The Hidden Oasis (28 page)

‘We’ll lose ourselves here for a while and then take a taxi to the Embassy,’ said Flin. ‘Preferably driven by someone other than me.’

He glanced at her, then started off along the left-hand gallery. Freya remained where she was.

‘We can get the films developed,’ she called after him.

He stopped and turned.

‘You said you had a friend who works here, in the photographic department.’ She held up the knapsack. ‘We can get the films developed.’

She was expecting him to argue. Instead, after considering a moment, he nodded. Coming back, he took her arm and steered her in the opposite direction, into the right-hand gallery.

‘Beats looking at Neolithic fish hooks, I suppose,’ he said.

They walked past a succession of giant sarcophagi – granite and black basalt for the most part – their surfaces covered in neat ranks of hieroglyphs. Groups of uniformed schoolchildren were sitting on the floor beside them, drawing.

‘All Late Period and Graeco-Roman,’ he explained as they went, waving an arm around like a tour guide. ‘Quality wise very inferior.’

‘Fascinating,’ muttered Freya.

At the end of the gallery was a security desk with a walk-through metal detector beside it. Flin spoke to the guard in Arabic, flashed some sort of card and led Freya past the detector and through a doorway. They were out of the public area of the museum and in what looked like an administrative section, rooms full of desks and filing cabinets opening up on either side. They followed a short corridor and climbed a spiral staircase, emerging into a cluttered, open-plan space with grimy windows and floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with rows of labelled box files.

‘Papyri, Ostraca, Vases, Coffins,’ read Freya, her gaze lingering a moment on the files before widening out to
take in the rest of the space. There were half a dozen filing cabinets, a scatter of dilapidated furniture, a rusty paper guillotine and everywhere, stacked in corners and on shelves and underneath tables, a jumble of photographic and developing equipment, most of it old-fashioned and out of date, all of it shabby and covered in dust. Light-boxes, projectors, enlargers, teetering piles of Forte black-and-white photographic paper. It felt, Freya thought, more like a junk shop than a photographic studio.

A man sat at a desk on the far side of the room – plump, curly haired, with thick round glasses and a garish Hawaiian shirt – talking on the phone. They hovered, waiting for him to finish his conversation. When he showed no sign of doing so Flin gave an exaggerated cough. The man looked up, saw them and broke into a broad smile. Swiftly terminating the call, he slammed the phone down and bounced to his feet.

‘Professor Flin!’ he cried, bustling over. ‘How are you, my friend?’

‘
Kwais, sahebee
,’ replied Flin, kissing him on each cheek. ‘Freya, Majdi Rassoul – the finest archaeological photographer in Egypt.’

Freya and Majdi shook hands.

‘Watch him,’ the Egyptian warned, grinning. ‘He’s a terrible heart-breaker!’

Freya said she’d bear it in mind.

They made some polite small talk, Majdi launching into an extended description of how he’d recently unearthed a box of hitherto unpublished Antonio Beato glass negatives – ‘A hundred and fifty years old and never seen before! Gold dust, absolute gold dust!’ – before Flin
steered the conversation round to the purpose of their visit.

‘I need a favour,’ he said. ‘Some photos developed. Quickly, if possible. Can you do that?’

‘I would hope so,’ replied Majdi. ‘We’re a photographic studio after all.’

Flin nodded at Freya, who opened her knapsack and handed Majdi the camera and plastic canister.

‘They’ve been out in the desert,’ said Flin. ‘Probably for years, so I’m not holding out much hope.’

‘Depends what you mean by “in the desert”,’ said the Egyptian, turning the objects over in his hand. He examined the Leica first, then the canister, popping its cap and shuffling the used roll of film into his palm. ‘If they’ve been sitting on top of a dune in direct sunlight then yes, the film’ll be fried, impossible to develop. If they were covered up, on the other hand …’

‘They were in a canvas bag,’ put in Freya.

‘In that case we might get something from them. I’ll do the roll first – the film in the camera might be more complicated. Will you be wanting the develop-while-you-wait service?’

Flin smiled.

‘That would be perfect.’

‘Deluxe develop-while-you-wait with complimentary tea?’

‘Even more perfect.’

Majdi shouted down the spiral staircase and, leaving the camera on the desk where he’d been sitting, crossed to a door on the far side of the gallery and opened it. Inside was a darkroom: sink, developing tank, drying cabinet, light-box, shelves lined with bottles of chemicals.

‘Give me twenty minutes,’ he said, throwing the roll of film in the air and catching it. He winked, stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. ‘And no smooching on the sofa!’ came his muffled voice.

For a moment they stood there, embarrassed by this last comment. Then Flin reached out and touched Freya’s shoulder.

‘You OK?’

She nodded. She felt calmer now, her pulse settling after the frenzy of the car chase.

‘Sure?’

Another nod

‘You?’ she asked.

He opened up his hands.

‘I’m in a museum. Couldn’t be better.’

Freya smiled, more in acknowledgement of his attempt at humour than because she was amused by it. Their eyes held, neither of them quite sure what to say, how to vocalize the shock of what they’d just been through.

‘Do you know who those men were?’ she asked at last.

‘Not the Marx Brothers, that’s for sure.’

This time she didn’t smile. Flin gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

‘It’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘Trust me. We’ll get out of this.’

They stood a moment longer, staring at each other. Then, as if uneasy with the intimacy, they broke away. Freya threw herself into a leather armchair and began flicking through a book of aerial images of Egyptian monuments; Flin wandered over to the box files lining the wall and ran his finger along their peeling sepia labels, pulling one out at random – Bas-Reliefs – and rummaging
distractedly through its contents. An elderly man appeared with two glasses of tea, spooning sugar into each one before shuffling away again. A sparrow fluttered in through a window, perched a moment on top of a fan and swooped back out the way it had come. Twenty minutes passed. Twenty-five. Thirty. In the end it was almost three-quarters of an hour before the darkroom door opened again and Majdi put his head out.

‘Success?’ asked Flin, moving towards him.

His friend was frowning. He seemed rather less jovial than he had been before.

‘Well I got the pictures developed, if that’s what you mean, although I have to say … You know, I don’t want to seem like a prude here, but …’

He shook his head and beckoned them over.

‘You’d better come and see for yourselves.’

Flin and Freya glanced at each other and followed him into the darkroom. The light was on now, a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Majdi opened the drying cabinet and removed a long strip of film negative. He laid it out over the light-box and switched off the overhead bulb while at the same time flicking a switch on the side of the box. A fluorescent glow welled up through its Perspex surface, illuminating the images.

‘I mean, I’m as broad-minded as the next man,’ he huffed, stepping aside to make room. ‘But really … this is a museum, not a sex club.’

They leant over and stared at the negatives. It took them a moment to work out exactly what they were looking at. When they did both of them gawped in horror.

‘Bloody hell,’ murmured Flin.

The pictures – black-and-white – were of a large, not unattractive woman in stockings, suspenders, G-string and a half-cup bra, although after a couple of shots the bra and G-string disappeared, revealing breasts, luxuriantly-haired pudenda and, the focus of most of the shots, an extremely ample backside. She seemed to be in a hotel room, on a bed, sometimes lying on her back with her legs athletically akimbo, mostly kneeling with her posterior towards the camera, hand scooped between her thighs, probing at herself with an unnaturally fat banana.

‘I’ll never eat banoffee pie again,’ said Majdi gloomily, fiddling with his glasses. ‘What in God’s name possessed you to take … ?’

‘I didn’t bloody take them!’ Flin was outraged. ‘Jesus, Majdi, you don’t think I’d …’

‘We don’t know who took them,’ said Freya, sounding rather less put out than the two men. ‘The camera was found in the desert. We were hoping the pictures would tell us who the owner was, what he was doing out there.’

‘Exploring, by the look of it,’ said Majdi, twisting his head to one side as he assessed a particularly contorted posture. ‘How on earth does she … ?’

‘Don’t,’ snapped Flin. ‘Just don’t.’

There were thirty-six shots in total and they went through them one by one. Freya got about halfway before concluding it was a waste of time and going back out into the waiting area. Flin remained, hunched over the light-box. Majdi pottered around behind him as he worked his way methodically through the remaining images, peering intently at each in turn in the vain hope it might reveal
something useful. By the time he came to the last few shots even Flin had accepted it was a lost cause. He was starting to straighten when, suddenly, he tensed and bent down again, face hovering just a couple inches above the box’s Perspex surface.

‘What’s she doing now?’ asked Majdi, noting his interest and leaning over beside him.

Flin ignored the question.

‘I need a print of this,’ he said, tapping the very last image on the roll, his voice urgent suddenly, excited.

‘Flin, you’re an old friend, but this really isn’t the place …’

‘No bananas, Majdi, I promise.’

The Egyptian let out an exasperated sigh.

‘OK, OK.’

He whipped a sheet of Ilford photographic paper from a pile on one of the shelves and, ushering Flin out of the darkroom, pulled the door closed.

‘Did you find something?’ asked Freya, looking up.

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Flin. ‘Majdi’s doing a print now.’

‘What is it?’

‘Let’s wait for the print.’

She tried to push him further, but he batted away her questions and paced up and down before returning to the darkroom door and banging on it.

‘Are you ready?’

‘Give me a chance!’ came the muted reply.

‘How long?’

‘Ten minutes.’

Flin resumed his pacing, up and down, up and down,
glancing constantly at the clock on the wall, tapping a hand against his thigh until finally the darkroom door opened and Majdi emerged, a glossy A4 sheet clasped in his hand. Flin walked swiftly over and practically snatched the print from his friend’s hand. Freya looked over Flin’s shoulder.

She didn’t know what she had been expecting – dunes, perhaps. Or a picture of Rudi Schmidt, some indication of why her sister should have been interested in him, why that interest should have got her killed. The photograph provided none of the answers for which she was hoping. It didn’t even seem to have been taken in the desert. Some sort of enormous stone gateway or entrance, that’s what it showed, overgrown with lush eruptions of vegetation as if the building to which it gave access had long ago been abandoned and given over to nature. She leant in closer, trying to make sense of it, taking in the rectangular wooden doors, the outline of a bird carved into the lintel above them, the high trapezium-shaped towers to either side. For a moment she stared; then reached out and pointed to the image carved into the face of each tower: an obelisk enclosing a curious cross-and-looping-line motif.

‘I’ve seen that before,’ she said. ‘On the clay obelisk in Rudi Schmidt’s bag, the one I told you about.’

Flin just gazed down. The photo trembled slightly in his hand.

‘
The city of Zerzura is white like a pigeon
,’ he whispered. ‘
And on the door of it is carved a bird
.’

‘What does that mean?’

He didn’t respond. Instead, crossing the room, he snatched up the Leica, brandishing it at Majdi.

‘We need to develop the film in here,’ he said. ‘We need to get it out of the camera and develop it.’

‘Flin, I’m delighted to help but I do have other things I’m supposed to be—’

‘We have to develop this film, Majdi. I need to know what’s on it. Now. Please.’

The Egyptian blinked, rattled by his friend’s brusqueness. Then, with a nod, he took the camera.

‘If it’s that important.’

‘It is that important,’ said Flin. ‘Believe me.’

Majdi turned the camera in his hand.

‘It’s probably going to take longer than the other roll,’ he said. ‘The rewind’s buggered, the casing’s probably going to be full of sand and grit – Leicas are notoriously bad for that sort of thing – and even if I can get the film out there’s no guarantee …’

He shrugged.

‘I’ll see what I can do. Give me forty minutes. I’ll know by then whether its salvageable or not.’

He turned back towards the darkroom. Flin called after him.

‘Thanks,
sahebee
.’ He paused, then added: ‘And sorry for being a wanker.’

Majdi waved a hand.

‘You’re an Egyptologist. Being a wanker goes with the territory.’

He turned, winked and disappeared into the darkroom, leaving the two of them alone again.

‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’ asked Freya. ‘What that place is in the picture?’

Flin was staring at the photograph again, his head
shaking slightly as if he could barely believe what he was looking at, the faintest of smiles playing around the corners of his mouth. There was a long silence.

‘I can’t be absolutely certain,’ he said eventually. ‘Not without seeing what’s on the other film.’

‘But you think you know.’

Another silence, then:

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

He looked up at her. Although his face was pale and drawn, his eyes were gleaming brightly, a combination that seemed to amplify his good looks.

‘I think it might be somewhere called Zerzura,’ he said.