Page 22

Charlotte

Charlotte hadn’t expected to confide in Annie. She also hadn’t expected the crazy swells of emotion that arose in her as they drove in the cab from the airport. She was stunned that she’d made it all the way to Egypt, having been convinced for the entire length of the transatlantic plane ride that they might plummet into the ocean any minute, or that the pilot would have to turn around and return to the New York airport due to a technical difficulty. As the sun had swept up from the horizon and painted the buildings of Luxor a soft pink, she’d found herself inhaling sharply, remembering all the times she and Henry had walked these streets. The spice store stood on the same corner; the vegetable market was opening for business, same as it had four decades ago. Probably the same as it had four centuries ago. The city was infused with her past, the way a lover’s scent lingers on a pillow.

She remembered vividly what it had been like to arrive here as a nineteen-year-old. Confused, uncertain of her place in the world. But eager to please. So eager to please. While her skin might be more wrinkled and her stamina not what it was, being back on Egyptian soil made it impossible for her to deny that she still was that same raw, vulnerable person, and the thought rattled her deeply.

Maybe that was why she hadn’t walked away from Annie after they landed at the Cairo airport. Annie’s desperate act was no different from Charlotte’s. The haunted look in her eyes was perhaps partly from the trauma of being attacked in the basement of the Met—an attack that Charlotte could have avoided if she’d been thinking straight—but also something else, something deeper. They both wanted to escape the web of pain that New York represented.

The shock of being back in the tomb with the two mummies, and the near miss as the ceiling rumbled and the rocks began to fall, made Charlotte once again worry about the sanity of her decisions, as well as the possibility that the curse was still in play. But they’d made it safely out and rescued the canopic box with the cartouche, all thanks to Annie. Even if the box didn’t prove a thing about the mummy on the floor and Charlotte’s photographs turned out to be indecipherable, it was something to add to the story of Hathorkare.

As the sun set over the Valley of the Kings, it had been a relief to tell Annie of her prior time in Luxor, to say the name of the man she’d loved out loud. With each retelling, the painful memories subsided—ever so slightly—and Charlotte was able to cautiously acknowledge the harsh series of events that had shaped her life as a young woman. If only her mother had encouraged her to speak about her experiences in Egypt, maybe she wouldn’t have lived the ensuing years in such terrible fear of losing someone else. It had been awful of her parents to insist she shut away that time of her life, but, looking back now, she understood that they were products of their era and had been frightened and shocked by her brash decisions. They’d done the best they could.

After an unexpectedly solid night’s sleep, bolstered by the lingering effects of jet lag, Charlotte and Annie met up in the hotel restaurant the next morning for breakfast. Leon wouldn’t be back until tomorrow, which meant the day stretched ahead of them. Charlotte dropped the film off at a nearby camera shop and returned to the lobby, where Annie was waiting, dressed in a white linen blouse and khaki-colored, wide-legged linen pants belted at the waist, looking as though she’d just walked off a film set about Egyptian explorers. Charlotte stopped herself from asking Annie where her pith helmet was.

“Last night I reread what my ancient Egyptian history book says about Hathorkare, and it’s really dismissive,” said Annie in between bites of toast. “Why don’t they know what you do?”

“Because it’s new information. Which unfortunately is no longer in my hands.”

“What do you mean?”

“The night of the theft, someone took my file containing all the research I’d done. They left behind a threatening note, and I’m guessing it’s related to the broad collar’s provenance and the fact that I was asking about it.”

“That’s horrible.” Annie straightened in her chair, her eyes sparking with anger. “Do you think it was taken by the same man we chased?”

“The timing would suggest it. But it doesn’t explain how he got into the locked offices.”

“An inside job.”

“Hopefully the security team will figure that out.”

“Yesterday, you said that Leon was associated with the thieves who stole the Cerulean Queen, is that right?”

“That’s what I’ve been told. Of course, we don’t have any proof that it’s Ma’at that stole it, although the theft is similar to others they have committed.”

“It’s worth digging around, right?”

“I do think the stolen Queen and the reappearance of the broad collar are related. But we have to be careful. I’ve been warned that Ma’at is a dangerous organization, and no one knows exactly who’s involved or how widespread their reach is. In any event, the first step is to talk to Leon, which we can’t do until tomorrow, unfortunately.”

The waiter poured them more coffee. “Well, what should we do today, then?” asked Annie. “My guidebook said that the Temple of Karnak is pretty cool.”

“Funny you say that.”

“Why?”

“The Temple of Karnak is where my Hathorkare theory begins.” Charlotte described the destruction of the images of Hathorkare, and how the precise timing of the vandalization could be calculated by studying the subsequent pharaoh’s renovations at Karnak. “In the file that was stolen, I had photographs from Karnak that backed up my theory.”

“Then we have to go. You can start over.”

Starting over. All those hours, lost. It hurt to think about. “That’s futile. It took me three years to get to this point.”

“So what? Instead of proving it now, you do it three years later.”

“I’ll be sixty-three then.”

“And three years after that you’ll be sixty-six. What does that matter?”

How nice to be young, thought Charlotte, with decades stretching ahead of you. But exploring Karnak was better than sitting around waiting for Leon to return.

They headed out into the bright morning sun. Outside the temple, they walked along the Avenue of the Rams, which was lined with over one thousand statues, a troop of sphinxes, rams, and ram-headed lions.

“When will the mummies and artifacts from the tomb be taken to Cairo?” asked Annie.

“ Bukra fil mish mish ,” answered Charlotte.

“Mish what?”

“It means ‘Tomorrow, when the apricots bloom.’ Basically, it’s the Egyptian way of saying they’ll get there when they get there, don’t hold your breath.”

“But they’ll eventually go on display at the Egyptian Museum?”

“Hopefully, yes.”

“Why hopefully?”

“It’s something of a shambles, the Egyptian Museum. To be honest, they’d be much better off at the Met. At least we have electricity, we can keep the temperature and humidity stable and ensure they don’t get damaged.”

“Last week, I heard some of the docents talking about the Benin bronzes in the same way. That they’re better off at the Met instead of being returned to Africa.”

“Right. Truly gorgeous pieces. Stolen from the kingdom of Benin by British troops in the 1800s and now scattered in museums around the world.”

“But now the ruler of Benin wants them back. The docents were very upset that the Met’s collection of bronzes might be spirited away.”

“They’re safer at the Met, for certain.”

“But they were stolen. Shouldn’t we give them back? Just like when we find the Cerulean Queen, we’ll want it back, since it was stolen from the Met?”

“You can’t compare the two. Benin doesn’t even have a museum. What then, the bronzes get put into storage, completely out of the public’s view?”

“What about all of the things in storage at the Met?”

Charlotte caught herself bristling. Why was she becoming so defensive? “We can’t exhibit everything,” she explained. “There wouldn’t be a building large enough. And in any event, the question of the Benin bronzes is moot, as it looks like they’ll have a deal in place to return them very soon.”

A conversation from long ago drifted into Charlotte’s memory, back when she and Leon had been on this very site, arguing about the obelisks, one of which had ended up in Paris. Charlotte had rued the fact that it had been taken away. It was strange how, after so many years working at the Met, her viewpoint had changed 180 degrees. Had she been just an innocent kid, like Annie was now, unable to understand the nuances of antiquity preservation and ownership as they existed in the real world? Or had she become jaded over time, developed an unwarranted proprietorship over the objects in her galleries?

Her galleries. That really said it all.

Charlotte spent a moment among the columns in the Hypostyle Hall, remembering her first kiss with Henry, before getting to work. The more she studied the erasures and compared them with the dates of reconstruction, the more a hesitant excitement crept through her. Hesitance because this was only the beginning, not the end of the project now, and she still didn’t have the solid proof that Frederick was looking for, the reason why the erasures occurred in the first place.

But excitement because, even without the proof, she was even more certain she was correct.

The next day, it was time to track down Leon.

As Charlotte and Annie headed back to Leon Pitcairn’s apartment building, they passed a grungy-looking open-air restaurant with mismatched tables and chairs spilling onto the sidewalk. The customers, all men, stared hard at the pair of women as they walked by. Charlotte doubted tourists often ventured this way. But one of the men glanced up and then quickly turned away, lifting a cup of coffee to his mouth. He wore khakis and a white button-down shirt, and Charlotte caught a glint of yellow on the pinky finger of his left hand. A ring made of yellow jasper, a ring Charlotte had seen before.

“This way,” she said to Annie, maneuvering in between the tables to where Leon Pitcairn sat.

He put down his coffee and did a terrible double take. “Charlotte Cross? My God, is that you?”

She’d last seen Leon on a sinking ship, yet here he was, drinking coffee and walking the streets of Luxor like nothing had ever happened. Seeing him in the flesh was astonishing and strange, and she knew her face reflected that. Leon’s professed shock, though, had an air of showmanship about it, as he loudly exclaimed his surprise and wrapped his arms around her before giving her a European-style double-cheek kiss. Charlotte introduced Annie as her assistant and took up his invitation to join him, gesturing for Annie to do so as well.

Leon’s youthful good looks were gone. His high forehead was now a bald pate, the skin sagged under his eyes, and his nose looked like it had been broken a few times over.

“I thought you were dead,” he said, twisting the ring on his finger. “I can’t believe it’s actually you.”

“Imagine my own surprise when I heard you were still alive, kicking around the Valley of the Kings.”

He regarded her with wary eyes.

“Let’s stop with the games,” she said. “I know what was going on back in ’37. That you and Henry were smuggling antiquities from the digs out of Luxor, out of Egypt. Is that why we had to leave so quickly? It wasn’t because of world politics, like Henry said.”

For a moment it looked as if Leon was going to try to deny it, but Charlotte cocked her head at him in warning. “I’m sorry for what happened,” he finally said. “It was a terrible night, a terrible time. And yes, Henry convinced me to set some things aside. We’d worked at the Egyptian Museum that summer, we knew what a mess the place was, that no one would notice. Why not get a little cash for all the trouble we took to pull these things out of the earth, digging away in the hot sun, melting day after day? You remember what it was like.”

“From what I recall, it was the local Egyptian workers who did most of the hard labor. I don’t remember seeing you lift a pickax.”

“Henry said he wanted to take care of you and…”

As he trailed off, Charlotte spoke up fast, not wanting to hear the baby’s name come out of his mouth. “You survived. How did you survive?”

“All those years swimming for Cambridge paid off and I made it to shore, somehow. I assumed you and Henry had perished, as hardly anyone escaped. It’s truly astonishing to see you, really. In any event, I took it as an opportunity to turn my life around, eventually becoming a guide.”

“After a stint in jail for smuggling.”

Leon shifted in his seat. “You’ve done your homework.”

“I have.”

“Well, you’ve got me there. When I first got to Cairo, I changed my name to get the authorities off my back, did what I could to get by. But yes, I eventually got caught and paid the price. An Egyptian prison is not something you want to ever be inside, trust me on that. I learned my lesson, and now I take tourists around, charm the ladies, make the men think they’re getting a look at the ‘real Egypt,’ collect my fee. It’s not much, but it keeps me going.”

“I know you and Henry took the broad collar that I found.”

“That we found.”

She ignored his correction. “It ended up in New York, on loan to the Met. How did that happen?”

Leon shrugged. “All I know is that it was in the suitcase that Henry was carrying. What happened next is anyone’s guess.”

“He’s still alive.” It was a statement, not a question. “Where is he?” She’d avoided this question until the last moment, knowing the answer could send her reeling. To anyone walking by, they looked like two people having a pleasant enough conversation, when in fact she would have enjoyed clawing the smug look off his face.

Leon licked his lips. “I have no idea. I assumed he died as well. Never heard from him again. Heck, maybe the broad collar washed up on shore and someone else nicked it. The curse lives on, it seems.” He checked his watch. “I have to get to work, there’s a dozen Swiss tourists waiting for me to reveal the wonders of the ancient world. It was nice catching up, best of luck to you, Charlotte. And to your pretty assistant.”

Charlotte rose to go and Annie did as well. “You’re despicable,” said Charlotte. “Zimmerman trusted you, we all trusted you.”

“I didn’t work alone. Maybe you don’t know the man you married.”

The accusation cut to the quick, but there was something else to it, something that didn’t fit.

Charlotte and Annie walked back to the main road, where Charlotte ducked into a store selling tunics and pulled Annie in with her. “Let’s just make sure he’s not following us,” she said.

They pretended to peruse the offerings, and a minute or so later Leon hurried by, looking haggard, and boarded a bus headed to the ferry.

“He’s lying about Henry,” said Annie.

“You noticed that, too?”

“Instead of saying, ‘Maybe you didn’t know the man you married,’ he said, ‘Maybe you don’t .’ Present tense.”

“I caught that as well.”

The truth had come out, even with all of Leon’s denials and evasions. Henry was alive, and her heart soared with hope that maybe, just maybe, their daughter was also alive. But that line of thinking would get Charlotte nowhere without tracking down Henry, and she wasn’t any closer to the answer than she’d been before ambushing Leon.

“What curse was he referring to?” asked Annie.

“It’s said that if you take something that was dear to Hathorkare out of the kingdom, you’ll face the wrath of the gods.”

“Then the shipwreck was Hathorkare trying to stop them?”

“I’m not sure what it was.” She explained how the curse first came to light in the early 1900s, with the tragic deaths of the earl and his wife not long after they brought the Cerulean Queen to England. She also mentioned her aborted attempts to return to Egypt, which both times had ended in disaster. Charlotte waited, expecting Annie to offer some kind of platitude or repudiation, as Helen had done when she’d brought up the curse.

But Annie didn’t question it. “That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”

In spite of the heat, a chill ran down Charlotte’s spine. “Let’s go back to Leon’s apartment building, speak to some of his neighbors.”

The landlady answered the door, scowling as she’d done the day before, but her reticence fell away when Charlotte offered her fifty Egyptian pounds. Charlotte’s Arabic was rusty and the photo she’d brought of Henry from their wedding day was faded and wrinkled, but the old woman studied it carefully. The photo had been shipped separately in a trunk the day after she and Henry left Luxor, along with some hastily packed clothes and possessions, and was waiting for Charlotte when she arrived in New York. It had taken her six months before she could even summon up the courage to open the lid and look inside.

“Have you ever seen this man before, with Mr. Pitcairn, perhaps?” she said to the landlady. “He would be around the same age as Mr. Pitcairn.”

The landlady pointed to Henry’s face and nodded. “Big ears,” she said in English. “It was a few years ago, I can’t remember how many, a man with big ears like that and hair like that came looking for Mr. Pitcairn. I can’t say if it was the same man.”

A mixture of joy, fear, and confusion threaded through Charlotte. Henry had been here. But before she could ask another question, Annie began coughing. Charlotte turned to her. “Are you okay?”

Annie shook her head and leaned over, hands on her knees. The cough grew worse. “I need water,” she finally said, her voice cracking. “The desert air, it’s too much.”

The landlady pointed behind her to a small room off to the left, where Annie disappeared from view. Charlotte found herself irritated at Annie for distracting the old lady at such a crucial moment.

She held up the photo again. “What was his name? Was it Henry?”

The woman shrugged. “I only saw him that one time. Mr. Pitcairn, he pays his rent on time, but I don’t like him. I told my dear husband when he was still alive that I didn’t trust Mr. Pitcairn one bit.”

“What happened when you saw Mr. Pitcairn and this man?”

“They were shouting, making a terrible noise. The man was English, like Mr. Pitcairn.” She wrinkled her nose, her disdain for the country obvious.

“What were they fighting about?”

“I don’t know. My husband told them to stop yelling in the hallway, that they were disturbing the other residents, but Mr. Pitcairn refused to let the man inside his apartment.”

Annie returned, her face red but the coughing fit over. “Sorry about that.”

Charlotte ignored her. “What were they saying?”

“The man with the ears was warning Mr. Pitcairn.” The landlady looked up at Charlotte with rheumy eyes and a determined look on her face. “He was telling him to stay away from his daughter.”

After the landlady closed the heavy wooden door, the world spun around in circles, as if Charlotte were caught in a tornado. She looked up and saw a swirl of skinny palm trees and a grainy sky and tried to catch her breath.

Annie, whose coughing fit had immediately abated, guided her to a bench set back from the road. “Put your head down, try to breathe.”

The landlady had spoken of a daughter. Where was Layla now? Why had Henry not tried to find Charlotte after the shipwreck? He had to have assumed she was dead, as Leon had. Perhaps he was ashamed of what he’d done, at the peril he’d put them all in. But she could have forgiven him; they could have been a family again.

Charlotte had always been reluctant to imagine Layla as a fully grown woman. In her head, she’d kept her as a baby or at best a young girl. Now she had to reconfigure everything. Including the fact that she was alive.

The questions kept coming. What was her daughter doing with Leon a few years ago that Henry was so worried about? Leon Pitcairn was sickly looking, his teeth stained and his breath foul—Charlotte couldn’t imagine her beautiful daughter being romantically involved with a man like that, if that was what Henry’s warning was about. The landlady could have been wrong, of course. Her eyesight wasn’t very good, and there had to be more than one Englishman with big ears out in the great wide world.

Right before Charlotte and Annie had stepped off the stoop of Leon’s apartment building, the landlady had added that the Englishman finished with a threat for Leon to stay far away from Cairo.

Perhaps Layla was only visiting Luxor when she saw Leon, and she lived in Cairo.

Charlotte had so many questions. She closed her eyes, trying in vain to shut out the madness and frustration, as the world spun once again.