said. “Who else would have Johnny Cash?”
“Don’t answer it,” John ordered. “Let her leave a message.”
“You can’t be sure it’s Suzi,” I said.
“If it is, I’d rather Schmidt didn’t talk to her before he gives it due consideration.”
“And before I have finished my dinner,” Schmidt said, scooping the last of the eggplant onto his plate.
“I’d better check my messages,” Feisal said, taking out his cell phone. “I told Ali’s brother to let me know at once if they heard from him.”
I couldn’t blame him for clinging to that hope, increasingly unlikely though it seemed. He had several messages, none of which wrung a comment from him until the last. He let out a strangled squawk of horror.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Don’t tell me Ali is—”
“Not Ali,” Feisal muttered. “But it’s bad. Very bad. What am I going to do?”
We waited, holding our collective breaths. Feisal’s face was haggard. “Saida. She’s coming. Tomorrow. She wants to see…him.”
NINE
F eisal’s first impulse was to cut and run for it. “She can’t get in the tomb if I’m not here.”
“Wanna bet?” I inquired.
Feisal thought it over. “Bloody hell,” he said.
“Perhaps,” said Schmidt, “we should enlist her aid. She is very intelligent.”
“Tell her the truth, you mean?” said Feisal, horrified.
“Out of the question,” John said. “Control your lascivious impulses, Schmidt. It’s not her intelligence that interests you. You’ll have to ring Ashraf, Feisal. He’s the only one who can head her off.”
“Yes, right.” Feisal pushed his chair back and rose. “Let’s find a more private spot.”
We let Schmidt pay the check and hurried back to the hotel. A turbaned attendant was turning down the beds and putting little foil-wrapped pieces of chocolate on the pillows.
“The service here is very good,” Schmidt said, unwrapping his chocolate.
“Too good,” John said, roaming restlessly around the sitting room. “Get rid of him, Feisal. Politely.”
“Find anything?” I inquired, after John had looked behind the sofa cushions and under the table.
“No. That’s the trouble with all this assiduous service, one can’t tell whether the place has been searched. Watch what you say to Ashraf, Feisal. Schmidt, you had better report to Suzi.”
“I want to hear what Feisal says first,” said Schmidt, settling himself on the sofa.
Feisal got through to Ashraf right away. I found this surprising until it occurred to me that Ashraf must be as edgy as we were, and as anxious to stay in touch.
“Put it on speaker,” Schmidt said, all ears.
“Sorry, my equipment is somewhat primitive,” Feisal snapped. “Ashraf? Feisal here. We have a slight problem…No, nothing like that…No, there’s been no news of him. But Saida wants to visit a particular site in the Valley tomorrow, and…Yes, that site. Can you…Good. No, I’m going to Denderah tomorrow, there has been…Oh. If you say so. What? Oh. Are you sure you…Oh. You’re sure. Right.”
“Let me guess,” I said brightly. “He’ll put Saida off. And you are not going to Denderah.”
“Very clever,” said Feisal, baring his teeth. “Go on.”
“Ashraf is coming to Luxor.” I was guessing now, but Feisal’s expression of deepening gloom confirmed my hunch. “When?”
“Maybe tomorrow. Next day at the latest. He’ll let me know.”
“Hmph,” said John. “He’ll expect progress, won’t he?”
“Indubitably.”
“Then we must make some progress,” said Schmidt, taking out his cell. “What shall I say to Suzi?”
“As little as possible,” John said.
I must say, the little rascal was good. After the initial fond greetings, his first question was a coy, “Guess where I am?”
Suzi didn’t go in for guessing. She knew. Schmidt’s mustache twitched; he chewed on his lower lip as he listened to a fairly lengthy speech. “But,
The last fell, it was clear, on deaf ears—the ears of Suzi, at any rate.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Suzi is coming to Luxor.”
S uzi was stupider than I had believed, or else dangerously confident of her powers of seduction. If I had been in her shoes I’d have begun wondering about Schmidt. She had had sense enough to assure him of her complete trust, and she had promised to stay away from us while she was in Luxor. I didn’t believe that promise. It wouldn’t be difficult to follow us unobtrusively; Egyptian dress, for men and women both, involves long flapping garments and a variety of concealing headgear. And most men sport beards. Useful things, beards. Suzi was tall enough to pass for a man.
Feisal had declared his intention of heading for the West Bank the next morning to join the search for Ali. After a somewhat acrimonious discussion we decided to join him. Most of the acrimony came from John, who pointed out that we would only be in the way, since we knew nothing about the terrain and weren’t in fit condition to climb around the cliffs. Schmidt took this personally and started loping around the sitting room flexing his muscles.
I didn’t argue with him. I understood why he wanted to go; action, any kind of action, was better than sitting around stewing and speculating. He even agreed to skip breakfast and head out at sunrise, so we’d have several hours before the heat got too bad.
If Schmidt was going, I was going too. I thought John might try to talk me out of it, but he didn’t. Having lost the argument with Schmidt, he retired to our room in high dudgeon (and John’s dudgeons are extremely high), leaving me to work out the final details. When I joined him he was already tucked up in bed, reading. He put the book down and held out one elegant, expressive hand. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.
It would have been childish to hold a grudge. Besides, the sofa in the sitting room was only five and a half feet long.
S chmidt rousted us out at 6:00 A.M. There was coffee. There was also a heap of square white boxes, the hotel’s packed lunch offering. Schmidt delved into one of them as we left the room, and finished a banana before we emerged from the hotel. He had arranged for a car the night before, tactfully refusing Feisal’s offer of his Jeep. Schmidt doesn’t care for Jeeps, especially the ones that are often in the repair shop. This vehicle was a small van, with plenty of room for us and the lunch boxes. It takes longer to cross the Nile by means of the bridge instead of taking a boat, but Schmidt isn’t crazy about gangplanks either, especially the type used by the launches, which are planks about six inches wide. They don’t usually wobble, but they look as if they might. Schmidt had been a good sport about the gangplanks the day before, so we tacitly agreed to indulge him this time.
Up front with the driver, Schmidt kept up a running monologue of commentary to which I did not listen. The rest of us didn’t talk much. I assumed that John and Feisal, like me, were preoccupied with the ensuing arrivals of a couple of people we didn’t want to see. Suzi wasn’t answering her phone. Ashraf had ordered Feisal to wait for his call instead of trying to reach him. According to Feisal, Ashraf was not in a good mood early in the morning. It struck me as a very civilized attitude, generally speaking, but I would have given a great deal to be assured that Ashraf had Saida under control. Too damn many people were coming to Luxor. I felt like a nanny in charge of undisciplined children, or a guard single-handedly trying to control a prison break.
The bridge was a grandiose affair, with ornamental statues and posters with enormous portraits of Mubarak. Once on the West Bank, the van headed north, past irrigation canals filled with reeds and garbage. Traffic included carts pulled by morose donkeys, bicycles and motorbikes, people riding morose donkeys, and the occasional tourist bus. Schmidt passed a hard-boiled egg back to me.
