Star of Egypt (11 page)

At last they lay deep in steam and cloudy suds, his head buttressed against the faucet and hers at the opposite end, psychologically
cleansed as well as physically drained.

“Let’s get dressed and dispose of the garbage,” he said in even tones, now fully under control. He tickled one of her generous
nipples with his big toe, causing lazy eddies in the water. “I want to see those crates you mentioned tonight.”

“How are you going to—” She looked toward the door.

“I am going to go to wherever the ice and soft drink machines are to be found in this lodge, and steal the plastic bag out
of the trash can you always find there. I’m going to touch that monster out there one more time, and then pack him and the
sheet out of your sight and mine. If I get my sense of humor back between now and then, I may just leave our visitor in the
hotel swimming pool. Or maybe the wishing well in the lobby.”

“Ben, does this mean…?”

“Darlin’, this has everything to do with what I was just telling you about. We’d better get started.”

“These marks were on the crates before we ever opened them up,” said Shauna. “Like they were pried open.”

“But nothing’s missing,” said Slayton.

“Right. Now look at this. This box was ninety percent padding and fiber; there’s a space in the middle where something rested—something
fairly big, by the size of the box and the size of the impression left by whatever was removed. It’s part of our shipment,
and it was accounted for on the manifest of the
Star of Egypt
. But whatever was in here is gone.” She shrugged.

The Seth-Olet exhibit, now uncrated for the most part, nevertheless required that the shipping materials be maintained almost
as carefully as the artifacts themselves. It was three o’clock in the morning, and with the benediction of the Sparta men,
Slayton and Shauna were mucking about in the boxes, now disconnected from the tractor trucks, adding chunks to the puzzle.

Slayton examined the box Shauna said had been pried open. It was composed of multiple layers of cardboard, slatted wood for
structural rigidity, and many thicknesses of padding. It was designed to keep its hard side outward, its soft sides toward
the contents.

Slayton looked at her briefly and said, “May I?” indicating the wall of the box. She nodded.

He drummed his fingers against the flat wood, sounding the material. Abruptly he stepped back, pivoting at the waist and driving
the heel of his hand into the solid wood with considerable force. It cracked hollowly and collapsed inward, the outside facing
apparently turning out to be only thin plywood.

“Look inside,” he said.

“You didn’t come all the way through,” she told him.

“Yeah. But look at my arm.” It was sunk into the side of the box to the elbow, yet she could not see his hand within. “Dummy
facing,” he said. “Where once there was padding, now there is a hidden storage area. If you casually ripped off the lid, it
wouldn’t give itself away, but if you knew which nails to yank out, you could slide this whole section out, like the door
of an elevator—a lift—clean out the compartment, and replace it.” He tapped the wood.

There was a rueful expression on Shauna’s face in the semidarkness. “And nobody finds out until long after the ship docks…”
she said, looking pained. “Not only that, but the optimum protection for the artifacts we’re supposed to get from these is
gone. Oh, bloody hell!”

Slayton felt like a teacher giving a familiar lecture once too often. “And since, when you’re a smuggler, it never pays to
put all your eggs in one basket, you employ several methods in case the cover gets pulled on one or two of them en route.
Here we have a gimmicked box. But this—” He indicated the second huge crate Shauna had pointed out to him. “—is the result
of a faked manifest. This says it’s yours, but it isn’t. And there are probably two or three more gimmicks we haven’t spotted
yet.”

“What could take up so much room?”

“Well, the only thing truly harder than weapons to smuggle is large groups of people, and that’s out. I’m thinking guns. I’ve
seen some photos to back that up. Conversely,” he added, “dope is the easiest thing in the universe to sneak in and out of
countries. That people still get caught at it is a testament to their amateurishness. But guns—”

He paced around some of the other boxes, browsing, considering other angles he didn’t really need, now that he had satisfied
himself that the smuggling had been real—he did not expect to find leftovers hanging around.

“Guns you can get anywhere, especially in the United States. Any shmuck can buy one, even stolen military stock, automatic
weapons, explosives—no trouble here. America is the land of free enterprise. You smuggle guns if you need disposable weapons
in a hurry, or if you don’t trust anyone outside to handle your armaments. The catch is, to smuggle guns and have it be worthwhile,
you’ve got to smuggle a
lot
of guns.” More to himself than anything, he said, “He not only got himself past us, but his goddam arsenal too.”

“You know, that crate with all the straw would be the perfect thing to ship over a—” Her voice caught, just slightly. “—a
big snake like that.”

“King cobra,” Slayton said. “Jesus. The only time I’d ever seen one of those things was on a reptile farm. They grow to be
eighteen, twenty feet long, sometimes more. Which is just about twenty feet too long for my taste.”

“I couldn’t believe what you did back there,” she said. “To think that that thing might have been on the ship with us the
whole time…”

“Yeah,” Slayton said, suddenly brightening. “Somebody had to tend to it—if only to make sure it didn’t die in transit.”

“Sorry,” said Shauna. “Can’t help you. No herpetologists that
I
know of in the bunch.” Then she said, “I know a sneaky way that might help us, though.”

Slayton raised his eyebrows, attentive.

“Ahmed Sadi… uh, is rather enamored of our own Maggie. It’s her hair. If she quizzed him on this, he’d turn the work crew
inside out trying to fill the bill. We might wind up with just a scapegoat, but it’s more than we have at the moment.”

“Good,” said Slayton. “It’s a start. I’ve got some records and things to check.”

She immediately became defensive. “No. I
don’t
want to crawl back into that bed and pretend to try to go to sleep, because that will be useless. And you know it.”

“And
you
know we can’t be much good as a team if we’re spliced onto each other constantly,” Slayton said, becoming stern. “I’ll relocate
you, get you out of that place, at least.”

Shauna bit her lip. “Okay, okay.” She understood, and that was a relief to Slayton.

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll ring Maggie back at the hotel. But I’m not going to tell her exactly where I’ve relocated.
As long as I’m on time and on the job, it doesn’t really matter where I stay, and I really don’t have to account to anybody
for my off time. This way, maybe we can have results by morning.”

“Alright,” Slayton said. “Let’s get out of here before we uncrate something else that bites.”

Shauna did not need to be convinced to leave.

Professor Gordon Willis had handled snakes.

Slayton shifted the folder on his lap. The Professor must have, he thought, if he had poked around in half the tombs his dossier
suggested. An unlikely possibility, but there. Maggie Leiber had frequently been unaccounted for during the voyage, wandering
around the ship, but she didn’t seem the right temperament for it. Slayton’s instinct pulled him toward Ahmed Sadi, but the
boisterous Arab was usually highly visible—he certainly did not have time to supervise two loadings on the docks simultaneously.
He
had
been one of the first to rush over following the incident with the forklift—it would have been simple to merely double back….

“Let’s see if I can get anyone to flinch at the word
snake,
” he said to himself, knowing that that, too, was halfhearted.

Then there was still the trio of Willis’s diggers—Cooke, Winslow, and Pratley. They all checked out as adventurous European
knockabouts; unimaginative academic careers stopped somewhere midway, followed by a fairly predictable run of caving, mountaineering,
and touring the continent with practically no support whatsoever. Their function on the tour was principally to provide a
counterpoint to the stuffy technicalities of Professor Willis’ speechmaking by hitting the university campus audiences
hard
with personal anecdotes and adventures. Tanned, assured, muscular, and self-confident, as well as having a legitimate claim
to being worldly, they were a perfect advertisement for drumming up support and interest in Willis’s endeavors.

During Slayton’s primary interview, they had appeared bored but amused. They had promptly vanished into the campus milieu
in order to meet their tight speech-making schedules. From the moment the
Star of Egypt
had docked, they were, for all intents, and purposes, booked up.

Too bad they could not loiter around, thought Slayton, even as potential allies. They would have been the most useful—they
had a profound sense of teamwork, among other things, and were virtually inseparable. “Randy little buggers,” Shauna had said,
with the sort of affection one reserves for wayward younger brothers. “I sometimes suspect they realized this tour would be
practically a sexual smorgasboard of America—Willis did not have to do much in the way of convincing them.”

The trio was essentially irrelevant to Slayton’s problem. Though even his brief talk with them had been enough for him to
register that these three were, in every way, apolitical European youngsters unconcerned with the power squabbles that were
the stock in trade of people like Slayton, or, for that matter, Rashid Haman. Instead of shooting and point-making, they were
balling their merry way through life. Slayton shook his head and added their dossier to the filtered stack.

Slayton, now alone, was acutely aware of his increasing physical need to strike back at Haman. It was pure frustration at
being toyed with. He wanted to corner the elusive, damnable man, and take him on barehanded, one-on-one.

It would be easy for Haman to be one of the crew, any of the crew—
all
of the crew. Slayton kept running up against that particular investigative brickwall. He had to trust Ahmed Sadi, but what
if he was Haman?

Slayton regarded the accumulated documents stacked on the table before him. There was Winship’s material, Wilma’s research,
his own notes gleaned from observation and the copious details given to him by Shauna, the photos, dossiers, profiles of each
member of the expedition, xeroxes—in all, a library that was doing him little direct good. In that moment, he decided that
his mind would sift and retain whatever would be needed in a crunch, and henceforth it would of necessity be his hunches and
instincts that would have to carry him. He had to approach this problem with the same sort of animal cunning Haman would apply—and
was
applying even now—to bedevil him.

That determined, Slayton left the papers on the table and regarded the slowly rising sun through a nearby window.

He had to start early, regardless of the fact he had gotten little sleep during the night with Shauna, the cobra, and the
hunt-and-peck session aboard the truck trailers. He decided he’d better get a shave before leaving.

The grin on Ahmed Sadi’s face was almost cinematically apologetic.

“We seem to have misplaced one of our men, sir,” he told Slayton, as the two walked along outside the exhibit center. “Miss
Dr. Leiber spoke to me this morning—ah, she is so beautiful, is she not, sir?”

Slayton nodded.

“She asked me some most peculiar questions about the handling of animals,” he continued. “I mentioned that several men in
my humble contingent had occasion to work for foreign collections—zoos and that sort of thing.”

“And the man foremost in your mind as fitting her description has now disappeared?” Slayton felt a different kind of snake
twist uncomfortably in his gut.

“Yes, Mr. Rademacher. You remember Bassam.”

“The one who seemed so offended by my interview?”

“Yes sir, indeed.”

This seemed even stranger to Slayton. Haman would certainly not try to draw attention to himself by being immediately hostile,
and then being the first person to split when questions were asked. And then he thought:
misdirection
.

“Where would he go? He’s practically a tourist, Ahmed.”

“Ah, yes, sir. I think he will turn up here again soon. Unless he abandons us altogether.”

In which case we’ve got nothing to worry about, Slayton added mentally. Maybe he’ll go to work for the Bronx Zoo.

After being waved through into the exhibit area, Slayton found that the background flats had been erected, and now the area
actually did look like the interior of a tomb. Two men were doing some preliminary fiddling with lighting effects and baby
spots. Shauna was busy at a work table near what she had earlier described as the coffin area, brushing and inspecting what
looked like a mask.

“Death mask?” said Slayton, and she looked up.

“Hardwood face,” she said. “Laid over the real thing. Look, see—the eyes are made of obsidian.”

He inspected the article briefly. She lowered her voice so the others in the room would not hear: “My god, Ben, you know now
that it’s morning, I find myself disbelieving that adventure last night…”

“What adventure?” said Slayton, picking up an amulet from the table.

She shook her head. “Did you find out anything?”

“No.” He paused, really wishing he could tell her something positive, allay whatever demons were pestering her now. “This
is a
hydrocephalus
—correct me if I’m wrong. What does it say?”

“It’s a rubric from Chapter 162 of the Book of the Dead,” she said, holding the amulet in both hands before her face and calling
up the passage from memory. “That’s the ‘chapter of making heat to be under the deceased.’ It reads:
O Amon, O Amon, who art in heaven, turn thy force upon the dead body of thy son and make him sound and strong in the Underworld
. You’d better be free tonight, damn you.”