‘GLADIATORE 3000,’ FLAVIA SAID.
‘Yes,’ Mariam said.
‘Directed, of course, by the wonderful Enrique Gallo.’
Mariam smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘How did he propose?’ Flavia said, responding with a smile of her own.
‘It was at the Cap d’Antibes,’ Mariam said. ‘We were sailing on Dino De Laurentiis’s yacht. Well, I don’t know if it was his yacht. But he was hosting a party on it. The sun was setting… Enrique got on one knee.’
‘You’re positively glowing,’ Flavia said.
‘It was very romantic,’ Mariam said.
‘Did you say yes?’ Flavia said.
Mariam laughed. So did Flavia.
‘It was a big diamond,’ Mariam said.
‘Can I see it again?’
‘Of course.’ Mariam extended her hand. Flavia admired the ring.
‘You first met how?’ she said.
‘It was on the set of Headhunter’s Bloodbath,’ Mariam said. ‘A Margheriti picture we shot in Almeria in Spain. I die halfway through the movie. Enrique was assistant to the DP.’ She shrugged. ‘It was just meant to be,’ she said.
‘You’ve built an impressive résumé since Black Dirt,’ Flavia said. ‘Genre fare like those two Ferdinando Baldi Westerns you made early on, Margheriti of course, now Gladiatore 3000 – but you also had roles in art house films, most recently in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, and in Godard’s Je vous salue, Marie—’
‘I go where the work is,’ Mariam said. ‘To me it is only the role, the chance to play my part.’
Outside on the stage, the lights waited. They murmured soothingly. There were only the lights, and when they were turned on her she came alive, and everything else was just the antechamber. This is what she couldn’t say, that she couldn’t explain to a reporter: it didn’t matter if she was a zombie or the girl who drowned or was tied to a stake, the romantic interest or the girl back home or a sad clown (a blink-and-you-miss-it background shot in Verhoeven’s De vierde man), a woman fighting to save her family (in Yousry Nasrallah’s Summer Thefts), an alien or a cartoon squirrel (a small but memorable voice role in a Ralph Bakshi short). And she remembered with aching clarity the first time she heard anyone yell ‘Action!’ and the cameras were turned on, and she walked across the large room from one side to the other, carrying the laundry, trying not to look to where the cameras were…
*
All that day was ordinary, but she got her break at last as she stood by the laundry room door, about to go to lunch. A man she hadn’t seen before, an important man in a service suit with a green name badge on it, with a thin waxed moustache and a sweaty face, stopped her abruptly and barked, ‘You!’
‘Sir?’
‘Where is the usual girl?’ the man demanded. ‘You lot are like clucking chickens since all this nonsense started. Take this’ – he pointed to a basket full of freshly laundered sheets – ‘to the second floor immediately.’
‘But sir, I have never—’
‘Do it!’ the man barked. He mopped his brow. His name badge said Mr Ali. ‘I don’t have time for this,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir,’ Mariam said.
She picked up the laundry basket. She followed the corridor, found the doors, stepped through them.
Suddenly she was in another world.
Marble floors and muted colours, the rich cool shade of high-ceilinged rooms and slow-moving fans. Men and women who looked busy and important wore the sort of clothes one only saw in movies, new and expensive. Ice tinkled in glasses. Front-of-house staff moved with dignified purpose, exuding calm efficiency. No one paid the slightest attention to Mariam.
She walked almost blindly, found the elevators before being grabbed by the arm by a man in a jacket whose name tag said Mr Rahim.
‘Use the service elevator, girl!’ he said. His thick moustache, white woven into the luxurious blackness of it, quivered as he spoke.
‘Where is it?’ Mariam said.
‘There, girl!’
He took her to one side of the lobby, where a smaller, discreet elevator waited. Mr Rahim pressed the button, waited for the doors to open, pushed Mariam in.
‘Where are you going?’ he said.
‘Second floor. Mr Ali sent me.’
Mr Rahim pressed the button for her, stepped outside the elevator, regarded her with mute disapproval until the doors closed on his visage and she was left alone. She hoped she wouldn’t see Soraya. Things had been tense between them for a while now, and Mariam had the distinct impression her mother tried to avoid her at the hotel. Soraya seemed to regret letting her daughter into the place she considered hers, where she had a life of her own, divorced from the realities of Mokattam and their home.
Mariam understood it. Here, her mother could be herself, at least a different version of herself, not the daughter of Zabbaleen, not the mother of a Mariam, but a woman who had her own, separate existence. Mariam didn’t begrudge her that. But she felt hurt all the same, and the two emotions, acceptance and resentment, swirled inside her like acid in the pit of her stomach.
The elevator pinged softly. The doors opened. Mariam carried the laundry to the end of the corridor, her feet making no noise on the carpet. Two maids with a trolley were at the far end.
‘About time,’ one of them said. Neither of them was Soraya. They vanished through the open door of a room with an unmade bed in disarray and piles of clothes on the floor. A tray of food and two empty wine glasses were left outside on the floor. Mariam snuck a look at the room list clipped to a board hanging from the trolley’s side. The two women paid her no attention. Dr Müller’s room (do not disturb before twelve) was on the third floor.
There was no one else around.
Mariam took the stairs.
*
‘Yes?’ Dr Müller said. ‘Come in, come in. Don’t touch the artefacts.’ He was a thin and nervous-looking man with a prominent forehead and weak blond hair. He fiddled with a pipe but never seemed to light it. Mariam stepped in. She looked around her uncertainly.
Mona was right – the room was filled with all kinds of antiquities, old sheesha pipes, hand-carved backgammon boards, rolled-up rugs, loose mosaic tiles and glass fragments and clay pieces. A slowly assembled, beautiful blue glass bottle took pride of place on a low table, its missing pieces lying beside it along with a brush and a pot of glue.
‘Stunning, isn’t it?’ Dr Müller said. ‘Byzantine. I’m something of an amateur archaeologist, you might say. You speak German? English? French?’ He seemed lonely, eager to talk.
‘English,’ Mariam said.
Dr Müller made a face. ‘Such a barbaric tongue,’ he said. ‘But there we are, there we are. Well, I won’t get in your way, miss. I will go on the veranda.’
‘Dr Müller,’ Mariam said.
Dr Müller looked startled.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘I didn’t come here to clean.’
‘Then why—’ An awful suspicion came into his eyes. ‘No, no,’ he said, waving his hands and retreating, ‘I told Junker not to send me pr—’
‘Dr Müller!’ Mariam said. ‘I came to talk to you about mummies.’
Dr Müller blinked.
‘Mummies?’ he said.
‘I know where there are some.’
‘Mummies, you say? Genuine mummies?’
‘Yes.’
Dr Müller finally lit his pipe. He drew smoke and blew it out in a blue cloud.
‘Well, that’s a relief,’ he said. ‘I thought Junker sent you. He means well, but I really…’ He stared at her in suspicion.
‘You are sure you’re not a…?’
‘Dr Müller!’ Mariam said.
‘Good, good.’ He puffed on his pipe. ‘Then I am all ears, young lady! You work here, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘No doubt you have some street contacts, yes, yes, perhaps a cousin or a boyfriend? People do offer me finds from time to time. My door is always open!’ He looked at her with his watery eyes.
‘Dr Müller, what is it that you do?’ Mariam said.
‘Me?’ he said, surprised. ‘I’m a chemist. Well, petroleum, mostly. I’m advising your government on some possible drill operations. Fascinating stuff, oil. Do you know, it causes terrible pollution, but we’re not to talk about that. Not good for business, eh?’ He tapped his nose, almost dropped his pipe, then looked about him in some confusion.
‘We are all scientists in my family, do you know,’ Dr Müller said. ‘My great-grandfather – or was it my great-great-grandfather? I forget – he knew Darwin. Darwin!’ He looked at her in expectation.
‘About those mummies,’ Mariam said.
Dr Müller nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well, then. I would need to see them, of course. Arrangements will need to be made. It is hard to get such things out of Egypt. A lamentable state of affairs.’
‘They will be in Cairo early next week,’ Mariam said.
‘I go to Alexandria tomorrow for a few days,’ Dr Müller said. ‘Too much noise here with this film crew around. How can I make contact with you on my return?’ He still looked at her with some suspicion. She couldn’t blame him. She must seem mad to him, bursting in like this. Only his greed saved her from being reported.
‘I will slip a note under your door,’ she said.
‘Excellent,’ Dr Müller said. His pipe had gone out. He fumbled with a match. ‘A mummy would be just the thing to round off my collection,’ he said. ‘I could put it on display in my living room back in Munich.’ He lit his pipe; he sank into a reverie; he seemed content. Mariam quietly withdrew from the room.
*
On her return to the laundry she found everything in disarray, the girls chatting freely, Umm Jalil and Umm Zayed in the middle of an argument, and Mr Ali pacing back and forth and mopping his brow from time to time. No one had noticed Mariam’s absence, nor was her sudden return commented upon. The steam continued to rise into the air, the great washing machines kept spinning, and it took Mariam a moment longer, having returned to her station (and attempting to pretend she had been there all along) to realise that there were three strangers in the room.
The first one she already knew. It was Thomas Greene, the director. Beside him was a man who looked quietly competent, and measured things with a small device in his hand, and talked to Thomas Greene animatedly, pointing from time to time and framing little windows with his fingers.
Twice Thomas Greene looked her way, and once he smiled.
The third person with them was a woman in her early to mid fifties, small and trim, impeccably dressed, with no rings on her fingers but a bracelet on her arm, very small and delicate, and two small and delicate diamond earrings, which between them must have cost a small fortune. She looked directly at Mariam once, and said something quietly to the director, who nodded. The woman looked at Mariam again. She motioned her to come over.
Mariam, stupefied, abandoned her iron and approached the foreigners.
‘You’re Mariam,’ the woman said. ‘Soraya’s daughter?’
‘You know my mother?’ Mariam said, surprised and a little discomfited.
The woman nodded.
‘My name is Henrietta Feebes,’ she said. ‘I knew your father, long ago.’
‘I never met anyone before who knew my father,’ Mariam said. She looked at Henrietta Feebes in longing. ‘What was he like?’
‘He was a man,’ Henrietta Feebes said. She said it as if that summed up everything. Then she said the words that were to change Mariam’s life.
‘How would you like to be in a movie?’