Dead Men's Hearts (10 page)

Gideon understood the need for him. Egypt wasn’t an easy country to get around in. There were frustrations at every turn: bureaucratic muddles, “rules” that didn’t exist yesterday and wouldn’t exist tomorrow, unexpected demands for fees or for permits that could only be gotten in Cairo on the first day of the second week of alternate months. There were confusions and noisy fracases over matters whose import—whose very sense—eluded foreigners. And, especially, there was an utter unconcern for time—nobody in Egypt was ever in a hurry— and a disinclination to interfere with the not-always-transparent manifestations of God’s will that had driven more than one harried Westerner around the bend.

It was to spare the group these adversities that Phil was there. With his excellent Arabic (his father had been a petroleum engineer, and Phil had spent much of his first twelve years in Riyadh and Cairo), with his scruffy, eager, friendly manner, with a perpetually sunny disposition and a willingness to see the best in people, with an insider’s perspective on the Egyptian view of life, and with a resilient, take-things-as-they-come approach to the inevitable hard knocks of travel, he was just the person to smooth over whatever vagaries lay ahead.

Vagaries were not long in coming. The ZAS plane that he had chartered was not ready and waiting when they arrived. Worse, no one was able to tell them why it wasn’t there, where it was, or when, precisely, it was expected.
Shortly, very shortly,
they were told by an eager-to-please clerk in a trim, Sadat-style blue suit.

Phil was turned to for counsel. “Go, as they say, with the flow,” was his cheerful advice, delivered in the faint but crisp British accent that was a remnant of his Saudi Arabian school days. “Speaking for myself, I intend to sit down and have a Coke.”

“Third World travel,” said Bea philosophically. “How I love it. Well, I’ll have a Coke too, Bruno.”

At 3:00 there was still no sign—or word—of the plane. A testy Haddon, having gone with the flow as long as he could, stamped up to the counter. “I’m not going to wait here all day,” he snapped, his beard jutting aggressively. “Is it or is it not expected? Answer truthfully, please.”

“Oh, yes, sir, to be sure,” the clerk told him with an encouraging smile.
“Inshallah.”

God willing.
The others looked at each other. It didn’t look good.

“This is your fault, Forrest,” Haddon said crossly.

Forrest Freeman, who had been sitting glumly in a corner and not bothering anyone, surfaced from whatever worries he had been chewing over.

“What? My fault?”

“I maintain, as I have from the beginning, that there is simply no good reason for us to be making this trek, given our ridiculously compressed schedule.”
Shedyule,
Haddon said. “Tel el-Amarna hardly represents a critical milestone in the history of Horizon House.”

Forrest sighed, a man who had been through this before. “Sorry, but I have to disagree with you there. And as long as I have—”

But at that point ZAS Airlines was heard from, and twenty minutes later the plane rolled up outside the window. The party shouldered their carry-on luggage and prepared to leave the terminal.

“One moment, please, ladies and gentlemen, there seems to be an additional small problem,” the clerk told them jovially, “a very small problem indeed.”

“Imagine that,” Bea said.

“Hardly any problem to speak of,” the clerk went on. “No, not really a problem at all. It seems that the baggage hold of this airplane is already filled with baggages from an earlier trip which was unfortunately misrouted, through no fault of the airline or this airport. These baggages are on the way eventually to Cairo, and therefore there is no room for your own baggages on this airplane at this moment.”

“Yikes,” Julie said.

Next to her, Phil tapped the backpack that was slung over one shoulder of his T-shirt—his standard Middle Eastern apparel along with a long-billed “On the Cheap” baseball cap, rumpled beige shorts that came down to his skinny knees, and sockless canvas running shoes. “First rule: never travel with more than you can carry.”

“Now he tells us,” Gideon said.

Forrest, who had continued to sit in his corner quietly gnawing his lip, suddenly took to gibbering. “I knew this would happen! I knew this would happen! What about our equipment? We only have four miserable days, we don’t have any spare time, we, we—” He switched suddenly to a long string of loud and impressively fluent-sounding Arabic. Other passengers turned to observe with interest and respect.

The clerk shouted back no less loudly, waving his hands and thumping the counter. Gideon had no trouble with the gist of it but understood not a word. Ordinarily he took pride in being able to get along in the language of whatever country he was in, but this time he simply hadn’t had the time to learn. He could handle
hello-goodbye, yes-no,
and
please-thank you,
and that was it.

After a few seconds, Phil came to the rescue, edging Forrest out of the way and taking up the yelling match in his stead, his voice well up to the challenge. It went on for a good five minutes with, if anything, an increase in fervor; several times the clerk raised his face to the ceiling, apparently to address his thoughts to a higher authority. Phil, clearly having a good time, finally bent over the narrow counter and wrapped
his
arm around the clerk’s shoulder. They leaned together, talking more quietly, until there was a sudden spate of good-natured laughter, a spirited shaking of hands, and an obviously amicable conclusion.

Phil turned to Forrest. “All right, your equipment comes with us.”

“Whew,” Forrest said, spent. “Gad. I knew this would happen.” He appealed to his crew of two, slouched on a bench. “Did I or did I not say this was going to happen?”

“You said it was going to happen, man,” Cy agreed.

Julie looked at Phil. “How in the world did you do that?”

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

“You bribed him, you gave him some what-do-you-call-it,
bakshish,
didn’t you?”

Phil grinned. “I showed him the error of his ways. I revealed to him a better path.”

“You gave him money.”

“I did not give him money. No such thing. Not a single piaster. And anyway, I’ll be reimbursed.”

Julie shook her head. “Is this what it’s always like?”

“Yes,” Phil said happily.

“Fortunately,” the smiling clerk now said, “we will be able to place all of your baggages on the very next flight to Cairo. A special intermediate stop at el-Minya shall soon be arranged, I am happy to say.”

“Oh, yes? And when would that be?” Haddon asked. “Any time this week?”

“To be sure,” the clerk said earnestly. “Of course. You will have it in no time at all.”

Haddon was unimpressed.
“Bukhra,
you mean?” he said sourly.

The clerk threw back his head and laughed.
“Bukhra,
yes, without fail! And now, you may be boarding, please, gentlemen and ladies?” He shook Phil’s hand again and bowed them through the door to the tarmac.

“What’s
bukhra?”
Julie asked Gideon as the group walked toward the mid-sized plane. “I’m afraid to ask.”

“Phil, what’s
bukhra?”
Gideon said over his shoulder.

“Bukhra?
Literally, it means tomorrow. But—put it this way. When someone in Egypt tells you
bukhra,
treat it in the same manner as when someone in Mexico tells you
mahana.”

“Great,” Gideon said.

“Except, of course, without the same sense of urgency,” Phil finished.

“Rats,” Julie said. “And us without a change of clothes.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Gideon said with more assurance than he felt. “He said the very next flight. We’ll probably get it before the night’s out.”

Julie, who took logistical problems in her stride better than he did, laughed.

“
Inshallah
,” she said.

Chapter Nine

Ninety minutes later they deplaned at el-Minya, a drab, sprawling city chiefly known for processing sugar and making cheap soaps and perfumes. There, as directed by Phil, they went to a waiting area where transportation to el-Amarna was to be waiting for them. There was nothing there. Passersby looked curiously at the stranded-looking knot of Americans surrounded by videotaping gear in dented metal trunks and valises.

Forrest turned apprehensively to Phil. “I thought there was supposed to be a van to meet us.”

Phil nodded. “Sort of.”

Forrest twitched slightly. “What do you mean, sort of?”

“Sort of a van,” Phil explained.

“Well, where is it? We’re almost two hours late, why isn’t it waiting?”

“They probably went for tea when they heard we’d be late. They’ll be along.”

A tic beside Forrest’s right eye started jumping. “Now, but—look, Phil, we’re on a very tight schedule, we, we need our transportation to be right bang on time, right on the minute.”

“Then my advice is to shoot this thing in Switzerland.”

Phil said pleasantly. “Cheer up, Forrest, you know the way things work here. You ought to be used to it by now.”

“Oh, God, do I know the way they work,” Forrest said, “but I’ll never get used to it. Not in a million years will I get used to it.”

Phil smiled encouragingly at him. “Everything will work out; you can trust me.”

Forrest heaved a great, pathetic sigh, and sank down onto a metal bench. “Why do I keep doing this to myself? Why don’t I ever learn?”

But at that moment, the “sort of a van” came coughing and chugging up to meet them, with two smiling Egyptians in the front seat. It was a doddering old flatbed truck with benches bolted to the bed and a canopy rigged on top, probably used for hauling local workmen to and from their jobs.

“Christ,” said Forrest, but he wasted no time getting his equipment aboard, and within a few minutes they were on their way. They boarded the ferry to cross the Nile, then drove in the deepening twilight past dilapidated tenements, falling-down houses, and beautifully, meticulously cared-for garden plots of tomatoes, onions, wheat, and potatoes, then into the desert, and finally to their lonely destination on the east bank of the Nile. To everyone’s astonishment, and even Phil’s mild surprise, the ship was there waiting for them; a white, modern, two-level affair tied up beside a dusty, rubble-strewn embankment, boxy and welcoming in the uneven glare of a couple of wavery, generator-powered spotlights set up on the shore. On its side, in gleaming metal lettering was its name:
Menshiya.

They boarded by means of a gangplank, under the engrossed, unswerving gaze of a row of Arab men from the nearby village of el-Till. A pack of giggling,
bakshish-
demanding, sociable children (“Hello, mister! What’s you name?”) were kept ineffectually at bay by an unshaven, patently unmenacing local policeman in a frayed, untidy black uniform with a private’s stripe safety-pinned to one sleeve.

The Americans ran this lively gauntlet and reported to the dining room, where the boat’s manager, Mr. Murad Wahab, formally introduced the ship’s captain,
Reis
Ali, a ferocious-looking, weathered old man who seemed to be wondering how he’d gotten mixed up with all these infidels, and the lined-up staff, ten dark, shy, friendly men, half of whom would work on the upper deck as servers and room attendants, and the rest of them out of sight as cooks and boat crew on the lower.

Mr. Wahab then gave a short speech of welcome on behalf of the Happy Nomad Navigation Company, cordial in tone, but consisting mainly of admonitions to report to the dining room at the stated times if they wished to eat. Breakfasts would be from seven to eight o’clock, lunches from one to two, dinners from seven to eight-thirty. Exceptions would be made in cases of illness only. Tea, coffee, and biscuits would be served on the poolside terrace at ten-thirty in the morning and four in the afternoon for forty-five minutes. Guests were strongly advised not to drink or brush their teeth with water from the taps. Ample bottled water would be provided to each room daily. Women guests were asked to refrain from using the swimming pool or wearing immodest clothing when the ship was close to land, as when going through the locks at Asyut the following day.

Mr. Wahab, himself an amiable man, moderated the severity of this presentation with the announcement that this evening’s special meal would be a typical American dinner in honor of the guests and their recent national holiday of Thanksgiving.

Whereupon the four servers who had gone back into the kitchen returned with happy smiles, wearing white jackets and black ties, and bearing trays of roast turkey, cranberry sauce, and Yorkshire pudding.

It made a pretty good combination, Gideon thought.

The staterooms were forward on either side of a lushly carpeted corridor. Gideon and Julie’s surprised them with its roominess, and with the small but sparkling bathroom and shower. Heavy curtains covered two big rectangular windows. There was a table, three chairs, an ottoman, a TV set, a knee-high refrigerator, an ample chest of drawers. The air-conditioning was quiet and effective. The only importantdeficiency was readily repaired by their moving a night table aside and pushing the two single beds together.

“Posh is right,” Julie said appreciatively. “I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble living here for a few days. As long as our luggage catches up with us pretty soon.”

“
Bukhra
,” said Gideon.

“That’s what worries me.” She took a hairbrush out of her bag, put it on the chest, and lined it up neatly with the edge. “Well, it certainly makes unpacking a snap.” She held up a plastic container. “At least we have toothbrushes.”

She kicked off her shoes, plumped up the pillow and sat on the bed. “Is there anything cold to drink in here?”

In the little refrigerator he found miniature soft-drink bottles, water, and a stack of plastic glasses. He poured them each a glass of mandarin-flavored
Schweppes.
“Did you happen to notice the name of the ship?”

“The
Menshiya
!”

“Right. Phil probably lined it up on account of the name. Do you happen to know what the original
Menshiya
was?”