Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  We did not all stay indoors all that time; but, when we walked abroad it was in twos, with our bodyguard on the watch, while the third man kept guard over Chu Chi Ying and the apartment. On two or three occasions our men gave us timely warning of an attempt to rush us in the street; and even Narayan Singh, who is a natural-born fighter, swallowed down his instincts and ran like a rabbit at the very sound of danger. The more we ran away, of course, the more impudent they grew, appreciating that we did, not dare appeal to the authorities.

  Nevertheless, what with our alertness and the loyalty of our coloured gang, they hardly did a thousand dollars’ worth of damage. A second mob rising that they tried to stir was nipped in the bud by the authorities, and a patrol of British soldiers in an armoured lorry broke up the mob who were busy trying to break in our door on that occasion.

  But it reached a point at which the only places where we could be safely seen were the verandas of the big hotels, the racecourse and the clubs, where no attack on us was possible without a clash with the authorities; so when my turn came to venture outdoors I put in more time smoking on the veranda of Shephard’s, for instance, than was good for a man of my bulk and active habit. And it was there, on Shephard’s veranda, where one half of transient Cairo sits and the other half passes by, that Zegloush Pasha caught sight of me and walked up as friendly as you please. He sat down in the basket-chair beside me and lighted a cigarette, with an air of amusement, before he spoke.

  “Well,” he said at last, “that was a clever trick you played on me! Oh, yes. Always I admire a man of strategy. Yes, always.”

  “It’s a quality that you and your rascals seem to lack,” I answered, and he laughed, but the laugh was superficial; he was one of those fat men who appear good-natured and sportsmanlike on the surface — who, in fact, deliberately cultivate that air; but it was less than skin-deep.

  “You have been too clever,” he confessed, with a wave of his cigarette and a mock bow. “The worst is that the Chinaman has doubtless told you all he knows. You probably know the value of the secret. That is fine for you, but bad for me! However, the game is not yours quite altogether yet. You realize that, of course?”

  He paused for me to answer him; but some of our said-to-be-civilized conventions are not all they are cracked up to be and I chose the way of the untutored savage, saying nothing, moving not a muscle of my face.

  “You see,” he went on, with the air of a heavy uncle lecturing a spendthrift nephew, “you are a private individual, or perhaps I had better say a number of private individuals — a syndicate, if you prefer it. And you have a secret. But you are vis-a-vis to an organization. You have our political influence to bear in mind. It is true that you have a secret, but it is also true that your secret is valueless — to you, I mean — without the good will of your opponents. Vous comprenez?”

  The way to keep out of an argument is not to say anything, so I did exactly that.

  “Perhaps you do not understand. You are a stranger. Let me explain. If that secret were to become known to the British authorities, it would be worth nothing to anybody but to them. If there is no law under which they could commandeer everything, they would instantly make one. They would be very plausible about it, and the law would be made in the public interest — provided that by that I you understand the British public — but they would make the law immediately — at once — and the proclamation would be issued with the ink still wet.”

  “Whereas, if you had your way?” I suggested.

  “There are laws enough,” he answered. “The treasure that we know of would find its way into channels where it would do the most good — both politically and to certain individuals of whom you may just as well be one, my friend.”

  I was not exactly aware of having reached a friendly basis yet; but let that pass.

  “What’s the great idea?” I asked him.

  “Let us be men of business. Before all else, business. I have received a cablegram from a certain Individual, who informs me that you represent the young woman who, by the merest accident, is the present owner of the property in which we are all interested. There are various ways of negotiating this matter. I might say, to commence with, that, as she obtained possession and title while Egypt was under military law, the civil courts can look into the title and perhaps upset it. I have been advised by eminent counsel that there are more improbable contingencies.”

  “Why don’t you go to law then?” I demanded.

  “Because, my dear sir, I have proposed that we first talk business. The purpose of business — its legitimate purpose — is to make money. Between men of business the question of price is the paramount consideration. Tell me your price, then, and I will see what can be done.”

  “My price for what?” I asked him bluntly.

  “Well, sir, in the first place, I am suggesting to you that you might advise your principal — this already immensely wealthy young woman — that her legal title to the property in question is so insecure that she would serve her own interest best by accepting a reasonable figure — cash down, of course. And unquestionably, since such advice to her, reasonable though it is, would react to our advantage in certain contingencies, we would expect to compensate you in proportion. That is a sound business principle which my friends and I will gladly recognize.”

  Well, as a mining engineer, of course, I have had that kind of proposition made to me-less crudely as a rule-at least a score of times. I said nothing, but may have lost control of my face muscles for a second, and he noticed that he had not scored very heavily. So he brought out the next tool from his kit.

  “I am told you are a mining man”, he resumed. “And of course we shall need a man with great experience of mining to help us in uncovering what we are after, when the time comes, especially as it will be wise to work secretly. So that, if you were to elect to take your compensation in the form of a commission on the proceeds, we are ready to enter into an agreement with you along those lines, as well into an agreement with you along those lines, as well five per cent, what would your idea be as to salary?”

  I came back at him with a question:

  “When would you propose to start digging?”

  “Ah!” he answered. “Your salary as engineer would commence at once. But there are conditions to be considered. Political conditions. Egypt will not remain a British back-garden much longer. When we have control of our own country it will be time enough to begin digging. We would have to wait for the auspicious moment, but you would receive your salary meanwhile, so why should that trouble you? And five per cent of that treasure will certainly amount to an enormous fortune for one individual. Come, let us agree!”

  “I’ll think it over,” I answered.

  “I can give you five minutes,” he said, pulling out his watch.

  “Suppose I don’t give you my answer in five minutes?” I asked him.

  I’m probably not good at disguising my opinion of a man and his proposals. He changed his tactics instantly, and his manner with them, becoming as deliberately insolent as only an Egyptian can be.

  “Miss Leich shall be told the truth, that you have been making overtures for a bribe,” he answered. “You are simply a dishonest employee.”

  I stuck both fists in my pockets from force of habit, for I always do that when I firmly intend not to use them. There were two or three Egyptian officers in dark-blue uniforms keeping a watchful eye from the other end of the veranda, and though it was tempting to take and toss him into the street, that was neither the time nor place. But he mistook the motion, jumped out of his chair, and backed away from me in a great hurry; maybe he had been to the movies and seen Americans using pistols at the least excuse.

  As I produced no gun he grew pompously confident again, and went down the steps to the street like a dancing-master, nodding and waving his hand to the police officers with an air of “There you are, my lads; I’ve turned the trick for you!”

  There is a row of shops opposite, and he entered one
of them in order to observe the fun through the open door. As soon as he had disappeared inside, one of the police officers — a handsome, swarthy fellow with a saucy upturned moustache — crossed to my end of the veranda and accosted me politely enough.

  “Pardon me,’ he said, speaking English perfectly. “Have you a pistol in your possession?”

  “No.”

  “Any kind of weapon?”

  “No.”

  “But three of us saw you threaten Zegloush Pasha only a minute ago.”

  “What do you suggest?” I asked him.

  “That you submit to search, effendi.”

  “By you?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” I said, “but in the presence of the U.S. Consul. I’ll drive there with you, if you care to come.”

  “Would it not be simpler just to prove to me that you have no weapons?” he asked. “We could step into a nom in the hotel here. It would hardly take a mute.”

  That sounded reasonable and he spoke with deliberate politeness as if anxious not to appear threatening or insulting. But it is an old game to plant a weapon on a man and then arrest him. Once under arrest, my individual activities in Egypt would be over for some time to come. However, Dame Fortune intervened. One of the assistants from the U.S. Legation drove by that minute, in a hired cab, with a friend. I signalled him.

  “Now,” I said, “I’ll let you search all you want to.”

  The officer tried to back down then, for he saw that the game was up. But it seemed to me that it was not up. I insisted on being searched.

  So we went into the manager’s private office and all three police officers went through the farce of searching me, with Lynch, the Legation assistant, looking on. I offered no explanation, so he invited me to lunch, and I drove away with him and his friend, to the disgust of Zegloush, whom I could see peering through the shop door.

  Lynch returned to the Legation after lunch, threatening reprisals at police headquarters. The morning hardly seemed to have been wasted.

  That night I took the train for Alexandria to meet Mrs. Aintree’s boat, Grim having agreed to let me have a try to spike her guns. It seemed well to call her off if that were possible. Any kind of interfering fool might tangle such a complex set of affairs as ours. Nevertheless, my going was a blunder, for all I did was to provide her with an idea that she used against us later.

  I explained to Mrs. Aintree that her new husband already had an establishment of wives, and pretended to assume that she would return home on the very next steamer. I even offered to secure accommodation for her.

  She laughed.

  “Supposing what you say is true, and I have yet to see it proved,” she answered, “I am quite able to take care of myself, thank you. I have decided to make Egypt my home.”

  “Very well,” I said, “we’re old enemies, but the time is coming when you’ll need help, Mrs. Aintree—”

  “Madame Moustapha!” she corrected.

  “So remember, Mrs. Aintree, that when you discover, too late, that the U.S. Legation can do nothing for you, my party will be glad to forget old enmities, simply as fellow-countrymen.”

  It was the unwisest break I ever made. I was talking to a woman who specialized in turning good intentions to her own advantage. She tapped me on the shoulder with the handle of a fly-switch.

  “You’re bound to be the eventual loser,” she assured me. “I’ll tell you why. Because you are selfish. You think only of your own pocket, whereas I know what true patriotism means. I am all the time serving’ others. This time I am serving Egypt, as you shall see’.”

  It’s no use arguing with anyone who attributes all the vices to you and concedes all the virtues to herself. I took the next train back to Cairo, expecting to be thoroughly laughed at by James Schuyler Grim.

  However, he did not laugh. He had been hit by a rock thrown through the window, and, what with headache and my report of failure, was looking on life more gloomily than I had ever known him. Back in the Army-back chancing his neck in the desert country eastward of the Jordan, where, if your life is in your hand, at all events it looks, feels, and tastes of life instead of the fetid, hot streets, that are hardly better than a noisy dream of death to a man who loves the open.

  He threw himself back in an armchair and grovelled in pessimism. According to him — and I think he was right at that — the only thing that kept Zegloush and his friends from shooting Atkins out in the desert and seizing Joan Angela’s camp by force was fear, not of the courts — for they could fake a strong case for the lawyers easily — but of the small British coterie who still had the Upper hand in government. They did not dare arouse the curiosity of those men by calling their attention to that strange well in the desert.

  He, Grim, did not dare excite the curiosity of those men either. If information should reach them of the fabulous amount of treasure supposed to be hidden in Khufu’s real tomb, that would be the end of Egypt’s hope of independence for many a year to come; for, according to Grim, while that fit of blues was on him, no argument except the economic had the slightest force with governments the whole world over, and the real British reason for pulling out of Egypt was simply that it cost too much to stay there.

  “And if they stay, there’ll be rebellion. If they go, there’ll be civil war. Whoever gets that treasure will raise hell with it. Yet it’s there, within reach, and it can’t be destroyed!”

  He dissertated for an hour on local politics, describing the corruption that is part of the very Egyptian atmosphere. He sketched Egyptian history for three thousand years, describing how one conqueror after another has descended on the country, looted and debauched it, and has finally been swallowed and made part of Egypt, ready to lie down and grovel for the next invader.

  “Whoever gets those millions can do nothing but raise hell with them!” he repeated.

  He described the fellahin — described them in lurid terms — the seemingly passionless bulk of Egypt’s population that can rise more swiftly than their mother Nile, and wreak more ghastly devastation, without leaving any fertilizing silt, as the Nile does, by way of compensation after their frenzy has died down again to sullenness. The fellahin, who care for, nothing but their bellies and their buffaloes, and yet who can be whipped up into stark-mad, howling fanaticism by any religious hypocrite with politics up his sleeve — the voters-to-be of Egypt!

  “There’s bloody murder ahead, whichever way you look!” Grim prophesied.

  Then he harped on the string of Joan Angela’s coming. She would be assassinated as she stepped ashore. Or, failing that, she would come to Cairo like a typhoon and, in the footsteps of every other moneyed hussy — to quote Grim again — she would try to run things to suit her own crazy notions, would insult the administration, make friends with the wrong people, put the new wine of her absurd ambition into Egypt’s ancient bottle, and explode!

  “She’ll raise hell I tell you. If there’s one thing under heaven that’s as sure as pay-day, it’s that Joan Angela Leich is going to raise insatiable hell!”

  Suppose she should get murdered in the streets of Cairo! Setting aside the shame that would be ours in consequence — the black, ingrowing shame of experienced men who have failed their employer — there would then be the United States to reckon with! The Legation would be forced to take it up, and that might lead to international friction.

  “As if there weren’t enough already!” he groaned.

  You can’t be a public servant — and the firm of Grim, Ramsden and Ross was that or nothing — without a sense of responsibility. And a sense of responsibility is all right as long as your liver is in first-class working order, but it becomes an overload as soon as pessimism creeps into your veins. Then you can’t see the assets for considering the liabilities, and hope, which is driving power in the last analysis, grows cold, fails to expand, and quits. Grim could see all the possibilities of evil in that hour, and not one element of good.

  He made the bald, dry statement that
there was not one Power in Europe that in the present state of the world’s finances would not go to war for the chance of getting hold of Khufu’s treasure. Furthermore, that the sum was so vast that no Egyptian politician would hesitate to plunge his country into anarchy in order to get hold of even part of it.

  “And if Big Business learns of its existence, Lord help us all!” he grumbled.

  He vowed that he could feel the crisis in the air. He swore that Zegloush and his party were only waiting for Joan Angela’s arrival in order to play some trump card that would either win them title to the property or give them an excuse for cutting loose with all the forces at their disposal. I suggested that such forces as they might be able to control were only unarmed rabble, whereat he simply snorted with contempt, and quoted G. B. Shaw by the paragraph, word for word, swearing that the our barons, typified by Undershaft and Lazarus, were making up for the business they lost when the Armistice was signed by running cargoes of arms in whole shiploads.

  “And d’you suppose their governments are trying to prevent them?” he demanded. “Governments are preventing nothing that can bring in revenue.”

  He cited instances; gave the names of ships that had been caught in the act of running arms into Egypt from Italy.

  “D’you kid yourself they’ve caught them all?” he asked. “There are rifles and machine-guns cached all over the place!”

  He went on to assert that the British force still kept in Egypt was no more than an ably managed bluff. He said there were not enough British troops there to hold the country for a week in the event of a serious uprising, and that all they would attempt to do would be to protect the Suez Canal and keep open the route to India.

  “It’s a perfect bastard of a proposition!” he complained. “If we took a hundred tons of T.N.T. and blew that Khufu’s tomb to atoms, that wouldn’t get us anywhere; the money would only be scattered, not destroyed! And it wouldn’t be scattered far enough to accomplish anything. It would merely call attention to the stuff, and make it easier to fight for!”