Channeling Cleopatra (8 page)

"Yes," Leda said. "And fortunately, I do
have a good imagination."

"Rue Nokrashi," Gabriella told the driver.
"We had better do our shopping and return home if I am to put this
dinner together. You may have to entertain our guests while I
cook."

"Be careful, or Daddy will be in there
telling you how to do it," Leda said. "It'll taste like Chinese by
the time he's done with it."

The
souq
was similar to other such markets
she'd been to, and sort of a cheaper version of Pike Place Market
in Seattle on a touristy Saturday. Nobody juggled the fish, but
they did everything else to attract the attention of the buyers,
especially prosperous-looking ones like Gabriella and
Leda.

"One thing you must have first," Gabriella
told her, veering away from the food stalls to a little jewelry
shop featuring mostly a lot of Chinese merchandise such as one
would see in the finer dollar stores at home. But Gabriella emerged
a moment later flourishing a watch with a black plastic band.

"Here, put it on. All of the Westerners on
the site have them." As Leda strapped it on, murmuring a puzzled
thanks, she saw why. The large black numbers on the dial were big
enough to be easy to read, except they were all in Arabic. "It
helps you tell prices, street numbers, all sorts of things,"
Gabriella told her.

Leda was touched by her thoughtfulness.
Maybe she would have her sister send over a Marvin watch for her
new friend in exchange.

As Gabriella did the food thing, Leda looked
longingly over to the next street where yard goods and garments
hung. She longed to buy a really pretty caftan and a few fake
antiquities to salt around her apartment at home with her
collectible toys and books, but then she remembered that she no
longer had an apartment at home. Her stuff was in storage, her cats
with her sister. Thinking of the cats, she felt a pang of
homesickness but then thought, how homesick could she be with Daddy
here, and after all, she was in Egypt, assisting in an actual
excavation, field work, no less! And she already had a new friend
who had just given her a useful and exotic present.

Still, the crowd and the heat, stifling even
now that the sun was past the midpoint in the sky, were making her
woozy. She was glad when Gabriella bought her last lemon and they
were able to hail another taxi back to the villa.

CHAPTER 6

All through dinner, Duke flirted with
Gabriella while Leda and the hydrologist, Dr. Peter Welsh,
exchanged glowers across the lemon chicken.

When Gabriella rose to go see to
after-dinner drinks, Dr. Welsh stepped on the bare toes protruding
from Leda's sandal, dropped a fork, and ducked under the table. She
ducked under, too, frowning as hard as he did.

All during dinner she had choked her food
down and tried to maintain her cool and slightly comical
condescension toward him while being warm to Gabriella and
controlling her irritation with her father. Damn him, anyway. Why
did he have to buddy up with the last guy in the world she ever
wanted to see again? She knew the answer to that but didn't like
it.

As for Peter Welsh, now Dr. Peter Welsh,
hydrologist and high-muck-a-muck of the cofferdam, he smirked at
her, also with condescension mixed with scorn, the worm. She
managed to flip a bowl of rice into his lap, but it was small
comfort. The damned rice wasn't hot enough to burn or even sticky
enough to make him uncomfortable till could change. But as soon as
Gabriella left the room, true to his old form, he pounced.

"What the hell are you doing here, Punkie?"
he demanded in a harsh whisper.

"Not chasing you, my dear, that's for damned
sure," she said. "I knew they had some dam fool holding back the
Mediterranean for this dig, but I had no idea it was you."

"Yeah, well, Duke's a great guy. I had no
idea his last name was more than a coincidence."

"Of course not. You wouldn't have known my
last name if it hadn't been on my name tag."

"I sure wouldn't have known you now, Punkie
my girl. I never expected you'd live up to being my Pumpkin in such
a literal way. You've become quite thick through the middle, and
you've wrinkles round your eyes and gray hair."

"You're no spring chicken either, chum. And
what happened to the surfer boy hair?"

He tried to run his hand across the bald top
of his head and rise at the same time. This resulted in a lurch of
the table and some of the choice expressions they'd learned, or at
least perfected, aboard the same ship. She hated to admit it, but
there wasn't much but the baldness she could use to retaliate. He
wasn't thick through the middle at all. Still lean and lanky with
the bad boy smile, though sometimes he did seem to have other
expressions as well when he talked to Gabriella or Dad about the
damn dam. Men! Why did only the ones who wanted to spend money and
the rest of their lives with you age badly?

Duke poked his head down under the table,
too, grinning as if his face would split. "You two already know
each other, I guess. Shoot, I could have spared the
introductions."

"Daddy, remember me writing to you about
Sneaky Pete?"

Welsh snorted. "Shall I explain what I
called you to your dad?"

"As if you'd have to!" Leda snapped
back.

Her father cleared his throat, no doubt
sensing that the responsibility for this, one of her adult
relationship problems, was about to land in his parental lap even
without the benefit of a daughterly visit to a shrink.

"Children, children," the old man said,
downright paternally. "Can't you give it a rest? We all have to
work together, after all."

Too, too true, which unaccountably made
Leda's blood really boil. She turned on him. "Yeah. Daddy, that's
what you always say to your former wife when your new one starts
consulting the lawyers about lowering the child support payments. I
might have known you'd make friends with this turkey! I think I was
only attracted to him because I was young and dumb enough to want a
guy just like the guy that married dear old Mom. I forgot that dear
old Mom was three wives back before I got old enough to date
anybody!"

"Bitter!" Welsh said. "I knew she'd get
bitter one of these days. She was too sweet to be believed back in
Tasmania."

"I
was
sweet then, you asshole!" she
said. "But you cured me of it really fast."

Gabriella returned with a tray of glasses
and a pitcher. "Is something wrong?" she asked.

Both men suddenly looked as innocent as if
they had been discussing their favorite Father's Day cards, and
after awhile, the talk turned to the lab. Much to Leda's surprise,
Peter Welsh readily agreed to have his crew assist Duke in erecting
her beluga laboratory.

"That is very good of you, Dr. Welsh,"
Gabriella said. "I could probably arrange for my cousins and some
of their friends to help, but—"

"No, no," Pete said with a sharp glance at
Leda. "It isn't related directly to the dam, but Nucore has footed
our bill, however indirectly. It's the least we can do. Besides,
anything to get Punk—Dr. Hubbard here, to earning her keep in her
windowless beluga five miles across the harbor from my dam."

This was all said with a charming smile, but
as soon as the men had departed, Gabriella poured Leda another cup
of tea and said. "Oh my, it is a truly small world, yes?"

"You said it," Leda groaned, sliding down in
her chair. "Man, all this stuff with Nucore and past lives . . . I
sure didn't want to catch up with my own. And as far as good ol’
Pete goes, I thought I had switched that channel off for good."

Gabriella smiled appreciatively in the
direction of the doorway where the men had taken their leave. "I
can see how that one could have been trouble. I honestly hadn't
noticed that he was so attractive before, though, I must say. I
only asked your father to invite him so we could talk him into
helping with your beluga. He's always seemed a bit of a bore
before."

This remark cheered Leda up enough that she
was able to sleep soundly beneath her mosquito netting despite the
heat. She knew she and Gabriella were going to be really good
buddies.

* * *

Leda left the construction
of the beluga in the capable hands of Duke and
his
friend and their assorted cronies
and most unprofessionally allowed Gabriella to show her the sights,
especially the archaeological ones. Welsh didn't fail to make a
remark in her hearing about women professionals who left all the
grunt work to men. But she retorted by saying loudly to her father,
"I know from all those Christmases when you let me help you put
together your new motorcycles, Daddy, that you can handle 'some
assembly required.' And even the most concentration-challenged
individuals who can't seem to remember whose bed they last crawled
out of can be educable with proper supervision and
encouragement."

"Hey," her dad had said. "Watch it."

"I didn't mean you, but if the sheet fits,
wear it. After all, there were a lot of Romans in togas here at one
time."

Before she and Gabriella took off, Leda
said, "I guess I'd better report in, eh? Let them know I'm here,
that sort of thing."

"With Namid? You did already, didn't you? It
is a courtesy at the most and what courtesy do you owe him now? No,
you cannot work at your assignment until your facility is erected,
and it is not erected. Besides, you need the background I can give
you. Consider this your orientation to Alex. After all, I am the
historical and cultural liaison between the museum and the project.
Namid is on the museum's board of directors, but my cousin Claude
is chairman of the board." She shrugged and grinned
mischievously.

Still, as laid back and charming—and
young!—as Gabriella was, she had that monied aristocracy
born-to-command way about her, like an officer who'd come from a
long line of Annapolis grads. Might not know his ass from a hole in
the ground but could make you think he did and that it was to your
advantage to follow him to hell and back. Or whatever. Leda had no
doubt that Gabriella knew exactly which way the local cookie
crumbled, or falafel fell, or whatever.

Besides, the clever girl's plan appealed to
Leda. Of course, Leda knew that later she would need to make nice
with Namid and work with the dig so that she would be privy to any
finds of the sort that interested Nucore. Obviously, the
archaeologist in charge couldn't be trusted to follow through on
his agreements.

Still, what was one day, more or less, and
there really wasn't any place to park her stuff until the boys had
the beluga up.

Feeling vaguely that she really ought to
supervise but not much wanting to spend time watching Pete wax all
competent and engineer-ish, she took Gabriella up on the offer.

Later, she felt that it was fortunate that
the boys had the beluga up in a day's time and sad but also
fortunate that it didn't take too much longer than that to drink in
what was left of the ancient splendors of Alexandria.

If Leda hadn't already toured Luxor and the
Valley of the Kings while she was in the Navy, she might have
allowed herself to be impressed by the puny splendors of the little
Roman theater and several catacombs and tombs. The Greek cemetery
did make her wish she had an entrenching tool handy; those people
were buried several deep, and the bottom layer could well hold the
remains of some of the scholars whose work had once graced the
great Alexandria Library.

The truth was, for all her enthusiasm, it
was hot. It was damned hot. And she had been soaking up so much
information in the past few weeks she felt as if her brain was a
soaking wet, swollen sponge. She found it hard to jump up and down
at the sight of Pompey's pillar, which had nothing to do with
Pompey but more to do with the Serapeum, which was originally a
temple to the religion the Greeks made up to blend their beliefs
with those of the Egyptians. It was literally a lot of bull, since
Serapis was a bull. The most interesting thing about it was that it
had once held the overflow from the great library. You couldn't
tell it now. There was nothing but a lot of holes and trenches in
the ground and nary a page nor a scroll in sight. Not that she
expected anything. She knew that the library had been destroyed
some time during or after Cleopatra of movie fame had succumbed to
Caesar, Mark Antony, and the asp, in that order. Exactly who the
culprits were who destroyed the library was a matter of debate, but
that was long ago and not in her jurisdiction. Maybe if she had
found a bit of an ancient library card catalog inscribed on one of
the few remaining stones, she would have felt more impressed.

The catacombs had seemed more promising—dead
people were, after all, Leda's thing—but although it might have
been fun to compare the DNA of the ancient skeletal remains to that
of contemporary Alexandrites—no, that was the
stone—Alexandrians—she wasn't working that particular corner
either. And the paintings on the walls reminded her of graffiti
pretending to be pictographs. She almost expected to see a Mickey
Mouse hieroglyphic among the ones that were so very un-Egyptian,
while pretending to follow the ancient style.

Gabriella picked up on her lack of
enthusiasm. "It isn't really terribly impressive, is it?" she said,
making a wry face.

"I'm just tired and really, it's a little
recent for me. I've always been more into the earlier dynasties.
And Greece up to and including Alexander but not so much
after."

"No, no, I understand
perfectly. If not for Alexander, poor Alex would not exist, and if
not for Cleopatra, it would have little to boast of except the soap
opera family histories of the Ptolemys before Cleopatra the
Seventh.
Our
Cleopatra. She would have agreed with you, too, that the
fascination with Egypt lay in earlier times."