He Shall Thunder in the Sky - Elizabeth Peters [124]
“No!” he exclaimed loudly. “Professor, I told you—”
“He couldn’t prevent me from coming,” Nefret said. She gave him a bewitching smile and held out a small, daintily gloved hand. “You wouldn’t be so rude as to exclude me, would you, sir?”
For once Nefret had met her match. Russell took her hand, held it for no more than two seconds, and stepped back. “I could and I would, Miss Forth. What the Professor chooses to tell you and Mrs. Emerson hereafter is his affair. Police matters are my affair. Take a chair. One of the men will bring you tea. Come to my office, gentlemen.”
From Manuscript H
“I asked you here,” Russell said, his voice as cold and formal as his manner, “because one of my men informed me you were present night before last when we raided Aslimi’s shop. Did you get a look at the fellow we were after?”
“Yes,” Emerson said.
“You followed him, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Caught him, too,” Emerson added.
“Damnation, Professor! You have the infernal gall to stand there and tell me you let the fellow go?”
“I told you when we first discussed the subject that I would not help you capture Wardani, but that I would attempt to speak with him and convince him to turn himself in.”
Emerson’s voice was as loud as Russell’s. Ramses didn’t doubt that every police officer in the building was in the corridor, listening.
“It wasn’t Wardani!”
“Well, I didn’t know that, did I?” Emerson demanded indignantly. “Not until after I had cornered the fellow. As it turned out, he was one of Wardani’s lieutenants. We—er—came to an agreement.”
“Would you care to tell me what it was?”
“No. I may do after I’ve spoken with him.”
“It’s too late for that,” Russell said. “Come with me.”
They followed him along the corridor and down several flights of stairs. Being underground, the room was a few degrees cooler than the floors above, but not cool enough. The smell hit them even before Russell opened the door. The only furnishings were a few rough wooden tables. All but two were unoccupied. Russell indicated one of the shrouded forms.
“Damned inefficiency,” he muttered. “That one should have been buried this morning, he’s not keeping well. Here’s our lad.” He pulled the coarse sheet off the other corpse.
Farouk’s face was unmarked except for a line of bruising around his mouth and across his cheeks. If he had died in pain, which he certainly had, there was no sign of it on the features that had settled into the inhuman flatness of death. His naked body showed no signs of injury except for his wrists, which were not a pretty sight. The ropes had dug deep into his flesh and he must have struggled violently to free himself.
Russell gestured, and two of his men turned the body over. From shoulders to waist the skin was black with dried blood over a patchwork of raised welts.
After a moment Emerson said, “The kurbash.”
“How can you tell?”
Emerson raised his formidable eyebrows. “You can’t? Why, man, it’s an old Turkish custom. The marks left by a whip made of hippopotamus hide are quite different from those of a cat-o’-nine-tails or bamboo rod. I’ve seen it before.”
Ramses had seen it too. Once. Like Farouk, the man had been beaten to death. Unlike Farouk, he had not been gagged. He had screamed till his voice gave out and even after he lost consciousness his body convulsed at every stroke of the whip. An old Turkish custom—and one Ramses would have experienced if his father had not burst on the scene before they started on him. The memory still made him break out in a cold sweat of terror, and it was one of the reasons why he had agreed to take Wardani’s place. Anything that would help keep the Ottomans out of Egypt.
Fingering his chin, Emerson added, “Government by kurbash. Popular in Egypt, as well.”
“We outlawed the kurbash years ago,” Russell said stiffly.
Emerson