Death on Tour (13 page)
After an uncomfortable pause, Nimmi turned to Lydia, who was just putting her plate down on the crisp white table cloth. “And your niece? How is she this morning?”
I’d forgotten all about the niece. Now that Nimmi brought her up, I realized I hadn’t seen her since the airport in Cairo. Anni must have performed some magic to whisk her away to the hotel while the rest of us bused around Aswan.
Lydia smiled. “She is much better this morning.” She looked toward the doorway and made a little gesture. “Here she is now.”
We all turned. An exceptionally thin girl entered the dining room through the wide glass doors and was walking toward our table. Her clothes looked far too large for her, as though she had lost a great deal of weight in a very short time. Her long straight hair hung loose around her face and the way she tipped her head had it swinging forward like curtains to hide her cheeks. Ben hopped up and pulled out a chair for her, while Lydia made quick introductions, and then leaped up to fill a plate for her. I smiled and said hello automatically, but I was shocked. Was this really the same vibrant young woman I’d noticed with Ben and Lydia at the airport?
As the others made small talk about our upcoming excursion, I covertly studied the niece. She was very close in age and coloring to the girl I’d seen that first day, but gone was the curling dark hair, the strong line of the jaw, the slightly crooked nose. Gone also was that subtle air of energy and enthusiasm that had been so obvious and attractive even across the crowded baggage claim. If I hadn’t noticed her so particularly because of her resemblance to one of my students, I might have attributed her changed appearance to her illness. But this couldn’t be the same girl. Could it? I did not know what to make of it. Why would Ben and Lydia be passing off an impostor as their niece?
Maybe the woman I’d seen in the Cairo airport had not been with Ben and Lydia at all. She could have been a fellow passenger with whom they’d struck up a conversation. But in that case, where had the niece been? Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Ben watching me, a little line of anxiety between his eyebrows. He looked away the instant I turned toward him. Was it because I had mentioned that I’d seen the niece at the airport?
I rose and returned to the buffet for another slice of bacon that I didn’t really want, just so I could get a good look at her on the way back without seeming too rude. The baggy clothing looked at least two sizes too big. She couldn’t have lost that much weight in only two days. Was it possible the clothes weren’t hers at all? I noted the way Ben hovered, arm protectively draped over the back of her chair, the way Lydia buttered toast for her and urged her to eat it. Standard treatment for an invalid, or something more? But what would be the point? Why arrive in Egypt with one girl and in less than two days trade her in for another? Friendly, funny Ben and Lydia were hardly likely candidates for sex slave traders. The best thing I could do would be to concentrate on enjoying my dream vacation and minding my own business.
* * *
The group met just outside the lobby after breakfast, where a team of white-jacketed bellhops were busy hauling our luggage from our rooms. To my surprise, the tour director, Mohammad, was waiting by the growing pile of bags. He had not come with us on the airplane, so what was he doing here? The houndstooth jacket was missing, and he looked larger than ever in a polo shirt and black pants. Not quite as tall as DJ, who towered over everyone else, Mohammad was even broader through the shoulders and chest, and without the jacket, I could see that his stomach overhung his belt like that of a small-town Texas sheriff. Gone, too, was the relaxed, helpful attitude of a professional tour guide from the airport. Now, well, he wasn’t quite tapping his foot, but he might as well have been. I wondered again about the phone call I’d overheard in the gardens of the Mena House. Could it have been Mohammad?
Anni rounded the corner from the hotel lobby and performed a perfect double take. Her eyebrows almost vanished under the folds of her red headscarf. Brushing off Charlie, who was trying to get directions to the town center, she hurried to Mohammad’s side and began a rapid conversation in Arabic. The rest of us waited uneasily. Was he here because of Millie? Were the police going to show up? Were we still going to be able to go to Abu Simbel?
Eventually, they reached some agreement and Anni returned. She rejoined Charlie and Yvonne, produced a small map and quickly gave instructions. Yvonne nodded in understanding, although Charlie looked a little glassy-eyed and started asking questions. I suppressed a smile and hoped I’d be half as active and alert in fifty years.
Time was passing. We were already ten minutes past our appointed meeting time, and this time it mattered because we were catching a plane. Jerry Morrison looked at his watch and gave Anni a pointed stare. Even Ben and Lydia were shifting from one foot to another as Anni did her swift count. As usual, Flora and Fiona weren’t there. Anni beckoned to a uniformed bellhop and gave him swift instructions in Arabic. He loped off in the direction of the elevators.
“Now you all have left your suitcases outside your doors? Remember, we will not be returning here. Mohammad and our driver will take the luggage to the ship for us while we are away, and when we return we will go directly to the
Nile Lotus
. Do not leave anything behind. If you have personal belongings that you do not want to take to Abu Simbel, you can leave them right here, and Mohammad will watch them and ensure they make it onto the ship.”
A little reluctantly, we left our carry-on bags in a little pile. “My computer is in that bag,” said Jerry Morrison officiously to Mohammad. “It needs to be hand-carried at all times. No tossing or dropping. And it can’t be left alone even for a minute.”
“Of course, sir,” said Mohammad. “I will handle it myself.”
Jerry eyed him for a moment, then stalked away, only to return a second later and pull the bag out of Mohammad’s hands. “Never mind. I’ll carry it myself.”
Lydia stepped past me, pulling a cigarette and her little ashes carrier out of her purse. “Probably doesn’t want to risk losing his porn collection,” she said in a stage whisper as she went by.
I suppressed a howl of laughter, mostly because I saw Jerry’s head whip around, his expression irate. I looked around to see if Kyla had noticed, but she was standing alone, pointedly not looking in my direction. At the last minute, and somewhat to our collective disappointment, the bellhop returned with Flora and Fiona in tow.
At the airport, we went through the same chaotic check-in process as in Cairo, although because we had no luggage, the security checks took less time. The tiny airport seemed less strict, and only Flora was pulled aside to have her bag searched more carefully. The female security agent pulled an umbrella out of Flora’s huge purse and looked at it in disbelief. The yearly rainfall in all of Egypt was basically zero. Flora tottered on through the metal detector and then wandered off toward the gates and had to be called back. The security agent put the bag back into her hands gently and looked as though she wanted to pat her on the head. Flora looked at her bag bemusedly as though she’d never seen it before. Eventually, Fiona caught up to her and led her away.
Anni handed out our boarding passes, as before trying to ensure couples or families sat together without any regard to the names on the tickets. When she called our names, Kyla took both passes from her. Then, before I knew what she was going to do, she descended on Alan.
“Here,” she said, snapping his pass for herself and handing him ours. “You don’t mind sitting next to what’s her face on the way out, do you?”
She turned on her heel without giving him time to reply. I felt my face redden. Was she just that determined not to sit next to me, or did she think she was doing me a favor? Either way, we were going to have to have a little talk.
Alan made the best of it. “I’d be delighted,” he called to her retreating back, then lowered his voice. “I hope you don’t mind,” he added.
“Not at all,” I answered with what I hoped was a pleasant smile, even though I seemed to be unable to unclench my teeth.
We took our seats and waited through the safety lecture and then the recorded prayer in Arabic. As usual, I tried to guess what the singsong words meant. “Oh, Lord, please do not let us burst into a million flaming pieces. Do not let us crash in the desert and then be lost and die of thirst and heat in the sand. Do not let us resort to madness and cannibalism.” Maybe I didn’t like flying all that much after all.
To my surprise, Mohammad appeared at the last moment and swiftly took a seat near the front of the plane, as though hoping not to be noticed. If so, it was a vain hope. His huge shoulders overhung the back of his seat, and I could see his arm protruding into the aisle.
“Hey, what’s he doing here?” asked Jerry Morrison. He was sitting behind me and he grabbed the back of my seat to pull himself up for a better view. My head jerked back, and I turned in protest, but he didn’t notice. “He’s supposed to be watching our luggage. It’s a good thing I didn’t let him keep my bag,” he added, with a scathing look at Lydia.
“Oh, Daddy. It’s all right. I’m sure he gave it all to the driver,” said Kathy. Her tone was just as patronizing to her father as it was to the rest of us. I saw him give her a swift glare, but she was already leafing through her magazine and didn’t notice.
No one else answered him. But he had a point. Why was Mohammad coming with us?
I leaned back in my seat, hoping Alan and I weren’t going to have any more cryptic conversations, but as it turned out, he seemed to have forgotten about his odd comments on Elephantine Island and instead chatted at length about the project that lifted the temples. I knew only the bare facts myself, and he was entertaining.
“When they built the Aswan Dam, the waters on this side started rising and they realized pretty quickly that they were going to lose Abu Simbel if they didn’t do something. It was an extraordinary thing—no one knew how they could possibly move such an enormous structure, carved into the side of the cliff. But then one of the engineers got the brilliant idea to slice the carvings off the sides of the cliff and reassemble them in an artificial cave on top. They cut the statues, the carvings, the columns, everything into manageable pieces, carefully mapped and labeled everything, and then reassembled it all like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Honestly, that had to be almost harder than doing the original construction. And to top it off, the water was rising the whole time. They actually had to build a miniature dam around the monument to hold back the waters. Some of the pieces were even submerged entirely before they could get them out.”
He could have been talking about earthworm excretion, and I would still have hung on his every word just to watch him talk: the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, the way he moved his hands, the way his hair fell across his forehead. And he smelled good. By the time the plane landed, we had moved on to talking about other countries we had visited and traveling in general. I think it was the first flight in the history of flying that seemed far too short.
A coach waited to drive us up the steep hills from the airport to the temple. We did not see much of the town on our route. Only a few houses, a vast expanse of rock, and an empty sky. I thought of other deserts I’d visited. The Sonoran Desert in Arizona, dotted with saguaro cactus. The Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas with its prickly pear and yucca. Both seemed lush and tropical compared to this. A few straggly plants existed around some of the homes, but in the untended areas, white rock and dust stretched as far as the eye could see. I felt thirsty just looking at it.
The bus stopped in a gravel parking lot and we scrambled off. Our driver stood at the steps, offering his hand to the ladies, and just beyond him Alan waited for me, a smile on his face. My stomach did a little flip as I joined him. I could see Kyla ahead of us, walking beside Anni, who was holding Hello Kitty above her head. As usual, the path from the parking lot wound through a miniature marketplace. Eager vendors called to us and tried to interest us in packs of Abu Simbel postcards, miniature replicas of the monuments, and cheap t-shirts.
“Pretty lady! I have many things for a very pretty lady. Come with me!”
“Cheap souvenirs. The best prices! The best quality! Look! Look!”
By this time, we were almost immune to the colorful compliments and exuberant greetings, but I noticed that walking beside Alan provided a better buffer than when I was alone or with Kyla. The salesmen did not approach so closely or yell so loudly, and their comments were mostly directed at him. My chin just topped his shoulder, and I could glance across him into the stalls without worrying about making eye contact. I liked it.
Although haggling on my own seemed all but impossible in the face of the shouting, I was still determined to try it at least once. The little gold pyramid that Alan had given me was nestled safely in the bottom of my purse. Foolish to carry it around, but I liked having it with me and it weighed hardly anything. Oh well, maybe I would be able to find some little gifts in the alabaster and perfume shops that we were scheduled to visit later in the tour. Fortunately or unfortunately, there was no time to stop at a shop now, even if I could get up the nerve to try.
On the other end of the spectrum, DJ hurried forward to haggle at the nearest booth, but Anni grabbed his arm and propelled him onward.
“We will have time to shop after we go through the temples,” she told him. Glancing back, she noticed Flora and Fiona had been cornered by three salesmen, and she hurried to rescue them.
We went through a modern building where Anni bought tickets for us. We had to open our purses for inspection and go though a metal detector before being allowed through to the other side. How sad that the world had come to this—a world where ordinary people thought nothing at all of the requirement for metal detectors and armed guards at a historical monument. The terrorists had a lot to answer for, I thought as I opened my purse for the guard’s examination. I was glad I’d hidden Millie’s bag at the bottom of my suitcase back at the hotel. I was still trying to figure out how to return the stolen items, although at this point it was going to be all but impossible.