The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  ‘Sorry, Doc,’ I said. ‘For a while I just lost it.’

  ‘That’s all right, Jamie,’ she said. ‘I know the feeling, believe me. Let’s have a look at those wrists.’

  They were bulbous and painful, and when I removed my shirt Doc gasped at the reddish-purple bruise on my ribs. ‘You ought to report this,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there’s anything broken, but those were really vicious kicks.’

  ‘Delivered with a precision that came of long practice, I suspect,’ I said. ‘But no, Hammoudi and Mustafa would just deny it. The Mukhabaraat can get away with anything.’

  While she washed my wounds and sprayed them with antiseptic, I described my encounter with Julian, and how the police had been waiting. I told her what Hammoudi had said about the transfer of the body to the British Consulate.

  ‘That shit Melvin,’ she said. ‘Was it Julian you saw?’

  ‘It was Julian’s voice and Julian’s build, but I could not really swear it was him. I just wasn’t near enough, and by God when he spotted the police he made off at a rate of knots. I never saw Jules move like that before. The Julian I knew only had two gears: “take it easy” and “stop”:

  ‘Only the three of us — me, you and the man who rang me, whether or not it was Julian — knew about the meeting. I never breathed a word, darling, so that means you were set up.’

  ‘I know. And if it was Julian, he deliberately set me up. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know what to believe any more.’

  ‘Tell me, did you ever hear any rumours about why I was sacked from the Service?’

  Doc stopped spraying and looked at me slightly embarrassed. ‘Come on,’ I said.

  ‘Julian told me that Rifad sacked you over a difference of opinion,’ she said, ‘but there were stories flying about that you’d been caught trafficking in antiquities. Believe me, I never swallowed a word of it, darling.’

  ‘It’s a lie, Doc. It’s a bloody fantasy from beginning to end. Christ, I’m going up to Rifad’s office right now to throttle the bastard!’

  ‘Do you think it’s wise with Hammoudi breathing down your neck?’

  ‘I don’t give a toss about Hammoudi. This is my reputation. This is me.’

  17

  Nine roads intersect in Medan Tahrir, ‘Freedom Square’, the very heart of Cairo city. In my youth, pedestrians had to dice with death to cross the multiple lanes of traffic, but now there are the Metro subways under pavements of concrete slabs and flower-gardens. Taxis came and went at the steps of the Nile Hilton, where tall security men in blue blazers stood by the frame of a metal-detector — a permanent fixture in Cairo hotels since the day a mad gunman opened up on a bunch of tourists breakfasting in the Semiramis Intercontinental on the Corniche just round the corner. In colonial times Tahrir was known as Ismaeliyya, and the notoriously flea-ridden Ismaeliyya Barracks, home of the British Garrison, once stood where the Nile Hilton is now. The National Museum, built in 1902 by Auguste Mariette, Rifad’s predecessor as EAS Director, still stands on the northern corner of the square, almost opposite the soaring blade of the Ramses Hilton, and Doc dropped me outside among luxury coaches and lines of tourists.

  The thick-set guard at the staff entrance wouldn’t let me in, so I queued up with the tourists and bought myself a ticket. This was almost a pilgrimage for me. I’d first seen the museum as a small boy, and no matter how many times I’d been there since, it had never lost its magic. The Old Kingdom sculpture of a lion in blue basalt was still there outside the main door, and as the queue diminished I found myself staring at it. I could still feel that shiver of strangeness I’d experienced when I’d first seen it. It was clearly a lion, yet there was something about it, some uncanny hint of otherworldliness which transformed it from being an ordinary, everyday lion, to a lion from the wildest shores of delirium.

  The guards were hustling the tourists for their cameras, but I scurried past them, on through the dark galleries and up the colonnaded stairs. In spite of my hurry to see Rifad, I couldn’t resist stopping off at the 18th-Dynasty rooms. I bypassed the Tutankhamen exhibition, where lines were already forming, and dipped into the less popular Amarna exhibition. Almost at once the sandstone colossus of Akhnaton — almost thirteen feet high — halted me in my tracks. I knew then that it was this statue that had drawn me here. I looked again at the oddly distorted features of the ‘mystery pharaoh’, the long flattened skull, the elongated neck, the jutting chin, the uncanny leering expression, the slanted, slit-like, chilling eyes. There was something frighteningly inhuman about Akhnaton — and it was not only the strange face. His body had broad hips, swelling breasts and plump thighs, almost as if he was actually a woman masquerading as a man. Yet some of the distortions of his physique belonged neither to normal men nor to normal women. I wondered if Julian Cranwell had really found evidence that the tomb of the ‘lost pharaoh’ had been discovered. As I stared at the odd features I couldn’t resist the feeling that Akhnaton was somehow laughing at me.

  I found my way to the staff quarters through a little-used side door I’d known about for years. Rifad’s office was on the top floor. A blowsy secretary — a middle-aged battleaxe with dyed blond hair — sat smoking at an ancient typewriter in the anteroom outside. ‘Can I help you, Your Presence?’ she enquired, exhaling smoke. Her vinegar expression clashed uncomfortably with the politeness of the phrase.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Dr Rifad. Is he in?’

  ‘He’s in, Your Presence, but he’s very busy. Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then can I suggest you make one?’

  ‘You can suggest what you like,’ I said, ‘but I’m seeing him right now.’

  I pushed abruptly past her and barged through the glass-panelled door bearing the legend ‘Director General’, ignoring her yell of ‘You can’t go in there!’

  The office was large and luxurious with shelves of files and documents, a courtesy suite of leather chairs and a huge wooden desk laden with in and out trays, blotter, stationery and telephones. Rifad was standing behind the desk, his small, fat torso covered with a tailored blue pinstripe suit. He froze in the act of picking up the telephone and his moon-face, as smooth and pink as a baby’s, registered alarm. The secretary was banging determinedly on the door behind me, but I forced it closed and snapped the latch. Rifad’s tiny black eyes followed my movements, measuring my distance from him. ‘What are you doing here, Ross?’ he said at last.

  I walked up to the desk. Rifad turned to face me and I saw that streams of perspiration were running down his jowls. His face was white and his whole body was quaking. He looked as if he’d seen a ghoul.

  ‘I want to know why you told the police I was sacked for trafficking in stolen antiquities,’ I said. ‘You know bloody well why I was dismissed — for expressing views you didn’t happen to agree with.’

  Rifad began to wipe his forehead with a snow-white handkerchief. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a liar! I’ve heard the rumours and the shit about forging the Siriun Stela. It was genuine — you yourself assigned a team of 18th-Dynasty experts to investigate it.’

  ‘You must be mad, Ross. You come here, barge your way into my office without so much as an excuse me, and assault me with this farrago of nonsense. What is it you want?’

  ‘I want to know why you’ve clouded my reputation when you know bloody well I never helped myself to a piece in my entire career!’

  ‘What about the statuette of Thoth they found on you at the airport in ‘92?’

  ‘Christ, I can’t believe this! I took that piece for a lecture in London. You catalogued it yourself when I brought it back.’

  ‘The piece you brought back was a forgery. So was the Siriun Stela. You’re untrustworthy, Ross. You were awkward from the start. You never got on with anybody but Julian Cranwell, about whom I had my doubts anyway. You’ve got a chip on your shoulder a mile high, and you came to the Service with your own
agenda. You were determined to prove you were right at any cost, even manipulating the evidence to suit you. Anyone else would have thrown you out from the beginning but I took pity on you because you’re half-Egyptian and were so keen on finding a place for yourself. In the end I just couldn’t put up with your crazy aberrations any longer.’

  ‘You’re lying, Rifad. The Thoth piece was no forgery, neither was the Siriun Stela.’

  ‘I don’t want to discuss it further. I advise you to get out before the Mukhabaraat pick you up. You’re no longer welcome in Egypt!’

  That remark really touched a raw nerve. ‘Just who the hell do you think you are?’ I demanded, stepping towards him, feeling the fury rising to the surface — the same heedless fury which had led me to batter the living daylights out of another boy with a cricket bat at school. ‘I have Egyptian nationality as well as British,’ I said. ‘My ancestors lived here for millennia. You have no right to tell me if I’m welcome or not.’

  Rifad shrank away from me — he must have seen the look in my eyes. I don’t know what I might have done to him if at that moment the door hadn’t burst open and four uniformed museum guards clattered in. I froze. The guards surrounded me expectantly — all of them had night-sticks, I noticed. Rifad began to wipe his bald head assiduously with his handkerchief. ‘Escort this man to the main entrance,’ he ordered in a shaky voice. As the guards marched me out into the anteroom I took a last look at him. He was ghostly white and trembling visibly. From the moment I’d entered he had been scared of something. Really scared. And I was certain it was more than any physical threat I might have supplied.

  18

  I leaned wearily against the bar at the Club Casaubon and ordered a Stella from the barman, a broad Nubian dressed in a button-up white shirt. He filled a glass from the green bottle and slid glass and bottle across the counter to me. I drank some of the beer. It was ice cold, and streams of condensation formed on the glass almost immediately. It was good — very good. I swallowed more and let its coldness bite in my mouth and throat. Then I looked round the cavernous cellar. It was only lunch-time and broad daylight outside, but the club was lit with ultra-violet strips, full of shadows and shrouds of cigarette smoke, inhabited by nests of dark cameos around little tables: Egyptian good-time girls in tight skirts, beautiful blond-haired Russian prostitutes, Saudi youths in designer jeans and expensive leather jackets, pimps, drunken Afrangis, business-men, pushers. It wasn’t the kind of place I’d have chosen to meet, but Doc had some kind of romantic attachment to it. I guessed it was where she used to meet Ronnie. A band was playing on stage — a brilliantly lit cube in the gloom — with a busty female singer whose ethereal voice seemed not to suit her buxom dimensions. It wasn’t traditional Arab music, I realised, but a sensuous blend of old and new, a sinuous, narcotic sway of tablas and pipes.

  I spotted Doc, sitting at a table over a beer, smoking and trying to watch the band, while a young Egyptian hustler with greased hair, muscles, a square jaw and a gold pendant dangling from his open shirt, attempted to chat her up. I wanted to warn him he was courting danger, that I’d once seen Doc put two would-be muggers twice her size through a plate glass window. I elbowed my way over to them carrying the bottle and the glass, and sat down unceremoniously opposite Doc. Today she was dressed for action in brushed denim slacks and Levi shirt, with a scarlet neckerchief.

  ‘Ah, here’s my friend!’ Doc said, turning to me. ‘You came just in time for the Ghawazis, darling. The Ghawazis are on next.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘I’ve always liked the Ghawazis.’

  The young hustler glared at me and sidled off.

  ‘Doc,’ I said, ‘I can’t leave you alone for a minute.’

  ‘Actually he was rather nice,’ she said, gazing after him a little wistfully. She puffed smoke out and turned to me. ‘So, tell me, Jamie, did you and Rifad kiss and make up?’

  ‘The shit denied everything and set the dogs on me.’

  Won illegitimis carburundum, as the Romans used to say,’ she said, lifting her glass in salute, then drinking her beer. ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down!’

  ‘Amen,’ I said.

  For a second we drank in silence and watched the band. The singer was superb. The warbling melody seemed to ambush your emotions somewhere unexpectedly and send a shiver of pleasure down your spine.

  ‘Bloody good, aren’t they!’ Doc said.

  ‘The only good thing about this place. Why on earth did you pick this dump, Doc? Is this where you used to do your canoodling?’

  ‘Me and Ronnie? No way. Here, it was strictly business. This is where I used to meet my snouts - informants for the uninitiated. Three martinis and the services of the odd hooker and they were in my pocket.’

  She looked at me again, her eyes probing my face intently, ‘So how was Rifad, Jamie?’

  ‘Scared shitless.’

  ‘Probably thought you were going to pulp his brains.’

  ‘No. I mean, he was shitting frogs from the moment he saw me. I sensed it.’

  ‘Sensed it! Jamie, you’re getting more like Julian every day. Thought you laughed in the face of intuition.’

  ‘I do. But there it was. You could have cut it with a knife. And it was more than my physical presence — more than any difference of opinion between us on the origin of Egyptian civilisation. It was like he thought I knew something about him.’

  Doc stubbed her Rothmans out with professional efficiency. ‘Ever hear of Ibrahim Izzadin?’ she asked.

  ‘Izzadin? Sure. He was Rifad’s predecessor as Director General of the EAS’

  ‘Did you know he was zapped by a hit-and-run car leaving the museum one day in ‘79?’

  ‘I knew he was killed in a motor accident.’

  ‘Car was never traced. Izzadin had just decided to launch an investigation into the Tutankhamen finds.’

  ‘Hang on, I do remember this. They said there’d been some hanky-panky at the original examination of Tut’s tomb — artefacts had gone missing or weren’t recorded. They said Carter’d broken into the tomb and dipped into the treasure before Carnarvon arrived. They reckoned that explained the mess they found inside later. All malicious claptrap, of course — I mean can you imagine him ransacking a tomb or failing to report a find — Howard Carter?’

  Doc smiled enigmatically. ‘Didn’t Karlman say that he’d got rid of a tablet that pronounced a curse on those who disturbed Tut’s sleep?’

  ‘Carter denied it.’

  ‘He would, wouldn’t he.’

  ‘Anyway, the decision to open the investigation got the heave-ho.’

  ‘After Izzadin snuffed it, yes. Rifad took over and put the kibosh on it. End of story.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting Rifad was responsible for Izzadin’s death?’

  ‘You reckoned he was scared shitless. Wouldn’t that give him something to be scared shitless about?’

  ‘Doc, this is libel! Where do you dig this stuff up?’

  ‘In Julian’s computer files. And it’s not all I found out. There are two more things; well, three actually.’ She grinned with satisfaction, and I suddenly realised that she was excited. She’d been dying to tell me something since the moment I’d arrived, and was deliberately holding it back, playing for effect. Doc never had been much good at suppressing her emotions. We finished our beers and I ordered more from a passing waiter. The band had stopped playing, and the female singer was leaving the stage amid a flutter of applause. ‘Now the Ghawazis,’ Doc said.

  Two beautiful young women came on stage, dressed in shiny black cloaks. They looked like gypsies, with cascades of jet-black curls and dark skin, their eyes heavily shadowed in kohl, their faces decorated with gold nose-rings that looked like antiques. They were strikingly similar.

  ‘Twins!’ Doc said excitedly. ‘Oh, boy. This should be good! You know the Ghawazis are a tribe? They reckon they’re descended from the Baramika, a family of entertainers in the time of Hirun ar-Rashid.’

  I snort
ed. For once Doc was wrong. There were pictures of dancing-girls performing dances like those of the Ghawazis on the walls of Old Kingdom tombs — three thousand years before the Khalif Hirun ar-Rashid of the Thousand and One Nights. The Ghawazis were one of the oldest institutions on the Nile.

  The music began with a boom of percussion, a clack of castanets, a ponderous beat of tablas. The cloaked figures began to sway almost imperceptibly, their movements perfectly synchronised, the steps seeming slightly mechanical at first but with every stroke of the beat becoming looser and less controlled, until suddenly the stringed instruments and pipes exploded like a tidal wave — a sheer wall of sound. The girls stepped and twisted, flicking off their cloaks to reveal sleek, dark, muscular bodies in red velvet bikinis beneath the transparent coverings of tobs and sirwal. Both wore rubies in their navels and heavy jewelled bracelets at their ankles and wrists. There was a pant of emotion from the audience. The music was intoxicating, and the girls seemed utterly possessed by it, their flesh undulating, thrusting, jerking spontaneously without conscious design. It was breathtakingly erotic.

  ‘Bravo!’ Doc said. ‘By God, they’re good.’

  The crowd began to clap in time with the music. The rhythm was so powerful that the melody seemed almost entrapped in it, straining to escape from its confines into sublime rapture. The tempo increased and the girls’ movements became more intense. They turned deftly with the grace of panthers, muscles working, faces ecstatic. They moved voluptuously in perfect synchrony, in perfect time with the music. The percussion built up into a thrilling surge and the Ghawazis abandoned themselves to it, jumping and pivoting like acrobats. Some of the men in the audience stood up and shouted. Others held them back. The girls moved still more wildly, hurling themselves sideways, doubling over backwards in a blur of movement. I gasped. The music throbbed, ebbing and flowing mesmerically, drawing the audience in, uniting them into a single pulsating unit, on and on until I felt lost in it. The beat built up and up, climbing to new levels of excitement until suddenly it reached a shuddering climax. The girls collapsed like rag dolls into perfect splits, their upper bodies folded forwards in positions of supplication. The cavern shook with applause.