“It’s strange,” Pierce agreed. “They didn’t bug my room. Do you think the government suspects you?”
“I don’t see why. In any event, if they’ve been snooping, all they’ll hear are a lot of suggestive noises. I’ve been preoccupied with my girls,” Grover said.
“Well, don’t touch that mike, whatever you do,” Pierce said. “Just play it straight until we get out of here.”
“My feelings, exactly.”
“Welcome,” Barnaby said. “Nice to see you’ve arrived, Robert. Pleasant trip?”
“Very.” Pierce took out his pad and wrote, GROVER’S ROOM IS BUGGED. IS YOURS?
Barnaby read it and shrugged. “Come in and make yourself comfortable. Not the Hilton, I’m afraid, but it will have to do.”
“What have you got to drink?” Grover asked. He was walking around the room, looking behind the pictures, beneath the window sill, over the door, under the washbasin. There was a faint smile on his face.
He likes this, Pierce thought. It’s all a part of the game to him.
“Just a little bourbon.”
“Bourbon?”
“An American drink.”
“How ghastly. I thought they stopped drinking bourbon when they killed Wild Bill Hickok. Isn’t that the one that tastes like scotch and molasses?”
“Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it, of course. The room is all right, by the way. So perhaps our cover isn’t blown.”
The spy-talk irritated Pierce, but he said nothing.
“Why do you suppose they picked on me?”
“I don’t know,” Pierce said. “Maybe you don’t have an honest face.”
“Do you think so?” He gave a pleased little smile.
Nikos came in, followed a few minutes later by Conway. Greetings were brief. Pierce took out a map of Luxor and spread it on the bed.
“You’re all familiar with the first part of the operation. Now you want to know what we do with the stuff once we find it.” He glanced at Lord Grover. “You guessed it, the other night—we float the treasure down the Nile in a boat. We can load in darkness and send it off; in the morning, if the government inspectors come around, we’ll be lily-pure and empty-handed.”
“Where do we get the boat?” Nikos asked.
“Upstream. We’ll steal a fisherman’s felucca in Aswan and sail it down. Nobody would ever connect us with a boat stolen 200 miles away. The Egyptians are always stealing things, I understand, and wood is scarce.”
Barnaby was listening, shaking his head.
“What’s the matter?”
“Do you know how large those boats are? Not very large, I can assure you. And when Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered, the treasure from the anteroom alone filled five railroad flatcars. You’ll need a whole fleet of little boats.”
“No,” Pierce said. “We have to think of our second problem: how we convert our treasure into hard cash.” He looked around the group. “Barnaby suggested selling it to private collectors. That’s too difficult, and besides, word would be bound to leak out. Nikos undoubtedly could find fences, but we’d lose too large a percentage of the total value. So what do we do?”
He paused dramatically.
“All right, for Christ’s sake,” Grover said, puffing a cigar. “What do we do?”
“We sell it to the party that wants it most.”
“Egypt?”
“Of course. We send them a note, a few photographs of the tomb, and a trinket or two—worth 20,000 dollars, perhaps. We announce to them our discovery and give them forty-eight hours to pay fifty million dollars into a numbered Geneva account, which I have opened. We might mention in passing that after forty-eight hours, the treasure will either be melted down or offered for sale in toto to the museums of the world. First choice, I think, going to the museum in Tel Aviv.”
Dead silence in the room. Then Conway began to laugh, “Beautiful,” he said, “just beautiful.”
“In forty-eight hours,” Pierce continued, “the government will have no time to search out the treasure themselves. They will have no time to hunt the tomb robbers. They will have no time to do anything except scrape up the dough and get it off to Geneva. We can arrange transfer of the money from there by letter. We cannot be traced. It will be done as cleanly and anonymously as you could wish.”
“All right,” Nikos said. “But you still haven’t explained how we get the stuff out of the country.”
“But that’s the point—we don’t. The treasure will never leave Egypt.”
There was another long silence, and then Barnaby said, “But won’t they know? Won’t they know—as we do—that it is almost impossible to get it out of the country? When they get the letter, won’t they assume that it must still be in Egypt?”
“Would you, in their place?” Pierce shook his head. “I don’t think you’d take that chance. Not faced with the prospect of having it melted down on the one hand or displayed in Israel on the other. So long as they are perfectly assured that a treasure exists—and we will take great pains to assure them—then they must act as we wish. They have no choice. The stakes are enormous.”
Barnaby stood and walked up and down the room. He finished his cigarette in silence, turning the plan over in his mind. It was clever, as clever as the original hieroglyph. Somehow, the continuity of cunning appealed to him.
“Okay. What do we do?”
“We load part of the treasure—not all—onto a boat and sail it down to Cairo. We take only the most valuable and choice pieces. This will be our insurance against backfire of the plan. Should the Egyptians decide not to pay, we will have something to show for our efforts. The likelihood of their acting that way is minute, so minute that I considered not removing anything from the tomb. But I think it is best to be prudent, even if it is troublesome to us.
“Once in Cairo, we hide the treasure either in the city or in the desert outside. It should not be difficult to find a place. When it is secure, we will send off our letter. By that time, we will have returned to Luxor, where we will continue to dig innocently for another few months. The Cairo government will recover the treasure, and there will be immense publicity. We will feel foolish working diligently on a narrow-minded project when such grandeur was practically under our noses the whole time. But we will shrug and talk vaguely of the advancement of science by unspectacular steps. Six months later, we will all be rich men.”
Pierce smiled. The others smiled back.
“Do you have final clearance from the antiquities people?” he asked Barnaby.
“Yes. All set to go. The Land Rover has been loaded with everything we need. Nikos is driving it to Luxor in the morning. We can fly down the day after tomorrow.”
2. Lisa
PIERCE WAS SITTING ALONE at breakfast the next morning when a girl came up and joined him. She wore a blue linen sleeveless dress that fitted smoothly over her breasts and narrow waist. Her long dark hair was loose around her face; her eyes were an incredibly deep blue.
“Would you call the waiter?” the girl asked. She looked directly at him. “I hope you don’t mind company. I wanted to meet you.” Her accent was English.
“Not at all,” Pierce said, lighting a cigarette. “My name is Robert Pierce.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m Lisa Barrett.”
Then he remembered: Lord Grover’s personal secretary. Count on Grover, he thought. He let his eyes run over her while she ordered coffee and eggs. When she looked back at him, he said, “Lord Grover has excellent taste.”
“Is that a compliment,” she asked, “or a slur on my character?”
“I’m wondering myself.”
“I thought you were the man with all the answers.”
“Only some of them.”
She spread her napkin across her lap. “Well, you can keep wondering, then.”
“Do you like men who have all the answers?”
“Never met any,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to meet you.”
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He watched her eat. She had a strong face, dark eyebrows leading to a fine, straight nose, and a proud mouth. High cheekbones. She looked rather Egyptian, he thought.
“Would you care,” he said, “to accompany me on a tour of the city?”
“Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “I would like it very much.”
They took a cab to the citadel, on the eastern edge of the city. The mosque of Sultan Mohammed ibn Qualawun rose magnificently behind the high, ochre walls of the fortress, which still housed troops. Pierce walked with Lisa through the mosque and out onto a terrace where they could see all of Cairo spread out before them. In the distance were the gray hulks of the pyramids, disrupting the horizon.
She stood next to him at the railing, looking out. “It’s awfully big,” she said, “I never expected that.”
“It’s the largest city in Africa and the tenth largest capital in the world,” Pierce said. “Three and a half million people. That makes it bigger than Paris.”
“You’ve been doing homework,” she said. She pointed to a nearby mosque. “What’s that?”
“The mosque of Sultan Hasan.”
“And over there?”
“The mosque of Ibn Tulun.”
“You really know what you’re talking about.” She walked along the railing. He liked to watch her walk.
“Is that Giza out there?” She pointed to a group of pyramids to the south.
“No, that’s Saqqara. Giza is over there.”
He had the feeling that she was testing him in some peculiar way, examining him. Often, he noticed her watching him closely; she had been doing it all morning. He wondered about her age. It was hard to say—twenty-four, twenty-eight, perhaps even thirty. She pushed her dark hair back from her face.
“Do you have a cigarette?”
He gave her one and lit it. She really was an astonishingly beautiful girl. There was a wide-eyed look about her which he liked.
Suddenly, from one of the minarets came the sound of the muezzin, the warbling voice calling the Moslem faithful to prayer.
The call was picked up in one mosque after another. It floated over the city, soft and gentle, mingled with the wind.
“My God,” she said, “that’s an incredible sound. It’s so…foreign.”
He nodded. He was thinking of what Barnaby had said in a moment of drunken exhilaration: Cairo—the city of a thousand minarets, where the call to prayer had been heard five times daily for a thousand years.
“Have you been here before?” she asked.
“Yes, once.”
“You travel a lot.” It was a statement.
“Yes.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“I suppose.”
He felt uncomfortable.
They walked down a side street, looking at the faces in the crowd. The variety was remarkable: pale Europeans in business suits; native Egyptians with dark skins and straight noses; black-haired, lighter-skinned men of Turkish or Persian extraction; stocky, purple-black Nubians from Lower Egypt and the Sudan; an occasional slim Negro from the Nilotic tribes of deeper Africa. There were women in veils and women in tight skirts, makeup, and high heels; and there were children everywhere, running up to clutch at your clothes, palms extended, asking for baksheesh.
In the Egyptian Museum, they stared at the mummies, all collected in one room. A guide explained to them about each pinched, drawn face. Pierce found it a strange experience, looking at the features of men of power and majesty dead three thousand years and more. Some of them still retained their regal appearance.
For instance, there was Sekenre, who united Egypt about 1550 B.C. and drove out the invaders. He was the subject of a folktale for centuries afterward; his mummy showed the scars of battle, a horribly mutilated face and skull.
But the most impressive was Ramses II. The skin was black from exposure to air, the hair tufted, the body shrunken. Even in death, the firm chin and tight mouth indicated unmistakably that this was a man to be reckoned with. Ramses II had built the mighty temple of Abu Simbel; he had ruled Egypt with a strong hand for sixty-seven years and had sired 150 children. He had been the pharaoh of Biblical oppression, and he had ruled with an iron hand, one of the most famous kings in a civilization that continued for thousands of years.
Later, they walked through the galleries displaying the contents of Tutankhamen’s tomb. It seemed to go on forever: case after case of jewelry, gold, lavish ornaments. Then, when they went outside, they passed a woman squatting on the street, nursing her child, her eyes hollow as she stared forward. Flies crawled on the baby’s face.
“It’s not fair,” Lisa had said.
The air-conditioning hummed softly in his hotel room. The shutters had been drawn against the afternoon light, giving the room a warm yellowish glow. But it was cool. Pierce sat in a chair watching the girl sleeping on the bed. She had fallen asleep sitting upright while they had talked after lunch. It was his own fault, he thought—talking too much, as usual.
He had made her lie down. She mumbled protests but was soon asleep again. Her skirt had been pulled up slightly, showing a firm thigh above a dimpled knee. She slept soundly, innocently.
A funny girl. More than anything else, she seemed to have been confused by their exploration of the city. Well, he thought, it was a confusing city—so vast, so poor, with so many sharp contrasts and contradictions.
He must have fallen asleep himself, because he dreamed of a huge wall of gold, then a room, then a vast cavern the size of a football field, all dull yellow. And he saw, drifting before him in a jumbled fog, a leering face above quivering breasts and the leering tanned faces of the crowd, which merged with the face of an old hag, missing most of her teeth, her jaws wrinkled grotesquely. Then a one-eyed man, staggering down a street, and a man on crutches. And the noise of an airplane, a humming, a droning.
He opened his eyes and heard the air-conditioner. Lisa was sitting up on the bed, looking at him.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, standing up. “But my dress is all wrinkled. How long did I sleep?”
“I don’t know. I fell asleep myself.”
“It was all that sun,” she said, walking into the bathroom. “Where did I put my purse?”
“By the lamp.” Pierce felt oddly happy. The fact that they had fallen asleep together gave him a feeling of unexpected intimacy which was pleasant. He watched her retrieve the purse and go into the bathroom. He followed her. She was combing her hair.
“I think I’d like to know you better,” he said.
“There’s plenty of time for that.”
“How about dinner?”
“Sorry, I have a dozen letters to get off before we leave Cairo tomorrow. I’ll have dinner in my room.”
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely.” She put the comb in her purse and snapped it shut. “I’d better get started now.”
You’re in a rush to leave, Pierce thought. You felt the same way I did.
He accompanied her to the door.
“Thanks for the use of your bed.”
“Quite all right. I’m sorry it couldn’t have been more—”
“It couldn’t have been. See you in the morning.” She smiled again, and was gone.
He went back and sat down on the bed, thinking about her for longer than he realized.
About ten that night, as he was packing for the airplane, a girl entered his room without knocking. He recognized her as one of the girls on Capri—a short blonde with short hair and a firm little body. She had a pixie manner and arched her back to thrust forward her breasts as she dangled the bottle of champagne in one hand.
“Company?” she asked.
“No thanks,” Pierce said. He was working on a way to pack his shirts so they wouldn’t wrinkle. In all his years, he had never quite learned how.
“Wouldn’t you like some champagne on our last night in civilization?”
“You’re nice,” he s
aid, “But I’m not in the mood.”
“That’s all right,” she said brightly. “I can fix that.” She began unpeeling the wrapping around the cork and loosening the wires. “Do you have any glasses?”
“Please,” Pierce said. “I’d rather be alone tonight.”
The girl shrugged and left. A few minutes later, he got a call from Grover, who sounded hurt.
“Listen,” Grover said, “don’t you believe in Santa Claus? I don’t often have Communist impulses, you know.”
Pierce felt nothing but exhaustion. He sighed and said, “If I didn’t believe in Santa Claus, I wouldn’t be here.”
“I know what the problem is. You think you’re Santa Claus. You’re getting a complex, my boy.”
“Go to hell.”
“Dreaming of gold, are you?”
“See you in the morning,” Pierce said, and hung up. He sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette.
Tomorrow, they would be in Luxor.
3. Luxor
THE FIRST THING ANYONE buys in Luxor is a little whisk rather like a feather duster. The going price is twenty-five piasters, or roughly fifty cents, and it is worth it.
The flies in Luxor are very bad.
In the following days, Pierce learned to do everything one-handed—take pictures, eat and drink, draw charts, and write up notes. With his other hand, he used the whisk to keep the flies off his face, away from his eyes and mouth. It was something you learned quickly in Luxor.
There was no wind at the airport, only dry, wavering heat that shimmered from the sand, distorting the red limestone cliffs on the horizon. They caught a cab into the center of town and said little on the way in.
Lord Grover appeared thoroughly disgusted. Sitting in the back seat between his two girls—the blonde and a dark-eyed Malaysian—he watched the dusty buildings go by, smelled the dung in the streets, saw the traffic of donkeycarts, chickens, dirty people on battered bicycles.
“Luxor,” he snorted, “the jewel of the Nile.”
Conway smiled. “Well, look at it this way. What’s good enough for the pharaohs is—”
“Never mind.”
It was a small town, though it had once been the largest city south of Cairo. That had been three thousand years ago, when Cairo was called Memphis, a city of splendor, boasting a huge sphinx of pure alabaster. Luxor was Thebes, the fantastic necropolis of the Empire, the “hundred-gated Thebes” of Homer.