EXCERPT

Chapter One

Hell must be something like this. A claustrophobic museum basement where lost souls (like him) separated from their material bodies moved among artifacts from immemorial burial chambers. Chisholm tried desperately to concentrate on his work, but the buttery, dust-laden light wavered before his eyes as he broke open the crate borrowed from the Cairo Museum and unwrapped several scarab amulets and the small, sculpted ushabti figures which were buried with pharaohs and eminent Egyptians to serve them in the hereafter.

If only they would act as his apprentice sorcerer and hold his hand, for he felt like death himself. In that stifling basement, he alternately sweated and shivered; for eight eternal days and nights he had not touched alcohol, not even through his skin with aftershave lotion. Now he had the shakes and his tongue felt too big for his parched mouth. But he must hold out. Hadn't he promised Danny Inglis, his Alcoholics Anonymous confidant, that he'd stay sober this time and break the habit for good?

So, he toiled on, cursing Sheldon Wright, Director of the Aspenwall Foundation, who had wished this job on him. Nine months hence, the Foundation museum upstairs would hold an exhibition entitled The Great Pharaohs, and Chisholm was cataloguing exhibits from six different foreign museums and writing captions for them. In two weeks, he had listed more than a thousand scarab seals, papyrus scrolls, hieroglyphic panels and cuneiform tablets; he had spent so long in this purgatorial hole he had almost forgotten what life upstairs looked like.

For a moment, he paused at the wooden sculpture of an Egyptian chariot purportedly found in Ramses II's tomb. A phony if he had ever smelled one. And this faience head of Nefertiti he dated no further back than twenty years, its providence most likely Cairo's Khan el Khalili bazaar. Yet, he catalogued them faithfully. Sheldon Wright wouldn't know a junk-shop chariot and a flea-market Nefertiti from a sacred bull's foot.

As he bent over the crate, something hard hit him on the shoulder and he spun round as though he had seen a ghost. Sheldon Wright's secretary, Jenny, was standing grinning at him, a flask and two cups in her hands

“Jenny, you scared the shit out of me creeping up like that. It's spooky down here.”

“My, but you are jittery, Ewan. What did you think I was—something out of a sarcophagus?”

“No—Beelzebub himself.”

Jenny looked at him quizzically then laughed. “But you know Beelzebub, in the skin of Seldom Right lives aloft, and he sent me down here because he wants to see you pronto.” As she spoke, she unscrewed the flask top, handed him a cup, then poured them both milky coffee and dropped two sugar cubes into each steaming cup. “That's to wash the pharaonic dust down,” she said.

Jenny knew his problems. Who in the Aspenwall didn't? However, she never referred to them, even when he guessed she wanted to offer her shoulder, or her mouth or herself. Well, she wasn't to be spurned, he thought, looking at her as he sipped the tarry, bitter coffee. She was blonde, nubile, eager, and still the right side of thirty.

“What does Seldom want?”

Jenny shrugged her ignorance. “All I know is that he took a call from a Mrs. Seagram, genuflecting and licking the handset mouthpiece, then sent me into this nether world to fetch you.”

Seagram? As he finished his coffee and accompanied her upstairs, he tried the name on his memory, but it meant nothing. Sheldon Wright had his nose in a bulky, yellowing file which exuded dust that spangled in the sunbeams and had triggered his allergies. His nose and eyes streamed and he was snorting into his handkerchief, but he kept his head down and his eye on the script, seemingly oblivious of Chisholm who was waiting respectfully.

He knew what Wright was thinking. Why shouldn't I keep this drunk on the balls of his feet to make him aware of the immense favor I've done him by hiring him—a man without a formal archaeological degree who has just come out of prison?

Finally, Sheldon Wright raised his head and fixed Chisholm with those eyes the color of stone-washed jeans.

“Chisholm, I want you to drop Ancient Egypt and go and crate Garfield Tate's papers and his bits and pieces.”

“Garfield Tate—but hasn't he been dead for twenty-odd years?”

“He has, and we're well aware of it. But his widow died eight months ago, they've just settled the estate and they're selling her house and clearing everything out. Which explains why we’re at panic stations.”

Sheldon Wright banged his file shut, scribbled an address on a slip of paper, and handed it to Chisholm. “Just go there and see the stuff's crated and stacked in a corner of our morgue. We'll catalogue it later.”

Chisholm glanced at the Barnes address on the chit. “You mean they've been lying there for more than twenty years?”

Wright nodded. “Everything was left to Lady Garfield Tate, but she refused all our offers to part with the papers until after her death—and don't ask me why.”

Sir William Garfield Tate ranked with Schliemann, Flinders Petrie, Howard Carter, Woolley, and the really great archaeologists and Egyptologists; in the Aspenwall he had a room named after him and several hundred square feet of space there and in the basement housing some of his finds. Many of his expeditions to Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey had been financed by the Foundation, including the last one twenty-five years ago to Egypt where he had met his death in a car crash. His white marble bust sat in the museum entrance above a case recording his most famous “digs.”

“Why don't you do a special exhibition on him...a sort of life story?”

Chisholm suggested. “You've already got most of his stuff and it wouldn't cost much.”

Sheldon Wright rose and walked to the window overlooking Kensington Gore. He pointed to the people passing the museum and the park crowd beyond. “Can you see any of them remembering who GT was and what he did. And if they remembered would they bother to come and look at his Pharaonic scarabs and sarcophagi, his Hittite and Assyrian
trinkets and the rest of the crap?...”

“But there's a lot of good material, and if it was properly publicized.…”

Sheldon Wright rejected that idea with a toss of his graying head that threw bits of dandruff into the shaft of sunlight. He emphasized his refusal by the way he screwed his cigarette butt into the jade ashtray on his desk.

Chisholm knew better than to argue. Sheldon Wright had a cynical approach to the art and treasures in his Foundation and museum. His philosophy was that anything he did not want or could not buy or otherwise procure, the Louvre, the British Museum, or the Met in New York could have willingly. He had little judgment of art, ancient or modern, and paid high prices for mediocre painting, sculpture, or archaeological pieces because this earned his museum publicity and drew the public.

He never tired of reminding Chisholm and others that more people queued in a week at the Louvre in 1911 to gawp at the vacant space where the stolen Mona Lisa had hung than had bothered to look at the painting itself in ten years. But then, Seldom Right was carrying on the brave traditions of the Aspenwall. Hadn't Sir Henry, the tea merchant who started the Foundation, quietly lifted anything that came to hand— from Ming Dynasty sculpture to worthless Indian temple idols—on his travels?

His present foundation director had the same sticky-fingered attitude, stopping at nothing to acquire what he wanted without questioning its provenance.

“Look, Chisholm, just go and crate the old bastard and shove him where I said.” He scribbled two more addresses of the removal firm and estate agents who were handling the house sale and returned to his knee hole desk and his files.

Yet, a few minutes later, he took post by the window to watch Chisholm leave the building. There were two pubs on the way to the bus-stop.

Would Chisholm's no-drink pledge get him past them? Sheldon Wright knew the Scotsman now had to rely on buses, for he had lost his license when he tested above the legal alcohol limit for the second time in three months. Wright's mouth curled at a clever thought. Why, with so little blood in his alcohol stream, the man would have tested positive before breakfast! Though now they said he was trying to stay on the wagon. He wouldn't have taken a thousand-to-one on that.

Why did he employ him? Well, Chisholm might not have had any formal training outside his engineering degree from some Scottish technical college, but he had a brilliant, synoptic grasp of archaeology. Not only could he leave most academics standing, he had done brilliant field work in four continents and had several valuable discoveries to his credit. It was the man's bad luck and the Foundation's good luck that he was a psychic cripple.

To Sheldon Wright's astonishment, Chisholm walked past both pubs without so much as a glance.

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