Authors: Gore Vidal
“What’s his line? I happened to meet him at Shepheard’s one evening.”
“Smuggler, mostly. Black market, that kind of thing. I’d keep away from him.”
“I was just curious,” said Pete, and then they discussed the King, the favorite topic in these parts.
Finally, his drink finished, Pete excused himself. He left the car with only the briefest sidelong glance at the curious stranger, who was now engaged in studying the interior of an empty coffee cup.
Back in his compartment, Pete undressed slowly, trying to identify the man in the dining car. It annoyed him, like a word temporarily eluding the tongue. He hung his clothes up on a highly ornamented cast-iron hook. Everything was ornate and old, he thought, sitting down on the bunk to take off his shoes.
Beneath the blanket something moved. He jumped to his feet, heart racing. Where he had been sitting there was a lump about the size of a silver dollar; it moved. He threw back the covers and saw a large ugly insect. Disgusted, he rang for the porter.
“Mineral water?” said the plump face peering into the compartment.
“Mineral water, hell. Get that bug out of here.”
The porter’s eyes grew round and his face paled in spots, producing an unpleasant mottled effect. Muttering under his breath, he rushed down the corridor, returning a moment later with a dustpan and a brush. With great care he removed the insect from the bunk; then, with the back of the brush, he crushed it in the dustpan.
“Very bad,” he said, his normal color returning to his face. He was breathing heavily, though.
“I hope to God you haven’t got bedbugs here, too.”
But the porter was not listening to him. He continued to shake his head, murmuring, “Very bad, very bad.”
Pete, a little irritated, asked him what the insect was.
“Scorpion, monsieur. Never before has there been one found like this,
never
before. You must believe me. It is impossible. I clean. They clean. Everyone guards well the filth. There are
never
scorpions on train.”
Pete sat down heavily on the bunk, feeling ill. “They’re poisonous?”
“Yes, monsieur. Most painful.”
“Can they kill a man?
“Seldom, but he becomes sick, oh, sick like the poor soul in hell.”
Pete considered the poor soul in hell for a reverent moment.
“The sickness lasts many days,” added the porter morbidly.
“About how many days?” Pete was suddenly interested.
“Ten days, maybe less, maybe more.”
“About a week, then?”
“A week, yes. Now I will examine the bed with care.” While the porter remade his bunk, Pete considered the scorpion, whose poisonous sting might have laid him up for the entire time he was in Luxor. The coincidence was striking, and sinister. Yet who could have had the opportunity to…
Then he remembered where he had first seen the dark man in the dining car: at L’Auberge des Pyramides. He had waltzed with Hélène; she had called him a business rival.
He wondered then if it was too late for him to turn back.
For a long time that night in his bunk, he lay awake, listening to the clatter of the train’s wheels as they sped him into the hot barren wastes of Upper Egypt.
He got off the train shortly before nine o’clock in the morning, before the sun had begun to scorch the streets of the town. Even so, the glare of morning light was blinding and he blinked in it as he stood uncertainly beside the train, a crowd of natives jostling him, trying to get his suitcase away from him.
Except for these usual pests, he was unnoticed in the crowd. The rich Egyptians, wearing white suits and dark red fezzes, moved easily, naturally through the crowds, accustomed to the noise and confusion. There were no Americans, Pete noticed, no Europeans in sight. Suddenly he felt isolated and strange, cut off from his own kind.
He walked slowly toward the station house, a fairly modern building, like those back home. Inside the station he paused. He was wondering whether or not to strike out on his own when an old man, wearing a turban and steel-rimmed spectacles, approached him, smiling, his broken teeth like an animal’s fangs.
“Sir Wells,” he said, bowing, reaching for Pete’s suitcase. “I am Osman, dragoman, sir.”
“I was wondering where you were,” said Pete, suddenly relieved, even by the sight of this evil-looking old man.
“We shall take the carriage. Sir Wells, to the Karnak Inn,” said Osman, without altering his wide, unpleasant smile.
“Good deal,” answered Pete, following him out to the street.
There were several battered old taxicabs of obscure ancestry out front, and a number of horse-drawn, open carriages, to one of which Osman guided Pete. The driver, without even looking around, cracked his whip as soon as they were seated, and off they rode through the crowd of milling natives. In a moment they were out of the yard surrounding the station and moving down the dry dusty street. The dragoman sat very straight beside Pete, no longer smiling, his face dignified.
For a few moments Pete was a tourist, watching the houses flash by as their carriage moved through narrow streets, natives ducking out of its way. The houses were two-story, a little like the houses of Mexico, he thought, although the minarets, the red and white striped towers on the skyline, were like nothing he’d ever seen before.
He turned to Osman and said, “Is it far from here, the hotel?”
“Only several minutes from the town, sir,” said the old man. “It is on the river.”
“The Nile?”
“Is there another river?” The old man looked surprised.
“Very crowded?”
“The hotel? No, sir. This is not the time of year for tourists. The other hotels are closed. Only this one stays open in summer, for people who must come up here to do the business.”
“Like me.”
An ugly smile split the brown withered face. “You are tourist, Sir Wells,” he said, and he sounded more as if he were giving an order than making a comment on Pete’s status.
“Any Americans at the hotel?”
“No Americans.”
“All Egyptians?”
“I think yes, Sir Wells, but then I am seldom in Karnak Inn,” and he inclined his head obsequiously.
Pete sat back in the carriage and observed the streets as they grew more and more rustic, houses giving way to fields of shacks and palm trees until, at the bend of a road, they were on a bluff overlooking the Nile.
“Dry up in summer,” said Osman, waving a professional hand at the river, which wound like a gray-green snake through the eroded valley. Even Pete could tell that it had shrunk, leaving sand bars and islands and rock beaches behind. “Libya,” said Osman, pointing to a line of skull-white mountains beyond the river to the west. “And the tombs.”
“Tombs?”
“Where the jackal god guards the dead kings,” said Osman, a strange expression in his filmy eyes.
Pete nodded, uneasy, his flesh prickling a little. Somehow the old man’s words had struck an unexpected chord of fear deep inside him…the tombs, the Valley of the Kings, where the mummies of the great Pharaohs lay buried with all their treasure. He began to recall legends, old newspaper stories.… But then they were at the Karnak Inn, and in the rush of paying for the carriage and registering the mysterious fear was forgotten.
The hotel was a one-story ramshackle building, like a house in New Orleans, with shuttered windows, tall ceilings, many overhead fans, flies, and tile floors. The lobby was comparatively cool and dim. Except for a pair of Negro servants leaning with eyes shut against the farthest wall, the lobby was empty.
Osman clapped his hands; it was the Egyptian way of getting service, and very royal in effect. One of the servants ambled forward and took the suitcase. The manager, a dark youth in a gray suit with chalk stripe and Windsor tie, appeared from an inner office.
“Mr. Wells? Yes? We were expecting you. You missed our car at the station? But I see you are in good hands. So hot…” Pete registered, then asked if there were any messages for him.
“No, sir, nothing. Would you like me to show you your room or would you care to have breakfast now? We have a celebrated dining room.” Pete said he would prefer to go to his room. The manager himself led the way down a long corridor in the wing that overlooked the river. Osman followed with the porter. It was quite a procession, thought Pete, trying to concentrate on what the manager was saying.
“You are our first American guest in two months…a rarity in hot weather. We have no Europeans here at all in the hotel, except, of course, myself and Miss Mueller. You perhaps know her? She is a very famous artist.” Pete said he was pleased to hear it. “She is here to examine the sights. You see, she works in Cairo during the season and this is her vacation. She is enamored of the tombs and spends a great deal of time on the other side of the river. A strange occupation for a young lady who is an internationally famous artist and the intimate of the highest, but then we must allow for human nature, Mr. Wells,” said the manager, ushering him into his bedroom. It was a large comfortable room with a huge bed canopied by mosquito netting. Below the window was a strip of garden, the road, and, beyond that, the river. Downriver, north of the hotel, behind a wall of green foliage, Pete could make out the dusty bulk of a temple.
After assuring the manager that all was well and that he would eat presently, Pete was left alone with Osman in the bedroom. They looked at one another thoughtfully. Pete spoke first: “Where is Said?”
“The gentleman will come to us in good time.”
“Soon?”
“I have no idea, Sir Wells. Until then you will see the ruins.”
“Are you telling me or asking me?”
The old man gave his mirthless leer. “You are tourist, Sir Wells.”
“You may have a point there. No ruins today, though. I’m going to get my bearings first. Understand?”
Osman bowed. “I am at your service.”
“Where can I find you if I want you?”
“The manager will see that I attend you, sir. Ask him. But I shall be nearby all the time.”
“That’s good news,” said Pete, and he gestured curtly to the door. Osman bowed himself out, almost bumping into a tall figure who hurried by so fast that Pete caught only a quick glimpse of the man who had sat opposite him on the train.
* * *
The celebrated dining room of the Karnak Inn was not quite so bad as Pete had suspected; he did not mind cockroaches as long as they were not on the menu. Paper gummed with glue hung from the center of each slowly revolving fan, attracting those few flies that were not already busy with Pete’s breakfast. He brushed them away and ate hungrily. Through French windows opposite him he could see a rank green garden, bright with flowers. As he was drinking coffee, a woman entered. He knew immediately who she was.
Anna Mueller was far more attractive than he had imagined. For some reason her name had made him think of a fat, red-faced German blonde with her hair tied in braids about her head; the reality was very different.
She was not tall. Her body was perfectly proportioned, from the smooth straight neck to the small waist and slender legs; but it was her face that most attracted him. Her hair was a natural red-gold, more dark than light, like dull copper. Her skin was naturally pale and her eyes, beneath straight dark brows, were a deep vivid blue. Her expression was sad.
She hesitated when she saw him; then she moved toward the French windows. “Would you like some coffee?” His own voice sounded suddenly harsh in his ears.
She turned, surprised, one hand on the door leading into the garden. “No, thank you,” she said. Her voice was deep, the German accent faint. And then she was gone.
Pete cursed himself for a fool. The first impression was always important, and he had sounded like a high-school boy cruising a Main Street girl. And it mattered, he realized suddenly; it mattered very much the impression he made upon her. Bewildered by his own discovery, he finished breakfast. Then, after lighting a cigarette and counting to twenty to quiet the familiar buzzing in his ears, he got up and walked out into the garden.
He was not sure whether or not she was surprised to see him. Her face was serene. She was seated on a bench beneath an arbor of what looked to Pete like camellias.
“May I sit down?”
“If you like.” Her tone was neutral. She moved over to make room for him.
“My name is Wells, Peter Wells.”
“You are American?” She turned half around and looked at him frankly.
“That’s right. You?”
“I have no country,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice, completely without the usual dramatics he had grown accustomed to in Egypt whenever nationality was discussed.
“You are German?”
She nodded. “Düsseldorf, once,” she said. “How did you know? My accent?”
“The manager told me the internationally famous artist Anna Mueller was staying in the hotel. You fit the description.”
She laughed, suddenly, her face becoming, magically, like a little girl’s. “International, yes,” she said finally. “Artist, no. Famous, no. Anna Mueller, yes, I am she.”
“You sing in a night club?”
“How did you know?”
“I heard about you in Cairo.”
She frowned and looked away. “I am so notorious?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you mean, isn’t it?” There was a sharp edge to her voice that startled him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve only been in this country a week or so.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. Forgive me.” She was genuinely sorry, he could see, and he forgave her. He talked to her a little about himself, telling her the story of wanting to see the ruins, not mentioning his actual business or his Cairo connections. When he asked her why she was in Luxor, she said, “To think.”
“In this heat?”
She smiled. “It doesn’t stop the thinking, does it?”
“A little, maybe. Why didn’t you go somewhere cool?”
“There is no such place in this country.”
“And you have to stay here?”
“I have to stay here.” She plucked a flower absently and twirled it between her fingers.
“Have you been a singer long?”