The Mummy (9 page)

“Let me go with you,” Evelyn said.

Groaning, Jonathan said, “Oh, sis, why?”

The warden said, “That’s out of the question. No women are allowed at hangings in my country.”

Her chin up again, she said, “In your country, women wear veils. Do you see a veil on my face? I’m an Englishwoman, after all.”

Hassan shrugged. “So be it. Unlike your face, hanging is not pretty, my dear.”

Soon Jonathan, Evelyn, and the warden were stepping out onto a balcony overlooking another courtyard, where from barred windows all around, inmates could look down at the gallows that had been erected. These gallows had no lower apronlike enclosure to keep onlookers from seeing the struggling and kicking of a hanging man. The warden was no sadist: he obviously felt the need to provide his prisoners with a little entertainment.

And Evelyn’s presence was providing entertainment, as well: From every barred window, bulging eyes in horrible faces took in the presence of Jonathan’s lovely sister. There were no catcalls or wolf whistles: These sorry countenances—displaying a remarkable collection of scars, scraggly beards, missing eyes, and rotten teeth—had gone dead silent at the sight of her, starving jackals staring at fresh meat.

“A woman without a veil,” the warden said, lifting an eyebrow in an
I-told-you-so
manner, “might as well be sitting here unclothed.”

Evelyn ignored the remark, her eyes on the prisoner being ushered into the courtyard.

O’Connell was led up onto the gallows by the same guards who’d manhandled him in the visitor’s pen, and positioned on the trapdoor. A hangman in a mask, with a bare chest and loose-fitting pants, draped the noose around the prisoner’s neck, then cinched it tight. O’Connell noticed Evelyn and Jonathan seated in the balcony nearby, and at first frowned, then smiled.

The warden took his seat and Evelyn sat next to him; Jonathan preferred to stand.

Evelyn said to Hassan, “I will give you fifty pounds more to let him live than the legion’s paying you to kill him.”

Jonathan could barely believe his ears. One hundred pounds for that lout? Of course, if he could lead them to Hamanaptra . . .

The warden’s nose twitched like a big dark bunny’s. “I would
pay
one hundred pounds to see the insolent pig hang.”

“Two, then,” she said.

“Two hundred pounds?” Jonathan asked. Now he sat down, heavily, next to his sister.

“Two hundred pounds,” Evelyn said, nodding curtly.

The warden shook his head, dismissively, and raised a hand. “Proceed!” he called to the hangman, who stood near his deadly lever. O’Connell’s forehead was tensed and beaded with sweat; he could hear every word of the negotiation between the warden and Jonathan’s sister.

“Three
hundred pounds!” Evelyn said.

Jonathan clutched his sister’s arm, whispering, “Are you mad? A year’s stipend for that blackguard?”

Evelyn looked daggers at her brother and her mouth formed, but she did not speak the word, “Hamanaptra.”

The warden, however, did not even reply to this latest offer. Down on the gallows, the hangman was saying to O’Connell, “Any last request?”

“Yeah—could we do this tomorrow, instead? That fish-head lunch just isn’t settling.”

That stopped the hangman cold—he’d never had such a request—and he turned, and yelling, repeated the plea for the balcony, though the warden and his guests had heard every word.

Interrupting, the warden said, “No, he can’t wait until tomorrow. Get on with it!”

Embarrassed, the hangman gave O’Connell a
why-I-oughta
look, and grabbed the trapdoor lever.

“Five hundred pounds,”
Evelyn said firmly.

Jonathan covered his face with a hand.

The warden looked at Evelyn, calling out to the hangman, “A moment! . . . Five hundred pounds?”

“Yes.”

Hassan placed a hand on Evelyn’s leg, just above the knee. “I will consent, if you grant me some other inducement, not financial . . . a personal kindness. I am a lonely man in a difficult job.”

Evelyn plucked his greasy paw from her leg with the thumb and middle finger of her right hand, as if removing a particularly odious bug. She turned away and made a sound in her chest that conveyed her revulsion.

The warden had his pride, which was wounded by rude, crude laughter from the windows where prisoners had witnessed the rebuff. In the thumbs-down gesture that had been good enough for Nero, Hassan cued his hangman to pull the lever.

Which the hangman did.

The trapdoor fell away, under O’Connell’s boots, and as Evelyn screamed, “Nooooo!”, the former corporal of the Foreign Legion dropped through the hole, the rope jerking tight.

O’Connell’s body snapped at the end of the rope . . .

. . . but he was clearly alive, struggling, kicking!

“Ah!” the warden said, and touched the fingers of his hands together playfully, “a rare treat: His neck did not break. We have the pleasure of watching him take his time strangling to death.”

The audience in the barred windows gave the show mixed reviews: Some were amused, and hooting with laughter; others were angry, possibly outraged that the prisoner should be tortured so slowly, or was it annoyance over having the fun of seeing a neck broken denied them? Jonathan certainly took no pleasure in seeing the beggar turning various shades of red, struggling so piteously.

Evelyn was whispering in the warden’s ear. Surely she wasn’t telling him about . . .

“Hamanaptra?” the warden said, eyes wide. “You lie!”

“Never! I’m a respectable woman.”

Hassan frowned. “This filthy godless son of a pig knows where to find the City of the Dead, and all its treasures?”

“Yes . . . and if you cut him down, we will give you five percent.”

O’Connell, strangling and eavesdropping, managed to croak out, “Five percent?” His eyes were bugging out, in part due to Evelyn’s cheapness, Jonathan supposed, but also because he was choking to death.

“All right,” Evelyn said, “ten percent.”

“Fifty,” the warden said.

“Twenty.”

“Give it . . . give it to . . .” O’Connell was saying, as he twisted and turned redder.

“Forty,” the warden said.

“Thirty.”

“I’m . . . I’m dyin’ here!” O’Connell called.

“Twenty-five,” the warden said.

“Done!” Evelyn said, and they shook hands.

The warden flashed his green smile, yelled a command in Arabic, and a scimitar slashed the air, cutting the rope, sending O’Connell crashing to the ground.

He rolled on the gravel, half dead, still gagging; but he’d won the crowd over: the captive audience at the barred windows was cheering and clapping and whistling, though O’Connell was in too much agony to appreciate his celebrity.

Jonathan didn’t feel much better himself. Twenty-five percent! That City of the Dead better bloody well be out there . . .

Evelyn stood and leaned over the balcony railing and smiled down at her new partner.

“Nice meeting you, too,” she said.

And O’Connell passed out.

 
6
 

A Night on the Nile

T
he Nile—with its two branches, the White and the Blue—was the longest river in the world and the only one Richard O’Connell ever heard of that flowed north. Everyone in this damn-fool country lived on the river’s banks or along its canals; here at Cairo, and just south, was the widest part of the valley—five whole miles.

Under the hot, dry afternoon sun, the Nile lay like a bolt of shimmering satin, a few shades deeper than the nearly cloudless sky, spiked by pyramids across the way. On the river’s placid surface graceful little boats glided, laden with passengers and cargo, sails spread like the white wings of gulls.

The peacefulness of this view was negated by the bustle of the boardwalk adjoining the docks of Giza Port, where tourists and teams of explorers were pushing awkwardly through an army of turbaned men in their nightshirtlike robes, hawkers peddling King Tut trinkets, and beggars bellowing, “Baksheesh!”

The word, which meant “Gimme something!”, seemed to be a two-syllable national anthem: They all sang it. O’Connell, lugging a gunnysack, ignored them, even the child who informed him, “Fadder and modder dead, belly empty.” The Chicagoan had spent enough time in this part of the world to know that pitching a quarter to one of these poor souls would bring every beggar down on him like the Notre Dame front line on a ball carrier.

O’Connell was a new man, thanks to the twenty pounds he’d talked out of his benefactor, Miss Evelyn Carnahan, to cover expenses and supplies. Shaved, hair cut and combed, boots and chinos begging to be broken in, his white shirt so new and fresh it bore no sweat circles yet, a brown kerchief covering where the noose had rubbed his neck raw, he looked dashing and handsome and damn well knew it.

He spotted them in the crowd. Evelyn, in a wide-brimmed white hat and a blue dress that might have seemed frumpy were it not traversing some very nice curves, and her brother, Jonathan, in pith helmet and khakis. They were both hauling heavy carpetbags, doing their best to hold on to their hats, dignity and money, as they moved through the horde of peddlers and panhandlers, to the steamer
Ibis
that awaited them at the jetty.

As he caught up to them, O’Connell could hear their conversation, in progress.

“How can we even be sure he’ll show up?” Evelyn was saying. “For all we know, he’s sitting in a bar, drinking away my twenty pounds.”

“That sounds more like me, Sis, than O’Connell. He’ll be here—these American cowboy types are as good as their word. It’s all they have.”

Evelyn continued, in a clipped, haughty manner: “Well, personally I find him a filthy, rude, impertinent cad, and I don’t like him one tiny bit.”

“Anybody I know?” O’Connell asked, sidling up to her.

Her eyes widened in surprised embarrassment—big blue eyes that O’Connell wouldn’t have minded diving into; and that mouth, full, sensual . . .

He caught himself, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of noticing his admiring her, and in the process he failed to notice that she had been admiring the new spit-and-polished him.

“Afternoon, O’Connell,” Jonathan said, nodding toward his sister, taking the American’s arm, shaking his hand enthusiastically. “Don’t mind Sis—she was talking about some other cad.”

“He sounds pretty bad,” O’Connell said, with a little smile.

“Hello, Mr. O’Connell.” Evelyn smiled nervously at him, pretending she didn’t know she was being needled, as O’Connell fell in step with them, pushing through the crowd toward the waiting stern-wheeler.

All around them, beggars were bawling, “Baksheesh!”

“Ripping day to begin an adventure, what?” Jonathan said, a hand on O’Connell’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” O’Connell said, withdrawing himself from Jonathan’s grasp and stopping to check for his wallet. “ ‘Ripping.’ ”

“Dear boy,” Jonathan said, pausing to touch his heart in a gesture of wounded pride, “I would never steal from a partner.”

“Nice to know you have standards. How’s the chin?”

The bruise on Jonathan’s jaw, from O’Connell’s punch-through-the-bars, was a lovely black, blue, and orange, like an exotic blossoming flower.

“Think nothing of it, partner mine,” Jonathan said cheerily. “That sort of thing happens to me all the time.”

“Bet it does.”

Evelyn dropped her bags to the boardwalk, where they clunked heavily, drawing the two men’s attention. She cleared her throat and, with exaggerated formality, said, “Mr. O’Connell, as you well know, we have a considerable journey ahead of us—”

“One day by steamer, two by camel, yes, ma’am.”

“Yes. And before we embark on this arduous adventure, and put ourselves to considerable trouble and discomfort, not to say expense . . . can you look me straight in the eye and convince me that this is not a sham designed to bilk me of my money?”

“What?”

Evelyn, lovely face blushed blue by her hat brim’s shadow, lifted her chin and looked down her nose at him—a habit she had that was not her most endearing, in O’Connell’s opinion. “Despite what you might assume, my brother and I are not wealthy, nor do we have any desire to spend our meager funds and risk our lives on . . . what is the phrase?”