Star of Egypt Read online

  “Most people in America call it a ‘compartment,’ “ she said, reaching in and drawing out a silver flask that had been a Christmas gift to Slayton from Wilma Christian a few seasons back.

  “Ahmed got me started on flasks,” he fibbed.

  She sniffed. “Scotch. Thank god.” She took a dignified little pull and then wiped her lips, passing the flask across. They hit a stop light as Slayton took a hit, and Maggie dissolved into gales of laughter at the haughty indignity evinced by two elderly ladies in the VW that had pulled up alongside them. When Slayton heard their chatter about the evils of combining the bottle and the wheel, he laughed, too.

  “If we were on the opposite side I’d moon them,” Maggie said in a mischievously quiet voice.

  “I’ll pull up and pass if you want,” he offered quickly.

  “No, kind sir, I dare not. It would too quickly evoke those long-gone college days. Fancy’s passed, anyway.” She took another short sip and stowed the flask, crossing her legs in the cramped foot well and watching the road. “It’s three o’clock,” she said.

  “Oops, pumpkin time. I may break a few local laws, but I’ll get you back. They let us go any speed we want in the United States, you know.” He pulled ahead and maneuvered to make the best legal time back to the exhibit hall. “And I’ve got some things to check up on as well.”

  “Don’t worry, you may get to see it later,” she said.

  “What’s that?” he said, slightly turning his head.

  She watched the road. “Nothing.”

  13

  Even if Slayton had lacked a key to Shauna’s new hotel room, getting one from the desk would have been simplicity itself—he had checked her in. And lacking any kind of key, his talented fingers could do away with the standard hotel-issue deadbolts in something under fifteen seconds. There was no breaking as such involved on his part—only entering.

  Soon the cold, sweaty second wherein his body verified that the room was empty had passed. There was always that residual tingle of getting caught in the act. But he was alone, and set about a task which he found both objectionable, yet necessary.

  The first thing he ascertained was, despite Maggie’s description, there was no carton of objets d’art skimmed from the Seth-Olet shipment—merely one figurine, one of those Shauna had described as Ushabtiu figures. This one was in the likeness of Rameses VI.

  He hit the closets, the toilet tank, the undersides of the drawers, and the standard search spread, taking up a neat five minutes in general looking. He sounded the mattress on the bed and went through every pocket on every article of clothing he could find. As best he could, he verified the contents of the glass and plastic medicine vials in the bathroom and near the bed.

  A glass pill bottle, labeled Dexedrine, was not what it claimed to be. It was filled with liquid.

  Slayton recognized fluoric acid, which he avoided inhaling, since fluorine, its base element, was normally a toxic gas. Beside the bottle on the night table was one of Shauna’s Egyptology references.

  Something extremely vague nagged at Slayton from his sketchy research. Wasting time was not advisable, but he took a moment to sit on the bed and go to the book, looking up Rameses VI, forcing himself not to rush.

  Rameses VI dated from the 20th Dynasty. The Seth-Olet material, as he had observed earlier, had come out of a mastăba, a truncated, oblong form of tomb. Mastăbas were pre-Dynastic; Rameses VI was 20th Dynasty. He was as out of place, temporally, as a knight in armor at a bus stop in Harlem.

  Slayton picked up the figure. Sure, mastăbas were pre-Dynastic. That didn’t mean they were not used in later eras. They just did not have that much flash…. He had lifted the figure, which was composed of a rudimentary porcelain, and almost immediately noticed that the weight was wrong. He flipped it over. The porcelain did not look ancient or restored, but seemed to be of a much more recent vintage—the kind tourists were gulled with in Tangier Harbor. The figure seemed hollow, but the base was solid and smooth.

  From the bathroom, he retrieved a glass vitamin pill bottle with a thick bottom and used it to rap sharply on the base of the figurine. The noise of contact seemed overly loud in the funereal quiet of the room.

  At once, there was a yielding crack. Slayton rapped again, and hairline cracks webbed out, dividing the base into triangular chunks which held fast. He used a thin penknife blade to peel the chunks up. They were very thin.

  Rameses VI was stuffed up the middle with white putty. Slayton prodded it with his finger. Like a long-distance phone connection finally clicking and clunking home, the relays and references in his head fell into place.

  The IRA had often used bombs designed with homemade fluoric acid fuses. You cracked a component of the device, and the time to detonation could roughly be determined by the hardiness of whatever the acid had to eat through. Plastique and fluoric acid worked nicely. Slayton was holding at least half a pound of plastique in his hand.

  “Jesus Christ.” He sat staring at the figurine, contemplating the implications of all he had unearthed, for a moment too long.

  There was the sound of people in the outside corridor, and the racheting of a key in the door to the connecting room of the suite. At the first noise, Slayton was on his feet. By the time the door in the next room swung open, the rickrack was all back in place, visually undisturbed.

  Strike one: The only door out of the bedroom was into the next room. Strike two: The suite was ten stories up with no balcony and no ledge; the bed was too small to belly under; and the closets were too damned obvious and open.

  Silently, Slayton padded into the bathroom, stood in the bathtub, and quietly drew the curtain to at least partially hide himself.

  He overheard several voices, but distance made it hard to distinguish numbers or personalities. Two minutes crept past and not once in that time did he hear Shauna’s voice. If she was giving orders or supervising, she would have spoken by that time.

  Sweat beads began to crawl from Slayton’s scalp to his collar. There were men’s voices—two separate ones, perhaps three. Maybe more. They were speaking in English. Slayton had, somewhat unfairly, expected Arabic.

  “—wants to corner the—”

  “—took a lot of balls to just walk past—”

  Rough laughter, followed by several men talking at once.

  Then: “—might be right.”

  Very clearly: “Better take a look around to make sure.”

  In the shower, Slayton’s heart thudded harder, the blood rushing into his ears and making the utter silence seem like the roar of a waterfall.

  In the other room the men were moving about. Quick mental fill-ins told Slayton that if it had been their intention to intercept him—or someone—at the room, then they would have to check to see if there was any evidence of tampering with the objects in the suite. Now they had stopped talking and started looking.

  Could it be Cooke, Winslow, and Pratley? The diggers? They all spoke English, but stilted by predominantly Scandinavian flavorings. It could be just the muffled uncertainty of the eavesdropping, but Slayton was somehow sure that it was not those three.

  If it had been, he might have been able to bluff his way out, lie on the bed or something, and let the inferences fall where they might. They all would have laughed heartily, and Slayton would have been able to depart intact.

  The absence of conversation from the connecting room, the silent determination of the now-searching team, seemed to eliminate that potential right away. Slayton’s fist curled around the vitamin pill bottle, holding it immobile so that its contents did not rattle.

  They had moved into the bedroom. One would lift up the Rameses VI Ushabtiu figure and see the white dust it would inevitably deposit on the dresser’s surface. Then he would look underneath and see the cracks of inspection.

  “This looks like it’s broken, or like somebody set it down real hard.”

  “Just her stuff; closets are okay.” A deeper voice.

  “Shut up.” Bronx
accent. “Check in there.”

  The muscles in Slayton’s back bunched together. He set his jaw, poising for a strike (just like the cobra, an imp gibbered in the back of his mind) as the bathroom light clicked on. Shoe leather tapped an echo out of the floor.

  The shower curtain was jerked casually back.

  Slayton saw the man’s eyes go wide as he drove the heel of the pill bottle into his face, putting everything behind it. The bottle shattered into thick shards as Slayton felt the nose and upper teeth break beneath his hand. The man stumbled backward, flailing, and his right fist took out the bathroom mirror. The roar of splintering glass was incredible; the shattering noises reverberated back on themselves endlessly. He fell, slapping the wall for balance, hitting the door jamb, sliding down and turning off the light just as Slayton heard jesus fucking christ from the room outside.

  As the first man fell, Slayton’s hands sought quickly for a pistol, but there seemed to be none. Before the man could slump completely to the floor, Slayton grabbed him by the armpits and heaved, his feet crunching on the broken plating of the big mirror. He lifted the man up before him, lagged back for half a beat, and then charged out the bathroom door.

  He collided with the second man standing in the doorway. It was more a time-buying maneuver than anything. Slayton pistoned his legs, and drove the second man, with the unconscious attacker sandwiched between, into the far wall. To his immediate left was a third man that needed dealing with, while the second rebounded. He slammed into the wall, arms swanning out, and Slayton pivoted. The man with the staved-in face crumpled in a tumble of rubberlike arms and legs to the shag carpet.

  The third man was pulling a gun out of his windbreaker. It was still too far for a direct strike, so Slayton danced around into a sweep kick. The pistol made it out, but could not be aimed in time for the man to avoid the kick turning his stomach inside out, and as he tried to dodge, his gun hand went wild. Slayton spun and stepped once more, pegging the man’s wrist with his toes, and the pistol somersaulted toward the connecting door.

  He came out of the spin into a solid right cross that connected low, but snapped Windbreaker’s head around like a top on a string. Number Two bounced off the wall and headed for the gun on the floor. They were too far apart; Slayton had to close up the distance between them.

  He raced the man toward the gun and they both halted with it between them on the floor. Number Two instantly assumed a primary offensive posture and tried to drive Slayton back with a flurry of quick jabs. Slayton countered with a savate kick that changed direction after the man shot down an arm-deflection for it. Instead, Slayton kicked the pistol into the bathroom, and as the man’s eyes unwillingly followed it, he delivered a solid throat chop.

  There was only time for one blow before Windbreaker grabbed him from behind. Slayton anticipated the meaty paw clamping down on his shoulder, but before he could shift weight into an easy throw, Windbreaker brought home a devastating shot deep into Slayton’s left kidney. He felt his legs instantly trying to give way, and botched the throw, sprawling Windbreaker on the carpet beside him instead of in front of him, on top of Number Two.

  Windbreaker grabbed Slayton’s leg, stealing his balance as Number Two pile-drived into him. He felt his shoulderblades smash onto the soft carpeting and tried to roll backward, but Number Two still had hold of him, bearing down from above. Slayton twisted and planted his other foot in the man’s face. The force lifted the man’s feet from the floor and he jack-knifed back, flailing and crashing down.

  Windbreaker, the biggest and thickest of the three, rolled and tried to get a claw grip on Slayton’s throat before he could move to stand. He batted the meaty fingers away and rolled hard, coming to hands and knees.

  Number Two saw it and dived, trying to keep Slayton prone. Slayton braced the flying man and boosted him overhead to land on the wide dresser. It, and all of its contents, avalanched to the floor as the man’s wildly grabbing hands sought purchase. He still was not out.

  Windbreaker plowed into Slayton from the side. Together the two men weighed over four hundred pounds, and their impact with the divider door bent it back beyond where it was designed to go, blowing the thin masonite apart like a dry graham cracker.

  They both rolled away from the door, rebounding, but Slayton managed to end up on one knee, and was able to drive his right elbow straight back into Windbreaker’s mouth. He went “gugh!” and his grab never hooked on.

  Slayton turned and looked up just in time to see the Rameses VI figurine, throttled in both of Number Two’s hands, coming down with the speed of a runaway comet in the conclusion of a long arc that must have begun somewhere around the small of the man’s back.

  Strike three….

  Slayton’s whole universe exploded laterally outward in a shower of hot white sparks, lightning against the blackness of his inner eyelids. His entire body went deaf, blind, and numb. The sparks elongated and slowed, moving farther and farther out, like air bubbles in thick, opaque syrup. He did not know he was falling, nor did he feel the relative lack of violence with which he was introduced to the carpet.

  With only a handful of hours left, Ben Slayton was quits.

  14

  “I suppose it’s just destiny that everything should blast off on its merry way to screaming hell less than a day before the bloody opening, with a million things undone and the most reliable of workers scampering off to do god knows what with who knows who and I wind up doing everything myself, as usual, I say as bloody usual, and why are you standing there staring at me as though I’m a full-moon case. Are you deaf or dumb, woman, speak up, speak up and for christ’s sake tell me something encouraging or I shall certainly scream!”

  Veins stood out in relief on Professor Willis’ flushed face. Maggie Leiber was certain he was, at any moment, going to hurl a priceless artifact across the room and watch it explode into useless—and worthless—fragments. In some cases, semi-decayed or aged pieces had to be reassembled, like puzzles. For it to get broken all over again seemed like a farcical waste of everyone’s time.

  “Where’s Rademacher?” he demanded. “I want to speak with him first!”

  “That’s just the trouble, Gordie,” Maggie said, trying to calm the steaming man down. “Nobody seems to know where he’s got to. I’m sure he’ll be back.”

  “Why did Shauna leave without telling anyone—oh, god, all these smaller pieces need to be checked off and set up.” Willis made a desultory motion toward the work scattered over the table. His heart was not really in it.

  Maggie could only shrug again, but she strove to make the gesture as sympathetic as possible. She found Willis’ pique funny in a sort of silent-movie-comedy way—the scientist stereotype flying into a burlesque of rage.

  “And the crew chief—shot by one of his own bloody men! What happened to the security we were supposed to get from—” He nearly spluttered, considering the Sparta men. “—from those incompetents!”

  It was impossible for Maggie to explain to Willis just what was really going on. It would not have been relevant to his eye no matter what the excuse; all that he could understand or care about was the disruption, or complication, at least, of the opening presentation, Smoothing such ruffled feathers was a stock-in-trade for Maggie—she was accustomed to manipulating events back onto the track with minimum fuss. Willis was almost unreasonably angry. Therefore, logic dictated to her, simple, superficial curatives would not get him back to work. He could be satisfied only by events beyond the current realm of probability.

  So, she lied.

  “Professor, I’ll go right now and round up Shauna and find Mr. Rademacher. The crew is operating practically by reflex. I don’t feel any pressing need to watchdog them this close to the opening of the tour. And you’ve got to get those stage-fright jitters out of your system a bit, if I may be so bold.”

  He was not expecting something like that. “Stage fright?” he said. “Nonsense. Never had it in my life. What are you talking about?”
/>   “You might not acknowledge it by that name, but I’d guess you’re more nervous than you’d care to admit about facing the President of the United States and his august minions tomorrow. I’d think you’ve been devoting too much of your time to the preparations on the exhibit—and not enough time on your speech. Hm?”

  Maggie knew what she was saying; she was invoking the hallowed deity of academic respectability. All at once, Professor Willis would become a high-visibility figure, exposed to national television and newspaper coverage, and so expected to be a personality as well. He must consider not accurate dating and ancient burial procedures but, to him, the nebulous and fearsome prospect of stage presence. At ease before an audience of peers, he now must regear with the common tourist in mind.

  “It’s making you reactionary and snappish,” she said, shifting gears and appealing directly to his sense of intellect, now. “Just cool it; sit and do nothing for a minute. A minute won’t disrupt anything.” She placed her hands on his shoulders and gently impelled him down. He slid easily into the metal folding chair directly behind him.

  Calm rationality seemed to flow over his face in a wave. “You’re right, Maggie, damn you, you’re always right. Do you know what bothers me about all this?” He indicated the room, now a convoluted reproduction of the tomb of an obscure Egyptian general named Seth-Olet. “It sounds silly when I say it this way, but in a word, it’s accessibility. I feel so steeped in my own speciality that it’s a singularly futile proposition to try to make it palatable to laymen on a level that would satisfy us both. It would either disappoint me, or confound the public.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “What about Mr. Rademacher? He surprised you.”

  His tone was flat. “Do you suppose Mr. Rademacher is a representative example of the people who will partake of this exhibit, Maggie?”

  “Touché,” she said. To say she thought he was would sound too glib, as though she were too anxious to get Willis back to normal. “Well, I think he’s an exception, and he seems to impress you, at any rate. How about this—when you imagine the people to whom you’ll be speaking, why not picture him and address them as though you were speaking directly to him? Start a trend by not talking down to your audience. They may not be as dense as you fear.”