Mummy Dearest

by Joan Hess

  I was more than ready to retreat to the ship after we’d climbed the steps at Dakka and obligingly admired the view of sand, rocks, and the Nubian Sea. I could almost hear the tinkle of ice cubes in my very tall, very cold drink as I sat in the lounge.

  “Don’t be such a wimp,” Caron said, correctly interpreting the blissful look on my face. “If Buffy can do it …”

  “The next temple has a most delectable juxtaposition of Ramses II offering flowers to Saint Peter,” Samuel inserted. “The original reliefs were plastered over when the building was converted into a church. Some of the plaster deteriorated.”

  “Poor Ramses,” Inez said. She took a tissue from one of her numerous pockets and dabbed the corner of her eye. “He would have been mortified.”

  I was not swayed by Inez’s bizarre emotional display, but I was surprised to see that Buffy had gone ahead of us and was no longer visible. “All right,” I said ungraciously. “Let’s go weep for Ramses.”

  My thighs were howling, albeit silently, as we came up the last hundred feet and gazed at a rather unimpressive structure. I was more concerned about the long walk back to the pier than the mortification of Ramses II, who seemed to have exalted himself on the majority of temples in the Nile Valley and deserved a little bit of humility. Peter was having a quiet conversation with Samuel about the Roman era, while Sittermann continued his maniacal obsession with his camera and Inez steeled herself for the upcoming ordeal.

  Buffy was now within our sight—as were two men on horseback. She was standing next to a glistening black horse, speaking with some vehemence to its rider, a young Arab with a tattered rag tied around his head. He was ill shaven, with a hooked nose, heavy eyebrows, stained teeth—and a rifle slung across his back. It was peculiar, to put it mildly. I stopped abruptly, as did my companions.

  “What’s she doing?” asked Caron.

  “She can’t know them,” Inez volunteered in a thin voice.

  From behind me, I heard Sittermann’s camera clicking, as well as others. Peter clutched my elbow and said, “I don’t like this. Something’s wrong.”

  Samuel began to head toward the odd group, his mouth tight. I agreed that some sort of action was required, but I had no idea what it might be. The few remaining passengers from the ship were gawking.

  I had every intention of saying something when the rider leaned down, grabbed Buffy by the arm, and dragged her across the saddle in front of him. He banged his ankles against the horse’s belly and it took off at a gallop. The second horseman followed at an equally furious pace. I could see Buffy struggling, but the rider had a tight clutch on the back of her shirt. The second rider fired a shot into the sky.

  Seconds later, they disappeared behind a hill.

  “What the hell …?” Sittermann said.

  CHAPTER 9

  We stood there like a cluster of hypostyle columns, too stunned to so much as twitch. There was no sound, no cloud of dust, no distant shrieks. The sky was lucid, unmarred by even a wispy cloud. The sunlight no longer danced on the sand; it sank without a sparkle.

  Samuel was frozen in mid-step. His foot finally came down and he reeled around. “What just happened?” he demanded hoarsely.

  “I don’t know,” Peter said, as bewildered as the rest of us.

  “Was she abducted?” asked a thin blond woman from the ship.

  Samuel began to run in the direction the riders had taken, a gallant but futile effort on his part. Peter nudged me. “Let’s get in the shade,” he said, “and decide what we ought to do. Maybe someone has a cell phone.”

  “There’s no reception here,” Sittermann said, “but I agree there’s not much point in getting a sunstroke. Come along, little dogies. There’s a nice patch of shade next to that wall.”

  “Can we kill him?” Caron whispered to me as we headed for the temple.

  “It’s okay with me, “I said, “but there are a lot of witnesses.”

  “Do you think anybody will testify against me?”

  “Good point.”

  No one seemed to have anything to say. After a few minutes, Samuel joined us, panting and soaked with sweat. “I couldn’t even see which way they went,” he said as he leaned against a rock and gulped down some water. “They’ve vanished. This is unreal. I feel like I must be dreaming.”

  “Reckon not,” Sittermann said.

  Samuel shook his head. “That’s what you’d say in my dream. Maybe Osiris will show up next and point me in the right direction. I’ll make my way to a fabulous temple, where Buffy will be seated on a golden throne, playing with an asp.”

  “As much as we’d love to hear the details, we can’t just sit here,” I said. “Anyone have any bright ideas?”

  “We need to go back to the ship,” one of the passengers said, mopping his face with a handkerchief. “The captain will call the police, and they can deal with it.”

  Peter stood up. “Everybody stay together and let’s go as quickly as we can. If you feel faint, say so and we’ll stop for a minute. Agreed?”

  Sittermann reached over as if he intended to help me to my feet. I got up with amazing agility, gestured at the girls, and looked back at the spot we’d last seen Buffy. It looked eerily normal, merely sand and rocks. In another situation, I might have found it romantic, in the same way I imagined the moors would be if populated by dyspeptic heroes and raven-haired virgins with heaving bosoms.

  “Seventy thousand square kilometers of desert,” Samuel said as he fell into step beside me. “The size of—I hate to say this—Texas.”

  “Well, they haven’t had time to ride from Amarillo to El Paso,” I said. “The police will know where to find them.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he muttered.

  I caught up with Peter. His jaw was tight, his eyes slitted. I doubted that he was in the mood for speculation. We trudged slowly but steadily in the direction of the sea. When we reached Dakka, we mutely sought shade and took deep swills from our water bottles. Samuel continued to mutter under his breath; no one seemed willing to attempt to comfort him. The final stretch to Maharakka was excruciatingly painful. Every grain of the sand was now my enemy. Conversation was reduced to grunts and wheezes. Even Caron and Inez were pink faced as we scrambled down the slope to the primitive pier and onto the launches.

  As soon as we were on board the Nubian Queen, Peter and Samuel headed for the lower deck to find the captain. Since I had nothing to contribute, I went to the cabin and sponged off the accumulated grit and perspiration. Feeling much better in a clean shirt and sandals, I went to the lounge for a much-needed cold drink.

  Two American men I’d met at dinner the previous evening waved for me to join them. One was a gray-haired, loquacious Egyptologist, the other a much quieter connoisseur of architecture and art. The older man, who’d introduced himself as “Dennis from North Carolina, ma’am,” demanded to know what was being done.

  “You know as much as I do,” I admitted. “I suppose the police have been notified. The horseman can’t have taken Buffy too far.”

  “There could be a Bedouin camp in the area,” Joel, the younger one, said. “The men thought she was flirting with them, and snatched her as a prank. They must be regretting it by now.”

  Dennis had been taking almost as many photographs as Sittermann. He pulled out his camera and began clicking a button on the back of it. “Digital,” he said for my benefit. “You can see all the pictures I took this morning. Although I was trying to get a decent shot of Wadi es Sebua, I may have caught a few of the horsemen as well. Here’s one of you, Mrs. Malloy.”

  He held the camera so that I could see a tiny rectangle that reflected my grimace as I navigated the uneven path. It was not my most flattering demeanor. He continued clicking for a few moments, then said, “I thought so. You can’t see much of the men’s faces, but the police can enlarge it.”

  Buffy, her hands on her hips, appeared to be speaking to the Arabs. Bewildered, I waited as the man clicked to the next photograph. In this one, her
head was tilted as if she understood what they were saying. I found it hard to believe that they spoke English or that she spoke Arabic. Of course, I thought, they might have been proffering an unseen object and attempting to haggle over its price. It was likely that Buffy was capable of shopping in any language, be it Arabic, Urdu, or an obscure Chinese dialect. I toyed with the idea, which made a lot more sense. She’d managed to offend them during the negotiations, and they’d grabbed her in a fit of anger.

  “What are you looking at, Mother?” Caron said as she and Inez sat down.

  “Digital photos,” Dennis said, saving me from a minor display of ignorance of the wizardry of technology. “It can hold six hundred shots on one memory card. Look, here’s your friend haranguing our fellow cruise mates. The blonde looks like she’s half-asleep.”

  “I was not haranguing them,” Inez said stiffly. “I was answering their questions.”

  Joel grinned at her. “I didn’t hear them asking any.”

  Peter entered the lounge before Inez could come up with a retort, although, to be candid, I was looking forward to hearing it. He stopped by the piano to address the entire room. “The captain has contacted the authorities. At the moment, we’re in the middle of nowhere. There are some soldiers in Abu Simbel, and more in Aswan. They’ll join up to cover this area and all the way to Kharga Oasis to the west, if necessary. If any of you were close enough to see or hear what happened with Buffy and the horseback riders, please let me know.” He waited for a moment, then shrugged. “That’s really about all. Lunch is being served on the upper deck, and we’ll be sailing shortly.”

  When Peter joined us, he studied the photos of Buffy and her abductors. “Interesting,” he murmured, noticing the same thing that I found curious. “Turn over the memory card to the police in Abu Simbel. They can send the images via the Internet. Take very good care of it until then.”

  “Give them the memory card?” the man sputtered. “Unthinkable, utterly unthinkable. I have some very dramatic shots of the reliefs at Beit al-Wali. I intend to use them for an article I’m writing for a prestigious Egyptology periodical. The juxtaposition of light and shadows brings out the intricate details of—”

  “The police will be fascinated,” Peter said, “and will let you tell them all about it from your cell. A woman has been kidnapped. It’s serious.”

  Caron leaned forward. “Do you think they’ll hold her for ransom?”

  “Why her?” asked Inez. “She was wearing regular clothes and no jewelry except for little earrings. She told me she couldn’t wear her watch because of the danger of a tan line.” She lowered her voice. “If they wanted a ransom, that blond woman over there is fabulously rich. She has a private jet and vacation houses all over the world. She invited me to visit her in Costa Rica this summer.”

  “She what?” Caron said with a gasp. “You didn’t tell me!”

  Inez took off her cloth hat and ran her fingers through her limp brown hair. “She collects characters, she said. She was very impressed with my khaki outfit. It seems I have a certain je ne sais quoi.”

  “You look like a refugee from a Foreign Legion surplus store.”

  “I’ll be wearing a bikini in Costa Rica,” Inez said smugly. “Shall I bring you back a parrot?”

  “It’s preferable to a case of malaria.”

  Peter held up his hands. “That’s enough. If you two don’t cut it out, you can have lunch in your cabin—and stay there the rest of the afternoon.”

  Caron stared at him, then at me. “He can’t say that to me, Mother.”

  “He just did,” I said. “Shall we go up for lunch, everybody?”

  I was hungry, but I couldn’t eat more than a few bites of salad. I kept looking back at the receding view of Maharakka as the ship continued south. We were scheduled for a visit to the temples of Amada and Derr, but I wasn’t in the mood for more sand and yet another jumble of rocks. When our waiter brought coffee, I said as much to Peter, who admitted he preferred to wait on board in case there was information about Buffy. I was reluctant to allow Caron and Inez to go ashore, but Dennis and Joel agreed to stay near them and keep an eye out for suspicious men on horseback.

  After a while, Peter and I were alone on the deck. The staff had been reluctant to abandon us, but Peter had slipped the more persistent ones a few pounds to purchase our privacy.

  “Did you talk to Mahmoud?” I asked.

  “I told him what happened. He was surprised. In general, Egyptians are very friendly and courteous to tourists. They may expect baksheesh, but even Cairo is safer than most large cities. The Bedouins are peaceful, and mostly settled in government housing instead of tents.”

  “What about this terrorist group?”

  “We’ve already discussed that, Claire. They’re not into small-time crime. The last thing a covert organization wants is to have its members arrested for shoplifting or brawling. As Inez pointed out, Buffy doesn’t dress as though she’s from a wealthy family willing to cough up big bucks for her return.”

  “Would you cough up big bucks for my return?” I asked sweetly. Admittedly, it was a silly thing to say, but we were on our honeymoon.

  “The sun and moon,” he said with a properly amorous leer. “You are my jewel of the Nile, my sultry Cleopatra, my diamond in the vast sands of the Sahara.”

  “Not bad,” I said. “Shall we go check with the captain?”

  As we went down to the lounge, I noticed that quite a few of the other passengers seemed to share my lack of enthusiasm for another temple. Abu Simbel would be less worrisome, since it was near the water and would be crowded with tour groups and eager guides. We continued down the curved staircase to the lower deck and followed a corridor to the pilot room.

  The captain and the cruise director were in the middle of an unhappy discussion that focused, I surmised, on Buffy. Neither of them looked especially pleased to see us.

  “Have you heard anything?” asked Peter.

  “I presume you are asking about the girl,” the cruise director said, plucking invisible lint off his sleeve. “The answer to that is no. If you’re asking about my future with the company, then the answer is no less palatable. When the Nubian Queen returns to Aswan, my replacement will be waiting.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said.

  “I suppose not, but someone must be punished for the company’s embarrassment. In the old days, the sultan would have arranged a public execution. My head would have ended up on a pike at the pier, and my entrails fed to the vultures.” He sighed loudly. “As it is, I will go back to Cairo and try to find work as a doorman, all because of that girl.”

  I bristled. “It wasn’t her fault, either. None of us were warned about the potential danger of being abducted by militant rebels.”

  “Ah, yes, you’ve been reading that nonsensical book,” he said with a sneer. “There are no savage sheiks these days, Mrs. Malloy, any more than there were eighty years ago. With a few exceptions, the few tourist fatalities come from reckless behavior, such as driving off the paved roads into the desert or scuba diving in the Red Sea without adequate training.”

  “The exceptions being the attacks at the Temple of Hatshepsut and the Red Sea?” I said, staring at him. “The tour bus outside the Cairo Museum?”

  “How many Arabs have died because of American aggression?” he countered.

  Peter intervened. “Let’s go, dear. The captain will let me know if he receives any information.”

  I was hustled back along the corridor, fuming silently. Sittermann was waiting at the top of the stairs, dressed in baggy shorts and another outlandish print shirt. All he lacked was a plastic lei and flip-flops.

  “Well, there you two are,” he said. “I was just about to go down to the pilot room, but I reckon that’s where you were. Have they heard anything?”

  “No,” Peter said. “Now, if you’ll excuse us—”

  Sittermann blocked our way to the corridor that led to our cabin. “Why don’t you all come alon
g to my room for a drink and a chat? I have some new information that might prove kind of interesting.”

  “You?” I said, arching my eyebrows.

  “About Buffy.”

  Peter and I exchanged looks as Sittermann led us to the upper deck and around a corner to a door. He unlocked it and gestured for us to precede him. His cabin, and I use the term loosely, was a vast sitting room with a bar, wicker furniture, and sliding glass doors to a sizable balcony. An open door on one side gave me a glimpse of a bedroom with a king-sized bed and a pile of silk pillows. It was not as large as the Presidential Suite at the Old Winter Palace, but our cabin on the ship could have been tucked in a corner.

  “Wine?” Sittermann said as he went behind the bar. “Martinis? You name it, I got it. In fact, Mrs. Malloy, if you’d like to slip away while your husband and I talk business, there’s a Jacuzzi in the bathroom. You can stretch out and look at the mountains while all them bubbles soothe your aching muscles.”

  “How did you get this?” I demanded.

  “The owner of the cruise company owed me a little favor.”

  Peter sat down on the sofa and distractedly picked up a dried apricot from the platter of pastries and fruit on the table. After a moment, he replaced it. His expression was blank, but I could almost hear him thinking furiously.

  “Not in the mood for a bath, Mrs. Malloy?” Sittermann went on. “I seem to recollect you’re a scotch drinker. I’ll call for some ice.”

  “I’d prefer lemonade,” I said mendaciously, then joined Peter. We both watched Sittermann as he picked up the telephone and ordered ice and lemonade. “This is crazy,” I whispered.

  “So it is,” Sittermann said, sitting down on a nearby chair and propping his ankle on his knee. “By all rights, you two should have gotten this little bit of heaven for yourselves, it being your honeymoon and all. Guess I got lucky.” He leaned forward and took a honey-coated piece of baklava. “Maybe I should get to the point. I managed to make a few calls while everybody was having lunch.”