The Sunbird

wonderful times.’ Her tone had a hundred intimate shades of invitation and promise.

‘Lunch? That’s wonderful, Professor. Why don’t I pick you up. I have a hire car.’ She gave me a triumphant thumbs-up sign.

‘The Bell at Hurley? Yes, of course, I remember. How could I forget.’ She made a sick face at me. ‘I so look forward to it.’

The silver Jaguar slid into the car park, and I saw Sally at the wheel. With a scarf in her hair and laughter on her lips, she didn’t look like a girl who had sat fourteen hours in the cramped seat of an intercontinental jet.

She slid out of the car, giving me a flash of those wonderful sun-browned thighs, and then she was coming towards me, hanging on the arm of Eldridge Hamilton, and laughing gaily.

Hamilton was a tall stoop-shouldered man in his fifties; a baggy Harris tweed suit with leather patches on the elbows hung like a sack on his gaunt frame. His nose was beaky, and his bald pate shone in the pale sunlight as though it had been buffed up with a good wax polish. All in all he was not formidable competition, but his little eyes sparkled behind the heavy horn-rimmed glasses and his lips were slack with desire, exposing a mouthful of bad teeth, as he looked at Sally. I found it a hard price to pay for his services.

Sally led him to my table, and he was six feet from me before he recognized me. He stopped dead, and I saw him blink once. He knew instantly that he had been taken, and for a moment the whole project hung in the balance. He could so easily have turned on his heel and walked out.

‘Eldridge!’ I leapt to my feet, crooning seductively. ‘How wonderful to see you.’ And while he still hesitated, I had him by the elbow in a grip like a velvet-lined vice. ‘I’ve ordered you a large Gilbey’s gin and tonic - that’s your poison, isn’t it?’

It was five years since last we had met, and my memory of his personal tastes mollified him slightly. He allowed Sally and I to ease him into a seat and place the gin convenient to his right hand. While Sally and I bombarded him with all our considerable combined charm he maintained a suspicious silence, until the first gin had gone down. I ordered another and he began to thaw, halfway through the third he became skittish and voluble.

‘Did you read Wilfred Snell’s reply to your book Ophir in the Journal?’ he asked. Wilfred Snell was the most vociferous and merciless of all my scientific adversaries, ‘Jolly amusing, what?’ And Eldridge neighed like a randy stallion, and clutched at one of Sally’s beautiful thighs.

I am a man of peace, but at that moment I was having difficulty remembering it. My expression must have been a sickly grin, my fingernails were driven like claws into the flesh of my palms as I fought down the temptation to drag Eldridge around the room by his heels.

Sally wriggled out from his exploring hand, and I suggested in a strangled voice, ‘Let’s go through to lunch, shall we?’

There was a quick game of musical chairs at the dining-room table, as Eldridge tried to get a seat within clutching distance of Sally and I tried to prevent it.

We out-foxed him on a cunning double play, allowing him to settle down triumphantly beaming over the top of his menu at Sally who was backed into a corner beside him, before I cried, ‘Sally, you are in a draught there.’ And smoothly as a pair of ballet dancers we changed seats.

Then I could relax and give the pheasant the attention it deserved, although the burgundy that Eldridge suggested was nothing if not gauche.

With characteristic tact Eldridge brought up the subject we had all been flirting with.

‘Met a friend of yours the other day, big flashy chap like a cross between a male model and a professional wrestler. Accent like an Australian with the flu. Had some cock-and-bull story about scrolls you’ve found in a cave outside Cape Town.’ And Eldridge neighed again at a volume that momentarily stopped all other conversation in the room. ‘Damned man had the cheek to offer me money. I know the type, not a bean to bless himself with, and talks like he’s made of the stuff. He had “shyster” written all over him in letters two feet high.’

Sally and I gaped at him, struck dumb by his astute grasp of the facts and his masterly summation of Louren Sturvesant’s character.

‘Sent him packing of course,’ said Eldridge with relish, and stuffed his mouth with breast of pheasant.

‘You probably did the right thing,’ I murmured. ‘Incidentally the site is in northern Botswana – 1,500 miles from Cape Town.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Eldridge asked, expressing disinterest as politely as one can with a mouthful of pheasant and rotten teeth.

‘And Louren Sturvesant was on Time Magazine’s list of the thirty richest men in the world,’ murmured Sally. Eldridge stopped chewing with his mouth ajar, and afforded us a fine view of a semi- masticated pheasant breast.

‘Yes,’ I affirmed. ‘He is bank-rolling my dig. He has put in 200,000 dollars already, and he has set no limit.’

Eldridge turned a stricken face towards me. That sort of patron of scientific research was almost as rare as the unicorn, and Eldridge realized suddenly that he had been within range of one and let him escape. All the bumptiousness was gone out of Professor Hamilton.

I signalled the waitress to clear my plate, and I swear that I felt true compassion in my heart for Eldridge as I unlocked my briefcase and took from it a cylindrical bundle wrapped in its protective canvas jacket.

‘I have an appointment with Ruben Levy in Tel Aviv tomorrow, Eldridge.’ I opened the canvas wrapping.

‘We have 1,142 of these leather scrolls. So Ruby will be pretty busy for the next few years. Of course, Louren Sturvesant will make a donation of 100,000 dollars to the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Archaeology for their cooperation, and I shouldn’t be surprised if the faculty doesn’t have some of the scrolls given to them as well.’

‘ Eldridge swallowed his mouthful of pheasant as though it were broken glass. He wiped his fingers and mouth with his napkin, before leaning forward to examine the scroll.

‘From out of the southern plains of grass,’ he whispered as he read, and I noticed the difference from Sally’s translation, ‘received 192 large ivory tusks, weighing 221 talents—’