Firebird

by Michael Asher

  Daisy looked up and touched my hand. ‘By rights I should turn you in,’ she whispered, ‘this is my case too, remember. Right now you’re officially renegade.’

  ‘The whole thing stinks. Why didn’t they wait for the autopsy on Fawzi?’

  ‘Ssh!’ the guard insisted. ‘Silence please. If you go on disturbing everyone I shall have to ask you to leave.’

  Daisy giggled and looked around. Apart from the dead bodies there was no one but ourselves in the chamber. ‘But who are we disturbing?’ she asked.

  ‘Madam,’ the guard said, ‘you are disturbing the dead.’

  We were still chuckling when we came down the steps to the main concourse. Daisy halted to examine some models in glass cases — squads of black Nubian soldiers carrying bows and arrows, and Egyptian spearmen which had been found buried with a mummified ruler of Asyut, and dated from the First Intermediate Period. ‘That was the time Andropov was talking about,’ I told Daisy. ‘The First Intermediate Period came after the collapse of the Old Kingdom — the so called “Golden Age”.’

  ‘What was your feeling about Andropov, anyway?’

  ‘Kind of glib and egocentric. Reeled off his story like he’d learned it by heart. No emotion about Ibram’s death, and did you notice — the monks seemed scared shitless about something.’

  ‘Yeah, Grigori couldn’t keep his hand still enough to light a cigarette.’ She read the caption with interest. ‘The First Intermediate Period,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that when Ibram reckoned the Sahara turned to desert?’

  ‘Yes. There’s no doubt there was a lot of turmoil in the Nile Valley at that time. Monuments from the period are very few — just pathetic copies of older ones, and fine carving disappears. Every local ruler was at war with his neighbour — that’s why they had themselves buried with squads of model soldiers — they believed the same petty wars would continue in the afterlife.’

  Daisy moved on and examined a lion-sphinx of the Nubian period, small but powerful looking with an almost human face. ‘So we’ve now got three guys Ibram worked with in the past,’ she said. ‘First he works on desertification theory with Andropov, then, a year ago with this Monod in the Great Pyramid at Giza, and more recently, six months ago, with Sanusi in the what was it...the Bahr...’

  ‘Bahr Bela Ma.’

  I ran my hand over the sphinx’s fine carving, knowing it was not allowed, but wanting to do it all the same. Another security guard started looking at me hard, so I took Daisy by the elbow, moving her through distorted oblongs of light thrown across the floor from the high windows. We ducked into a side room where there were more reliefs from the First Intermediate Period, very crudely done compared with those of an earlier age.

  ‘Man, they really lost it,’ Daisy said.

  ‘There were a lot of invasions from nomads — Semites from the east and Libyans from the west, taking advantage of the disorder — and look at this.’ I pointed to some models of funerary boats, roughly carved, their cabin roofs protected by cowhide shields. ‘You won’t see shields on the funerary boats of any other period,’ I said. ‘That gives you an idea of the defensive mentality they must have had.’

  Daisy looked up suddenly. ‘What do you know about this Bahr Bela Ma?’ she asked. I noticed she was pronouncing it perfectly now.

  ‘It’s one of the most arid regions of the Western Desert,’ I said. ‘Just sanddunes rolling on and on for ever. Nothing lives out there — it’s as sterile as the icecaps, but there are legends that there was an inland sea there in ancient times.’

  ‘Why would anyone be doing archaeology out there?’

  ‘Search me. The ancient Egyptians were shit scared of the wilderness outside the banks of the Nile and never built out there. The only possibility I can think of is some neolithic find like Nabta Playa — a prehistoric waterhole with traces of generations of human settlement.’

  ‘But Sanusi’s an Egyptologist, not a prehistorian, and he was along for a reason.’

  ‘Sure, because Ibram was digging in the same place Sanusi’s ancestors were digging when they were defeated by the British in 1916. Whatever it was the Sanusiya and the Germans were looking for then, Ibram must have been looking for too.’

  ‘Let’s get into the light,’ she said, ‘it’s too gloomy in here.’ We hurried down the long colonnaded stairs, through knots of sightseers, past the gift shop and out into the blazing light of the museum garden. It was packed with tourists queuing to go in and others picknicking or just sitting on the lawns. A brass band in Ruritanian uniforms of purple with gold braid was about to strike up, and bootblacks and ice cream sellers prowled through the crowds. We blinked in the light and sat on the grass by the ornamental fountain, from where I was able to keep a careful eye on the guards at the gate. I felt naked without my Beretta.

  Daisy was wearing grey slacks cut off at the knees and a close fitting blue blouse, and she sat with her legs folded enticingly sideways, with all the elegance of a ballet dancer. She tossed her long plait and pinned me down with her soft blue eyes. ‘Your stoolie told you he saw Lawrence’s report, right?’ she asked.

  ‘He said it was a fat file, and he reckons it’s probably still in the archives of the old British embassy.’

  Daisy’s eyes came alive again and for an optimistic moment I thought it might be because she’d suddenly developed the hots for me. ‘I read about that recently in an Int. Brief,’ she said. ‘The Brits moved their embassy out of the city centre, but they left some of the old Arab Bureau files from World War One in there, pending transfer to the UK.’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it would be a pretty easy job to get into that old place, wouldn’t it?’

  I gaped at her, remembering that I was being hunted by my own side. ‘Are you crazy?’ I said. ‘That’s all I need.’

  She smiled again and tipped her head to one side mockingly. She looked incredibly alluring and it was all I could do to stop myself throwing my arms round her there and then. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but how else are we going to find out?’

  ‘It’d be a whole lot easier just to ask the Brits.’

  ‘We have to keep this in the family. We don’t know what’s really behind it.’

  ‘Why not lean on Sanusi?’

  ‘The file would give us a lever. Anyhow, forget it — I wouldn’t expect a dedicated SID man like you to do anything illegal.’

  I almost choked. ‘You conniving little —’ She stopped me in mid-sentence, grinning beautifully, displaying even white teeth and wriggling slightly as if angling her body into seduction mode. I knew I was being manipulated by the oldest trick in the book, but I couldn’t resist it anyhow.

  24

  The old British Embassy was built in 1893 by a guy called Sir Evelyn Baring, who was known as British Agent, to disguise the fact that in those days it was the Brits, not the Khedive, who really called the shots. Officially Egypt was part of the Turkish Empire up till the Brits creamed the Turks in 1918. Then the Agent was renamed High Commissioner, but his power stayed the same right up till 1920, when the country got its nominal independence. Throughout the colonial period this house had been the centre of power, but like the Sanusiya it was only history now. Through the window of Daisy’s Fiat it looked deserted — there were no TV cameras or paramilitary guards on the gate.

  ‘Why don’t we just steam in from the front?’ I suggested.

  Daisy made a face. ‘It might look decrepit,’ she said, ‘but the archives are well guarded.’

  I glanced at her quizzically. ‘How the hell can you be so sure?’ I said.

  ‘US Mark One Eyeball,’ she said. ‘One of our guys got in there under some pretext a while ago and wrote a brief just in case anyone might need it. Said there are guards with dogs outside.’

  ‘So how do you propose to get in, if it’s not through the front door?’

  She grinned, enjoying this. ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’

  She halted the car under a convenient gamez tree on the Corniche an
d flipped a folded document from the back seat on to my knee. It was a map, but one you certainly couldn’t buy at a corner stationer’s — a Cairo street plan dating back to colonial times, almost yellow with age. ‘God bless the US embassy resources section,’ she said.

  I looked at her in surprise. ‘You didn’t register it, did you?’ I asked. ‘We’ll be up shit creek if anyone gets even a whisper of this.’

  She shot me an irritated glance. ‘This is not my first time on covert,’ she snapped. ‘Of course I didn’t register. I just borrowed it.’

  ‘Hey, don’t take that tone with me, miss. You guys aren’t famous for discretion.’

  She pouted at me, and pointed a finger at the map. ‘Here’s the old embassy complex,’ she said. ‘The basement where the Arab Bureau files are kept is directly under the old chancellery building — here.’ As she leaned over to look I smelled her hair, like wild grass, and a hint of perfume that was almost intoxicating. I blinked deliberately to remind myself to concentrate. ‘Now look at this,’ she said. ‘There’s a drain connecting the complex to the Nile — a big one — and it passes right under the chancellery. If we could get up that drain, I’ll bet we could enter the basement.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘It’s a big if,’ I said. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, the Nile’s quite high these days. That drain is going to be flooded, and anyway who says the drain connects with the archives?’

  ‘Our scout does. He reported that there is an iron grille set in the floor of a passage which leads to the archives’ main door — a steel door with a padlock.’

  I scratched the stubble on my chin. ‘So even if we got through the grille, we’d have the door to deal with.’

  ‘Yeah, but the good news is that the guards are outside the building.’

  ‘OK, but you still have to get up a flooded drain.’

  Daisy ran a hand through her silky blonde hair, just above the ear. ‘No problem to me,’ she said, ‘I’m from California. I could snorkel when I was five and use scuba gear at ten. I’ve done the sub aqua course with the Navy Seals, which included underwater demolitions.’

  I let out a long gasp. ‘You mean the plan is to blast your way in with explosives?’

  She chuckled. ‘No way,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘we’ll use oxyacetylene torches. Almost the first thing you learn with the Seals. Go through the grille like a knife through butter.’

  ‘What do you mean we?’ I said. ‘I never agreed to any of this.’

  She flashed me a pitying look, ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Whatsamatter? Can’t you swim or what?’

  ‘I’m a land person, I’ve always had a deep distrust for water.’

  This time her surprise was genuine. ‘You’re kidding,’ she said. ‘I thought you grew up on the banks of the world’s longest river!’

  I laughed. ‘Had you going though,’ I said. ‘We’ve got some of the best sub aqua sites in the world here on the Red Sea coast. I know how to put an aqualung on anyway — the oxyacetylene business is your baby, but I’m mustard on doors and locks.’

  She looked at me with real pleasure. ‘So you’re in then?’ she said.

  I sighed. ‘For you, Special Agent, anything.’

  25

  It was just sunset when I nursed the launch out of the docks at Bulaq, and the Nile was a river of fire, painted crimson by a sun melting into soft golden wreaths. We’d worked like skivvies to get everything assembled in a day. Daisy had hired the scuba gear from an American company that specialized in supplying Egypt’s offshore oil rigs in the Red Sea, while it had been my job to hire the boat. All I could get at such short notice was a Nile longboat with an awning and an outboard motor. I had to pay a lot of bakshish to my old buddy Gasim Abd al-Majid at the docks, to take the boat out myself and to keep his mouth shut. The launch was called Princess Maria and though she wasn’t fast she was solid and comfortable, with plenty of room for our tanks. As we headed downstream towards Garden City the colours slowly burned out of the river, reducing it to a slick blackness, and the boat seemed to merge into the waters, a diaphanous dark ghost. Daisy sat in the bows in her wetsuit, looking at the great buildings that reared up on both sides of us like colossal networks of coloured lights — gold, emerald green, sodium orange, scarlet and methylene blue. It was like running in a deep ravine between chasms hung with billions of pulsating jewels. For a moment the noises of the city faded and the lights went out of focus, blending with the stars into an infinite galaxy of sparkling points. For a moment I was absorbed into the waters: the Horns-King drifting in his Royal Bark through the Great River in the Sky.

  For this crossing I had adopted yet another persona — I stood at the tiller like a real Nile boatman, wearing a loosely bound turban and a flowing gallabiyya with my wetsuit underneath. I guided the boat past the great floating restaurants north of Tahrir Bridge, galaxies of lightbulbs scintillating in the darkness, and chugged on under the bridge itself, veering to the eastern bank. I was born almost in sight of the Nile, and despite years away I have never lost my awe of the river. Its perennial waters flow out of Lake Victoria, four thousand miles south of here, and take three months to reach the Mediterranean Sea. The annual spate on which the entire edifice of ancient Egyptian civilization rested, though, was due mainly to the rain that fell on the mountains of Ethiopia and rushed down the Blue Nile, meeting the White Nile at Khartoum, then surging north into Egypt itself. The ancient Egyptians never discovered the source of the Nile. They believed that the stream issued from a cave under Elephantine Island at Aswan, presided over by the ram-headed deity, Khnum. The pharaoh was regarded as no less than the creator of the Nile flood, and one of his main duties was to perform magical rites to ensure that it would be bountiful — rites which probably included the drowning of a sacrificial victim. At times like the First Intermediate Period, when the flood failed, though, it was the pharaoh himself who became the scapegoat.

  At the northern end of Roda Island the river narrowed, and we passed under a bridge lined with yellow globes which threw streaks of flame on the velveteen waters. Near Garden City I drew in closer to the bank and throttled down. Daisy shifted place, careful to maintain balance, creeping up beside me. She opened a rucksack and brought out our old city map covered in polythene, a sub aqua spotlight, and a handheld GP S . It took her only a minute to punch in the coordinates. ‘Here it is!’ she said, flashing her spotlight at the bank, which was lined with masonry blocks. I slowed down and let the craft glide in along the masonry, where the mouth of a giant drain suddenly yawned at us in the torchlight. The details of the masonry and the chance play of light and shade made it look momentarily like the open jaws of Apop — the Eternal Snake. Closer up, we could both see that the drain was covered by a deeply rusted iron grille that looked at least a hundred years old. Daisy switched the torch off and I cut the engine and dropped anchor. Higher up the bank the Corniche was lined with ornamental trees, and from behind them came the unceasing growl of the traffic. I knew now we’d been right to launch the op in the early hours of the evening rather than the dead of night. At three in the morning we’d have stuck out like sore thumbs. We sat in the shadow of the awning while Daisy made last adjustments to the tanks.

  ‘That grille’s wrought iron,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a bunch of laughs cutting your way through it in muddy water at night.’

  Daisy was faceless in the shadows, with only highlights picked out on her wetsuit zips, and hair. ‘I’ll do a recce,’ she said. ‘At least we don’t have to worry about sharks.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but watch out. A hundred pound Nile perch can give you a nasty suck.’

  She giggled as she pulled on her flippers, and I helped her to check and fit the double tanks. Finally she fitted a hood and mask, and I opened the oxygen for her. She took a long breath from the mouthpiece and gave me the thumbs up. I helped her to the bows, where she squatted down awkwardly then rolled backwards into the water with a splash, instantly disappearing into the darkness. The boat r
ocked slightly, and I moved back amidships where the rest of our gear was stowed under a dark oilcloth. I was about to strip off my gallabiyya, when I noticed the beam of a searchlight playing along the river from the south. I stopped and peered into the night. The searchlight was powerful and it was attached to a launch, invisible behind the glare, but moving up towards me fast. A moment later the beam hit me full in the face and stayed there. I blinked in the light. The launch swept closer and the Princess Maria wobbled in its wash. I peered at it, certain now that it was a police patrol vessel. Nothing else would carry such a powerful light, or have the effrontery to use it on the river at night. I heard the launch’s engine change to idle, and made out the movement of crouching figures on deck. I knew that police launches carried machine guns, and became horribly aware that right now I was a sitting duck.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted, trying to shade my eyes and putting on my broadest, most indignant Cairene accent. ‘What’s the big idea?’

  ‘Police!’ a gravel voice called through a megaphone. ‘Everything all right, Princess Maria?’

  ‘It was till you come alongside blinding me — Your Presence.’

  ‘What are you doing at anchor off Garden City?’

  I paused and brought out a fishing line I’d found in the stern, wound around two pegs of wood. I held it up and grinned broadly in the searchlight beam. ‘Supper!’ I said.

  There was a moment’s silence from the launch and in that moment I heard a faint splash behind me. It could only be Daisy surfacing, I thought, and in a second she would probably throw herself across the bow with some exclamation, right into the searchlight. I waited, frozen with fear, the grin etched painfully on my face. The seconds passed with excruciating slowness. ‘Watch out for anything unusual,’ the voice from the launch came back suddenly, ‘and report it immediately to the river police. There are a lot of drug smugglers about.’ I nodded and forced myself to smile. Then mercifully the beam flashed on some other vessel downstream and the launch’s engine was engaged. The vessel grumbled past, sending Princess Maria rocking in its wake. ‘Tisbah ‘ala khayr!’ I shouted as it went, ‘Wake up with the goodness!’ I watched it melt into the night, adding ‘and drown yourselves you bastards!’ under my breath. Only when the throb of its engine had faded completely did I heave a sigh of relief and shift to the bows.