The Falcon at the Portal - Elizabeth Peters [119]
Once again he had underestimated his mother. He ought to have known she’d come through—for the child, and for him.
The old woman was squatting on a bench outside the door of the house, blinking in the sunlight. She told him Rashida and the child had left early that morning and had not been back. Certainly he could look at their rooms. He was paying for them, wasn’t he?
Rashida had not been much of a housekeeper, but one look at the room in which they slept told him that this disorder was significant. She had not meant to come back. The carved box in which she kept her few treasures was gone, and so were the pots of kohl and lip paint and henna. Lying across the bed was a crumpled bit of bright pink cloth—one of the little dresses he had bought the child. He picked it up and smoothed it between his hands. No doubt he had been a fool to believe Rashida’s protestations of gratitude and reformation, but she had seemed so glad to be free of the life she led, even gladder that there was a way out for her daughter.
He finished searching the room. Half-buried in the ashes of the brazier were a few brown stubs of cigarettes with a faint, unmistakable smell.
He waited for an hour, pacing the floor in growing worry and impatience, even as he told himself there was no basis for his fears. Kalaan was one of the most notorious pimps in Cairo. He could have tracked the girl down and forced her to come back to him, with no ulterior motive except pour l’encourager les autres. She’d have admitted everything to him, she had been in his power too long to resist his demands or the drugs from which she had been cut off. The idea of blackmailing her protector would come readily to Kalaan’s pragmatically filthy mind. She might even have agreed to go with him in the hope that the Inglizi would save her child. Ramses wanted to believe that.
If that were the case he would get her back, and put an end to Kalaan’s activities by one means or another. It was his fault she had fallen back into Kalaan’s hands; if he hadn’t been so stubborn he would have told his parents the truth immediately, and this disaster would never have happened.
It was the most likely possibility. The only consolation—and a feeble one it was—was that if his worst suspicions were right, there was no way he could have anticipated this. No way of proving anything, either, unless he could find her before …
He could only think of one other place in which to look. By the time he reached Cairo it was early in the afternoon; the reeking alleys of el Was’a steamed in the heat, and most people were within. The hovel from which he had removed them was occupied by two other women. They took him for a customer at first; the terms in which he corrected that assumption made them cringe into a corner, and he had to waste more time reassuring them. They denied any knowledge of Rashida.
The sun was setting before he admitted to himself that the search was futile. He might not have abandoned it even then had it not belatedly occurred to him that he had another responsibility.
His first indication of the correctness of that assumption came from Ali the doorman. He was standing outside in the road looking anxiously up and down, and when he saw Ramses he came running toward him, white puffs of dust spurting up under his sandaled feet. “Allah be praised, you are here. Hurry, hurry.”
He knew Ali well enough to know that the emergency was not dire, but he was not entirely prepared for what he found when he entered the courtyard, followed by the howls of Narmer. His mother, his father, and Fatima were there. His mother was clutching a glass of whiskey. On his father’s knee was a small bundle wrapped in tweed. The face atop the bundle consisted of a mop of black hair, a fist, and a pair of enormous eyes, gray as storm clouds.
“Thank God!” his father exclaimed.
“Don’t swear,” his mother muttered.