Candice Cushing and the Lost Tomb of Cleopatra

by Georgette Kaplan

  “That’s too bad,” Nevada said, switching hers on and putting it on Jacques’s channel as she turned back to face front. “So how’s your week been?”

  They sped down the runway, eating up the same dust Jacques had kicked up on his approach. The flock of flamingos buzzed away from their sputtering, hiccupping horsepower. It made Nevada feel like she was back in Florida.

  “Very nice,” Jacques answered her. “Katy Perry released a new single. I think it’s très magnifique .”

  “Oh, we should play it later.”

  “ Oui .” Jacques pulled back on the yoke, starting their take-off. “And the woman? You have, ah, conquested her yet?”

  “Shut up, it’s not even like that.” Nevada looked back at Candice, who was gesturing somewhat wildly. Nevada gave her a thumbs up.

  Inside the vacuum-sealed echo chamber of the cans, the din of the propellers was locked out, leaving only Nevada’s own thoughts and Jacques’s radio-transmitted voice. Without the headphones, vocal conversation was as impossible as a scientific debate with an anti-vaxxer.

  “Oh, ho ho!” Jacques laughed. “But how you would like it to be, n’est-ce pas ?”

  “Shut up,” Nevada said again. “Go surrender to something. Did you get my shopping done?”

  “ Oui, oui , I put it by the, how you say, latrine . Butch was happy to help.”

  Nevada smiled humorlessly, refraining from pointing out that latrine was how he say. “Was he now?”

  Jacques hedged as The Flying Carpet ’s climb continued, pitching Nevada’s digestive system all out of whack—not to mention her eardrums. She should’ve stayed up later. A good yawn would’ve come in really handy right about now.

  “He may have expressed some dismay that you lost his Wilson Combat Sentinel XL when he gave it to you as a gift.”

  “I didn’t lose it!” Nevada said defensively. “I know exactly where it is—approximately. I found the HMS Endeavour , I think I can find his stupid—forget it, how’s he doing?”

  Jacques hedged some more, shrugging as eloquently as he would order wine. “He looked good. He’s doing some, ah, ponytail sort of thing with his hair. I don’t know, maybe it’s the style now. But at least it’s not dyed!”

  “Small favors,” Nevada muttered. She looked back at Candice, who was now ignoring her except to direct a backwards peace sign her way. Nevada smiled at her, turning away before Candice could see.

  Jacques noticed the interplay, which Nevada noticed in turn as the Frenchman devoted excessive care to making some final adjustments on his instruments. “So now, if there is nothing going on between the two of you, then you would hardly mind if I…”

  “ Casse-toi ,” Nevada told him, taking off her headset.

  Jacques leveled The Flying Carpet off and throttled back the engines, settling them down to a comfortable amount of thrust now that they had reached cruising altitude. The din inside the cockpit dropped off considerably.

  Candice was quick to take advantage of that. “Is that duct tape?” she asked, pointing upward.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Nevada said. “What kind of operation do you think we’re running here? It’s electrical tape.”

  There was an expanse the size of a walk-in closet in the back of the Albatross; it adjoined the bathroom and the minibar and contained a Pelican case the size of a footlocker. Nevada got down on her knees, threw the latches, and opened it up with a hissing breakage of the airtight seal. Inside, laid precisely into scalpel-cut Kaizen foam, was a CZ Shadow 2 and a CZ Scorpion with an integral suppressor giving the barrel a blunt symmetry, several magazines for both rifle and pistol, and boxes of the 9MM ammunition both guns took. Nevada picked them up, verified they were empty, and did a few quick dry-fire exercises. The action was crisp and clean on both. She wouldn’t expect anything less of a craftsman’s tools.

  Candice appeared in the doorway. There was a tall sunflower planted beside her and she gave it a desultory sniff as she watched Nevada.

  “We’ve done more good than bad,” Nevada said, not facing Candice, but letting the words ricochet back to her. She reached down the sides of the Pelican case, found a catch, and slid open a drawer. Inside, for perhaps the first time in his life, Butch had folded clothes. “Saved some kids, put money into a refugee camp. Don’t go all Nancy Reagan on me now.”

  She picked out a reject pile of clothes for Candice. A cotton button-front shirt and boot cut twill pants from Columbia Sportswear, along with a vented Booney hat. Then, for herself, a short-sleeved work shirt, khaki cargo pants, and a keffiyeh . The sun hat just wasn’t cute enough for her. An M-1951 field jacket would give her some protection from low-flying bullets. There was also a set of boxer briefs. They said BUTCH UNICORN on one side and had a picture of a rhino on the other. No way she was letting Candice wear those.

  “Get changed,” Nevada said, sliding Candice’s pile over to her with a set of briefs on top. “We’re nine hundred some miles from Ennedi, we’re going at about a hundred and twenty-four miles an hour, so by my calculations—math is hard.”

  Candice didn’t pick up the clothes. “It’s not like we’re traveling do-gooders. We left people to die in Sudan. Okay, fine, there was nothing we could do, but—I don’t think we made it better.”

  Nevada opened a package of 9MM Parabellum ammo and started loading it into a magazine. “‘Officer, I swear, South Sudan was like that when we got here.’ We’re not making anything worse here. How can we?”

  “You have two guns.”

  “And we’re going to Chad!” Nevada loaded the magazine into the Shadow 2, racking a bullet into the chamber and making sure the safety was on before setting the pistol down. “So if anything, we’re making South Sudan less dangerous.”

  Candice stooped down to pick up the clothes. “What do you think we are, though? Survivors? Tourists? Mercenaries? How would you describe us?”

  Nevada was loading another magazine for the Scorpion. When she spoke, her voice was as low and steely as the sound of bullets sliding into place. “You’re an archaeologist. I’m a businesswoman. I’m doing a job; you’re consulting. It is not my problem that the job takes us into bad neighborhoods. What is my problem is making sure we’re both alive to enjoy the fruits of our labor.” Nevada loaded the Scorpion, racked a bullet up into the chamber, and set the rifle aside. “That problem I am handling. If a plumber gets called into the Bronx, it’s not his job to bring up literacy rates. He fixes the toilet and he goes.”

  “What if that’s not enough?”

  Nevada stood and faced Candice. For a moment, Nevada almost felt sorry for her. To be so beautiful and to know nothing about the world… maybe one led to the other. “You can’t change the past. So why spend time there?”

  “Is that what you tell yourself?” Candice asked, and Nevada thought of tiny feet kicking the inside of her womb—angry at her even before she gave him away.

  “I don’t have to tell myself that anymore. Here.” She picked up a denim jacket and added it to the pile in Candice’s arms. “Sheepskin lining. The desert gets cold at night. And Ennedi is in the middle of the Sahara.”

  Pike’s truck rolled back toward Camp Esau, the frayed tire treads scratching like blunt fingernails on the burnt-out landscape. They barely raised a murmur of dust. In the relative cool of the afternoon, the children were taking a break from their studies, and as the truck came in, they ran over to greet it. Pike sat in the back, playing tail-gunner, but as they began to pass the horde of children, he stowed his rifle and instead came up with a soccer ball he had managed to get his hands on. He threw it out to the mob, starting an animated game that took up half their number. The truck came to a stop and Pike got out. The rest of the children had recently finished an English lesson and were eager to try half-formed knock-knock jokes on him. Pike gamely added ‘who?’ to each of their set-ups as he pushed the boy he’d taken from Jacob Lol Gatkuoth in a wheelchair.

  Inside the compound, he immediately noticed the tension. His men with gu
ns in their hands instead of on their straps. People hiding in their tukuls despite it being the middle of the day. Noises strangely muted, like there was a lion in the center of the village and no one wanted to draw its attention.

  He delivered the boy to the infirmary, where Ladu started giving the doctor the patient’s background. Neither bothered talking to Pike. They knew he had other problems. A nurse pointed to an acacia tree growing between two tukuls. The tall, thin trunk opened up like an umbrella into widespread branches, the skeletal twigs holding a green hint of leaves. Weaverbirds nested there by the dozen, their spherical nests hanging from drooping branches like Christmas ornaments.

  A man sat in the shade, his heavy head sagging, his white robes splattered with the shadows of the branches looming over him. He looked not so much relaxed as like he had fallen from one of those delicately suspended weavings and was now cracked against the ground.

  He made no move to get up as Pike approached.

  “All are welcome here, brother,” Pike said, coming to a stop just outside the shade. If the man attacked, Pike doubted he could cross the distance before Pike drew. “But we’d like to know who we’re welcoming.”

  “Names are unimportant,” the man said. “A conceit of men who seek immortality apart from Heaven. What’s truly important is how a man serves God.”

  “Here’s where I ask how you serve God.”

  The man shifted his weight and turned his head to the side, making himself more comfortable—seemingly bored. “Two women came this way. One black, one white. They killed Farouq al-Jabbar, the son of my lord. He wishes them brought to justice.”

  “Justice,” Pike repeated. “Did he use that exact word?”

  “We know they’re not here. Tell us where they went.”

  “Leaving aside why I would tell you that, why would they tell me in the first place?”

  “Not all things are told. Some are overheard.”

  Pike shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where they are.”

  “Perhaps you’re forgetting.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “There are good reasons to remember.” The man took a pouch from his belt, setting it down on the scorched grass. One pull of the cord revealed the gleaming gold nuggets inside. “And other reasons. Some men serve God as messengers. Others as the message.”

  God didn’t say anything to Pike. Nothing at all.

  Chapter 3

  As the hours passed, the

  buzzing vibration of The Flying Carpet ’s engines and the stomach-roiling nausea of its speed passed into something almost comforting to Candice. The dangers of South Sudan were largely abstract; she hadn’t actually experienced any of them. But being back on the trail of Cleopatra’s tomb felt like returning to the shootouts and chases she’d been in after Meroe. Despite the hundreds of miles that separated Ennedi from the Khamsin, thoughts of the two boiled with coincidences, conspiracies, and wild imaginings. Her hands fervently rolled against each other as she remembered how close she had come to death and how easily the same could happen in Ennedi, in the middle of nowhere. She had thought she was safe in Meroe too…

  In the cargo compartment, there were four litters set up bunk-bed style, two to a wall. Candice stretched out on one after moving the plants. She’d found pen and paper among numerous clipboards filled with the paperwork attendant to operating a modern-day tramp steamer. As she lay there, the vibrations of their flight working to both massage her tense muscles and electrify her nerve endings into buzzing neurosis, she tried to compose her thoughts and write. She’d put this off long enough. And having this brief, nervy respite in the sky collapsed down everything she was feeling into guilt over what her parents were feeling. What they would feel if she died out in the middle of the desert, thousands of miles from home.

  She wrote, but only in hesitant scratches. It all seemed so impossible to explain. She tried to stick to the facts, making a dry accounting of events and her reasoning for continuing, but it all felt so heartless. This was her passion. She was doing what she loved, risking her life for an ideal—and all she could think was how unlikely it’d be that they would even get to bury her.

  Nevada came out of the cockpit. She had mostly left Candice to her own devices on the trip, only passing through to use the bathroom and sticking to Jacques like they were some secondary school clique. Now she sat down in the bunk opposite Candice.

  “Please tell me you’re writing Naruto fanfiction,” she said. “You’re so close to being the perfect woman.”

  “Close,” Candice replied, with sarcasm so stark it nearly crossed into friendliness. “I’m writing a letter to my parents explaining why I’m dead in case I get shot in the head.”

  “Ah.” Nevada swiveled in her seat, putting her feet up.

  Candice carved out another sentence, but doubted it would add any comfort to the message should the letter find itself delivered. “A wise man once said—if a man has not found something worth dying for, he is not fit to live. Here I am, trying to explain that I’ve found my something… and I’m not sure if that makes me sound more like an idiot or a selfish prat.”

  Nevada looked at her, dark hair streaking across her face, barely stirred by her breath. “Selfish people don’t think they’re selfish. They think they’re—smart.”

  “And idiots?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m not an idiot.”

  Candice stared at the paper. The words jumbled and bunched together in front of her eyes. Empty platitudes, raw clichés, offering no comfort, nothing of what she felt. Her parents deserved an explanation of why she wasn’t safe and sound; she could barely give them an epigraph.

  “How do I make them understand?”

  “They’re not going to,” Nevada said with blunt certainty. Candice looked at her again. She had picked up a loop of hair from off her cheek and was toying with it. “First of all, because parents just don’t understand—as a wise man once said. And second, because you’re their little girl. They’re not going to care if you died curing cancer. They’re only going to want you back.”

  “So what do I tell them?”

  “There’s only two things worth doing in this world. What you love doing and what you have to do. Tell them you’re doing one of those. And if they don’t like it, go to work at Wal-Mart and get hit by a bus. That’ll show ’em.”

  “You’re sure you’re not an idiot?” Candice asked.

  “I have no emotional investment in any aspect of 90 Day Fiancé , so I like my chances there. We’re two hours out, so if you wanna nap, now’s the time.”

  Candice looked at her letter again. Reasoning, justifications, explanations—excuses. She ripped it off the clipboard and crumpled it up. Then she started writing again.

  “You don’t even care if they do a gay Bachelor?” she asked Nevada.

  Nevada rolled out of her bunk. “I think that’s my cue to leave.” Before she did, though, she crouched down beside Candice. “It’s too bad you’re against casual sex. This would’ve been the perfect time to join the Mile-High Club.”

  “I’ve never gotten the appeal of that. Sex, but the only thing you can eat after is really bad food.”

  “You’re British. Isn’t that all sex for you?” Nevada booped the tip of Candice’s nose. “Not for real-real, just for play-play.”

  With Nevada gone, Candice knew a kind of clarity she didn’t want to think about too hard. Right or wrong, Nevada’s Falstaffian way of looking at things had a way of boiling life down to its bare essentials. Candice wrote plainly, simply, working hard not to double-down on explanations or try to tell her parents what they wanted to hear. She managed to fit everything from salutation to signature onto the same page. Then, hugging the letter to her chest, she found a brief, dreamless sleep.

  She came back to consciousness slowly, sparingly, lingering in a waking dream where her mother was singing to her, cocooning her with miles of ocean and song and love against anything that might want to harm her. Candice woke up with Kamasi
Washington’s cover of “Cherokee” washing over her, a velvety smooth jazz standard that was brassy enough to be memorable and tender enough to go down sweet.

  Getting up, then stretching, she tiptoed around the potted plants and followed the music to the cockpit. The door was open, Jacques still piloting, Nevada in the co-pilot’s seat. Neither of them noticed Candice. Nevada had an iPod, too old to be a phone but too new to have a display, connected to a port in the plane’s control board. Candice supposed that with all the instruments, dials, gauges, and switches, one of them had to take an aux cord.

  Jacques looked over the gauges, then out the windshield, and sighed. “ Sacre bleu , the monotony of it all. The only thing worse than flying over the desert must be limping through it.” He turned to the fuel gauge, tapping on it. The needle stayed resolutely on the right. “We still have plenty of fuel. If you like, perhaps we could find our way off the flightpath, arrive at a more suitable destination.”

  Nevada had a parachute on her lap and was going through one of its pouches, evidently checking it over. “Such as?”

  Jacques took his hands off the yoke to flutter his fingers in the air. “Cambodia!”

  “Cambodia?” Nevada repeated dubiously.

  “We could get there with two, maybe three stops. Fine food. Friendly people. For pennies on the dollar, I could have a suit made that you would swear came from Saville Row. And, if you happen to have a young woman in your company, it would be far more conductive to showing her a good time than a dusty old desert.”

  Nevada shook her head. “You don’t know women, Jacques.”

  “ Au contraire! Au contraire! In this plane alone, I have—”

  Nevada conceded the point with a surrendering gesture of her hand. “Well, you don’t know this woman. We’re going to Ennedi. We’re finishing this.”

  “ Oui ,” Jacques said wearily. But he gave the fuel gauge another regretful tap. It remained tauntingly full. “Tell me one thing. Only one—if there is nothing there… if we are too late… if this operation we are paying so much for ends up tourner au vinaigre … what will you do?”