Children of the Storm - Elizabeth Peters [143]
“None of the waiters recognized her?”
“They all claim they had never set eyes on her before. But I think you have.”
“Hathor?” Ramses thought it over. “The description fits, such as it is.”
“It must be the same woman. This is the connection between two seemingly unrelated parts of the pattern, and it explains how Martinelli was lured to his death. He’d follow a woman anywhere.”
Ramses ran his fingers through his hair. It was late, and he was tired, but several other pieces of the pattern were falling into place. “So he ‘borrowed’ the jewelry in order to impress her. Offered it to her, perhaps, in exchange for favors she had withheld. He had no intention of paying so high a price, though. It would have meant the end of his lucrative job with Cyrus, and the police on his trail. What a dirty little swine he was.”
Sethos lifted his glass and set it down again, making a pattern of interlocking rings on the table. “A moralist would say he got what he deserved. She agreed to sell her favors, with no more intention of carrying out her share of the bargain than he, and he went panting after her, too blinded by lust to wonder why she was leading him into a remote part of Luxor; and in a dark, verminous alley his doom awaited him, as Amelia might put it. He was probably dead before he knew what had happened.”
“They bundled him up and tossed him over a donkey and carried him out into the desert.” Ramses continued the story. “They took the jewelry, and everything else that might have identified him, and left him for the jackals.”
“It was as easy as taking candy from a child,” Sethos said, bland and unmoved. He sounded almost admiring. “Brilliantly planned, really. One had only to look at the poor bastard to know he had had no success with the sort of woman he wanted. No woman of taste would have touched him with a barge pole. He was ripe for the plucking, and she plucked him like a goose.”
“Why? If it’s the princesses’ treasure she’s after . . .” He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. “Could that be it?”
“Why ask me? I’m a reformed character,” said his uncle virtuously. “If I were after it—and don’t give me that fishy stare, I’m not—I wouldn’t go about it in such a disorganized fashion. I certainly wouldn’t arrange a series of haphazard attacks; they’ve only succeeded in putting you on the qui vive. No. What I’d do is bide my time, lull you into a sense of false security, and then strike. I could break into that locked room in sixty seconds, and with a dozen well-trained villains helping me, clear out everything that’s portable and be away from Luxor before morning.”
“I’ll bet you could, at that,” Ramses muttered.
“It would be an attractive challenge,” Sethos mused. He leaned back and lit a cigarette. His face took on a dreamy expression. “Transport arranged in advance . . . ready admission to the Castle for a trusted friend . . . servants asleep in their wing of the house . . . Cyrus gently escorted back to his room and locked in, with his wife . . .”
He sighed regretfully and blew out a wobbly smoke ring.
“It must be quite a temptation,” Ramses said, with unwilling amusement. His uncle’s expression was that of a man remembering a particularly successful romantic interlude. “How you must miss the good old days, before Mother reformed you. Or has she?”
“Mmmm.” Sethos put out his cigarette and leaned forward, elbows on the table, no longer smiling. “Believe this, if you can. I swore to her I would never interfere with their work again. That goes for Cyrus too. I don’t steal from my friends.”
“Does that mean—”
“We had better go. Your wife will be sending out search parties.”
His evasive response roused certain dire suspicions. It wasn’t the first time they had entered Ramses’s mind. What had Sethos been doing in Jerusalem when he was