Nile Shadows

wonder Liffy used to like to slip away from the mayhem aboveground and have a little quiet discussion down here, why not? Never was much good for his people, that mayhem up there.

Joe looked down at the thick wad of forged foreign currency he was holding in his hand. He had picked up the money at random from the neat piles stacked along the walls of the vault, crisp counterfeit bills left over from Ahmad's last run On the printing press, uncounted sums of Bulgarian leva and Rumanian bani and Turkish paras, all of it apparently worth something somewhere.

The Balkans, thought Joe. Always was a confusing concept, as Alice says, and its money is just as confusing as the rest of it. What's one to make of leva and bani in the end? Or for that matter, of paras above all?

He studied the money, aware that something about it wasn't quite right.

Coins, he thought all at once. In real Balkan life this money was never issued in anything but coins, but here's Ahmad turning it out as paper money. Surely the old poet must have had a strong sense of private reality to be able to forge coins as bills, even if they are Balkan bills.

Joe stuffed the money into his pocket and moved uncomfortably around on the hard park bench, his attention drawn to the crude sign hanging over the iron door at the entrance to the crypt.

THE PANORAMA HAS MOVED.

It was an old sign clumsily painted, a slab of whitewashed wood with uneven block letters in green, badly faded by years of exposure to powerful sunlight. Where had the sign come from and why had old Menelik seen fit to hang it over the door of his retirement home? What memories had it held for the greatest archeologist and subterranean graffiti specialist of the nineteenth century?

Joe frowned.

There's something sad about that sign, he thought. Something ciphered too, I would imagine. Surely it's no mere slip of stray sentiment adrift in the gloom, considering what this place has meant to so many people. Of course things would tend to be cryptic in a crypt, that's only to be expected. But all the same I'll wager that sign has a hidden message to it. It would have to down here in old Menelik's mausoleum of stoned coincidences, as Ahmad used to call it, quoting his father who had lapsed into a heavy use of hashish toward the end.

THE PANORAMA HAS MOVED.

Mysterious graffiti, thought Joe, and what might its origins be? Pharaonic? Nilotic? A Biblical writing on the wall after the manner of mene, mene, tekel, upharsin?

Who knows? thought Joe. Best to ask Stern about it when he shows up. When in doubt about a sign faded by sunlight deep in a crypt underground, best to ask a master cryptographer what's really going on, as some old Cairo saying must have it.

Joe turned uneasily. A sound seemed to have come from the corner where the small printing press stood

. . . metal rubbing lightly against metal . . . a soft crunching noise.

Impossible, he thought, gripping the arm of his park bench. Yet a part of the machinery in the corner seemed to be moving, almost as if the manual press were preparing to crank through a cycle.

My God, he thought, of course that's impossible, and steady there, I can't go losing my bloody mind now. These antique shadows are playing tricks on me

But then he jumped, startled, unable to believe it. The small hand-driven printing press was actually beginning to turn over. Meshed parts were moving methodically in some kind of inscrutable order, up and down and sideways, backward and around and in. There was a loud groan and then the machine clattered noisily, cranking out a slip of paper. The paper fluttered and floated down to the floor.

Message from the past, thought Joe, leaping to his feet and rushing over to snatch up the slip of paper . . .

a Greek banknote newly printed. One hundred drachmas. The ink was still wet.

Joe whirled where he stood, taking in the crypt at a glance. The thick iron door was still solidly locked, the massive stone lid was still on the sarcophagus and as so often in life, everything seemed still the same when it wasn't.

THE PANORAMA HAS MOVED.

Joe spun around, peering in every direction. Oh help, he shouted silently, turning over the strange banknote in his hand only to find there was a different currency printed on its other side. . . Albanian money. Ten thousand leks.

Ha, he thought. Inflation in the Balkans as usual and so much for classical Greek values too. They've gone to the Albanians like everything else we once admired. Just nothing's worth what it used to be and that's a fact in this world. . . .

Joe jumped, became rigid. Deep laughter was booming through the crypt, great surges of rolling laughter.

A hand was reaching out of a hole in the wall behind the press, stealthily removing block after block of stone and widening the hole, methodically pushing the blocks aside and stacking them up on the floor.

After a moment a ghostly head emerged from the blackness, an apparition in the age-old rags of a mummy. Without warning the ghostly head jerked back to reveal a dusty masklike face staring directly up at Joe, fierce dark eyes glittering in the dimness, beneath them the third eye of a gun barrel pointed at Joe's head.

Joe's mouth fell open. The revolver disappeared. The ghostly figure crawled forward and then all at once there was Stern standing in front of him, laughing and dusting off his tattered Arab cloak, laughing and laughing and shaking his great dark head.

. . . sorry about that, Joe. I didn't mean to scare you.

Joe hopped up and down.

How's that, Stern? Didn't mean to, you say? Well do you always go around cranking off counterfeit money when you break into a tomb? Just in case you have to pay your way in eternity?

. . . a mistake, said Stern, throwing back his head, laughing. . . . I was groping around and my hand happened to fall on the printing press handle.

Happened to fall, you say? Well after seven years in the desert I just happened to drop in down here to say hello, so hello, you stranger.

Joe laughed too and they embraced, hugging each other.

***

They sat on a park bench near the huge stone sarcophagus. Stern sniffed the bottle of arak in his hands and passed it to Joe.

The honor's yours, you must be thirsty. There's an Arab saying that nothing quickens a man's thirst like seven years in the wilderness.

Joe smiled and took the bottle, admiring it. When Stern had begun rummaging around in the crannies of Ahmad's little printing press, poking into its recesses and finally holding up the bottle in triumph, it hadn't surprised Joe particularly. Somehow it was the kind of thing he would have expected of Stern. An unlikely act in an unlikely place.

Joe glanced sideways at Stern.

Strikes you as a scene you've come across before, does it? Two down-and-out tramps sharing a bottle on a park bench?

Stern smiled.

What happened to that wondrous thirst?

Right. It's got me in its grip.

Joe drank. He turned his head and coughed.

My God that's strong stuff, Stern. But it helps a printing press think more clearly, you say?

Stern laughed.

Ahmad was very fond of his old printing press and he always claimed arak was the best solvent for cleaning counterfeit type.

And I don't doubt it for a moment, said Joe. It's a first-rate solvent for all kinds of things, brains being one and Balkan reality another. But aren't you the tricky one now? Imagine just sneaking in here through a secret passageway like a regular tomb robber on the prowl.

Stern took a drink from the bottle. He lit a cigarette and a smoke ring floated up over the sarcophagus.