Night Train to Memphis - Elizabeth Peters [2]
‘Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .’ Somebody was whining. It wasn’t I. I was blubbering and swearing – or was I praying?
Swearing. ‘Damn him, damn him!’ I reached out blindly in the dark. There was something monstrous and hairy on my bed. I threw my arms around it and clutched it to my bosom.
Caesar stopped whining and began licking my face with frantic slurps. Caesar is a Doberman; his tongue is as rough as a file and about a foot and a half long. He has very bad breath.
‘All right, okay,’ I gasped, fending him off and reaching for the bedside lamp.
The light helped, and so did the sight of my familiar messy bedroom, but I was still shaking. God! That had been the worst one yet.
Caesar’s furry face stared worriedly at me. He wasn’t allowed on the bed. I must have cried out in my sleep, and the gallant dog had leaped up to my rescue.
Clara was allowed on the bed. Caesar hasn’t got over the injustice of this yet, but he can’t do anything about it because he is terrified of Clara, who weighs approximately seven pounds to his seventy. I think he thinks she is a god. He slobbers with delight when she condescends to curl up next to him, and grovels when she raises a paw. She had retreated from her usual position, on my stomach, to the foot of the bed and was sitting up, eyeing me with that look of tolerant contempt only Siamese cats have fully mastered. In the dark seal-brown of her face her eyes looked very blue.
A shudder twisted through me as I remembered how blood had filled those other blue eyes.
It was the third time that week I had dreamed about John. The first one hadn’t been bad, just an ordinary anxiety/frustration dream in which I pursued a familiar form along endless streets only to find, when I caught up with it, that it wore someone else’s face. The second . . . well, never mind the details of that one. The metamorphosis of the body I clasped into a scaled, limbless creature that slid slimily through my arms and vanished into darkness had left a nasty memory, but it hadn’t awakened me.
I knew the cause of the dreams. My subconscious doesn’t fool around; it’s about as subtle as a brickbat. I had told myself there was nothing to worry about, even if I hadn’t heard from him for over a month, and I had believed it – sort of – until a week ago. Hugging my warm, hairy, smelly dog as a child would clutch a teddy bear for comfort, I remembered the conversation that had forced me (or my subconscious) to admit there was something to worry about.
II
‘But I don’t know anything about Egyptology!’ I yelled.
Normally I don’t yell when I say things like that. I mean, it’s hardly the sort of statement that arouses passionate emotions. But this was the fourth time I had said it, and I didn’t seem to be getting the point across.
The two men behind the desk exchanged glances. One of them was my old friend Karl Feder of the Munich Police Department. The other man was about the same age-mid-fifties, at a guess. Like Karl, he was losing his hair and starting to spread around the middle. He had been introduced to me as Herr Burckhardt, no title, no affiliation. If he was a colleague of Karl’s he had to be a cop of some variety, but I had only known one other man with eyes as cold as his, and Rudi had definitely not been a police officer.
I knew what they were thinking. It was Burckhardt who said it. ‘I fail to understand, Dr Bliss. You are an official of our National Museum, a well-known authority on art history. The Herr Direktor, Doktor Schmidt, has often said that you are his most valued subordinate.’
‘Yeah,’ I said gloomily. ‘I’ll bet he has.’
Schmidt has a mouth almost as big as his rotund tummy. He is as cute as one of the Seven Dwarfs and not much taller, and if he wasn’t so brilliant he’d have been locked up long ago as a menace