The Curse (23 page)

“That is what happened. There was a clue on the Tutankhamen mummy that solved the mystery for me. I am preparing a paper on it—”

He suddenly stopped and stared past me.

Two Egyptian men stood at the entryway.

One of them had a big nasty weapon, the sort of thing you see terrorists firing on TV news reports.

The man without the weapon pointed and said in Arabic, “That one.”

The machine gun bucked in the man's hands and the boom of rapid fire filled the room.

48

“They were thieves, not terrorists,” the police captain told me.

Sitting in the backseat of a police car on my way to Luxor's police headquarters, I was numb.

De Santis was dead.

“But they took nothing.” I hardly recognized the voice as my own.

The killers had left immediately after shooting him.

It happened that fast. My ears were ringing when they left and still ringing when I had called the hotel and asked them to send for the police because I didn't know how to contact the authorities in charge.

My taxi driver wasn't there when I came out. Neither was the old man providing “security.” Both had probably fled as soon as the killers stepped out of their car.

There was nothing I could do for the priest. A look of shock, even surprise, was imprinted on his features for eternity.

I put my scarf over his face to give him some privacy.

The first officers that arrived were patrol officers who spoke no English and could not understand my attempt to explain what had happened.

Moments later the higher-ranking officer who I was now riding with arrived and told me he was taking me to police headquarters. He spoke English but asked me almost nothing.

As we drove, I finally demanded if he wanted to know what the killers looked like.

“When we get to the station,” he said.

I laid my head back and closed my eyes. I needed a drink. A plane ticket home. And a passport in order to get onto the plane.

I suddenly woke up to the fact that we were approaching the Luxor airport. I had no idea where the police station was and assumed it was near the airport until the police car pulled up to a curb.

A man with a cell phone to his ear hurried toward us.

“What is this? What's going on?” I asked the officer.

“He will take care of you.” He indicated the man coming toward us.

“Take me to police headquarters. Now!”

“A flight to Cairo takes off in twenty minutes. You can be on it or you can stay in Luxor for a great deal of time explaining to the police why you were at the scene of a murder.”

I didn't have to think that hard about which option to choose.

My passenger door was opened by the man with the phone glued to his ear.

He handed the phone to me as I stepped out, keeping a firm grip on my arm while I listened to the voice on the other end.

“Are you familiar with the Khan?” Kaseem asked.

I was so irate I couldn't speak but kept the phone to my ear and permitted the man to lead me into the terminal.

“I have followers in Luxor,” Kaseem said. “Even in the police. I was called after you reported the death of the monk. I notified the officer who drove you to the airport to get you out of there.”

“What's going on?”

I knew I probably wouldn't get the right answers from Kaseem, and I was right. He ignored the question.

“I asked, are you familiar with the Khan?”

Not even God was that familiar with the Khan el-Khalili, the medieval marketplace in Cairo's Old City.

“Enough to find the front entrance.”

I knew more than that about the great marketplace in the Old City.

The medieval souq was a twisted maze of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of vendors. It was an endless labyrinth of narrow serpentine alleyways. A few steps off the beaten path and tourists need a guide to get back to their bus.

“That is all you need to know. You are to meet a blind beggar at the entrance at five o'clock. He will be selling bottle cap openers.”

“Selling what?”

“Bottle cap openers. Twist-off caps are not that common in my country.”

“And what am I supposed to do with this blind beggar? Exchange secret passwords? Let you know what's going on by speaking into my Dick Tracy watch?”

“The man will lead you to where you can examine the scarab.”

“That's it? I just walk into the marketplace and a blind man with bottle cap openers will take me to a priceless treasure?”

How blind was this beggar?

“I didn't make the arrangements, the thieves did.”

I restrained myself from pointing out that thieves weren't the reason my passport was pulled, he was.

A man was dead. An old monk, priest, whatever he was, had been murdered in front of me. Savaged by a spray of bullets that made loud popping sounds. And Kaseem acted as if I was returning from a Red Sea vacation. And there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.

The police officer he sent to get me out of the investigation into De Santis's murder had expressed it nicely—get on the plane for Cairo or get stuck in Luxor, with many thousands of dollars in a panty hose money belt around my waist for which I had no explanation the police would like. And my passport had been pulled because I was on a watch list.

I wanted to tell Kaseem to shove his whole intrigue in a place where the sun didn't shine, but I was screwed no matter which way I turned.

“What do you plan to do when I'm examining the piece?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't want to get shot in a crossfire.”

He chuckled without humor. “These people are not fools. They will be prepared for an intervention. The ransom money is being put up by patriots that can afford it. And this time the money will be real. I just want the scarab, not a gunfight in the marketplace that will attract the police.”

I believed him—at least the part about not wanting to attract the police.

“Put the battery back into your phone,” he said. “You might need it in a hurry.”

“Ah, I get it. You're tracking me by the signal my phone gives.”

He hesitated.

“You might as well tell me. I'm also being tracked by the antiquities police. You're not going to want them following me into the marketplace.”

“Take the battery out of your personal phone.”

“My phone's turned off.”

“You still have to take out the battery. Most cell phones give off a signal that is easily tracked even when the phone is off. Taking out the battery kills the signal.”

Once I was on the plane, I took the batteries out of my phone and the one Kaseem had given me and took two aspirins.

I tried to make sense out of why De Santis was murdered.

Did Kaseem have him killed because the monk was going to publish a scholarly paper hypothesizing that there was no Heart of Egypt scarab?

That just didn't compute because the scarab had always been more legend than reality. Besides, the poor masses of Egypt who believed the legend and would be galvanized about it weren't going to be reading Italian archaeological journals.

Did my presence bring killers to De Santis's door?

That made no sense, either. There was a very short time from when I asked about the monk at the hotel to the time the killers had arrived—hardly enough time to plan out a killing.

The reason De Santis was killed escaped me at the moment, but it was just one item on a long list.

Two things, however, had not escaped me.

Kaseem never asked me what my conversation with De Santis was about, and something De Santis said about King Tut's mummified remains provided the clue that he had never had a heart scarab.

I tried to focus on the clue on the mummy, rather than drive myself crazy trying to think of the dead bodies that I had left in my wake since meeting Mounir Kaseem.

Trying to focus was all I could do because I kept thinking about the old scholar who smelled of wine and just spent his life with his head stuck in books and artifacts.

49

The Arabs called their marketplaces “souqs” and the Khan el-Khalili was the biggest one in Egypt, and the most interesting and exciting of the ones that I had been to over the years.

I walked through the market watching the swarm of people, smiling politely and shaking my head at hucksters peddling “priceless antiquities” made in the back room of their shops and at tourists and locals haggling over prices that never seemed to have a set amount, while I warded off kids and beggars demanding baksheesh—all of these and more were part of the everyday rhythm at the Khan.

Just about anything under the sun could be bought here—from three-thousand-year-old antiquities looted in the past week to three-year-old AK-47s last used even more recently.

The market had served for six hundred years as a caravan stop, but camels had now been replaced by tourist buses.

The tourists didn't venture far because the endless rows of narrow, serpentine, and nameless passageways filled with tiny shops in the Old City were daunting.

Not far from where the tourist buses unloaded, you felt as if you had stepped into the past—and you had. Although the merchandise no longer arrived in long caravans of camels as it did for hundreds of years, much of the marketplace hadn't changed since the Turkish pashas had ruled Egypt.

Daylight was passing, and the muezzin late-afternoon call for prayers was in the air as I entered the marketplace.

Even though I was dressed modestly—a scarf over my head, a shawl over my shoulders, and a long charcoal cotton dress down to my ankles—I wasn't exactly blending in as a local, but at least I didn't pulsate like a neon sign as a lot of tourists did, either, especially the women who insisted on wearing tight short-shorts in what was still a socially conservative country for the most part.

I walked leisurely through the ancient streets, pretending that I was listening to the peddlers hawking their goods with a babble of short phrases in languages they thought you spoke and that had some connection to your homeland.

“My cousin's in Texas,” said one merchant as he tried to sell me “ancient” papyrus with hieroglyphics painted on it.

“Kein danke,”
I answered in German, hoping to throw him off, and he replied,
“Mein Vetter ist in Berlin.”
(“My cousin is in Berlin.”)

No doubt if I had spoken the language of a remote Brazilian jungle tribe some Khan vendor would know it.

The pungent odor of aromatic spices hit my nostrils as I walked near the area where big stuffed sacks of the fragrant substances were lined up next to each other. Every imaginable spice was displayed for your eyes and nose.

I had only walked for a few minutes when I saw the blind beggar, an old wizened man standing in the middle of an intersection of passageways. He had dozens of metal bottle cap openers attached to the front of his coat like war medals.

The bottle cap openers made him stand out for me like a metal-blazoned neon sign.

I started to make my way toward him when a boy who looked about twelve approached me and said in a soft, enticing voice, “Come, Maddy.”

50

At first I wasn't sure I had heard the boy right.

He walked past me and then stopped and turned around when I hadn't followed him.

Then he said my name again. “Come, Maddy.”

He had probably been taught the one phrase in English.

I stayed a few steps behind as he took me deeper into the midst of the ancient alleys and off the beaten track and into a tiny canvas-covered passageway.

As I followed, I slipped the battery back into the cell phone Kaseem had provided and also stuck my battery into my own phone.

It was time to let the world know where I was in case I needed help.

He paused in front of a small shop with inexpensive copper goods—fat coffeepots, bowls, and cooking pans were stacked in heaps.

An old woman in the doorway of the shop narrowed her eyes at me for a moment before gesturing me to enter.

I stepped into the shadowy, unlit interior that was also crowded with copper goods and warily looked around.

She then led me into an open-air workshop in the back where a man and two boys barely looked up from hammering and bending metal into all shapes and sizes.

We passed through the work area to a door and went through it into another passageway.

I reluctantly followed her.

What was I getting myself into?

I was retreating farther and farther away from the outside world and, worse, I didn't have a clue where I was.

Not uttering a word to me, the woman kept going, leading me farther into the confusing, tortuous passageways, the sky growing darker as the shadows lengthened with the sun setting.

I was truly in the medieval realm of the Khan where no tourist ever ventured.

How would I ever find my way back?

What perfect timing. Making the rendezvous late in the afternoon, the passageways were dimmer, which disoriented me even more, but they were not so dark that I might refuse to go deeper into the maze.

I had been in the Khan dozens of times but I had no idea of where I was now, although the city's relentless honking of horns in the distance clued me in to the fact that I wasn't that far from an ordinary street.

The woman led me to a shop where tobacco for shishas, the ubiquitous water pipes, was sold. Besides a large selection of aromatic tobacco these places also sold pot and maybe a little hashish.

She gestured for me to wait and I stood and watched for a moment as a man on a stool outside the shop forced smoke through the pipe's bubbling water and inhaled it.

The woman waved me in and stepped aside as I entered, hurrying away.

The shop was dark, lit only by a dim lamp, and the air was thick with the sweet and pungent smell of scented tobacco.

The only person I saw was a man behind the counter. He pointed to a door at the rear of the small shop.