Night Train to Memphis - Elizabeth Peters [10]
My eyes went back to the paper on my lap. It was the passenger list. My name wasn’t on it. I would appear, and be introduced, after the boat had sailed. This was in keeping with my cover story – that I had replaced a friend at the last moment. It was also a safety precaution, to keep my presence from being known in advance. Some safety precaution, I thought sourly. Well, it couldn’t hurt.
Some of the passengers had boarded the boat the day before. I had gone to a hotel instead and spent the afternoon . . . guess where?
A few hours in the Cairo Museum for someone in my profession is like a nibble of fudge to a chocoholic. The place is stuffed, bulging, overflowing with wonders. I was familiar with many of them from photographs and films, but there is no substitute for seeing the real thing. And the ‘minor’ artifacts, the ones that weren’t so often featured, were just as beautiful. I stood for ten minutes studying the inlay on a small box.
Shadowing my enjoyment, however, was my real reason for being there. The more I saw, the more I wondered why people like John hadn’t already stripped the museum.
I don’t mean to criticize. The whole damned country is a museum, and no one knew better than I how much it cost in money and manpower just to maintain the antiquities, much less support additional excavation. Egypt is a poor country, with a soaring birthrate; there aren’t enough schools, clinics, or jobs, or even food; half of it has to be imported. The Egyptians were in a particularly ironic situation, since the hordes of tourists on which the economy depended were slowly and inexorably destroying the treasures they came to see. According to one article I had read, visitors to the tomb of Tutankhamon put out as much as twenty-five pints of perspiration per day, raising the humidity in the small room to a point that damaged the paint and the underlying plaster. The very stones of the Sphinx had been eaten away by pollution and misguided attempts at repair.
The museum was a disaster in progress – dirty, crowded, and dangerously understaffed. Some of the cases looked as if they could be opened with one of my hairpins. There was no air-conditiomng or humidity control; the windows were open, admitting dust and the exhaust fumes from Cairo’s teeming traffic. When I left, reeling under a combination of horror and artistic overload, I had to pick my way through a group of chattering women scrubbing the floor on their hands and knees, and I found myself peering intently at their faces, looking for familiar features – the shape of a neatly curved ear, the outline of a high cheekbone. That was the sort of disguise that would appeal to John’s bizarre sense of humour.
What could he be after this time? His usual modus operandi involved substitution rather than outright theft; this must be something big, so big in size or importance that its absence couldn’t be concealed. God knows there were plenty of possibilities, starting with the golden coffins of Tutankhamon.
I had managed to convince myself there was no immediate danger. The tour group was leaving Cairo next day; it would return in three weeks for a longer stay. That must be when he intended to do the job, using the other passengers as camouflage.
That morning I had sent my luggage to the boat and taken a taxi to Giza; I would join the others when they got on the bus that was to take them back to the boat.
I had already spotted John on the passenger list. It had to be he; no one would have a name as ridiculous as Peregrine Foggington-Smythe. He had even had the gall to use a variation of his favourite nom de guerre. Typical of his arrogance and his sometimes dangerous sense of humour . . .
He wasn’t a passenger. The list included the names of the staff; Foggington-Smythe was one of the guest lecurers, a distinguished Egyptologist from