Night Train to Memphis, page 6
The space was dark and shadowed. Jen was sitting on the ground, her open bag beside her. “Jen?” I said uncertainly. “Are you—”
She turned a blank, gray face toward me and toppled over onto her side.
Chapter Three
I yelled. At its loudest my voice is the equal of any Wagnerian soprano’s, in volume if in no other quality. My call for help was answered sooner than I had dared hope; apparently I hadn’t been the only one to observe Jen’s sickly look. First on the scene was her devoted son, with Mary close on his heels.
Jen had resisted my attempt to lift her, curling herself into a ball with knees raised and arms clasped over her midsection, but when she saw John she made a gallant effort to smile.
“Just my silly old tummy,” she gasped. “Don’t worry, darling, I’ll be fine in a minute.”
Her face was now green instead of gray, and sticky with perspiration. Mary knelt by her with a little cry of sympathy.
“Mother Tregarth!”
“Get out of my way,” John said brusquely. I didn’t know whether he meant me or his bride. Mary assumed it was me. As she bent tenderly over Jen, the latter was violently and messily sick. Mary stumbled to her feet and backed off, her face twisted with disgust.
John hoisted his mother into his arms and put her down again a few feet away. Contemplating the spots on my brand-new outfit I said, “Oh, shit,” took a handful of tissues from my pocket, and began wiping Jen’s face.
“I do admire a woman with an extensive vocabulary,” John said under his breath. “Don’t just squat there, fetch the doctor.”
“I’ll go,” Mary said quickly. “I’m sorry, darling, I… I’ll go.”
When they returned they were accompanied by several of the other passengers, moved by kindly concern or morbid curiosity. It’s not always easy to tell the difference, I admit. I felt fairly sure it was the latter emotion that had moved Suzi to join us, but I was willing to give Blenkiron the benefit of the doubt. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
Jen demonstrated. I had hoped she would throw up on John, but he managed to avoid it, supporting her head and shoulders so she wouldn’t choke. She kept on heaving, poor thing, although she had obviously got rid of everything in her stomach.
I hadn’t paid much attention to Dr. Carter when he was introduced the night before, except to hope devoutly I would not require his services. He was a particularly unnoticeable man—middle-aged, middle-sized in both height and girth, with a bland, pink face.
“Just a case of the pharaoh’s curse,” he said, with that infuriating blend of condescension and jollity some doctors mistake for a soothing bedside manner. “Relax, Mrs. Tregarth; we’ll get you back to the boat and—”
“No.” John didn’t look up. “I want her in hospital. The boat has moved on, we’re as close or closer to Cairo.”
“Now, son, there’s nothing to worry about. This is a common affliction, and the infirmary is—”
“Moving steadily south, among other disadvantages,” John said, in his most offensive drawl. “My mother is not a young woman, Doctor, and she has had difficulties of this sort before.”
Carter started to fuss, and Blenkiron murmured, “Mr. Tregarth is right, Ben. It would be foolish to take chances. Perhaps the bus can take her to Cairo and then return for us?”
His voice was soft and hesitant, but when you are rich you don’t have to yell to get your point across.
“Just what I was about to suggest,” Carter exclaimed.
Jen was too weak to resist. She looked awful, her closed eyes sunken. “Wouldn’t an ambulance be better?” I said anxiously.
Blenkiron directed a smile in my general direction. “The back seats on the bus fold down into a cot, Vicky. She’ll be far more comfortable there, and safely in Cairo by the time we could get an ambulance out here.”
John scooped his mother up and walked off, followed by Mary and Carter.
“Wow,” said Suzi, staring. “He’s stronger than he looks, isn’t he? The old lady must weigh a hundred and sixty, and he’s practically running.”
Since I knew exactly what she was thinking I decided to ignore this. Since Blenkiron did not know, he responded. “One can understand his concern, though I’m sure it’s unnecessary. Many travelers get some kind of digestive upset. It’s nice to see a young man so devoted to his mother, isn’t it?”
“He’s not so young,” I said.
“Had you known him before?”
I recollected myself. Blenkiron’s question had been casually disinterested, but the gleam of avid curiosity in Suzi’s eyes warned me that she was the kind who thrives on scandal. “No,” I said.
“I don’t believe we’ve met formally,” Blenkiron said. “First names are easier and friendlier; mine is Larry.”
He looked younger and more relaxed in a sweat-stained shirt open at the throat and a pair of wrinkled khaki pants. I noted with sympathetic amusement that he was wearing a pith helmet. The darned things were practical, shielding the head and neck from the deadly rays of the sun, and heavy enough to resist the tug of the constant north wind.
“I believe this is your first visit to Egypt?” he went on, looking down at me and offering me his hand.
I let him pull me to my feet. He was still looking down at me; not many people can do that. A part of my mind I try to ignore assessed the breadth of his shoulders and his flat stomach and decided he wasn’t at all bad for a man of fifty-odd. And he was a multimillionaire. Or a billionaire? What’s a few million more or less? I thought tolerantly.
“Does everyone on the boat know I’m a fraud?” I asked.
“Now, Vicky, don’t call yourself names. You have quite a reputation. I read your article on the Riemenschneider reliquary with great interest.”
“I’m flattered. But I don’t know a damn thing about Egyptology,” I admitted, with one of my most winning smiles.
“Would you like me to show you around? I’m only an amateur, but I know Sakkara fairly well.”
It was one of the most fascinating mornings I have ever spent. Sakkara is a very complicated site; there are several smaller, ruined pyramids in addition to the Step Pyramid, which is surrounded by a maze of subsidiary buildings, temples and courtyards, corridors and chapels. There are underground structures whose function is still unclear, and a lot of private tombs built for high officials. The larger of these mastabas, as they are called, are mazes in themselves. One has thirty-four separate rooms in the superstructure and a tomb shaft below. I had given the guidebook a hasty perusal the night before and ended up with my head stuffed full of miscellaneous, unrelated facts. Larry made sense of it all.
“You’ve missed your calling,” I said, as we left the temple complex. “You ought to be a guide.”
He looked absurdly pleased at the silly compliment. We were getting on like a house afire, I thought complacently. No wonder the poor man fled from women like Suzi; he must be sick of being relentlessly pursued. All he wanted was to be treated as an intellectual equal, to be admired for his brains instead of his money. I could sympathize with that, though in my case it wasn’t money that distracted admirers from my intellectual achievements.
“It’s easier to simplify a complex subject when one is an amateur,” he said modestly. “Shall we have a look at one of the mastabas before lunch? As an art historian you are probably familiar with the reliefs.”
“I remember some Old Kingdom reliefs—they were wonderful, very delicate and detailed—but at this moment I couldn’t tell you which tomb they were from. There was one of a baby hippopotamus…”
“You’re probably thinking of Mereruka.” Larry took my arm. “But some of the other tombs are equally remarkable. We’ll see which is least crowded.”
They were all crowded, at least to the eyes of someone like me, whose definition of too many people is three, but Larry said, “Never seen so few people here at this time of year. Tourism is down, people are afraid of terrorists. Nice for us, but unfortunate for the Egyptian economy.”
I got to see my baby hippopotamus, who was ambling along through the river reeds apparently unaware of the huge crocodile right on his heels (if hippos have heels). He had no cause for alarm; his devoted mum had grabbed the predator and was in the process of biting it in two.
The photographs I’d seen hadn’t done the carving justice. To an eye accustomed to Western sculpture the reliefs had a simplicity that verged on naïveté, but the more I studied them the more I realized that that impression was deceptive. The technique was sure and skilled and highly sophisticated; only an ignoramus or an observer who was unable to put aside his unconscious prejudices would have undervalued them.
Larry absolutely agreed with me and told me how clever I was to have reached that conclusion. We were having a lovely time when I heard shuffling footsteps and a familiar voice. “That’s Feisal, surely,” I said.
Larry looked at his watch. “He is right on schedule. It’s later than I thought. The time has gone very quickly.”
He gave me a meaningful look. I probably simpered.
The first to enter the room was the tall raw-boned man who had been at Larry’s table the night before. He had been following us at a discreet distance all morning, and he continued to be tactful, staring off into space until Larry murmured, “I don’t believe you two have met. Dr. Victoria Bliss—Ed Whitbread.”
“ ’Morning, ma’am.” Ed whipped off his hat—a broad-brimmed white Stetson—and bowed.
Despite the stifling heat he was wearing a jacket. I thought I knew why. He was a good three inches taller than Larry, which made him almost six-five. I sincerely hoped that Larry had convinced him I was a friend. I wouldn’t have wanted him to think of me as an enemy.
Led by Feisal, the others crowded into the room. Larry faded discreetly away as Suzi headed toward me, shoving bodies out of her way with good-natured impetuosity. “I wondered where you’d got to,” she said. “How’d you do that?”
“Do what?”
“You know.” She gave me a grin and an elbow in the ribs. It was a surprisingly sharp elbow to belong to a woman so well padded elsewhere. “It sure didn’t work when I tried it. You’ll have to tell me how you—”
“Quiet, please.” Feisal clapped his hands like a teacher calling a class to order. “We have only fifteen minutes, there is another group waiting. The reliefs in this chamber…”
He was a good lecturer, crisp and witty and, so far as I could tell, absolutely accurate. I had a hard time concentrating, since Suzi kept whispering and nudging me. After a while Feisal broke off and fixed a stern eye on her. “Suzi, you are a bad girl, you do not pay attention. Come here and stand by me.”
Giggling happily, Suzi obeyed. Feisal caught my eye and lowered one eyelid in a discreet wink.
The sun was high and hot when we left the tomb and set out across the uneven surface of the plateau. Sunlight bleached the sand and rock to a pale buff; though the distance wasn’t great, several of my companions were puffing and complaining by the time we reached our destination.
The bus was waiting. I collapsed into a seat with a sigh of relief and accepted a glass of water, tinkling with ice, from a smiling waiter. Not for us the crowded rest house where ordinary tourists ate and drank, risking not only discomfort but the pharaoh’s curse; the seats had attached trays, like those on planes, and we were served chilled wine and food on fine porcelain. Even as I thought how easy it was to accustom oneself to such luxuries, my scholar’s conscience reminded me that the exhaust was pouring out pollution that gnawed away the very stones of the pyramids.
As soon as everyone was settled, Feisal addressed us. “Some of you know that one of our friends was taken ill this morning. You will be glad to hear that Mrs. Tregarth is now comfortably resting in a Cairo hospital…”
I didn’t hear the rest. One word had forced its way through the layers of stupidity that enrobed my brain.
Cairo. The Cairo Museum was in Cairo. Take it slow, Vicky, slow and easy; you obviously aren’t up to complex reasoning. Right. No question about it. The museum was in Cairo. And now John was too.
Not only was he in Cairo (where the museum was) but his departure had been sudden, unexpected, off schedule. I had told myself I had three more weeks. I should have known—damn it, damn it, I should have known!—that John never stuck to schedules and that the unexpected was his stock-in-trade. The mere sight of me would have warned him that someone had got wind of his scheme. He wouldn’t abandon it, not John, not until he had to; he’d change his plans, catch me off guard, find an excuse to get to the scene of the crime ahead of schedule, a nice valid excuse like…
Poisoning his own mother?
It seemed a trifle extreme, even for John.
All the same.…
I blundered up out of my seat, squeezing past the tray with its load of china and glasses. Bright and Sweet were a few rows ahead of me; I could see Bright’s thick, brown expensive hair over the top of the seat. They beamed a welcome, but I didn’t wait for an exchange of greetings.
“It’s a shame about Mrs. Tregarth, isn’t it?”
“Very sad,” Sweet said cheerfully. “But Feisal says she is on the road to recovery. It should be a lesson to us all, you know; the poor dear lady was constantly overeating. That is epecially dangerous when one is unaccustomed to strange food and water.”
Bright nodded vigorously. He probably wouldn’t have spoken even if he had been able to, but in this case he wasn’t; he had just shoved an entire stuffed egg into his mouth.
“Right,” I said. “I wonder how long they’ll stay in Cairo. Where the—” I managed to stop myself. Larry, in the seat across the aisle, was watching me with a bewildered smile.
“Let us hope she will be able to join us again soon,” Sweet said. “A pity to lose part of such a delightful trip.”
I tried again. “Especially when it’s also a honeymoon. I suppose her son will stay in Cairo with her?”
“I suppose so.” Sweet gave me a puzzled look.
I got a grip on myself and turned to go. “Well. See you later.”
“We will meet in a pyramid,” Sweet called after me.
I inserted myself into my seat and picked up a sandwich—nothing plebeian like cheese or chicken, but a masterpiece of shrimp and chopped egg yolk and some mysterious sauce. Sweet and Bright didn’t appear to be concerned; in fact they had both looked at me as if I were losing my feeble mind. Of course, I told myself; they were professionals. Like the others they had heard of Jen’s illness. They might not know John was the man they were after, but they’d be on the alert for anything unusual. They probably even knew the Cairo Museum was in Cairo.
I can’t say I enjoyed the remainder of the tour of Sakkara, even though Feisal was at his most eloquent and Alice stuck with me most of the afternoon. She was good company, knowledgeable and yet unassuming, with an unexpectedly wicked sense of humor. Watching Suzi, who had attached herself to Feisal, she said with a grin, “Looks as if she’s going to settle for youth and beauty instead of cash. Larry will be relieved, he looked like a cornered rabbit last night.”
“He’s a very nice guy,” I said. “Larry, I mean. Do you know him well?”
“Nobody knows him well.” Striding briskly, her hands in her pockets, Alice looked as fresh as a woman half her age. “I’d met him once or twice; he’s truly dedicated to archaeology and very well informed. But I was surprised to find him on this trip, he’s a very private person. Of course the highlight of the cruise is the reopening of Tetisheri’s tomb and that has been his major interest for over three years. He’s probably hoping to persuade the other filthy-rich types on board to support similar projects.”
She stopped, waiting for the others to catch up, and I said, trying not to pant, “He’s not with the group this afternoon. Trying to avoid predatory females?”
She caught my meaning. “Not you. You made quite a hit. In fact, he sidled up to me and asked me if I thought you’d like to accompany him this afternoon—he’s gone off to see the Eighteenth-Dynasty nobles’ tombs, which aren’t open to the public.”
“And you told him I wouldn’t? Hell’s bells, Alice, how am I going to catch myself a millionaire if you interfere?”
Alice laughed. “Don’t blame me. He talked himself out of it before I could reply. Honest to God, I felt like a high school student counselor trying to convince some bashful kid it was okay to ask the cheerleader to a dance. But,” she added, with a shrewd glance at me, “don’t get your hopes up. He likes you because you treated him like a human being but I don’t think he’s interested in matrimony.”
“Neither am I.”
“Sensible woman.”
“Why didn’t you go with him? This tourist stuff must be boring for you.”
“My dear, I’m on duty. Anyhow, I never tire of the tourist stuff. I haven’t been inside the Teti Pyramid for years.”
“Is that the next stop? I’m getting confused,” I admitted.
“No wonder. We’re cramming an awful lot into one day. The brain overloads. You don’t have to go inside if you don’t want to.”
“I think I won’t. Go ahead, I’ll sit here and admire the view.”
All but the most energetic were beginning to flag, after a long morning and a large lunch. Some had stayed on the bus, others wandered off in search of souvenirs, of which there was no dearth. Only a dozen people expressed an interest in the interior of the pyramid. Among them were Bright and Sweet and the large square woman who had been pointed out to me as a famous novelist. No one could have accused her of treading on Egyptian sensibilities; she was draped from shoulders to shins in flowing robes, with a scarf wound wimple-style around her large square face. Her features were vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen them, and I thought I would have remembered that face. Not many famous lady novelists have perceptible mustaches.
“What’s her name?” I whispered to Alice.
“Louisa Ferncliffe. But she writes under the name of Valerie Vandine. Ever heard of her?”
I had. I had even, for my sins, read a couple of her novels. She was one of Schmidt’s favorite authors. Schmidt only reads two types of fiction: hard-boiled mysteries featuring lean tough detectives, and torrid historical romances featuring helpless voluptuous heroines. Violence and sex, in other words. I studied the massive form ahead of me with disbelief. The woman must have an incredibly vivid imagination. The sexual gymnastics she described in such interesting detail would have been physically impossible for someone built like that.
