The Pyramid Prophecy

by Caroline Vermalle

  For a moment, Sixtine thought of stopping everything and going back to the life that had been hers before, to Jessica’s life. To bid farewell to vengeance, violence, the thirst for justice, and to let go of all the swords and daggers that she carried inside. Let go. Live. Dare to live.

  But the slightest movement caused her robe to fall open and she faced her reflection in the mirror of her hotel room. The dark stain of the tattoo on her navel. The ink embedded in her skin – the anchor of her vengeance.

  That was her purpose now.

  Three days later she was on a plane bound for Paris and the punishment she would mete out. She was going to the sale at Sotheby's.

  She was going for Nefertiti.

  47

  The dry desert breeze brought no relief from the heat, but merely provided easy transport for the flies that drifted into the room in droves before swirling in an invisible vortex at the center. Some of the parched creatures came to rest on Max's naked body, to drink the sweat that seeped continuously from his pores, soaking the sheets.

  He didn’t have the energy to chase them away and tolerated them until they grew too brave or desperate and darted into his half-open eyes, hoping to extract the liquid there instead. He had escaped the collapsed tunnel at dawn on the second day. The tons of earth that had entombed them had been gradually shifted by the hands of cousins, friends, neighbors, and anyone else who answered the desperate pleas for help or seen the plume of dust erupt from the earth into the night sky.

  After his wounds had been attended to by one of Spidey’s aunts and he had been fed by his mother, he had been escorted back to his hotel by a brother. Even after emptying and refilling the bathtub several times and scrubbing with such force that his skin had been left raw and smelling of cheap soap, the dust had refused to budge. It seemed as if it had made its way under Max’s skin, never to be washed away. His lungs still ached too, and while his leg might eventually heal, he was certain that the desert dust would remain a part of him forever.

  In the tunnel, there had been only the deep awareness of the present; the darkness that could almost be scooped out with an open palm; the hunger, the thirst and the presence of Spidey and Ahmad. There had been fear too, tangible and justified, which had come in waves, pounding viciously at their hopes and then, like a false tide, retreating only long enough to allow thoughts of futility to be momentarily replaced by visions of salvation.

  Max knew that from European prehistory to post-Columbian Indians, generations of boys had gone underground to meet death, only to emerge as men. This universal rite of passage generated extreme anguish and hunger, which in turn gave birth to visions of the supernatural. Since the dawn of humanity, these underground hours marked the end of adolescence and innocence, and introduced men to their mortal reality, as well as to their ancestors or guardian spirits. Would he, too, be transformed?

  The time that Max had stayed in the dark tunnel, coming so close to death yet again, had fractured his perception of time and he endured episodes of a kind of temporal disequilibrium, where he could not tell the future from the present or the past. But through all of this, only one thought remained consistent, lodged stubbornly in his skull:

  Sixtine.

  The dust may have buried the rest, but she belonged to an intimate and timeless dimension. Somehow, she was the only thing out of this ordeal that made sense to Max. He raised his debilitated frame from the bed, chasing away the flies, and limped over the rough carpet to grab his phone, still covered in dust.

  He dialed Sixtine’s number.

  As each ring went unanswered, loneliness deepened the furrows creasing his brow. At last, he heard the voice he longed to hear, offering him only the chance to leave a message. He hung up. And threw his phone across the room.

  The angry movement unbalanced him. He tried to steady himself by grabbing onto the edge of the table. Everything fell away, and in an instant he was on the floor, grimacing from the searing, unbearable pain in his leg. Several minutes later he still lay there, fearing that even the slightest twitch would cast his sanity adrift.

  Through the pain, he heard his phone ring. His hands grasped the veneered surface of the table, and after many false starts, he finally managed to pull himself up and hobble towards the phone.

  It was Florence.

  He was about to answer when his eyes fell on one of the photocopied pages scattered at his feet, a satellite image of the Giza plateau sent by archeologists at the University of Texas. Max had studied them for two months and knew them all by heart. But he was now noticing something that he had never seen before.

  While the phone carried on ringing, he fumbled around in his bag and retrieved the GPS unit, which he brought next to his laptop.

  Latitude, longitude, coordinates, intersections and altitudes. Max’s head was abuzz with possibilities. Could it be? He downloaded the GPS data and plotted the points onto a composite of a map of Giza and the satellite photo. As he had suspected, the place where the looters’ tunnel had been stopped by a granite wall could not possibly be the base of the pyramid. It had to be something else. And suddenly, he understood.

  The phone had stopped ringing. He leaned back in his chair, triumph gleaming from his exhausted face. It was what he had been searching for, and now it was there, in front of him.

  He made a screenshot and emailed it to Florence, before dialing her number.

  “Max, what’s going on? I've been trying to reach you for days!”

  Telling her about the visit to the tunnel while carefully omitting any mention of the collapse was an exercise in restraint. He short-circuited her inevitable interrogation by asking: “Are you in front of your email? Did you see what I sent?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “A satellite image of the Giza Plateau.”

  “Thank you Max, I can see that, it’s infrared too while we’re stating the obvious. I’ve looked at it a thousand times before.”

  “You haven’t seen this one before. It was taken on a rainy day.”

  “Right. Right. Fascinating,” Florence said, not even attempting to hide her sarcasm.

  “Look on the northeast face of the pyramid of Cheops, towards the museum. Do you see the line that is slightly darker than the sand around it?”

  “Wait. I can see something.”

  “What looks like a line is a difference in soil densities at depth. That’s only revealed when the ground is wet and caught by an infrared camera at an altitude of a few thousand yards. This in itself is not unusual, there are natural variations in density in the soil – but look at how straight and regular the line is. That doesn’t happen in nature.”

  After a long pause, Florence said carefully, “It could just be an old road that the desert has covered over.”

  “Except it isn’t. The looters' tunnel hit a vertical granite wall in precisely the spot corresponding to that line.”

  “Stop beating around the bush, Hausmann. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Well… a tunnel that leaves the pyramid and connects to a point somewhere in Giza.”

  There was silence at either end of the line.

  “Giza, Giza...,” said Florence finally. “Wait a minute.” Furious tapping of keys, shuffling of papers. “Try this address, El-Khofo in Giza. Would that be in the line of your tunnel?”

  Max entered the address.

  “Yes, it’s a few feet away, but within probable range. What’s that address?”

  Florence briefly explained her theory of the lotus flowers. “I found two lotus farms that made deliveries to Cairo's upscale neighborhoods in June. There were more than thirty addresses, so I was about to give up. But there is only one address in Giza. A delivery on June first. Fifty flowers.”

  “But this part of Giza is poor, that doesn’t make sense.”

  “You’re kidding, it’s the first thing that makes sense in a long time,” Florence giggled. “If there is a secret tunnel leading to the pyramid, you don’t think they’d dig it all the wa
y to a mall in Garden City? Hunter thinks that Al-Shamy and Hassan wanted to lure the Pryces into the pyramid with some kind of VIP experience, I guess they brought it to Giza. Flowers liven up any party. This is great, I can feel we are really onto something. Say, Max?”

  In the sudden silence, the line crackled.

  “Mmh?” Max mumbled, still poring over the satellite image.

  “Promise me that you will not tell anyone about this discovery, okay?” Florence pleaded. “I wouldn’t want something to happen to you. I care about you, you know?”

  Perhaps it was the slightly charged tone of her voice, but despite the oppressive heat and the throbbing pain in his leg, Max felt a strange thrill run through his naked body.

  He chuckled, awkwardly trying to deflect the moment, “Flo, don’t worry, okay? I’ll call you as soon as I have news. Bye.”

  He dressed as quickly as his leg allowed him. He tried not to dwell on Florence's words and the unease they had brought. As his body went through the automatic motions, his mind wandered towards the vision of Sixtine's face. Once embedded in his mind’s eye, it obscured everything else.

  Now he knew what to do.

  A few minutes later, he was moving towards Giza. Like the boys that had become men after returning from the depths, Max’s own trial by darkness had sewn into him a new certainty. It scarcely touched his conscience but he felt it at the core of his being.

  He would win Sixtine's love one day. But first, the truth had to be torn from the world.

  48

  The taxi lurched to one side to avoid the swathe of traffic circling around the Arc de Triomphe. Its solitary passenger, dressed to the nines in a flaming orange cocktail dress, hardly noticed.

  “Three days,” Florence mumbled to herself, scratching at the pink nail polish that had spilled over the edge of her fingernail and onto her skin. Three days was all she had to find this damn tunnel and get Max to sign the contract. She glanced briefly out the window, the ornate buildings of the Parisian avenues reduced to a multi-colored blur as the taxi sped towards its destination. It would have been nice to stroll the streets of Paris. With someone. With Max.

  The story should have been simple: girl meets boy in the streets of Cairo, girl and boy fall head over heels in love, girl loses boy because of a terrible misunderstanding, boy forgives girl and girl forgives boy and they find each other again in a spectacular Parisian happy-ever-after. Instead, in her own story, girl meets boy and decomposing bodies in a pyramid, pyramid curses them by amplifying their ambition at the expense of their love, boy hides things from girl and girl lies to boy and things become awfully complicated.

  Suddenly, a blinding certainty came to her: if she wanted her happy ending, she would have to go and get it. She had three days before the deadline. She needed two days in Paris for the Sotheby's sale.

  The third she could spend it in Cairo. With Max.

  It took only a handful of clicks on her smartphone to book a flight. Her chest swelled in delicious anticipation. When she stepped out of the taxi outside a hôtel particulier on the rue Saint-Honoré, she was flushed and beaming at the same time. Her optimism restored, she was ready to face Yohannes DeBok and Nefertiti.

  As she was paying the fare, a vintage opalescent silver blue 1961 E-Type Jaguar parked up behind the taxi, causing the driver to whistle in appreciation. Florence was more interested in the driver though. A man in his thirties dressed in a tuxedo, tall, slim, with grey eyes that complimented the color of the car. But it was the way that he moved that caught Florence’s attention more than his good looks. His casual grace seemed to come from an earlier age, a discrete and understated confidence at odds even with the elegant people flocking to the mansion for the party. Their eyes locked, causing Florence to fumble and drop her change.

  The stranger seemed to cover the ground between them in no time; the next she knew, he was beside her, helping to gather up the coins laying on the pavement. When he gently took her hand and placed the coins in her palm, he looked at her and smiled. For a second, Florence wondered if she had met him before, but had to conclude that if she had, she couldn’t possibly have forgotten. Flustered and off balance, she mumbled thanks. He only dipped his head in gracious acknowledgment.

  She followed him to the entrance of the mansion. She noticed that the doorman greeted him with “Mr di Blumagia”, without asking for his invitation. She made a mental note to Google his name later. A door opened and the dull whisper of chattering guests and the clinking of the crystal glasses spilled out on the threshold. Florence craned her neck, while showing the doorman her invitation.

  “Welcome, miss Mornay-Devereux,” the doorman said. Thaddeus smiled and gestured for her to enter ahead of him. They found themselves in an empty marble vestibule. When the silence became too embarrassing, Florence asked: “Are you here as a guest of…”

  “No one in particular. I’m a flâneur today.”

  “I love French,” said Florence. “Even when you have no idea what it means, it still sounds like a great idea.”

  “It means strolling, with no other purpose than the quiet enjoyment of life.”

  He gave her a smile so disarmingly charming that it went straight to her knees.

  Yes, she would definitely be Googling him later.

  But when they arrived in a large and classically decorated reception space where about a hundred guests mingled, the handsome Mr di Blumagia didn’t look as carefree as he had pretended to be a moment earlier. More importantly, he didn’t take seem to notice Florence’s presence beside him anymore.

  His attention was entirely focused on someone else. Florence followed his gaze, and couldn’t help but gawk too.

  She was facing away from them, the gentle undulations of her naked back and shoulders framed by a silver satin dress that fell to her ankles. Her grey hair was cut in a boyish bob. The whole picture reminded Florence of old Hollywood in black and white movies. Only when the thin woman turned and faced them did Florence see that despite the gray of her hair, she was young – twenty-five years old at most. Her eyes were the color of emerald.

  When they latched onto Thaddeus’ unwavering stare, he walked towards her, leaving Florence alone in the center of the room, wondering if those two magnetic creatures came from another world.

  “Miss Mornay-Devereux. How is my shrew?”

  Florence turned and found Yohannes DeBok, smiling.

  “Well, still dead, thank you” she said, shaking his offered hand.

  “Excellent, so another satisfied customer then? Were you offered some champagne?”

  He directed a waiter to present her with a tray of champagne glasses.

  “How could I say no,” she replied, picking one and gulping it with abandon, “but only one. I don’t want to be tipsy for the little interview you promised me. Unofficially, of course.”

  “Did I make that promise?”

  “Most solemnly. On the soul of a shrew.”

  DeBok sipped quietly, an appraising look on his face, but saying nothing.

  “Is there really nothing that you tell me about Nefertiti?” Florence pleaded. “For posterity.”

  “Actually there is.” DeBok smiled broadly before leaning in closer and whispering conspiratorially, “The sale of Nefertiti is my last. Tonight I'm celebrating my retirement, and for now, no one else but you knows. So with this secret I have given you, have I not saved the soul of a shrew?”

  “Where are you retiring to?”

  But his amused silence told her that her ruse had run its course. If she were going to get any more from the wily dealer, she would have to try a different, more risky tack. She emptied the remains of her glass in a single swallow.

  “Tell me, Yohannes, who is Oxan Aslanian?”

  The shift in DeBok’s expression was subtle, and yet Florence sensed that she had touched a nerve. He still had the face of someone who had mastered the art of giving nothing away. But even a second of fear always left a trace on men’s eyes.

  “My d
ear Florence,” he said in a tone devoid of any attempt at warmth or charm, “you should pay close attention to this name. If you say it a little louder in a room such as this, you will hear the spirit of every collector, dealer or curator here, break like thin glass. You may as well be invoking the name of the boogeyman in front of frightened children.”

  “Why? He's just a forger, isn’t he?”

  DeBok smiled, but Florence saw his gaze darting quickly around the room.

  “As a rational man, I'd say yes and agree that he must be the heir and disciple of the great master of Berlin. Others, less rational than I, argue that he is, in fact, the reincarnation of a master craftsman from ancient Egypt; a specter sent by the gods to confuse and mislead us in retribution for all that we have removed from its rightful place.” DeBok paused for a moment, looking into his nearly empty glass. But how could I know, I've never met him. I'm not even sure he really exists.”

  “But Yohannes, as an expert in forgeries, you have studied his methods?”

  “Yes, it took me ten years to break through some of his secrets, and now I can spot his creations and date them fairly precisely. But I do not doubt that, if he does exist, that he has already found ways to fool even me.”

  The faintest flicker of mischief flashed in DeBok’s steel grey eyes, “You are a journalist, so you will like this anecdote, which I provide to you exclusively.”

  Florence held her breath.

  “A few years ago, Sotheby's sold an Aztec vase, which was described as an urn containing the ashes of a noble. A few weeks before the sale, on the steps of the Templo Mayor in Mexico, dozens of cats and dogs were found dead. Inside their corpses, forensics discovered numerous jewels and pieces of Aztec gold. Given the number of corpses and the value of the treasure, a rumor began to go around that the Sotheby's vase had contained the ashes of not just any rich man, but Ahuitzotl himself, the greatest Aztec emperor that ever lived. And Mexico was gripped by the curse of Ahuitzotl, and many more animals would die. The rumor reached its peak the day before the sale, when a prized bull collapsed at the feet of a famous matador inside the Mexico City Arena, a sacrificial Aztec knife planted in its neck. The next day, the vase was sold at seven times the value of even its highest estimate.”