‘Never heard of him.’
‘Before your time, young man. Dead now, of course. They all are. Only me left of that vintage.’
She sighed and for a moment her gaze drifted away down the valley, her mind seeming to cross over into a different time-frame. It only lasted a few seconds and then she was back in the conversation.
‘Just after they found the body, I remember having tea with Max and him talking about Pinsker, what he’d been like. Didn’t have much good to say about the man. Heavy drinker, apparently, always arguing with people. Got in a fight with some
Qurnawis
once, laid one of them out cold.’
Again Khalifa thought of the girl who’d been raped. She’d been from Qurna too. He could feel Pinsker coming into focus. The facial deformity obviously set him apart, but character-wise he sounded like a stereotype: the violent, boorish, superior Englishman who claimed a stake in Egypt’s heritage and yet for whom Egyptians themselves were a subordinate race, there to be patronized and abused and violated. A typical old-school colonial.
‘Carter liked him, apparently,’ Dufresne was saying. ‘Which I guess would figure, what with Howard himself having a bit of a temper. You know he once got sacked from the Antiquities Service for walloping a French tourist at Saqqara?’
Khalifa hadn’t heard that story.
‘Anything else?’ he asked, trying to tease out some link with Ben-Roi’s case.
‘Well, I can’t remember the conversation verbatim,’ said Dufresne. ‘Forty years is still a long time ago.’
She dipped her head, pondering.
‘I do seem to recall him mentioning Pinsker was an extremely skilled engineer, did a lot of work shoring up monuments here and over on the East Bank. Oh yeah, and that he had a habit of disappearing into the desert for weeks on end.’
Khalifa was bending to tamp out his cigarette on the shelter’s concrete floor. He looked up at this. Pinsker’s landlady in Kom Lolah had said much the same in the statement she’d given to police after the Englishman’s disappearance, although there had been no mention of a desert.
‘Did your friend say which desert?’ he asked, straightening again, interested.
‘Eastern, I think. Yes, definitely the Eastern Desert.’
‘Do you know what Pinsker was doing out there?’
She shook her head, unable to answer. Khalifa’s mind was turning, cogs taking up the bite of other cogs. The night of his murder Samuel Pinsker comes back from another mysterious trip out into the middle of nowhere, gets drunk, rapes a girl, then staggers over to Howard Carter’s house and boasts of finding something that was ‘miles long’. The scenario was leading him somewhere, he could feel it, although whether that somewhere had anything to do with Ben-Roi’s case was another matter entirely. It was certainly intriguing.
‘Did you ever hear of Samuel Pinsker finding something?’ he asked.
‘How do you mean, finding something?’
‘I don’t know, a tomb maybe, a . . .’ He tried to think of anything else that might warrant the description ‘miles long’. A discovery Pinsker would have wanted to boast about. Nothing obvious came to mind. Even a tomb didn’t really seem to fit the bill. ‘Something big,’ he said lamely.
Dufresne gave him a quizzical look, not understanding what he was driving at. By way of explanation he pulled the 1931 file out of his plastic bag, removed the Carter letter and handed it to her. She read through it, her eyes widening in surprise.
‘How extraordinary,’ she said when she came to the end. ‘I can almost hear Howard’s voice. “Tommyrot” – he was always using that expression.’
‘Does it mean anything to you? That bit about –’ Khalifa leant over and pointed to the relevant lines.
‘Nothing at all, I’m afraid. I’m as much in the dark as you. It’s certainly a mystery.’
She started to hand the letter back. Before Khalifa could take it, she suddenly withdrew the sheet and read through it again. Something about her demeanour as she did so, the way her eyes kept flicking off to the side as if reaching for a distant memory, hinted that some connection had suddenly suggested itself.
‘No,’ she murmured. ‘It couldn’t be.’
‘What?’
‘It was years later. Completely different context. Although it
was
Howard. And the language was certainly similar.’
She seemed to be talking more to herself than to Khalifa. For a brief moment he wondered if perhaps her age was finally catching up with her, her mental faculties starting to scramble. Then she looked at him and it was clear her mind was as lucid as it had ever been.
‘What?’ he asked again.
‘Well, I really don’t want to be confusing the issue. And it’s almost certainly not connected, but . . .’ She looked down at the letter again, then leant back against one of the posts supporting the shelter’s roof. ‘It was just something I overheard. About eight years after Pinsker disappeared. It stuck with me, and reading this, that line, “I found it, Carter”, kind of brought it to mind. Like I say, it’s probably something completely different, but –’ She broke off, shaking her head.
‘Do you want to tell me?’
‘Sure. It’s actually one of the handful of things from that period I remember quite clearly. Probably because it was the last time we saw Howard alive.’
She was silent for a few seconds, gathering her thoughts.
‘It was three or four months before he died. Which would have put it, what, end of 1938, beginning 1939. He was living back in London then, but he used to winter in Luxor, and often came over for dinner with us. I always got sent upstairs, but like most kids I’d creep out on to the landing, try to eavesdrop on what the grown-ups were saying. I can’t recall exactly who was there – my father and Howard, certainly, maybe Herbie Winlock and Walt Hauser . . .’
She paused, thinking, then waved her hand.
‘It doesn’t matter. The point is, there was a big argument and Howard started shouting. He was always irascible and got worse towards the end, what with the Hodgkin’s Disease. I’ve no idea what they were actually arguing about, but I do remember Howard shouting very loudly, “He did
not
find it. The whole thing is tommyrot. A myth. You can dig up the whole damned Eastern Desert and it won’t be there, for the simple reason that the Labyrinth never existed.” ’
Khalifa frowned. ‘Labby-rin?’
The word was unfamiliar to him.
‘
Mahata
,’ she translated.
‘What does it mean?’
‘I honestly couldn’t say. The only labyrinth I’ve ever heard of is the Amenemhat pyramid complex, but that’s over at Hawwara in the Fayoum. And anyway, Petrie had discovered that at the end of the 1880s.’
She scanned the letter again, then handed it back.
‘That’s it?’ asked Khalifa, returning the sheet to the folder. ‘You can’t remember anything more?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘You’ve no idea who they were talking about? Who the “he” was?’
‘I’m sorry, Yusuf. It’s just that little fragment. Maybe it
was
about Petrie and Hawwara, and Howard just got his deserts mixed up, East for West. Maybe
I’ve
got the deserts mixed up – it was eighty years ago, after all. Memory plays tricks. It just struck me there was a similarity in tone. And the mention of the Eastern Desert . . .’
She gave an apologetic shrug. Khalifa hunched over and worked the folder back into the plastic bag. There’d been a moment when he’d thought she was going to tell him something illuminating. Instead she just seemed to have clouded the issue even further. Samuel Pinsker claimed to have found something ‘miles long’, possibly out in a desert somewhere. Someone else, who may or may not have been Pinsker, claimed to have found a labyrinth, possibly out in the Eastern Desert. Both claims were vague; neither seemed to have any obvious relevance to the case Ben-Roi was working on. It was, to coin one of Chief Hassani’s favourite phrases, like playing
tawla
in a pair of buffalo turd goggles.
His perplexity must have registered in his expression, because Dufresne reached out and squeezed his arm.
‘There
is
one person you could speak to,’ she said.
He looked up.
‘English guy. Digby Girling. Funny man, chubby, looks like a balloon. A few years back – actually more than a few years – he wrote a book on bit-players in the Tutankhamun excavation. I’m pretty certain Pinsker was mentioned. Digby might know something more.’
‘Do you know how I can get hold of him?’
‘Well, he’s based in England – London, Birkbeck, I think – but at this time of year you’ll probably catch him guest-lecturing on one of the Nile cruisers.’
Khalifa made a mental note, then looked at his watch. It was later than he’d thought.
‘I ought to be getting back. I don’t like to . . . you know . . . Zenab.’
She gave his arm another squeeze.
‘I understand, Yusuf. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more help.’
‘You’ve been extremely helpful.’
‘At least I got you rehydrated,’ she smiled, tapping the lemonade flask. ‘Can I give you a lift down to Dra Abu el-Naga?’
She nodded towards her motorbike. Khalifa declined the offer, not wanting to inconvenience her, but she insisted, saying that she needed to go down that way anyway to pick up some things. A blatant lie, but the prospect of trudging all the way back down the valley in the blazing afternoon heat persuaded Khalifa to swallow his pride and accept the lift.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘Thank
you
. It’s not often these days I get to cruise around with a handsome young man riding pillion.’
She returned the lemonade flask to the tomb, locked its entrance gate and the two of them chugged off along the
wadi
and on to the tarmac road that curved down through the hills from the Valley of the Kings to the verdant plain of the cultivation below. Rather than dropping him at Dra Abu el-Naga, she continued all the way on to the river, a diversion to which he offered only token resistance. It felt good to have the wind in his face.
They said their goodbyes on the Gezira waterfront, he paid his fifty piastres, boarded the local ferry and rumbled his way over to the East Bank, all the while thinking about Samuel Pinsker, and the crime he had committed, and the lonely death he had endured, and the mysterious object or place he claimed to have found. Only when the ferry had docked on the far shore, and he had disembarked in the jostling press of passengers, and was climbing the steps up on to the Nile-front Corniche, did he suddenly stiffen and stop dead in his tracks.
For the first time in nine months he had been on the water and not thought about his son Ali. He swung back to the river, shocked, uncertain whether he ought to be feeling relieved at the momentary distraction from grief, or horrified at the idea that his boy was beginning to slip away from him.
T
EL
-A
VIV
Having dropped Zisky off in central Tel-Aviv, Ben-Roi put in a call to his journalist friend Natan Tirat to see if he fancied hooking up for a drink. The ulterior motif being to pick his brains about Barren Corporation. Tirat was on a deadline – some fascinating story about a black hole in the IDF pension fund – but said he’d be finished in an hour if Ben-Roi was OK to hang around. He had no pressing reason to be back in Jerusalem, so said that was fine and they agreed to meet for a beer in a bar they both knew on Dizengoff.
He put in a second call to Sarah, left a message on her voicemail. Then, with time to kill, he parked up in a side-street off Ha-Yarkon and took himself for a walk along the seafront.
The Corniche was bustling, as it always was on Saturdays – walkers and joggers and cyclists and rollerbladers; rammed cafés; a row of couples playing
matkot
behind the Sheraton Moriah, the thwack of balls on bats audible for a hundred metres in either direction. There was music, and a crowd of people practising salsa moves, and down on the beach rows of sunbathers in costumes so skimpy they might as well have just gone naked. It didn’t just feel like a different city from Jerusalem, but a different world – so much more relaxed and easy-going, so much less intense and up itself. In Jerusalem there was always a weight on your shoulders – of religion, of history, of the irreconcilable politics of the Palestinian situation. Here on the coast the burden was lifted, it almost felt like Israel was a normal country. Not for the first time he wondered why the hell he’d ever moved away.
He bought himself an ice cream – double scoop, strawberry and pistachio – and wandered south along the promenade, the sea to his right, the towering facades of the beachfront hotels forming an unbroken wall of concrete to his left. He thought maybe he’d go all the way down to Clore Park, give his legs a good stretch, but in the end only made it to the ziggurat-like hulk of the Opera Tower before he ran out of steam. He stood a while listening to a string quartet giving an impromptu concert underneath a palm tree. Then, crunching away the last of his ice-cream cone, he turned and wandered back the way he had come. His thoughts turned with him, away from random musings on Tel-Aviv, Sarah and the baby, the direction his life was taking, back to the Kleinberg case. Thanks to Zisky’s parting shot in the prison, it was clear there was some interface between Genady Kremenko and Barren Corporation, although what the hell that interface was was anyone’s guess. And Kremenko’s involvement in the sex trade obviously linked him with Vosgi, who in turn provided a connection with the Armenian side of things. So far so good. But what about the Nemesis Agenda and Kleinberg’s unexplained trip down to Mitzpe Ramon? Had Nemesis turned up something that was relevant to the article Kleinberg was researching at the time of her murder? Had Kleinberg gone to
them
with something? At a push, it could just about be made to fit, albeit in a not entirely satisfactory manner. So: Barren, Kremenko, trafficking, Vosgi, Armenian Cathedral, Nemesis – all potentially linkable, with a couple of the links weak at best.
The problem element was the articles Kleinberg had been looking at about gold-mining and Samuel Pinsker. The gold-mining piece obviously linked to Barren and, in a very tenuous way, to Samuel Pinsker, who apparently had been a mining engineer. And Pinsker connected with Egypt, which was a trafficking hub. Despite that, the two stories felt jarringly out of place, inexplicable diversions from the main thrust of Kleinberg’s work.