I had never seen him cry. I didn’t think he could. I didn’t know what to say.
He took hold of my hand. “Schmidt and Feisal and Saida are in the waiting room. I’m supposed to tell them when you wake up.”
“Send ’em in,” I said grandly. “We’ll have a party.”
“You’re doped up to your eyeballs,” John said, shaking his head. “No party, not yet.”
“Stop squeezing my hand, it hurts. Can’t you just enclose it tenderly in your long, strong fingers, like heroes in books?”
His face lit up. “You are going to be all right. You sound like your normal, rude self. Do you know what you said, just before you keeled over?”
“Three little words,” I murmured.
“Three little words, yes. Words you fought a deadly injury to utter. Could they have been ‘I love you’?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You said,” John snapped, “‘Elizabeth of Austria.’ Why did you say ‘Elizabeth of Austria’?”
“I remember now,” I said drowsily. The shot the nurse had given me was beginning to take effect. “You remember her, the empress of Austria back in 1890 something…She got stabbed by an anarchist, he’d probably be called a terrorist these days, and then she went on walking for, gee, I forget how long, before she collapsed, because she thought he had just punched her in the side, and that was what it felt like, and I thought I should tell you that that was what it felt like, in case you didn’t notice—”
“A knife sticking out of your side? I noticed.”
“I love you.”
He leaned closer. “What was that?”
“I said…I don’t remember.”
“Coward. I love you too. Go to sleep.” He enclosed my hand tenderly in his long, strong fingers.
Six weeks later. Munich.
J ohn came down the stairs, with Clara draped over his shoulder. Caesar, lying beside the couch on which I reclined, jumped up with a howl and dashed toward them.
“Stop that, you idiot dog,” I said. “You saw him ten minutes ago, before he went upstairs.”
Caesar stopped and thought it over. Then he came back and lay down again.
“Schmidt is on his way here,” John reported. “He’s bringing dinner.”
“He’s brought dinner almost every day. I’m getting fat.”
“Maybe you ought to get more exercise.”
“I don’t feel up to it yet.” I leaned back against the cushions and tried to look like Camille.
John wasn’t looking too healthy himself. His Egyptian tan had faded and he had lost weight. As soon as I was able to travel, we had returned to Munich. John had made a couple of flying trips to London, leaving at dawn and getting back by midnight, leaving Schmidt to fuss over me. The shop was closed until he found a replacement for Alan. I knew he was losing business, not to mention money. Jen had been driving him up the wall, demanding to know what he was doing and why he wasn’t in London. When he explained I had had a serious accident and he was looking after me, she had offered to come and play nurse—an offer that almost brought on a relapse.
I was being unfair and selfish. The truth was that I liked having him around, bringing me things, walking the dog, doing the washing up. We argued all the time and fought some of the time. I liked that, too.
Alan had died without recovering consciousness. Schmidt had wallowed in self-reproach when he heard, but taking care of me cheered him up, and the news from Egypt was balm to his wounded soul. The news from Berlin was even balmier. Jan Perlmutter had resigned from his position. The museum tried to hush up the details, but Schmidt’s gossips had told him that Jan was locked up in a maximum-security psychiatric institution. He kept telling the attendants he was King Tutankhamon and demanding that they kneel when they addressed him. I failed to feel sorry for him. The people I felt sorry for were innocent victims like Ali and his grieving mother. We would never know whether Ali had gone to the expedition house as part of his normal custodial duties, or whether he had had a sudden inspiration. It didn’t matter, not to him. He was dead because he had tried to do his duty. His family would be taken care of, at any rate. Schmidt had seen to that.
Tutankhamon’s triumphant appearance at the Cairo Museum had been featured in the media for days. Ashraf had wrung every ounce of publicity out of it. Privately he had apologized for being unable to give us rewards, medals, and universal acclaim; but that, as he pointed out, would have necessitated making the whole embarrassing affair public.
“That seems to be the story of my life,” John had remarked caustically. “The next time I become involved in a case like this I shall demand to be paid in advance.”
It had had its moments, though.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me you were related to the world’s most famous family of archaeologists?” I asked. “Professor Emerson and his wife dominated Egyptology for over half a century!”
Hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, John stood looking out the window. He didn’t turn around. “I and about eighty other people.”
“Surely not that many.”
“Look it up. They had only one child, but he had three, and their descendants bred like rabbits. I’m not even in the direct line; I’m descended from their younger granddaughter. That and two pounds ten, as the saying goes, is good for a cup of coffee at any Starbucks.”
“Be blasé if you want to. I’m impressed. Amelia P. Emerson is one of my heroines. It was their house we were in, their things we saw. Her legendary parasol, his knife—”
“According to tradition, the knife and the swords belonged to their son.”
“But he was a scholar, not a soldier. Degrees from all sorts of places, dozens of books to his credit.”
“There are a lot of stories about Ramses Emerson, as he was called,” John said. “Some almost certainly apocryphal…Never mind my damned ancestors, Vicky, I have to talk to you about something important.”
“Okay.”
He turned around, opened his mouth, closed it, coughed, and then said, “Would you like a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
“I think I will, if you don’t mind.”
“Go right ahead.”
He took his time about mixing it. Here it comes, I thought. Anytime John needed liquor to strengthen his nerve, the news was going to be bad.
He sat down in a chair next to the couch and cleared his throat. Suzi had managed to get the goods on him after all? He was dead broke and had decided to go back into his old business? Jen was on her way to Munich? When he came out with it, I was caught completely off guard.
“You want to have a child.”
“I do?”
“I saw it in your face, when you were working on that pathetic baby cap.”
“You did?”
“I lack the qualifications for being a proper father.”
“You do?”
“That being the case,” John said, taking a deep breath, “the only decent thing is for me to get out of your life so you can get on with it.”
I sat up straight, yelped, and clutched at my side. “Are you dumping me, you rat?”
John’s face turned red. The color contrasted nicely with his cornflower-blue eyes. “Bloody hell,” he shouted, “it is impossible to carry on a reasonable conversation with you.”
“You weren’t being reasonable, you were being noble,” I growled. “It doesn’t become you. Be yourself.”
“Be myself.” The angry color faded from his face. His mouth twitched. “I’m over my ears in debt. My business is failing. Another situation like the last one may arise at any moment, without the slightest warning.”
“Go on,” I said encouragingly.
“Isn’t that enough? Oh, all right. My mother is a consummate nuisance. She will never love you. After four weeks in your company I have lost my command of proper English syntax. Do you want to get married, or what?”