When his famous archaeologist father is murdered in Egypt, Anson Hunter begins by 'excavating' his father's life in America… ('The Smiting Texts’)

An Egyptologist's life in ruins

They reached the door to his father’s apartment, not far from the Johns Hopkins University campus where the professor had once lectured, Anson Hunter and two Homeland men, Bloem and Browning. They planned to force the door, but they didn’t need to. “Someone has beaten us here,” Bloem said. Anson hesitated. An image flashed through his mind. He pictured a false doorway from a tomb. A door that went nowhere. A magical door between two worlds, the living and the dead. This was such a door, he thought, although this one had a handle to open and bore a number in brass. His father, or some vestigial remains of his life, lay behind the door. Would it really admit him into some new knowledge or understanding of him? Now that his father’s life was over, would he finally make a contact of sorts? How he longed for that contact and had longed for it ever since he was a boy. “You okay?” Bloem said to him. “Maybe we’d better go first.” “No.” He must cross the threshold. He reached out and pushed. The door swung open at a touch. He expected to discover the presence of his father inside. Instead he found the wreckage of his father’s life. The apartment lay in chaos. Books, journals, papers, photographs, print outs, letters and scraps of papers littered every surface, scattered over table tops, a green leather topped desk, a trestle table, even strewn out on the carpeted floor. They went inside. The place was deserted and a quick check around the studio apartment left him feeling empty too. He was stricken with a childlike loneliness and regret that this ruin was all that was left of his father. But there were personal clues left around that struck Anson like a minor revelation. In the bathroom, he learnt that his father must have taken a toiletry travel kit to Egypt on his digs, for here was another set. He saw the brand of toothpaste his father used and the methodical way he squeezed the tube, rolling it up from the base, a bright red toothbrush sitting in a glass, an antique metal scrape shaver, a striped dressing gown hanging behind a door, intimate markers of a life that his father had denied his knowing. He felt like an intruder seeing secrets never meant to be seen by others and by him in particular. Anson felt a grief come up in his chest for the first time. He fought it down. Stop, he told himself simply. You’ve got a job to do. But where would he begin? Torn from shelves like an avalanche of erudition, lay hundreds of volumes on ancient Egypt, medieval Egypt, archaeology, mythology and magic, piled in heaps. He came back to the door. “Either my father was not as methodical as his reputation,” he said, “Or this place has been turned over.” It looked as if it had been hit by a howling windstorm. Even pictures had been torn off the walls. Framed illustrations of Egypt’s ruins by nineteenth century landscape artist David Roberts lay on the floor. Anson looked around the place in wintry bemusement. “Not burglars, I’m guessing.” “They were searching for information.” Approaching the personal effects and papers of the dead Egyptologist’s life was going to be like approaching an archaeological dig, he thought. Was this how his father had felt when approaching the excavation of a ruined site? To go over this wreckage carefully almost called for the methodology of grid method excavation, he thought, groaning inwardly. To do it properly wasn’t just a matter of clearance. Like an archaeologist working on an excavation, he should probably establish relationships in time between the objects, a relative chronology and that almost meant calling on the same disciplines of stratigraphy and superimposition that his father wrote about using in his diggings. Maybe he should establish a datum point, like the desk where his father worked. Anson sighed. No time for that. This is my father’s apartment, not a tomb site. Yet these personal books and papers were parts of his father and, like the body of the god Osiris, who had been ripped into pieces by his enemy, the intruders had scattered Emory Hunter’s life all over the floor... THE SMITING TEXTS (Print and Kindle fiction - Amazon)