The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories (24 page)

An English assistant manager came in. He was accompanied by an Egyptian police officer in a field marshal’s uniform.

“Sorry to bother you, Captain Cartaret,” the manager said. “But this officer wants to know if you heard anything unusual taking place last night.”

Cartaret collected his thoughts, and:

“At what time?” he asked.

“At about half past eleven.”

“I was out then. I didn’t return until after one. Why?”

“A certain Mrs Parradine had the next room. She was seen to go out at about eleven-thirty, and she hasn’t come back. Her baggage contains the suit in which she arrived, toilet articles, and so on, and a lot of tissue paper and cord. The whole room is in a state of disorder.”

“What do you suspect? Suicide?”

The manager glanced aside at the police officer.

“We don’t know. I apologise again. Obviously, you can’t help us as you weren’t here.”

They went out.

Cartaret had just come from the bath when the manager returned alone.

“I couldn’t tell you while that damned policeman was standing by,” he explained. “But this disappearance of the mysterious Mrs Parradine is probably linked up with something that happened out at Bûlak last night.”

“What happened there?”

“One of Aswami’s girl friends drugged him and got clear away with a haul of his priceless rubies! I wasn’t on duty when Mrs Parradine arrived—but I wonder. Aswami’s a nasty bit of work, and my own sympathy is entirely with the lady, even if she left without settling her account! Knew you’d be curious, so dropped in to tell you.”

For a long time after he had gone, Cartaret sat smoking and trying to find out where
his
sympathy lay. He recalled the horror which Abdûl had whispered. He recalled Sirena’s eyes when she had said, “You remember how handsome he was?…He has seen a famous French specialist. There is hope, but it will take a long time and cost a lot of money—”

These recollections settled the point.

But he changed his plans. He decided to leave Cairo that morning.

“What you say is true enough,” Tom Borrodale admitted. “Most professional Egyptologists are unimaginative. Meant to be, I guess. You see, they come across queer things, things which just have to be written off for the good of a man’s health. There’s the Haunted Tomb in the Valley of the Kings where the unwrapped mummy of a strangled girl was found; there’s the empty room in the Pyramid of Meydum; and there’s the Woman of the Great Pyramid.”

He rested bronzed and hairy legs on one chair, leaning back in another—six feet of sunbaked stolidity arrayed in shorts and a khaki shirt. It was the in-between hour, so that Shepheard’s terrace showed as nearly deserted as I had seen it since my arrival in Cairo. There were inky shadows and dazzling high lights, and, save for rather more uniforms than usual, traffic in the Sharia Kâmel was much like the traffic I remembered ten years before.

“You look fit, but a trifle warworn, Tom.”

“Yes.” He nodded and began to fill his pipe. “I joined the infantry, like a mug—and any foot slogger who follows Montgomery wants iron feet as much as iron nerves. Enjoying a spot of leave at the moment.”

We fell silent, until: “You are not one of those, I recall, who believe that Ancient Egypt holds no more mysteries for modern man?” I said.

“Not by long odds.” He threw a worn pouch on the table and took a sip from his glass. “Those I have mentioned, for instance. Then, since your time, a case cropped up which eclipsed, for a while, the Tutankhamen legends. Something quite in your way.”

“What was it?”

“Oh, a classic example! If we hadn’t been in the middle of a number-one war, the home newspapers would have sent special reporters out on the job. It happened to a man we’ll call Lake. You don’t know him, and nothing would be served by using his other name. The second man—a fellow in my own line; experienced excavator and well up in Arab matters—we’ll call Thomson. Then—there was a girl.”

And this is the story which Tom Borrodale told me about Lake, Thomson, a girl, and the mark of Maat.

Thomson, before the war, had been employed by the Department of Antiquities, and was recognised as a sound Egyptologist. His last job (for which he had been “lent” by the department) was an attempt to complete an excavation begun by Schroeder, the American. Schroeder had sunk a shaft, at great cost, by means of which he had hoped to gain access to the tomb of a queen who was also a priestess of Maat (Maat is the Ancient Egyptian goddess of truth, a somewhat mysterious deity of whose rites little is known).

Funds failing or something of the kind, Schroeder went home and this shaft was never completed; but Thomson, who had followed the work with interest, decided to try to influence new capital and to carry Schroeder’s shaft through. This was where Lake came into the scheme of things.

Lake and Thomson had been up at Oxford together; but Lake, who had inherited a considerable property, had blossomed into a fashionable dilettante, whereas Thomson had had to work hard for his living. Lake, latterly (this was just before the outbreak of war), had been pottering about Egypt and had developed a keen interest in Thomson’s studies. Perhaps seeing himself as another Carnarvon, he agreed to put up the necessary funds and, Thomson in charge, they resumed the work.

It seems that Schroeder’s calculations were accurate enough, and in rather a shorter time than Thomson had anticipated, they found their way into the antechamber of the tomb. Further progress was held up by a massive portcullis which offered every promise of a first-class nuisance. However, there were some objects of interest in the anteroom, including a great part of the regalia of a royal high priestess. An amethyst scarab set in a heavy-gold ring and inscribed with the sign of Maat, Thomson pronounced to be unique.

Much encouraged, they had just gone to work on the portcullis when war was declared—and once more Schroeder’s shaft had to be abandoned. Lake, who already held a pilot’s certificate, joined the R.A.F., and Thomson obtained an infantry commission. In due course, both drifted back to North Africa, and both became attached to the Eighth Army. It was during the lull before Montgomery’s great advance that the girl stepped into the picture.

Moira (let’s call her Moira) was an Irish-Australian and had come out as a nurse with a contingent from Melbourne. Her family had plenty of money, and she had been educated in England, and I gathered that she was by way of being a beauty.

Both Lake and Thomson met her socially in Cairo, and Thomson, who found her altogether too attractive for his peace of mind, seems to have resigned her to Lake, slightly the younger man, good-looking, and in every way more suitable; or so Thomson thought. “He didn’t believe,” as Tom Borrodale put it, “that mere brawn, a medium brain, and small prospects beyond five hundred a year could appeal to any sensible girl. Particularly, with a charming and wealthy man, who one day would inherit a baronetcy as competition.”

Thomson was shifted first; and Moira saw him off. There were tears in her eyes, and he decided that she was sorry for him. Although he had tried hard to conceal his real sentiments, he gave her credit for knowing how he felt; he believed that women were like that. To Lake, on parting, he said simply, “Good luck, old man.”

When the campaign really got going, Lake’s squadron was right up in support. But the two men had seen little of each other up to the time that Thomson was sent over on a special job behind Rommel’s lines. His intimate knowledge of Arabic and the Arabs was not wasted. Suitably dressed, he could pass for a member of any one of six or more orders without much risk of detection.

Attired in Senusi style, he was flown across by a roundabout route to be parachuted at a selected point; and the pilot allotted to him was Lake.

Well, they were unlucky. An unsuspected A.A. gun, hidden in a wadi, scored a beauty just as they were turning northward toward the coast. It developed into a race against leaking petrol and faltering engines—and they lost. Lake crash-landed in the middle of what Borrodale described as “God knows where.”

Thomson had a splinter in one shoulder, and lost a quantity of blood; the wound was difficult to dress; but Lake escaped intact. Observations showed that they were about sixty miles west of the British lines. They had, and could carry, sufficient rations and water, sparingly shared, to last them for three days. Their radio had cracked up. It would have been grim enough under normal conditions: being in enemy country made it worse.

They started to trek back; “and,” said Borrodale, “only those who know the gritty, shelterless hell called the Libyan desert can begin to imagine those days and nights.”

* * *

Both were bitten by some unidentified crawling thing while they slept in the shadow of a wadi, and Thomson developed a high temperature. His injured arm swelled to nearly twice its normal size and he began to laugh out loud and talk nonsense. Lake, a man of slighter physique, was not in much better shape. But he did his best to drag Thomson along.

Just before dawn of the third day, Thomson fell into a sort of coma from which Lake was unable to rouse him. Weak as a kitten, himself, he waited until the end. It meant the loss of eighteen precious hours and of nearly all the water. Then, he scraped out a shallow pit and dragged the largest bits of stone which he could carry from a neighbouring mound to make a cairn over his dead companion. It was the best he could do to protect him from the jackals and the vultures.

Lake was picked up, a whole day later, by a reconnaissance party from an Indian unit and rushed to a hospital in Cairo.

“I may as well tell you,” said Tom Borrodale, “that he was a pretty desperate case. He looked more like a mummy than a man; and for a long time he hovered on the border line.”

No one followed the stages of his slow recovery with greater interest than Moira. You see, so far, he had been quite unable to tell the story of that dreadful march. Incoherent rambling formed his only conversation; and the grim facts were fearfully awaited.

When, at last, a sick man but a sane one, Lake told his story, Moira was among the first to hear it Much to most people’s surprise, she took the news of Thomson’s death very badly. The thing that seemed to worry her, and it was a queer thing to worry about in the circumstances, was the possibility that Lake, in his weakened state, had made an inadequate cairn—the possibility that Thomson’s body might become the prey of carrion birds and beasts. Lake did his best to reassure her, but he was not altogether successful, as will appear.

Whether the thought of the dead man lying out there in the Libyan desert preyed on her mind or whether overwork at the hospital where she was stationed was responsible has little to do with the matter; but Moira had a breakdown and became a patient herself.

However, she made a good recovery, and was given sick leave. This was the cool season, and she decided to go up to Luxor. Lake was still reporting to the MO when she left, but he had never failed to send flowers, fruit and such offerings to Moira throughout her illness. They lunched together at Shepheard’s on the day she left, and Lake saw her off. About a week later he was given a clean bill, and he lost no time in heading upriver;,too. He, also, decided to spend his leave in Luxor.

“This brings me,” explained Tom Borrodale, “to the mystery I promised; and here is the mystery.”

* * *

“There is something I want you to do for me,” Moira said to Lake one morning as they sat in the hotel garden.

Lake, stretched beside her in a long chair, looked at Moira smilingly. She was well worth looking at, too: one of those chestnut blondes with warm, creamy colouring whose production in the climate of Ireland seems so odd. With her deep violet eyes and her daintiness, she looked like a flower of the sunny south. Actually, of course, Moira was born in Australia, but both her parents came from Ireland. Lake was a goodlooker, also—a man of medium build, fairish, and always groomed perfectly, whether in uniform or out of it. He looked quite fit by this time, and so, for that matter, did Moira. They used to take long rides together on the other side of the Nile, Lake loving to act as her guide to the city of dead kings.

“You know I would do anything for you,” he replied—and he meant it; his brown eyes glowed as he watched her. “What is it you want?”

That he was hopelessly, blindly in love with her no one who saw them together could doubt. She was his religion; for Lake there was no God—only Moira.

She hesitated a while before she answered, staring out over the river to where a native dahabeah moved slowly through morning haze like a giant hawk moth with lifted wings. Except for the clanking of an ancient water wheel near by, there was hardly a sound. The pair of them just lay there in a peaceful world that didn’t seem to know that Hitler had ever been born. At last, Moira spoke.

“I want you to let me go down Schroeder’s shaft,” she said.

This was not the first time she had made that request. But Lake, gently, and evidently inspired by sincere anxiety to spare her pain, had always headed her off. In their many expeditions among the tombs and temples he had avoided showing her the spot upon which he and Thomson had been at work when war interrupted them. Moira didn’t even know quite where it was located.