“Hardly,” she said, taking a moment to sip her drink. “I work for the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. In Cairo.”
This was getting odder by the minute, though he caught the first glimmer of what it all might be about. He pictured the glyphs on the ossuary.
“I also know that you were assigned to the Cultural Recovery Commission.”
Now it was coming into even greater focus. But he would not, could not, give anything away, so he waited her out.
“And that you’re probably working for them still,” she said with a half smile. “How am I doing so far?”
“So far,” he conceded, “you haven’t struck out.”
“I don’t know exactly what that refers to,” she replied. “Baseball, I presume? But it sounds as if I’m on the right track.”
“What is it you want from me?” The throbbing in his head returned, but he left his chilled glass on the bar.
“I think you know,” she said, but when he gave no indication that he did, she added, “A certain artifact has recently been transported here. An artifact that belongs to me.”
“To you?” He raised a brow.
“My father and I were the ones who found it.”
Lucas had been under the impression that he was the one who had found it. “So that means you own it?”
“It means that it belongs to the Egyptian people.”
“That might not be how everyone sees it.”
“You mean the Third Reich?” she said, dismissively. “Well, they wouldn’t, would they?”
“I mean the United States.”
“But do you intend to keep it?”
Lucas did not know the answer to that one, nor was he immune to the issues inherent in cultural appropriation — no Greek who had ever seen the Elgin Marbles adorning a wing of the British Museum instead of the Parthenon from which they had been stripped was unfamiliar with the feeling. But he still had no idea who this woman really was.
“Conceding absolutely nothing,” he said, even his empty eye socket throbbing now, “I still don’t know what you’re getting at. Are you here to reclaim the artifact in question?”
“Eventually,” she said, “yes. But given the state of the world right now, it is probably for the best that it’s here right now. For safekeeping.”
“Safekeeping,” he repeated.
“And further study.”
She sipped her drink, and he took a slug from his own. He liked this bar, but it looked like he’d have to find a new place.
“I doubt you even know what you have,” she said.
“And you do?”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you tell me.”
“In good time, once you’ve learned to trust me.”
She was spot-on there.
“Right now, it’s essential that you understand just one thing.”
He waited.
“It’s more than what it seems. Much more.”
“What isn’t?”
“Now you’re being glib. Don’t be. That box holds secrets you can’t even guess at.”
Whoever she was, he was beginning to think she was unhinged. And for that matter, what proof had she shown that she worked for the Egyptian ministry? For all he knew, she was an Axis spy. Throwing back the last of his drink, he tossed a couple of bills on the bar and slipped off his stool.
“Look, Mrs. Rashid—”
“Miss Rashid, not that it’s of any consequence.”
“Miss Rashid. I’m just a lowly professor, and the work I do is nowhere near as glamorous as you seem to think.”
“You need my help,” she said, pinning him with her gaze.
And God help him, but that look prodded awake something in him that had lain dormant for a long time. Something that had nothing whatsoever to do with ancient artifacts.
“You can find me at the Nassau Inn,” she said. “You will want to.”
Picking up his briefcase, he headed for the door.
“If you open that sarcophagus without me,” he heard her call out as the door was easing shut behind him, “you will live to regret it.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Well, Simone thought, swiveling her stool back toward the bar, that didn’t go as well as she’d hoped. She should have relied more upon her feminine wiles — she had noted a certain glimmer in his one good eye, and, truth be told, she might have responded to it under different circumstances than these — but it was too late now.
She took a hearty swallow of her Campari and smoothed her skirt over her lap.
The bartender studiously attended to wiping some glasses clean.
She knew she had no one but herself to blame. Despite her intelligence and vast erudition, she had never mastered the gentle art of persuasion. While there might be some people who were natural diplomats, she wasn’t one of them. She was forever butting heads with people, challenging them when she should have been convincing them, raising hackles where she should have been raising support. She had always been in a hurry, without always knowing where she wanted to go; she was too impatient to wait for the right time or the right confluence of events.
And she had inherited her late mother’s temper. Everyone said so, most notably her long-suffering father: “If your mother were here today, you’d finally have an even match.”
But without that inborn obstinacy, who knew if the ossuary, now resting only a short walk away, would ever have been uncovered? When her father had first found the ancient papyrus scroll in the storeroom of the Cairo Museum — one of the many papyri that had been ignominiously deposited in the genizah, the refuse pile of fragments and faded scraps that no one thought important — he had been unable to persuade anyone of the magnitude of his find.
“That’s very interesting,” the director of the national library had said, patting him on the shoulder. “We’ll be sure to follow up on that one day, Dr. Rashid.”
And when he’d tried to acquire funding from the Ministry of Culture in order to launch an expedition, he hit the same brick wall. The fact that Simone had recently landed a job there only made things worse; she’d had to recuse herself from any deliberations lest it look like nepotism.
“Can’t you see that my father might have found the true tomb of Saint Anthony the Anchorite?” she had declared at the one board meeting she had been allowed to attend, under a vow of silence that she’d failed to honor. “For nearly two thousand years, penitents and worshippers from all over the world have been making pilgrimages to an empty tomb in the desert monastery at Al-Qalzam.”
“We don’t know that it’s empty,” the minister said.
“Of course we do,” Simone had insisted. “We’ve done the ground tests. We only keep this myth alive to keep the tourists coming.”
The minister shot her a warning glance — but she had built up such a head of steam that there was no stopping her.
“Our country should be proud, rightly proud, of Saint Anthony,” she said, rising from her chair. “Not only did he found the entire Christian ascetic theology, he defied a Roman emperor and prevailed. He came to the aid of persecuted Christians and led the fight against the Arian heresy. Without him, there would be no tradition of monasticism in the church.”
“Yes, Miss Rashid, we all understand the saint’s importance.”
“So then why don’t you all want to find his actual sepulcher?” She waved a copy of the monograph that she and her father had written, in which they had outlined their theory and even marked a possible route to the tomb. “Doesn’t the truth interest any of you?”
And that’s when she’d been ejected, under threat of losing her job altogether. It’s also when she had decided to cash in some of her considerable resources and use the money to finance the expedition herself. Her father, though, had been torn between his determination to find the tomb and the dangers such a mission might pose to his daughter’s career.