Star of Egypt Page 7

  “Uh-oh, caught again. Okay. I promise, alright?”

  “Fine.” She excused herself, presumably to dash to the bathroom.

  He returned his attention to the pictures. Perhaps there had been a door, or egress of some kind, behind the junked machinery. It would surely provide for the quick escape of the assailant he never had gotten the chance to identify. What if Seth-Olet crates had been removed from one part of the warehouse to an adjacent section, all the time men were loading and unloading?

  It made elementary sense, if one could see past the fact there were some thirty workers and guards in the Seth-Olet section, none of whom were asleep. Seth-Olet boxes could be taken next door, broken down, and trucked away while everyone’s attention was on the safety of the artifacts.

  Shauna Ramsey had noticed tampering with some of the crates, and consulted him.

  He grimaced into the maddeningly fuzzy photographs. Somewhere in there were the faces of Rashid Haman’s domestic army, his trainees. Still, it was an unexpected windfall of sorts. More verification he did not need, after this.

  Wilma reappeared, wrapped in a trench coat. “Tell me, Mr. Slayton, would the image you see before you pass muster as, shall we say, an unobtrusive spy-sorta person, someone who could blend into the scenery and operate unnoticed, like, for example, a Treasury agent?”

  “Have you filled out an application?” he said, deadpan.

  “No. But I have excellent references.”

  “Unfortunately, tops on our list of qualifications is not the question, do you have your own trenchcoat?”

  “Darn.”

  “Do you have any more conditions?” he asked, indicating the folder beside him on the couch.

  “One more.” She nodded soberly.

  “I’m waiting,” he said.

  “Do you really think I wouldn’t make a good secret agent?”

  “Secret agent, I don’t know. Treasury agents don’t wear secret agent trenchcoats, though.”

  “I know tae-kwondo. I can shoot.”

  “I know.”

  “I have a spy camera. I’ve seen all the James Bond movies.” she added, mock-desperately. “Twice.”

  Slayton folded his arms, administratively silent.

  “Guess I ain’t cut out for the life. huh?”

  Slayton struggled to look like Winship in one of his gruff, bureaucratic moods. He cleared his throat importantly and nodded.

  “Shit.”

  “That’s what all the applicants say,” intoned Slayton.

  “Grounded before I even took off,” she said, petulantly yanking the trenchcoat belt out of its loops and throwing it on the floor. She whipped off the coat and tossed it over Slayton’s head.

  She did not have anything on underneath the coat, and Slayton recognized the essence of her final condition—Board Number Four, as it were.

  “Wait a minute,” she said as he pulled her down into the sofa. She unfastened his shirt and pants in record time.

  “What is it?” he said against her mouth, trying to work at two or three things at once.

  “The pictures,” she said, dropping the folder to the floor. “Don’t want to crush them.”

  He was already mostly stripped. “Good thinking, Mister Bond.” Her body melted onto his, and they fit together very well indeed. Practice was everything.

  Slayton managed to fulfill all of Wilma’s conditions.

  8

  The uncrated artifacts were fabulously beautiful. They glowed, unlike rotting shards of pottery or dead silk, centuries old. Some of the items looked newly minted, as gleaming and dazzling today as forty centuries ago. Slayton caught his breath in fascination.

  And through the tableau moved a figure from another time, an enchanting woman with flowing dark hair. She might have been a court dancer from the Pharoah’s stable, or some kind of concubine indoctrinated in the arts that drive men wild and cause thrones to fall. Here, she touched a golden jug in passing; there, caressed the flank of a glittering sarcophagus.

  Slayton saw how easily Shauna Ramsey fit into the strange jigsaw of Egyptology. It had the power to hypnotize beautiful women, to fascinate them in the real sense of the word, perhaps through the cat god, Bast, and the basilisk gaze that that particular daughter of Isis offered the mute world.

  “See how it all shines!” She was enraptured, enthusiastic. “This is the general arrangement, though everything is still scattered around. Finishing touches come up until the last moment—Professor Willis is forever rearranging things in the interests of historical accuracy; then Maggie changes them around to fit her concept of a more effective presentation.”

  “The mummy goes here?” indicated Slayton, somewhat like a perturbed housewife unable to decide where to place the new piano.

  “The sarcophagus area. The multiple coffins go inside, and the whole package goes here. Now—” she looked around, “—near the sarcophagus go the Canopic jars; those are these.” She lifted an ornate jug to the light and it glittered. “Important for several reasons. First, almost all the mastăbas found previously were pre-Dynastic, which means they date to an era that wasn’t known for flashiness and ostentation.”

  “All this elaborate, throw-away stuff came in with the pyramids, then? Disposable gold?”

  “Roughly, yes. You know what Canopic jars are, don’t you?”

  What was taking place was a quiz every bit as elaborate as the tomb furnishings Slayton was inspecting. His rudimentary Egyptological knowledge was having its limits tested by Shauna—since Slayton had dropped a ringer on Willis earlier—and Slayton was in turn quizzing Shauna, rationalizing that he had not yet pinned her to the wall, testing her in his subtle fashion to see if she was in fact what she claimed to be. It was time, and the touchy game proceeded.

  “Supplied for the storage of the intestines of the dead,” said Slayton. “Literally, guts. But heart, liver, and so on, too, all supposedly to be restored in the Afterlife.”

  “But these Canopic jars indicate that Seth-Olet was treated to the most expensive form of qes, because under the cheaper methods, the organs were dissolved.”

  “How expensive was all this?”

  “One talent of silver. In 1904, that equalled about £240, or… I’m lousy at mathematics….”

  “Around six hundred bucks. Six hundred 1904 bucks,” Slayton said. “Still pretty costly. What did you get for your money?”

  “You got your brain removed through your nose with a pair of iron forceps,” said Shauna. “Then you were slit open—by Guild practitioners, of course, all this being done strictly according to law—with a sharp Ethiopian stone. Your intestines were removed, cleansed in palm wine, salted with aromatic gums that had been beaten into powder, and placed in the jars.”

  “Good idea,” said Slayton, who knew from bitter experience what a freshly slit-open corpse smelled like.

  “Then,” Shauna said, moving to several jars decorating a counter top, “your body would be filled up with myrrh and cassia—and anything else that was astringent and smelled good—and then laid in natron for seventy days. Natron is a sodium carbonate, hydrated, and it certainly killed any odors that were left. But after they removed you, they washed you again anyway. Then you got wrapped up in linen strips smeared with gum—three or four hundred yards-worth of bandages. That’s just for openers.”

  “Do tell,” said Slayton.

  There was mischief in Shauna’s eyes. “Okay, you asked for it. Come over here, I want you to see this stuff so you don’t think I’m making this all up.”

  Slayton obliged, and found himself at a desklike table scattered with yet-uncataloged odds and ends. He held up a small, heavy image of a man in repose.

  “I think this is called a cartonnage, isn’t it?” The work appeared very intricate. “What’s it made out of?”

  “Twenty to forty layers of that linen, glued together, a lot like pasteboard, then covered with stucco. The coloring is tempera; the inscriptions are the names of deities and things from the Bo
ok of the Dead. You find the Book of the Dead everywhere; apparently, the more times you mentioned it on your burial items, the better chance you had at the Afterlife.”

  “What do you do with this?”

  “It goes inside the wrappings. You find all sorts of things wrapped up with the mummy—porcelain bugles, images of gods, and of course, chapters from the Book of the Dead.”

  “An ominous title, like the Necronomicon.”

  “Actually closer to a combination of Frankenstein and the Bible. It was called Per em hru, ‘the chapters of coming forth by day,’ a collection of burial-related chants. Sort of a hymnal of chapters regarding the dead.”

  More little figurines like the cartonnage lay to one side, and Slayton browsed over them.

  “Those are Ushabtiu figures, old kings, generally—to do services for the dead. They were made out of everything—wax, clay, stone, wood, porcelain—and the inscriptions—”

  “More Book of the Dead?”

  “Right. They were placed all around the coffin, like the Canopic jars. But the most important little guy was this one, placed in the coffin with the mummy, or actually wrapped up in the bandages.”

  Slayton lifted a wooden figure carved onto a thick base, almost like a coffee-table statue.

  “That’s a Ptah-Seker-Åusår figure. A triune god—do you know the components?”

  “Uh—” Slayton wracked his memory; the names were familiar from his quick research. “Uh—Ptah… the creator. Seker was the god of death. Åusår was another name for… um, Osiris, god of resurrection and therefore, immortality.”

  The little figure wore horns, a sun disk, and plumes on its tiny head to verify each of Slayton’s descriptions.

  “There’s a little drawer there in the base,” said Shauna. “That’s the special part; it contained a papyrus roll with colored vignettes of the mummy’s life and—”

  “And more Book of the Dead,” Slayton added, obviously pleased with himself as well as with his vindication of the woman doggedly describing everything in detail to him. Somehow she had sensed that he needed convincing.

  “As for the other stuff near the coffin—” She indicated it with a sweep of her hand. “—those are all vessels of one type or another, to hold food, wine, unguents, whatever viands the mummy might need… you must include items that the mummy used while living, or prized, or just liked, and in Seth-Olet’s case that means we have a lot of ancient weaponry cluttering up the coffin area… then you have gifts from the relatives and friends, which include little insignificant things, like chariots—of which we have one, right over there—battle armor, pets—which means everything from mummified dogs and cats to horses…”

  “God, if we did this that way today,” said Slayton, “it would mean about half the gross national product would go underground every year.”

  “It’s a fad that’s difficult to explain to a starving population,” offered Shauna.

  “Spectacular, though. And much more involving for the people who knew the deceased. But I’m afraid I don’t have that many friends who’d be willing to chant and sing at my funeral.”

  “I don’t have that many friends, period,” said Shauna. “But, according to the beliefs, your Afterlife was literally in their hands. Your friends and the priests were supposed to compose prayers and short litanies, all of which made reference to your ‘future life.’ The readings of these were all-important; they guaranteed you unhindered passage to God in the next world, allowed you to overcome ghostly foes, would allow your corpse to resist corruption, and ensure you a new life, in a glorified body, up there.” She jerked her thumb toward the ceiling.

  “God help you if your friends wanted to screw you up,” summarized Slayton.

  “It’s all a classical romantic notion,” she said. “A lost age. You’ll pardon my rambling. Sometimes I wonder if I won’t end up like Professor Willis.”

  “Bloody impossible,” said Slayton.

  “I like the way you handled it,” she said, her face turned so that it was in darkness and the light shone on her cascade of hair. “It took you about ten minutes to get over my body and start talking to me professionally.”

  Slayton came to attention. “It’s not a routine, and I’m not that mechanical. I haven’t gotten over your body yet.”

  “A battle between the physical and mental personae. My apologies. We’ve been working a lot. The last thing I expected to have on this tour was a sexual identity problem. There was room in the Egyptian god-hierarchy for women, you know—every important god had a female counterpart or alter ego. They were sexually interchangeable, unlike the Greeks or Romans where the distinction between god and goddess was sexist.” Her words had dwindled into a kind of frustrated bitterness.

  He said it too fast, but got it out: “Shauna, can I help at all?”

  There was a long and decisive silence, then: “Yes. Yes, I think you might be able to.” She reached across the table, taking his hands, pulling him toward her, wrapping her intoxicating body and scent in the warmest of embraces. Slayton held her that way for several minutes, and when she had dammed back brief tears, she brought her head up from his shoulder and kissed him thoroughly and hungrily, as though she were drawing sustenance from his body. It lasted quite a long time. She made small sounds of pleasure.

  And when she looked back at him her eyes were shining blackly, promising dancer’s eyes, and she said softly, “I’d like to see Washington, now.”

  By ten o’clock that evening, Ben Slayton had managed to shake the untidy notion that Rashid Haman might be Shauna Ramsey. The new possibility that Haman might be a gestalt personality—that is, several people instead of a single man—was his new theory, but it, too, was quiokly discounted. Haman’s blueprints, and gimmicks, bore the stamp of an individual. To Slayton’s perception, egomania was easily added to the incomplete picture of that personality. Besides, if Haman were more than one person—a group, say—then someone still had to make decisions, give orders… he could not visualize a terrorist phalange being run like a San Francisco commune of the late 1960s, with community decisions overriding everything.

  No, these notions were annoying sideroads, tossed into Slayton’s path to force him to waste time in fruitless pursuits, while elsewhere, plans were being laid and actions taken. Misdirection was Haman’s forte. He seemed to be a man of many parts.

  “A man in ancient Egypt was composed of nine distinct parts,” said Shauna, intruding on the subtext of Slayton’s thought.

  “That sounds like a dirty joke.”

  “No, it’s true. There’s your khat; that’s your physical self. Your corruptible body.”

  “Leave my corruptible body out of this,” he said, waggling a Groucho Marx eyebrow. “I don’t have many faults, but I make the most of the ones I do have.”

  The devastated remains of their dinner filled the table before them, and periodically their waiter recharged their glasses and kept them happy. The food at Haskell’s had always been secondary to the service, but all in all it was an entertaining choice.

  “Now, there’s also your sāhu, spiritual body, and ăb, your heart—heart in the sense of the seat of life and thought.”

  “Sort of like id, ego, and superego.”

  “Rather, yes. Then there’s your ka and your ba.”

  Slayton could not hold back the laugh that welled up. “I’m sorry,” he said, going for his napkin.

  “This is serious business,” she chided. “Ba is literally your soul. Ka is your double, an abstract sort of essence of individuality. Ka is endowed with your personality, all of your characteristic attributes—in your case, that redolent sense of humor—and it has an absolutely independent existence. They thought one’s ka could inhabit a statue of the deceased, another reason for all the figurines.”

  “But, if I get blown away by someone, I don’t even have a statue. The closest thing I have is an inflatable doll in the bottom drawer of my dresser.”

  Shauna cleared her throat like a teacher ad
monishing a naughty schoolboy, continuing, “You also have a shadow, a khaibit; a wispy sort of intelligence or similitude called khu—a ‘shining’ is a good word for it—and a sekhem, a divine form.” This time, Shauna laughed.

  “I’ll thank you not to giggle at my divine form, madam. So that’s what little Egyptian boys are made of.”

  “One more thing,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” said Slayton. “I think I’ve heard this before.”

  “Will you listen, please. It’s not what you think. It’s ren. Your name.” She grasped his hand across the table. “Whatever your name really is, Ben.”

  “Like cats,” Slayton changed the topic, once again reinforcing his awareness of the things going on around him, keeping his body in perpetual condition yellow—alert, but relaxed.

  “Cats are said to have three names: the name by which people call them, the name by which other cats call them, and the private name that cats call themselves, which no one ever finds out.”

  “And which are you, Benjamin? Benjamin Rademacher.” She sounded ill at ease saying it, as though some muse told her it was not real.

  “I’m the man getting us the hell out of here, because you and I have had exactly enough to drink, and we both have frightful workloads to face tomorrow which must not be compromised.”

  “You’re right. But tonight isn’t finished yet, either. I’d be a sad specimen of a woman if I dragged you out and liquored you up and then spent the night alone, cataloging the various parts and names of various people.” She was still smiling.

  “Verily, the road to lunacy.”

  “Verily, sir. If you don’t make love to me of a passionate nature, I shall become quite cross with you.” She assumed a stern expression. “Don’t argue. You’re doing your job. You’re protecting the Seth-Olet exhibit and keeping the members of the tour happy.”

  “Well, since you put it that way…”

  9

  In Washington, Shauna Ramsey had wound up with a suite, which to her was a vast improvement over the cramped hotel room she had shared with Maggie Leiber in Baltimore, or the confined cabin aboard the Star of Egypt. She told Slayton so.