Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

The Phoenician moves away from the wall and comes up behind them. There is no glitter of gold and jewels, only a sort of opaque mass.

“It’s empty,” the second tomb robber shouts.

“No,” says the first. “Those are the palls. You don’t know shit about death, kid. Those are just the linen palls. It’s Death’s hope chest in there, sonny. Here, look.” He stirs the palls and reveals a coffin shaped not like a man so much as some trophy of a man, tight and stern and scowling as an Academy Award. Its skin is a tattoo of hieroglyph and chevron. In the dim light the mummiform coffin gives the appearance of someone fat dressed in unflattering swatches of chain mail. Its surfaces break up the light of the torch held down to investigate, disperse it in weird blue and gold tints on the faces of the robbers.

“Pay dirt,” the second tomb robber proclaims after a pause.

“Nah,” says the older thief, “it’s wood. You don’t know wood from Shinola.” He appears to feel around the side of the coffin with his fingers and apparently presses some button or lever which triggers a springlock, popping the coffin open like a lady’s compact. Another mummiform coffin is revealed in hand-in-glove relation to the first.

“The five hundred hats of Bartholomew Cubbins!” says the young tomb robber. He places his hands on the tiled, golden scales of the second coffin, palming its lumpy contours as if he were copping a feel.

“That’s just gold-plated wood,” the first robber murmurs, “inlaid with glass paste.”

So, the Phoenician thinks, not only a mind like a key but a geologist as well. A tailor’s affinity for fabric; there’s Geiger in him, some litmus vision.

Now the older thief feels around the edges of this coffin, his chin raised and an expression on his face as if he is judging the taste of his food. He is exactly like the attendant in a filling station whose fingers seek a clasp which will raise the hood of your car. He finds it, and the lid of the second coffin snaps into the contours of the first.

The kid tomb robber laughs. “It ain’t any Pharaoh’s mummy at all, it’s a nest of fucking matrioshka dolls.”

“Pay dirt,” the first tomb robber says. “That’s gold, my old son, nothing but gold.”

“Did you ever?” The boy whistles.

“It’s useless to us. We couldn’t even lift it.” Nevertheless their eyes travel up the long horizontal shell of the dead king — this priceless golden Easter egg of a Pharaoh which seems to float in its sarcophagus as in a bathtub — taking in each detail, its crossed arms and big golden gloves that grasp the shepherd’s crook and flail, Pharaoh’s and Osiris’ carrot and stick, its great head in three dimensions like some coin of ultimate denomination. They study the weird sphinxy headdress, oddly like hair turbaned in wrapped bath towel. Its open eyes seem not blind so much as distracted, as though its pupils, large and black as handballs, witness something going on extraordinarily high in the sky. Its sweet lips look as if they taste their own goldenness.

“Okay,” the older man says, “here we go, then,” and again he touches something, and the last veil groans marginally upward, its great weight lying on it like gravity. “Lift, lift, ” the first thief commands, “get the crowbar in, get some leverage. Now prop the lid with your bar. A little more. That’s got it. There.” The mummy itself, exposed now, lies under the final raised lid as under some gold tent protected from sun, and the Phoenician and the kid see what they have come for: the Pharaoh’s funerary mask which has been placed over the head and shoulders of the mummy just as Anubis’ jackal’s head had been fitted onto his human body. For all the delicately wrought human features of the mask, the mummy is mysteriously bestialized by it.

They stare at the fantastic face, prefigured in each of its protective coffins but only as a paper silhouette prefigures flesh. They have not been prepared for this; all they can do is stare. They are looking at Egypt’s most precious materials — gold, lapis lazuli, faïence, quartz and chalcedony. The Phoenician himself cannot take his eyes from the raised lapis lazuli brows that describe an arc from the nose almost to the ears, or from the lapis lazuli lined eyes like the unjoined halves of spectacles. He peers closely at the eyes themselves, stares at the canthi where the angles of the upper and lower lids meet, at the red wattles at the outer and inner edges there, the queer caruncles of God.

The second tomb robber looks at the vulture and cobra, symbols of Upper and Lower Egypt, which seem to grow out of the Pharaoh’s forehead, rising spectacularly, ribbed and thick and aloft as the underedge of erections.

The first tomb robber gazes at the long blue faïence beard that looks like a plaited hocky stick. “All right,” he says, breaking the spell, “let’s get to work.”

He takes up a position behind the mummy, and for all his previous delicacy now grabs hold of the mask with both hands and pulls at it roughly. It comes off like a saddle. He puts it down, takes a knife and slashes the bandages.

“Hey, man,” says the second tomb robber, “don’t do that.”

The first tomb robber lays the knife in the coffin and tears at the bandages with both hands, opening the Pharaoh like a package. The cloth squeals apart and he plunges his hands inside and pulls out necklaces, gold rings, bracelets, fingerstalls, a scarab brooch, golden pectorals, a spilled piñata of Tiffany implement. “He was gay,” he laughs. “This was no king; this was a fucking queen.” He reaches inside once more, gropes and brings out a bandaged parcel, holding it up, rapidly unwinding it, tumbling the linen strips like a fisherman dealing line. It is the Pharaoh’s natron-dried, embalmed heart. He raises it above his head. “What a good boy am I!” he shouts, and shoves the heart into his garments with the rest of the jewelry. “Now, mate, now we scarper!”

“Hoy,” says the other.

It is too late. Perhaps the noise of the sarcophagus slamming to the floor had alerted them, or the pounding on the coffin seals, or the older man’s shouts, or maybe they’d been tipped off, but when the thieves gathered their booty and made for the antechamber the flics were already there, out of breath — they’d been running and, not knowing the way as expertly as the first tomb robber, stumbling — but in sufficient numbers to put escape or even struggle out of the question. The Phoenician looks around for officials, and everywhere among the men shouting orders at each other and pressing forward to get a better look at the haul or to inspect the damage he thinks he can make them out. There are chief inspectors, priests (part clergyman and part guard assigned to protect the tomb), higher-ups, ministers and deputies from the court, important civilians who sat in the highest councils — all the grace and favored, singers, guests, even popular athletes.

It is what he expected. It is a big bust, and his only worry is that harm might come to the tomb robbers through some dumb grandstand play by one of these social commandos before they can be safely hustled out of there. “Hoy,” he shouts in the confusion, “let’s play this one by the books, men. It’s too big to blow in the heat of anger.”

He needn’t have worried. Obviously acting under the highest orders, the police were almost rougher with the spectators than with the suspects. Quickly they collected the evidence, organized the crowd and marshaled them all out of there. They even thought to leave a detail behind until the shrine could be put back together and resealed.

The arrest was swift and correct. A brief announcement was made to the public and the prisoners were put under special guard. The Phoenician requested that he be permitted to stay with them, but, as he anticipated, this was out of the question. They did permit him to remain in the building where the men were being held, however, a concession that came as something of a surprise. He offered money to the jailer who had told him he would be allowed to stay, but it was politely turned down.