Night Train to Memphis vbm-5

by Elizabeth Peters

  Louisa dropped the subject of my manuscript with a thud and started to tell Schmidt the plot of her forthcoming book. She hadn’t written it yet, so she didn’t have a manuscript (see Twain, above, number three).

  I excused myself, leaving Schmidt listening with prurient fascination to Louisa’s description of her heroine’s struggles with the lustful priest of Amon. I had some hope of waylaying John before the afternoon tour left. Instead I was waylaid, by Mr Hamid the purser. I thought he was looking rather grave, and when he drew me aside I expected . . . well, I don’t know what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t what I heard.

  ‘You remember young Ali, your room steward, Dr Bliss?’

  ‘Of course I remember him. He wasn’t on duty this morning . . . Oh, good heavens. Don’t tell me he’s jumped ship, or whatever you call it?’

  ‘That was what we believed, when he did not report for duty this morning. It would not have surprised me; if he was responsible for the accident of the flowerpot, his guilty conscience and fear of punishment might have driven him into flight.’

  That would have been bad enough, but I could tell by Hamid’s frown that it was even worse. I didn’t say anything. I suppose I had a premonition of what was coming.

  ‘He fell, or jumped, overboard, sometime during the night,’ Hamid said slowly. ‘The body was found a few hours ago.’

  Chapter Five

  I

  I MUST HAVE looked as sick as I felt. Hamid took my arm and led me to a chair.

  ‘You must not blame yourself, Dr Bliss.’

  ‘I don’t.’ One of my less convincing lies, that one. It didn’t even convince me.

  ‘It was an unfortunate accident,’ Hamid said gently. ‘He must have tried to swim to shore and been seized by a cramp or something of the sort.’

  The others were gathering for the afternoon tour. John was among them – with Mary, as usual, by his side.

  ‘Tell them to wait for me,’ I said, rising. ‘I won’t be long.’

  All I could see as I ran up the stairs was that kid’s face – wet with tears as he protested his innocence, wreathed in smiles as he assured me of his appreciation for my kindness. Kindness! It couldn’t have been an accident. Either he had been bribed to drop the flowerpot and later repented, or he had seen the person responsible. They had disposed of him as coolly and callously as if he had been a mosquito.

  The note I scribbled wasn’t very coherent, but I was pretty sure it would get the point across. I put it in the safe and ran back to the lobby.

  The others were heading down the gangplank when I got there, but Feisal had waited for me.

  ‘Hamid said he had told you.’ His warm dark eyes searched my face.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He should not have. It has distressed you.’

  ‘Of course it has! What kind of monster do you think I am?’

  ‘I don’t think you are a monster. That is why I did not want Hamid to tell you.’ He put a supportive arm around my shoulders. I leaned against him for a moment, and his grip tightened as a violent tremor ran through me. He didn’t know I was shaking with rage, not distress.

  ‘There is no need to mention this unhappy business to the other passengers,’ Feisal said.

  I nodded. ‘I’m all right, Feisal. Let’s go.’

  ‘Herr Schmidt is not yet here. He indicated his wish to accompany us.’

  A wild hope dawned in my heart. ‘We can’t wait indefinitely. He’s probably fallen asleep.’

  No such luck. Beaming all over his round pink face, burbling apologies, he emerged from the elevator, complete with pith helmet, sunglasses, bag, and a variety of objects that dangled from straps criss-crossing his torso. I identified a camera, a pair of binoculars, and a canteen among other, more arcane, impedimenta.

  Fewer than half the passengers had taken advantage of the opportunity to visit the royal tomb. I was relieved to see that dear old Anna had declined; in fact, only the diehards, all of them relatively young and vigorous, were there. After considering the other options – Sweet and Bright, John and Mary, Louisa, swathed in veils and trying to look mysterious, the German couple from Hamburg, Alice and Perry – Schmidt seated himself next to Larry Blenkiron and greeted him like an old friend, which, as it turned out, he was – or at least an old acquaintance, which is the same thing by Schmidt’s standards. I wondered if there was anybody in the world of art and archaeology Schmidt didn’t know. Ed Whitehead politely moved over so I could sit on Larry’s other side. It was a touching demonstration of confidence, I thought – in my harmlessness, or in his ability to stop me if I attempted to assassinate his boss. I didn’t doubt he could.

  We went rattling off across the empty plain, followed by the armed escort. The sun high overhead bleached all the colour from the sand; the only contrast was the brilliant blue of the sky above. The breeze of our movement felt like the blast from an oven.

  Schmidt started reminiscing about the last time he and Larry had met, at a conference on preservation and restoration. From the stained glass of medieval cathedrals to the stones of the Colosseum, scarcely a monument in the world has escaped damage from fire and flood, pollution and traffic, and the mere presence of human beings. Larry, of course, was primarily interested in Egyptian monuments and he became more animated than I had ever seen him, his voice deepening with distress as he described the devastation of the tombs.

  ‘The plaster, and the paintings on it, are literally falling off the walls. There has been more damage done in the last twenty years than in the preceding four thousand.’

  ‘But it is a wonderful thing you have done,’ Schmidt exclaimed. ‘To restore the tomb paintings of Tetisheri – ’

  ‘It’s only one out of many.’

  ‘There is also Nefertari’s tomb.’

  ‘The Getty people have done a splendid job with Nefertari,’ Larry agreed. ‘But if the tomb is reopened, the same thing will happen again.’

  ‘Then you support the idea of constructing reproductions?’ Schmidt asked. ‘For the tourists to visit, while the original tombs are open only to scholars?’

  ‘Yes.’ Larry caught my eye and smiled deprecatingly. ‘It does smack of elitism, doesn’t it? Don’t admit anyone – except me!’ He shifted uncomfortably; the seats were hard. ‘It’s too late for the Amarna tombs,’ he went on regretfully. ‘There’s very little left. I admit the Egyptian government needs tourist dollars, but I regret what they’ve done here to make it easier for visitors to reach the royal tomb. Until they made this road through the wadi, it was a long, hard, three-mile walk.’

  ‘I hear that the Japanese are talking of building lifts to the nobles’ tombs,’ Schmidt said.

  They sighed in unison.

  We had crossed the plain and entered a canyon or wadi that cut through the enclosing cliffs. They gave little shade; the sun was still high and the centre of the road baked in the bright light. Seeing me swallow, Schmidt unscrewed his canteen and offered it to me. Gratefully I accepted it. I took a drink and gagged.

  ‘Beer!’

  ‘Aber natürlich,’ said Schmidt, retrieving the canteen. ‘Herr Blenkiron?’

  Larry refused the offer. So did Ed.

  There was an ice chest on the trailer. When it stopped we had drinks all round before starting on the last part of the trip. It was an easy walk along a narrower side wadi up to the entrance to the tomb. A short flight of steep steps led down. I could see a glow of light from the passage beyond, but it wasn’t exactly dazzling.

  Feisal gathered us around him and began lecturing. Schmidt wasn’t looking at Feisal. He was looking at me. He had taken off his sunglasses preparatory to descending into the dimly lighted passageway, and his beady little eyes were worried.

  Schmidt was one of the few people in the world who knew about the time I had been buried alive under a castle in Bavaria. That may sound melodramatic, but it’s the literal truth; the tunnel had been blocked by an earth-fall and I had to dig my way out. I had no tools, only my bare hand
s, no light except a few matches, and, towards the end, not much in the way of oxygen. I have avoided dark, confined underground places since. Even Schmidt didn’t know that I still dream about it from time to time.

  John knew. He knew because I had had the dream once when he was with me. He had held me while I choked and gurgled and made a damned fool of myself, clinging to him and pleading incoherently for light and for air. After I calmed down he had insisted I tell him the whole story. It would help exorcise the demons, he had said . . .

  He was staring at me too. Over Mary’s head his eyes, narrowed and unblinking, met mine. I looked away.

  The others started down the stairs and Schmidt edged closer to me. ‘Vicky, perhaps you should not do this.’

  He was under the impression that he was whispering. Several heads turned, and Feisal came back to me. ‘Is there a problem, Vicky?’

  ‘No problem,’ I said curtly.

  Nor was there, not really. What bothered me was not claustrophobia in the classic sense: abnormal fear of narrow, confined spaces. As long as there was light and there were other people around, I was okay.

  At least that’s what I told myself.

  It wasn’t as bad as I had feared. There were lights at frequent intervals and modern stairs or ramps over the rougher parts of the ancient passageways. And people. Schmidt stuck close, bless his thoughtful little heart.

  Egyptian tomb architecture has never been one of my passions in life. Sweet set out to prove it was one of his; he latched on to Perry, despite the latter’s attempts to get away so he could come and tell me all about everything, and began babbling about changes in axis and angles of descent and comparisons with earlier and later types. He’d certainly done his homework. Alice and Schmidt were arguing about Minoan influences on Amarna art. Feisal’s voice echoed weirdly as he mentioned points of interest.

  There weren’t many. The walls of the sloping passage were rough and unadorned. It had an eerie impressiveness, though, and by the time we reached the burial chamber everyone except Feisal had fallen silent.

  There wasn’t much to see there either, only a few scratches on the rough walls; but when Feisal pointed them out and described the scenes of which they were the scanty remainder, he managed to suggest something of the beauty that had once been there: depictions of the king and queen offering to the sole god they had worshipped, the sun disk with rays ending in small, caressing human hands; mourners, their garments rent and their hands raised in ceremonial grieving. Even with his eloquence I couldn’t make out the details of the figure on the funeral bier. Feisal claimed these details proved it was a female figure.

  ‘But I thought this was the king’s tomb,’ the Frau from Hamburg said.

  ‘We don’t know the identity of the woman on the bier,’ Feisal answered. ‘It has been suggested she was – ’

  ‘Nefertiti!’ Louisa swooped down on him, waving her arms. Her veils billowed like bat wings. ‘Yes, I feel it. I feel her presence.’

  She flopped down onto the floor and sat cross-legged, crooning to herself.

  The others studied her in mingled disgust and embarrassment. Sweet muttered something derogatory about New Age mystics and Blenkiron’s face was rigid with distaste.

  ‘Odd how so many people go soggy over Nefertiti,’ murmured a satirical voice. Hands in his pockets, hair shining in the light of the bulb overhead, John glanced at me and smiled.

  Feisal was the only other member of the party who was more amused than embarrassed. He had probably run into this sort of thing before. ‘It is not Nefertiti. She appears elsewhere in the same scene. One authority has suggested that this was her tomb, not that of her husband, but that viewpoint is not generally accepted. The unfinished suite of rooms leading off the downward passage may have been intended for her burial. We will visit them later, but first you will want to see the best preserved portion of the tomb, which was designed for one of the royal princesses.’

  Ignoring Louisa, he led us out the way we had come.

  The others crowded after him. They weren’t any more comfortable in that room than I had been, and I’m not just talking about the temperature and the close air. It was good sized – about thirty feet square, according to Feisal, and the ceiling didn’t brush the top of my head. But somehow I felt as if it did, and the battered stone pillars looked as if they might collapse at any moment.

  Whistling softly and irreverently, John stood studying the wall and Mary sidled up to me. ‘Are you as anxious to leave this place as I am?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know. How anxious are you?’ I wiped the perspiration off my forehead.

  ‘I suppose it’s partly psychological,’ Mary murmured. ‘The reminders of death and decay and darkness . . .’

  That was one of the words I didn’t need to hear right then. Without replying I headed for the door.

  I was determined to stick it out, though. The chambers we had visited in the mastaba tombs at Sakkara were above ground; the nobles’ tombs at Amarna were cut into the cliff, but we hadn’t gone down under, into the burial chambers, and I had always been able to see daylight in the distance. This was the most difficult place I’d encountered yet, and I felt I was going about conquering my phobia in a very sensible way. The hell with jumping back onto the horse; I’d rather start with a very small pony or a Saint Bernard, and work my way up.

  One of Akhenaton’s daughters had died young and had been buried in her father’s tomb, in a suite of rooms located off the main descending corridor. The scene I had found particularly moving, that of the little body lying stiff on the funeral bed, with the grieving parents bending over it, could hardly be made out. Some vandal had tried to hack out a portion of the relief; the deep jagged incision had destroyed the upper part of the princess’s body and other details.

  ‘That’s an example of why I dread increased accessibility,’ said Larry, who was standing next to me. ‘These reliefs were virtually intact until the thirties.’

  ‘But you cannot blame the poor devils of villagers,’ said Schmidt, the unreconstructed socialist, on my other side. ‘It is the European and American collectors who pay large prices for illegal antiquities who are responsible. I do not mean you, of course,’ he added quickly.

  Larry laughed. ‘That’s why my collection isn’t very impressive. The best objects were acquired by museums and less scrupulous collectors before I got interested. Anyhow, I’m more concerned about preservation than collecting.’

  When we left the princess’s rooms I noticed that John again hung back while Mary followed me. Had there been a lovers’ tiff? I waited for her and gave her a friendly smile. I had, of course, no ulterior motive.

  ‘Almost through,’ I said encouragingly.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind.’ Her voice wavered a little, though. ‘It’s been very interesting.’

  We started up the ramp. It seemed a lot steeper than it had when we descended. The last suite of rooms, the ones Feisal had said might have been meant for the queen’s burial, was located about halfway up the incline. Indicating the entrance where the others were waiting, I asked, ‘Are you going to skip the final treat, or shall we participate?’

  Mary glanced behind her. John was some distance away, taking his time. Couldn’t the poor little wimp come to any decision without consulting him? What had he been doing down there alone? Perhaps there had been a quarrel and he was sulking, trying to make Mary feel guilty about hurting his sensitive feelings.

  ‘I meant to ask you before,’ I said casually. ‘About Jen. How is she?’

  ‘Much better. In fact – ’

  She stopped with a gulp. All of a sudden there he was, behind her, looming. ‘You startled me, darling!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘In fact,’ John said, ‘she’s recovered enough to return home.’

  ‘You mean she’s left Egypt?’ I stared at him.

  ‘This morning. She doesn’t trust Egyptian doctors or hospitals.’

  ‘Then she won’t be rejoining the tour?’

>   ‘No, she won’t.’

  I looked from his self-satisfied smile to Mary’s downcast face. Was that what the quarrel had been about?

  ‘You sound pleased,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I am. She was a bloody nuisance,’ John said callously. ‘Now hurry along, girls. One would suppose, from the way you’re dawdling, that you are enjoying this.’

  By the time we had finished examining a few more rough unfinished rock-cut rooms and listened to Feisal describe their possible function, everyone, even Louisa, was ready to call it a day. ‘I do not feel her presence,’ she intoned. ‘The beautiful one was never interred here.’

  ‘She’s probably right about that,’ muttered Larry. ‘But for the wrong reasons. Since when did she become an expert on Nefertiti?’

  ‘I think she’s making her the heroine of her new book,’ I said.

  ‘Then why was she carrying on about missing Meydum?’ Larry demanded. ‘That pyramid predates Nefertiti by over a thousand years.’

  ‘Historical novelists don’t worry about little details like that,’ I explained, with certain guilty memories of my own heroine’s activities. Having Rosanna hide in a broom closet to elude Genghis Khan had not been kosher, but it had entertained Schmidt, which was my primary purpose for continuing the saga.

  Hot, thirsty, and coated with dust, we made a beeline for the ice chest and stood swilling down cold drinks. The late-afternoon heat was intense, but it felt refreshing after the confined airlessness of the tomb. Even in the shade I seemed to feel my skin drying and shrinking over my bones. It was the climate of Egypt, not the well-meaning but often destructive process of burial, that produced such excellent mummies.

  Blenkiron wanted to see a few more tombs on the way back to the boat, but he gave in with smiling good grace when the others emphatically outvoted him. Mary let out a muted wail when he suggested stopping at the southern tombs. Schmidt, ever gallant, hurried to her and offered her his arm.

  He’d held up well, but I was worried about him. The open-heart surgery he had undergone a few years earlier had, he claimed, made a new man of him. The new man looked to me just as unhealthy as the old one. His face was flushed with heat and exercise, but his smile was as broad and his moustache as defiant as ever. He was obviously having a wonderful time.