PIERCE WAS SITTING ALONE at breakfast the next morning when a girl came up and joined him. She wore a blue linen sleeveless dress that fitted smoothly over her breasts and narrow waist. Her long dark hair was loose around her face; her eyes were an incredibly deep blue.
“Would you call the waiter?” the girl asked. She looked directly at him. “I hope you don’t mind company. I wanted to meet you.” Her accent was English.
“Not at all,” Pierce said, lighting a cigarette. “My name is Robert Pierce.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m Lisa Barrett.”
Then he remembered: Lord Grover’s personal secretary. Count on Grover, he thought. He let his eyes run over her while she ordered coffee and eggs. When she looked back at him, he said, “Lord Grover has excellent taste.”
“Is that a compliment,” she asked, “or a slur on my character?”
“I’m wondering myself.”
“I thought you were the man with all the answers.”
“Only some of them.”
She spread her napkin across her lap. “Well, you can keep wondering, then.”
“Do you like men who have all the answers?”
“Never met any,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to meet you.”
He watched her eat. She had a strong face, dark eyebrows leading to a fine, straight nose, and a proud mouth. High cheekbones. She looked rather Egyptian, he thought.
“Would you care,” he said, “to accompany me on a tour of the city?”
“Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “I would like it very much.”
They took a cab to the citadel, on the eastern edge of the city. The mosque of Sultan Mohammed ibn Qualawun rose magnificently behind the high, ochre walls of the fortress, which still housed troops. Pierce walked with Lisa through the mosque and out onto a terrace where they could see all of Cairo spread out before them. In the distance were the gray hulks of the pyramids, disrupting the horizon.
She stood next to him at the railing, looking out. “It’s awfully big,” she said, “I never expected that.”
“It’s the largest city in Africa and the tenth largest capital in the world,” Pierce said. “Three and a half million people. That makes it bigger than Paris.”
“You’ve been doing homework,” she said. She pointed to a nearby mosque. “What’s that?”
“The mosque of Sultan Hasan.”
“And over there?”
“The mosque of Ibn Tulun.”
“You really know what you’re talking about.” She walked along the railing. He liked to watch her walk.
“Is that Giza out there?” She pointed to a group of pyramids to the south.
“No, that’s Saqqara. Giza is over there.”
He had the feeling that she was testing him in some peculiar way, examining him. Often, he noticed her watching him closely; she had been doing it all morning. He wondered about her age. It was hard to say—twenty-four, twenty-eight, perhaps even thirty. She pushed her dark hair back from her face.
“Do you have a cigarette?”
He gave her one and lit it. She really was an astonishingly beautiful girl. There was a wide-eyed look about her which he liked.
Suddenly, from one of the minarets came the sound of the muezzin, the warbling voice calling the Moslem faithful to prayer.
The call was picked up in one mosque after another. It floated over the city, soft and gentle, mingled with the wind.
“My God,” she said, “that’s an incredible sound. It’s so…foreign.”
He nodded. He was thinking of what Barnaby had said in a moment of drunken exhilaration: Cairo—the city of a thousand minarets, where the call to prayer had been heard five times daily for a thousand years.
“Have you been here before?” she asked.
“Yes, once.”
“You travel a lot.” It was a statement.
“Yes.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“I suppose.”
He felt uncomfortable.
They walked down a side street, looking at the faces in the crowd. The variety was remarkable: pale Europeans in business suits; native Egyptians with dark skins and straight noses; black-haired, lighter-skinned men of Turkish or Persian extraction; stocky, purple-black Nubians from Lower Egypt and the Sudan; an occasional slim Negro from the Nilotic tribes of deeper Africa. There were women in veils and women in tight skirts, makeup, and high heels; and there were children everywhere, running up to clutch at your clothes, palms extended, asking for baksheesh.
In the Egyptian Museum, they stared at the mummies, all collected in one room. A guide explained to them about each pinched, drawn face. Pierce found it a strange experience, looking at the features of men of power and majesty dead three thousand years and more. Some of them still retained their regal appearance.
For instance, there was Sekenre, who united Egypt about 1550 B.C. and drove out the invaders. He was the subject of a folktale for centuries afterward; his mummy showed the scars of battle, a horribly mutilated face and skull.
But the most impressive was Ramses II. The skin was black from exposure to air, the hair tufted, the body shrunken. Even in death, the firm chin and tight mouth indicated unmistakably that this was a man to be reckoned with. Ramses II had built the mighty temple of Abu Simbel; he had ruled Egypt with a strong hand for sixty-seven years and had sired 150 children. He had been the pharaoh of Biblical oppression, and he had ruled with an iron hand, one of the most famous kings in a civilization that continued for thousands of years.
Later, they walked through the galleries displaying the contents of Tutankhamen’s tomb. It seemed to go on forever: case after case of jewelry, gold, lavish ornaments. Then, when they went outside, they passed a woman squatting on the street, nursing her child, her eyes hollow as she stared forward. Flies crawled on the baby’s face.
“It’s not fair,” Lisa had said.
The air-conditioning hummed softly in his hotel room. The shutters had been drawn against the afternoon light, giving the room a warm yellowish glow. But it was cool. Pierce sat in a chair watching the girl sleeping on the bed. She had fallen asleep sitting upright while they had talked after lunch. It was his own fault, he thought—talking too much, as usual.
He had made her lie down. She mumbled protests but was soon asleep again. Her skirt had been pulled up slightly, showing a firm thigh above a dimpled knee. She slept soundly, innocently.
A funny girl. More than anything else, she seemed to have been confused by their exploration of the city. Well, he thought, it was a confusing city—so vast, so poor, with so many sharp contrasts and contradictions.
He must have fallen asleep himself, because he dreamed of a huge wall of gold, then a room, then a vast cavern the size of a football field, all dull yellow. And he saw, drifting before him in a jumbled fog, a leering face above quivering breasts and the leering tanned faces of the crowd, which merged with the face of an old hag, missing most of her teeth, her jaws wrinkled grotesquely. Then a one-eyed man, staggering down a street, and a man on crutches. And the noise of an airplane, a humming, a droning.
He opened his eyes and heard the air-conditioner. Lisa was sitting up on the bed, looking at him.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, standing up. “But my dress is all wrinkled. How long did I sleep?”
“I don’t know. I fell asleep myself.”
“It was all that sun,” she said, walking into the bathroom. “Where did I put my purse?”
“By the lamp.” Pierce felt oddly happy. The fact that they had fallen asleep together gave him a feeling of unexpected intimacy which was pleasant. He watched her retrieve the purse and go into the bathroom. He followed her. She was combing her hair.
“I think I’d like to know you better,” he said.
“There’s plenty of time for that.”
“How about dinner?”
“Sorry, I have a dozen letters to get off before we leave Cairo tomorrow. I’ll have dinner in my room.”
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely.” She put the comb in her purse and snapped it shut. “I’d better get started now.”
You’re in a rush to leave, Pierce thought. You felt the same way I did.
He accompanied her to the door.
“Thanks for the use of your bed.”
“Quite all right. I’m sorry it couldn’t have been more—”
“It couldn’t have been. See you in the morning.” She smiled again, and was gone.
He went back and sat down on the bed, thinking about her for longer than he realized.
About ten that night, as he was packing for the airplane, a girl entered his room without knocking. He recognized her as one of the girls on Capri—a short blonde with short hair and a firm little body. She had a pixie manner and arched her back to thrust forward her breasts as she dangled the bottle of champagne in one hand.
“Company?” she asked.
“No thanks,” Pierce said. He was working on a way to pack his shirts so they wouldn’t wrinkle. In all his years, he had never quite learned how.
“Wouldn’t you like some champagne on our last night in civilization?”
“You’re nice,” he said, “But I’m not in the mood.”
“That’s all right,” she said brightly. “I can fix that.” She began unpeeling the wrapping around the cork and loosening the wires. “Do you have any glasses?”
“Please,” Pierce said. “I’d rather be alone tonight.”
The girl shrugged and left. A few minutes later, he got a call from Grover, who sounded hurt.
“Listen,” Grover said, “don’t you believe in Santa Claus? I don’t often have Communist impulses, you know.”
Pierce felt nothing but exhaustion. He sighed and said, “If I didn’t believe in Santa Claus, I wouldn’t be here.”
“I know what the problem is. You think you’re Santa Claus. You’re getting a complex, my boy.”
“Go to hell.”
“Dreaming of gold, are you?”
“See you in the morning,” Pierce said, and hung up. He sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette.
Tomorrow, they would be in Luxor.