"I think so," Belloq said.
"I assume it is the decision I imagined you would reach?"
"Assumptions are often arrogant, my friend."
Dietrich looked at the other man silently.
Belloq smiled. "In this case, though, you are probably correct."
"You wish me to attend to it?"
Belloq nodded. "I trust I can leave the details to you."
"Naturally," Dietrich said.
7: Cairo
The dark was warm and still, the air like a vacuum. It was dry, hard to breathe, as if all moisture had evaporated in the heat of the day. Indy sat with Marion in a coffeehouse, rarely taking his eyes from the door. For hours now, they had been moving through back streets and alleys, staying away from the central thoroughfares-and yet he'd had the feeling all the time that he was being watched. Marion looked exhausted, drained, her long hair damp from sweat. And it was clear to Indy that she was becoming more and more impatient with him: now she was staring at him over the rim of her coffee cup in an accusing fashion. He watched the door, scrutinized the patrons that came and went, and sometimes turned his face upward to catch the thin passage of air that blew from the creaking overhead fan.
"You might have the decency to tell me how long we're going to creep around like this," Marion said.
"Is that what we're doing?"
"It would be obvious to a blind man that we're hiding from something, Jones. And I'm beginning to wonder why I left Nepal. I had a thriving business, don't forget. A business you torched."
He looked at her and smiled and thought how vibrant she appeared when she was on the edge of anger. He reached across the small table and touched the back of her hand. "We're hiding from the kind of jokers we encountered in Nepal."
"Okay. I buy that. But for how long?"
"Until I get the feeling that it's safe to go."
"Safe to go where? What do you have in mind?"
"I'm not exactly without friends."
She sighed and finished her coffee, then leaned back in her chair and shut her eyes. "Wake me when you've made up your mind, okay?"
Indy stood up and pulled her to her feet. "It's time," he said. "We can leave now."
"Brother," she said. "Just as I was trying to get some beauty sleep."
They went out into the alleyway, which was almost deserted.
Indy paused, looking this way and that. Then he took her by the hand and began to walk.
"You want to give me some idea of where we're headed exactly?"
"The house of Sallah."
"And who is Sallah?"
"The best digger in Egypt."
He only hoped Sallah still lived in the same place. And beyond that there was another hope, a deeper one, that Sallah was employed in the Tanis dig.
He paused at a corner, a junction where two narrow alleys branched away from one another. "This way," he said, still pulling at Marion's arm.
She sighed, then yawned. She followed.
Something moved in the shadows behind them, something that might have been human. It moved without noise, gliding quickly over the concrete; it knew only to follow the two people who walked ahead of it.
Indy was welcomed into Sallah's house as if only a matter of weeks had passed since they last met. But it had been years. Even so, Sallah had changed very little. The same intelligent eyes in the brown face, the same energetic cheerfulness, the hospitable warmth. They embraced as Sallah's wife, a large woman called Fayah, ushered them inside the house.
The warmth of the greeting touched Indy. The comfortable quality of the house made him feel at ease immediately, too. When they sat down at the table in the dining room, eating food that Fayah had produced with all the haste of a culinary miracle, he looked over at the other table in the corner, where Sallah's children sat.
"Some things change after all," he said. He placed a small cube of lamb into his mouth and nodded his head in the direction of the kids.
"Ah," Sallah said. His wife smiled in a proud way. "The last time there were not so many."
"I can remember only three," Indy said.
"Now there are nine," Sallah said.
"Nine," and Indy shook his head in wonderment.
Marion got up from the table and went over to where the children sat. She talked to each of them, touched them, played briefly with them, and then she came back. Indy imagined he saw some kind of look, something indeterminate yet obviously connected with a love of children, pass between Marion and Fayah. For his part he'd never had time for kids in bis life; they constituted the kind of clutter he didn't need.
"We have made a decision to stop at nine," Sallah said.
"I'd call that wise," Indy said.
Sallah reached for a date, chewed on it silently for a moment and then said, "It really is good to see you again, Indiana. I've thought about you often. I even intended to write, but I'm a bad correspondent. And I assumed you were even worse."
"You assumed right." Indy reached for a date himself. It was plump and delicious.
Sallah was smiling. "I won't ask you immediately, but 1 imagine you haven't come all the way to Cairo just to see me. Am I correct?"
"Correct."
Sallah looked suddenly knowing, suddenly sly. "In fact, I would even place a bet on your reason for being here."
Indy stared at his old friend, smiled, said nothing.
Sallahsaid, "Of course, I am not a gambling man."
"Of course," Indy said.
"We don't talk business at the table," Fayah remarked, looking imposing.
"Later," Indy said. He glanced at Marion, who appeared half-asleep now.
"Later, when everything is quiet," Sallah said.
There was a silence in the room for a second, and then suddenly the place was filled with noise, as if something had erupted at the table where the kids sat.
Fayah turned and tried to silence the pandemonium. But the kids weren't listening to her voice, because they were busy with something else. She rose, saying, "We have guests. You forget your manners."
But they still didn't hear her. It was only when she approached their table that they became silent, revealing in their midst a small monkey sitting upright in the center of the table, chewing on a piece of bread.
Fayah said, "Who brought this animal in here? Who did it?"
The children didn't answer. Th«y were busy laughing at the antics of the creature, which strutted around with the bread in its paws. It bounced over, performed a perfect handstand and then leaped from the table and skipped across the floor to Marion. It jumped up into her lap and kissed her quickly on the cheek. She laughed.
"A kissing monkey, huh?" she said. "I like you too."
Fayah said, "How did it get here?"
For a time none of the children spoke. And then the one that Indy recognized as being the oldest said, "We don't know. It just appeared."
Fayah regarded her brood with disbelief. Marion said, "If you don't want to have the animal around-"
Fayah interrupted. "If you like it, Marion, then it's welcome in our home. As you are."
Marion held the monkey a moment longer before she set it down. It regarded her in a baleful way and immediately bounced back into her lap.
"It must love you," Indy said. He found animals only slightly more bothersome than children, and not quite so cute.
She put her arms around the small creature and hugged it. As he watched this behavior, Indy wondered, Who could hug a monkey that way? He turned his face toward Sallah, who was rising from the table now.
"We can go out into the courtyard," Sallah said.
Indy followed him through the door. There was trapped heat in the walled courtyard; at once he began to feel lethargic, but he knew he had to fight the tiredness a little longer.
Sallahindicated a raffia chair and Indy sat down.
"You want to talk about Tanis," Sallah said.