The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [167]
I understood the dismissal, took it with grace, shook the great man’s hand, and thanked him sincerely for his time, sorry to have bothered him. I headed back to town to hire myself a guide to help me find Trilipush’s site.
Now, Macy, what did we think at this moment? I’d been wrong. I admit it now and I admitted it then: Trilipush had told the honest truth: there definitely was a treasure, and Trilipush was so close to it, as of a week earlier, that he wouldn’t even let the great Carter see the site. That same day, Finneran must’ve found him. I was behind them by exactly a week, and part of me despaired, since I didn’t know where either of them was staying. Now, I didn’t really credit O’Toole’s idea that Finneran had come to kill Trilipush and steal the gold, though you can never be entirely sure with men under pressure. More likely, with the wealth right there glittering in front of them, the two of them would probably make amends, patch it all up, with Finneran relieved to forget everything I had so patiently helped him see, and now the murderer and his serially gullible father-in-law-to-be were already a week ahead of me on their way back to Boston, where Finneran would pay off his debts with Egyptian gold and Trilipush, bearing wealth and fame, would take Margaret’s hand as his wife, though a sad sort of marriage it would be, him using her to disguise his unnatural proclivities. And he’d probably get his Harvard job back on the strength of his find. I’d probably already missed them, and now I’d have to go sailing back the way I’d just come, to interrupt family bliss once more in order to ask my troublesome questions on behalf of poor murdered Caldwell-Davies and Marlowe. I didn’t relish the possibility, Macy. I don’t care much for Boston, and I didn’t want to go back. I’d spent enough time sailing the Atlantic Ocean, and I admit I might even have given up then, closed the case right there if these two were already on their way back to Boston with Trilipush consolidating his lies. I’d’ve done anything to keep the investigation near the scene of the murders.
I had to hold on for another night to get answers, and my fears grew stronger the next morning, when I finally managed to hire a local boy and two donkeys and we trotted over the rocks, past another archaeological site managed by an American, past a giant temple cut into the cliff side, past barren, brown boredom, not too different from certain rough parts of Australia. And then after a silent spell, for no particular reason I could see, the boy stopped and said, “Here.” “Here? Are you sure?” There was absolutely nothing different about this bit of cliff-side donkey path than anything we’d seen in the previous hour. We were on an incline amidst some little hills, around a bend from any other living thing, and I wondered if I was about to be ambushed by this Egyptian boy. “Here?” I asked again, and the boy shrugged. I tied up my donkey, took a walk around the area, and found nothing of interest, no sign of any life at all. “How do you know it’s not farther up?” I asked. The boy was adamant, he knew these hills, and this was what I had told him Carter had told me. We waited. I searched in the heat for two hours, walking up and down, finding nothing and no one. No glinting gold, no fleeing Finneran, no treacherous Trilipush, no corpse of Caldwell, no murdered Marlowe.
I was worried, and no lie. I had no other address for Trilipush, and now it appeared he’d shut down his excavations in the last week, kicked over the traces. At least I still had the post. Those cables and letters to Margaret had come from somewhere. I headed back to town and went from post office to post office distributing O’Toole’s money until I heard a correct answer: I paid the Egyptian behind the counter to open his mouth—“Yes, Mr. Trilipush comes quite regularly to check the poste restante, and yes, he sends cables from here, and the last time he was in was probably two hours ago”—and then in my joy I paid the Egyptian behind the counter to close his mouth, and to signal my boy there in the corner