The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [143]
Let’s see. I went downstairs. I’d a job to do, for her as much as for anyone. On Finneran’s desk were the notes for her and the nurse I already described, I think, as well as a stack of other incoming and outgoing correspondences, and a cable from Trilipush to Margaret, still trying to patch things up, just to buy himself some time. I left everything undisturbed.
Finneran’s note to Margaret mentioned being out of town for a spell, and it took me only half a day (the 1st of December) to confirm that he was on the steamer leaving that very day from New York, due in Alexandria the 14th. There was nothing to keep me in Boston another day now, so I spent the rest of the 1st making my own travel arrangements, returned to my hotel to pack. I was a bit low, rather like I feel now, hoping I’d feel back on track when I was clear and away from the gathering Boston winter, pursuing the case in the homier, more Australian warmth of Egypt. The end was in sight.
Well, comes a knock on my hotel door: J. P. O’Toole looking down his nose at me, and next to him a perfectly round little man I recognised from newspaper photographs as Heinz Kovacs, though O’Toole never introduced him, and he barely spoke throughout our meeting. (You remember what happened to Kovacs, I think in the late 1930s? It even made the newspapers in Australia. Jesus, that was ghastly.) In they strode like they owned the place, sat in the chairs by the window, and O’Toole talked at me in his Irish brogue: “You’re a detective, yes. Then haven’t we got a wee spot o’ detecting for you to do.”
We had new clients, Macy, and the first thing I learnt from them was what would drive Finneran to play Holy Family and vanish off to Egypt in the dark of night. In the previous eighteen months, the man had gone well past bankrupt, I can tell you now, seeing as the news certainly comes thirty years too late to prevent your uncle from marrying my Margaret! Yes, Finneran was quite out of money, his shops were in danger, and as I’d deduced, he’d gone to O’Toole and company for sizable sums on several occasions, with quite harsh terms. The last time, he’d sold them on Trilipush and his no-fail Egyptian excavation as a way for him to raise money to pay back his debt. O’Toole and Kovacs had played along, even loaned him more money to buy his share of the expedition, when his credit should’ve been long exhausted. What’s more: “We put money of our own into this venture,” O’Toole said. But now, to their “vast disappointment,” Mr. Finneran had departed for points unknown, leaving only a very vague word that he would repay everything as soon as he’d returned, a very vague date. This far I understood everything, and I was expecting a simple tracking job for us, Macy: they were going to ask us to find an address for their frightened and empty-handed Mr. Finneran-in-Hiding. Off the angry debtor had run in desperate hope of finding his wretched son-in-law-to-be, somehow squeezing money out of the rocks, and now after him would follow the irritable creditors, in the person of Tailor Enquiries Worldwide, Sydney Branch. Not a new story, a case I’d handled a hundred times before, though the details of this edition certainly intrigued. A simple enough task, and not inconvenient, since my itinerary was bound for Egypt anyhow, and one did like to have multiple clients paying expenses.
All correct, but I’d missed one wrinkle. “The man abandons his own home and daughter,” warbles O’Toole, “to run off and spend his ill-gotten gains all alone. Quite a wretched thing to do, you’ll be quick to agree.”
“Ill-gotten gains?” I must’ve sounded a bit thick.
“Quite. We’re owed most of what the professor found, that’s all square and legal, in writing,