unknown features. Ms Regis was tragically killed in a motor accident before publishing her analysis. Yesterday, only a week after her untimely death, her office was one of those gutted by a freak fire which swept through the JP L building in Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena. A spokesman for the Institute of Technology admitted that much of S I R -A’s irreplaceable film had been lost...

  ‘I see a link,’ I said, ‘the Western Desert of Egypt, Jules’s obsession.’

  ‘Maybe he’d been banking on using the SIR film for his Zerzura Project.’

  ‘Not a chance — the Columbia mission was in ‘81. Julian didn’t get involved in the Western Desert until we found the temple of Ptah at Bahri in ‘86, four years after the film had been destroyed.’

  ‘Then why his interest in something that happened more than a decade ago?’

  I stood up heavily and stretched. I put my pipe down, whipped off my glasses, and took a couple of deep inhalations, expelling the air steadily through my mouth. I hadn’t slept a wink last night; Julian’s last words had played themselves over and over in my head, and the more they had replayed, the more angry I’d become at my confusion. ‘What we need is a pattern,’ I told Doc. ‘What we’ve got is a list of anomalies. One, Julian rings me in Britain claiming his life is in danger from the same “devils” who killed an ancient Egyptian pharaoh almost three and a half thousand years ago, and two twentieth-century Englishmen — all right, Britons —who themselves seem to be unconnected in any way. Two, he’s found dead by the Great Pyramid supposedly of a heart attack, with no tracks and no indication of how he got there. Three, Julian’s flat has been turned over by the SID. Papers and a computer are removed as “evidence” in a case they have already dismissed as misadventure. Four, Julian leaves the name of a contact, and what seems to be a cryptic message for me in the form of an old photograph of Carter and Carnarvon, and a newspaper article about the destruction of some film years before he even started his quest in the Western Desert, and fifth...

  ‘Is there a fifth?’

  ‘There might be — at least one person reports seeing Julian alive since I saw his corpse disappear in the ambulance yesterday morning!’

  ‘Whoever told you that must be off his chump, darling.’

  ‘No doubt. But I’d like to see Julian’s body. Where would it be now, in the city morgue?’

  ‘Yes, but they’ll never let you in — or give you access to the pathologist’s reports. You’re not even next of kin.’

  ‘Julian’s parents are dead, he never married and he has no brothers or sisters. In fact, I was his only kin.’

  ‘I doubt if that will wash.’

  ‘Couldn’t you pull some strings at the Embassy?’

  ‘I don’t carry much weight there anymore — not since they retired me from the Office. If anyone has to inspect the body it’ll be the Consul. They won’t see why an unrelated private individual should be allowed to go.’ Doc sat down and lit a cigarette, deep in thought. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘Pete Margoulis — Dr Pietro Margoulis. He teaches physical anthropology and genetics at the American University of Cairo and he might be able to get you permission to visit the morgue for academic purposes.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘Pete’s a friend of mine from the old days. He’s clever but very self-absorbed, you might say. If you weren’t so polite you might say egotistical or even narcissistic. He’s very fond of young girls, — students mostly — but he’s also respectably married to an heiress and occasionally there’s what you might call a “conflict of interests”. I once helped him out of bother, and he owes me.

  ‘Sounds charming!’

  ‘OK, Pete’s not my favourite person. But he’s a brilliant geneticist. He’s done surveys of the skull-dimensions on the Nubian population to determine a correlation between them and the ancient Egyptians. Got it all on some kind of computer matrix. He also worked extensively on Tut’s mummy, so by chatting him up you can kill two birds with one stone — get a chance to see Julian’s body, and find out whether Tutankhamen really was murdered.’

  8

  Margoulis’s office was on the first floor of the American University, opening off an outside walkway, and I arrived there at the end of the lunch break when dozens of Egyptian students were milling around in the courtyard beneath, drinking Coke. Margoulis’s timetable was pasted on the board outside his room, and I glanced at it. He was anything but hard worked, I noticed: only four hours a week were blocked in. The rest of the time was marked ‘free research’ — like the period which was beginning now. I leaned on the balustrade. A slender, bearded man in a white lab-coat came swinging along the walkway, hand-in-hand with a pretty girl. He saw me standing there, and released the girl’s hand, speaking to her softly. He must have been in his forties: the girl looked about eighteen. She hurried
off quickly, and the man glared at me with clear blue eyes. His black hair — bottle-black probably — was cut short and he wore a small gold ring in his left earlobe. Under the lab-coat, I glimpsed jeans and cowboy boots.

  ‘Dr Margoulis?’ I asked: the man nodded, ‘I’m Omar James Ross, a friend of Evelyn Barrington. She said you might be able to help me.’

  ‘What about’

  ‘Can we talk?’

  Margoulis shifted uneasily and glanced, almost wistfully after the girl.

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said at last. ‘Come in, won’t you?’

  The room was small and untidy: a desk pushed into one corner, bookshelves, a full-sized skeleton in another corner, and anatomical charts in garish colours on the walls. Two computer terminals blinked at me from the top of a steel work-table. Margoulis brought out a bottle of old sherry and two stemmed glasses from a specimen cabinet that stood in another corner.

  ‘Care for a tot?’ he asked, ‘Don’t normally drink in the office, you understand — hospitality purposes only.’

  He filled the two glasses, handed one to me, and sat down in his chair. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘have a seat.’

  I sat down in the only other chair and sipped my sherry. Behind Margoulis’s desk was a digital shot of Tutankhamen’s mummy — a photo of the actual cadaver, stripped of its beaten-gold funerary mask.

  ‘Doc said you worked on Tut’s body.’ I said.

  ‘I did,’ Margoulis replied. His accent was mild, Californian perhaps. ‘There was already some anatomical analysis done, of course, by Harrison and others, but none of it was very reliable. I thought there was room for some, ah...first class work. My speciality is cranio-facial morphology and the hereditary factors affecting it. My particular interest is in malocclusion.’

  ‘Malocclusion?’

  Margoulis grinned as if he had scored a point. ‘Here,’ he said, let me show you.’ He put his glass down, stood up, and strode over to one of his computer terminals. I followed him. I watched as he dabbled the keyboard for a moment until the multicoloured digital image of a human cranium formed on the screen. He touched the keys again, tweaking the skull from side to side.

  ‘Tutankhamen’s cranium,’ he said proudly. ‘My methodology is to take precise lateral cephalometric X-rays and use the high-speed computer to analyse the data. Each image is traced on acetate and digitised. There are a hundred and seventy-seven coordinate points which are stored on the computer’s hard disk.’

  ‘With what result?’

  ‘Well, look at this cranium. Doesn’t it strike you as peculiar?’ I examined the image with interest. Tutankhamen’s face looked somehow flattened and the back of the skull seemed to project backwards abnormally far.

  ‘It’s platycephalic,’ Margoulis said, impatiently, ‘That is, flattened out on top, and projecting prominently backwards. Actually, there is a marked thickening on the left side and the region behind the brain is depressed.’

  ‘How unusual is that?’

  ‘Most unusual. In all my research I have never come across another specimen quite like it, except for the unidentified mummy from Tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings, which may be Smenkhare, Tut’s brother. That skull is even more remarkable — it’s probably the largest human cranium ever found. With regard to Tut, though, there are some other interesting peculiarities.’ He tweaked the image of the skull around to produce a frontal view. Tutankhamen’s narrow, lopsided face leered at me peevishly from the screen. ‘You know that teeth cease to decay after death?’ he asked. ‘Well, as you can see, the cadaver’s canine teeth are prominent — in life they would have protruded above his gums like fangs — that’s malocclusion. Despite the beautiful funerary mask, at the time of his death, “King Tut” would have actually have looked something like Dracula.’

  I chuckled. ‘So what was the cause of death?’

  ‘Well, ah, there is a fracture of the left cranium.’ Margoulis said, twisting the image laterally again. ‘Oh, there’s been a lot of hullabaloo over whether it was made before or after death. My opinion is that it was made before death by a blow from a blunt instrument, probably a club, used at close quarters. The angle of the wound suggests to me that Tutankhamen was hit from behind, which would mean a surprise attack — probably assassination — rather than a death in battle, as would be suggested by a frontal wound.’

  ‘Unless he was running away, of course.’

  Margoulis evidently didn’t get the joke. ‘Ah, quite...’ he said without smiling, flicking off the image on the screen abruptly. ‘Anyhow it’s a fascinating pathology. He was an adolescent when he died, you know, and there is every indication that his body was frail. The cadaver was incredibly well preserved. You may not be familiar with the details of the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification, Mr Ross.’

  I was tempted to announce that I was an Egyptologist of fourteen years standing, but Margoulis was so obviously enamoured of his own voice, that I decided to let it pass. I forced myself to remember that I was here to ask the man a favour.

  Margoulis sat down again behind his desk, motioning me to sit also. He retrieved his glass of sherry and held it up towards the light as if examining the colour of the liquid carefully. ‘After death,’ he said, ‘the brains of the cadaver would be pulled out through a nostril using a special iron hook. The parts that the hook could not reach were removed by an infusion of chemicals. The empty skull was filled with resin. They then made an incision in the cadaver’s side with a razor-sharp stone, removed the intestines, and having rinsed the belly with palm-wine, would fill it with cassia and myrrh, sew it up, and steep it in natron — rock salt — solution for forty to seventy days. The process was extremely expensive — it cost about four hundred dollars: a king’s ransom in those days — and its practice was probably perpetrated by a professional guild of embalmers: they were highly regarded, but they were principally charlatans. In fact, there are mummies from the 11th Dynasty — six hundred years older than Tutankhamen —in which the intestines and brains were left alone, and these are the best preserved mummies we have. The embalmers were guilding the lily for money: the best work of all was done by nature!’

  ‘Remarkable,’ I said with my tongue firmly in my cheek. Margoulis knew his malocclusion, but he was no expert on ancient Egyptian sociology. In fact the desecration of grave robbers had eventually forced them to bury the dead deeper and deeper, and of course the climatic conditions didn’t apply dozens of feet underground. I kept quiet, though: I didn’t need a discussion on mummification.

  Margoulis yawned as if he had suddenly lost interest in the subject and glanced at his watch. ‘Enough of this small talk,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you didn’t come here just to ask about Tutankhamen. What can I do for you, Mr Ross?’

  ‘I need to see a body in the city morgue. Doc told me you might be able to help.’

  ‘Are you medical?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see. It might be difficult. Which is the body in question?’

  ‘Julian Cranwell, a friend.’

  ‘Ah, I heard about Cranwell’s death — heart attack at the pyramids, wasn’t it? Should have drunk less whisky from what I hear. Why do you want to see the body?’

  ‘Last respects, you might say. Do you have any pull with the government?’

  Margoulis rocked back on his chair. I guessed I had pressed the right button: ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, slowly, ‘the Minister of the Interior is a personal friend of mine. So is the Minister of Health. My wife and I play bridge with them both.’ He stopped himself, realising that he was giving away too much. ‘But no need for high-level support. What I can do is give you a note saying that you are an assistant of mine, and that you need to see a recently-dead cadaver. I’ll put you down as a “Dr Ross, Assistant Lecturer in Physical Anthropology”. How you work it from there is entirely up to you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘Doc will be very grateful.’

  Margoulis reddened slightly, and I wondered what secret hold Doc had
on him. I waited while he scribbled the note and sealed it in an envelope.

  As I ran down the stairs afterwards, I saw the pretty, dark student, standing in the shadows under the stairwell. ‘Free research,’ I found myself thinking. The girl looked up sulkily as I hurried past.

  9

  The mortuary building might have been built for Stalinist Russia — a drab, grey, featureless block festooned with greasy windows. The plate-glass doors were cracked and there were crushed flies on the linoleum. A single, unshaded lightbulb dangled from the ceiling among coils of stripped grey paint, and a fan circled ponderously. A receptionist with a two day stubble and a frayed shirt-collar took my note and disappeared silently into the shadows. I sat down on a chair of patched leather and watched a squadron of flies colonising the tea-stains on the receptionist’s desk. Ironic, I thought, that in a country where the conditions were perfect for preserving human bodies, they should have to be kept here in refrigerators at enormous cost. I watched the minutes ticking away on a wall clock behind the desk, which was an hour slow.

  Ten minutes passed. Footsteps clicked across the lino, and I looked up to see a man in a dark suit coming out of a corridor. As he emerged into the light, I recognised the long, sad face of Dr Amin, the police pathologist, and was suddenly, embarrassingly, aware that I had just presented a letter introducing myself as an assistant lecturer in anthropology at the American University. Amin was walking quickly, deep in thought, his eyes fixed on the ground. He didn’t appear to have seen me yet. I looked around frantically for a way of escape — a newspaper to cover my face, anything — but this must have been the only waiting-room in Cairo without reading-material. The door of a broom closet stood almost opposite me. The odds were it would be locked, I knew. But Amin was still advancing, and there was no other way. I leapt up, keeping my face turned away from him, and tried the handle. It stuck.