Cleopatra's Needle

PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
NEW YORK CITY








The light morning rain wasn't keeping the bums indoors. Four of New York's most ragged were huddling under the footbridge as Dan strolled by on his way to work. One of them, a stout fellow about sixty with black axle grease lacquered through his hair, looked up and waved.
"Hi ya, Doc," he shouted. "Got any change?"
Dan waved him off. "Sorry, Georgie. Only packing my credit cards today." His bleeding-heart-liberal guilt stopped him for a second while he considered his obligations to his fellow man.
"How about I leave a hot dog for you at Sammy's stand?"
"I dunno. The cops don't like us out front of the museum, Doc. Freaks out the tourists, y'know."
"I'll clear it," said Rawlins, hurrying off, his conscience assuaged.
Georgie hurried after him onto the footpath. "I won't eat no sauerkraut! I didn't fight the fuckin' Nazis so I could make 'em rich eatin' their stinkin' cabbage!"
"Sammy only sells Hebrew National, for godsakes!"
"He just does it so he can sell that Fascist kraut!"
"Whatever you say, Georgie," yelled Dan as he turned onto the upgrade leading to the knoll. Dan sat down to rest on one of the benches on Greywacke Knoll next to the fence surrounding NewYork's obelisk. It was the highest point in Central Park and Cleopatra's Needle capped the slope.
The pillar made a perfect landmark for Dan's occasional morning walks to the Met. At that point, he knew he was less than five minutes away from the building. After a minute, he rose, saluted the obelisk for luck, and cut across the grass for the jogging path down to the street. He followed a couple of Rollerbladers at a safe distance and soon he saw the rear of the museum, looming like a hazy granite giant crouched against an approaching storm.
An enormous raindrop struck Dan square on the nose. He wiped it dry with the cuff of his jacket, but another hit his cheek almost immediately and more were splattering the top of his head. He dashed for the back door, hoping to get there before the downpour made him look like a dog after a flea dip.
One lousy drop falling through the New York atmosphere must have to pass through ten times its weight in grunge, Dan decided. Even his very expensive Nikes with their tire-tread soles were little help against oil and water on a downhill lane of asphalt. He minced through the flower bed and hopped across the low wall, figuring the shortcut would give him more traction and less chance of skidding on his ass where the entire staff would see him.
He raced around to the side steps and steered under the awning, coasting into the glass door with a squish. He was soaked past his underwear. Dripping, he pressed the buzzer urgently. An old security guard peered out, straining to recognize him through a fog of condensation.
"Open up, Lloyd," Dan shouted. "I'm drowning out here!" Dan brushed wet ringlets away from his forehead as the guard unlatched the door and held it for him to enter.
"Sorry, Doc."
The second person in five minutes to call Dan Rawlins "Doc." It happened all the time, of course, everyone assuming that one of the most famous names in Egyptology must have earned his doctorate. But Dan hadn't. He never found the time.
"Professor" went down easier. And it was nearly true. At least during the one semester each year he was committed to deliver his lecture series at Georgetown. Down in Washington they treated him like a celebrity with his own condo at the Watergate and a sackful of cash for his trouble. He was encouraged to spend time with all the fawning young archaeology majors he could bear.
Even so, Dan knew sleeping with a graduate student thirteen yearshis junior--no matter how discreet they were--meant that everyone would soon be talking. That bothered him. He had spent a lifetime building a reputation among his peers as a dogged researcher and an innovative scientist. He shuddered at the prospect of being labeled academia's answer to Joey Buttafuoco.
Especially when the problem with his father had just begun to die down.
The two of them had been feuding for years, but with his father spending most of the year half a world away, they had recently called a truce.
A decade before, Gunther Rawlins was the leading Biblical scholar in the world. Then, one night he had a revelation that the Scriptures were the literal, revealed truth of God. It was a point of view that many Vatican and fundamentalist scholars held, but it was a rare conviction for a secular researcher.
All Dan saw was his aging father's fear of stepping from life into oblivion. Gunther's perspective was that every new theory of God uncovered new mysteries. Mysteries that only faith could resolve. It might have stayed a family debate if the Rawlins weren't world-famous scientists. The media picked up on the secular/religious conflict because it was such a good story and had no shame about dividing the Rawlins clan.
Dan's mother, a leading authority on the prehistory of the Nile Valley, thankfully kept out of the verbal battles, but it was a terrible time. Clashes between Dan and his father aired for three straight nights on Hard Copy and, during Dan's last book tour, talk of the father-son discord dominated the interviews. The tumult was only now dying down in favor of political sex scandals and movie-star tragedies.
None of this seemed to bother the Jesuits who hired Gunther, since it helped their bottom line to have their science lectures play to a packed hall.
Dan's real joy came from the small condo group. With them he could hold court like his father. And often, after one of these informal get-togethers, one of the prettier girls would stay on for the night. His friends on the faculty called them Professor Rawlins's "excavations."
That's why!
A delicious moment of revelation struck him. Whenever one of his girls murmured to him, or panted or screamed, she called out "Professor!"
Never "Dan," or "Doc," or any little pet name she might have devised. No, always "Professor." No wonder he liked the title. Invariably, the next morning in class, his topic would turn to the bizarre sexual practices of the Egyptian court at Thebes. Most of his class would sit stone-faced and earnestly take copious notes. Except for one young lady in a front row. She'd giggle.
"Watch yourself, Doc. The floor's slippery, and you ain't making it any drier."
Dan nodded. "I'll try, Lloyd."
Dan dripped down the thirteen stairs to the corridor that led to a maze of offices and workrooms under the museum. He passed an open door, and a broad man in an immaculate blue suit looked up from a pyramid of papers on his desk and waved.
"Ha, you got caught, huh?"
"Not all of us can afford taxis to drop us under the canopy, John."
John Erman, the curator of Egyptian and Middle Eastern Studies, provided a desk and a grad student for Rawlins's office when he was in town. It was a nice symbiotic relationship. "We're the pilot fish to your shark," Erman was fond of saying.
In fact, Dan enjoyed his connection with such a prestigious institution. He felt legitimized by it, despite the inevitable talk by his more academic colleagues that he was merely the product of famous parents, and his standing in the profession was mostly media hype.
"Why does he write only those popular books?" they said.
"All this exposure on television trivializes the science of archaeology," they said.
"Is young Rawlins afraid of publishing in the proper academic journals?"
"That's poor Danny Rawlins. You know, the one from the TV, the Jerry Springer of Egyptology!"
Screw 'em, he thought. He knew he came across on the tube in a way his dull-as-dry-rot colleagues never could. Reviewers were generally on his side. They inevitably remarked on his ability to make Egypt's past come alive. It was as if he had actually been there, they said.
However, he did stop appearing on talk shows after a last avalanche of professional criticism jeopardized his work. Museums are conservative institutions. They rarely dole out consulting jobs or arrange financing for the projects of controversial figures. Still, a famous man attracts contributions and, in that respect, the Rawlins name on a museum's letterhead was a valuable commodity.
Of course, snaring D. Gunther Rawlins, Sr., for their stationery was every head curator's first choice, but Dan's father had stayed a fixture at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem for thirty-two years. Although he had privileges at the Met, they could not pry him away from the Middle East. "Not for a trillion bucks and a first-round draft pick," his old man always said.
"Let me go, John," said Dan. "I'm gonna get pneumonia from the chill in here if I don't get dry pretty soon."
"Wait a second. I sent a guy to your office. Sounds Irish, I think. He says he's from Sotheby's in London." Erman grinned, showing all three hundred teeth. In a brotherly gesture, he brushed back the wet strands from Dan's forehead. "We try to cooperate with our suppliers, don't we?"
Dan nodded reluctantly.
"Good," said Erman. "Now, go dry off your head!"
Marcy Lanyard met Dan at the end of the corridor. She stood blocking his office door, her arms folded as she assayed his condition. Dan gazed at her appreciatively. A long, thin colt of a girl, she stood model-tall and wore her glossy blond hair drawn back into an arching ponytail. Marcy had been on loan from NYU for five months. It had taken her three of those months to get into Dan's bed, but at the office, she made an effort to keep everything professional.
Dan felt a breath of cold air from the air-conditioning ducts and shivered. Magically, Marcy produced two towels from under her crossed arms and threw one to him.
"A couple of people are waiting for you, you know," said Marcy, wiping one of his ears with her towel.
"I heard about the man from Sotheby's. Who else?"
"An older woman," Marcy said while helping him dry his hair. "She didn't give her name, but she's got museum privileges and she's wandering around."
"Okay, I'll see Sotheby's first," he said. "Just give me a couple of minutes to change."
"No problem. I stashed him at the reception desk. He'll be happy. Gloria's wearing her pink sweater today, no bra."
Dan leered back at her. "Then, remind me to escort him in personally." Dan pulled off his sweatshirt as he headed into his private office. He felt Marcy's hand patting him on the rear as he swept by her.
Inside, he stripped off his wet shirt and changed to one he found in his office closet. He had just finished combing his damp hair whenhe heard a knock at the door. "Yeah, I hear you!" he shouted. He peeked through the spyhole in the door and groaned.
Dan opened the door. The woman standing in the dark hall flashed her ice-gray eyes at him.
"Hello, Mother," he said. "I didn't know you were back from Israel."
"You look like shit, Junior," she said, pushing the door wider. Dan moved aside and gestured for her to come inside. She marched to the center of the office and planted herself next to the leather couch against the far wall. Evangeline Beecham Rawlins, at sixty-three, could still dominate any room she entered. She was thin, even scrawny, with her bone-white hair worn long and free, a style she hadn't changed since the sixties.
Dan ambled in behind her, wishing he had organized the clutter of his latest researches before it had spread out into clumps over virtually every flat surface in the room.
"Son, have you considered hosing this office down?"
Dan didn't answer. Instead, he picked up the papers from the couch and piled them on top of a low bookcase. "Sit anywhere you like, Mother. Sorry there's no throne."
Eva Rawlins, although a foot shorter than Dan, managed to look down on him. "Unworthy of you, Junior." She perched on the edge of an old ladder-back chair. It was made of hard oak. Typically, she chose the least comfortable seat in the room.
"Can I get you a cup of coffee?" asked Dan. "I think there might be a Twinkie, too. I had one for lunch last week, and they come in twos. They don't get stale, do they?"
She shook her head. "I don't have much time before my preinterview at PBS. Your father and I are booked on that nice Charlie Rose's television show when he gets back from the Megiddo excavation."
"I didn't know you had a new edition coming out?"
"We don't. We're plugging Resurrection Unlimited. That's the gathering of all the world faiths in Washington next month. We're on the board of directors."
"Well, I'll avoid that little party like the plague."
"Mustn't let your emotions cloud your judgment, son," she replied, folding her hands on her lap. "All we need do is mention that we both accepted Christ as our personal savior, and you get irrational."
Dan knew he was outmatched and gave up his combative stance. "Sure you don't want any coffee, Mom? I only had a few hours' sleep last night. I could use about a kilo of caffeine."
She shook her head. "No wonder you're so testy."
Dan stepped into the outer office to the tiny kitchen area that serviced the Egyptology Department. The Mr. Coffee was plugged in, so all he had to do was pour a couple of glasses of tap water into the top and wait for the coffee to urinate into the Pyrex pot.
As the coffee started to drip, Dan poked around the half-sized refrigerator looking for the fabled Twinkie to have with it. Instead, he found a calcified Fig Newton behind a jar of five-month-old Smuckers grape jelly and put it on his last clean saucer.
"Ma? I've got Perrier, if you're still on your ascetic kick."
Eva suddenly appeared in the portal. "It's fine. Nothing."
The coffee was ready, and Dan poured himself a cup. He dunked the cookie, and when it sogged-up into edibility, he ate it in one bite. When he looked up, his mother was staring at him.
"What?" he asked finally.
"I won't beat around the bush, Danny. I don't want you to be this way when you see your father. Something is worrying him about his new dig. He's been calling Cairo almost every day about an ostracon they found. You may have heard about the robbery at the museum. Only a few minor artifacts and some of the less notable mummies in the collection were taken, but they found an interesting shard that mentioned Megiddo when they were inventorying the loss."
Dan stuck out his chin. "You know him. He keeps everything to himself when he's on the scent of a big find. It's just like it was in the desert. Rawlins-Pasha never sleeps until the mound is flat and all of its secrets revealed."
Eva handed him a manila envelope. "He'll want your opinion on this. Why don't we talk over dinner the night he gets back. Is that a deal?"
"Deal." Dan put down his cup and joined her at the door. "Don't concern yourself about Dad," he said in a comforting way. "He's just tired. And the work hasn't got any easier over the last thirty years. He's probably looking for one last discovery to cap his career and maybe then he can relax at the beach house like you two always planned." He kissed her on the cheek and she smiled. Then, she turned to go.
"I'm opening up the Montauk house. I'll phone you about that dinner." She passed Marcy and a short, red-haired young man on her way out.
"Who was that?" Marcy asked.
"My mother," said Dan flatly.
"Your mother? You mean Evangeline Beecham?" Marcy was very excited and looked back down the corridor, but by then Eva was gone. "Damn. If I'd known that's who it was, I would've asked for her autograph."
"Who's your friend?"
The man at Marcy's elbow spoke for himself. "Gunther Rawlins? Name's Liam McMay, sir," he said with a trace of an Irish lilt. "I'm with Sotheby's."
"Gunther's my middle name," said Dan, standing. "My father uses it, so we don't have to deal with the 'junior-senior' thing."
"Oh, a thousand pardons. I heard Rawlins and naturally I thought--"
"No problem, everybody does it." They shook hands. "Call me Dan. Come on in." Marcy turned to go, but Dan waved for her to stop. "When you get a minute, call Sammy's cell phone and tell him that Georgie's coming for lunch on me."
She leaned on the door frame after the two men entered Dan's office. "He'll probably bring 'the Council' with him."
"Yeah. I'll spring for them, too. Thanks, Marce." As she disappeared, he turned to McMay. "I'm treating my fans to a couple of hot dogs. They live in the park, but they hang around the museum all the time. I call them the 'Citizen's Art Council.'"
Dan glanced back to the closing door. "And Marcy," Dan shouted, "Tell Sammy to hide the sauerkraut."
Marcy shut the door behind her, and Dan eased back into his plump executive chair. He surveyed the Irishman with practiced eyes and smiled. This one looked green (read ambitious). And he worked for Sotheby's, so he had to be good.
Be careful of that open, freckled face, Dan thought. He didn't want to be seen as shilling for the same people who were driving the price of artifacts out of the reach of most museums.
"Sorry you had to wait, Mr. McMay," said Dan, looking at him steadily.
"It'll be worth it, I'm sure," he replied.
Dan again noticed the blarney in his voice. Trouble. "What can I help you with?" asked Dan, as if he meant it. "I warn you, our budget's tight this year."
McMay dug a sheet of paper from the welt pocket of his jacket and handed it to Dan. "Have you ever seen this piece?"
It was a color printout of a damaged artifact on black velvet. "It's a broken ankh," Dan answered as he passed the paper back toMcMay. "You can buy a whole one in the gift shop if you like."
"I mean this specific one," said McMay. "There's some talk that certain shadow groups, Palestinians and such, are anxious to get the other half. We at Sotheby's think if we could get all the pieces together, the bidding could be astronomical."
Dan frowned. Sotheby's had more important business than scouring museum vaults for fractured antiques. What was his real purpose? "Why come to me?" Dan wondered aloud.
"I thought you might check your inventory. Next to the British and Cairo Museums, you've got the biggest Egyptian collection on the planet."
"True."
"I think this cross may be very old."
"Doesn't mean the thing's valuable. It's busted in half, for godsakes." Dan saw that the Irishman looked crestfallen, so he relented and held out his hand. "Okay, give it here." He accepted the picture of the ankh and flattened it on his desktop. Except for the side-to-side motion of his eyes, Dan remained still for almost two minutes.
When he could hold himself back no longer, McMay blurted out, "What do you think, mate?"
"There are some interesting things about it. See how big it is? This is only a picture, but it looks carved out of gemstone. Not expensive ones like diamonds. Probably a crystal geode. Notice the internal faceting."
"And its age?"
"Carbon dating a mineral won't tell you when it was fashioned. There are clues, though. The size makes me think it was made for ritual purposes, not decoration. It's also inelegant in its shape, but the quartz is highly polished. That might mean it's old. Almost all the later ankhs were made from some ore: gold or silver for the upper classes, base metals for the commoners. If I were to guess, I'd say it came from the Holy of Holies of some temple. Except ..."
"Except, what?"
Dan pulled a book off his shelf and flipped through the pages until he found an illustration of an ankh. "This is an ankh from the Twentieth Dynasty. It's representative. Now compare it with your ankh. Usually, the crosspiece under the loop is shorter. On yours, it could almost be a handgrip."
McMay squinted at the image. "Oh, I see. You could hold it like a divining rod. Could you look for water with it, then?"
Dan wasn't listening. "I'd like to see the rest of it. You know, alot of ritual ankhs were destroyed by early Christians. But this one's cut cleanly in half, not smashed."
"Is that odd?"
Dan smiled. "No, not particularly. In the ancient world, that top loop was symbolic of life's journey. Cleaving it this way might be a clue to its origin. I'd guess it was used in mummification ceremonies. There is a tradition that the early bishops of Egypt wanted all the ankhs smashed because they were signs of eternal life and therefore an affront to the resurrection of Jesus."
"Well, now, nothing like talk of eternal life to perk up the bidding," mused McMay with a sly grin.
Dan held up the printout and put a loupe against a spot near the bottom of the image and shouted, "Marcy!"
No reply.
He went to Marcy's desk in the outer office and sat in front of the computer. Dan placed the picture on the glass of the flatbed scanner and tapped a few keystrokes to transfer the image onto the screen. He zoomed the picture to two hundred percent. Dan saw McMay at his elbow. "I thought I saw something," Dan said to him. "And there it is, a part of a cartouche carved into the base."
"A what?"
"A cartouche. It's a king's name. The Egyptians wrote it inside an oval drawn to look like a rope, like this--see?"
"Yeah. I never noticed it."
"It was hidden in this shadow area, but when I punch up the contrast, you can read it."
"Speak for yourself, my friend. All I see are little birds and squiggles and things."
"Classical hieroglyphs," said Dan with his eye glued to the paper. "Well, this doesn't necessarily tell us when it was made--it could've been an antique when this king got a hold of it--but at least we have a start date on it. The ankh belonged to Tuthmosis III. He's an Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh."
"Is that good?"
"They call Tuthmosis 'the Napoleon of Egypt,' but it doesn't begin to measure how truly great he was. He invaded most of the known world and took it all as his own personal fiefdom."
"And that adds to the price?"
"I couldn't possibly put a dollar figure on it."
"Oh, try."
"A damaged artifact rarely brings top dollar."
McMay pressed on. "But if I had both pieces--?"
"Under five hundred dollars. And that's only because it's a big ankh, and it's carved out of quartz, which is unique."
"Five hundred? That's hardly worth the trouble, Doc."
"You asked."
"If you don't mind," he said, "as long as you're at the computer, perhaps you might check the inventory to see if you've got the other half."
"Two seconds," said Dan, gliding his mouse to the inventory icon. When the dialog box appeared on screen, Dan entered the parameters of his search and double-clicked. A number and a description winked onto the monitor. A hit.
"This looks like it." Dan leaned back in his chair. "What do you know." Liam McMay flashed his brightest smile, then pushed back his cuff to note the time on his watch. "You've been a marvel, Doctor. I think I've got all the help I require."
"Sure?"
"Absolutely." He paused for a second, then leaned forward slightly. "Now that I know you have the matching piece, I was wondering ... ?"
"Yes?"
"I could give you a good price for my client's half." Now, Dan was convinced McMay was hiding his agenda. Sotheby's would never make a preauction deal on a piece like the ankh--not if clients with Middle East oil money were so hot for it.
"I'll be happy to take a look when you have it on hand."
"Great, darlin' man," McMay said in his heaviest Lucky Charms accent. "I understand it's en route." He raised a finger. "How do I get out of this bone farm?"
"C'mon, I'll show you the way." Dan stood. He came around the desk smiling benignly and held the door open for McMay. Marcy was just coming back, and they passed in the corridor. Dan stopped her, asked McMay to wait for a moment, and took Marcy aside.
"Marce, when you get back to the office, you'll find a partial artifact on your computer. I found the catalogue number, so if you get a chance, go down to the bins and bring it up to me."
"Right now?" she asked.
"Naw, it's no big deal. Leave it in my desk drawer, and I'll take a look at it tomorrow." He started off.
The tiled corridors were busy with staff on their way to coffee breaks and Xerox machines. One or two faces poked out of theircubicles, checking out the foot traffic. Dan turned into a dim side hall, deserted and bare. He escorted the Irishman to a featureless double door and pushed it open.
They stepped across the doorsill and back thirty centuries into the rich, black land of Qemet, where they stood, facing the stern granite figure of Amun-Re. McMay let out a small gasp as his eyes accustomed to the half-light. It was as if they had been trapped in an ancient tomb.
He followed Dan through a short passage into the main gallery. The room was huge with shafts of smoke-filtered sunlight bathing the ancient exhibits from high clerestory windows.
"Through the double doors. Leads you right into the lobby."
"Perhaps we can talk again," he said.
Dan excused himself, but turned back before leaving the gallery. McMay was hunched over one of the showcases. It held the scrolls of Nekhen, the ones Dan had unearthed from a First Dynasty mastaba which had served as the crypt of a holy man. These papyri were perhaps the oldest copy of the Book of the Dead ever discovered. That one find had sealed his reputation in Egyptology.
The Nekhen scrolls formed the crux of his often-challenged theory that the Osiris legend was, in fact, a much mythologized version of the lives of an actual Egyptian clan that may have ruled the Nile delta in prehistory. Dan wondered, as he walked back to his office, if the Irishman from the auction house was aware of the significance of the exhibit, or was simply looking at the drawings of the brown naked girls that had been propped up behind the scrolls to show the daily life of the period. He voted for the naked girls.
Dan left and McMay walked off a moment later. He blended with a bus tour of people and disappeared through the gallery doors.
Copyright © 1999 by Steven Siebert