“Have you seen the pyramids?” the bartender asked.
“No,” Pierce said. “I’m here on business.” He finished his gin and tonic and pushed it across the bar. “I’ll have another.”
The Nubian mixed it. “You should come back in the winter,” he said. “It’s better in the winter.”
“So they tell me.” Pierce thought about his bags. He would have to pack. He hated packing. The flight left at nine the next morning. He could get stinking drunk tonight.
The bartender handed him a fresh drink. He sipped it. Perhaps he wouldn’t wait until evening. He reached into his pocket and drew out an oval Papastratos cigarette. He liked Greek cigarettes. He would have to remember to buy more in Athens.
What else was there to do in Athens?
Another man came into the bar, looked quickly around, and took a stool near Pierce. Pierce watched him, playing a game he often tried at times like this. It consisted of guessing nationality and occupation; in his years of traveling, Pierce had become quite good at it.
This man, he decided, was American, judging from his clothes: button-down shirt of oxford weave and hopsacking sport jacket—rather collegiate attire, considering the fellow’s age. Pierce put him at a weary forty. The man’s eyes were bloodshot and his face haggard. Physically, he was nondescript—medium height, ordinary looking. Except that he was very nervous.
“Whiskey,” the man said. “On the rocks.”
He looked over at Pierce. Pierce smiled. “Hot, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” The man took his drink and swallowed it in a gulp. “I’ll have another,” he said to the bartender.
Pierce watched curiously, then said, “Allow me,” and nodded to the Nubian.
“Thank you,” the man said slowly. “You’re most kind.” He looked suspiciously at Pierce.
“My name is Robert Pierce.”
“Harold Barnaby. How do you do.” He did not offer to shake hands. If anything, he seemed more nervous than before.
“What brings you to Egypt in September, Mr. Barnaby?”
“My life’s work,” he said, in a rather disgusted voice. “I’m an Egyptologist. And you?”
“A writer. I was sent to interview the engineer in charge of the Italian construction firm moving Abu Simbel.”
Barnaby nodded. For an Egyptologist, he was peculiarly uninterested. “Been here long?”
“Four days.”
“Seen the pyramids?”
“No.”
“I don’t blame you. Christ.” He wiped his neck with a handkerchief.
“Are you excavating here?” Pierce asked.
“No. Translating. I read the stuff, you see.”
“You mean hieroglyphics?”
“Uh-huh.” He finished his drink abruptly. “My turn. What’re you having?”
“Gin and tonic.” Pierce was fascinated by this man. His gestures were so abrupt, so edgy—something was definitely on his mind.
Barnaby signaled to the Nubian, then looked at Pierce. “Have we ever met before?”
“I don’t think so,” Pierce said.
“You look familiar.”
“I travel a lot, on various assignments.”
Barnaby shook his head and lit a cigarette. Then he said, “Korea?”
“Just during the war.”
Barnaby thought about this, biting his lip. When his drink came, he turned the glass around in his hands, staring at it.
“Pyongyang?”
“Yes,” Pierce said, startled. “Company B.”
“You were a captain,” Barnaby said.
“Yes,” Pierce said. “And you…”
“I was a captain, too. The zenith of my life.” He laughed tensely.
“I don’t think I remember you,” Pierce said. “I don’t recall a lot from Pyongyang. I was only there a week.”
“On your way out,” Barnaby said.
“That’s right.” And heavily sedated, because the pain from the bullet-shattered bones in his left forearm was severe.
“I have a good memory,” Barnaby said. He sipped his drink. “You’ve been a writer ever since?”
“Yes.” Strange fellow. He was practically twitching with a kind of inner excitement.
“And you travel a lot?”
“Yes, I’ve been traveling almost constantly through Europe for the last ten years.”
“Know many people?”
Pierce shrugged.
“Must be an interesting life,” Barnaby said, finishing his third drink. He had a peculiar way of beginning slowly, then drinking more and more rapidly. “You know any rich people?”
“Some.” Pierce signaled to the bartender, who brought two more drinks. Pierce now had three gin and tonics lined up in front of him, two untouched.
“I mean really rich. Terribly, stinking rich.”
“I think you could say so, yes.”
“I see.” Barnaby dabbed at his forehead with the handkerchief and said nothing for several minutes. Then he lifted his glass. “Cheers.”
Dutifully, Pierce drank. “Cheers.”
“Going to be in Cairo long?”
“No. I’m leaving tonight.”
“Another assignment?”
“I wish I had one. Actually, I’m just going to Athens to be near the water. I may spend a few days on Crete until something turns up. I understand I may be sent to Bonn after that.”
“You’re leaving tonight?”
“Yes.”
Barnaby set down his empty glass. “Just time for one more,” he said. The bartender set up a final round. Pierce managed to finish his gin and tonic, so there were only three fresh drinks sitting before him.
Barnaby was sluggish, red-faced, and sweating heavily. He looked at Pierce’s drinks. “Come on. Bottoms up,” he said, “I must be off soon.”
He gulped back his own drink swiftly and set the glass down. Then he made small, embarrassed shifting movements on his stool.
“Well,” he said, “it’s been a pleasure.” He stood rather unsteadily and smiled. “A great pleasure.”
He started to walk out of the bar, then stopped, and looked back. “You were a pretty rough customer in those days, weren’t you? Silver Cross, as I recall.”
Pierce nodded. Barnaby smiled again and stumbled out. Pierce turned back to his three gin and tonics, arranged in a neat line before him. He picked up the first and sipped it slowly.
Strange fellow.
Pierce finished packing his typewriter, locked the case, and walked to the window. He looked out on the Nile, a broad muddy river in the yellowing afternoon sun. A small sailboat traveled gently downstream; he saw the traffic on the Kasr el-Nil Bridge. Directly below him was broad Maspero Street, named for a famous director of the Cairo Museum. It was a tree-lined boulevard, with flags flying in the light breeze. Little black and white Fiat taxis hurried up and down, weaving, honking.
Pierce watched, his mind a blank. He hated inactivity, hated passivity, and had spent the last twelve years of his life moving around the world on assignment after assignment, deadline after deadline.
He dreaded the occasional times like this—moments between stories. It had nothing to do with the money; he had more than enough. It was simply the time that hung so heavily upon him.
Lately, it had been getting worse. When he was not working, the glamour of his job, the excitement of the travel and the women drained away before his eyes, and he could find nothing behind it all. Nothing but a bored, tired man standing in a hotel room, living out of a suitcase.
He sighed. The Italian engineer, Mannini—now there was a busy man, totally preoccupied with his work, completely satisfied by it. The project he had just finished was quite incredible: lifting the entire monument of Abu Simbel and relocating it on a new site two thousand feet higher, clear of the lake to be formed by the Aswan High Dam. The giant statues were cut from friable limestone; they had been sawn into sections and had been rejoined after raising. The project had taken nearly ten years and cos
t thirty-six million dollars.
He sat down on the bed, forgetting Mannini, and wondered whether he could fall asleep. The easiest thing would be to nap until he went to the airport.
Just as he lay back, the telephone rang.
3. The Proposal
HE PICKED UP THE receiver. “Yes?”
“Mr. Pierce?”
“Speaking.”
“Harold Barnaby here.”
“Yes, Mr. Barnaby.”
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Barnaby said quickly.
“No. I was just resting.”
“Oh dear.” A pause. “I wanted to speak to you.”
Pierce laughed: “Speak away.”
“It’s a private matter,” Barnaby said, lowering his voice.
“Then come over, and we’ll discuss it in my hotel room.”
A very long pause, then: “Why don’t you come over here?”
Pierce shrugged. “Where are you?”
“Gresham House. Suleiman Pasha Street.”
“All right. I’ll be there shortly.”
He replaced the receiver and thought for a moment. Probably, he would be treated to a tale of woe concerning Barnaby’s maiden aunt. Drink was called for. He went down to the bar and said to the Nubian, “Will you sell me a bottle of Scotch?”
“It’s not allowed,” the bartender said.
Pierce pushed a five-hundred piaster note across the counter. The Nubian looked at it, and wrapped a bottle for him.
The Gresham House was a small pension occupying the two top floors of an office building right on Suleiman Pasha. It preserved a faintly British colonial atmosphere, with dark wood paneling, huge bathtubs, faded watercolors of Windsor Castle and Ely Cathedral on the walls, and occasional little signs. One quotation, framed in cracking gilt, read: “Please understand there is no depression in this house, and we are NOT interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do NOT exist—Queen Victoria.”
The corridors smelled of kerosene, used to keep down the dust. A short man in a fez directed Pierce to Barnaby’s room.
Pierce entered and coughed. It was hazy with stale smoke. Barnaby sat on the bed, hands on his knees. “It was good of you to come.”
“Not at all.”
Washbasin in the corner, with glasses. Pierce broke open the bottle and poured out two stiff drinks. “What’s on your mind?”
“I have a problem,” Barnaby said, drinking and wincing. “Warm Scotch. Christ.”
“What kind of problem?” Pierce dropped into a chair and lit a cigarette.
“Well, you see—” Barnaby broke off and gave him a strange, direct look. He twisted his hands and said nothing for several moments.
“Go on.”
“Well, you see, my problem involves…a lot of money.”
Pierce remembered the questions about rich men. “You’re in debt?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. This involves money which is—well, available.”
Pierce drained his glass on that. Barnaby seemed suddenly frightened, as if he thought Pierce might leave, but he remained seated.
“How much money?”
“I don’t know. A lot.”
“Give me a rough estimate.”
“You don’t understand,” Barnaby said, almost whining. “It’s difficult to say.” He finished his drink and held out his glass for more. “Twenty million, maybe fifty million.”
“Dollars?”
“Yes.”
“That,” Pierce said, refilling both glasses, “is a hell of a lot of money to be available.”
“Yes.”
With a journalist’s mind, Pierce ran over the great robberies of the past. The largest in recent history had been the British train robbery in 1962, but that had amounted to only seven million dollars. But twenty million! Where in the world was that kind of cash?
He began pacing up and down the room. “Just how available is this money?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Who has it?”
“Nobody, at the moment. At least, I don’t think so.”
“You’re not being very helpful,” Pierce said. The man’s nervous secretiveness was tiresome. “Why don’t you just tell me the story from the beginning. When did you first find out about this money?”
“Two days ago,” Barnaby said, then hesitated. “Are you interested in the possibilities?”
“Interested? Yes. But not committed. Frankly, I don’t have much experience with robberies, but I’ll listen to anyone who’s talking about twenty million dollars.”
“Robberies? Who said anything about a robbery?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Pierce said. “Are you going to tell me, or not?”
Eventually, nervously, Barnaby told him.
Pierce stared. “You’re kidding,” he said.
“No.”
Suddenly, Pierce began to laugh. His whole body rocked, and tears came to his eyes. He sat on the floor and clutched his aching stomach.
“What’s so funny?”
“This tomb—you want to rob it?”
“Yes.”
This threw Pierce into another uncontrollable fit of laughter. He rolled helplessly on the floor, knocking over his chair and his drink. Barnaby watched him solemnly.
“I don’t think it’s particularly funny.”
Pierce got up, wiped his eyes, and poured himself another drink.
“Neither do I,” he said at last. “I think it’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard.”
Barnaby found talking with Pierce an enlightening, if uncomfortable, experience. As they began to discuss actual procedure, he realized that the gaps in his thinking and information were vast.
“Whose tomb is it?” Pierce asked.
“I don’t know. The inscription does not name the king. After Ikhnaton died—he was the monotheist, the heretic—the country declined, and several kings followed in rapid succession. First was Tutankhamen, then a man named Ai. After him, several whose names we do not know until Ramses II. It was a period of turmoil in the country—invading armies and a corrupt bureaucracy. Rapid changes of power, that sort of thing.”
“Where exactly is this tomb?”
“In Thebes, along the banks of the Nile three hundred miles south of here. Most of the pharaohs of the 19th and 20th dynasties were buried there, in and around the Valley of the Kings. Sixty-two in the valley itself, which is a little niche set back in the cliffs on the west side of the Nile. But most of those tombs have been found, and nearly all had been robbed before they were discovered by archaeologists. Supposedly, there are two more tombs which lie in the valley and have never been found, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“This tomb isn’t in the valley?”
“Apparently not. It lies to the south, high in the cliffs. The inscription gives coordinates for its location, and knowing the Egyptians, they are probably quite precise coordinates. They were sophisticated mathematicians.”
“Have you looked for it?”
“No,” Barnaby said. “But it wouldn’t have proven much if I had. Finding that tomb will be a major undertaking. It would require several men living in the area for months. One man on his own couldn’t do anything.”
Pierce accepted this. “What makes you think it hasn’t already been robbed?”
Barnaby explained about the diagonal code, which read in both the normal and secret manner. He explained, too, about the philosophy of the times.
“There is a progression in Egyptian tomb-building. In the earliest dynasties, the kings erected pyramids, designed to protect their bodies after death. Unfortunately, the pyramids didn’t protect anything—they merely signaled the presence of great wealth, and attracted robbers. By the time of the Middle Kingdom, one thousand years later, all the pyramids had been entered and robbed. So the kings of this period changed tactics.
“The first to break with tradition was Thutmose I, who ordered a rock-cut tomb near Thebes, which was then the capitol of Upper and
Lower Egypt. Thutmose did this because he wanted his resting-place to remain secret. It didn’t, and later pharaohs, though following the rock-cut tradition in the Valley of Kings, made no attempt to hide the location of their tombs, but relied on guards to protect them after death. That didn’t work, either. The guards could be bought and the priests could be bribed. Whether the location was secret or known, the tomb was plundered all the same. And usually, it was an inside job—the robbers seemed to have known the precise location of the tomb, which passages were false, and so on. Somebody must have told them.
“But the progression was there, a tendency toward more and more secrecy. After Tutankhamen, it isn’t surprising that the pharaohs would begin to conceal completely the location of their tombs and build elsewhere than the Valley of Kings. This particular tomb was built, and afterward, the architect and all the workers were murdered. If the inscription is true, only the vizier knew the location—and he kept his secret.”
“None of that proves anything, of course,” Pierce said. “The tomb may still have been robbed.”
“I know,” Barnaby said, “but I don’t think so. It’s funny—when you’ve been reading the manuscripts and vicariously living the life of the people for as long as I have, you begin to develop an instinctive feeling for what you read. You can tell when something is a lie or an exaggeration, or when someone is puffing up his ego or degrading an associate. It’s just a feeling, that’s all.”
“How are you going to go about the robbery?”
“To tell you the truth, I haven’t any idea.” Barnaby sighed. “It may be impossible. You can’t formally excavate, or you’ll have the government all over you, watching like a hawk. Nothing of importance gets out of Egypt anymore—not if the officials can help it.
“And even if you found the tomb and loaded it all onto a caravan of trucks, there would be other problems. Checkpoints on every road, frequent checkpoints. Hotels register you with the police each night, and they hold your passport. All in all, it’s a very effective system for keeping track of anybody in the country.”
“Why couldn’t we get five or six people together, check into a Luxor hotel, and then excavate during the day? That’s a start, anyway.”