25

"Hadi nearly suffocated," said Tucker that night, in our hotel. "The sand must have caved in on him."

My guy's serious face and tone contrasted with his spiky post-shower hair, wilder than Albert Einstein's.

I sat on on our bed and set two plastic forks on top of our Styrofoam box of day-old koshary, which balanced on the bedspread between us. "I saw the sand on him. But why was he underground?"

"I don't know." Tucker tossed an old paperback, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, onto his bedside table before he folded his legs to sit across from me on the bed. "I asked the mom and dad a few times, in Arabic, until the rest of the team told me to leave it alone."

"They were probably more worried about his neuro status," I agreed. "Did they end up stabilizing him?"

"I only got a quick look at him and the monitor. He was maintaining his O2 sat with nasal prongs at the time, and his BP was stable. Then they asked me to go to the ambulatory side, so I don't know any more than you do."

We both stared at the closed box of koshary. Neither of us had worked up an appetite yet. At the hospital, I'd barely managed to scribble down my Egyptian phone number and hand it to the grandmother before the paramedics came for Hadi.

No one had called me. For all I knew, Isabelle would keep blowing me off, and the family could not afford pediatric ICU care.

"What do you think of this elective so far?" I said.

Tucker flashed a smile at me. "Definitely the weirdest. And that's saying a lot with you around"

"Did you get any word on a scorpion, or what made the mark on his ankle?"

Tucker picked up his fork and drummed it against his palm. "I didn't want to ask and look even more stupid."

"Understood." I took a deep breath. This might be a good time to tell him about the Becker notes. You're not stupid. We got clues! I asked him another question first. "Hey, this is random, but does it mean anything if you add 'sa' onto someone's name? Like 'sa-hope' or 'sa-tucker'? Like in Japan, you'd say Hope-san out of respect?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Not that I've ever heard. Why?"

"Oh, just another niggly thing. On the acute side, a guy said 'sarudi.' I wondered if he was talking about Rudy."

Tucker burst out laughing so hard that I held down the Styrofoam box and utensils to make sure everything didn't fall off the bed. He chortled, "Hope! Sarudi just means Saudi. As in, Saudi Arabian."

"Well, how am I supposed to know that? Saudi is shorter than Sarudi."

Tucker shrugged, his shoulders still shaking. "Sorry. I guess I needed a laugh."

Mmph. I grabbed my fork and threw open the koshary lid for something to do.

Then I inhaled. The tomato sauce still smelled good. Ali knew what he was doing.

"Well, even if the medicine sucks, I got a lead on identifying the guy with the cobra bag," said Tucker.

"How on earth did you find that guy? Seems impossible in a city of 10 million people—double that if you include the suburbs."

Tucker waggled his eyebrows and gestured at the koshary. "Ladies first."

I winked at him and managed to balance some rice, macaroni, and lentils on my fork, but spilled them when I speared some fried onions. I shoved what I could in my mouth and said around that, "Not bad!"

Tucker chewed and grinned. "Yeah, I think there's some vinegar in the sauce. Anyway, for the cobra guy, I posted it on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Reddit and Discord and anywhere else. Kevin helped too."

"My little brother helped you from Canada?"

"Yeah. Him, Reza, Tori, Mireille, anyone. It doesn't matter, as long as you're boosting the signal. And I had a secret weapon."

"A billion friends?"

"Yes! Including Rudy, Maryam and Ali. The Mombergs retweeted it. The dad's recovered part of the vision in his eye, by the way, so that's promising."

"Phew."

"I even asked Isabelle and Youssef, but they didn't respond."

I grabbed my water from the bedside table and sipped it to clear a chick pea from my throat. "So basically you hit up everyone you've ever met?"

"Exactly! Then I went through all the suggestions and narrowed it down to two." He wiped his hands on a napkin so he could show me a photo.

I made a face. "That guy looks a bit fatter."

"And ten years older. But this one … " He moved to the next shot.

I sucked in my breath as I stared at the screen.

"Looks juuuuuust right," Tucker drawled.

I dropped my fork back into the styrofoam box we shared. "Who is he?"

"According to LinkedIn, Mr. Abdallah Hussein is an Egyptologist and private consultant who has worked for several museums. I messaged him."

"Hold up. He works for museums? Like the one that they tried to bomb on Wednesday?"

Tucker shook his head, shut the box of koshary, and got up to set it in the fridge. "His c.v. isn't up to date, so I'm not sure. In the past ten years, he's had contracts at both the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, which is in downtown Cairo, and the new one. That's the Grand Egyptian Museum, in Giza, near the Pyramids. The one with the IED."

"And that's the one Phillip Becker was trying to visit. So maybe the treasure is in the Grand Egyptian Museum, or the key to it is in that cobra bag."

"That's what I think, too. Occam's Razor: it's the simplest explanation. The problem is proving any of it."

I shook my head. "It's still amazing! So do you have any contact info for Mr. Abdallah Hussein? Maybe through his publications?" Lead authors list their e-mails.

"Nah. His last publication was four years ago, and he wasn't the lead author. But he does have a Twitter account, @OsirisPhD." Tucker showed it to me.

The photo definitely still looked like the same guy, although his hair was a little longer and his face fuller. However, there was a bigger problem. "This page is in Arabic."

"Ta dah!" Tucker clicked and translated it into English.

I scrolled through the posts. Lots of them were retweets (RT), reposting other people's articles:

RT: 10 Plagues of Egypt. Legend or reality?

I admired his RT'd photo of a green crystal called dioptase which had occasionally been mistaken for emeralds in ancient times. He also retweeted the occasional cat video. He posted one pic of his family. The littlest kid was maybe two.

Occasionally, he answered people's questions, mostly in English:

Yes, Osiris death in Nile is basis for belief that drowning in Nile is sacred.

No, Isis was nursemaid for the sons of the king and queen of Byblos. Isis bathes younger son in fire, trying to make him immortal.

Someone named @meinklaus replied to that one: lol #IsisFail

I rolled my eyes. I avoided Twitter because of trolls. Still, I pointed out the obvious. "@OsirisPhD mostly talks about Egyptian history, especially Osiris and Horus." I shot Tucker a look. "Like Phillip Becker."

Tucker lifted one shoulder. "Not so unusual in an Egyptologist, maybe, but between that and the cobra bag, he's definitely a person of interest."

"If he's at the museum, you think it's safe for us to go visit him? After the IED?"

Tucker nodded firmly as he stretched back on the bed with me. "They've stepped up security. Like I said, they don't want to lose any more tourists. I told him we could treat him to dinner somewhere else, too. His choice."

Comforting thought. Oh, well. Abdallah Hussein hadn't even answered Tucker's messages yet.

Tucker swung his legs out and knocked The Murder of Roger Ackroyd to the ground. As he picked it up, he said, "I've barely gotten to read that thing. My mom gave it to me. You know what's weird, though? It talks about Rikki-tikki-tavi."

I pressed my lips together. "You're kidding."

"Seriously. Right near the beginning."

I flipped to a dog-eared page. The narrator says his sister is so curious, she's like a mongoose. He thinks she should adopt the mongoose family motto, "Go and find out."

I shook my head. "It's probably a coincidence that your mom gave us a book with a mongoose. You know what it's called when you see something once, and then it seems to appear everywhere, just because you're looking for it?"

"Right. Total Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon."

Anyway. I took a deep breath. Time to put up or shut up, Hope. "I've got some news, too. I have the notes Gizelda Becker made for her dad."

"What? How? Did you find anything?"

"Sort of." I brandished the red notebook.

"That's awesome! You're fantastic!"

I beamed as I handed it to him. It actually felt good to relinquish it. While he perused the little red book, I finished researching the story of Anubis and Bata in more detail online.

To recap: Anubis kills his faithless wife (wah) and Bata heads off to what is now Lebanon to build a beautiful home.

There, the god Khnum takes pity on Bata and creates the world's most gorgeous woman for him, although Khnum predicts that she will die by the sword.

Bata adores his Heavenly Wife. That's my name for her, since she was created by a god and doesn't seem to have an official moniker. Unfortunately, a) Bata's also missing some crucial equipment to satisfy her, and b) the heavenliness attracts the ocean, so Bata warns her to stay away. Nevertheless, Heavenly Wife heads to the ocean waves, which leap up and pursue her on land. She manages to escape, leaving behind a lock of hair.

That divine hair winds up on the pharaoh's shores, and it smells so irresistible that the pharaoh himself falls for her. Heavenly Wife marries the pharaoh and asks the ruler to cut down Bata's heart tree, which kills him.

I couldn't resist summarizing and continuing the story for Tucker. "Back in Egypt, Anubis's beer ferments. He makes his way to the Valley of Cedars and finds Bata's body in bed. After searching for almost four years, Anubis comes upon a flower that is, upon closer inspection, his brother's shrivelled heart. He places it inside a cup of water. Eventually, the heart drinks its fill and begins to beat once more. Anubis places it in his brother's chest, and Bata returns to life."

"Whew," said Tucker. "Did he get his penis back, too?"

I patted his hand. Always about the peen. "No, but then Bata turns into a bull. And the bull is the symbol of the pharaoh, so the pharaoh's stoked to have such a majestic symbol show up at his palace, certifying him as a divine ruler. Bata the bull lets his wife know who he is, and she in turn asks the pharaoh to kill the bull and feed her his liver."

"Ugh. Shades of Snow White."

"Right. Except this time, there's no merciful hunter. They really do kill the bull."

"And she eats the liver?"

"Presumably. But as they're carrying his dead body into the chamber, Bata the bull shakes his head. Two drops of blood fly on either side of the threshold, and two Persea trees grow."

Tucker made his way to my side of the bed so he could circle his arms around me and rest his chin on my head. "Those trees are Bata, reincarnated?"

"Right-o."

"And he tells the queen who he is again?"

"Of course. Then she asks the pharaoh to cut down the trees and make them into furniture."

"So he becomes a picnic table?"

"Two benches, but yeah. Still, this time she's watching them cut the trees down, and a splinter enters her mouth, making her pregnant."

Tucker snorted. "That's not how it works."

"It does in legend. The newborn baby is Bata himself. So after the pharaoh dies, Bata becomes the king and the god, and denounces his wife. She dies by the sword, like the prophecy predicted."

He grimaced.

"Exactly. We're supposed to concentrate on Bata, the king-god and rightful ruler of the world, who summons his brother and appoints Anubis as one of his muckety-mucks. So now the brothers are reunited."

Tucker ruffled my hair sympathetically. "The wicked women have been decapitated, and all is well."

I sighed. "That's my big problem with it. They blame the women, and I'm not saying they're saints, but the guys could have saved themselves so much grief. I mean, if Bata hadn't cut off his own dick, then maybe his wife would have stayed with him in the first place."

"Harsh."

"Yeah, but she doesn't want to be on house arrest. She wants fresh air. So then the ocean attacks her. And it's not her fault that the gods made her with super-strong smelling hair. Not that it justifies her repeatedly having her husband killed. Ahh, everyone's awful in this story. The only one who doesn't kill anybody is Bata."

Tucker lifted me into his lap and kissed my neck, distracting me. "You're the most gorgeous woman in the world. Please don't have me killed."

I wound my fingers through his hair. "Please don't have me decapitated."

"Deal."

I had to giggle. "Who said romance was dead." I kissed him once, twice, and sighed. "We should talk about Becker's notes. Figure out why he brought up two similar legends."

"Kings getting kicked off their thrones."

"Guys missing this." My hand headed south.

Tucker spread his legs to allow more access. "Treacherous women."

"Isis isn't treacherous! She's more faithful than Penelope!" That part of The Odyssey always annoyed me: ever-dependable Penelope, fighting off suitors, while Odysseus screws around.

"But Anubis and Bata both had bad wives." He pressed against my hand. "Nephthys kept going back and forth"—he enacted the back and forth motion, his voice deepening—"on helping her sister and helping her brother-husband."

I wrapped my fingers around the main event. "Well, does that make Nephthys a good sister or a good sister-wife? She kind of took turns."

"In the end, everything turned out all right," said Tucker, pushing me back on the bed and climbing on top of me.

I linked my ankles behind his back and drew his head down for another kiss. "Better than all right."

Then we did our level (and occasionally vertical) best to banish all thoughts of severed penises and women dying by the sword.

I sank into sleep afterward.

Never heard my phone.