Mummy Dearest (31 page)

The old man did not glance at me as I went across the street and entered the Desert Inn. The front room was dim and shabby. From behind a desk, a young woman gaped at me, bewildered. It struck me as peculiar, since an inn might expect to have an occasional tourist come in to inquire about a room. My head was bare, but I was dressed decorously. My face was grimy, but not so badly as to warrant her trepidation.

“Do you speak English?” I asked politely.

“A little.” The woman backed away, as though I were holding a weapon of some sort. Behind her, a limp curtain covering a doorway twitched. I heard agitated whispers and stifled giggles. Children, I surmised, instead of fierce, gun-wielding thugs.

“Oh, good,” I said, hoping for the best. “I wonder if you might allow me to use your facilities—your bathroom? I had quite a lot of coffee this morning, followed by a very bumpy ride.” I illustrated this with a few hops. “Bumpy.”

“You want the bathroom?” She was increasingly alarmed and seemed on the verge of dashing out of the room. She was liable to trip over the spies behind the curtain, who were giggling more loudly. “You are alone? This is not …”

I opted for an apologetic smile. “I’ll just be a minute.”

The woman opened a drawer and pulled out a loop of cord with a dozen keys. “Up there,” she whispered, pointing at the stained ceiling. “At the end.”

“Thank you.” I took the keys from her trembling hand, nodded, and went up a short flight of stairs to a narrow corridor lined with closed doors. I realized that Buffy was likely to be in one of the rooms—and I had the keys. However, I had a more pressing problem, so I hurried toward the door the desk clerk had indicated. Halfway down the corridor, a door opened and two men stepped out, cutting me off. They were swarthy, with unshaven faces, deep-set dark
eyes, and brown teeth. The cloths tied around their heads were stained with sweat, as were their pants and frayed shirts. One had a pistol tucked under his belt.

I gulped, then moistened my lips and said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I’m looking for the bathroom.”

They spoke to each other in rapid Arabic, darting slitted looks at me and at the empty corridor behind me. From inside their room I heard the cheers of a thousand soccer fans. One of the men glanced over his shoulder at what I cleverly surmised was a TV set. He said something to his companion, who rolled his eyes and replied with what may have been a crude expression of displeasure.

“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, putting on a pinched smile and fidgeting, “I really need to be on my way. One of those imperatives of nature, you know. It’s much more difficult for us ladies. We require some privacy, so we simply can’t find an alley and… relieve ourselves. That’s the only thing I envied about boys when I was growing up, you know. It didn’t seem fair.” I sensed they were weakening, and began to move toward them. “Who’s playing today? Egypt? I do hope your team is doing well this year. The sport is catching on back home, but it’s not nearly as popular as it is in other countries.”

An announcer began to jabber excitedly from inside their room. There was a burst of thunderous applause as someone somewhere did something of note. I eased by the men, who were both halfway into the room watching the TV screen. When neither of them barked at me, I halted in front of the door and fumbled through the keys. They all had bits of masking tape with Arabic squiggles on them. Rather than trying to match the squiggle on the door, I began to try each key.

On my fourth attempt, the key slid into the lock and I opened the door. Having anticipated a primitive bathroom (sanitation was no longer an issue), I was startled to see nothing more than a narrow iron bed—and Buffy.

“Mrs. Malloy!” she gasped. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You might pretend to be a little more pleased to see me.”

“I… uh, I am glad to see you. It’s just that… that I thought Samuel—where is he? Did he come with you?”

“He came with me, but he wandered off.” I tried without success to decipher her horrified expression. “Would you prefer to wait for him so that you can swoon into his arms? It’s up to you, Buffy. However, I do think it might be wiser for us to leave while we can.”

She remained on the edge of the bed, her forehead puckered with irritation. “He wandered off? What does that mean? Where did he go?”

“I have no idea. I assume the two men in the room several doors away are responsible for your incarceration. At the moment, they’re engrossed with a soccer match on TV. I suggest we tiptoe past their room and downstairs. The only person I saw was a young woman who looked incapable of letting out the tiniest yelp.” I wrapped my hand around Buffy’s wrist and yanked her to her feet. “Shall we?”

I had to drag her down the corridor. The floors creaked, but I heard no sounds other than the soccer announcer’s voice and another round of cheers. The lobby was unoccupied. Buffy seemed reluctant to move quickly, although she did not appear weak with hunger or suffering from a physical assault. I resisted an impulse to shake her into more active cooperation. She was young and had been through an ordeal for the last forty-eight hours.

As soon as we reached the sidewalk, I propelled her down the side street. We turned again at the alley I was fairly confident would bring us to the car in only a few blocks. “Could you please cooperate?” I said to her, my annoyance growing as I clung to her wrist.

“What about Samuel?” she said mulishly.

“Samuel’s a big boy. If we don’t spot him before we get to the car, we’ll leave him. He can take a bus back to Luxor, or hitch a ride with a caravan. The goal today is to get you—and me—out of here without being killed. It is not to reunite young lovers. You can deal with that at your convenience.” I gave her wrist a more forceful yank, eliciting a
squeal of protest. “If your captor is a captivatingly handsome sheik, you can drop him a postcard. You can write him a love letter in the sand, for that matter.” I yanked again, hoping I didn’t dislocate her shoulder. It would be embarrassing if her only injury was caused by me. “There’s the car. Get in and duck.”

She froze. I opened the door, shoved her in, and hurried around to the driver’s side. She was sprawled across both seats, so I pushed her out of my way, slammed my door closed, and felt for the key under the seat.

“Ow,” she said from the floor of the car. “You didn’t have to do that, Mrs. Malloy.”

“Stay there and be quiet!” I snapped. I found the key and started the car. It had been several years since I’d driven a stick shift, but I eventually ground the gears into reverse and backed away from the curb. After some more exploration, I managed to convince the car to lurch forward. “We’ll have to stay away from the main street because of the camel jam. We should be able to get back on it in two or three blocks. It’ll be easy to find the highway from there. You stay where you are. I don’t want anykne to notice your blond hair.”

“We have to find Samuel,” she said, glaring at me.

“No, we don’t. If you recall, you were the hostage. He’s merely another tourist—in his case, stranded. There are plenty of tour vans in town. Somebody will give him a lift to Luxor.”

When she tried to get up, I firmly pushed her head down. It became a bit of a game, since she stealthily assessed her chances each time I was obliged to shift gears. Eventually, I turned onto the main road as it headed out to the desert. “You can get up now,” I said, feeling most unfriendly.

“About time,” she grumbled as she crawled into the seat. “It’s utterly gross and sticky down there. I’ll have to get a tetanus shot when we get back. If anybody in this country knows what a tetanus shot is, anyway.”

“Perhaps you should express a small degree of gratitude for being rescued. I didn’t have to risk my life for you, much
less a painfully swollen bladder and an ominous realization that there aren’t any roadside rest areas between here and Luxor.”

“You could pull over somewhere and go behind some rocks,” she suggested, overlooking my pointed remark about gratitude. “It’s not like this is a California freeway.”

I shot her a chilly look. “Speaking of California, you’re not from there. You don’t live in Sausalito unless your daddy owns a car dealership with an apartment over the body shop.”

She let her head flop back and closed her eyes. “Do you have any aspirin? My head is about to implode. I haven’t had anything but bread for two days, and my blood sugar is careening. And water—I need water. They gave me a bottle last night, but none since then. I was locked in that room for—I don’t know—at least a day and a half. No window, so I couldn’t tell for sure if it was day or night. I had to guess from the nosie level of the traffic. It was so gruesome.” She turned her face away and whimpered softly. “I thought I was going to die.”

I gave up and turned my attention to avoiding potholes while making the best time I could. After a while, I was obliged to stop at the edge of the road. Buffy had not made a sound, but I took the ignition key with me when I carefully made my way behind one of the craggy rock formations.

I parked in front of the Winter Palace, then nudged Buffy, who’d been dozing since my brief pit stop. I’d been imploring every deity I’d ever heard of not to let us run out of gas along the highway. One of them (the Almighty OPEC, perhaps) had allowed us to run on fumes the last few miles.

“Honey, we’re home. You can get out of the car now,” I said. “Never mind; you’re welcome to stay here if you prefer. I myself am going in the hotel.” Uninterested in her decision, I slammed the car door and climbed the curved staircase to the lobby. Ahmed stared at me as I put down the car key in front of him. “There’s a really ugly car out front. Feel free to have it towed. Is my husband back?”

“No,
Sitt
Malloy-Rosen, he is not. Is this car yours? We have valet parking, if you would like us to—”

“I don’t care what you do with it, although you should remove Miss Franz before you do anything drastic.”

“Miss Franz who was kidnapped? She is with you? This is wonderful news.” His voice dropped and he leaned forward. “Were liberties taken with her person? Should I send for a doctor?”

“You’ll have to ask her. Is her luggage still in the basement storage room? I suspect she’d rather have her shampoo and moisturizers than a doctor.”

He stood upright and cleared his throat. “About the storage room in the basement,
Sitt
Malloy-Rosen. The Winter
Palace prides itself on taking care of its guests’ valued possessions. There have been rumors that you and a young lady, as yet to be identified, were seen—”

“There are always rumors, aren’t there?” Smiling brightly, I went to the elevator and willed myself not to look back at him. Once I’d let myself into the suite, I flopped on the sofa and let weariness invade my every nerve and muscle. My back ached from the tension of driving the horrid car through a minefield of potholes and rocks. My neck was a mass of steel rods, and my fingers were numb. My tongue had mutated into thick sandpaper, but I couldn’t muster the energy to stagger to the mini-bar and take out a bottle of chilled water.

I allowed myself a couple of minutes, then went into the bedroom. I dialed the number of the police station and repeated Mahmoud’s name until I finally breached the protective barriers of bureaucracy and he came on the line. After I finished my terse recital, I listened to the sound of his measured breathing.

“Miss Buffy Franz is in a car parked in front of the Winter Palace?” he said at last.

“I don’t know if she is now, but she was ten minutes ago.”

“And you rescued her from a hotel room at the Kharga Oasis?”

“That’s what I just told you, Mahmoud,” I said, trying to be patient. “Her boyfriend, Samuel”—I floundered for a moment, but I’d been up since dawn—“Berry, that’s his surname, may still be over there, or he could be on his way back to Luxor.”

“And Peter is not aware of any of this?”

I switched the receiver to my other ear. “I don’t know how to get in touch with Peter. He went to Cairo yesterday. I was hoping you might have some idea how to contact him.”

“Yes, I will try,” Mahmoud said. “You are unharmed, I trust. What about the girl?”

“We didn’t discuss it, but she appears to be fine. She may have some scratches on her knees from the floorboard of the car. I thought it was better that she not be seen until
we were well away from the town. It seemed like a good idea at the time. She may have felt differently about it.”

He made a small noise. “I will do everything I can to reach Peter. Will you please stay where you are until I speak again to you? Not just in the hotel, but in the Presidential Suite with the doors locked. I need to assure him that you’re safe.”

I agreed and hung up. In that Caron and Inez had not appeared when I arrived, I surmised they were elsewhere. I’d left a scribbled note for them, saying only that I would be back in time for tea. It was four o’clock, according to the clock beside the telephone. Since tea was not among their daily rituals at home, they might not be attuned to the time. Disinclined to fret until they returned, I called the desk.

“Ahmed,” I said briskly, “in that the Winter Palace prides itself on taking care of its guests’ valued possessions and I am a guest, I’d like to report that I’m missing two of mine. They’re females, seventeen years of age. Please have a bellman track them down in the lobby of the New Winter Place, on the terrace, or by the pool, and tell them to get up here immediately. Thank you so much.”

I went into the bathroom and took a shower, then wrapped my hair in a towel and slipped into the hotel bathrobe. Feeling much improved, I fetched a bottle of water from the mini-bar and went out to the balcony. I was torn between modest pride at my accomplishment and leeriness at Peter’s reaction when he learned about it. Which he probably had by now. I wasn’t sure if he would drop everything and fly back to Luxor in order to clasp me in his arms and shower me with admiring kisses—or start investigating the divorce procedure in Egypt. I’d read somewhere that Muslim law required the husband to do little more than utter the fateful sentence three times. Peter had learned enough Arabic at spy camp to handle it in a respectable accent.