by Adam Palmer
‘We want to get the authentic local experience,’ Gabrielle had explained. ‘Or rather my husband does.’
She realized, quite spontaneously, that the afterthought was a nice little touch to make it sound convincing. She knew that Walid and his crew could well relate to that. The Western city slicker who wants to get his hands dirty, and the educated, dutiful wife reluctantly going along with her adventurous husband’s wishes.
‘And you want to go all the way to Cairo?’ Walid asked by way of clarification.
‘Yes.’
If they could make it to Cairo, they had several options, including going to their respective embassies and asking them to liaise with the Egyptian authorities – even if it meant Daniel being returned to the UK and arrested. But what they really wanted was to have a look at the papyrus from the tomb of Ay that Mansoor had told them about – the one at the Cairo Museum. Daniel was hoping that it was the one that Harrison had mentioned – the one that described the resurgence of the plague. It might hold the key to why Harrison was killed and why someone had locked them in the tomb.
‘You know there is no toilet on boat, yes?’
‘We understand,’ Gabrielle confirmed, giving Daniel a dirty look as if to say: Why are you forcing me to go through this?
‘Okay, you have American dollars?’
‘No, only sterling or Egyptian pounds.’
‘Okay, give me twelve hundred pounds.’
He meant Egyptian pounds. But that was still too much – even allowing for the fact that it would take them about five or six days to make it to Cairo.
‘I’ll give you five hundred,’ said Gabrielle.
Daniel smiled; it was obvious that she knew how to haggle a lot better than he.
‘Five hundred?!’ The mock-indignation in Walid’s tone was almost theatrical. ‘For one person I do for five hundred. Give me thousand, I take you all the way to Cairo.’
‘A thousand? Look, we’re not first-timers. This is my fifth trip and my husband’s third. I’ll give you six hundred.’
‘Okay, give me eight hundred,’ he said with a smile. ‘I do for you for eight hundred.’
‘Seven hundred,’ she replied, matching smile for smile.
‘Why you do this to me? Where else you find beautiful boat like mine?’
That was not exactly the way she would have described it; ramshackle old dinghy might have qualified. But she had to be careful not to overplay her hand. Most of the feluccas operated south of the Esna lock, between Luxor and Aswan. They wanted to get to Cairo and there were very few feluccas trying to compete with the cruise ships on that northern stretch of the Nile. So it was a case of beggars can’t be choosers. But the competitive streak in her made her decide to have one last try.
‘Seven hundred,’ she said firmly.
‘Seven fifty.’
‘Okay,’ she said. If he had stuck at eight hundred, she would have said seven fifty herself. Still, it was better this way. It was always better to let the man name the final figure and then agree to it.
After the money had changed hands, they boarded the boat and within minutes were drifting downriver. Sails were useless in this environment as the prevailing wind was almost always southerly, taking the boats upstream. Hence the rule of the Nile: sails upstream, current downstream.
All of this made for a very energy-efficient, and gentle mode of transport along the Nile. The vessel had no engine, no ‘indoors’ and no shower or toilet. It was this, as much as the Western preference for comfort, that made most tourists prefer the luxury cruises on offer from the numerous tourist companies, to the Spartan austerity of a felucca.
Walid insisted on making a pot of strong Turkish coffee for them. Having these interesting foreigners on his boat was something of a social occasion, and it was clear that he wanted to get the most out of it. As they drank the coffee, they were content to let Walid tell them about his beautiful fat wife and five wonderful daughters. He was sad that he only had one son, but if that was Allah’s will then he must accept it.
Listening to this man, well past his prime, talk with loving affection about his family, Daniel felt safe for the first time in several hours. It was unlikely that a felucca owner eking out his living on the Nile would sit with his ears glued to the radio to hear the news. To Walid, the things that mattered most were the weather and the exchange rate.
‘So what you do here?’ asked Walid in English, addressing Daniel.
‘Well, my wife is a professor of Egyptology and she has to come here often because of her work. I’m a businessman myself. I don’t really have time for all this academic stuff. I’ve been here a couple of times before and the first time I saw the pyramids and the Sphinx and the Valley of the Kings. But the second visit, I spent most of the time scuba-diving in Sharm el-Sheikh, so this time the missus here challenged me to see the real Egypt. And I figured if I’m going to see the real Egypt, I may as well go the whole way.’
He looked around at the scenery to emphasize the point.
‘What business you do?’ asked Walid.
‘Computer software,’ said Daniel. He figured it would sound suitably Western and wouldn’t prompt too many questions.
‘Ah, Microsoft,’ said Walid.
‘They’re our competitors,’ Daniel replied, laughing. ‘They’re much bigger than us.’
‘I have an X-box,’ said Na’if, obviously anxious to add something to the conversation.
‘This is goooood!’ said Daniel, as he sampled the lamb stew that Walid had prepared for lunch. Walid looked relieved by his reaction. He had apologized for the fact that it wasn’t as good as his wife’s lamb stew. He explained that his wife made the best stew in the world and Daniel and his wife should visit them in Cairo sometime and taste it. He also explained that when he wasn’t taking people on his boat, he usually existed off fish, caught in the river and grilled over an open flame in the metal bucket and grill rack that doubled as a barbecue.
After lunch, Walid and the crew took a siesta on deck, leaving Daniel in charge of the helm.
‘We should have turned ourselves in when we had the chance,’ said Daniel. ‘We might have been able to sort this out if we hadn’t run away.’
Gabrielle’s Nordic face held a cold, implacable look. ‘You seem to be forgetting one thing: they didn’t give us the chance. They started shooting before we could say a word.’
‘I guess they must have panicked because of that story about us carrying some disease. That message on Mansoor’s phone said that you infected that curator at the British Museum.’
‘I know, but that doesn’t make any sense. I haven’t got any symptoms.’
‘Maybe it only affects men.’
‘But Mansoor said it affected the volunteers.’
‘Only a few. They put them all in quarantine, but not all of them were infected – and he didn’t say anything about the gender of those who were.’
‘And what about you? And Mansoor? Neither of you have shown any symptoms and you’ve had at least as much exposure as the curator in London.’
‘Okay, but some people evidently are getting ill. And your uncle did say something about it when I went to see him on the morning I flew out here, just before he was…’
‘That’s the other thing, Daniel. Too many bad things seem to be happening at once. People are getting killed. First Uncle Harrison and the maid. Then the guardian of the tomb. And of course whoever did that also tried to kill us – and Mansoor. I’m just wondering if they’re connected.’
‘We don’t actually know who they were trying to kill. It might have been any one of us.’
‘The question is, Daniel… what are we going to do?’
Chapter 46
‘Can you hear me?’
The big man on the bed didn’t want to hear him. He didn’t want to do anything. All he wanted to do was sleep. But he couldn’t sleep any longer; the time for sleeping was over.
Goliath opened his eyes. There were maybe half a dozen people
in the room. Two of them were nurses. The rest…
They were in white.
Doctors? Policemen?
At the back of his mind, he remembered seeing Egyptian policemen in their white summer uniform.
‘Mr Carter? Can you talk?’
He felt the bandages upon him. Where was he? Hospital. He remembered what had happened to him. Fire… driving …woman… she threw something…
‘Yes,’ he muttered.
Through blurred vision, he fancied that he saw one of the nurses smiling. Was she happy because he could talk? Or was she cunning and scheming, like most women?
‘Do you know what day it is?’ asked one of the men in white coats.
What day is it?
He couldn’t think. How long had he been here? He had been slipping in and out of consciousness.
‘Mr Carter…’
Goliath turned his head and tried to sit up, but he couldn’t.
‘We need to ask you about the car you were driving… the car… it was destroyed by the fire. But we need to ask where you got it?’
‘The woman…’
‘The woman? The woman gave you the car?’
The man who had asked the question looked at his colleague. The other man shrugged.
‘But didn’t the woman have another car? Her own car?’
‘Petrol bomb…’
‘What?’
‘She threw it into my car…’
‘The woman threw a gasoline bomb into the car?’
Goliath made a slight nodding motion.
‘Did you know the woman, Mr Carter?’
Goliath said nothing, just looked at the policeman blankly.
‘Mr Carter, we need to know what’s going on. That jeep you were in was hired by our Deputy Minister of Culture. Someone tried to lock him in a tomb.’
Something flickered in Goliath’s mind when he heard the words ‘tried to lock him’ – did that mean that he had failed?
‘Was it you, Mr Carter? Was it you who killed the guardian and locked him in the tomb? Or was it the woman?’
‘Captain, this man is extremely weak,’ said one of the doctors. ‘He needs time to recover.’
‘I need answers!’ snapped the captain.
‘He isn’t going anywhere. You can ask him when he’s stronger.’
‘I will ask him now!’
‘Look, Captain, it’s obvious that he isn’t fully conscious. At the moment he’s in no position to give you any answers. Give me a day or two to get him better and you can have all the answers you want.’ The tone was as appeasing as the words.
‘All right. You have one day.’
And with that the captain turned and left, followed by another man.
Goliath felt an itch on his nose and tried to rub it. It was then that he noticed that his left hand was handcuffed to the iron bed frame.
Chapter 47
On the felucca, the rest of the day drifted by uneventfully as Daniel and Gabrielle sat on deck with Walid and his two-man crew, chatting and watching the scenery go by. They even both had a go at smoking through the narghilla, which neither of them liked, though Daniel pretended to.
The evening meal was a light affair, after the very filling lunch. As the evening descended upon them, Daniel amused them with his Wild West, cowboy style of harmonica playing. The harmonica belonged to Walid, but he confessed, with some embarrassment, that he had never learnt to play it. But despite the cultural differences, they seemed to enjoy Daniel’s rendition of ‘Clementine’ and ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’.
A few hours later, they were shown to their sleeping quarters – a space on the open deck. Daniel and Gabrielle had the privilege of sleeping in the semi-covered part of the boat, although the cover was little more than a tarpaulin thrown over a metal frame. Walid and his crew slept at the other end of the boat, under the moonlight, affording their Western guests at least a modicum of privacy. But the quilt that Walid had offered them to soften the discomfort of the wooden deck was not the cleanest of items, and it seemed to have lost most of its padding a long time ago.
As he lay there in the darkness, with only the stars, the moon and the lights from the riverbank for company, he saw Gaby as she was now, rather than as the teenage girl that he remembered from his student years. They were lying together like two spoons, him behind her. But even though she was fully clothed, he could see her firm arms and strong shoulders – the powerful build of the swimmer who had won the silver medal in the student games. And he realized how incredibly sexy he found her. Daniel was never one to be drawn to thin, spindly women, but nor was he particularly enamoured of the fat women favoured by some Eastern cultures. He admired fitness and his ideal women were athletes, not sexless supermodels.
And Gabrielle was one such woman. It amazed him to realize now that she had been like this for some time, yet he hadn’t realized even when he worked with her on a dig in Jerusalem. Thinking about her as she was now, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to make love to her or wrestle with her. And if he did wrestle with her, he was equally unsure if he would want to win or lose. Then again, perhaps it really made no difference.
As if sensing his eyes upon her, she rolled over on to her back and then turned another ninety degrees to face him.
‘Have you got something on your mind?’ she asked.
He felt embarrassed, almost as if she actually knew what he had just been thinking.
‘I was wondering, maybe we should turn ourselves in to our respective embassies when we get to Cairo.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, Daniel.’
‘It’ll get us out of immediate danger. Maybe we can be tested for whatever they think is causing this illness. If they’re still worried that we’re infectious they’ll let us stay in the embassies or arrange to have us quarantined instead of shot by trigger-happy cops.’
Gabrielle was looking at him with that same implacable look as before. ‘That’s all right for me, but what about you? That message on Mansoor’s phone said there’s a warrant out for your arrest in England. Do you want to be extradited back to London to face a murder charge before we can figure this out?’
‘I don’t think I will be facing a murder charge.’
‘Then why did they issue a warrant?’
‘Probably because I breached my bail conditions. That’s an offence in its own right.’
‘You may be right, but if they arrest you and send you back, you’ll be putting yourself in their hands – and we don’t know for how long. In the meantime you’ll be treading water, waiting for someone else to solve the mystery. The way I see it, whoever killed Uncle Harrison is probably the same person who locked us in the tomb and we need to find out—’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘I think it’s a reasonable starting point. And then there’s the small matter of these manuscripts that you’re supposed to be translating for our joint paper. This could be the biggest thing in our careers. Do you think the British authorities will let you work on academic papers while you’re a guest of Her Majesty? I can just see the citation: “Daniel Klein is currently the Professor of Semitic Languages at Wormwood Scrubs. He is sharing a cell with a pyramid salesman who…”’
Daniel burst out laughing. If nothing else, Gabrielle’s humour had broken some of the tension.
‘That’s the only thing that’s holding me back,’ said Daniel.
‘What, the prospect of prison?’
‘No, the fact that I still want to solve this mystery – well, actually both of these mysteries.’
‘How do you mean, both?’
‘The disease and your uncle’s missing paper. And I guess also his death and the people trying to kill us. I think you’re right: it probably is all tied in together. Your uncle said his paper was based on a translation of a manuscript in Proto-Sinaitic. We need to find that manuscript. Maybe it’s the one that Mansoor was going to show us.’
Gabrielle thought about this for a moment. ‘So let’s stick to
the original plan. When we get to Cairo we try and get a look at that papyrus that he was going to show us: the one from the tomb of Ay.’
‘I wish we could actually phone Mansoor and find out if he’s all right. Maybe he could even help us.’
‘It’s too risky. Even just switching on our phones could give away our position.’
‘Okay, but how are we going to get into the museum archives without Mansoor to help us?’
He saw the twinkle in her eye.
‘You’re forgetting what he said. He has copies in his office at the SCA.’
Daniel waited for the other shoe to drop. After a couple of seconds, he prompted: ‘And what do you think we’re going to do, Gaby? Just walk in there and take a copy of an ancient papyrus from under the noses of the staff?’
‘No, we’ll go in after lunch when most of them are out. You’re forgetting, Daniel – this is Egypt and we’re heading towards summer.’
‘So?’
‘So, the old ways of the Levant die hard. Between one and four in the afternoon, most of them are away taking a siesta. That’ll give us the perfect opportunity.’
‘Oh, don’t tell me these trusting Levantines leave the door unlocked?’
‘Of course not. But a locked door never stopped anyone really determined, especially if they’re properly equipped.’
‘And I suppose you’re also an expert on picking locks?’ he asked with a sarcastic smile.
‘Oh, do me a favour. This isn’t Charlie’s Angels!’
‘Then how are you going to get us past that locked door?’
She reached into one of her pockets, and with a smile and a flourish, pulled out a key.
Chapter 48
‘These are very serious charges, Miss Stewart,’ the police captain said, leaning forward to emphasize his point. ‘This is no longer just a case of leaving the scene of an accident. According to Mr Carter you threw a gasoline bomb through the window of his car. And I have to tell you that despite the fire, we found melted glass fragments in the burnt-out wreckage that supports this claim.’