The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [105]
Such are the resolutions of foolish men in love, Macy, even detectives who should know better. When she appeared at my hotel that same evening, laughing at her effortless escape from the house and her Great Dane guard dog, I eagerly escorted her to jazz club after jazz club, into quarters of Boston where we were the only white faces to be seen in a sea of dark ones, then into a district with no one but Chinamen for street after street, and finally back to JP’s, where she raised every glass to her fiancé’s triumph. Oh, yes, she was cheerful that night, and didn’t touch the opium, never stopped singing her Trilipush’s praises. Clear as clear water I hadn’t made the slightest impression on her despite it all. She drank and I paid (or the immortal estate of Mr. Davies paid, to be fair). A necklace sat bunched up in my pocket.
That was also the night I met the mysterious J. P. O’Toole, if I recall right. I’m sure you’ve heard O’Toole’s name, Macy, rather infamous after the gangland shootings at the end of the ’20s. Back then, he operated this club among other lurks, fed opium to your aunt, and was one of the investors in the Egypt expedition. When he descended to our couch (probably to see why Margaret wasn’t coming up for her drug that evening), he gave me two fingers of his hand to shake, affected a sort of French royalty attitude to anyone who dared speak to him, though he took Margaret on his lap and bounced her on his knee, calling her his wicked goddaughter, a freedom that made my blood boil. Still, I won’t say he was a bad fellow, since he does turn up again as one of our clients just a ways down the road, Macy.
I helped her home that morning, just before dawn. We stopped in the public gardens near her home, and I was ready to tell her everything. I was going to tell her that Trilipush had used her for her money, that he’d never been to Oxford, though plenty of his perverted friends had and had forged his diplomas for him. I was only deciding where to start the whole tale: the dissipated English gent, sodomist, murderer of his male lover and an innocent Aussie digger. I was going to tell her for her own good, you see. And I hoped—I knew—that when I told her the truth, she’d be grateful, would thank me, would finally see me in a new light, a light I hadn’t been able to turn on by myself because she was blinded by Trilipush’s lies. She said, “Good night, Harry.” I didn’t speak. She turned towards the gate of her home, not caring if she was caught coming in or not. Then she looked back at me and said, “Can you even believe it? My hero found his treasure! Ain’t it grand?” And off she went. And now I called her name, but too quietly, and then the gate clinked shut. I can hear it still, that sound. There’s a gate here at the nursing home, between the so-called garden and where the rubbish bins stand in a sort of shed outside, waiting for collection, and when the orderlies carry things out there and the window is open in certain weather and when there’s a certain smell in the air, that gate latch makes its little clinking sound, and I remember your aunt so clear I could cry. Surely she told you about it.
Sunday, 12 November, 1922
Book notes: Yesterday was Armistice Day, a moment to recall our brothers fallen in the Great War, and to be thankful for the blessings of peace that the rest of us now enjoy, eternally, one hopes. Include something here about Marlowe and me saying farewell before my departure to Turkey, Marlowe promising to hold Fragment C until my return, recalling in that moment our green and happy days