“Do you think they are planning to steal it?” Nefret asked, laughing.

“I am sure some of them would like to,” Ramses replied. “I won’t be late. If you would like to wait a few hours I will be happy to assist.”

I offered my services instead and Nefret accepted them. It was an odd conversation altogether; we talked, as we usually did, of our work and our future plans, but I could see that even Emerson had to force himself to take an interest. Not so odd, perhaps, considering that three of the four of us were concealing something from the fourth.

After dinner we went to the parlor for coffee. Several letters had been delivered while we were out; despite the general reliability of the post, many of our acquaintances clung to the old habit of sending messages by hand. There was one for me from Katherine Vandergelt, which I read with a renewed sense of guilt.

“We have seen so little of the Vandergelts,” I said. “Katherine writes to remind us of our promise to visit them at Abusir.”

Emerson started as if he had been stung. “Damnation!”

“What is it, Emerson?” I cried in alarm. “Something in that letter?”

“No. Er—yes.” Emerson crumpled the missive and shoved it in his pocket. “In part. It is from Maxwell, asking me to be present at a meeting tomorrow—another example of the cursed distractions that have plagued this season! I meant to go to Abusir several days ago.”

“A war is something of a distraction,” Nefret said dryly. “You are probably the only man on that committee who knows what he is talking about, Professor; you are doing Egypt a great service.”

Emerson said, “Hmph,” and Nefret added, “This can’t last forever. Someday…”

“Quite right,” I said. “You will do your duty, Emerson, and so will we all; and someday…”

Nefret and I spent several hours in the darkroom. When we emerged, both Emerson and Ramses were gone.

Ramses could remember a time when carriages and camels and donkeys transported tourists to the pyramids along a dusty road bordered by green fields. Now taxis and private motorcars made pedestrian traffic hazardous and the once isolated village of Giza had been almost swallowed up by new houses and villas. Baedeker, the Bible of the tourist, dismissed it as uninteresting, but every visitor to the pyramids passed through it along the road or on the train, and the inhabitants preyed on them as they had always done, selling fake antiquities and hiring out donkeys. The town relapsed into somnolence after nightfall. Its amenities were somewhat limited: a few shops, a few coffee shops, a few brothels.

The coffee shop Ramses favored was a few hundred yards west of the station. It was not as pretentious as the Cairene equivalents: a beaten earth floor instead of tile or brick, a simple support of wooden beams framing the open front. As he approached Ramses heard a single voice rising and falling in trained cadences, which were broken at intervals by appreciative laughter or exclamations. A reciter, or storyteller, was providing entertainment. He must have been there for some time, for he was deep in the intricacies of an interminable romance entitled “The Life of Abu-Zayd.”

A few lamps, hanging from the wooden beams, showed the Sha’er perched on a stool placed on the mastaba bench in front of the coffee shop. He was a man of middle age with a neatly trimmed black beard; his hands held the single-stringed viol and bow with which he accompanied his narrative. His audience sat round him, on the mastaba or on stools, smoking their pipes as they listened with rapt attention.

The narrative, part in prose, part in verse, described the adventures of Abu-Zayd, more commonly known as Barakat, the son of an emir who cast him off because his dark skin cast certain doubts on the honor of his mother. The emir did his wife an injustice; Barakat’s coloring had been bestowed on him by a literal-minded god, in response to the lady’s prayer:

“Soon, from the vault of heaven descending

A black-plumaged bird of enormous weight

Pounced on the other birds and killed them all.

To God I cried—O Compassionate!

Give me a son like this noble bird.”

Waiting in the shadows, Ramses listened appreciatively to the flexible, melodic voice. It was quite a story, as picaresque and bloodthirsty as any Western epic, and it was conveniently divided into sections or chapters, each of which ended in a prayer. When the narrator reached the end of the current section Ramses stepped forward and joined the audience in reciting the concluding prayer.

He and his father were among the few Europeans whom Egyptians addressed as they would a fellow Moslem—probably because Emerson’s religious views, or lack thereof, made it difficult to classify him. “At least,” one philosophical speaker had remarked, “he is not a dog of a Christian.”

Emerson had found that highly amusing.

Ramses exchanged greetings with the patrons and politely saluted the reciter, whom he had encountered before. Refreshing himself with the coffee an admirer had presented to him, the Sha’er nodded in acknowledgment.

Ramses edged gradually away from the attentive audience and into the single, dirt-floored room. Only two creatures had resisted the lure of the narrator; one was a dog, sound asleep and twitching, under a bench. The other was stretched out on another bench and he too appeared to be asleep. Ramses shoved his feet rudely off the bench and sat down.

“Have you no poetry in your soul?” he inquired.

“Not at the moment.” David pulled himself to a sitting position. “I heard.”

“I feared you would.” He told David what had happened, or failed to happen, the night before. “How they got wind of his intentions I don’t know, unless he tried to blackmail them.”

David nodded. “So that’s the end of that. What do we do now?”

“Back to the original plan. What else can we do?”

There was no answer from David, who was leaning forward, his head bowed.

“I’m sorry,” Ramses said. He decided they could risk speaking English; the narrator’s voice was sonorous and no one was paying attention to them.

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Never mind the compliments. There’s one thing we haven’t tried.”

“Trailing the Turk?”

“Yes. The first time I encountered him I was—er—prevented from doing so. The second time, you were prevented by your concern for me. There will be at least one more opportunity, and this time we’ll have to do more than follow him. As you cogently pointed out, we need to learn not where he’s going but where he came from. He’s only a hired driver and he is probably amenable to bribery or persuasion. But that means we’ll have to take him alive, which won’t be easy.”

“The Professor would be delighted to lend a hand,” David murmured. “Are you going to let him in on it?”

“Not if I can help it. You and I can manage him.”

“One more delivery.”

“So I was told. It has to be soon, you know. At least Farouk is out of the picture. If they try to replace him we’ll know who the spy is.”

“Are you trying to cheer me up?”

“Apparently I’m not succeeding.”

“One can’t help wondering,” David said evenly, “what he told them. The kurbash is a potent inducement to confession.”

“What could he tell them, except that the great and powerful Father of Curses had tried to bribe him? He didn’t know about you or—or the rest of it.”

“He knew about the house in Maadi.”

Ramses swore under his breath. It had been a forlorn hope, that David’s quick mind would overlook that interesting fact—a fact whose significance had apparently eluded his father. Not that one could ever be sure, with Emerson…

“Listen to me,” he said urgently. “Father’s private arrangement with Farouk was a diversion that had nothing to do with our purpose. We didn’t sign on to smash a spy apparatus, we’re only trying to prevent an ugly little revolution. If we can do that and come out of it with whole skins, we’ll be damned lucky. I refuse to get involved in anything else. They can’t expect it of us.”