What’s going on here, the Phoenician wonders, for whom fine print and subordinate legal clause, loophole and condition and contractual exigency are as clear and straightforward as the exit signs on superhighways. Then he sees the fine translucent alabaster vessel with its gorgeous banded layers — teeth and checks and regiments of painted slaves, friezes of pumpkin and rows of something like nails in colors he has never seen and does not recognize but which remind him of vast latitudes of campaign ribbon. It is here, just beneath the first buxom curve of the high jug, that the first tomb robber means to make the puncture.
“Spread the lip on that skin wide as you can. Here, stand right here, we want to catch as much of this gism as we can. I’ll try to do the hole clean but the goddamn thing may shatter. Whatever happens don’t let the flame anywhere near this shit or we’ll go up like sunshine.”
The Phoenician moves against a wall, his back, he imagines, grazing the strange painted symbols. He feels an odd warmth through the cloth of his shirt. Is it brown craftsmen in white kilts preparing funerary furniture, sawing wood, one man holding the piece steady while the other leans toward him awkwardly, his saw extended like the bow of a cello? Long-eared Anubis in his jackal’s head bending over the mummy on its couch, touching the chest, making the embalmist’s final adjustments like someone straightening a pal’s tie? Osiris, fastidious as a hostess, checking the offerings on the dead man’s table, the decoy food and painted drink? The wailing, grieving women of the house, their breasts bared, arms raised in a semaphore of grief, dust on their heads and in the limp springs of their hair? His flesh takes their electric impression.
“Get ready to catch the juice. It’ll come out like high tide.”
He makes one deft, powerful stroke. The thick shaft goes in neat as a needle, but he was wrong to have worried about the flow. The amber liquid, whatever it is, is viscous, slow and thick as glue. It comes in measured plops, filling the chamber with a sweet sick smell, the odor of vital essence, a human butter lined with brine and the scraped, rendered slimes and marrows. A Pharoah’s liquors indeed, stuff of his godhead, ejaculatory final ethers. The Phoenician and the two tomb robbers reel and sway in a sort of instant drunkenness that sobers as it stuns.
“Wow,” says the kid, “those Rosetta and Avaris traders must be cuckoo. Who’d want this crap around?”
The older man giggles. “Collectors, man. Souvenir hounds. First editioners. That lot.”
“One sip and you’re dead.”
“They don’t drink it, fool; it ain’t any aperitif. They put it in their cellars with the rest of the hard stuff.” He dips his finger into it and holds it under his nose for a second. “A very good dynasty. Yech.” He wipes his hand off on his clothes. “There, that’s enough, close the skin, plug it. I’ve got to stuff something into this bunghole or the smell will put us out.” Closest to the source, the older tomb robber starts to gag. “Quick, get me a rag, a strip of that weave. Over there. On top of that chest in the treasury. Hurry up, will you?”
“That’s no rag. That’s cloth-of-gold. That’s priceless.”
“I’m puking my guts out and the connoisseur here gives me an estimate. Stand aside, I’ll get it myself.” He gropes toward the chest, stumbles over a low couch, blunders momentarily against the brake on a golden chariot which skitters across the floor and crashes into a wall. Recovering his balance he rips the cloth from the top of the chest, knocking a gilded alabaster statuette of the king to the stone floor and shattering it.
“You got good moves,” the other tomb robber says. “Jesus.”
“Forget it. Just plug that hole so we can get to work.” The young tomb robber shrugs, crumples the cloth and stuffs it into the amphora’s open wound. It protrudes from the hole, a golden run of gut. The Phoenician thinks of the gold weave sopping up the Pharaoh’s sublime jams and gravies, an inside-out alchemy that turns gold to dressing. But the smell is stanched and the air clears. What little lies uncollected on the floor is defused when the second tomb robber thinks to pour some of the perfume from the first waterskin over it. “You didn’t use too much, did you?” the older thief asks.
“A couple drops. We can fill her up again from the first whatdoyoucallit, amphora.”
“Okay. Go ahead, pour. Hold it, that’s got it. Good man. Here, set these skins in the antechamber where we can pick them up again when we leave.” They seem pleased to discover that they can cooperate. With a lift of his chin the second tomb robber indicates a gold life sign like a giant key ring that lies on a funerary chair. The older man nods, the kid scoops it up to place with the waterskins in the antechamber, and then both of them simultaneously rub their hands together. They are giddy with greed, high on their mutual visions of untapped plunder, their initial reserve and caution turned by their preliminary success. They know that they are already rich men. They move through the tomb expansively, magnanimous as high rollers.
“The crowbars?” the second tomb robber suggests.
“Crowbars it is,” says the first. “No, not that. Use this.” He strides up to the sculpted, life-size double and wrenches the shepherd’s crook from where it rests like a riding crop on a ledge of hip and along a rail of upturned palm.
“That’s class,” the second says. “Is it real gold, you think?”
“Thirty three thousand-karat.”
They start the short stroll to the sarcophagus, but their initial jauntiness fades as they approach. They come up to it much as they might to a living Pharaoh, tentative, as if each hides behind his own presence, concentrating, queerly chaste, made innocent by the magnitude of the violence they are about to do.
They move silently toward opposite ends and silently raise their tools to the sealed lid. The older man seeks a purchase for the flat wedge of his crowbar, tilts at the seam experimentally, pumping in brief arcs as he would prime a tire jack. It slips out and the second thief swears.
“Easy, old son. This ain’t no beer can.”
“Let me try.”
“No, hold on. I’m not even budging it. You come on over to my side. Maybe if we both try.” The second thief stands behind the first, gets a grip on the long handle as if he were holding a rope in a tug of war. “When I give the signal, push in and up.”
“Wait up,” the young one says, “I better wipe my hands first. They’re all slippery from that Pharaoh grease. Okay. What we really need is a block and tackle.”
“We ain’t got any damn block and tackle.”
“What’s this stuff?”
“I don’t know — yellow quartzite probably. You set? Push…in and up.”
“No good. It’s like trying to drive a spike with your bare hands.”
“Get the mallet.”
“Are you kidding? It’d take months to chisel a hole in that thing with the mallet. Why don’t you give it a karate chop?”
“Shut up. Give me a minute to think.”
The boy, satirically deferential, retires to a throne chair from which he first removes a small ivory casket. He puts it on the floor and props his feet on it. “I don’t know,” he says, “we’ve already got more than I ever bargained for. There must be half a million bucks worth of junk right in this casket I’m resting my tootsies on. Why don’t we just grab what we can and scarper?”
But if the first thief has even heard him he gives no indication. He is walking around the sarcophagus, touching it here, tapping it there, looking for invisible levers. He is the complete cynic who has trained himself all his life to think in an idiom of Achilles vulnerabilities. He simply does not trust walls. He has a cryptographer’s imagination. In his fingers there is a touch for weak link like a blind man’s for Braille. He is a piano tuner of a man who in some other age or different circumstances might have found the Northwest Passage or the source of the Mississippi. He makes his slow, halting circuit of the sarcophagus. “It’s bonded solid,” he says.