The Serpent on the Crown (9 page)

The dusty prints faded out in the corridor, but it was not difficult to deduce that the intruder had come in through the courtyard and left the same way.

“Hell and damnation.” Ramses ran his fingers through his disheveled hair, dislodging a shower of sandy dust. “He didn’t leave a single clue. As Father would say, this is getting monotonous.”

FROM MANUSCRIPT H

The children had been awakened by the commotion, and were indignant at Elia for not letting them join in the fun.

“It was not fun,” Ramses said sternly. “Wasim might have been badly hurt.”

Carla looked ashamed, and David John considered the comment. “We should not be angry with Elia. She did what you told her to do.”

“So it’s my fault?” Ramses inquired, tucking the blankets around his son.

“You acted for what you believed to be the best,” David John conceded. “Was it an unfortunate accident, or an attempt at distraction?”

Silently Ramses cursed his son’s precocity. He tried to avoid lying to the children, so he phrased the answer with some care. “We don’t know yet. Now go to sleep.”

He kissed them both good night and left, knowing full well that his attempt at equivocation would be a failure. They’d hear the whole story, and a number of wild theories, from the servants.

I
nstead of going to Deir el Medina next day, they conducted another kind of excavation. The rubble had been disturbed by their frantic attempts to free Wasim, but close examination, of the sort Emerson would have approved, confirmed Ramses’s suspicion that the sturdily built structure couldn’t have been brought down by anything less than a battering ram or an explosive charge. They found a few fragments of a stick of dynamite and, some distance away, traces of the fuse.

Dynamite wasn’t hard to come by. (Nothing was, in Egypt, if you knew where to go.) Examination of the blackened, fragmented bricks at what had been the northeast corner indicated that the effect of the blast had been limited to that area. The collapse of the rest of the building had followed, but it might not have been intended.

“It was lucky for Wasim that he was sleeping near the door,” said Selim, brushing powder off his hands. “But this is not good, Ramses. We must question the men of Gurneh and find out who has an alibi.”

Ramses smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “You are getting to be quite a detective, Selim, but I doubt that line of investigation will get us anywhere. I photographed the clearest of the footprints this morning, but that is probably a forlorn hope too. The fellow wasn’t missing a toe or anything useful of that sort.”

“All the same, we will ask,” Selim said. “How is Wasim?”

“Enjoying a nice rest and all of Fatima’s food he can eat. Nefret treated his bruises and scrapes and told him he could go home, but he says he’s too weak to move.”

“We must find another guard,” Selim declared. “And rebuild the house.”

“I’ll leave it to you, then. There’s no use going to Deir el Medina today.”

He went back to his papyri. He felt slightly guilty, though he knew he wasn’t needed. From time to time he went to the window and looked out. Selim had a dozen men at work setting up a temporary structure of poles and canvas, and making new bricks. Their aggressive presence was enough to deter the few curiosity seekers whose carriages approached.

When they met for luncheon his mother was sorting through the messages that had arrived. “Nothing from the Pethericks?” Ramses asked.

“No. I am somewhat surprised. Mrs. Petherick must be getting bored.”

The communication came that afternoon, in the form of a hand-delivered message. David John, who had learned to read at an alarmingly early age, was poring over a book and Ramses was playing tag with Carla when his mother joined them in the garden. “Where is Nefret?” she asked.

“She has a patient.” Ramses took the note from her and eluded his daughter by pulling himself up into a tree. Ignoring Carla’s enraged, and justified, shrieks of “Not fair. Not fair!” he read the message.

“You’re right, Carla,” he said, dropping back to the ground. “I cheated, so I lose. You win. Now run along and clean up for tea. Papa has to go out for a little while.”

“Fatima has made a plum cake,” his mother added.

“Are you going out too?” Carla demanded.

Her grandmother smoothed the little girl’s ruffled black curls. “Yes.”

Carla weighed the advantages and disadvantages, her dark eyebrows drawn together in a thoughtful frown. David John had already reached the logical conclusion: With only the indulgent Fatima to supervise their tea, the entire plum cake would be theirs. He closed his book, gave his grandmother a quick hug, and trotted off toward the house, followed by Carla.

Ramses picked up the coat he had tossed on a bench, and his mother said, “I am glad you agree that we must go. Mrs. Petherick sounds on the verge of hysteria. If we don’t turn up before dark, heaven knows what she’ll do.”

Ramses looked again at the note. The ragged handwriting was certainly suggestive of shaken nerves and shaking hands. “‘He will come for me at nightfall. For the love of God, hurry!’”

“I agree that you have determined we must go,” he said. “It must have struck you, Mother, that this frantic appeal has the same calculated air as her earlier performances. I was under the impression that you considered the entire business a publicity stunt.”

“Life is seldom so simple as that,” said his mother sententiously. She took his arm and led him, gently but inexorably, along the path. “People are capable of incredible feats of self-delusion, as we see in cases of hypochondria. Mrs. Petherick may have convinced herself that the menace is real, in order to justify her actions in her own mind, and—”

“Yes, Mother.”

She was right, but her complacent smile and the briskness of her stride betrayed her real motive. It had been a forlorn hope that he could keep her from meddling in the Petherick affair.

They paused only long enough to collect Nefret, who had finished with her patients. By the time they reached the riverbank and had selected a boat to take them across, the sun was low in the west. Its slanting rays brightened the splendid columns of the Luxor Temple and, in incongruous juxtaposition, the modern facade of the Winter Palace Hotel. They hurried up the stairs from the quay to the street. As they waited to cross, Ramses referred again to the note.

“She asks us to come directly to her room. She’s afraid to open the door, she says!” He took his mother’s arm. With the skill of long practice they wound their way through the procession of camels, donkeys, and carriages that filled the street.

“Which room?” Nefret asked, looking up at the long facade of the hotel. The first floor, with the lobby and reception rooms, was reached by a pair of opposed curving stairs; guest rooms were on the second and third floors, with the ground floor reserved for storage and service areas.

“Three fifty-two and -three,” Ramses said. “A suite. It’s the one at that end.”

“The one with the balcony? I’m surprised she didn’t…Oh, good Lord! What’s that?”

There was no mistaking what it was, despite its distance from the ground. Sunset shone with theatrical intensity on the stone balustrade of the balcony and the form leaning over it. Man-high, shrouded, dead black, it seemed to drink the sun’s rays. As they stared in disbelief, the shape slowly bent forward and fell, forty feet, toward the terrace below.

Ramses shook off his wife’s hand and went up the stairs three at a time. People in the lobby turned to stare as he ran past. He didn’t wait for the lift, which was uncertain at best, but headed straight up the staircase. He reached the third floor and ran full tilt along the long corridor, damning the architect of the Winter Palace for wasting so much space on staircases and passageways. Most of the guests were at tea, on the terraces or in the tearoom; only a few soft-footed servants stared as he passed.

Mrs. Petherick’s suite was at the end of a right-angle turn in the corridor. As Ramses knew from visits to other friends, her two rooms were reached through a small antechamber which gave greater privacy to the occupant of the suite. In front of the closed door of the antechamber stood Abdul, one of the hotel servants, tricked out in a red fez, a gold-braided jacket, and inauthentic but picturesque baggy trousers. Ramses cut short his cheerful “Salaam aleikhum” and pounded on the door, calling out her name and his own. No answer, no sound at all from within. He turned to the servant. “Is the lady not here?”

“She has not come out, Brother of Demons.” Abdul thought for a few seconds and then proudly came up with a conclusion. “So—she must still be there, yes? She gave me much baksheesh and told me to let no one in. No one at all except you or the Sitt Hakim or—”

The door wasn’t locked. Thinking she might be cowering in the closet or bathroom, Ramses hammered even harder on one of the inner doors, the one that led to the sitting room. Still no answer.

“What’s she playing at?” he demanded. There was no answer from Abdul, who knew the question hadn’t been addressed to him. Ramses realized he had no choice but to play along, but he would have a few words to say to the confounded woman when he located her.

The inner door wasn’t locked either. The tall French doors to the balcony stood open, the filmy curtains blew in the breeze. A blazing, bloody sunset reddened the sky. The room was in perfect order, and so were the adjoining bedchamber and bath. Mrs. Petherick’s garments filled the wardrobe, her toilet articles were laid out on the dressing table, but the lady herself was nowhere to be found.

“
I
t was an empty robe,” I said. “There was nothing inside. I realized that at once, naturally, from the way it fluttered down.”

“Yes.” Ramses was pacing up and down Mrs. Petherick’s sitting room, picking up objects at random as if hoping to find something he had overlooked. “How many of the damned things does the damned woman own?”

“Several, I expect. She favors black, and it is a popular color for evening cloaks and wraps.”

Nefret and I had hastened upstairs as soon as we had made certain we did not have to deal with a mangled body. I spread the garment out across the back of the sofa. It was similar to the one the intruder had abandoned at our house, though not identical; the first had been of corded silk, while this was of a heavier velvet, trimmed across the shoulders with jet beads. In the inconsequential way it does sometimes, my mind wandered off into speculation about what this garment was supposed to suggest. Undefined powers of evil? The notorious Prince of Darkness? It was not Egyptian, ancient or modern. However, those who believe in evil spirits are not prone to logical ratiocination.

We searched the suite again, finding no more than Ramses had. Nothing was missing, so far as we could tell. Before long we were joined by Mr. Salt. The manager of a large hotel is not easily rattled, but Mr. Salt was not a happy man. His guests had informed him that a dead body had been thrown from a third-floor window or balcony. Or, according to one imaginative witness, from an invisible hand in the heavens above the hotel. He requested—his voice only a little tremulous—that we tell him what we knew of the matter.

Our assurance that there was no dead body cheered him quite a lot. “Then the police will not have to be called,” he said, wiping his perspiring brow.

“Not yet,” I replied.

“Not yet? But Mrs. Emerson, if there is no body—”

“That is the difficulty, you see,” I explained. “Mrs. Petherick’s living body is not here either. She seems to have disappeared.”

“Forgive me, Mother, but that conclusion is a trifle premature,” said my son. “There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for her absence. We must question the other guests, and Mrs. Petherick’s son and daughter, and her maidservant.”

“She did not bring an attendant with her,” Mr. Salt said. “One of the hotel maids waited on her when she required assistance. But I am sure there is, as you say, a perfectly innocent explanation!”

“You have no objection to our conducting an inquiry?” I asked.

“I would be infinitely obliged if you would, Mrs. Emerson.”

Mrs. Petherick was not in the dining salon or the other public rooms. The concierge had not seen her, nor had she left her key at the desk. The keys had large, heavy bronze tags attached, so it was unlikely she would take hers with her, even supposing she had suddenly changed her mind and gone out without leaving a message for us. Adrian and Harriet Petherick were not in the hotel. They had left their keys, but no one knew where they had gone. The hotel maid was so unnerved at being questioned she could only dither and deny knowledge of any kind. We decided to postpone further investigation. Questioning all the hotel guests would take hours, and was likely to produce as much imaginative fiction as fact. Had I not known this from my previous acquaintance with criminal investigations, it would have been brought home to me when we attempted to make our way across the lobby. As soon as we emerged from the lift we were surrounded by a curious crowd, all asking questions, some claiming to have vital information. I was forced to employ my parasol in order to pass through, and one importunate fellow, who had announced himself as a journalist, followed us all the way to the dock.

We took our places in the boat. It was a beautiful night, as most nights in Luxor are; moonlight rippled along the water and the stars were bright. I glanced at my watch. “Late again. Fatima will be wroth.”

“And Maaman will be weeping into the soup,” Nefret said. “Well, Mother, what do you make of this?”

“There are only two possible explanations,” I said, settling myself more comfortably on the cushioned bench. “Either Mrs. Petherick left of her own accord or she was carried away against her will.”

“How could anyone carry her off without being seen?” Ramses demanded. “Abdul isn’t the brightest lad in Egypt, but even he would have noticed a man encumbered with a struggling, screaming woman—or even an unconscious woman, who was, to put it tactfully, a well-rounded armful.”

“You noticed that, did you?” Nefret murmured. “Perhaps he lied.”

“Not to me. Oh, hell,” Ramses said, running his fingers through his windblown hair. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. If he had been threatened or extravagantly bribed he wouldn’t have been able to greet me so unselfconsciously, or look me in the eye. He’s terrified of Father. Anyhow, he’s an honest man, in his fashion. No, Mother. The lady has pulled another stunt. She had plenty of time to get out and away before I reached her room.”

“Leaving everything she owned?”

“Packing a suitcase would have spoiled the effect,” Ramses said.

“But then honest Abdul must have lied when he said she had not come out of her room.”

“Not necessarily. He wasn’t smack in front of her door the whole time; he admitted he’d left his post once or twice or, yes, Brother of Demons, perhaps more often, to sneak a cigarette with one of the other men or answer a call of nature. She could have got past him if she was quick and careful. A kidnapper couldn’t have done.”

In my opinion he was now jumping to conclusions. Admittedly his was the most obvious interpretation, but clever criminals are capable of ingenious schemes. If the villain had been disguised as a servant and Mrs. Petherick as a rug or bag of laundry…I decided not to pursue the subject, since Ramses was in a rare state of exasperation.

“I wonder if we should notify your father of this latest development,” I said.

“Why bother? He’ll read about it in the Cairo newspapers tomorrow.”

“Oh, good Gad. I suppose he will, won’t he? He isn’t going to like this at all.”

“Particularly,” said Ramses, “when he reads the comments we made to the press.”

“But we didn’t say anything,” I protested. “Except that those who had information should give it to Mr. Salt.”

“That won’t prevent the journalists from quoting us,” said Ramses.

“I wonder what Abdullah would say about all this,” I mused.

“Have you dreamed about him lately?” Ramses’s voice was studiously noncommittal. The family was still skeptical about those strange dreams, but they were more than dreams to me, so realistic that they were like seeing my dear departed friend in the flesh. He had given his life for mine, acting as instinctively as a father who throws himself in front of a threatened child. He had loved me as I had learned to love him; but that act of supreme sacrifice had also been his way of taking his fate into his own hands, defying the god who threatened him with the failing strength of old age.

“Not lately,” I said.

Nefret smiled affectionately. “At least he won’t complain that we have a new corpse on our hands. Remember what he used to say? ‘Every year, another dead body!’”

E
very year, another dead body!” said Abdullah. He came striding along his usual path, the one from the Valley of the Kings. My route had led me up the steep slope of the cliffs behind Deir el Bahri, and as the sun rose behind me, my shadow rushed forth as if to greet him.

“What do you mean?” I demanded. “We haven’t had any dead bodies this year. You might say ‘hello’ before you start complaining,” I added.

He never did, though. I suppose that to him, in this place where there was no time, it was as if we had spoken together only moments before. He smiled sardonically and stroked his beard. It had been pure white the day he died in my arms. In these dreams it was black, and his face was that of a young, hearty man.

“Not yet, Sitt,” he said.

“Who?” I demanded. “Not Emerson? Not Ramses? Not—”

“I cannot tell you the future. It is yet to be determined. But is there not always a dead body? Always you look for danger, Sitt.”

“If you are referring to Mrs. Petherick and her statue, she came to us, not we to her. And what danger can there be? She is a silly woman who invents foolish stories.”

“The statue is not invented.”

“Where did it come from, Abdullah?”

He rolled his eyes and smiled. “From the last place you would expect, Sitt.”

“I might have known you wouldn’t give me a direct answer! Not Amarna, not Tomb 55?”

His teasing smile vanished. He came a step closer and put out his hand, as if to touch my cheek. “Sitt, heed my words. Stop seeking trouble, rest in the shade and be at peace. As it was for me, so it is for you. Do not the days grow shorter, the paths longer, the loads heavier?”

The words fell like stones onto my heart and the sky seemed to darken; but I shook my head and spoke resolutely. “All the more reason to make the most of the shorter days and brace one’s strength to bear the heavier loads. I never expected to hear such talk from you, you whose strength and courage never failed.”

“Ah,” said Abdullah. “I knew you would say that.”

A ray of sunlight brightened his smiling face and I said in exasperation, “What I want from you is practical advice—not that I ever get it! If you won’t tell me where the statue was found, at least give me a hint.”

“I have,” said Abdullah, stroking his beard. “And now I will give you another. Once before, not long ago, you asked me a similar question and I answered it. Remember that question and that answer, Sitt.”

He turned and walked away. I stamped my foot with annoyance. Over the years I had asked many questions; the answers I had got were, to say the least, enigmatic. I had not the least idea which of those questions he meant.

I
f I had entertained any expectation of going out next day, I abandoned it as soon as I went to the veranda after breakfast and saw the people who were gathered round the temporary guardhouse. Our new guard, Daoud’s son Hassan, stood foursquare in the center of the road, Wasim’s antiquated rifle in his hands; and I believe the sight of the weapon (which I devoutly hoped was not loaded) was the only thing that prevented some of the curiosity seekers from skirting the guardhouse and coming at us from one side or the other.

To be honest—which I always endeavor to be—I became increasingly restless as the morning wore on. I was itching to know what was happening in Luxor: whether Mrs. Petherick had turned up, whether any new information had been learned, and what her children thought of it all. After surveying the scene with a particularly stony expression, Ramses had strictly forbidden me to leave the house—or rather, since he knows me well, he had strongly suggested that I follow his advice on the matter. I agreed (while reserving the right to act otherwise should the situation change) and he went off, declaring that he meant to spend the day working on the hieratic papyri we had found in such numbers. The Egyptian language was Ramses’s specialty and major interest, and he had fallen behind on his translations.

My thoughts strayed to my conversation with Abdullah. He had been as annoyingly mysterious as usual, and there was nothing new in his lecture about my habit of looking for trouble, as he called it. But this was the first time he had had the temerity to hint that I was getting too old for such adventures! He ought to have known that would only spur me on.

Perhaps that was why the old rascal had done it. Not that I needed any such inspiration. Like Abdullah, I would be the master of my own fate. A swift and honorable death, particularly if it were in the service of a loved one, was preferable to slow decay of mind and body.

What the devil had he meant by that last “hint,” as he called it? I tried to recall the many conversations I had had with him. He had often told me that time had no meaning in the afterworld; what had seemed years to me might have been only a few moments to him. We had spoken of many things; try as I might, I could not call to mind any reference to Amarna or Akhenaton.

After Nefret had tended to the patients who had turned up that morning—an infected toe and a case of ophthalmia—she joined me on the veranda, admitting that she was unable to emulate her husband’s lack of curiosity.

“Who are all those people?” she asked, accepting a cup of coffee from Fatima. “Don’t they have anything better to do?”

“Many people lead lives of crushing boredom,” I said. “They are so lacking in imagination and intelligence they don’t even realize how bored they are until something like this happens. That flashily dressed lady and gentleman in the carriage, for instance—I think I remember meeting them last year. Idle, uninformed members of the aristocracy.”

“Who is that fellow in the shooting jacket and broad-brimmed hat?”

“A journalist,” I said with a sniff. “No, I don’t know him, but I can spot the villains a mile away. Goodness, I do believe the fellow is offering Hassan a bribe!”

“He is probably not the first to do so. Hassan knows better.”

“Wasim knows better too, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover he extracted a sizable amount of baksheesh from various people.”

“By promising to deliver messages, which you had instructed him to do anyhow? So that’s why he is now anxious to return to his duties. One would have supposed that having a house collapse on him would put him off the job.”

“Greed is a motive strong enough to overcome cowardice,” I remarked. “Curse it, look at all those people. I wish…”

“That you could find out what is going on? So do I,” Nefret admitted. “But we daren’t risk leaving the house. We would be surrounded.”

“I had thought of borrowing a robe and headcloth from Fatima and going just as far as the guardhouse.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. Please don’t, Mother. I have a feeling that before long we will hear from either Miss Petherick or Cyrus.”

It was neither of the above who came first. I was a trifle surprised when I saw Hassan stand back and try to hide the rifle behind his back. Then I recognized the man who came walking up the road—taller than most Egyptians, his white uniform crisp, his close-cropped black beard framing a keen dark face. A wise man does not argue with the chief of the Luxor police, especially this one. Ibrahim Ayyid was still young, but in the past few years he had acquired a reputation for strict discipline and fair dealing.