"Thought you were clever, didn't you, sabotaging my lm?" he said, unperturbed. "But your own photographs have exposed you."

"What are you talking about?" She tried to conceal her confusion.

"Canopic jars, Miss Foret. You forgot about them. Where there are canopic jars, there is a mummy, and grave robbers take gold, not cadavers." He took a step down and stood eye to eye with her. His long * 116 *

horse face softened to a smile. "You have the mummy, don't you? And I will bet you have even been foolish enough to bring it back to Cairo."

He shook his head slowly.

"Oh, Miss Foret. I have found you out. I don't know your reasons for this folly, but those admiring reporters inside will have to change their headlines now, won't they? And President Rashidi will have his men on you in a minute."

Her mind reeled, mixing rage and fear. "You can go to hell," was all she could manage. She spun away and hurried down the rest of the staircase, feeling his glare like a spear aimed at her back.

He called down the stairs after her. "It's over, Miss Foret. As an archaeologist, you are nished. And shortly I will have you in jail."

She pushed open the door to the street into the blinding heat of the Cairo afternoon, wondering if he would pursue her. He had a reason now and the force of the state behind him. The professional duel had escalated into open warfare.

* 117 *

* 118 *

CHAPTER XVIII:.

MEMENTO MORI.

Her ear rang. Madness. Sheer madness to provoke him that way when so much was at stake. What had she been thinking?

She had imagined exposure would let her snatch the prize back from him. But it had just made things worse. Vastly worse. And now she had endangered all the others too.

She hurried down the street, indifferent to the crowds that brushed her, the noise and choking air of traf c. She searched her memory to recall if Vanderschmitt would have any way to trace her to her friends.

No, he had seen Auset at El Fishawy that one time, but her last name was never mentioned. He had met Derek, but could not connect him to Auset. Yes, the two of them-and the mummy-were safe as long as she did not lead Vanderschmitt back to the apartment.

She quickened her pace until she was almost running, directionless.

Where could she go now? Who could help her out of the pit into which she had jumped?

Sammad. Of course. Sammad knew how to get in or out of anything. She looked around and realized she had no idea where she was. No matter.

She agged down a black-and-white taxi. "Midan Al Hussein,"

she said, leaning back in the dilapidated seat, breathing heavily. Her head was throbbing. In a few minutes they were at Hussein Square, where she hurried across the pass over the highway into the shabby butcher's souq where tourists were a rarity. In the afternoon heat, the animal odors were pungent, and she winced as she passed the chicken cages piled up just before the cloth-sellers' market.

There it was, at the bend in the alley, one of half a dozen anonymous tiny cafes in the local souq. A young man stood behind * 119 *

a tiny counter near the brick oven where charcoal smoldered, sipping tea from a glass. He stared toward the far corner, where a television on a high shelf broadcast an Egyptian soap opera at great volume. In spite of the heat, all four tables were populated with men sipping coffee and puf ng sheesha. Apple-sweet tobacco smoke enveloped her as she stepped through the doorway. "As salaamu 'alaykum, Khalil," she said hurriedly. "Is Sammad here today?"

"Yes, miss. In the back. Go on in." His glance sprang back to the television screen, where young lovers quarreled intensely.

She pushed aside the heavy curtain to the rear and stood for a moment, letting her sun-blinded eyes adjust to the darkness.

"Good afternoon, Dr. Foret," a hoarse voice said. The blurry form of a short, paunchy man in a dark galabaya took on clarity. He had a strong presence by virtue of his girth, and his prominent nose, which on a tall man would have been conspicuous, approached the grotesque. It always made her think of a vulture.

"Have you got a few minutes for me, Sammad? I have a business proposition for you."

"Of course, Doctor. Here, sit down." He motioned to the closest of the dozen tables that ringed the room of his "nightclub" and then sat down in front of her with his business smile. Without commenting on her need for it, he took a slightly rumpled handkerchief from his side pocket and offered it to her.

"Thank you, Sammad." She held it to the thin trickle of blood that had formed in front of her ear. "I'll get to the point. I need something smuggled out of Egypt. Something large."

"Smuggled out?" He tapped a pudgy nger on the wooden table.

"We are better at 'in' than 'out,' but it can be arranged. How large?

A suitcase? A refrigerator? An automobile?" He lit a cigarette, an American cigarette, she noticed. Presumably his own merchandise.

"A mummy."

"Inti magnoona?!" His cigarette hand went up in the air. "Do you know what you are asking? Antiquities has inspectors everywhere. No, no. The shape is too dif cult to conceal."

"Sammad. You know I'll pay whatever it costs."

His eyelids lowered, covering his instant calculations, and he inhaled again from his cigarette. "Where would you want it shipped, assuming we could manage it?"

* 120 *

"New York. It would have to be New York."

"Oh, perfect. Why don't you simply ask for the head of the Sphinx?"

"I'm desperate, Sammad. Can you do it? I can't pay everything up front. I'll have to do it in installments. But you know you can trust me."

"Do I understand you correctly? You want me to transport an impossible object to an impossible place, and you want me to do it without any money. Dr. Foret, I think you are too used to getting your way in the souq."

"It's an emergency, Sammad. A lot is at stake. I can't explain now, but..."

The businessman suddenly looked past her at the doorway she had come through, and she turned to see what distracted him.

Khalil stood there, holding the curtain closed behind him. "Effendi, the police are here, with a foreigner. They are looking for you, Doctor."

His eyes darted toward her and then darted away.

"Damn. That didn't take long." Valerie stood up. "How can I get out?"

With a smooth matter-of-factness, as if hiding clients from the police was a frequent and unavoidable occurrence in his line of business, Sammad tilted his head toward the rear. "Over there. Through the kitchen. Tell the cook you have to go to the carpet shop." With practiced ease, he slid out from behind the table, reignited his business smile, and waited until she was at the door before pulling back the curtain.

Valerie closed the imsy wooden panel that functioned as a door and ran along a corridor to the kitchen.

A hirsute man stood at a table cutting up a joint of lamb into cubes, a stubby cigarette between his lips. The long ash broke off as he raised his head.

"Sammad said you could show me to the carpet shop," she said breathlessly.

"Carpet shop? Yes. This way." Setting aside his carving knife, he went around the table to the wall. With a single vigorous tug, he pulled back a cabinet set on tiny wheels and revealed an opening in the wall, about a meter high. She scrambled through and felt the cabinet roll back behind her, as muf ed voices, sudden and angry, sounded in the * 121 *

kitchen.

Directly in front of her, a narrow wooden staircase, scarcely more than a ladder, was hammered into place between the two walls. She clambered up the steps to a wide second-story court where women and girls were washing carpets. They glanced up only brie y as she shot up in their midst. One of them, a crone enveloped in chador, pointed a black-draped arm toward cotton bales piled on the opposite side.

"Shukran. " Valerie staggered toward the bales, pivoting behind them to an opening identical to the one from which she had emerged.

She went down the second ladder in leaps and slipped along the wall of another court, behind a row of drying carpets. At the end, the gate to the street was mercifully open.

She emerged on the wide Sharia el Muizz as, with almost comical precision, a city bus stopped in front of her in the middle of the street.

She plunged into the traf c around screeching cars and jumped onto the bus seconds before it moved into the intersection.

Diesel fumes, cigarette smoke, and the smell of oily hair assailed her, and she tried to bury herself in the crowd of passengers. But a dozen sets of eyes stared at her, the men disapprovingly, the women, their faces half-covered by hijab, more discreetly. All the faces said the same thing: what are you doing here?

What the hell was she doing? And where the hell was she going?

She inhaled deeply, dry mouthed. Her head ached.

Two men stood on the bus steps hanging onto the top of where the door once had been. Between their chests she caught glimpses of the thoroughfare. The bus rumbled past mosque, archway, and madrassa, and each time it stopped more people climbed in, packing ever more tightly around her. The hot bodies breathing the scarce air seemed the embodiment of her fear. Even standing still, she felt her heart pounding, and she was suddenly desperately thirsty.

"Arafa," the driver called out nally, and Valerie realized where they had come. She was swept along with the crowd oozing from the bus and kept her eyes on her feet to avoid being stepped on. Finally in the light, she looked up at the medieval gateway to the great southern necropolis, Cairo's city of the dead.

She made a wide circle around the bus to see if any government vehicles had followed. The several dark cars outside the cemetery seemed innocent enough, but she could not be sure. She followed the other passengers as they dispersed along the dusty paths and alleys of * 122 *

the necropolis. Cairo's main burial site for over a thousand years, she knew, had also become Cairo's most notorious slum, housing thousands of the poor in its labyrinthine paths. Would the authorities follow her here?

Her eyes burned, for she looked westward toward the late-afternoon sun. Chiseled dark against it was a landscape of mausoleums and tombs punctuated by obelisks and minarets. Some were miniature palaces with their own minarets, others simple stone mastabas. On the poorer side, still others were simple mud-brick domes, like bread ovens.

The thought of ovens reminded her of her parched throat.

"Minfadlak, where can I nd water?" she called to a man who walked just ahead of her.

He turned partway around and pressed his lips together, in the midst of a dense black beard. "Go away. You do not belong here."

Valerie stopped, rebuffed, and watched him stride on until a woman and a child came out to greet him. On both sides, other gures emerged like phantoms from the tombs to meet the arriving men.

Drawing ngertips across dry lips, Valerie realized how she must look to them, foreign and intrusive. She could not think of what to do.

Then, just in front of her, a gure emerged from a mortuary.

Covered in black, like death itself, a woman came to the path and stopped. She turned around, facing her, and seemed to wait. Valerie walked toward her. "Masaa' il kheer. Please, is there water here? I need water."

A loose veil covered the woman's head like a hood and, silhouetted against the low afternoon sun, her features were indiscernible. She leaned on a stick, but when she spoke, her voice was robust. "Not here.

Our Bishr brings it from a long way. But there is tea. Bishr!" she called out with sudden authority.

At the sound of his name, a small grotesque man came from behind the wall, wiping his hands on baggy pants. A bandy-legged dwarf, his lionlike face surrounded by an unbroken line of hair and beard, panted from the exertion of walking. The woman raised one arm to shoo him back. "Bishr, tell Meskhenet to make more tea. We will have a guest."

The dwarf stopped in his tracks, wiped his hands again, and retreated, rocking back and forth, into the complex.

"Oh, thank you. Tea would be very good." Valerie's voice was hoarse.

* 123 *

"This way," the woman said, and went ahead of her toward a stone pathway leading to an inner court. While behind them the sky still held a pale pink light, inside the mausoleum court it was already dark. The dwarf was lighting a kerosene lantern.

Valerie's eyes were drawn rst to the western end of the court where an elaborately carved stone mastaba lay. At the other, under a high archway, a thin, white-haired man sat on the remnants of a rug.

"My name is Nira," the woman nally said, "and this is Jehut."

The old man greeted his guest with the solemn courtesy of a caliph and waved her over to him. In front of him, a young girl squatted over a charcoal stove on which a kettle of water steamed. "Meskhenet," the hostess said. "And this is Bishr."

Meskhenet looked up brie y and then returned to pouring boiling water into a copper carafe. The dwarf Bishr waddled over to the old man and dropped down awkwardly next to him. He breathed with obvious dif culty, resting his tongue on his lower jaw like a dog. Then he leaned over to move the lantern nearer to the stove and sat up, placing his stumpy hands on his knees.

Together, the two objects gave off heat and light, and the group sat in a circle as if around a hearth. A bizarre family, Valerie thought, if indeed they were one. The girl could have been a grandchild. As for the dwarf, it was impossible to tell if he was a handicapped offspring of the couple or a wretched creature they had adopted into their household.

She wondered how the four of them managed to survive.

Valerie accepted a glass of scalding tea and waited with concentrated patience for it to cool. She licked dry lips. "My name is Valerie, Effendi.

I thank you for inviting me into your home." She looked across the court toward a limestone arcade carved with calligraphy. Under the arcade, she could see a sleeping room where pallets had been laid out and baskets held folded clothing or linen.

The patriarch glanced at where she looked. "Here men unfold their carpets next to the bones of sultans and caliphs from every age, and their children play between the tombs."

Valerie sipped the steaming tea, astonished at the re nement of the old man's speech. Like a museum guide or professor of history. How did such a person end up squatting on a rug in a cemetery?

"Yes. It is both the richest and the poorest part of Cairo, isn't it?

But who is this resident here?" She pointed toward the sarcophagus at * 124 *

the lower end of the court. "With whom do you share your home?"

Jehut set aside his tea. "This is the house of Emir Husaam al Noori. He was killed, so the story goes, in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Crusaders. Presumably by one of your Christian ancestors." He gestured toward the sleeping room. "His story lies within. A volume of most beautiful writing."

"Ah, then it is Husaam al Noori whom I should thank for sheltering me in his house," she said lightly.

Jehut smiled, pressing his ngertips together. "No, my dear. This tomb bears only the story of the Emir, not his substance." He looked up at the calligraphed arcade. "This empty monument was created by his scribe and companion, Sharif al Kitab, who is resident, or at least a part of him, in a modest tomb in the rear. His head lies there, and we do not disturb it, although the stone of his sarcophagus is broken." He signaled Meskhenet to offer the guest some of the pita that had been toasting over the charcoal.

"In effect, you are the guest of a scribe."