The Sphinx (14 page)

He sighed
impatiently. Then he swung out of bed, and went across the room to fetch his
cigarettes. He-normally hated smoking” in the bedroom, but he was so wound up
that he couldn’t stop himself. He lit a cigarette and sat naked in one of the
bedside armchairs, blowing smoke into the grainy light of dawn.

“Supposing I
told you that, as your husband, I demand that you have an operation?” he said.

In the gloom,
Lorie’s eyes glistened.

“Then I’d have
to say no,” she said quietly.

“Even though,
yesterday, you promised to honor and obey me?”

“Obedience and
honor doesn’t include changing your hereditary characteristics.”

“But they’re so
goddamn–”

“I know what
you think, Gene, and I’m sorry. But it’s my own body and I’m proud of it.”

She sat up hi
bed and watched him sadly through the half-light, her arms clasping her knees.

“I love you,
Gene,” she said gently. “I wanted to marry you right from the start But I knew
what you’d think about me, and all I can say is I’m sorry, and I hope the next
girl you find will be better-looking than, me.”

Gene stubbed
out his cigarette. He got tip from the chair, went over to the bedroom basin
and switched on the light. He washed his face, shaved with his electric razor,
and then started to dress. All this time, he didn’t look at Lorie once.

“Where are you
going?” she asked him, as he laced up his shoes.

He still didn’t
turn around. ‘Tm going out,” he said, in a controlled and emotionless voice.
“I’m not going for good, but I need to think this thing out in my mind. I’ll
probably be back around nine or ten this evening.”

He pulled on
his jacket and went to the mirror to straighten his necktie. “Perhaps you’d
call Mathieu for me, and get him to kennel the dogs so that I can get out of
this place alive.”

“Dogs?”

Gene brushed
lint from his sleeves. “That’s right Those little pet pooches who practically
ripped me to shreds.”

“Oh, those,”
said Lorie absently. “Yes, ni…”

Gene turned.
For some reason, he .felt that something was wrong. There was something
important about this whole situation that he still didn’t know; There was some
other secret that Lorie was keeping from him; some hidden knowledge that he
sensed was. far more terrible than anything he had yet discovered.

Maggie was
amazed to see him in the office at ten after eight. “Gene, what happened? Don’t
tell me the happy husband is that anxious to get back to work.”

He sat down
wearily and looked at her. “Maggie,” he said, “I would dearly love a cup of
coffee.”

As she brought
the styrofoam cup from the coffee machine, he settled ‘back tiredly In his
chafr and rubbed his eyes. He felt as if he’d been traveling across. Siberia
all night in a peasant-class train. He sipped the. coffee gratefully, then
rooted through the drawers of his desk for a spare pack of cigarettes.

Maggie hovered,
looking pretty and bright and concerned. He was suddenly so grateful for her
presence and her friendship that it brought a lump to his throat. It was
probably nothing more than the over-emotional effects of tiredness, but he had
to blow his nose to hide his watering eyes.

“Gene,” said
Maggie, “I wish you’d tell me.”

“Well,” he told
her, dabbing his nose, “there isn’t very much to tell, happily married one
minute, and thinking about divorce the next. It must be that shortest marriage
in the history of wedlock.”

Maggie sat down
opposite. “Something awful happened, hasn’t it? What, Gene? Is it something to
do With the Semples?”

He nodded. “It
certainly is. Listen, before I ten yon anything about it, will you trust me for
a while and do me a favor?”

“Gene,
anything. You know that”

“Go to Records
and look up everything you can about a race of people called the Ubasti. They
come from a, region of lower Egypt near Zagazig, and I think they used to live
in a city called Tell something. Tell Bast, or Tell Besta. That was in the
reign of Rameses III, about thirteen hundred b.c.”

Maggie
scribbled the details on her shorthand pad. “The Ubasti?” she said. “Okay, just
.give me a couple of hours.”

“Will you keep
it to yourself? I don’t want anyone to know what I’m doing until I’m quite
certain.

There’s
something.,. strange and wrong about the Semples. I can’t work out what it is
right now, but I know that it’s there, staring me right in the face. I just
need more information, that’s all.”

Maggie laid her
hand on top of his, and looked at him with genuine anxiety. “Gene,” she said,

“what about
your marriage? I mean, what’s going to happen? Is it really something as wrong
and strange as all that?”

He pressed his
knuckles to his forehead, and didn’t answer her for almost a minute.

“I don’t know,”
he said. “If you can get me that information, then maybe I’ll understand enough
to do something about it.”

“Just two or
three hours,” she promised. “The Caribbean profiles can wait.”

As she folded
back the cover of her pad and turned to leave, Gene suddenly thought of
something else.

“Maggie,” he
said, uncertainly.

She waited.

“Maggie, do you
still have that friend in the police department?”

“Enrico? Sure I
do. I took his children out to Maryland a couple of weeks ago for the circus.”

“Well,” he said
slowly, “do you think that Enrico could check on any dog licenses that might
have been issued to the Semples? It’s not important enough to lose any sleep
over, but if he can do it easily...”

“I’ll ask him.
Incidentally, you ought to find some stray kids and use them as an excuse to
visit that circus. It’s coming to Washington in a couple of weeks, and it’s
really terrific. Do you like high wire acts?”

Gene managed a
tired smile. “Sure I do. In this office, we don’t do anything else.”

While he was
waiting for Maggie to dig out some background information on the
Ubasti
, he dialed Peter Graves’ number. An answering
machine told Mm that Dr. Graves was engaged right now, but he could leave a
message. He asked the psychiatrist to call him back. Then he paced around the
office, fidgeting, and staring out of the window at a cold gray day with clouds
that drifted across the sky like the ragged smoke from a distant battle.

One of the more
curious aspects of last night’s argument with Lorie was the mention of Smith’s
gazelle. It had cost Mathieu an enormous amount of physical effort to say it,
and yet Gene couldn’t see what the significance of it might be. He knew that it
was an age-old method of catching and killing big game, this business of tying
a kid or a sheep to a stake as bait, but he couldn’t decide what the parallel
was with his marriage to Lorie. Was Mathieu trying to warn him that Lorie was
the bait for some design that her mother had of him? But what could her mother
possibly hope to gain from having him marry Lorie? A little social distinction
on the Washington cocktail circuit, perhaps, but hardly very much more. Maybe
she had dreams that, one day, Gene would be Secretary of State.

Lorie herself
had pointed to the etching of Smith’s gazelle, as if it was some kind of
explanation for everything that had happened. But whatever the explanation was,
Gene couldn’t work it out.

His mind was
direct and blunt, and he was usually baffled when it came to obscure metaphors
and arcane puzzles.

He felt
exhausted and disappointed, but he was also guilty that he had left Lorie so
abruptly. He felt like calling her and telling her that everything was okay,
but in the end he decided against it.

The most
important thing for him to do now was to make up his mind about her
idiosyncratic body, and whether he was going to accept Lorie for what she was,
or spend six weeks in Reno fixing himself a divorce. He wondered why the hell
God had singled him out for a burden like this.

Maggie came
back and found him asleep in his chair. She shook his shoulder gently, and he
opened his eyes in shock.

“You’ve been
dozing,” she told him. “How do you feel?”

He blinked, and
tried to stretch himself back into the real world.

“I was having
nightmares,” he said. “I keep having these nightmares about beasts and
creatures, and they’re all trying to chase me.”

“Sounds like
you’re suffering from overwork and lack of sex,” said Maggie.

Gene nodded,
and pulled his lower eyelids down to wake himself up. “You’re probably right,” he
said thickly. “All I need is a long vacation in a bawdy house.”

She fixed him
another cup of coffee, and then she sat down and opened a thin manila file that
she’d brought from records.

“Is that it?”
he asked her. “’It doesn’t look like very much.”

“That’s because
there isn’t very much there. The librarian had never even heard of the Ubasti,
and we only found any reference at all by accident. There’s a book called
Wanderings in Lower Egypt by a Victorian gentleman called Sir Keith Fordyce,
and he mentions them briefly in passing, and there’s also something about them
in a topographical dispatch sent to Gordon at Khartoum, but that’s all.”

“What does Sir
Keith have to say for himself?”

“I made a
Xerox. It’s all here.”

She passed over
a sheet of paper, and Gene read it carefully through. It was one page from a
closely printed Victorian book, and Maggie had also attached a copy of the
steel engraving from the facing page. The picture showed a dark pile of stone
ruins, under a forbidding sky, and the notes underneath said, “Tell Basta. All
that remains of a magnificent ancient city, as seen from the Southeast.”

The words from
Wanderings in Lower Egypt read: “My guide had informed me in Cairo that many
European opinions about the pyramids at Gizeh and about the sphinx were
erroneous. He told me much that I already knew; that the word ‘sphinx’ itself
was Greek for ‘the strangled and that the popular legend was that the sphinx
was originally a monster with the head of a woman and the body of a lion. She,
or it, would lie in wait for passers-by, and pose them a riddle. If they were
able to answer it, she would let them go. If they were not, she would strangle
them. But what I did not know was that among the fellaheen there are stories’
that the sphinx was copied from life, and that in the vastness’s of the
southern desert there was a race of people who were actually descended from the
carnal conjunction of women and lions. He became uneasy when he told me this,
and he insisted that I pay him additional fees, because he said that even today
the descendants of that dark and terrible people lived on, and guarded their
obscene secret with a ferocious jealousy that had meant the murder of many a
loose-tongued guide. Paid and given food, he went on to say that the
lion-people had worshiped the cat-god Bast, a demonic being whose rituals had
demanded human sacrifice, mutilation, and sexual perversities beyond the
imagination of Christian minds. They lived hi the city of Tell Basta, and even
today no guide, including himself, could be persuaded to visit those ruins, for
fear of retribution from what he could only describe as that people.’“

Gene laid the
piece of paper down. He was shaking. He stared at Maggie as if she were a
visitor from another world, and for a long while he was unable to speak.

“Gene, are you
all right? Don’t you think you’d better see a doctor? You look awful!”

He shook his
head. His lips were dry, and there was a sour taste of cigarettes in his mouth.

“That people? “
he whispered. “It’s incredible.”

“Gene, what’s
incredible?”

He passed the
paper back to her, and pointed to the foot of the page. “It’s all there,” he
told her.

“It’s crazy,
and it’s frightening, but it’s all there.”

She read it,
but all she could do was shrug. “I don’t see why it’s crazy, and I don’t see
why it’s frightening. It looks like a legend to me. I mean, isn’t it?”

Gene went back
to the window and watched the traffic. Finally, he spoke. “When I first went
out with Lorie, she told me she belonged to a tribe of Egyptians called the
Ubasti. Naturally, I didn’t think anything of it. Why should I? I’d never heard
of them. Then, later, she said that her tribe was always referred to by the
Egyptian fellaheen as ‘that people.’ Apparently they were so terrifying, these
Ubasti, that no one could bring themselves to speak their name out loud.”

He came back
from the window and straddled an office chair, looking Maggie straight and
level in the eye.

“Last night, on
our wedding night, when Lorie undressed–”

“Gene!”
interrupted Maggie.

“Listen, will
you?”

“But, Gene,
that’s private. I can’t–”

“Will you
please, for God’s sake, listen! When Lorie undressed last night, which she was
very reluctant to do, I might tell you, she turned around and she had six
breasts. And hair, brown curly hair, that came right up her stomach to here.”

Maggie’s mouth
was open, and she was totally dumbstruck.

“Gene,” she
said, blinking, “are you putting me on?”

He swallowed.
“It’s the truth, Maggie. She has breasts here, like normal breasts, and then
two smaller breasts underneath, and then underneath those, two nipples. She
said... she said that American doctors call them ‘supplementary breasts.’ It’s
one of those... weird kind of conditions that happens now and again.”

Maggie could
only shake her head in agonized sympathy. “Oh, Gene, I’m so sorry. Oh, God, no
wonder you’re so upset. Listen, can’t she have them removed by surgery? Or
maybe hormone medication?”

“She won’t,” he
said dully.

“She won’t!
What do you mean, she won’t?”

“Precisely
that. She thinks they’re beautiful, and normal. And she’s so convinced about it
that, in the end, I decided to try and find out whether they were normal.”