Death on Tour - Janice Hamrick [19]
A commotion behind us made us turn. Fiona and Flora were blocking the scanning machine, surrounded by guards who were suddenly very alert. The screener was holding up a camera and Fiona was shouting at him. Anni said something in Arabic and flew past us, throwing herself between the ditz duo and the guards. The rest of us stood frozen, our mouths hanging open.
“Tell me that is not a camera,” said Kyla in disbelief.
“Those women shouldn’t be allowed to travel by themselves. They’re a menace,” said Jerry Morrison with contempt.
There was a brief silence. Not that he was wrong, and not that the rest of us weren’t thinking exactly the same thing, but he was so obnoxious that no one wanted to agree with him about anything.
The Australian couple, Ben and Lydia, moved away from him rather pointedly. Their miniature feud was heating up, which made for some interesting moments. I wondered if another wager with Kyla was in order.
A man in a suit appeared and instantly the shouting ceased. The guards drew back respectfully. The man said something in a quiet tone to Anni and then vanished into an office with Fiona and Flora in tow.
Anni returned, her lips pressed tightly together. For a moment, I thought she was going to explode, but she drew a deep breath and produced a smile from somewhere. Kyla smirked at me.
“She’s still fine,” I said in an undertone.
“Oh, she’s going to snap.”
“Yes, but not until Wednesday,” I said bravely, although I thought the odds against me were rising dramatically. No one could stand firm under the dual pressure of Flora and Fiona. Mother Teresa herself would be flexing her fingers for a bitch slap of epic proportions.
“We’ll wait here a moment,” said Anni, and began explaining that the only replica in the entire museum was the Rosetta Stone, the original of which was in the British Museum in London. Everything else was authentic and thousands of years old. We walked a few paces away to a huge stone table, a massive block carved from a single piece of stone. It rested in the middle of the aisle, concave on top, with odd carved channels designed to draw away fluids. I thought I could guess what it was, and gave a little shiver, then poked Kyla to see if she’d noticed. Her grin told me she had, and together we moved closer to look for stains, unrepentantly ghoulish.
Fiona and Flora rejoined us after a few minutes, oblivious to our cold stares. Fiona plunked her oversized purse down on the table. Anni went white and in one smooth moved whisked it off and dropped it back in Fiona’s arms. Fiona looked startled and almost dropped it. I could tell it weighed a ton. I wondered what she carried in it and how her scrawny arms could tote it around all day.
“This,” said Anni loudly to forestall any protest, “is a three-thousand-year-old funerary table where the ancient Egyptians placed the bodies of the dead to prepare them for mummification. Notice the drainage hole at the foot.”
Fiona looked disgusted and began rubbing at the bottom of her bag. I was surprised to see a look of anger pass over Flora’s usually vapid face. For a moment, I could swear she almost glared, not at Anni, but at her sister. But the moment passed swiftly, and in another second she began talking to Lydia, who was trying to listen to Anni. Lydia looked annoyed and shuffled away from her.
Anni herded us skillfully through the museum, stopping to point out the highlights, which we dutifully admired. Some of the treasures were surrounded by other tour groups, and we had to wait for our turn to swarm the object. After the grand tour, Anni turned us loose to explore on our own.
“Thirty minutes,” she called after our retreating backs. Our life as tourists seemed chopped into thirty-minute segments. We checked our watches and scurried away like cockroaches in a kitchen.
* * *
Kyla and I made a beeline for the mummy chamber, completely ignoring