Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

She felt uncomfortable entering the club premises alone, because men were here with one purpose: to behave badly around women. In her mother’s day, it had been considered a good thing for a man to place a woman on a pedestal; but this was not what had been intended. The foyer was as garish as a child’s drawing, black-light, zebra-skin and pink neon, exuding ersatz sophistication to men who were unfamiliar with the notion of restraint. I bet the blokes who come here would love to work in tall buildings and drive overpowered cars in town, she thought, smiling to herself.

Along the industrial-steel runway that protruded into the main room like a late-eighties video set, a pair of unnervingly upbeat latex-thonged girls dropped and flexed before the drinkers. The preference here was for female extremes: big hair, long legs, hard breasts, fat attitude. She had imagined that the audience would be raucous and dangerously playful, overweight schoolboys hiding their sexual discomfort with jibes and dares, but was surprised to find many groups almost ignoring the dancers. Workers huddled in urgent clusters, jacketless, arguing office politics, holding the kind of intense discussions that had been pumped up to nonsense level by chemical stimuli. Private rooms hosted the stag nights, keeping aggressive behaviour out of the main room. She couldn’t entirely blame the clientele; the work-hard, play-hard ethic had invaded everywhere.

Longbright knew at once that Ubeda would not be found near the stage. She asked a hostess to check the booking, and was sent to a private bar on the first floor. He was seated alone, drinking something with a lot of leaves sticking out of it. She required a pretext for approaching him without drawing suspicion, but after wracking her brain and failing to come up with anything original, settled on a direct approach.

‘Do you have a light?’

He withdrew a slim silver Cartier and flicked it, then looked at her in puzzlement. ‘Do you have a cigarette?’

‘No, I don’t smoke.’

Ubeda did not look happy about having his reverie interrupted. ‘Then what do you want?’

‘I’ve seen you before.’

‘That’s because I’m usually here.’ Now he appraised her. Longbright hoped that the softer lighting was working in her favour. ‘I’ve never seen you before.’

‘Well, I’ve definitely noticed you. We share something special in common. Let me buy you a drink.’ She summoned the bargirl, pointing to Ubeda’s glass. ‘Two of whatever he’s having. It looks like it has a hedge in it.’

‘Two Gold Mojitos.’ All the staff in here are women, Longbright noted. There was probably something like this on the same site three hundred years ago.

‘What’s in it?’ she asked.

‘Rum, mint, molasses, but you switch the soda water for champagne.’ Interesting accent, she thought. Possibly Alexandria. Dead eyes. They’d watch someone being hurt without flinching.

‘I do know you,’ she persisted. ‘You were at the British Museum the other day, in the Egyptian gallery.’ Another tip from Greenwood’s wife. She hoped it would work.

‘I wonder what made you single me out from so many visitors.’ His smile revealed matching gold eye teeth, like some Monte Carlo version of a pirate.

‘You stand out. Besides, it’s mostly grazing tourists. I can spot someone with a real interest in artefacts a mile off.’

‘I’ve been known to look in from time to time,’ he conceded. ‘What were you doing there?’

The drinks arrived. Longbright took a sip, then another. She was a large woman, and could drink most men under the table, but reminded herself to be careful; she was dealing with a man who carried a firearm. ‘I’ve a friend who works at the museum-Gareth Greenwood,’ she said casually. ‘I was meeting him for lunch at the Court Restaurant and saw you.’

He was watching her carefully now, choosing his words with deliberation. ‘Then it seems we do have someone in common. He is an acquaintance of mine. But I presume you already know that.’

‘Actually, no, I didn’t.’

He leaned closer, then a little too close for comfort. ‘What exactly is your interest in my affairs? I wonder if-oh, I wonder . .’

She saw the unveiled accusation in his eyes. He knew that someone had been to his offices, and had connected her with the act of trespass.

‘Mr Ubeda, I’ll level with you. I know who you are because you’re a familiar face to sellers of antiquities. Your interest in Anubian statuary is common knowledge to us all.’

He sipped his drink and smiled. ‘I know all the dealers in London, Paris, New York and Cairo. I don’t know you.’

‘There’s no reason why you would. It’s my job to find potential clients before they can find me.’

His impatience with her was burning through to anger. ‘You’re saying you have something to sell. I’m not some easy mark waiting to be sold a crappy chunk of hieroglyph smuggled from the Valley of the Kings. There’s more necrobilia circulating on the black market these days than there is left in those limestone hills. I have friends working on every excavation gang, and you’re going to tell me you have something no one’s seen.’ He stopped to light a cigarette. She remained silently watchful, knowing that he would continue because he was a collector, and collectors needed to transmit their zeal to others.

‘The necropolis of the New Kingdom has been steadily robbed for the last three and a half thousand years,’ he told her, ‘from the interment of Tuthmosis I to the arrival of Howard Carter-sixty-two tombs and there’s nothing left. Carter was as big a liar and cheat as the rest of them. Take a look at what remains. Merneptah, Amenhotep, Siptah, Sethnakht, a few chambers filled with pretty little bas-reliefs to amuse the waddling tourists. Relics sell because everyone wants to touch the past, but the past makes no sense if you smash it up to make a quick sale. It’s robbed of all purpose and life. It will only mean something if its mythical power remains intact. There’s nothing of interest left in Thebes.’

‘What about KV5?’ she asked quietly. Bryant had briefed her on the most recent developments in Egyptology. In 1994, an American archaeologist named Kent Weeks had discovered the valley’s biggest tomb to date, the burial site of the fifty-two sons of Rameses II. Excavation was still continuing.

‘It’s been over ten years. No treasures have been discovered there.’

‘But thousands of artefacts have been recovered from the debris, pieces of great importance.’

The jet eyes remained too still. ‘Now. . I think you’re trying a little too hard.’

She was about to shift her stool back a little, but he was too fast for her. His hand had slipped around her neck, his index finger looping beneath her gold chain. As he twisted, the chain tightened. Anyone glancing at them would think he had embraced her.

‘Forget Thebes, tell me about this.’

It had been Arthur’s idea to thread the central panel of the sandalwood bracelet on to a neck-chain, in the hope that Ubeda would notice it. ‘It has a special meaning for those of us who are prepared to keep searching,’ she said, thinking I deserve an Academy Award for this .

He let the bracelet panel fall from his fingers. ‘The seeds of regeneration springing from ancient waters. How quickly we forget our own creation myths. Look down there.’ He nodded to the gyrating dominatrices of the blue-lit stage. ‘The artificial pleasures of a civilization in decline.’

‘Then why do you come here?’

‘I own the place.’

I should have been told that, she thought, wincing inwardly. No wonder he was so deeply in debt. How many thousand square feet did he have to maintain here?