The Golden One - Elizabeth Peters [191]
After dinner they retired to the sitting room for coffee. Selim knew what was on the agenda. He had been perfectly at ease up till that time; now he began to fidget and tug at his beard. Stage fright? Or fear that he would forget the lines in which he had been coached by the great Sitt Hakim?
“All right now, Amelia, we’re ready,” Cyrus said, settling himself comfortably in a deep armchair. “I’ve been looking forward to this all day.”
She smiled complacently and sipped her coffee. “Selim will tell it. Go ahead, Selim.”
All eyes turned toward Selim, completing his discomfiture. As he confessed later to Ramses, he would rather have faced a horde of assailants, armed to the teeth, than those focused stares. He cleared his throat.
“I am no storyteller,” he began in a voice several tones higher than his usual baritone. “Not like Daoud.”
“All the better,” Cyrus said with a smile. “We know Daoud’s tendency to—er—embroider.”
“Start with the motorcar,” Emerson suggested, seeing that Selim needed encouragement. “It was a fine motorcar, and you drove magnificently.”
Once launched, Selim described the charms of the motorcar in loving detail and dwelled with excessive but pardonable enthusiasm on the perils of the long journey and his skill as a driver. “Khan Yunus is an ugly town, not like Luxor,” he declared. “There were many soldiers. The house of the friend of the Father of Curses was where we stayed; it was very dirty. It was there that the real adventure began!”
“About time,” muttered Cyrus. “Khan Yunus, eh? What did you go there for?”
Selim glanced at Ramses’s mother, who gave him an encouraging nod. He had got over his self-consciousness and was enjoying himself—as well he might, Ramses thought. Never, not even from his mother or Daoud, had he heard such a wild story.
They had been summoned to Khan Yunus to rescue a beautiful maiden—the daughter of a Bedouin sheikh, their friend and ally—from the evil old man who had carried her off, with designs on her fortune and her virtue. It was Ramses who had gone after the maiden and succeeded, after many dangers, in rescuing her. Selim described some of the dangers, which included a duel with scimitars. Ramses covered his face with his hand.
“He does not like to have his courage praised,” said Selim. “But it was not over. The evil old man sent men to take her back, and we had to fight them off and escape, in the night, with enemies pursuing us and the town in flames. We stole horses from under the very noses of the Australians! But I have not told you about the ragged beggar, who was a policeman in disguise—and a good disguise it was; he had fleas and smelled bad. The evil old man was a thief, you see, who had stolen jewels from many rich ladies and important antiquities from the Cairo Museum. The beggar was trying to catch him and bring him to justice, but in the end it was not he who captured the villain, it was Ramses.”
“It was not,” Ramses exclaimed, driven beyond endurance. “It was Father, with—”
“Hmph,” said Emerson loudly. “Very well told, Selim. You see, Vandergelt, it was just another of our attempts to assist the police. It is the duty of every citizen.”
“How about the maiden?” Cyrus inquired. “You didn’t bring her home with you?”
Selim sighed and looked soulful.
“The—er—policeman took her away,” Ramses said. He’d had as much as he could stand.
“He was her lover, I think,” Selim added.
“Oh, I see. You mind if I ask a few questions, Selim?”
Selim had enjoyed himself, once he got well under way, but he knew better than to risk an interrogation by Cyrus Vandergelt. He got hastily to his feet. “I must go. It is late. Thank you for your kind hospitality.”
“Now see here, Amelia,” Cyrus exclaimed.
“We mustn’t detain him, Cyrus, he has other responsibilities. Jumana, you are excused as well. Selim will