The Deceit (19 page)

‘You must char the face of Francoise, you must force the suffering from her.’

‘Yes—’

‘I invoke you today, Sourochcata, You who are strong in your power, who brings the rocks to dissolution, let my voice come to her.’

‘Come to me, dissolving me—’

‘You who dissolve the sinews and the ligaments and the joints, you who take her hands away, you are to dissolve the sinews of Francoise for all time, and give her this child, the child of her end, the child of her death, come now, and come forever.’

He was taking her by the waist, hoisting her to her feet. She was so unsteady she stumbled, the blood loss had been so great; but Rothley’s strong arms held her fast, and guided her to the space in the floor, where she would be buried; where she would die.

‘Yea, I adjure you, your names and your amulets. Lay her down here, inside this place, the house of death.’

The planks were scratchy on her bare feet as she walked to the void where the floorboards had been ripped out; was there enough space for her in there? Under the floorboards? It was dark. For the first time a shudder of fear trembled through her. What would it be like to be dead, to be buried under these floorboards forever?

‘As this daughter lies down, yea, yea, Jesus Christ, Beth Betha, Yao Sabaoth, Adonai,
Eloueiu
—’

Rothley pushed her head, he was pressing her into the crawlspace, into the dust and the darkness, under the floor. He was pushing on her body so she could fit under the floor; and now she was in, and he was putting the planks back over the space, and hammering nails, sealing the lid of her coffin, and as he did he called the words, still.

‘Gemas, Demas, Gemas, Demas.’

Francoise trembled with fear and joy, she could not see anything except a few cracks of light; she was in her wooden tomb, and he was sealing it shut, and she was happy and all she could hear in the darkness, as she died, was his beautiful voice in the distance, the Jesus of Death, calling her, calling her …

‘God who has bound the heaven and has bound the earth, must bind the mouth of Francoise, that she may not be able to move her lips.’

Francoise moved her lips, silently, repeating the words. It was nearly over now. The last nails were being driven in: she was in her womb of darkness. She fumbled to fill her mouth.

‘Lazarlai, Sabaoth, Eloim, take your daughter, bring her suffering, bind her silence, make her perfect. Zothooza, Thoitha, Zazzaoth, the saints of darkness, come at once, at once, at once. Amen.’

The Canadian soldier, Simon, twitched the curtains of their hotel room, gazing warily at the twilit street below. The cool of a January evening approached. His boss – leader – captain – whatever he was – called across.

‘Anything?’

‘Nah. Quiet here. For the moment.’

Callum nodded. ‘Good.’ He turned to face Ryan. ‘So, Harper, tell me again. Pretend I have the IQ of a spoon. Why can’t you just translate what you know, here and now, and tell us what the document says?’

‘Because …’ Ryan sighed, and looked at Helen, who sat on the bed drinking a Pepsi, her expression drawn, and unresponsive. Did he really have to go over this again? He’d already explained the problem three times, since they’d arrived in Cairo from Bubastis, ferried in Callum’s dusty four-wheel drive, before hunkering down here, in this anonymous hotel in this anonymous Cairo suburb.

‘You just want to film, don’t you?’ Callum pressed. ‘That’s why you want to actually go to these places, so you can make the movie, make money.’

‘
Shakespeare
wrote for
money
.’ Albert Hanna had returned from his trip to the bar in the lobby: he had fetched the drinks himself, as they didn’t want anyone to see the Sokar documents.

Hanna sipped from his tumbler of Scotch, and continued. ‘It is
quid pro quo,
no? We have our motivation. And you have yours. You want to know what is in the papyrus. Ryan Harper is the
one man
who might be able to do it, now that poor Victor Sassoon has gone to the western hills. Therefore, let him do it his way. Because you need our help.’

Ryan listened to the dialogue, impatiently. He still didn’t trust these ‘soldiers’; but the threat from the Israelis seemed clear enough. They had been kidnapped by Fate.

Callum turned to Albert. ‘OK. Get it. Shakespeare wrote for cash. But Shakespeare didn’t have Mossad trying to shred his Coptic arse with clusterbombs.’

‘I’ve certainly never read that in the canonical biographies.’ Hanna moistened his lips with more Scotch. ‘Nonetheless the point is good,
mon brave
:
if Ryan says he can’t decipher the papyrus without visiting the locales, then you surely have no choice. We must go.’

‘It’s like this,’ Ryan said, gesturing to the third sheet of the papyrus, ‘Macarius says here: “I went to Tell Amarna, the city of the Aten, and I saw the second
something
of Tutankhaten …” The
something
is illegible, or written in an even obscurer alphabet. What is he referring to – a stele maybe? Some column of hieroglyphs in a tomb? We need to go to Amarna and see. Look in the tombs.’

Callum gazed at the walnut finish of his expensive pistol, which was lying on the coffee table next to the papyrus. The juxtaposition was significant. Ryan recognized the distinctive shape of the gun. A Korth. Very pricey – and very professional.
Soldiers, definitely soldiers. Or mercenaries.

‘OK,’ Callum said. ‘OK. And this is just one example. Macarius does this several times, yeah?’

Ryan nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. At Luxor. At Philae. Again and again. Indeed, this might be deliberate.’

‘How?’

‘It’s possible he wrote the most significant remarks in code, or in some intractable alphabet which we have yet to crack, so that his deductions would be revealed only to the initiated. Like here, see, there’s a passage in Greek – AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF – but it seems to make no sense at all. It is maybe some kind of riddle, or a spell, in code. It is
deliberately obscure
.’

‘Don’t get it.’

Hanna sat in the largest chair, the tumbler of Scotch hanging from his hand. ‘Krafft-Ebing, the nineteenth-century German physician, wrote his groundbreaking work,
Psychopathia Sexualis
,
in Latin so that the common reader wouldn’t be shocked by his accounts of men having sex with patent-leather boots. It is a leitmotif of literature: when the contents are very controversial or dangerous –
encode
.’

‘You’re saying the writer, whatsit, Macarius –’ Callum gestured at the document – ‘deliberately
chose
to be as obscure as possible because he didn’t want people to be able to easily follow his conclusions? So only a select few would be able to get what he was saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s very annoying.’

‘Yes it is,’ Albert said. ‘But also tantalizing, and further indication that what we have here is a unique and maybe explosive document. Combustible!’

Callum stood up, abruptly, and disappeared into the bathroom. For a few minutes the hotel room was silent, the only noise the faint murmur of the blond Brit talking on his mobile phone, apparently to some senior authority. This had already happened several times. Discreet phone calls, which produced a swift decision.

Helen was still on the bed, cross-legged. Staring into space. Simon was at the window, anxiously alert and plucking at the curtain like a prurient neighbour.

Callum returned, zipping his mobile into his jacket pocket.

‘All right,’ he said, sitting down. ‘We’ll do it your way.
For now.
There are some benefits: we keep moving. Less chance of us getting vaporized by a drone.’

Hanna nodded. ‘Excellent decision.’

Callum pressed the questions. ‘But where are we going? What’s the route?’

Ryan sighed. He had a
kind
of plan: Cairo, then Amarna, and Luxor, then Aswan. North to South. Maybe. That seemed to be the path Macarius had taken, ascending to Upper Egypt, and the first Cataracts of the Nile. It made emotional sense, too: a journey along the Nile to its highest navigable reaches. But what exactly had Macarius seen, on that route?

Ryan shrugged and admitted: ‘It’s not quite that simple. To say exactly where we are going, I mean.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, after Bubastis, the papyrus becomes even more obscure, verging on chaotic. It mentions baptism several times, and also Bastet, the cat goddess. Most of all, from this point on it mentions Moses. So we know he is important to the puzzle.’ He picked up his notebook and read: ‘Here Macarius cites the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote that Jews were a “detested race in Egypt”, because they were unclean, and they brought epidemics, and that’s why they were sent to the desert with Moses, and then on to Zion, where they instituted a new religion.’

‘OK. And?’

‘There are another half a dozen references to Moses on this page alone.’ Ryan laid a gentle finger on the document. ‘Here Macarius quotes the historian Manetho, who wrote an Egyptian chronicle under Ptolemy the Second. Manetho represented Moses as a rebellious Egyptian priest, and leader of a colony of lepers.’

Hanna interrupted, ‘The idea that Moses was an Egyptian is not entirely startling, Freud made the same point; indeed Moses probably
was
Egyptian – the suffix
mose
is Egyptian, meaning
son
or
child.
As in Tutmose, the Pharaoh. Ptahmose. Rameses even. It is the same syllable.’

‘Acts Seven, Twenty-two.’ This time the interruption was Helen’s. She elaborated. ‘Moses is said to have been “versed in all the wisdom of Egypt”.’

‘So Moses is an Egyptian. Great.’ Callum sat forward, aggressive and taut. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘We don’t know,’ Ryan confessed. ‘No one is sure. Historians argue to this day whether Moses even existed, or if there really was an Exodus of Jews from Egypt, in 2000
BC
or 1500
BC
or whenever. There is no archaeological evidence, though there is quite a lot of documentary evidence. But Macarius is clearly obsessed with the idea, and in particular with the idea that a new Jewish faith threatened the ancient Egyptian faith.’

Finishing his Scotch, Hanna set the tumbler on the glass coffee table. The noise of glass on glass was jarring in the tense silence.

Ryan mused, aloud, ‘You know, my guess is that Macarius must have first read some of the texts at the White Monastery in Sohag. Remember it was the greatest library in Egypt after the destruction of Alexandria, perhaps the greatest library
in the world
at that time
.
Therefore, something he found there must have inspired him, or troubled him enough that he undertook his journey. To find the real truth.’

‘Like us,’ said Helen.

‘Yes … I guess.’ Ryan was frustrated. Muscles taut. ‘But remember we only have some of the Sokar documents here. And we need to go to Luxor and Philae, and Amarna.’

Callum raised a forceful hand. ‘Look. Just decide where we are going
now
. What’s our first stop?’

Ryan looked closely at the papyrus. ‘According to Macarius, he says he next went to the place where “Moses was found”. He means the place by the Nile where the baby Moses in the basket was found by a Pharaoh’s daughter, somewhere in Lower Egypt, around here. He says this is the same place Jesus was washed as a baby, by the Virgin Mary, according to Coptic tradition. But I have no idea where: Coptic folklore isn’t my speciality.’

‘But it is mine,’ Hanna intervened, eyes glittering. ‘I know exactly where that is. Ben Ezra synagogue.’

‘The synagogue in Maadi?
Coptic Cairo?
’

‘Exactly.’

‘But that’s not by the river.’

Hanna shook his head. ‘You forget, the Nile has
retreated.
The Romans built a watergate there, the so-called gate of Babylon: Coptic Cairo used to be on the riverbanks.’ He sat forward. ‘Coptic Cairo is one of the most lavishly historic quarters of the city, a walled city within the city dating back to ancient Egypt, when it was a suburb of ancient Memphis. More importantly, that little corner of Cairo has a remarkable
plenitude
of religious legends attached. There is a spring behind old Ben Ezra synagogue – itself inside the Coptic quarter – which is said to be simultaneously the place where baby Moses was found in his crib, where Jesus as a baby was baptized by his divine mother, during the Holy Family’s flight through Egypt, and where Jeremiah preached to the Jews. And it is also where the Virgin Mary took a ferry. I’ve no idea why. Perhaps she needed to do some shopping in Heliopolis? The point is, this place, this spring in particular, is intensely significant and it
exudes
mythology. Shall I continue?’

‘No.’

Hanna smiled. ‘As you wish. But this is, without question, where we need to go. I suggest we do it at night.’

‘At night?’ Helen asked. ‘Will it not be closed? It is a walled area, as you said.’

‘The entire Coptic quarter has been shut for days.’ Hanna replied. ‘Because of the riots and troubles. The police are protecting it from our good neighbours theSalafists, who might otherwise be tempted to burn down the Hanging Church, and probably expectorate on the iconostasis.’

‘So if it’s shut down by the authorities,’ Callum said. ‘How the hell do we get in?’

‘I have a friend.’

Ryan had expected this. Hanna had friends everywhere.

Hanna explained. ‘But it will be dangerous. Less dangerous if we do it under cover of darkness – but dangerous nonetheless. But then, everything is dangerous now, is it not? The sons of Abraham might be drawing a bead on us this very minute.’

Callum stood up. ‘We do it tonight. Midnight.’

A fine crescent moon rose above the tiny crucifix that adorned the dome of St Sergius. The symbolism was apt. Ryan stared around, sensing the danger. They were parked in a side street three minutes from the hushed white walls of Coptic Cairo.

Despite the curfewed calm of these deserted streets – the disturbances were miles north – the place felt surrounded. Besieged and frightened in the darkness. And perhaps facing its final doom, after two thousand years of remarkable survival.