The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [169]
Finneran provides the cash to deal with these last details in Luxor while he prefers to stay near the tomb. “I find the place too lovely to leave just yet,” he says, dozing on a cot in Chamber 8. I set off to town to arrange tickets on various boats home, hotel reservations along the way.
But that red-haired fellow is lurking about again, and CCF and I watch as he loses interest, again some 200 yards down the path from us. The strangest sort of pursuer—inefficient, purposeless, but still clumsily menacing my work. He is utterly unrelated to anything important, but he seems devotedly intent on being in my way. At last he putters off, and CCF sends me to run our errands.
On the afternoon of the 30th our patience is rewarded at last, Macy! I’m back at my hotel after again staking out Trilipush’s excavation site across the river to no avail. And now, all at once, Trilipush moves from invisible to omnipresent. The riverboat office calls: reservations were made just now for Trilipush and Finneran on the boat north to Cairo for Monday, the 1st of January. A wire is delivered to me from Cairo: they’ve received word at the Hotel of the Sphinx to expect Messrs. F and T for the evening of January 2nd. And then a knock on the door: one of my little Luxor bandits, his palm out. “Bock Sheesh,” he says, the local greeting. “Bock Sheesh,” I reply. “What news?” His palm remained outstretched. Of course: as soon as his hand had been suitably weighed down with money, its connecting pulley system opened his mouth: Trilipush had come to the post office an hour before, had received nothing and sent nothing, and he was now sitting not thirty feet from my very hotel!
I ran after the boy down the stairs, out into the blinding sun, and across the street. I hid behind a palm tree. My heart was beating hard. Any moment now I would at last meet the devil who’d slaughtered the Australian boy and the English officer, the swine who’d broken the heart of that wondrous girl, your aunt. I recalled a picture of him she’d shown me, his arm round Marlowe’s shoulder. Trilipush had looked an ordinary man with sandy hair, but with something greedy and immoral around the mouth and eyes. I looked now where the boy was pointing, but I saw no Trilipush. “There, he is there.” The boy pointed again to a bearded man in native garb, staring at a drink at a shaded café table. “You’re certain?” “Certain, yes. The man at the post said. I follow him here. He takes drink, I go to you.”
And here we were, Macy, after all this time, racing so many thousands of miles across the globe, probing events of years before, chasing the dreams and nightmares of so many clients, often not even knowing myself that this man here was the man I was seeking, this was the man whose crimes would become famous only three decades later thanks to you and me right now.
“Mr. Trilipush, I presume?” I stood before him with the sun behind me, a tried and true method to disorient an interrogatee.
He looked up. “Ah, the dogged Mr. Ferrell. I’m a busy man. I’ve only a few minutes for a drink. Join me if you must, but do let’s be brief about it.” The effect was astonishing, Macy, I confess it. The brilliance of criminals must never be denied, otherwise it’s the detective’s pride getting the better of him, you see. And he was clever: he’d known me, a total stranger, at a glance, God knows how,