He Shall Thunder in the Sky - Elizabeth Peters [194]
His search of the room was quick and cursory; even Percy wouldn’t be lunatic enough to keep incriminating documents in the room where he entertained his female visitors. The only item of interest he came across was a length of narrow silken ribbon, the kind that might have been threaded through the insertion on a woman’s garment. He stood for a moment holding it before he tossed it aside and left the room.
A door across the narrow hallway opened onto a more promising chamber. Percy certainly liked his comforts; Oriental rugs covered the floor and hung from the walls, and the furnishings included several comfortable chairs as well as a well-stocked liquor cabinet, several oil lamps, and a large brass vessel that had served as a brazier. For burning documents? If so, they had been completely consumed.
Nothing in the room betrayed the identity of the man who sometimes occupied it. Acutely aware of the passage of time, Ramses searched the rest of the little building. A door at the end of the hall between bedroom and study opened onto a flight of stairs going down. The cellar was more extensive than the upper floor. There was nothing there now except rats and moldy straw and a few scraps of wood, but he suspected it had once contained the weapons sent on to Wardani—and elsewhere? One section had been subdivided into a series of small, cell-like rooms. All were empty except one. The sturdy wooden door creaked when he pushed it open.
The narrow beam of light showed a floor of beaten earth and walls of mortared stone. The room was about ten feet by fifteen, and it contained two pieces of furniture—a chair and a rough wooden table. A large earthenware jug stood on the table; dead flies floated on the surface of the stagnant water. There was only one other object in the room, aside from several heavy hooks on the wall opposite the door. Coiled and sleek as a snake, it hung on one of the hooks. It had been wiped clean and oiled, but when he looked more closely he saw the dark stains that had soaked into the beaten earth and dried, and he knew, with a sick certainty, that this was where Farouk had died. One of the heavy hooks was about the right height from the floor.
He went back up the stairs, thankful that David wasn’t with him. He was sweating and shaking like a timid old woman. Anger, at himself and at the man who had used the kurbash, stiffened him, and he went back to the makeshift office. Damn it, there had to be something, somewhere! Before he began a more intensive search he unbolted the shutters and opened one of them a few inches. It was always a good idea to have another exit handy, and with the window open he would more easily hear an approaching horseman. There was no certainty that Percy would come tonight; but if that letter of Nefret’s had been from Percy, he had canceled an engagement that would have kept him in Cairo that evening. Not proof of anything, but suggestive. David was waiting at the crossroads near Mit Ukbeh; Percy would have to pass him whether he came north on the Giza Road or crossed the river at Boulaq, and once Percy had got that far, his destination was certain. Mounted on Asfur, whom Ramses had delivered to David before coming on, David could easily outstrip Percy and arrive in time to give the signal that would warn Ramses his cousin was on the way.
The hiding place wasn’t difficult to find after all. Behind one of the hangings was a largish niche, the plaster of its painted walls flaking. The wireless was there, and on a shelf under it a portfolio containing a mass of papers. Ramses picked one at random and examined it by the light of his torch. At first he couldn’t believe what he saw. It was a sketch map of the area around the Canal, from Ismailia to the Bitter Lakes. The drawing was