by Gore Vidal
He hadn’t thought of this. “I’m not sure. I was pretty vague about the geography. I figured Osman knew where he was going.”
“We’ll look at a map later,” said Anna. She was suddenly shrewd and capable. He had never thought of her like this, but then he remembered how she had been forced to live, by her wits. There was nothing weak or hesitant about her in a crisis.
“Good plan. We’ll also have a better idea when we get back across the river and find out what happened to…that old devil.”
“Why would they want to kill you?” asked Anna in a matter-of-fact voice, as though it were perfectly natural that there were people in the world who intended to kill him.
He chuckled nervously and handed the tray back to her. “You got me there,” he said. “Later on, maybe, when I have something they want, but not now.”
“Perhaps they don’t want you to get the thing they want in the first place.”
“Something in that.” But he was already thinking back to the day before, to the manager at the Karnak Inn, to Mohammed Ali, to what each had said. “Tell me.” he asked suddenly. “Why did you come over here?”
She looked away, pretended to arrange the dishes on the tray. “I had to,” she said softly.
“You mean you were ordered to?”
“Yes…no. Oh, Peter, don’t ask me about it yet. I can’t tell you.”
“Did you tell the manager at the inn that you had gone to Aswân?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I told him anything.”
That cleared that up, at least, he thought grimly.
“You didn’t want me to follow you?”
“No, Peter.”
“You were afraid of me?”
“Not of you, my darling.” She looked him full in the eyes. “I was afraid of falling in love. I was afraid of what might happen to you because of me.”
“Like last night?”
“Perhaps like last night. I don’t know about that.”
“You think some of your Cairo friends might have got in my way?”
She looked away miserably. “I can’t tell, but you shouldn’t have come. I was only going to stay here a day or two, just long enough to think.”
“To think?”
“About us, Peter. I wanted to be by myself, to make up my mind about so many things. I’m caught.” She said this last abruptly, sharply, desperately. “I can’t save myself or you or anything at all.”
“We can get out of the country, Anna.” He pulled her toward him and their lips met, his passionate and hers oddly passive, as though she had no strength left for loving. He was immediately conscious of this; he let go of her. “You don’t care,” he said.
She ran her hand gently over his face. “Care is not the word,” she said softly. “But I do care, very much, too much for your sake. I don’t want you killed.”
“I don’t think I will be,” he said with more confidence than he felt. “Now will you tell me what you’re mixed up in?”
“Soon,” she said distractedly. “Very soon, I hope.”
“Are you in any danger? I mean because of the mess you’re in?”
She smiled. “What a funny word—mess. It means trouble, doesn’t it? No, there is no real danger for me yet. But you must get dressed.” She got to her feet. “The manager found a pair of trousers and a shirt that should fit you. You feel all right, don’t you? Well enough to walk?”
He grinned. “I wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t been up to a little walking last night.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed. For a moment a dizzying green flood engulfed his eyes. He leaned forward, letting the blood rush to his head. When the room came into proper focus, he stood up. Except for a stiffness in his legs, he felt all right.
While he showered in the antique bathroom, he tried to think of ways for Anna and himself to leave Egypt, but each time a plan presented itself, lack of money made it impractical. He would have to find some way of getting hold of enough dollars to get them out before trouble really started, and serious trouble, he was sure, was about to begin for both of them. The business about the necklace was much too complicated to be successful. Too many people knew about it; too many people wanted it. He had become, almost without being aware of it, a target. A goddamned sitting duck, he muttered to himself as he turned off the water and stepped onto the tile floor of the dusty bathroom.
“What did you say?” Anna appeared in the doorway carrying the shirt and trousers.
“I was talking to myself. I was telling myself that if we didn’t get out of here soon there was a good chance we’d stay here forever. Jackal bait, as they say.”
Anna smiled. “We have time,” she said, and she handed him a towel. While he dried himself and shaved with an old-fashioned razor she had found for him, they talked of the future, of what America was like. “In fact, I might even settle down and go to work,” he said, putting on the clothes. They nearly fitted.
“Wild-dogging?”
He laughed. “Maybe that, too. Wildcatting is the word. But I don’t want to. That’s a single man’s game, something for the adventure-loving boy.”
“And you’re not that sort of boy now?”
He pulled her toward him. “Just loving now,” he said, and this time she returned his embrace, her hands caressing his back.
“Good evening,” said Mohammed Ali. They turned quickly and saw the Inspector, standing in the doorway. “I couldn’t be more disturbed over your accident.”
Pete grunted as they moved, all three, into the bedroom and sat down. Anna was pale and distracted, twisting a handkerchief in her hands, the knuckles white with strain. Pete was more relaxed, or at least managed to appear to be. “How come you’re here, Inspector?”
“I am the police,” said Mohammed Ali simply. “Whenever a crime has been committed, we go. It is our duty.”
“And maybe, when there’s no crime, you commit it yourself?”
“Ah, Mr. Wells, you are so ungenerous!” He lit a cigarette with a flourish. Then: “I was notified a few hours ago that an American had been attacked last night in the tombs. I knew immediately who it was and so I came as quickly as possible. We wouldn’t like anything to happen to you, Mr. Wells.”
“I’m sure of that,” said Pete.
“Now, to be businesslike for a moment.” The Inspector pulled a small loose-leaf notebook from his tunic pocket. With a pencil stub he made some marks in it. Then, in a precise neutral voice, he asked for details.
Pete gave them to him, amused by this official display. He did not exactly suspect Mohammed Ali of having made a trap for him the night before, but he was fairly confident that a man with so much information, so many irons in the fire, would probably know all he needed to know about events that interested him, and the movements of Pete Wells these days were obviously of a good deal of interest to the Inspector.
When the interrogation was finished, Pete asked about Osman.
The Inspector looked blank for a moment.
“The dragoman. He was the one who took me here, across the Nile. The old man I’ve just been telling you about.”
The Inspector made another mark in his book. “You didn’t tell me it was Osman,” he said. “I know him. A fine old chap.”
“Well, just tell me what happened to that fine old chap. The last I saw of him, he was streaking down a ravine headed for the river.”
“I will find out for you.”
“You mean you haven’t seen him? He hasn’t got in touch with you about last night?”
Mohammed Ali shook his head. “No, I learned about the accident from the hotel people here. They telephoned police headquarters in Luxor. By chance I was in the building when the call came through.”
“And here you are.”
“And here I am, in the room of the lovely Fräulein Mueller,” and he nodded cordially in the direction of Anna, making the ghost of a salaam with his right hand. She looked away quickly.
“She was good enough to put me up thi
s morning,” said Pete coolly, “when I came here, bleeding like a stuck pig—”
“You look well now.”
“Thank you. I don’t feel it.”
“I can understand,” said the Inspector amiably, “You were in a bad situation. As far as I know, you are the first man in a long time to escape.”
“To escape what?”
“The local people when they perform their…specialty. They work quickly. They take a knife, and then slash, it is done.”
“Stop it,” said Anna, suddenly white.
“The lips are then sewn shut,” said Mohammed Ali, ignoring her, “and the man is left to die.”
Pete felt sick to his stomach. “The point, though—what’s the point to it?”
“Just a custom. Robbery is the motive, of course. It always is among the poor. The rest is an added refinement that goes back to the beginning of our culture.”
Pete muttered an opinion of that culture, which the Inspector chose not to hear.
Mohammed Ali rose to go. “Said will be pleased to hear that you are safe,” he said, politely.
“Did you find the bodies, by the way? Two were killed, I think, and the third got away.”
“There are no bodies in Egypt,” said the Inspector, smiling, “except the mummies in the tombs. I suggest you both return tomorrow to Luxor, where you will be better protected.” He paused as though about to say something more, then, deciding not to, he bowed and left them alone.
“That devil!” said Anna, her voice sharp with strain.
* * *
The Libyan Inn was a cube of adobe surrounded by palm trees. It was nearly empty and they had the gloomy bare dining room to themselves. The manager, a fat, silent man with blue jowls, said, “Good evening,” and nothing more, no comment about the attack or about the visit of Mohammed Ali.
They drank great quantities of a sweet Italian wine, and after a while, despite the stickiness of the wine, they grew more cheerful, less aware of their isolation in this remote and hostile country.
They talked of one another. She told him about her life before the war, about her family. “I was ashamed,” she said thoughtfully. “Ashamed of my father even then, before I knew better, before Germany was defeated. He was good to me, in his way, and I adored him for a long time, until the last of the war. You see, they gave him a post at Dachau and he took it and was very successful there. The day Hitler killed himself, Father received a promotion in the S.S.” She laughed bitterly. “I remember, though, wondering what it was that Father did. I knew that the camp was full of bad people, enemies of our country. We were very patriotic in those days. But I had no idea how the people in the camp were treated. Father told us very little about it. We lived in the town and seldom did we ever go to see him at work. I only remember going there once before the end and I thought it nice, very clean and neat, and the prisoners I saw, though terribly thin, looked like almost anyone else. It was that—the looking like everyone else—that first made me wonder.”
“Wonder?”
“That something was wrong when so many ordinary people were locked up like that. I asked my father only once about it, and he was furious and struck me, very hard.” She touched her face lightly, as though the pain lingered. “Then, when it was all over, the whole crazy dream, we were taken, all the people, children too, who lived in the town on a tour through the camp, and my God, what it was like!” She bit her lip suddenly at the memory.
“And your father?”
“He was hanged, after a trial.”
“Were you sorry?”
“Only for my mother. She wept as though he had been good.”
“Perhaps he had been, to her.”
Anna shrugged. “Perhaps. I’m not sure. I forgot everything after that day when I walked through the camp and saw what my father had done.”
“He might’ve been only a soldier, doing what he was told to do.”
Anna was grim. “They all said that, but there were many other kinds of duty for a soldier. You see, he asked for this place; he wanted to be like a little king. It all came out at the trial—the letters he wrote begging for the appointment, the letters afterward about what he was doing. Oh, it was disgusting!”
“But it’s over now.”
“Over?” He couldn’t tell by her voice what she meant. He asked her about her mother. “She died a year after the execution. There was no point in her living in a world without Nazis.”
“Did you hate her so?”
Anna shook her head. “No, I hated no one. Only the world that made my father into an animal, a killer.” She paused; then she smiled. “I didn’t want to talk about all that with you, ever. I promised myself I’d never tell you, and now look! How bored you must be!”
Pete shook his head. “I don’t know how you lived through it. Afterward, I mean, when the crack-up came.”
“I think it was easier, though,” she said thoughtfully. “At least there was a kind of freedom. And I was lucky…to look nice, that is.” The simple way she said this was like a cold knife in his chest. He changed the subject, not wanting to know more.
“I guess I had as different a time as it’s possible to have,” said Pete, and he told her what it was like living in Oregon in the thirties. Even the depression seemed like fun compared to her childhood.
“I had a good time. Maybe that was the trouble—too good a time. I didn’t want to settle down, go to mining school like my brothers. I liked the idea of moving around, without any boss or place I had to be. So I started looking for oil. More a game, I guess, because even before the war it was no game for a guy without money, but I made a living, working every now and then for some big outfit. Then, once or twice, I got into some traffic—that’s the word they used for smuggling. I was tied up with a gang in Juarez for a while. We’d smuggle damn near anything into the country from Mexico: gold, dope, wetbacks—that’s the local word for Mexican laborers who get across the river into the States against the law, to work in Texas.”
“Did you like that?” she asked. “Being a bandit?”
He grinned. “Well, it’s a funny thing, but while I was doing it I never thought about it much one way or the other. I was having a good time and I was making money. It was like stealing home from third base in a baseball game. At the time it seemed like fun. The government had made a lot of border rules that seemed silly when you thought about them, and we had a chance to break the rules and make a little money as well as keep a lot of people happy. I know it was a dumb way to look at things, but at twenty-two you aren’t apt to worry too much.”
“They could have put you in jail, though.”
“I expect they could, but before that happened I had figured out that it was all wrong the way I was living, so I went into partnership with a couple of other fellows and we even managed to make some money out of oil, which I spent. When it was gone I went into the Army. The war had started conveniently at that moment. I was in the Infantry for a long time, over four years, right until the end. I covered a lot of Europe on foot.”
“You were brave?”
He chuckled. “As a matter of fact, I was. I was made a second lieutenant on the field, which was nearly as good as being shot by a firing squad, because second lieutenants got eaten up more than anybody else in that war. But I lived through it, getting medals for staying alive.”
“I wish I had known you then.”
He paused, suddenly serious. “It’s just as good now, baby. We can start just as though nothing ever happened to either of us—as if I was always a real honest kid from Oregon and you…well, as though the roof hadn’t fallen in on Germany.”
Tears filmed her eyes. “But it did fall in, Peter.” She bit her lip.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Together they went upstairs to her room. Since the manager had said nothing about arrangements for the night, Pete locked the door behind him and, in the bright moonlight, they lay together for a long time, not speaking, not thinking.
*
* *
The next morning they were rowed back across the Nile. A tattered umbrella protected them from the huge fiery sun, which hung like an orange balloon in the pale sky. No clouds obscured it; there was no relief except the umbrella.
“I don’t know how they stand it,” said Pete, pointing to the boy who was rowing them, a tall youth with a dirty cloth cap on his head.
“It burns my eyes,” she said, looking away.
“Are you getting tired of Egypt?” He smiled.
She laughed. “There are times when I long for a cold wet day with a gray sky and no sun at all.”
“You’ll like Oregon.”
“Perhaps,” she said, trailing her fingers in the warm water of the river.
They were greeted enthusiastically by the hotel manager, who crossed the lobby with hands outstretched, as though to embrace them both. “You are both safe! How worried we were when the Inspector told us what had happened! You were foolish, Mr. Wells, very foolish to go out alone like that, and near the tombs, where all the bandits are.”
“I wasn’t alone,” said Pete, but the manager was busy relaying messages to Anna: There were two letters for her and she was to telephone Cairo that evening, someone of great importance had called and the manager’s hands shook with excitement as he handed her the telephone message. Without looking at it she crumpled it into her pocket. Then she turned to Pete.
“I’ve got so many things to do, Peter,” she said. “Shall we meet in the dining room tonight, at dinner?”
“Sure, if you want to.” He tried to disguise his disappointment. For some reason he had thought they would be together all day, every day now. He had forgotten for a moment that they were, after all, separate, not tied to one another. “I hope you won’t disappear again.”
She smiled. “I’ll warn you next time.”
“I’ll see you. Eight o’clock,” he said, and she nodded; then she was gone.
Pete went to his own room. Everything was in order. He sat down on the edge of the bed and stripped his revolver, cleaned it, reloaded it. While he was doing this, the telephone rang.
“Mr. Wells?” asked a familiar voice. “This is Said.”
“Oh. Hello there.”