“Hassan says he was on his way to the stables. He lives somewhere on the other side of the temple area and cuts through there to get to the boulevard. I personally think he goes through the temple area to see what’s been dropped at the sound-and-light show the night before. He was walking through the forecourt of the temple and when he came to the steps he saw feet sticking out from the base of the obelisk—” Van Alt looked at Hassan.
“One look. Dead. I come straightly to you,” Hassan said as if in response to a minor pleasantry.
They turned off the boulevard and entered the long approach to the forecourt of the temple, an avenue flanked by massive statues of rams-headed sphinxes who looked down with a brutish, snouted indifference. At the steps of the forecourt they turned left into an intersecting avenue and were led by Hassan to the foot of the obelisk.
“Like I say. Dead.” Hassan smiled cheerfully and pointed.
The body of a man lay in the recess between the base of the obelisk and a low ruined wall. No signs of violence were visible. Van Alt knelt in the sand and jammed his hand against the neck under the angle of the jaw, feeling for a pulse. After a few moments he fumbled for the wrist, dropped it, and placed his hand against the man’s chest. The open, lightless eyes told him the same message as the absent pulse. He slid his hand under the back of the man’s head, feeling cautiously, and hastily withdrew it, plunging his palm into the sand as though to scour it.
“He’s dead,” he said, squatting back on his heels. “Beastly’s dead.”
Rogers tried to suppress the first thought that came to him: Now he won’t be able to stand in the back of the group and conduct an independent conversation while I’m lecturing. The expression on Van Alt’s face, a growing realization of some liberating relief, made Rogers wonder if others were not also experiencing untimely and unsuitable thoughts.
Rogers found Van Alt sitting on the top deck in the lengthening shadow of the wheelhouse, seemingly unaware that Rogers stood behind him. When Rogers slid a deck chair next to him, Van Alt roused himself from his preoccupation.
“How did it go?”
“Uneventful. Nobody seemed to miss you. We got to the temple at Abydos, where I gave them the full treatment. We stopped at that gift shop you hate so much and at Abdul’s papyrus shop — or I guess it’s his uncle’s, isn’t it? What about Beasley?”
“The autopsy showed a fractured skull. I took Mrs. Beasley to the airport. One of our people in Cairo will put her on the plane for New York and make the other arrangements. But take a look at this.”
Van Alt took out an envelope used for airline tickets, from which he extracted a red-bordered label, a fragment of paper whose curled thinness indicated that it had been peeled from something it had been stuck to. On it, in neat hand-lettering, were the words: “You will die for the Arena.”
“We were waiting at the airport when she found this. It was in the envelope where Beasley had kept their airline tickets.”
There was a familiarity about the label that Rogers tried to place. It was a common-enough sticker. Possibly they used them in the file room at the museum.
“What did Mrs. Beasley say about it?”
“She doesn’t know anything about it. She says Beasley never mentioned it to her.”
“If it was among his travel papers, it could have been there before he left home. It may have nothing to do with his death in spite of what it says. You’ll turn it over to the police, I suppose?”
“Of course. When we get back downriver. I’ll let our people there handle it.”
“All we really know is that he was threatened — maybe back home, maybe on the tour. The Arena sounds like sports, and that might involve gambling. Maybe Beasley had a bookie he didn’t treat with sufficient respect.”
“We may never know. Anyway, it isn’t my problem any longer.”
“How about us?” Rogers asked. “Can our tour leave when the boat does?”
“Of course. I saw Achmed, the hotel manager here. He saw a friend in the city. I spread some of Seven League’s money around and we’re free to continue upriver.”
Rogers marvelled at Van Alt’s ability to guide the tour through the thickets that flourish in the path of foreign travel. He admired his unobtrusive patience, his unfailing memory for names and faces, his store of neutral pleasantries. He felt that Van Alt, in dealing with the tour members, projected a hint of some shared assumption, as though he were saying: “Obviously, you and I are men and women of the world, and you are already quite aware of what I am about to tell you, but if I may—” The tourists always felt flattered. He noted that although Van Alt was attentive to the women on the tour, he carefully avoided any attachments. There were already two previous Mrs. Van Alts and a third about to be. He dressed too youthfully for a man who found it necessary to bleach out the streaks of grey that appeared in his blond hair. Rogers observed too that he had a way of suddenly withdrawing, as if some social barrier had been abruptly lowered. And sometimes he felt sure that Van Alt hated Americans.
It would not have occurred to Rogers that his own task on the tour was equally demanding, with lectures sometimes three times a day, covering four thousand years of art, architecture, religion, and history. When the Seven League Tour Agency had approached his museum in search of a lecturer for their Egyptian tour, the museum director had unhesitatingly suggested Rogers as the leading young man in the field. The recommendation had provided him with a paid vacation in the country that had fascinated him ever since he was sixteen and where for one trying and glorious year when he was in graduate school he had worked on a dig.
“What did you find out,” Van Alt asked, “about last night?”
“Not much. Most of the tour went to the sound-and-light performance behind the temple. Except for Mrs. Beasley — she was sick — and the four couples from the West Coast. They stayed on the boat and played bridge. Imagine paying Seven League’s prices and then spending the time playing bridge.”
“Did anyone see Beastly... Beasley, I mean? Did anyone see him leave the sound-and-light show?”
“Not leave, exactly. Trewin, that gloomy fellow who’s always reading, said he sat next to him at the show. When they were leaving, going through the temple area, he said you caught up with them so he went on ahead.”
“That’s right. Beasley was interested in some construction details of the temple. I pointed out a few things. Then Mrs. Murray asked me something and she and I went on ahead.”
“Well, everybody who was at the show had to come through the forecourt and down the steps. That means they passed within thirty feet of where Hassan found the body. Maybe Beasley walked back to the temple later, to see it by moonlight or something,” Rogers said.
“Maybe, but not likely. He struck me as being a tough customer who wouldn’t be given to looking at temples by moonlight.”
“I did talk to the watchman on the gangplank,” Rogers said. “He told me that everybody came back from the sound-and-light about ten-thirty. Some tourists left the boat again after that, and so did some crew members. The card players were among those who went ashore.”
“When did they get back?” Van Alt asked.
“He said they were gone for thirty or forty minutes, just for a walk along the boulevard. I asked them about it. They said they went to that cafe across from the entrance to the temple area and had a drink. Then there were some people, four or five, who came in around three o’clock. They had been at a nightclub in the Fayd-Al-Farm district. They weren’t members of our tour.”
“So Beasley wasn’t bashed by anyone from our group.”
“It doesn’t seem likely that he was,” Rogers said. “He obviously wasn’t going to be assaulted in full view of the people returning from the sound-and-light. And after everyone else was back on the boat except Beasley, it isn’t likely—”