Mummy Dearest

by Joan Hess

  “Did you call Mahmoud?”

  “I think we should wait a few more minutes. It’s not eleven thirty yet, and I hate to disturb him at home. Caron and Inez are seventeen years old, not seven.”

  “Then call Salima’s house,” I said.

  “Everyone there is likely to have gone to bed by now. Salima and the girls may be waiting for a ferry or crossing the Nile right now. Luxor isn’t like Cairo, Claire. There’s very little crime, and Salima knows how to avoid potentially troublesome areas. She grew up here, remember?”

  “You’re the one who mentioned muggings,” I pointed out acerbically. “Three young women, on their own, late at night. I’d be surprised if that town has streetlights. There certainly aren’t any crowds of tourists at this hour.”

  Peter waved over the waiter and ordered two brandies. “Fifteen minutes, okay? If they haven’t shown up by then, I’ll call Mahmoud and ask him to call Salima’s father.”

  “While they’re being held in some vacant alley by a bunch of thugs. They could have been drugged… or molested.” I shivered as gruesome images flashed across my mind. “What about that man they claimed was following them? He could be a murderer or a terrorist and—”

  “What man?” Peter said, startled.

  I tried to explain, but I could hear myself garbling the words and getting shriller by the second. “A scar—he has a scar,” I continued, unable to stop. “Inez saw him last evening. He might have grabbed them in the elevator or a hallway and dragged them into his room! If he’s staying here, I mean. We don’t really know if he’s a guest or not. Go find Ahmed and make him let you into all the rooms. No, we’ll need a team for every floor. And the New Winter Palace, too. He could be staying there. What if he’s already checked out?”

  Peter closed his eyes and waited until I began to whimper incoherently. “I don’t think we can demand that Ahmed start barging into rooms at this hour. This mysterious man is apt to be nothing more than what you surmised—a businessman. Young women are not abducted off the streets and sold into white slavery these days. At least not American women in Egypt.”

  “Okay,” I said, gulping. “But we have to do something. What about Bakr? He could have gone to pick them up in New Gurna or whatever it’s called.”

  “He lives with his parents and sisters. A call at this hour might not be appreciated.”

  “Do you think I care?”

  Peter grimaced. “All right, I’ll go back upstairs and check again. If they’re not there, I’ll call Mahmoud and see what he thinks. Do you want to come with me or stay here?”

  “Here, I suppose. I realize I’m being ridiculous, Peter, but this isn’t Farberville and the girls aren’t practiced travelers. Neither of them has ever been out of the country. They don’t speak the language.” I held up my hand. “Yes, I know they’ve squirmed out of a lot of bad situations, but sometimes they needed help, and I can’t do anything because they could be …” Unable to voice my fears, I wiped my eyes with a napkin. “Promise you’ll call Mahmoud.”

  He hugged me, then went into the hotel. I plucked at the napkin (had it been paper, I would have shredded it). The only customers left were three young men, all blond and tanned, in T-shirts and sport jackets, looking as though they had just come in from a lacrosse match. Their table was littered with beer bottles and their high spirits were obvious. They were so carefree and boisterous that I wanted to march over and lecture them about responsibility. It would not be well received, I suspected.

  I was considering hurling dates and figs at them when Alexander sat down across from me. I dropped the potential missile and said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, for one thing, I’m staying in the hotel, and the restaurant is closed,” he said. “I thought I’d have a drop of brandy before I retired. Also, I ran into your husband on the third floor, and he told me what’s going on. I came down to wait with you until he comes back.”

  “Wait someplace else,” I growled.

  “You needn’t be so worried about the girls. Salima will have them here any minute. She may seem rather giddy, but she’s savvy and she knows how to avoid sticky situations.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I made inquiries,” he said, shrugging. “I am by nature an inquisitive sort, although hardly of your caliber.”

  “I am not inquisitive.” I picked up a dried fig, then put it down before I was overcome by the impulse to test my aim. “I prefer to mind my own business, and I wish you’d do the same. Why don’t you trot back upstairs and raid your father’s suite for brandy?”

  “I tried, but the door’s locked. He knows me well enough to have made sure I don’t have access. One weekend when he and Mumsy were in Bath, I came home from Eton with a few friends and we decimated the ancestral wine cellar. He almost swallowed his tongue.”

  “Surely he’s back by now,” I said. “He and the McHavers were going to a dinner party at Lady Emerson’s villa.”

  “Lady Emerson’s villa? They told you that?”

  “We spoke to them in the lobby just before seven o’clock. It sounded as though it would be very dry and proper. Mrs. McHaver doesn’t seem the type to whoop it up until midnight with lowly college dignitaries from the U.S.”

  “You might be surprised.” Alexander gestured to the waiter, whose smile was increasingly forced. “A touch more brandy, Claire?”

  I stared at the sidewalk. A few tourists were still wandering in from what I surmised may have been nightclubs. I was surprised to see Jess Delmont, the grad student from MacLeod College, slinking toward the hotel entrance. Although Shannon King was a guest, I’d assumed the other members of her team, like Magritta, were in cheaper accommodations.

  Alexander sucked in a breath. “I wonder what he’s doing here. It’s late for a social call, not that I’d consider him convivial in any case. Every year MacLeod College sends a couple of them. They arrive with glowing faces, convinced they’ll be opening a tomb that rivals King Tut’s. Then they discover that they’ll be at the site at seven in the morning, sorting through dusty rubble in the hot sun, and back at their horrid hotel rooms at four o’clock to collapse on lumpy beds and watch cockroaches race across the ceiling. To add to the insult, they pay for the privilege. At least Nabil and the other workmen get paid. It’s much more glamorous in the cinema.”

  “I’m sure it is,” I said distractedly. Two figures were shuffling up the sidewalk, dressed in ponderous black robes and scarves that had been wound around their heads to cover everything but their eyes. I was about to dismiss them as hotel guests when I saw a flash of a hot pink sandal beneath one of the robes.

  “Just a minute!” I said, standing up with such impetuosity that my chair tipped over.

  A pair of green eyes flickered in my direction.

  CHAPTER 7

  “This had better be good,” I said as I sat on the edge of the sofa. Caron and Inez, who resembled escapees from a third-rate harem, stood in the middle of the room. They’d removed the scarves and pushed back their sweaty hair, but the faded black robes were shabby and frayed. Their feet were dusty. Peter had gone into our bedroom to call Mahmoud back and assure him that the girls were safe. He had seemed nothing more than relieved. I, on the other hand, was in the throes of maternal fury.

  “Can we change first?” asked Caron. “These things are hot.”

  “You have one minute, starting right now.”

  “I sort of need to use the bathroom,” Inez said timidly. “Badly.”

  “The clock is ticking.”

  As they dashed into their room, I took a bottle of water from the mini-bar, splashed a few drops in my palm, and patted my cheeks. Spontaneous combustion was a real threat, I decided as I forced myself to breathe more deeply. When they returned, dressed in T-shirts and shorts, I pointed at two chairs. “Don’t even think about lying. I’m in no mood for elaborate fabrication. Do you realize it’s after midnight? Peter called Mahmoud, who sent the police to bang on doors in that village—all beca
use you couldn’t bother to get back here on time. And when you finally showed up, you were in disguise and tried to sneak past me! Didn’t it occur to you that I was worried sick? This isn’t Farberville, for pity’s sake.”

  Caron rolled her eyes. “Are you going to lecture us all night, or would you prefer to hear what happened?”

  “It was really scary,” Inez added.

  Peter came in and sat down next to me. “Mahmoud’s calling off the cavalry. I apologized, but he sounded chilly.”

  “He’ll understand when his children turn into teenagers,” I said, sounding rather chilly myself. “All right, girls, from the beginning.”

  Caron settled back in the chair as if preparing to offer an amusing anecdote. “Salima came shortly after you left. We took a ferry to a pier on the West Bank, then walked to her parents’ house. She was telling us all about Cambridge and how they really do go punting on the Thames—which they call Isis for some crazy reason. She lived in a musty little room in an ancient building, and had to share the bathroom with a bunch of other students. They toasted crumpets in their fireplaces late at night. Whenever they could, they took the train to London to go to nightclubs and wine bars. Of course she had to hang out at the British Museum, because—”

  “You walked to Salima’s parents’ house. Then what?”

  “There were at least two dozen people, about half children. We were introduced to her mother and father—”

  “Her mamma and babba,” Inez said. “There were tantes and oncles, her grandmère, and cousins. Salima’s brother seemed to like the colored pencils and sketchbook we gave him, although he was a lot more excited about the Game Boy. They served a regular birthday cake, along with meat and cheese sandwiches, pickled vegetables and dips, and ta’amiyya in pita pockets. It’s made of mashed fava beans, with olive oil, and fried in little patties. It’s also known as felafel.”

  “So the party was uneventful,” I said before Inez launched into the recipe, which I had no doubt she could, given any encouragement whatsoever.

  “It was okay,” Caron conceded, “although it would have been more fun with a piñata or something. The party broke up at nine, and we were walking to the pier when one of Salima’s cousins rushed up, bawling and blubbering. Her name’s Nevine. Major boyfriend crisis. They had an argument earlier in the week, and she thought they’d made up, but he was at a nightclub in a hotel with another girl, blah, blah, blah. Salima tried to calm her down, then agreed to go with her and try to help them sort it out. She wanted to put us on a ferry first, but we said we’d go with them, since it was still early. I mean, we’ve never even been to a nightclub back home, and it sounded interesting.”

  “Educational, too,” chirped Inez.

  I narrowed my eyes. “The reason you’ve never been to a nightclub is because you’re not old enough, remember?”

  Caron shrugged. “It wasn’t like they were going to check our IDs at the door, Mother. We just wanted to see what it was like. We weren’t going to drink beer. Besides, we haven’t met anybody remotely our age since we arrived. Even the ones who aren’t fossilized are all out of college and have jobs. Alexander is nearly thirty.”

  I heard an odd noise from Peter that might have been a suppressed laugh, obliging me to elbow him in a discreet but emphatic manner. This was not the time for the good cop–bad cop routine. I would have much preferred that we were sitting at a scarred table in a claustrophobic pea green interrogation room, with a lightbulb dangling nakedly above our heads. I briefly considered calling the concierge to see if a laundry room in the basement might be available, then dismissed the idea.

  “That’s not quite true,” I said, “but you have a point. Not a very good one, but you may continue.”

  “We went up some narrow streets to this nightclub on the ground floor of a little hotel. The name was in Arabic, but it had a neon sign with a blue camel. It wasn’t very big and it was absolutely packed with people, mostly Egyptians and a few scraggly tourists. A lot of them were smoking cigarettes and cigars. It was hot and dark, and the music was really loud. Salima got us sodas and Nevine found us a place to sit with some girls she knew, and then they left to go deal with the boyfriend. For a second, I thought I saw Samuel, that guy from Virginia or wherever with the brainless girlfriend, but then people got in the way and I didn’t see him after that. Nevine’s friends didn’t speak any English and were jabbering away in Arabic. The smoke and the noise got to be awful. We finally decided to go look for Salima and tell her that we’d find the way to the ferry on our own. They’d gone toward the back, so we started trying to squeeze through all the dancers and sweaty bodies.” She paused for maximum effect. “That’s when we saw Him.”

  “Nevine’s boyfriend?” asked Peter.

  “No, the man who’s been following us. The one with the scar.”

  Inez blinked soberly. “And a mustache. He was wearing jeans and a turtleneck. It was so dark we could barely see across the room, but he was wearing sunglasses. It was unbelievably suspicious. I thought I was going to throw up on somebody’s foot. Caron finally shoved me, and we made it to a back exit.”

  “Where,” Caron said, regaining center stage, “we ducked around a corner and crouched behind some garbage bags. That’s when we heard the same door open and footsteps coming in our direction. We were totally paralyzed, but I realized we had to get out of there before the guy got to the corner. We ran along the street, then started turning down alleys. We had to dodge around boxes and piles of concrete bags and rubble. Dogs were barking at us. An old lady yelled at us from an upstairs window. Some men came out of a café and tried to block us. One of them grabbed Inez, and she whacked him.”

  “Not really,” Inez said, turning pink. “I just sort of swung at him. He started laughing so hard he let go of me.” She made a fist and looked at it. “No wonder.”

  “Was this man with the scar chasing you?” asked Peter.

  Caron shrugged. “Somebody was. We caught glimpses of him whenever we looked back. Finally, we got to the edge of town. The only place to go was up a path, so we did. It was a nightmare. We were tripping and sliding on the loose rocks, and it was too dark to see where we were going. Inez was wheezing so raggedly I thought she was going to pass out. There was nowhere to hide, even though it was so dark we couldn’t see much of anything. It was like we were on a different planet, pursued by a carnivorous beast. Sweat was literally streaming down my face, and my leg muscles were screaming in agony.”

  I couldn’t be sure how much she was embellishing the story, since she was more than adept at exaggeration when it served her purpose. “Was it wise to leave the town? Why didn’t you just stop and ask someone for help?”

  “As if they all speak English? It’s not a trendy tourist destination, Mother. It’s a grubby little town that probably didn’t have electricity until a year ago and still lacks plumbing. The businesses were closed and the shutters drawn on the ground-level apartments. There were goats in the streets—Egyptian goats, bleating in Arabic.”

  Peter leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. If he had the same doubts that I did, he was masking them. “Then what happened?”

  “We stayed on the path until we came to a dirt road. We crossed it and dived behind some big rocks to catch our breath. The footsteps stopped, so we knew the man was nearby, listening for us. I bit down on my lip so hard I thought it would start bleeding. I’m sure it will be all swollen tomorrow and I’ll look like a boxer. Inez started hiccuping, but luckily he didn’t seem to hear it. All I could think of was how idiotic it would be if we were murdered because of Inez’s pathetic little spasms.”

  The door of the parlor flew open and Salima burst into the room. She was gabbling so loudly and rapidly that it was impossible to understand much of what she was saying. She flung herself around Inez’s neck and then around Caron’s, hugging them so fiercely their eyes bulged. “You’re safe, my darlings!” she shrieked. “I was so worried about you! I’ve been searching everywhere for t
he last hour. You cannot believe how utterly distraught I’ve been!” She flung herself onto a chair and wiped her eyes with her shirt cuff. “A drink! I must have a drink or I shall expire from sheer anxiety!” She lapsed into gasps and mutters, some of which seemed to be expressing gratitude to the entire pantheon for the girls’ safe return to the hotel.

  While the rest of us stared at her, Peter made a martini and put it in her hand. “How nice of you to drop by at this hour, Miss el-Musafira.”

  “Oh, dear,” Salima moaned, “you’re furious at me. You should be. It was all my fault, Mrs. Malloy. Well, technically, it was ninety percent Nevine’s fault, since she was the one who caused the crisis.” She took a sip and fell back. “If you want to throw me off the balcony—and I wouldn’t blame you—please let me finish the martini first. I’ve had a dreadful time this evening.”

  “You’re not the only one,” I said coldly.

  Salima hastily set down the glass. “Permit me to explain my inexcusable behavior. I assume Caron and Inez have told you why we went to the Sapphire Camel. Once they were safely settled, Nevine and I went to find her boyfriend, who was in the back with some silly slut. A shouting match erupted. Nevine bolted out the back door, and Gamil went after her. So I, naturally, went after them, as did several of the aggrieved’s friends and relatives, some of whom are my relatives as well, although I am loath to admit it. The verbal assaults escalated into a scuffle. One of Nevine’s more emotional brothers threw a punch, and Gamil stumbled and cut his forehead. Blood, hysterics, invectives, and that sort of thing ensued. Nosy neighbors came outside to cheer. The police arrived. Everybody was tripping all over everybody else to get away. Nevine and I managed to pull Gamil up and hustle him away to the emergency clinic. Although the damage was minimal, he was covered with blood. It took forever for the nurse to stitch him up. They were clinging to each other like thistles and declaring eternal devotion when I slipped away and went back to the Camel to look for the girls.” She shrugged, then reached for her martini. “After I discovered they’d vanished, I went to the pier and ascertained that they had not taken a ferry. I made sure they weren’t at my parents’ house, then ran up and down every street, my heart beating so hard I was nearly blind. On my third or fourth trip to the pier, someone finally said they’d caught a ride on a felucca. I would have called, but I lost my cell phone along the way. I came here as soon as I could.”