Many Words

“Nathaniel Cannon,” said Masaracchia wonderingly. “Of the Famous Fighting Fifty-First—I volunteered in the Aviation Section during the war.” Nonplussed, Cannon exchanged a look with Joe, and Masaracchia hurriedly added, “Before I found my true calling.”

It did explain his nearly-flawless English. “That was a lifetime ago,” Cannon said.

“I remember reading about you and your squadron in the papers. I thought you were a different Captain Cannon—how did you come to air piracy?”

“That was a lifetime ago,” Cannon repeated.

For an awkward moment, Masaracchia stared and said nothing, waiting for the rest of the story. He caught himself and said, “I should not pry. You’ve come to do a job.”

“I’ve flown halfway around the world, escaped a British attack, then moseyed right on up to a real hornet’s nest to do it,” Cannon said. “If the British find out I’m here, brother monk, we’ll get to see how they like being kicked. Let’s hear the low-down.”

Masaracchia nodded. “Yes, of course. In short, we have found a man called Hassan al-Massri, who lives in the village of El Balyana, here.” The map showed the course of the Nile, from the delta all the way into the Sudan. Masaracchia tapped on a point where the river, whose upstream course ran first slightly west of south then just east of it, took an abrupt turn to nearly due east.

“Near Thebes?” said Cannon.

“In that area,” replied Masaracchia. “The place of our interest has been abandoned for centuries. It was known to the Old Egyptians as Abdju, the site of several temples to Osiris and Set.”

“Those two?” Cannon said, going over what he knew of Egyptian mythology in his head. “That must have been tense.”

Masaracchia lifted his shoulders. “We’ll likely never know. The center of Abdju is several miles south from our newly-rediscovered site, and several miles west of El Balyana, which lies on the west bank of the Nile. Mr. Massri lived there as a boy when van der Hoek passed through, and remembered that he set out into the desert. He was not willing to talk very much about where he thought van der Hoek and his men might have been going, but we were able to pry from him a story of a lost temple of Osiris, reclaimed by the desert sands, and several days of exploration served to find it.

They walked around Alexandria’s main boulevard for a little under a mile, passing colorful awnings, open-air markets, and brown brick buildings redolent of coffee and exotic spice. The street opened into a square, a few palms at its center swaying in the sea breeze. People crowded around it, British and Egyptian alike. On the far side sat the church—the Church of the Blessed Virgin, Cannon recalled, a building unlike any of the cathedrals he knew of. The domes, simple half-circles, he might have called Greek or even Mohammedan, and the walls were unadorned, built of the same desert brick as everything else. The doors stood closed, but opened when Cannon pulled on them. In they went, finding a spare interior, dimly-lit by oil lamps and candles. A painted crucifix hung over the altar, and the chalice looked to be mere copper. As the doors swung closed, a priest appeared from further within, blinking at them.

Cannon cleared his throat. “Excuse us,” he said. “We’re here to see Michaelangelo Masaracchia?”

‘Ah,’ the priest mouthed, comprehension lighting up his careworn face. “You are expected.” He walked off.

Cannon looked to Joe, with a raised eyebrow, and Joe jerked his head after the priest. Cannon shrugged and followed him, to the apse and then up a narrow stairway to the left. It grew warmer as they climbed the flight, which doubled back upon itself, and Cannon wiped sweat out of his eyebrows. Before them was a hallway, doors on both sides, and the priest counted off on the right and knocked on the fifth. It opened a sliver.

“Questi sono gli uomini,” the priest said.

“Grazie,” said a voice behind the door. The priest went back toward the stairs, and door opened the rest of the way. “Come in, Captain Cannon.”

The room was small, but it didn’t have much to hold, either—a cot against the wall, beneath a small window cut into the stone, and opposite it a map of Egypt, clipped to a large easel.

Of all the cell’s contents, the one it looked least suited to hold was Michaelangelo Masaracchia. Whereas Cannon had a pilot’s build, trim and, as he would have put it, not overtall, Masaracchia more closely resembled a larger Joe Copeland. He towered over Cannon and Joe both, standing several inches taller than six feet, and he had the build of a full-back or a champion boxer, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested. His nose had the characteristic Roman hook, and his thin-lipped mouth, close-cropped hair, and imperious eyes completed the image. He was young, too, thought Cannon: not quite as young as most of Inconstant’s crew, but still a decade lighter on experience than Cannon or Joe.

They walked half an hour more to reach the Rosetta Gate, passing four redoubts on the heights outside the city, all flying the Union Jack. The slender barrels of anti-aircraft guns poked above the fortifications. Ominous, Cannon thought. The British had toughened up the defenses since his last visit—not surprising, he conceded, given the circumstances surrounding it.

Although the Rosetta Gate stood open, soldiers and machine gun teams stood at the ready in sandbag-circled slit trenches nearby. On the road, guards stopped automobiles and foot traffic alike to check identification papers. Cannon made a show of cowering in Joe’s shadow, the very picture of the oft-abused indentured man. The feel of the thing was important. If the guards made them, it wouldn’t be because of their papers; a five-year-old could do a convincing Ottoman passport.

“Your papers, please,” said a British soldier, as they came to the head of the line. Joe handed him the pair of passports, and he looked them over. “You don’t have entry papers here, Mr. Mustafa.”

“What do you mean?” Joe said, drawing his brows together.

“Entry papers, sir. It’s the new rules, since last week. To get inside the walls, you need entry papers from a British consul.”

Joe shook his head, then turned savagely on his heel to pace back and forth in front of the tommy. “I have never heard something so absurd!” he said. “Where is the British consul?”

The soldier shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Inside the walls.”

“Absurd!” Joe repeated, throwing his hands up. “My servant drove my automobile to overheating, and could not restart it. I must enter the city to retrieve my other car, and, perhaps, a better driver.” Cannon took a step back when Joe’s glare settled on him.

Brow furrowed, the soldier spoke hesitantly. “Rules are rules,” he said, “and—”

“What is your name, soldier? No doubt your ambassador will be most interested in that detail when next I deliver to him my fine fabrics.”

Behind them, someone shouted in Arabic, and the soldier leaned to look at the rapidly-growing line. He waffled a moment more, then finally decided, “Alright. Go on through, but if you get stopped inside and you don’t have papers, it’s not my fault.”

Joe bowed showily. “You are more reasonable than your rules, friend. Thank you.”

“Get on, then, before I change my mind.”

They went through the gate. “Laying it on a bit thick, don’t you think?” Cannon mumbled.

“Silence!” Joe replied.

Bowing his head so that no passerby could see his face, Cannon rolled his eyes.

They’d worked out a few more details, then, and the abbot had given Cannon a meeting place, the Church of the Holy Virgin in central Alexandria. The British had been the dominant influence in Egypt for decades, but in the years since the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire had been making inroads again, and it was not out of the ordinary any longer to see a Turk on the streets of that ancient city. Cannon, his face too well-known to the British authorities, could evade scrutiny disguised as a slave, and between his acquaintance with Turkish and his dashing appearance in a fez, Joe could pass as Cannon’s master.

“You know, boss,” Joe said, “in a year or two we’re gonna say, ‘Remember that time in Alexandria?”

“Not ‘boss’ anymore, efendim,” Cannon said, looking out the windscreen. “You’re Yusuf Mustafa now. Get into character—we’ll be on the ground in twenty minutes.”

“You dare speak to me in such a way?” Joe thundered, drawing his eyebrows together and glaring.

“That’s the spirit, efendim,” Cannon said. “Straighten your fez.”

Cannon kept an eye out for other planes, but Alexandria’s skies were nearly empty that morning, and the Albatross, a freshly-painted Ottoman crescent adorning the tail, winged toward the airfield alone. It crossed the shoreline, and below the left wing, Cannon saw the city laid out before them.

Although Alexandria had two good harbors, it did not shelter at the inland end of a bay, or sit far along an inlet—the coastline ran nearly east-to-west. A great T-shaped spit of land, however, jutted from the otherwise-featureless coast, linking what might have once been a barrier island to the mainland. The bar of the ‘T’ stretched to the east to nearly meet the far side of a divot in the coast; the resulting bay was the New Harbor. To the west, the bar petered out to nothing, a breakwater fixed to its end and running for more than a mile further west, where it and the gentle undulation of the coastline framed the channel into the Old Harbor.

The city proper squeezed into a very small area. Walls surrounded the central district on the landward side, the sea defending the rest of the perimeter. Inside the walls, the ‘T’ and the land around its base were packed with buildings several stories tall, separated by narrow, crowded streets. Outside the Rosetta Gate, at the eastern end of the city, fences and gravestones defined cemeteries, and smaller villages straddled the road. Two miles past the wall was the airfield. With no other planes in sight and no paved runways to speak of, Cannon simply turned into the wind and set the Albatross down.