Which one? Beasley asked himself. Which one thinks he is going to knock me off?
He looked at the tour members gathered in the riverboat’s lounge, where they sat talking and drinking like old friends although they had met only the week before. Reaching for the peanuts, he flicked them expertly one by one into his mouth, displaying the blue shield entwined by a snake that was tattooed on his forearm. As he chewed, he smiled in secret amusement at his answer to the nosey types who had tried to find out from him more than he wished to tell them about himself. “I ain’t of no interest to anyone,” he had insisted, with an aw-shucks, rough-diamond honesty, adding to himself, Except the Internal Revenue Service.
A cruise up the Nile River was not his idea of a vacation — Las Vegas or Acapulco would be more like it — but Agnes had exclaimed over the folders that Seven League Tours had sent her. His knowledge of Egypt was limited to vague memories of pictures in which overseers stood sideways on huge blocks of stone and lashed the backs of slaves who toiled at the drag ropes. He wished he had some pictures like that to take home to the union president to illustrate the land of contract he’d like to negotiate next time for Beasley Builders. It seemed to him that Agnes, now that they had money stashed away, was trying to wean him from his construction-site habits, just as she was making him dress more like the president of a company.
She had not been able to get him to stop wearing his diamond ring. “It’s the only thing I got that ain’t been mortgaged sometime or other,” he told her, “and that includes you, Aggie.” He was not unfamiliar with violence — he had battled his way from operating a manual concrete-mixer to the presidency of his own company — and had taken part in and known about practices he hoped were behind him forever. But the idea that someone in this soft, easy-going group intended to kill him was ridiculous. They were pussy cats and he had run with tigers.
Just the same, there were the threats. The first had come two days ago, their first day on the boat. He had come down from the bar to their stateroom to put on the coat that Aggie insisted he wear for dinner, until she found out that he was the only man in the dining room wearing a coat. He found the small red-bordered label pasted to the mirror.
“You will die for the Arena,” it read, in the careful lettering of a draftsman. He had clumsily removed it with a razor blade and was about to throw it away when he changed his mind and placed the crumpled slip among his traveling papers, saying nothing to Aggie. The next threat, at lunch yesterday, was not two feet from his face when he looked up from the menu at the tall, grave-faced waiter who held his tray pressed vertically against his robe, its bottom displaying the same kind of red-margined sticker that read “Remember the Arena.”
He took a slug from his glass, captured a handful of peanuts from the bowl, and mentally went down the list of tour members.
“Our tours are limited to twenty persons to give you the best in travel service,” Seven League Tours had boasted.
Van Alt, the tour director? Not likely. They had met only three days earlier at the Cairo airport. One thing he had noticed about Van Alt, and Van Alt seemed to know it and to resent him for it, was a lack that should not have been overlooked by an agency that claimed to take care of every detail, and charged accordingly. A complaint could get Van Alt fired, and Beasley had pointed this out to him, more as a casual comment than as a threat.
He was aware too of Van Alt’s practice of privately bestowing nicknames on the tour members. His own, of course, was Beastly, and although he regarded it as mild compared with what he had been called over the years, Van Alt’s attitude irritated him. Van Alt had referred to Aggie as the Mink Connection, even though she had not brought any of her furs on the trip. Van Alt was smart, but he wasn’t smart enough to know that a nickname should not be too accurate. Nor was he smart enough to keep his mouth shut.
But there was no way he could know about the Arena.
Beasley dismissed the women on the tour — twelve, including Aggie. Not even Aggie knew about the Arena; he never discussed matters of this kind with her. He dismissed Aggie too, although he admitted there had been a time when Aggie had had reason for being sore at him. But that was long ago and she wasn’t the type to hold a grudge. Anyway, she wouldn’t sneak around and paste up little notes. Pick up the nearest thing and fling it at him — that was Aggie’s way.
What about that little grey creep — DeWin? Trewin? something like that — sitting by himself with a glass of dry sherry and an even drier-looking book before him? Or that guy Hunter who showed up at breakfast their first day, wearing a jungle shirt and shorts and a white sailor hat turned down all around so that it looked like a sun helmet? Beasley had to admit that Hunter’s nickname, Dr. Livingstone, fitted him.
It couldn’t be anyone from the four West Coast couples who kept themselves apart from the others as if they were uneasy about associating with anyone who had ever shoveled snow. And certainly it couldn’t be that skinny professorlike fellow, Rogers, who was hired by the agency to keep them standing in the sun while he lectured them on the Middle Kingdom and the old gods and the achievements of ancient architects — a profession which he, as a builder, held in impatient contempt.
Beasley rose from the table to go down to see how Aggie was doing with the bug she seemed to have picked up. Dinner would not interest her, he was certain, nor would she be going ashore to tonight’s sound-and-light show at the temple. She would sleep like the dead until morning. He helped himself to the remaining peanuts and, tilting the bowl, he uncovered the sticker on its bottom.
It read: “Soon.”
The knocking at the door was insistent but controlled, as though under restraint because of the other passengers. Rogers resisted it, rationalizing that it must be a door other than his or that a crewman was pounding pipes in the overhead. When a vigorous shaking rattled the door, he surrendered and got up to answer it.
Van Alt stood in his pajamas. Behind him was an Egyptian who took pleasure in whatever it was that required people to be aroused at dawn.
“I want you to go with me. Hassan has found a body. He thinks it’s someone from our tour.”
“Yes. Yes. Your tour. Was in my carriage yesterday,” the Egyptian said.
“Who’s missing?” Rogers asked. “Surely someone would have reported someone missing by now.”
“No one’s been reported missing and I can’t very well get them all up at this hour to see if anyone is missing.”
Rogers saw that Van Alt was shaken and, for some reason, frightened. An experienced tour director who faced with equanimity cancelled flights, the usurpation by oil sheiks of rooms reserved months earlier for his tour, and the even more trying complaints of the tour members, Van Alt would not be expected to be so disturbed by the story the carriage driver had brought him. His was not the only tour on the Cheops, so the body might not be his responsibility. On the other hand, he could not afford to assume the driver was wrong.
“I’ll meet you at the gangway,” Rogers said.
He found the two men waiting beside the watchman and followed them ashore, climbing the stairs up the sandy bank into the palm-lined boulevard that skirted the river. The grey light that lay over the quiet river and the empty street was already dissolving under the oblique sunrise. The boulevard smelled of yesterday s carriage horses. The air, Rogers noted, was not cool. Rather there was an absence of heat, as though it had not completely cooled during the night and now was lying at some thermal nadir before beginning the climb to the daily hundred-degree mark. The dawn had a used quality as if, like everything else in this strange land, it was already old.