The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [53]
Writing about my trip to Boston daunts me. I’m just tired, I suppose, from my illness. But even as I recall stepping aboard the Angel of the Azores, preparing to cross the Atlantic, thanking heaven that a bloke like myself was going to have the opportunity to see America because of my professional abilities, I sit here in the wretched heat of the games room (two incomplete sets of draughts and one of chess, some playing cards, and a heap of old droolers), and I’m having to overcome something in me that’s resisting buckling back to our work. I take no pleasure in re-creating this leg of my adventure. I recall too well the price I paid for my hard work and open heart in Boston. But here’s my stack of blank stationery. (Horrible, that emblem of the home, isn’t it? Did they think a little drawing of the sea would make it true? Take it from me, you can’t see the Bay from this building even if you jump from the roof. Which is tempting.)
I made notes and notes, cataloguing my suspicions and the case’s loose ends on that weeklong trip across the Atlantic: Trilipush, Marlowe, and Quint are University mates, except that the University has never heard of Trilipush, though passing students have, years after he was there. Trilipush and Marlowe are friends, War chums, likely something else unspeakable, and Trilipush writes to Marlowe’s parents, referring fondly to time spent with the old folks, whose names he doesn’t know and who’ve never met him, though their son spoke often of him at Oxford. Where records indicate he was never a student. And the British Government claims to have no record of him participating in that War, though the unreliable Quint claims Trilipush was at Marlowe’s side until Gallipoli. But recall that no one has any recollection of Caldwell, who for his part, has no reason in the world to know Marlowe, a British officer, but Marlowe recommends him for promotions, and they vanish together on a nameless mission, after the War is over, while Trilipush is still far off in Turkey, “pulling through.” My case diagrams were more question marks than conclusions.
I had a girl at Tailor HQ cable ahead to be sure of Trilipush’s presence at Harvard, using a false name as I didn’t want to spook him just yet, didn’t want to give him time to cover his tracks. No, I wanted this one flustered and bumbling when I got to grips with him. The girl, however, I later learned when I cabled back to London for explanation, had foolishly asked if Trilipush “taught” at Harvard, rather than if he was “at” Harvard.
So, October 13th, 1922, I arrived at ivy-blanketed Harvard University, wandered from building to building looking for Egyptology, where I asked to see Mr. Trilipush, only to learn from a secretary that he’d departed for Egypt not even a month before on an exploration, and would be abroad well into 1923. So be it: I’d find what I could here and then have a holiday in sunny Egypt on the Marlowes’ and Davies’s shillings. So I asked for Trilipush’s chief and was brought to the office of a little round Dutchman named Terbroogan, the head of Harvard’s Egypt men. When I told him I was looking for some information about his Mr. Trilipush, he replied with a sort of spittly speech defect and Fritzy accent, “My dear man, vatever elth he may be, by no thtretch of the imathinathon ith he my Tchiliputh.”
Terbroogan had few gentle (or dry) words for his employee, and the tenor of the conversation was soon fine and candid, quite to my taste when compared to the timid snobberies of the Marlowes and the shadowy half-truths of Quint. “Insubordinate, arrogant, and wrong,” chants the fellow. “Insubordinate, arrogant, and wrong. If one is arrogant, one should at least be right. But his book is a tissue of nonsense. I hope he is eaten by crocodiles out there.” For a moment I found this violent language suspicious, and wondered how Professor Terbroogan and his rough fantasies might fit into our emerging picture. I wouldn’t’ve been at all surprised to learn he’d been in