Stephen’s tea cup rattled as he set it in the saucer with a jerk.
“My room! Then I did hear someone moving around.”
“You did,” Papa Antonio said. “I think that someone comes to your room just as to Leonardo and Jenny. He opens the door the littlest bit, but there is light within. He draws back, unwilling to have you give alarm. To permit this would be to stop his comrades who are doing such good work. Perhaps he plans to have them help him after their work is done, perhaps you are to be let live and he will slip away.”
The young linguist’s mouth was opening and shutting, but no sound came forth. Jenny took mercy on Stephen, inserting a question of her own to give him a chance to recover his equilibrium.
“How did the men get in here?” she asked. “Over the roof?”
“I think not,” Papa Antonio said. “The door to the storage room used by my guest the textiles merchant is unlocked. He found it so when in the commotion he awoke. Once he heard there had been intruders, of course he thinks for his wares. There is evidence that several men hid within among the boxes and bales.”
“Did he know his porters?” Jenny asked, already knowing how unlikely this would be.
“No. He hired a gang boss on the docks when his boat came in. The boss brought his own men. Probably these three simply picked up bales of fabric, carried them inside, then hid themselves. The lock is not difficult to open. It is meant more to keep someone from wandering in than to prevent the door from being opened.”
“They were lucky,” Stephen said, “but I see they didn’t trust in luck alone to get away.”
“No,” Papa Antonio said. “Why cross the courtyard twice? That is where they would most likely be discovered. Why chance the locked front door? My porter keeps half an ear awake in case someone needs him. The window is so much easier.”
“It seems to me that they may have intended to come in through one or more of the windows,” Neville said thoughtfully. “The arrival of your guest with his purchases simplified matters, and they did not hesitate to adapt their plans. Three men could have removed the grille from any of our windows fairly quietly if it had already been loosened, then they would slip in and…”
His gaze fell to where Jenny’s neat bandaging wrapped his chest.
“What did they want?” Stephen asked plaintively. “I mean, is this the same gang that went after Sir Neville years ago? Are those men connected to the bandits in the desert who foiled Alphonse Liebermann’s first venture, or was that mere coincidence? They were dressed like Anubis, and Anubis is the protector of the dead.”
“I wish I knew,” Neville said.
He was about to say more when Emily, who had been listening in mingled horror and fascination from one side of the room, gave a sudden sharp cry.
“Is everything all right, Emily?” Jenny asked, turning sharply, her hand dipping to where her six-shooter waited, heavy and reassuring in the pocket of her dressing gown.
“I’m fine, Miss Benet,” Emily said, looking nervously at her. “I just remembered something the porter gave me when I went back to the kitchen. I’d forgotten until now.”
She held out a flat, white rectangle addressed to “Sir Neville Hawthorne and Companions” at Papa Antonio’s address.
Emily continued. “The porter said he found it dropped near the doorway. Maybe one of those men was carrying it.”
Jenny accepted the envelope and held it to the light, feeling dully certain what she would see.
“I know the handwriting,” she said, tilting the envelope so that Stephen and Uncle Neville could see. “It is our correspondent again.”
The two men nodded. Everyone else looked mildly confused. The servants, however, would not pry. Papa Antonio seemed to sense that Jenny must have her reasons for being oblique.
“We’ll leave that letter ’til morning,” Sir Neville said, taking it and placing it in his bedside table, wincing as he pulled his wound. “Even if it spelled out the situation in chapter and verse, we would be no better off. It is late, and I think we should all endeavor to get some sleep.”
“I couldn’t sleep in my room,” Jenny interrupted hurriedly. “I don’t want to seem a coward, but I really couldn’t, not with the bars broken out and everything.”
Papa Antonio agreed. “For tonight we will change rooms. I have already spoken to several stout young men, older brothers of Castor and Pollux, and they are very eager to sleep in these rooms and forestall unwelcome visitors.”
“And we’ll take their rooms,” Stephen said. “Play ring around the roomies.”
He grinned, and Jenny liked him for this evidence of courage. Stephen had been truly frightened when he’d heard that he had been marked for assault along with the others, but he was bearing up well now.
They shifted their accommodations, Sir Neville taking the mysterious letter with him into the room he was sharing with Stephen. Jenny went to sleep with Emily and Bert, those two declaring they would feel much better if they knew that she wasn’t alone.
They would even have given her their bed, but Jenny insisted that a pallet on the floor was sufficient, and proving her determination by lying down and closing her eyes. She lay still, pretending to be drowsing off, and listening to the married couple whispering as they settled down.
Somewhere, as the earliest-rising members of the household were stirring the fires to life in the kitchen, pretense became reality and Jenny slept.
The next morning, soon after Jenny had risen, dressed, and inspected Uncle Neville’s wound, a young man arrived from Eddie Bryce.
“I don’t know if we’re going to visit the pyramids this morning after all,” Sir Neville began apologetically, when the young man introduced himself as Ahmed, one of Eddie’s nephews.
“Ibrahim, my uncle, said nothing to me about the pyramids,” Ahmed replied in English heavily flavored with Arabic. He was clearly confused. “My uncle said to me, ‘Go to the house of Antonio the Italian. You will find three English who are staying there. Give the oldest among them this letter. It will speak for me.’ ”
At this, Ahmed held out a folded sheet of paper roughly sealed with wax, but without an envelope. Asking the boy to wait, Neville opened the letter. It was quite short, and he finished quickly, then held it out to the others, his expression impassive.
Neville,
There was a bit of a dust-up here last night. I was assaulted outside my house by a man wearing a jackal-headed mask. Good thing he was wearing that ridiculous head-gear, otherwise he would have had me. As it was, I managed to win out. There are a few problems about the body, but when I have them sorted out, I will be by. I suggest you stay near to home where you will be safe.
Eddie.
“Your uncle Ibrahim is well?” Neville asked.
“Well enough, though he has some business this morning that must be attended.”
Ahmed looked positively shifty, and Jenny felt certain that the body of the mysterious assailant was not being dealt with through the usual channels. Was Eddie unwilling to present the police with an assassin who wore a jackal-headed mask?
“Tell him we will wait here as he wishes,” Sir Neville told Ahmed. “Tell him, we, too, had visitors last night, but none of them remained to speak with us.”
Ahmed nodded, his coffee-brown eyes widening in appalled understanding.
“Uncle Neville,” Jenny said, remembering her manners well enough not to embarrass the Arab boy by addressing him directly, “should we let our guest go home through the streets alone?”
Ahmed smiled brightly, appreciating her concern. “I am not alone, Miss. My older brother and two of my cousins are with me. I come inside because I speak English.”
“And you do so very well,” she replied.
The boy colored under his tan and salaamed himself away, promising to deliver their reply to his uncle.
Uncle Neville’s amusement at Ahmed’s juvenile embarrassment didn’t last beyond the boy’s departure.
“This doesn’t look g
ood,” he said. “I had hoped Eddie wasn’t included in last night’s fracas. I wonder what he has to tell us? It sounds as if his man didn’t escape. Certainly something could have been learned from the costume, if from nothing else.”
Stephen fidgeted. “We can guess all we want,” he said, “but it won’t tell us anything Eddie can’t after he arrives. I suggest we look at that letter.”
Sir Neville nodded, and removed the paper in question from the inside pocket of his light jacket.
“I’m surprised you didn’t remove it from my keeping while I slept,” he said as he handed the sealed envelope to Stephen. “I noticed you eyeing it as soon as you awoke. Here. I’m a bit clumsy still. You open it.”
Stephen flushed slightly, but took the envelope with such eagerness Jenny didn’t doubt her uncle’s description of Stephen’s impatience was perfectly accurate.
“It’s in cipher, again,” Stephen said, spreading the letter out for them to see.
“Different,” Jenny added. “It’s just a long list of numbers, not a single letter.”
Stephen produced clean paper and writing implements from seemingly nowhere.
“Let’s give it a shot,” he urged. “At least working on it will pass the time. I just wish I believed the Sphinx is going to tell us something we don’t already know.”
“You mean,” Jenny replied with an attempt at lightness, “like the fact that apparently we’re marked for death?”
10
Miriam’s Tale
Eddie arrived while they were still recopying the long list of numbers that made up the Sphinx’s most recent missive. He was not alone. Walking beside him, a veil drawn across the lower part of her face, was a woman whom he introduced as his wife, Miriam.
Neville thought Miriam much changed from the lovely, lithe girl who had courageously stood by Alphonse Liebermann’s small expedition ten years before. Her eyes were still dark and lovely, but the bearing of several children had forever robbed her figure of its girlish grace. Yet the change was not without benefit. There was a poise about this older Miriam, a centered strength, that the fiery Bedouin girl had lacked.
A Madonna now, Neville thought, rather than Joan of Arc.
The courtyard was quiet now. Papa Antonio’s staff was busy repairing the damage from the night before, and his other guests had gone about their business. None had blamed the attack on their host, though a few had looked slantwise at Neville and his associates, and had markedly avoided sitting too near to them at breakfast.
As if cobras might crawl out from beneath our kippers, Neville thought with grim humor, or scorpions from the sausage.
In this relative privacy, Miriam put her veil aside. Apparently, living within Cairo had not completely undermined her Bedouin independence—or maybe she simply felt herself among friends. Only the most restrictive Mohammedans kept their women permanently within harems.
Introductions completed, Eddie did not waste breath on idle chatter. “I’ve heard something about what happened here last night,” he said. “My nephews spoke with the servants. I’d like to hear your version, but I think you need to hear what happened at our place.”
No one disagreed. Eddie sighed, fumbled with his cigarette papers, and at last began.
“As you recall, I left here fairly late yesterday evening. I went directly home, keeping to main avenues—at least as many as I could, though you must understand that in the district where we live, ‘alley’ versus ‘street’ is a fine distinction. I stayed alert, for even without the matters we’ve been discussing, Cairo streets are not safe for a man alone.”
“Woman neither,” Miriam said, and from the throaty chuckle that underlay the words, Neville guessed that he was hearing the tag end of a joke.
The flashing smile Eddie gave her confirmed as much, but he did not pause to explain.
“Our house,” he said, “is rather like this one in that it’s built around a courtyard. However, not having European guests to appease, we don’t bother with windows on the outer walls, not on the ground floor at least. The main entrance is a wide door that goes directly into the central courtyard—you pass through a sort of alley between two blocks of the house to do so, if you follow me.”
Everyone nodded that they did.
“There’s a gate set about a foot inside this alley,” Eddie went on, “that we keep locked unless needed. There’s another door that goes right into one of the living areas that is more commonly used for visitors anyhow, so keeping the gate locked isn’t much of an inconvenience.”
Neville had a fleeting memory of himself telling Jenny and Stephen about how he had been attacked on the eve of his abortive second attempt to find the Valley of Dust. Something in Eddie’s deliberate, detailed narration bespoke a similar desire to avoid dwelling on the unpleasant climax of the story.
What could be so terrible? Eddie was here, apparently uninjured, his wife with him, as surely she would not have been had a member of their family been hurt. Neville fought back an urge to ask questions or attempt to hurry the other man along, but his sense of apprehension grew.
“Rather than wake anyone in the house, I decided to go in through this gate,” Eddie continued. “I was working the key in the lock when I heard a footfall behind me. It was the slightest whisper of leather against dirt, and had I not already been straining to catch the sound of the key turning in the lock, I wonder if I would have heard it. I swung around, one hand going instinctively for the knife I wear at my belt, but I don’t think I was really worried.
“Many of my wife’s relatives come and stay with us, and with winter making travel pleasant once more, I thought the newcomer might be one of these. I did wonder a bit about the hour, but there were reasons that someone might arrive so late—including that travel after nightfall is cooler and more pleasant.
“However, such thoughts fled as soon as I had a clear look at the figure approaching me. His head was that of a gigantic jackal, his attire beneath the long cloak he now let fall to the dirt almost as fantastic—that of an ancient Egyptian god or king, complete to the ankh he held stiffly in his left hand.
“I was so shocked I couldn’t cry for help, though my own house stood at my back. The jackalheaded figure came at me swiftly, that ankh raised as if he’d brain me with it, a longbladed knife held expertly in his free hand. There was an awkwardness to his approach that permitted me to dodge clear, bringing my own knife into play. That’s when I realized that the man wore a mask that covered his entire head, and though the eyeholes were cut large enough that I could see the entire of the human eye within, the mask must restrict his vision.
“I didn’t waste my advantage, nor did I give away what I’d realized. I let him see my fear, though it was fear at being attacked, not at some apparently supernatural manifestation. We dodged around each other. He had reach on me, reach and size, but I had greater mobility. He walloped me a few times with that ankh…”
Eddie peeled back the sleeve of his robe to show some shockingly purple bruises.
“It was carved from wood, solid as a club. I counted myself lucky, though, because that knife of his worried me and I’d already learned the hard way that the upper part of his tunic was made from overlapping leather scales, while the mask was like a helmet for his head. Neither would have been anything to a gun, but they were plenty to my knife. This chap was bigger than me, too, and had more muscle. My only advantages came from that big mask he wore. It slowed him some, and seemed to be hot and heavy, too, for I could hear his breath rasping like he was panting.
“To make a long story short, I got my knife in, up and under his right arm. I must have hit one of the big veins because blood came out like a torrent. He was on his knees almost before I realized what I’d done. He bled out amazingly fast, but before he stopped kicking I realized I’d better cover my tracks. I finished unlocking my gate, then dragged the body into the courtyard. Then I started hauling buckets of water up out of the well, eager to rinse the worst of the blood off the street outsi
de. When I got out there with my first batch a couple of feral dogs were already licking up the puddle. It fair made me sick, but I was grateful, too.
“I was hauling out a second lot of buckets when Miriam came out; the noise of the bucket crank had woken her.” Eddie looked fondly at his wife. “She’s not sleeping well, in her condition and all, and she’d been worrying about me being out so late. She saw the body, still in its mask, and smothered a scream in one hand.”
Miriam smiled with a sort of shy humor. “You learn not to wake the children no matter what, isn’t that true? I will not lie that I wanted very much to scream loud enough to knock the stars from the sky. That dead monster, my husband all wet with blood, it was all so terrible.”
“You’d never have guessed it from how she acted,” Eddie said proudly. “She realized that no one had better see that body. ‘I am awake,’ she said. ‘Someone else may wake, too. Put it in our room. Only the infant is there.’ I did what she said, having already realized that I was wasting my time trying to do what the feral dogs would do much better. I washed up using the water in those buckets I’d just drawn, and by the time I’d made sure my arm bones weren’t cracked, Miriam was kneeling by the body, pulling off the mask, cool as can be. What she uncovered gave us both a horrible shock.”
Miriam reached out and took Eddie’s hand.
“The dead man was one of my cousins, a fierce man, one who lives more in the desert than the city. We saw him once or twice a year when he brought camels into the city. Sometimes Eddie would meet with my cousin’s family for trade. We had never been very close—indeed, I thought my cousin held us in some contempt—but it was frightening to see him lying there dead.”
“I was worried about more than that,” Eddie added. “I’m not loved by any of the authorities. I’m not Arab, so the Arabs don’t trust me. The English never do like when one of their own goes native. The French and Turks have each had their gorounds with me, usually when my ability to translate for someone makes it easier for my client to avoid a whole lot of unnecessary bribes. I’m useful, though, too useful to ignore completely. If I got taken for murder or involved in a blood feud with the Bedouin, I wouldn’t be useful anymore—and I couldn’t expect much help.”
The Buried Pyramid Page 19