The sound of voices just outside my window gave me a start. I thrust the items back into the bag as quickly as I could, but the door of the bus swung open and I had no chance to replace it, even if I wanted to. I certainly didn’t want anyone to know I’d been snooping through Millie’s belongings and extras. Hastily I stuffed the entire thing into my backpack. I’d leave it on the bus at the end of the day, I thought. No one else knew it was there anyway, and it wouldn’t be missed. Achmed would find it when he took the bus away to be cleaned, and he could turn it over to Anni.
Chapter 3
MUMMIES AND MISHAPS
We arrived at the Egyptian Museum at about four o’clock, as the brilliant light was finally softening into a mellow afternoon and the shadows yawned and stretched gracefully across the lawns like tired cats. The red brick of the museum darkened to the color of dried blood, contrasting with the white stone columns and carvings that accented the massive front doors. A miniature weathered sphinx waited patiently in the courtyard, surrounded by tourists and palm trees. As the bus rolled to a stop with a squeak of brakes and a loud whoosh of hydraulics, we rose eagerly, but Anni waved us back and picked up the microphone.
“Just a few instructions before we disembark. This is very important. You cannot take your cameras into the museum, not even inside your purses. They are very strict about that here. We will be going through metal detectors and if you have a camera, the guards will make you go back outside to put it on the bus. Achmed cannot park here, so the bus will be gone. You will have to wait for the rest of us here in the courtyard, all alone. Your cameras and anything else you want to leave here will be completely safe because Achmed will stay with the bus the whole time. Do you all understand?” She spoke as though we were children, and not bright children at that.
However, we all nodded obediently and stashed our cameras in our packs or on the seats before following Anni off the bus. After taking so many pictures, the thought of leaving my camera for an hour or two came almost as a relief. I was tired of the distraction of examining each artifact and site more for good photo angles than for its historic interest. I thought of the old days when tourists in white linen suits sat for hours at the base of a monument, sketching curves and angles because there was no other way to capture the image and because time was a commodity in abundant supply. Not like the seven-day dash we were on now.
The grounds of the museum were crowded at this hour. Tired tourists sat on the stone benches lining the walkway and rested aching feet. A few children ran about the fountain, dodging the older pedestrians and laughing. Counting aloud, a harried male tour guide circled a small group, brows creased with concentration. We watched through the bars of the ornate iron gates while Anni bought our tickets, then we followed her through the museum doors.
As Anni had promised, two metal detectors waited just inside the entrance, surrounded by an excessive number of guards carrying small but lethal-looking guns. I eyed the guards warily, but they seemed bored and complacent. Dropping my small purse on the conveyor belt, I went through without incident and joined the others beside a replica of the Rosetta Stone.
The main hall of the Egyptian Museum could hold its own with the finest museums in the world. The ceiling rose two full stories, supported by Greek columns that seemed out of place beside the ancient and massive stone coffins, tables, and statues that filled the hall. In fact, the pieces were so famous, so iconic, that the hall felt more like a movie set than a real place.
A commotion behind us made us turn. Fiona and Flora were blocking the scanning machine, surrounded by guards who were suddenly very alert. The screener was holding up a camera and Fiona was shouting at him. Anni said something in Arabic and flew past us, throwing herself between the ditz duo and the guards. The rest of us stood frozen, our mouths hanging open.
“Tell me that is not a camera,” said Kyla in disbelief.
“Those women shouldn’t be allowed to travel by themselves. They’re a menace,” said Jerry Morrison with contempt.
There was a brief silence. Not that he was wrong, and not that the rest of us weren’t thinking exactly the same thing, but he was so obnoxious that no one wanted to agree with him about anything.
The Australian couple, Ben and Lydia, moved away from him rather pointedly. Their miniature feud was heating up, which made for some interesting moments. I wondered if another wager with Kyla was in order.
A man in a suit appeared and instantly the shouting ceased. The guards drew back respectfully. The man said something in a quiet tone to Anni and then vanished into an office with Fiona and Flora in tow.
Anni returned, her lips pressed tightly together. For a moment, I thought she was going to explode, but she drew a deep breath and produced a smile from somewhere. Kyla smirked at me.
“She’s still fine,” I said in an undertone.
“Oh, she’s going to snap.”
“Yes, but not until Wednesday,” I said bravely, although I thought the odds against me were rising dramatically. No one could stand firm under the dual pressure of Flora and Fiona. Mother Teresa herself would be flexing her fingers for a bitch slap of epic proportions.
“We’ll wait here a moment,” said Anni, and began explaining that the only replica in the entire museum was the Rosetta Stone, the original of which was in the British Museum in London. Everything else was authentic and thousands of years old. We walked a few paces away to a huge stone table, a massive block carved from a single piece of stone. It rested in the middle of the aisle, concave on top, with odd carved channels designed to draw away fluids. I thought I could guess what it was, and gave a little shiver, then poked Kyla to see if she’d noticed. Her grin told me she had, and together we moved closer to look for stains, unrepentantly ghoulish.
Fiona and Flora rejoined us after a few minutes, oblivious to our cold stares. Fiona plunked her oversized purse down on the table. Anni went white and in one smooth moved whisked it off and dropped it back in Fiona’s arms. Fiona looked startled and almost dropped it. I could tell it weighed a ton. I wondered what she carried in it and how her scrawny arms could tote it around all day.
“This,” said Anni loudly to forestall any protest, “is a three-thousand-year-old funerary table where the ancient Egyptians placed the bodies of the dead to prepare them for mummification. Notice the drainage hole at the foot.”
Fiona looked disgusted and began rubbing at the bottom of her bag. I was surprised to see a look of anger pass over Flora’s usually vapid face. For a moment, I could swear she almost glared, not at Anni, but at her sister. But the moment passed swiftly, and in another second she began talking to Lydia, who was trying to listen to Anni. Lydia looked annoyed and shuffled away from her.
Anni herded us skillfully through the museum, stopping to point out the highlights, which we dutifully admired. Some of the treasures were surrounded by other tour groups, and we had to wait for our turn to swarm the object. After the grand tour, Anni turned us loose to explore on our own.
“Thirty minutes,” she called after our retreating backs. Our life as tourists seemed chopped into thirty-minute segments. We checked our watches and scurried away like cockroaches in a kitchen.
* * *
Kyla and I made a beeline for the mummy chamber, completely ignoring three thousand years of history and artifacts along the way. It was the type of behavior I’d expect from a couple of high school girls, which just underscored my theory that no one really matured beyond the age of about fourteen. We paused just long enough to locate the room on a map, then giggled all the way up the stairs.
The Egyptians, no fools, had figured out that tourists thought the mummies were the most interesting thing in the entire museum and were charging an additional fee to go inside. I pulled a wad of crumpled, musty Egyptian pounds from my wallet and paid for a brightly colored ticket. The tickets at the tourists sites were beautiful enough to save for a scrapbook. A few steps away, we showed them to a bored guard who nodded us through, and I stowed mine in my
wallet, careful not to wrinkle it. Kyla wadded hers up, looked around for a nonexistent trash can, then stuffed it into her pocket.
The mummy room was small, dimly lit, and absolutely silent, worse than a church or a library. The ceiling was low and the air seemed musty and stale, as though it, like the mummies, had come from inside a crypt. I felt a trickle of sweat slide down the small of my back. As our eyes adjusted to the light, we could see walls lined with display cases and a couple of low glass boxes resting in the middle of the floor. Strategically placed weak lights threw a halfhearted glow on the shadowy forms within. In the far corner, a couple of tourists stood before the glass. They did not turn around as we entered.
We approached the first box on the floor cautiously, steeling ourselves for any number of grisly horrors, and found ourselves looking down into the open coffin of a woman.
“She’s tiny,” said Kyla finally. “And so … dry.”
She was, too. Small and brittle and creepy.
“We may have seen too many horror movies,” I admitted.
“I swear I saw her on a beach in Florida last year. That leathery skin, those anorexic cheekbones.”
We both burst into laughter. The two other tourists turned to look at us with deep disapproval.
The door to the mummy room opened again with a quiet swoosh, and Alan Stratton walked in, pausing for his eyes to adjust to the low light. Kyla brightened visibly, and instantly forgot all about the shriveled bandaged corpses.
“Now that’s more like it,” she whispered to me with a wink. She immediately went to his side.
I wandered over to another display case so I wouldn’t have to listen to the flirting on an empty stomach. I was ready for dinner and my feet and back were hurting. And now I had no one to mock the mummies with. Definitely time to head back to the hotel.
Susan and Tom Peterson burst into the room and looked around wildly, Susan’s plump little face frantic with worry.
“Damn it!” said Tom. “Where the hell are they?”
“I was sure they would be here,” answered Susan, sounding tearful.
They caught sight of me and hurried over.
“Have you seen the boys?” asked Susan. “They ran ahead of us and we’ve lost them.”
My heart went out to her, she sounded so apologetic. Trying not to laugh, I said, “No. They haven’t been in here. Shall I tell them you’re looking for them if I see them?”
Tom made a sound like a low growl. “You can tell them we’re going to kill them when we see them!”
“Tom!” Susan gave him an outraged glare, then turned back to me. “Don’t tell them that,” she pleaded.
I did laugh then. “I won’t. But if it helps, I’m sure they are fine. Probably back in the King Tut room or looking at the mummification tools. And this will probably be their next stop, so you might as well wait for them and take the opportunity to see what you want to see. You can kill them when they catch up to you.”
Tom shot me a grateful look, but Susan just shook her head. “We’ll just go back toward Tut’s room,” she said, and dragged him out.
Kyla still had her arm linked through Alan’s, and they were examining one of the pharaohs. She looked very pretty by his side. Tall as she was, her head barely reached his cheekbone and her shoulder rubbed against his arm in just the right place. I felt a sharp pang of jealousy, surprisingly strong. Just because he had spoken to me for a few moments did not make him interested in me, I told myself sternly. I was being all kinds of stupid and I needed to knock it off. Summoning up the strength of generations of Puritan ancestors, I firmly repressed my feelings into a small ball in the pit of my stomach where they could safely churn and burn an ulcer into the lining.
With a small shrug, I turned away. Looking down at the shriveled corpse of Thutmose III, I felt a mix of pity and revulsion. Here was certainly not the burly, menacing monster of countless mummy movies. I wondered if the pharaohs had known what their bodies would become. Perhaps so, especially since they frequently booted out their predecessors and confiscated the better monuments and burial chambers for themselves. Some of the kings made large muscular youthful statues of themselves to be used as a backup in case their mummies were destroyed or lost. The sarcophagi were covered with elaborate texts describing the steps that the dead should perform in order to successfully reinhabit the body or the statue. Sort of an early user guide. No wonder you’re still lying there like a dead cockroach, I thought at Thutmose. You wouldn’t stop to read the instructions.
* * *
Dusk was falling by the time we returned to the hotel. The Mena House stands in the metaphorical shadow of the pyramids and had since it was built in 1869. Agatha Christie had walked up the front steps into its dim interior in the days when it was cooled only by the desert wind and the shade of the palm trees that encircled it. Prince Farouk of Egypt used to stop by at all hours for sandwiches. World leaders and movie stars, the rich and the powerful, the intrepid and the timid had all come to the Mena House to stay in the one place on earth that provided the comforts of the present and a glimpse into the unfathomable past.
The original building was magnificent, designed with palatial proportions and filled with carved and embossed wood, glittering chandeliers, and gilded pillars. Set like a jewel in the Egyptian desert, the grounds were a garden paradise, complete with palm trees, winding paths, and a turquoise pool forming an oasis in the sand. To the left, the pyramids loomed over the puny buildings of modern generations, giant desert denizens guarding against the coming darkness.
Once off the bus, the group scattered with promises to meet before dinner in the upstairs lounge. Kyla and I returned to our room to shower and change. As peons on a budget tour, we were housed in the newer, modern wing across the grounds from the main building. Our room could have been part of any modern hotel in any city in the world, except that from our tiny balcony, we could see the pyramids on the western horizon. Even from this distance, they appeared immense against the deepening blue of the evening sky, and the crimson glow of the setting sun burnished their sides to a tawny copper. None of it seemed quite real.
Dinner that night was to include belly dancing and whirling dervishes, which I was looking forward to seeing. My shower and primping usually took about a quarter of the time that Kyla’s did, so I went first and then pulled on a t-shirt and threw myself on the bed to rest while she went through her elaborate routine.
As soon as the bathroom door shut and the water started, I leaped up and retrieved my backpack. I still had Millie’s pack and wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it. I should have given it to Anni before I left the bus, or even stuffed it under a seat, but at the last minute I’d decided I wanted to take one more look at the contents. For all I knew, something else of mine or Kyla’s might be hidden in the depths, but I knew that was only an excuse. I really wanted to read through the rest of that notebook. As soon as I heard the sound of Kyla drawing the shower curtain, I emptied the bag onto my bed.
The notebook, the lighter, the pen, and the purse all dropped onto the rust-colored floral bedspread, followed by a couple of small items that might have belonged to Millie herself and a hair brush filled with long black hair that certainly did not. Yuck, I thought, picking it up distastefully between thumb and forefinger. Either Dawn Kim’s or Fiona’s. Who would steal a used hair brush? With a little grimace I dropped it back into the bag so I wouldn’t have to look at it.
I picked up a small amulet made of dark green jade hanging on a leather cord. Intricately carved, it had an Arabic inscription in the center, and looked well worn, as though it had been rubbed between calloused fingers for years and years. Not something one could find in a tourist shop, I thought. Almost certainly someone’s cherished heirloom. There was no telling from whom she’d stolen it. Anni, Mohammad, even our bus driver, Achmed. I winced. These things would have to be returned.
I turned back to the notebook and flipped through the small pages until I found the entry about Kyla and me. Wh
ere did the lesbian suspicion come from? I guess it was inconceivable two women could share a room without something going on. Very catty. And mean-spirited. I did not feel so bad for disliking Millie, alive and dead.
Turning the page, I saw only one more entry remained, so maybe I hadn’t missed as much as I thought. I probably could have left the bag on the bus for all I had learned, but then I would have been curious about it for the rest of my life. I might as well finish what I had started. Reading on, I gave a little gasp.
Day 2
Something fishy going on. Smuggling!?
Must verify statue is real.
Contact A or M? Or police?
I sat frozen. Impossible, I thought. Millie had found something that made one of us look like a smuggler? A or M. That had to be Anni, our guide, or Mohammad, our WorldPal representative. How ridiculous. We were a completely ordinary group of tourists, by turns clueless, annoying, enthusiastic, kind, and so on. A pretty standard grouping of random people. In fact, the only thing at all unusual I’d learned about our little group was that most of us were fairly experienced travelers, which I supposed made sense. By the time someone chose Egypt as a destination, chances were that they’d already visited the standard European countries.
So Millie thought one of us was a smuggler. Believed it strongly enough that she was eager to pursue the possibility and turn that person in to the authorities. How ridiculous, I thought again. The unfounded fantasy of a petty mind, not to be given a second’s consideration. Except that Millie was now dead. I felt a chill of uneasiness shiver down my spine. A coincidence. Her death had been a freak accident. A simple fall that unexpectedly turned fatal, probably because she wasn’t exactly young and her bones had been brittle.
Death on Tour Page 5