The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [126]
“Very impressive, Chester.”
“Thank you, Ralph. I knew that you would understand, as a scholar. As you can see, though, I lack, sadly, anything of Egyptian providence. And, from what I read and hear from other collectors, there are items kept in the basement of the Louvre and your own British Museum that make the case for your ancient Egypt as a very mature artistic society.” Finneran peeped through a hole into his office, then pushed open the door and guided me quickly back through his bookshelf. He sat at his desk, mopped his head with a kerchief, crossed his arms, and arrived at the predictable point. “It seems to me, Ralph, that—” And all at once a perfect symphony of church bells and chiming clocks started to cascade, beginning from his desk to his wall clock, to pendulums all over the house, and then to the twelve o’clock performances of steeples from one side of Boston Common to the other. It must have been some sort of feast day for the locals, because at least two minutes passed while drunken belfry men and savant hunchbacks up and down the city vied for our ears with tinkling and crashing compositions, each ending with twelve booming cannon shots, but staggered (as if each church was just slightly in its own time zone) so that at least sixty closely spaced explosions thundered by before Finneran could muster the nerve to whisper his conclusion. “—your particular specialisation and my artistic and cultural tastes intersect here.” Another one of these sad men who cannot see the distinction (vast, elemental) between what I study and respect, and what they consume, thirst for, consume, thirst for. “And so, if you were to find, as you certainly will, any examples of . . .” I wondered if his secret was known to his daughter. “Of course,” he interrupted himself to answer my unspoken thought, “a single word of this side transaction to anyone would mean an instant end to our little financial arrangements, make no mistake.”
This is the man who for mysterious reasons—for no reason—has abandoned me in midexpedition. That he would do this to me, leave me in this fix, fall under the sway of some itinerant liar. A nouveau riche pornographer who would have made of his daughter’s fiancé a smut procurer. He and his hoodlum chums. Silent O’Toole, the kleptomaniac who pocketed one of CCF’s silver coasters in front of him at the investors’ meeting. Kovacs with his perpetually wet eyes, as if his conscience is so sodden with his crimes that he weeps the tears of his victims on their behalf.
The whole town is jabbering of Carter’s find. The rumours were deliriously implausible, and rightly so, since only the imagination of the underemployed, chicha-puffing Egyptian could conceive of such marvels as the fairy stories I heard today. And the rumours moved with great velocity. For example, I mentioned in passing to a fruit vendor that if I were Carnarvon, I should simply land a small ’plane in the Valley and fly my loot back to the British Museum, not give the Egyptians one bit of it. Sure enough, by the time I was in another district, where I finally found a haberdasher with a homburg my size, a finely coifed, trim-bearded Egyptian customer was telling me that Lord Carnarvon had last night landed three aeroplanes in the Valley and was running a series of flights every night, carrying Egyptian treasure out of the country to his estate in England, where (I informed the bearded ass) His Lordship kept slaves, a perquisite of the British peerage. He nodded, unsurprised.
Finally find a moustache trimmer. I purchased this last item from a barber, a muscleman-Mussulman of such massive strength, it is by Allah’s grace that he has not yet inadvertently crushed the heads of any of his clientele. I asked him, considering his strength, if he would be interested