by Sax Rohmer
Composedly, Sirena re-fastened her dress and turned to him.
“Didn’t Abdûl tell you?”
Cartaret nodded grimly.
“Yes, Abdûl told me.”
“And about Rod?”
“Yes. Is that—true?”
Again, the tigress eyes flashed, dangerously.
“It is true. You remember—” she swallowed—“how handsome he was? Now—” She paused for control. “He has been to a famous French specialist—and there is hope. But it will take a long time, and cost a lot of money.”
“It’s almost incredible! Surely, the authorities—”
Sirena’s smile was openly scornful now.
“I told you you didn’t understand. Everything here is different.”
Almost an echo of old Abdûl’s words!
“What happened tonight?”
“You saw Selim come in?”
“Selim? The fat Egyptian? Yes. Who is he?”
Sirena’s full lips curled contemptuously.
“He is in charge of some of Aswami’s treasures! I was afraid, although I didn’t think he had recognised me. I was wrong. As I came out of the bathroom, a man who had climbed from the garden to the balcony and hidden in here, sprang on me from behind. They think I am safe until all the lights are out. Then, they are coming back for me!”
Cartaret was thinking that this fantastic affair belonged to the days of the Caliphs, not to the prosaic twentieth century. But all he said was:
“They’ll have a surprise.”
Sirena impulsively, threw her arms about him.
“You must get me away! You have a car. It was this I wanted you to do. But now—it is even more urgent I must be out of here before midnight…”
* * *
As Cartaret drove his Buick from the garage he was wondering to which particular variety of fool he belonged. The role of knight errant he had never fancied. In this particular case, the captive princess was far from a paragon of injured innocence, and her Prince Charming ranked pretty low.
But the atrocious behaviour of Aswami Pasha had fired his blood. Rod Fennick might be no model of an English gentleman, but he was, or had been, a gallant officer, and there are more civilised methods of dealing with fickle girl friends and their admirers than those once practised by the sultans of Turkey…
“Mrs Parradine”, grey haired, bespectacled, and trapped in a mink coat, joined Cartaret as arranged at the corner of Sharia El-Maghrabi, below the Continental. With one swift backward glance, she jumped in beside him. The night air was chilly.
She carried no baggage other than her large satchel purse. She nestled up to Cartaret.
“I don’t think I was followed. But drive quickly. I will tell you the way to go.”
Cairo’s streets were curiously deserted, except in one district through which their route lay, where discordant music and harsh female voices disturbed the night. They left the city by an unfamiliar gate and drove right out on to the fringe of the desert. Cartaret tried to imagine where they could be going.
He slowed down and glanced aside at his passenger.
She had discarded the grey wig and was combing her hair. Its blue-black waves gleamed in the moonlight.
“Which way?”
“Follow this road.”
“Road? It’s hardly even a track!”
“It is an old caravan road. But you will have to drive slowly.”
In this, at least, Cartaret agreed with her. The path was more like a dry ditch than anything else, beaten out by generations of camels stepping in one another’s foot-prints.
Cartaret had groped his way along several miles of this when Sirena directed him to turn east. He could see nothing vaguely resembling a surface, but all the same, as he obeyed, he found himself driving on a sandy but practicable road again.
He recalled, at this moment, that such a road had been made in those dark days when Rommel’s Afrika Korps lay like hungry jackals watching the flesh-pots of Egypt. It led to an emergency landing strip long since abandoned.
Evidently, this was it.
* * *
Cartaret saw a few tumble-down buildings, desolate under the moon. Sirena had the key of one, at some time used as an office. She opened the door and they went in. Some papers were littered on a desk before which was placed an old cane-bottomed chair. An almanac and a map were pinned to the wall.
The night was diamond clear. Sirena had left the door open, and silver light poured right in, touching a dilapidated divan upon which she had thrown her mink coat and the leather satchel purse.
She sat there with the moon mirrored in her amber eyes and smiled at Cartaret.
“Safe at last,” she said, “free! We have some time to wait.”
Sirena opened a little cigarette case and offered him a cigarette.
He crossed, lighted one for her. She looked into his eyes all the time. Then he lighted his own. He went back and sat down in the broken cane chair.
There was a silent interval until:
“I’m sorry you won’t make love to me,” Sirena said softly. “It would make it so much easier.”
“Make what easier?”
“To tell you the truth.”
“Then all you told me was a lie?”
Sirena shook her head.
“Not all of it. You know I didn’t lie about how I was treated. You have seen. And it’s true what Abdul told you about Rod, and what I told you, too. I slipped away from Aswami’s house while he was taking a siesta, and when Selim came into Shepheard’s tonight I knew he was looking for me.”
“Then I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean that Selim didn’t recognise me. But I knew, when I saw him, that I must get away at once.”
“If he didn’t recognize you—” Cartaret began.
“Then who tied me up, you mean? Well, that’s what I think it only right to tell you. I tied myself—with some cord I got from the porters’ office! You were so quick that you didn’t notice my right hand was really free already.”
Cartaret watched her in a new way. Either he had formed an entirely wrong impression of Sirena’s character before, or she had changed. There was something ingenuous about this confession. She wanted to play fair. And there was an undercurrent of sadness.
“Whatever did you do it for?”
“I wanted to make you excited! I thought (because, you see, I know the Service mind) that if I didn’t, you would try to call up consuls, and police—and that would have spoiled everything. I had seen Selim looking for me. I knew he would have been to the police already—”
“Aswami has no legal claim. He can’t detain you.”
Sirena sighed like a tired child.
“Truly, you don’t understand. Please, believe it was the best way-—and forgive me.”
“I don’t believe it was the best way, but say no more about it. What would have happened, if I hadn’t walked along to your window?”
“I should have half untied myself and called out to you. You see—” a new expression came into the amber eyes—“you are still thinking about me as I used to be, before I knew Rod. I love him. I have never loved anyone else, and I never shall—even if…he stays as he is.”
Sirena dropped her cigarette on the floor and crushed it out under her foot.
“Suppose I hadn’t been staying at Shepheard’s? What should you have done?”
Sirena shook her head.
“I don’t know. Thank God you were. I wouldn’t have dared to hire a car. Selim will have called up every garage.”
“I always thought Rod had gone back home long ago.”
“No.” Sirena shook her head sadly. “Rod and a partner bought an old transport plane. They carry goods, and sometimes passengers, between Egypt and Persia.”
Cartaret checked a question just before it could be spoken. He was listening intently, listening to the drone of an approaching engine.
Sirena stood up and threw the mink coat over her shoulders; she picked up her
satchel purse.
“I must go,” she said. “Do one more thing for me. Stay here until we have left. Just close the door. No one ever comes to this place.”
Cartaret nodded.
“As you say.”
Sirena moved close to him. She slipped her arm around his neck. “I am glad, now, you didn’t try to make love to me. For what you have done I thank you with all my heart.”
She kissed him. It was a kiss of pure affection…
When she went out and closed the door, Cartaret found that through a cracked window he had a partial view of the landing ground. He saw a plane touch down and a mechanic scramble out. Sirena was helped on board and the plane was away again in record time.
Cartaret stood there for several minutes, thinking it all over. The shouted instructions of the pilot had been clearly audible—and the voice was the voice of Rod Fennick.
* * *
He was awakened, early the following morning, by a disturbance in the next room. Then, followed a banging on his door.
An English assistant manager came in. He was accompanied by an Egyptian police officer in a field marshal’s uniform.
“Sorry to bother you, Captain Cartaret,” the manager said. “But this officer wants to know if you heard anything unusual taking place last night.”
Cartaret collected his thoughts, and:
“At what time?” he asked.
“At about half past eleven.”
“I was out then. I didn’t return until after one. Why?”
“A certain Mrs Parradine had the next room. She was seen to go out at about eleven-thirty, and she hasn’t come back. Her baggage contains the suit in which she arrived, toilet articles, and so on, and a lot of tissue paper and cord. The whole room is in a state of disorder.”
“What do you suspect? Suicide?”
The manager glanced aside at the police officer.
“We don’t know. I apologise again. Obviously, you can’t help us as you weren’t here.”
They went out.
Cartaret had just come from the bath when the manager returned alone.
“I couldn’t tell you while that damned policeman was standing by,” he explained. “But this disappearance of the mysterious Mrs Parradine is probably linked up with something that happened out at Bûlak last night.”
“What happened there?”
“One of Aswami’s girl friends drugged him and got clear away with a haul of his priceless rubies! I wasn’t on duty when Mrs Parradine arrived—but I wonder. Aswami’s a nasty bit of work, and my own sympathy is entirely with the lady, even if she left without settling her account! Knew you’d be curious, so dropped in to tell you.”
For a long time after he had gone, Cartaret sat smoking and trying to find out where his sympathy lay. He recalled the horror which Abdûl had whispered. He recalled Sirena’s eyes when she had said, “You remember how handsome he was?…He has seen a famous French specialist. There is hope, but it will take a long time and cost a lot of money—”
These recollections settled the point.
But he changed his plans. He decided to leave Cairo that morning.
THE MARK OF MAAT
“What you say is true enough,” Tom Borrodale admitted. “Most professional Egyptologists are unimaginative. Meant to be, I guess. You see, they come across queer things, things which just have to be written off for the good of a man’s health. There’s the Haunted Tomb in the Valley of the Kings where the unwrapped mummy of a strangled girl was found; there’s the empty room in the Pyramid of Meydum; and there’s the Woman of the Great Pyramid.”
He rested bronzed and hairy legs on one chair, leaning back in another—six feet of sunbaked stolidity arrayed in shorts and a khaki shirt. It was the in-between hour, so that Shepheard’s terrace showed as nearly deserted as I had seen it since my arrival in Cairo. There were inky shadows and dazzling high lights, and, save for rather more uniforms than usual, traffic in the Sharia Kâmel was much like the traffic I remembered ten years before.
“You look fit, but a trifle warworn, Tom.”
“Yes.” He nodded and began to fill his pipe. “I joined the infantry, like a mug—and any foot slogger who follows Montgomery wants iron feet as much as iron nerves. Enjoying a spot of leave at the moment.”
We fell silent, until: “You are not one of those, I recall, who believe that Ancient Egypt holds no more mysteries for modern man?” I said.
“Not by long odds.” He threw a worn pouch on the table and took a sip from his glass. “Those I have mentioned, for instance. Then, since your time, a case cropped up which eclipsed, for a while, the Tutankhamen legends. Something quite in your way.”
“What was it?”
“Oh, a classic example! If we hadn’t been in the middle of a number-one war, the home newspapers would have sent special reporters out on the job. It happened to a man we’ll call Lake. You don’t know him, and nothing would be served by using his other name. The second man—a fellow in my own line; experienced excavator and well up in Arab matters—we’ll call Thomson. Then—there was a girl.”
And this is the story which Tom Borrodale told me about Lake, Thomson, a girl, and the mark of Maat.
Thomson, before the war, had been employed by the Department of Antiquities, and was recognised as a sound Egyptologist. His last job (for which he had been “lent” by the department) was an attempt to complete an excavation begun by Schroeder, the American. Schroeder had sunk a shaft, at great cost, by means of which he had hoped to gain access to the tomb of a queen who was also a priestess of Maat (Maat is the Ancient Egyptian goddess of truth, a somewhat mysterious deity of whose rites little is known).
Funds failing or something of the kind, Schroeder went home and this shaft was never completed; but Thomson, who had followed the work with interest, decided to try to influence new capital and to carry Schroeder’s shaft through. This was where Lake came into the scheme of things.
Lake and Thomson had been up at Oxford together; but Lake, who had inherited a considerable property, had blossomed into a fashionable dilettante, whereas Thomson had had to work hard for his living. Lake, latterly (this was just before the outbreak of war), had been pottering about Egypt and had developed a keen interest in Thomson’s studies. Perhaps seeing himself as another Carnarvon, he agreed to put up the necessary funds and, Thomson in charge, they resumed the work.
It seems that Schroeder’s calculations were accurate enough, and in rather a shorter time than Thomson had anticipated, they found their way into the antechamber of the tomb. Further progress was held up by a massive portcullis which offered every promise of a first-class nuisance. However, there were some objects of interest in the anteroom, including a great part of the regalia of a royal high priestess. An amethyst scarab set in a heavy-gold ring and inscribed with the sign of Maat, Thomson pronounced to be unique.
Much encouraged, they had just gone to work on the portcullis when war was declared—and once more Schroeder’s shaft had to be abandoned. Lake, who already held a pilot’s certificate, joined the R.A.F., and Thomson obtained an infantry commission. In due course, both drifted back to North Africa, and both became attached to the Eighth Army. It was during the lull before Montgomery’s great advance that the girl stepped into the picture.
Moira (let’s call her Moira) was an Irish-Australian and had come out as a nurse with a contingent from Melbourne. Her family had plenty of money, and she had been educated in England, and I gathered that she was by way of being a beauty.
Both Lake and Thomson met her socially in Cairo, and Thomson, who found her altogether too attractive for his peace of mind, seems to have resigned her to Lake, slightly the younger man, good-looking, and in every way more suitable; or so Thomson thought. “He didn’t believe,” as Tom Borrodale put it, “that mere brawn, a medium brain, and small prospects beyond five hundred a year could appeal to any sensible girl. Particularly, with a charming and wealthy man, who one day would inherit a baronetcy as competition.”
Thomson was shifted first; and Moira saw him off. There were tears in her eyes, and he decided that she was sorry for him. Although he had tried hard to conceal his real sentiments, he gave her credit for knowing how he felt; he believed that women were like that. To Lake, on parting, he said simply, “Good luck, old man.”
When the campaign really got going, Lake’s squadron was right up in support. But the two men had seen little of each other up to the time that Thomson was sent over on a special job behind Rommel’s lines. His intimate knowledge of Arabic and the Arabs was not wasted. Suitably dressed, he could pass for a member of any one of six or more orders without much risk of detection.
Attired in Senusi style, he was flown across by a roundabout route to be parachuted at a selected point; and the pilot allotted to him was Lake.
Well, they were unlucky. An unsuspected A.A. gun, hidden in a wadi, scored a beauty just as they were turning northward toward the coast. It developed into a race against leaking petrol and faltering engines—and they lost. Lake crash-landed in the middle of what Borrodale described as “God knows where.”
Thomson had a splinter in one shoulder, and lost a quantity of blood; the wound was difficult to dress; but Lake escaped intact. Observations showed that they were about sixty miles west of the British lines. They had, and could carry, sufficient rations and water, sparingly shared, to last them for three days. Their radio had cracked up. It would have been grim enough under normal conditions: being in enemy country made it worse.
They started to trek back; “and,” said Borrodale, “only those who know the gritty, shelterless hell called the Libyan desert can begin to imagine those days and nights.”
* * *
Both were bitten by some unidentified crawling thing while they slept in the shadow of a wadi, and Thomson developed a high temperature. His injured arm swelled to nearly twice its normal size and he began to laugh out loud and talk nonsense. Lake, a man of slighter physique, was not in much better shape. But he did his best to drag Thomson along.
Just before dawn of the third day, Thomson fell into a sort of coma from which Lake was unable to rouse him. Weak as a kitten, himself, he waited until the end. It meant the loss of eighteen precious hours and of nearly all the water. Then, he scraped out a shallow pit and dragged the largest bits of stone which he could carry from a neighbouring mound to make a cairn over his dead companion. It was the best he could do to protect him from the jackals and the vultures.