The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [37]
If some of the newspapers made Dahlquist a hero in ’16 and a fool in ’17, well, that didn’t slow him down any. He stopped an anarchist bomber, and if the price was a cloud of retractions and mumbled official apologies and cancelled trials, that didn’t bother him much.
Were you a military man, Macy, hero of Korea or some such? I was a bit too old to spit fire and sign up for this Great War of ours. Down here, most of our boys went off to show Jack the Turk a thing or two, the glory of us Aussies at Gallipoli! To watch your insides stain a turquoise Turkish beach for the good of Serbia, if I understand that one right—not for me, thanks, nor for Paul Caldwell, either, as we now see. If you missed Suez and Jerusalem and Gallipoli, as he did, then Egypt was a pretty safe spot by ’17, when he would’ve arrived, but of course he was going for love, not war. He’d found a way to do the unimaginable for a boy from Sydney’s slums: he was going to the land of his dreams. What he thought he’d find there, I can’t begin to say, and sure not worth dying for, if you ask me. Better if he took the prison time, my advice with hindsight, at least he’d be alive today.
By this time, July ’22, I’d spent a few weeks tracking down Barnabas Davies’s long-lost Sydney heir, and I didn’t really have much hope I could spin the case out any farther. I’d have a nice, hefty payday for what’d been easy, safe work. I cabled my long report to London, giving the good and the bad of Paul Caldwell. Thanks to this last interview, if you squinted, we did have him working on behalf of the Crown to stop the deadly tide of Communism in the Commonwealth. I mentioned (though admittedly downplayed) that he was likely deceased. There was, however, the option, I wrote, of learning from his regimental mates and officers something about his War record that might be interesting to Barnabas Davies. If he’d been heroic, I advised, perhaps Davies’s lawyers could retroactively change the dead boy’s name, maybe get him a medal or citation in the new name, if Bar-nabas Davies felt like bribing the right people. And, for what it was worth, more of a joke than anything, I proposed that my investigations into Caldwell’s heroism would most naturally lead me to England, where I should speak with the family and colleagues of Captain Marlowe, with whom our boy had vanished, and who had recommended the boy’s promotions.
I expected London HQ would thank me, pay me, and that would be that. I thought it possible they would pay me to write some guidance for some other Tailor detective in England, preparing him to conduct the English interviews I suggested. But four days later, I received a very surprising reply by cable: AUTHORISED IMMEDIATE TRAVEL TO ENGLAND, EXPENSES TO DAVIES CASE. Now this was odd, to say the least. Of course, I was more than happy at the news: see the world, make some more money on a safe and interesting job. But why would such a thing be done? Tailor Worldwide didn’t lack for snoops in England. What it cost to pay me and haul me around the globe was far more than any payment Bar-nabas had authorised in the first place to convince Paul Caldwell into becoming Paul Davies.
I mulled it over for two weeks waiting for the boat to leave Sydney, pondered it hard while I was ill then bored to tears then ill again from Sydney to Melbourne to Adelaide, Fremantle, Port Aden, Alexandria, Malta, and Liverpool, ill and confused the whole trip (though, give old Davies his due,