by Aaron Elkins
Gabra nodded, stirring sugar into his already sweetened glass of tea. "I too believe this to be so."
"If it is," Gideon said, "wouldn't your next step be to find out if there's been any new word of the head on the black market? Talk to the el-Hamids?"
"Yes, but to get information from these people is hard. Also, I think by now that this goes beyond the el-Hamids. It is too large a matter."
Gideon leaned forward. "I have a friend here, a Dr. Boyajian. He thinks he might be able to learn something from people he knows in Luxor, people who might have contacts in the illegal antiquities market—"
But Gideon had pushed a little too far, a little too fast. "Your friend is too much interested, I think," Gabra said curtly.
"I just thought—"
"This is a police matter, Doctor, a matter of..." He searched for the right words. "Of sensitivity, of discretion."
Glumly, Gideon took a sip of the thick, syrupy coffee from its small, squat glass. Was he running into another police roadblock after all? "What's so sensitive about it? Look, there have been two murders. There have been two thefts of antiquities that add up to a single piece of tremendous historical and monetary value. That piece properly belongs to Egypt, but if it's not already out of the country by now it's well on its way. I'd think—"
Gabra was shaking his head. "They will not talk to your friend, they will not talk to me. What we require is to have the help of a—a person with disguise, a—" He fumbled for words again.
"An undercover agent?"
"Yes, an undercover agent, a person to pretend to be a rich buyer of antiquities in search of an Amarna statue."
Gideon calmed down. "That's a good idea."
"We must have a person they do not know, a person who is familiar with Egyptian antiquities. We will have to speak with the antiquities authorities in Cairo. Unfortunately, this may take time—"
"How much time?"
Gabra hunched his shoulders while he used a pair of oversized tweezers to adjust the brazier of burning charcoal that kept the tobacco alight. "A week, no more."
"A week? In a week there wouldn't be—"
"Perhaps three days. If we are lucky, tomorrow, even."
Tomorrow. Bukhra. Well, Gabra might be operating on Egyptian time, but Clifford Haddon's killer wasn't. "Sergeant, there's a murderer at Horizon House. He—or she—is still there, but the more time we give him, the more chance he has—"
"Dr. Oliver, believe me, I have this many times before. To rush in without good preparation is bad. A proper undercover agent must first be found. Then he must be explained the situation, he must understand—"
"How about me?" Gideon said, startling himself.
Gabra appraised him for a good twenty seconds, through two pulls on the narghile. For a single, teetery moment Gideon thought he was going to go along with the idea, but then he shook his head. "This is not possible."
"Why not?" Now that he'd adjusted to having made the suggestion in the first place, he was beginning to see some merit in it. The only part that daunted him was the prospect of telling Julie about it, but he'd work that out later. "They don't know me. I know a fair amount about antiquities. I think I could do a pretty convincing imitation of a collector or a dealer who didn't have too many scruples—"
"You don't know to speak Arabic—"
"Why would a rich American collector speak Arabic?"
"You have no false identification."
"You couldn't have some made up for me?"
Again, there was a flash in Gabra's eye, a brief, eager weighing of pros and cons, but again it dulled. "It is too dangerous," he said with finality. "Already one American is killed. No. We will wait for a proper undercover agent. In the meantime, I have plenty of questions for your friends in Horizon House."
"But—"
Gabra smiled and shook his head. "Go slowly, Doctor. You're in Egypt. May I tell you an old Arabic saying?"
"Sure," Gideon said with a sigh. Who knew, a few words of guidance from the Koran might be what he needed.
Gabra steepled his fingers and looked sagacious. "How does the camel fuck the ant?"
Or maybe not from the Koran. "How?" Gideon asked.
"With patience," Gabra said.
Chapter Twenty
"Fortunately," Phil said, "I have a plan. Trust Phil to have a plan.
He had been lying in wait in the shade of a fig tree, angularly wedged into one of the wicker armchairs on the patio, when Gideon had returned from his talk with Gabra. He had listened with exclamations of excitement and interest to Gideon's accounting; his own researches, it seemed, had also led him to the shadowy el-Hamid family. He too felt an undercover agent was required. And he had a plan.
"What is it?" Gideon asked doubtfully. He hadn't much cared for Gabra's bukhra approach, but he wasn't wild about the idea of a Boyajian Plan either. "If it involves imitating an Egyptian police colonel, forget it."
"Ha, ha," Phil assured him, "nothing like that at all. As it happens, you're John Smith, a rich American antiquities dealer somewhat lacking in scruples. I'm acting as your agent." He glanced at his watch and unfolded himself from the chair. "Let's take a walk around the compound. I've been sitting here waiting for you since two-thirty. We meet them at five, which doesn't give us much time to get our act together."
"We—you—"
Phil had taken a couple of steps down one of the shaded paths before Gideon got his voice and his legs going and caught up with him. "You set up a meeting with these guys for us?"
"Yes, I did," Phil said with pride. "No easy matter."
"How did we get into it? I thought it was the antiquities police you wanted to get involved."
"I know, but I thought we might as well cut out the middlemen. Do you know what these plants are? The spiky ones? I always like to throw a few plant names into my books. Promotes credibility."
"They're agave. Phil, what the hell are we supposed to be meeting them for?"
"Ostensibly, because you're looking for a few little gewgaws to add to your stock without the bother of applying to Customs, or paying import duties, or other such nuisances. Actually, to see if they've heard anything about the head that might be helpful."
"Phil, if you set this up, then you already must have talked to them."
"I did talk to them. Some of them, anyway. God only knows how large the entire clan is."
"Well, why didn't you just ask them about the head yourself, then?"
Phil shook his head and clucked. "I don't know, for a supposedly intelligent man... Look, Gideon, these things take a certain amount of subtlety, of—"
"I know. Sensitivity. Discretion."
"Correct. You don't just walk up to them and ask. You negotiate, you express interest in buying a few things, you make it worth their while. I can't do it because they know me and they know I don't have enough money to be a serious collector. But you—you're John Smith. I've told them just how rich and avaricious you are. They can't wait to meet you. It'll be fun, you'll see."
"And how am I supposed to bring this delicate mission off with my eight words of Arabic?"
"That's why you have me along," Phil said reasonably. "They think you're paying me a commission to interpret. So those are agave. Ugly buggers."
They smiled greetings at a workman who was serenely pruning a leggy hibiscus trellised along an archway separating the main house from the annex.
"What if they ask for identification?" Gideon said.
Funny how he'd jumped from one side of the fence to the other in less than an hour. In the cafe, Gideon had been the one hatching plots and Gabra the one raising barriers. But working within the law and under its protection, collaborating with the sober, practical Gabra, had been a different prospect from trying to put over some harum-scarum deception with the breezily confident Phil.
"You won't need any identification," Phil told him. "These people aren't going to frisk you or demand proof of who you are. They're just diggers, poor bastards who hope to sell
what they find for a few piasters. They're decent people at heart, trying to scrape by any way they can. They're not dangerous."
"Oh, right."
"It's the dealers, the exporters, the middlemen with the clean fingernails who are the vicious ones—because at that level there's real money involved. The el-Hamids and people like them aren't the violent type."
"Tell that to the guard they killed."
"Yes, well, there is that," Phil allowed, "but you must admit that was clearly unintentional."
"I'm sure that was a great comfort to him. Look, assuming I'd be crazy enough to go along with this, what would we do with this information we gathered? We'd pass it along to Gabra, right?"
"Of course. That's the plan. Now then: let's go up to my room. I have something I want to give you before we get started that should, ah, help put a good face on this, shall we say."
"I haven't said I'm going to do it," Gideon said.
"Of course you'll do it. I never had a moment's doubt. You just feel you ought to give me a hard time for form's sake. Really, I don't mind."
Gideon opened his mouth to argue but laughed instead. He wasn't sure just where along the line he'd swung over, but there it was, despite his objections: of course he'd do it. If the two of them didn't, who would? Besides—had he been spending too much time around Phil?—it did sound like fun.
"One question," Gideon said. "What's the hurry? Isn't five o'clock pushing it a little?"
"I thought it might be better to be off before Julie gets back from the site. I'm not sure she'd approve."
"I can handle Julie," Gideon said.
Phil just laughed, a spontaneous peal of genuine amusement.
They had circled the main complex a couple of times and now returned to the patio. Stepping into the shade of the second-floor balcony brought a slight but immediate reduction in heat; something like getting out of a broiler and into a low-temperature oven.
"You'll probably have to buy a few things from them to establish your credibility," Phil said, searching through his wallet as they climbed the stairs. "They'll want American dollars, not Egyptian pounds. I have fifty dollars, what about you?"
Gideon checked. "A hundred."
"That ought to be more than enough. These people aren't used to seeing very much for their labors." He handed his bills to Gideon. "Now look. We'll turn over anything we come away with to the police, but I don't want the el-Hamids getting into hot water over it. I know that offends your stern sense of justice but those are my terms. I trust it will be all right with you? In the interests of the greater good?"
"It'll be all right with me. I just hope we end up with something Gabra can use."
Phil unlocked the door to his room and went to the air conditioner to flick it on. "I think it would be best," he said, "if you wore a disguise. What I have in mind," he said, opening the top drawer of the bureau, "is a beard."
"Come again?"
"A false beard and mustache. Fortunately, your hair color is almost the same as mine. Ah." He removed a plastic bag with a dark mass inside.
"A beard?" Gideon said. "What, with wires to hook over my ears? How about a pillow for my stomach?"
"No, no, this is an up-to-date little item; never travel without it. I use it often, most notably in Damascus a few years ago to successfully convince a supercilious government official that I was a close relative of the president of Syria."
"Didn't you wind up in jail over that?"
"Well, yes," Phil said, "I suppose you could say that, but it wasn't the fault of the beard." "Thanks all the same—"
"Gideon, it's quite possible that you've been noticed around Luxor. It's also quite possible that one of the far-flung band of el-
Hamids is working at Horizon House even now. It wouldn't pay for you to be recognized. It might even be dangerous."
"Dangerous? These decent, everyday—"
"I'm not concerned about the el-Hamids. I'm concerned about word of your interest getting back here. Haddon was apparently murdered over that head—by someone who is now at Horizon House—or have you forgotten for the moment?"
Gideon was silent. He'd forgotten for the moment.
"I wouldn't want the same thing to happen to you; it'd probably be up to me to get your body back to the States too, and it's a damned bother." Phil pulled the room's single chair into the center of the floor. "Now sit down and let me get this thing on you. I've had practice."
Gideon sat.
While Phil pressed and repressed the silky mustache and goatee into place, they went over their strategy for the meeting. It took fifteen minutes, at the end of which Phil stepped back for an artistic evaluation.
He nodded his satisfaction. "I don't believe we need to bother with the false eyebrows. Shall we go?"
Gideon got up to look in the mirror over the bureau. He'd worn a beard years before and had thought it suited him, but that one, while close-cropped, had pretty much been allowed to grow where it pleased. This one was fussy and pinched, a finicky little topiary beard sitting on the front of his face like a mat.
"I look" he decided, "like a poodle."
"You look corrupt," Phil said approvingly, "as if you ought to be sidling around the Casbah with a fez on your head and six false passports for sale in your breast pocket. All in all, not a bad image to cultivate tonight."
"I'll do my best. Any other advice?"
Phil thought for a moment.
"Yes," he said. "Try and look rich."
Chapter Twenty-One
When Phil asked to be taken to the Shari el-Jihad the taxi driver had protested.
"No, you don't want to go to that place," he told them. "Not for tourist, only for Egyptian peoples."
But he had unwillingly complied, and Gideon soon understood his initial reluctance. Luxor, like most of the Nile cities, was laid out in parallel bands of decreasing prosperity. Along the river the Corniche was a glittering filament of affluence, but with every block traveled inland the glitter diminished and the squalor increased. Their driver, muttering disapproval to the last, took them beyond the souks in which they'd grazed the evening before and let them out in a narrow, unpaved maze of shoddy two- and three-story tenements, recently built but already stained and crumbling. Bleating goats wandered in and out of doorways. Chickens and gaunt, listless dogs scratched in the rutted dirt or ate street garbage. Somewhere nearby a donkey bawled and was answered by a second. The smells were of animals, excrement, and rancid cooking oil.
They were only seven blocks from the opulent Corniche; they might have been on another planet.
Phil led Gideon another half a block, past the guarded, appraising glances of weary, thin men and the hidden eyes of women covered in black from head to toe like shrouded statues, who watched avidly as they passed. Or so it seemed; the thick, dark veils made it impossible to tell what was happening behind them.
At the first corner they turned left into a livelier area; a warren of souks something like the one they'd had their fuul and koshari in the night before, but a level or two downscale; a sort of blue-collar version, so to speak. Street vendors hawked oil-soaked fuul and pita bread ("Not recommended for the timid alimentary canal," Phil said.), charcoal-grilled corn, and fantastically colored soft drinks. In a shop no more than five feet by eight, a man sat in a cracked leather barber chair having his hair cut under a single naked light bulb. Next door was a stall selling used television sets with chipped screens and missing knobs.
And next to that was their destination, a dingy, six-table cafe packed with men hunched over tea or coffee, arguing over Arabic newspapers, and smoking cigarettes or narghiles. Walking through the entry way produced an immediate reaction: conversations were suspended, heads were raised, every pair of eyes was on the exotically dressed strangers. The waiter, carrying a tray with two cups of coffee, stopped in mid-stride. Gideon's skin prickled. In the fug of cheap tobacco smoke, the men, who had seemed merely weary a moment ago, suddenly looked like a pack of assassins. Even the two elderl
y, white-mustachioed constables in mildewed black uniforms, who had interrupted their backgammon game to watch, looked sinister.
Gideon glanced uncomfortably at Phil. "Are you sure we know what we're doing?"
"Not really, no, now that you mention it. Oh, we're supposed to go to a room in the back; that much I know."
They crossed to the far wall under a continuing barrage of silent scrutiny. In passing, Phil said a few words to the waiter, who responded with a nod. Only when they pulled the rickety double-doors shut behind them did the hum of conversation resume.
They found themselves in a bleak, harshly lit room half as large as the outer one, with rough, colorless walls grimed by smoke and oily hands, and two inert, dust-covered ceiling fans. The only furnishings were a single round table and five chairs, with three waiting men seated on them. There were no greetings. One of the men, with a square-cut white skullcap that came down to his eyebrows and a curling black beard that rode up his sweating cheeks almost to his eyes and put Gideon's prissy little affair to shame, motioned them into the vacant chairs and made a curt let's-get-on-with-it gesture. He was Fouad el-Hamid, he said through Phil. The old man beside him was his uncle, Atef el-Hamid, and the young man was a cousin, Jalal el-Hamid.
Phil, smiling, launched into the opening speech that he and Gideon had worked out: he, Phil, was there to assist the famous antiquities dealer, John Smith of Cincinnati, who was interested in enlarging his Egyptian inventory. Mr. Smith was quite wealthy, and was willing to pay well for superior objects but did not care to have his time wasted with fakes or cheap trash. Naturally, he carried only a limited amount of money on his person, but if he were shown something that pleased him he could easily enough return to his hotel, where his traveler's checks were kept.