Dead Men's Hearts

“You’ll probably have to buy a few things from them to establish your credibility,” Phil said, searching through his wallet as they climbed the stairs. “They’ll want American dollars, not Egyptian pounds. I have fifty dollars, what about you?”

Gideon checked. “A hundred.”

“That ought to be more than enough. These people aren’t used to seeing very much for their labors.” He handed his bills to Gideon. “Now look. We’ll turn over anything we come away with to the police, but I don’t want the el-Hamids getting into hot water over it. I know that offends your stern sense of justice but those are my terms. I trust it will be all right with you? In the interests of the greater good?”

“It’ll be all right with me. I just hope we end up with something Gabra can use.”

Phil unlocked the door to his room and went to the air conditioner to flick it on. “I think it would be best,” he said, “if you wore a disguise. What I have in mind,” he said, opening the top drawer of the bureau, “is a beard.”

“Come again?”

“A false beard and mustache. Fortunately, your hair color is almost the same as mine. Ah.” He removed a plastic bag with a dark mass inside.

“A beard?” Gideon said. “What, with wires to hook over my ears? How about a pillow for my stomach?”

“No, no, this is an up-to-date little item; never travel without it. I use it often, most notably in Damascus a few years ago to successfully convince a supercilious government official that I was a close relative of the president of Syria.”

“Didn’t you wind up in jail over that?”

“Well, yes,” Phil said, “I suppose you could say that, but it wasn’t the fault of the beard.”

“Thanks all the same—”

“Gideon, it’s quite possible that you’ve been noticed around Luxor. It’s also quite possible that one of the far- flung band of el-Hamids is working at Horizon House even now. It wouldn’t pay for you to be recognized. It might even be dangerous.”

“Dangerous? These decent, everyday—”

“I’m not concerned about the el-Hamids. I’m concerned about word of your interest getting back here. Haddon was apparently murdered over that head—by someone who is now at Horizon House—or have you forgotten for the moment?”

Gideon was silent. He’d forgotten for the moment.

“I wouldn’t want the same thing to happen to you; it’d probably be up to me to get your body back to the States too, and it’s a damned bother.” Phil pulled the room’s single chair into the center of the floor. “Now sit down and let me get this thing on you. I’ve had practice.”

Gideon sat.

While Phil pressed and repressed the silky mustache and goatee into place, they went over their strategy for the meeting. It took fifteen minutes, at the end of which Phil stepped back for an artistic evaluation.

He nodded his satisfaction. “I don’t believe we need to bother with the false eyebrows. Shall we go?”

Gideon got up to look in the mirror over the bureau. He’d worn a beard years before and had thought it suited him, but that one, while close-cropped, had pretty much been allowed to grow where it pleased. This one was fussy and pinched, a finicky little topiary beard sitting on the front of his face like a mat.

“I look” he decided, “like a poodle.”

“You look corrupt,” Phil said approvingly, “as if you ought to be sidling around the Casbah with a fez on your head and six false passports for sale in your breast pocket. All in all, not a bad image to cultivate tonight.”

“I’ll do my best. Any other advice?”

Phil thought for a moment.

“Yes,” he said. “Try and look rich.”

Chapter Twenty-one

When Phil asked to be taken to the Shari el-Jihad the taxi driver had protested.

“No, you don’t want to go to that place,” he told them. “Not for tourist, only for Egyptian peoples.”

But he had unwillingly complied, and Gideon soon understood his initial reluctance. Luxor, like most of the Nile cities, was laid out in parallel bands of decreasing prosperity. Along the river the Corniche was a glittering filament of affluence, but with every block traveled inland the glitter diminished and the squalor increased. Their driver, muttering disapproval to the last, took them beyond the souks in which they’d grazed the evening before and let them out in a narrow, unpaved maze of shoddy two- and three-story tenements, recently built but already stained and crumbling. Bleating goats wandered in and out of doorways. Chickens and gaunt, listless dogs scratched in the rutted dirt or ate street garbage. Somewhere nearby a donkey bawled and was answered by a second. The smells were of animals, excrement, and rancid cooking oil.

They were only seven blocks from the opulent Comiche; they might have been on another planet.

Phil led Gideon another half a block, past the guarded, appraising glances of weary, thin men and the hidden eyes of women covered in black from head to toe like shrouded statues, who watched avidly as they passed. Or so it seemed; the thick, dark veils made it impossible to tell what was happening behind them.

At the first corner they turned left into a livelier area; a warren of souks something like the one they’d had their fuul and koshari in the night before, but a level or two downscale; a sort of blue-collar version, so to speak. Street vendors hawked oil-soaked fuul and pita bread (“Not recommended for the timid alimentary canal,” Phil said.), charcoal-grilled corn, and fantastically colored soft drinks. In a shop no more than five feet by eight, a man sat in a cracked leather barber chair having his hair cut under a single naked light bulb. Next door was a stall selling used television sets with chipped screens and missing knobs.