It was a very thick envelope. Karl’s smile was very bland. I sighed. ‘We have already determined what you are, madam,’ I quoted. ‘All that is left is to determine your price.’
‘Bitte?’ said Karl.
‘Never mind.’
‘We will take care of everything,’ Karl repeated. ‘You need do nothing . . . Excuse me, what was it you said?’
He knew perfectly well what I had said. He prefers to believe a lady doesn’t use words like that.
I pushed my chair back and stood up. ‘Anything else?’
Karl reached into his pocket again. The object he withdrew was a slick, brightly coloured brochure. It had been folded once, lengthwise, to fit in his pocket. He unfolded it and handed it to me.
On the cover, under a tastefully designed title, was a photograph of the Sphinx, with the pyramids of Giza behind it. It was a gorgeous photo; the pyramids were a soft pale gold, the sky above them was a bright clear blue. The smile on the face of the Sphinx has been described in a number of ways – mysterious, enigmatic, contemplative. At that moment it seemed to me that it bore a distinct resemblance to the smug smirk on Karl Feder’s face.
V
Two weeks later I sat on a rock at Giza contemplating the real thing. I was trying to avoid the eyes of the Sphinx. It was still smirking.
The actuality wasn’t as attractive as the photograph. The photographer must have been a genius or a magician to eliminate other objects from his composition. There were lots of them, all more or less unattractive. Camels (they are not, at their best, handsome animals), tourists (ditto), guides and peddlers in dirty flapping robes, cheap souvenir shops, scaffolding and barbed wire and makeshift, ramshackle bits of fencing and construction. However, only a pedant would quibble about such minor flaws. The pyramids were wonderful. The Sphinx would have been magnificent, marred and scarred though it was, if it hadn’t been smirking. Was I enjoying the view? No, I was not.
My arms were swollen and sore from too many shots too close together, but that wasn’t what bothered me. The sun was beating down on my head and shoulders, but I didn’t mind that. My stomach felt slightly queasy, but it wasn’t from anything I had eaten.
Some distance away a small group of people had gathered round an individual who appeared to be lecturing to them. They were distinguished from the other groups that covered the plateau like hordes of locusts by the bags they had slung over their shoulders. Many of the tour groups presented their clients with such bags, so that the bright distinctive colours could help identify lost or wandering members of the group, but there were no colours quite as distinctive as these: broad stripes of gold, turquoise-blue and bright red-orange, the shades so often found in Egyptian jewellery. One of the same bags, trimmed in gold braid and bearing my name, lay on the sand at my feet.
My eyes went back to the paper on my lap. It was the passenger list. My name wasn’t on it. I would appear, and be introduced, after the boat had sailed. This was in keeping with my cover story – that I had replaced a friend at the last moment. It was also a safety precaution, to keep my presence from being known in advance. Some safety precaution, I thought sourly. Well, it couldn’t hurt.
Some of the passengers had boarded the boat the day before. I had gone to a hotel instead and spent the afternoon . . . guess where?
A few hours in the Cairo Museum for someone in my profession is like a nibble of fudge to a chocoholic. The place is stuffed, bulging, overflowing with wonders. I was familiar with many of them from photographs and films, but there is no substitute for seeing the real thing. And the ‘minor’ artifacts, the ones that weren’t so often featured, were just as beautiful. I stood for ten minutes studying the inlay on a small box.
Shadowing my enjoyment, however, was my real reason for being there. The more I saw, the more I wondered why people like John hadn’t already stripped the museum.
I don’t mean to criticize. The whole damned country is a museum, and no one knew better than I how much it cost in money and manpower just to maintain the antiquities, much less support additional excavation. Egypt is a poor country, with a soaring birthrate; there aren’t enough schools, clinics, or jobs, or even food; half of it has to be imported. The Egyptians were in a particularly ironic situation, since the hordes of tourists on which the economy depended were slowly and inexorably destroying the treasures they came to see. According to one article I had read, visitors to the tomb of Tutankhamon put out as much as twenty-five pints of perspiration per day, raising the humidity in the small room to a point that damaged the paint and the underlying plaster. The very stones of the Sphinx had been eaten away by pollution and misguided attempts at repair.
The museum was a disaster in progress – dirty, crowded, and dangerously understaffed. Some of the cases looked as if they could be opened with one of my hairpins. There was no air-conditiomng or humidity control; the windows were open, admitting dust and the exhaust fumes from Cairo’s teeming traffic. When I left, reeling under a combination of horror and artistic overload, I had to pick my way through a group of chattering women scrubbing the floor on their hands and knees, and I found myself peering intently at their faces, looking for familiar features – the shape of a neatly curved ear, the outline of a high cheekbone. That was the sort of disguise that would appeal to John’s bizarre sense of humour.
What could he be after this time? His usual modus operandi involved substitution rather than outright theft; this must be something big, so big in size or importance that its absence couldn’t be concealed. God knows there were plenty of possibilities, starting with the golden coffins of Tutankhamon.
I had managed to convince myself there was no immediate danger. The tour group was leaving Cairo next day; it would return in three weeks for a longer stay. That must be when he intended to do the job, using the other passengers as camouflage.
That morning I had sent my luggage to the boat and taken a taxi to Giza; I would join the others when they got on the bus that was to take them back to the boat.
I had already spotted John on the passenger list. It had to be he; no one would have a name as ridiculous as Peregrine Foggington-Smythe. He had even had the gall to use a variation of his favourite nom de guerre. Typical of his arrogance and his sometimes dangerous sense of humour . . .
He wasn’t a passenger. The list included the names of the staff; Foggington-Smythe was one of the guest lecurers, a distinguished Egyptologist from Boston, author of books with titles like Caste and Gender in Ancient Egypt, whatever the hell that might mean. I wondered how John had Convinced Galactic Tours, Inc., that he was the man in question. For all I knew he might be an Egyptologist; he had claimed his specialty was classics, but once or twice he had displayed a fairly esoteric familiarity with matters Egyptological. But I was sure – well, almost sure – he couldn’t be the real Foggington-Smythe. Not that an Egyptologist couldn’t be a criminal; scholars are no more noble than the next man. But not even John would have time to lecture, write several ponderous tomes, and carry on a career as a master thief.
Would he?
I looked up from the list to see someone plodding towards me. One of the bright bags was slung over her shoulder. She must have spotted mine. She was the type that would notice things like that – a woman of a certain age, of medium height and stocky frame, with unblinking grey eyes under heavy brows. She had to be English; her fair skin was already pink, though it glistened with sun shield, and she was wearing a long-sleeved tan blouse and a shapeless khaki skirt that reached almost to her ankles. She looked familiar, and of course I knew why; I had seen her type in a number of British films: the housekeeper, the headmistress, the stocky spinster who is either the detective or a leading suspect.