The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [172]
He looked up, pushed the sheet back to me. “And?”
“What happened to those two men, Professor?”
Watch him rise to the bait, Macy: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ferrell, listen to me once and for all: I did not return to Egypt—surely, surely you know this, you clever little man—until December 1918. And you want me to explain your scribbled document? How could I? But fine. You purport to be a detective, so use your head, Ferrell. I can think of a hundred explanations for something as vague as this without breaking a sweat.”
“A hundred? Really? I can hardly believe it, Professor.” I could hear his pride, the creative criminal’s pride, and this—I felt it—would be his downfall.
“Simplest thing in the world. One: captain and corporal go off, as you would plainly have it, for a romantic four-day weekend in the wilderness, celebrating the Armistice with a lovers’ retreat. They requisition a motorcycle and sidecar, and zip their way south, where they begin to lay out a picnic, strum guitars, recite Shelley, peel grapes. However, it is only a few hours since the Armistice, and some enemy troops have not heard the happy news or some bandits cannot be bothered to care. Captain and corporal find themselves not in amorous embrace but surrounded by enemies, and the captain draws his Webley revolver. He tells his lover to run. Corporal heads for the motorcycle, hears three shots in quick succession, turns to see the mob of blood-maddened Arabs tearing the captain to pieces, and in his fear, he cannot start the cycle. The devils pull him down as well, drag him off to torture him. His identity disks and rifle are left behind. Fits your facts, yes? Again? Fine. Two: the captain is in love with an Arab girl, decides to throw everything away for her—family, country, career, Church of England—to become her Arab husband. He takes his dearest friend, this New Zealandish private—”
“Australian corporal.”
“—this Os-try-lee-un cor-prill to be his manservant. They stage their own disappearances and now all live together not two miles from here, husband, wife, three children, and Aussie manservant. You can go find them right now, if you are smart enough to track them. They left their dead meat tickets in the open and hoped some idiot would presume them dead. You are that idiot. Again? Very well, three, and this one pitched to your taste: the impoverished Australian corporal was blackmailing the English captain, who was a sodomite. The English captain decided to end his compromised position by murdering his tormentor. So he invited the Aussie corporal out to the desert to show and share with him some valuable archaeological find. Over hill after hill he led him to a secluded spot. ‘Here is where I happen to know we should dig,’ he says. When the unsuspecting Aussie boy had his back turned and was pulling some digging tool out of the motorcycle’s saddlebag, the captain drew his Webley. The corporal caught sight of this reflected in the motorcycle’s gas tank, which pathetically, he had polished to impress the Englishman. There the captain’s distorted reflection made him resemble an insect with an enormous thorax, tiny little limbs, and a revolver. The corporal, just a harmless would-be archaeologist, secretly drew his combat knife and turned. The laughing captain told the poor boy he was going to kill him to end the blackmail and then would dig up the promised archaeological find all by himself. The captain even had the audacity to tell the boy not to take this news badly, suggested to the poor fellow that he would be kind enough to report the death as heroic so that the corporal would have posthumous awards and pensions for his impoverished family