He Shall Thunder in the Sky - Elizabeth Peters [175]
“He wouldn’t dare harm Nefret,” David insisted. “She’s not a poor little prostitute, she’s a lady, and the beloved daughter of the Father of Curses. Your father would tear Percy to pieces if he laid a hand on her.”
Ramses realized he hadn’t a chance of making David understand. He was too decent and too honorable to recognize evil. Or—Ramses rubbed his aching forehead—was he the one who refused to recognize reality? Had his loathing of Percy turned into dementia?
They tramped on in silence until they reached the train station at Babylon. Ramses stopped.
“I’m tired,” he said dully. “There’s a cab. I’m going to hire it, unless you want to.”
“You take it; I can sleep as late as I like. Are you angry?”
“No, just a bit on edge. This will boil over within the next few days; the signs are all there. I need to be able to reach you in a hurry if that does happen. Any ideas?”
“I’ll be peddling my wilted blossoms outside Shepheard’s every day, as we arranged.”
“Fine so far as it goes, but I can’t always be certain of getting away during the day. Give me an alternative.”
David thought for a minute. “There’s always the useful coffee shop or café. Do you remember the one that’s just off the Sharia Abu’l Ela, near the Presbyterian church? I’ll be there every night from now on, between nine and midnight.”
“All right.”
David’s hand rested for a moment on his shoulder. “Get some rest, you need it.”
Ramses woke the sleeping driver and got into the cab. He was tired, but his mind wouldn’t stop churning. Had his father made it home safely? And what the devil was his mother doing? Emerson had pointedly refused to answer questions about her.
Worst of all was the mounting conviction that had been forced on him by one fact after another. He doubted he could convince anyone else, especially when a crucial clue had been supplied by a transvestite Nubian pimp. He could picture Russell’s face when he heard that one!
But he had gone to el-Gharbi to ask where the ineffectual terrorist had procured his grenades, and el-Gharbi had kept dragging Percy into the conversation. El-Gharbi knew everything that went on in the dark world of prostitution, drugs, and crime—and he had kept talking about Percy, hiding his real motive behind a screen of fulsome compliments and pretended sympathy. El Gharbi was approximately as romantic as a cobra; that final sting, about Percy’s role in tricking Nefret into marriage, had been designed to give Ramses a single piece of vital information.
Percy’s connections with Nefret’s husband had been closer than anyone had suspected. Close enough to be a partner in Geoffrey’s illegal business activities—drugs and forged antiquities? Percy had spent several months in Alexandria with Russell while Russell was trying to shut down the import of hashish into Cairo from the coast west of the Delta. One way or another, Percy knew the routes and the men who ran the drugs. They were, Ramses believed, the same routes being used now to transport arms.
As Ramses had good cause to know, the grenades had not come from Wardani’s people. So whom did that leave? A British officer who had access to a military arsenal? A man who wouldn’t scruple to kill an innocent passerby in order to play hero and impress his alienated family?
Most damning of all was the fact that Farouk had known about the house in Maadi. It had been a closely guarded secret between Ramses and David until Ramses took Sennia and her young mother there, to hide them from Kalaan. Ramses had never known how the pimp tracked her down; she might have been the innocent agent of her own betrayal, slipping back to el Was’a to visit friends and boast of the new protector who had, incredibly, offered her safety without asking anything in return. Rashida was dead and Kalaan had not shown his face in Cairo since, and there was only one other person who had been a party to that filthy scheme.