Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“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.

“Yeah,” says the second tomb robber, “I could have told you that. Let’s scarper, mate.”

“But it’s still on its original platform.”

“Its original platform.”

“Look down here. See? The nine inches at the bottom are gilded wood. They must have moved the thing in on rollers, then pulled the rollers out and left it.”

“No shit,” the kid says wearily, “so that’s how they did it. The pyramids, now that’s some engineering feat. I mean when you think of the unsophisticated equipment they had. And all the patience…”

“We brought a file. Get the file.” The second tomb robber rises lazily, pokes around in the small pile of tools, finds the file and hands it without interest to the older man. “Bring that torch, hold it down here so’s I can see. I want to study the paint…Yes…No, a little closer. Watch it, don’t singe me…Yeah, see there, where the gilt bunches like badly hung wallpaper? That’s the fault line. That’s where the wood’s rotting. Where’s that mallet? All right.”

And he drives the file into the dead center of the dead wood, where it sinks like a knife into tender meat. Stretched out on the floor and working at arm’s length, he chips away like a sculptor at the rotting wood. But the file is only a foot long, the sarcophagus wide as a car. He sends the blunt end of the crowbar in after it, pounding at the boxcar connections, trusting as always in the mushy physics by which he lives, the leading edge of the file to be deflected by whatever is hard in there and drawn to whatever is soft. He calls for the second tomb robber’s crowbar and fits its blunt end to the protruding wedge of his own. He works in this way for more than an hour — a file, an iron, an iron, the ka’s shepherd’s crook and the mallet — and is almost through to the other side, but not quite, when he runs out of tools.

“Now what?” the kid asks.

“The bunghole. Bleed me a quart of that stuff. Fetch it in one of those vases.”

The older robber takes the substance and butters it along the leading edge of the platform. From time to time, to annul the smell, he has the kid wipe his face with a handkerchief that has been drenched in perfume from the first waterskin. “Now. Clear away anything that can burn. Get the torch.” He offers fire to the soaked wood; slowly it scorches, and the gilt blisters like a toasted cheese sandwich, and finally the fire takes hold. The front third of the platform is burning. The smell is horrible. “All right. The tunnel I’ve made inside the platform should act as a fire-brake.” He pulls the shepherd’s crook gingerly out of the odd train he has made and quickly substitutes the mallet, shoving it in as far as he can. “Go get the flail out of the double’s fist. You should be able to unscrew it. Good. Stand here behind the sarcophagus with me. We’ll watch the fire. When it burns through to the tools we’ll shove. The front should tip forward fifteen to eighteen inches. That’s a tremendous weight. Maybe the shock will jar the goddamn lid loose. Even if it don’t, we’ll have gravity working for us. We’ll worry it like a loose tooth. All right, when I say shove I want you to push up so hard your palms come out your wrists.”

The second robber stands by Neith, the first by Selkit watching the flames crawling along the bottom of the platform like fungus, and at exactly the right moment he yells “ Shove! ” and puts all his weight into it. “I said shove, you lousy skyver, shove. ” And now they both put all they have into it and the massive sarcophagus falls forward the full eighteen inches, making a sound of metal slamming stone. The shock is all the older man could have wished, for the Phoenician can see the thick lid actually stretch, bounce in some irreparable way that sets off tremors in the stone seam that start at the far ends of the lid and meet each other in a ragged, barely visible line. A crack. Hairline but enough, more than enough for this genius, this Columbus of breakage and entrance who would go through it as if it were a door or gate, whose very nature partakes of something like the quality of gas. He puts his crook down and looks up. “Whatever can I have been thinking of?” he asks abstractedly. “We don’t need these toys. Reach in there, mate, and pull our tools out.”

“They’ll be hot.”

“Nah, the breeze cooled ’em off when this big mother fell forward.”

The young robber fishes the tools out carefully and the older one picks up his crowbar and mallet. “See? The fire’s about burned itself out,” he says. “Better let me work at this for a while, kid.” Sure enough, he goes — this man who has lived life like a key — for the seal’s jugular, playing that hairline crack, driving his mallet and crowbar like a poolsharp, playing the angles, putting actual English on his strokes.

“I think it’s coming,” the younger man says, and gets up from the throne where he has been resting and takes up his tools. Together they pry and pull and probe and shove, wordless as movers negotiating furniture around the bends in stairs. The lid is loose, and then it’s off.