Chapter 8 (p.1)
Mr. Ibis wore a hat. It was a sober brown hat that matched his sober brown blazer and his sober brown face. Small gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. In Shadow's memory Mr. Ibis was a short man; whenever he would stand beside him, Shadow would rediscover that Mr. Ibis was well over six feet in height, with a crane-like stoop.
“So when the big companies come in they buy the name of the company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they are as local as Burger King. Now, for our own reasons, we are truly an independent. We do all our own embalming, and it's the finest embalming in the country, although nobody knows it but us. We don't do cremations, though. We could make more money if we had our own crematorium, but it goes against what we're good at. What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have an obligation to use it as best you can. Don't you agree?”
“Sounds good to me,” said Shadow.
“The Lord gave my business partner dominion over the dead, just as he gave me skill with words. Fine things, words. I write books of tales, you know. Nothing literary. Just for my own amusement. Accounts of lives.” He paused. By the time Shadow realized that he should have asked if he might be allowed to read one, the moment had passed. “Anyway, what we give them here is continuity: there's been an Ibis and Jacquel in business here for almost two hundred years. We weren't always funeral directors, though. We used to be morticians, and before that, undertakers.”
“And before that?”
“Well,” said Mr. Ibis, smiling just a little smugly, “we go back a very long way. Of course, it wasn't until after the War Between the States that we found our niche here. That was when we became the funeral parlor for the colored folks hereabouts. Before that no one thought of us as colored—foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored. Once the war was done, pretty soon, no one could remember a time when we weren't perceived as black. My business partner, he's always had darker skin than mine. It was an easy transition. Mostly you are what they think you are. It's just strange when they talk about African-Americans. Makes me think of the people from Punt, Ophir, Nubia. We never thought of ourselves as Africans—we were the people of the Nile.”
“So you were Egyptians,” said Shadow.
Mr. Ibis pushed his lower lip upward, then let his head bob from side to side, as if it were on a spring, weighing the pluses and minuses, seeing things from both points of view. “Well, yes and no. ‘Egyptians' makes me think of the folk who live there now. The ones who built their cities over our graveyards and palaces. Do they look like me?”
Shadow shrugged. He'd seen black guys who looked like Mr. Ibis. He'd seen white guys with tans who looked like Mr. Ibis.
“How was your coffee-cake?” asked the waitress, refilling their coffees.
“Best I ever had,” said Mr. Ibis. “You give my best to your ma.”
“I'll do that,” she said, and bustled away.
“You don't want to ask after the health of anyone, if you're a funeral director. They think maybe you're scouting for business,” said Mr. Ibis, in an undertone. “Shall we see if your room is ready?”
Their breath steamed in the night air. Christmas lights twinkled in the windows of the stores they passed. “It's good of you, putting me up,” said Shadow. “I appreciate it.”
“We owe your employer a number of favors. And Lord knows, we have the room. It's a big old house. There used to be more of us, you know. Now it's just the three of us. You won't be in the way.”
“Any idea how long I'm meant to stay with you?”
Mr. Ibis shook his head. “He didn't say. But we are happy to have you here, and we can find you work. If you are not squeamish. If you treat the dead with respect.”
“So,” asked Shadow, “what are you people doing here in Cairo? Was it just the name or something?”
“No. Not at all. Actually this region takes its names from us, although people barely know it. It was a trading post back in the old days.”
“Frontier times?”
“You might call it that,” said Mr. Ibis. “Evening, Mizz Simmons! And a merry Christmas to you too! The folk who brought me here came up the Mississippi a long time back.”
Shadow stopped in the street, and stared. “Are you trying to tell me that ancient Egyptians came here to trade five thousand years ago?”
Mr. Ibis said nothing, but he smirked loudly. Then he said, “Three thousand five hundred and thirty years ago. Give or take.”
“Okay,” said Shadow. “I'll buy it, I guess. What were they trading?”
“Not much,” said Mr. Ibis. “Animal skins. Some food. Copper from the mines in the upper peninsula. The whole thing was rather a disappointment. Not worth the effort. They stayed here long enough to believe in us, to sacrifice to us, and for a handful of the traders to die of fever and be buried here, leaving us behind them.” He stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, turned around slowly, arms extended. “This country has been Grand Central Station for ten thousand years or more. You say to me, what about Columbus?”
“Sure,” said Shadow, obligingly. “What about him?”
“Columbus did what people had been doing for thousands of years. There's nothing special about coming to America. I've been writing stories about it, from time to time.” They began to walk again.
“True stories?”
“Up to a point, yes. I'll let you read one or two, if you like. It's all there for anyone who has eyes to see it. Personally—and this is speaking as a subscriber to Scientific American, here—I feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse them—for they'll talk about the odd, but they won't talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it's true or not. I mean, here's a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here's another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who's descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows what'll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. That'll shake a few things up, you just wait.
“Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the west coast—what in later days they called the slave coast or the ivory coast—they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of times: they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I suppose you're going to say, but, Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn't have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes.”
Shadow hadn't said anything, and hadn't planned to say anything, but he felt it was required of him, so he said, “Well, weren't they?” The last dead leaves of the autumn crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.
“The misconception is that men didn't travel long distances in boats before the days of Columbus. Yet New Zealand and Tahiti and countless Pacific islands were settled by people in boats whose navigation skills would have put Columbus to shame; and the wealth of Africa was from trading, although that was mostly to the East, to India and China. My people, the Nile folk, we discovered early on that a reed boat will take you around the world, if you have the patience and enough jars of sweet water. You see, the biggest problem with coming to America in the old days was that there wasn't a lot here that anyone wanted to trade, and it was much too far away.”
They had reached a large house, built in the style people called Queen Anne. Shadow wondered who Queen Anne was, and why she had been so fond of Addams Family–style houses. It was the only building on the block that wasn't locked up with boarded-over windows. They went through the gate and walked around the back of the building.
Through large double doors, which Mr. Ibis unlocked with a key from his keychain, and they were in a large, unheated room, occupied by two people: a very tall, dark-skinned man, holding a large metal scalpel, and a dead girl in her late teens, lying on a long, porcelain object that resembled both a table and a sink.
There were several photographs of the dead girl pinned up on a cork-board on the wall above the body. She was smiling in one, a high school head shot. In another she was standing in a line with three other girls; they were wearing what might have been prom dresses, and her black hair was tied above her head in an intricate knot-work.
Cold on the porcelain, her hair was down, loose around her shoulders, and matted with dried blood.
“This is my partner, Mister Jacquel,” said Ibis.
“We met already,” said Jacquel. “Forgive me if I don't shake hands.”
Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. “What happened to her?” he asked.
“Poor taste in boyfriends,” said Jacquel.
“It's not always fatal,” said Mr. Ibis, with a sigh. “This time it was. He was drunk, and he had a knife, and she told him that she thought she was pregnant. He didn't believe it was his.”
