Chapter One

I

THE MOUNTAIN meadow was carpeted with fresh green and starred with small, shy flowers. He came towards me, walking so lightly the grass scarcely seemed to bend under his feet. His hair shone silver-gilt in the sunlight, and he was smiling, and his blue eyes held a look I had seen in them only once before. Trembling, I waited for him to come to me. He stopped a few feet away, still smiling, and held out his hands.

They were wet and red and dripping. I looked from his bleeding hands to his face and saw blood erupt from it in spurting streams, from the corners of his mouth, from under the hair on his temples. Bright scarlet patches blossomed on the breast of his shirt. There was blood everywhere, covering him like a red rain. I stretched out my arms but I couldn’t reach him and I couldn’t move and the scream I tried to utter wouldn’t come out of my throat and he fell, face down at my feet, and the back of his head wasn’t golden fair but sticky scarlet and the blood spread out, staining the green grass and drowning the shy flowers and still I couldn’t reach him . . .

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .’ Somebody was whining. It wasn’t I. I was blubbering and swearing – or was I praying?

Swearing. ‘Damn him, damn him!’ I reached out blindly in the dark. There was something monstrous and hairy on my bed. I threw my arms around it and clutched it to my bosom.

Caesar stopped whining and began licking my face with frantic slurps. Caesar is a Doberman; his tongue is as rough as a file and about a foot and a half long. He has very bad breath.

‘All right, okay,’ I gasped, fending him off and reaching for the bedside lamp.

The light helped, and so did the sight of my familiar messy bedroom, but I was still shaking. God! That had been the worst one yet.

Caesar’s furry face stared worriedly at me. He wasn’t allowed on the bed. I must have cried out in my sleep, and the gallant dog had leaped up to my rescue.

Clara was allowed on the bed. Caesar hasn’t got over the injustice of this yet, but he can’t do anything about it because he is terrified of Clara, who weighs approximately seven pounds to his seventy. I think he thinks she is a god. He slobbers with delight when she condescends to curl up next to him, and grovels when she raises a paw. She had retreated from her usual position, on my stomach, to the foot of the bed and was sitting up, eyeing me with that look of tolerant contempt only Siamese cats have fully mastered. In the dark seal-brown of her face her eyes looked very blue.

A shudder twisted through me as I remembered how blood had filled those other blue eyes.

It was the third time that week I had dreamed about John. The first one hadn’t been bad, just an ordinary anxiety/frustration dream in which I pursued a familiar form along endless streets only to find, when I caught up with it, that it wore someone else’s face. The second . . . well, never mind the details of that one. The metamorphosis of the body I clasped into a scaled, limbless creature that slid slimily through my arms and vanished into darkness had left a nasty memory, but it hadn’t awakened me.

I knew the cause of the dreams. My subconscious doesn’t fool around; it’s about as subtle as a brickbat. I had told myself there was nothing to worry about, even if I hadn’t heard from him for over a month, and I had believed it – sort of – until a week ago. Hugging my warm, hairy, smelly dog as a child would clutch a teddy bear for comfort, I remembered the conversation that had forced me (or my subconscious) to admit there was something to worry about.

II

‘But I don’t know anything about Egyptology!’ I yelled.

Normally I don’t yell when I say things like that. I mean, it’s hardly the sort of statement that arouses passionate emotions. But this was the fourth time I had said it, and I didn’t seem to be getting the point across.

The two men behind the desk exchanged glances. One of them was my old friend Karl Feder of the Munich Police Department. The other man was about the same age-mid-fifties, at a guess. Like Karl, he was losing his hair and starting to spread around the middle. He had been introduced to me as Herr Burckhardt, no title, no affiliation. If he was a colleague of Karl’s he had to be a cop of some variety, but I had only known one other man with eyes as cold as his, and Rudi had definitely not been a police officer.

I knew what they were thinking. It was Burckhardt who said it. ‘I fail to understand, Dr Bliss. You are an official of our National Museum, a well-known authority on art history. The Herr Direktor, Doktor Schmidt, has often said that you are his most valued subordinate.’

‘Yeah,’ I said gloomily. ‘I’ll bet he has.’

Schmidt has a mouth almost as big as his rotund tummy. He is as cute as one of the Seven Dwarfs and not much taller, and if he wasn’t so brilliant he’d have been locked up long ago as a menace to society. Not that he’s a crook. On the contrary; Schmidt thinks of himself as a brilliant amateur sleuth, the scourge of the underworld, and of me as his side-kick. As Watson was to Sherlock, as Archie was to Nero Wolfe, so Vicky Bliss is to Herr Doktor Anton Z. Schmidt. At least that’s how Schmidt looks at it. My own view of our respective roles is somewhat different.

I said slowly and patiently, ‘Human beings have been producing works of art of one kind or another for over thirty-five thousand years. Even if you include only the major visual arts and restrict yourself to Western art, you have to start with Stone Age man, proceed through the Egyptians and the Minoans and the Etruscans and the Greeks, to early Christian art and Byzantine and medieval and Renaissance and . . . Oh, hell. What I’m trying to say is that nobody can be an expert on all those fields. My specialty is medieval European art. I don’t know – ’

‘What about the Trojan gold?’ Feder inquired. ‘That does not come under the heading of medieval European art, does it?’

I had been afraid somebody was going to bring that up.

Schmidt refers to the affair of the Trojan gold as ‘our most recent case.’ He doesn’t often refer to it, however, because it had not been one of ‘our,’ most resounding successes. People had been looking for the gold, a hoard of priceless ancient jewellery which had vanished from besieged Berlin at the end of World War II, for almost fifty years. Educated opinion believed the Russians had carried it off to Moscow. Schmidt and I and a few other people had spent several weeks the previous winter following up a clue that suggested it had been smuggled out of Berlin before the Russians entered the city, and hidden somewhere in Bavaria. At one point I thought I had found the hiding place. Turned out I was wrong. Schmidt was still complaining about how I had misled him. Which I hadn’t, not deliberately. I had been – well – wrong. Sometimes I am wrong.

Not this time, though, dammit. Feder was smirking at me as if he had said something clever. He was correct. The Trojan gold could not be described as medieval art.

I tried again. ‘That had nothing to do with my expertize or lack thereof. It was pure chance.’

‘But you recognized, from a bad photograph, that the jewels pictured were genuine. Some degree of expertize – ’

‘Anybody could have done that!’ My voice rose. ‘The gold of Troy is famous. Everybody knows about it. Almost everybody . . . Let me put it this way, meine Herren; I could not pose as an expert on Egyptian art for more than five minutes without getting caught out. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting I accept the position of guest lecturer on a Nile cruise. In exchange for a free tour I will be expected to talk at least once a day on some damned temple or pyramid, and be prepared to answer questions from the people taking the cruise, who wouldn’t be taking the cruise if they weren’t already interested in and informed about the subject. Five minutes, hell! I wouldn’t last sixty seconds. Why me, for God’s sake? There are hundreds of people who know more about the subject than I do.’

‘But my dear Fräulein Doktor!’ Burckhardt exclaimed. ‘Look at it this way. Never again will you have the opportunity for such a holiday. This is a luxury cruise; the boat is new, designed for millionaire tourists – suites instead of rooms, gourmet food, the best of everything. Passengers will be admitted to places that are barred to the ordinary tourist, the lecturers are all distinguished scholars – ’

He waved a brightly coloured brochure at me. I shied back. ‘That’s just the point, Herr Burckhardt. Karl, will you please tell your friend that I am not an empty-headed blond bimbo, even if I do look like one.’

Lately I’d been trying very hard not to look like one, swathing my too well endowed torso in loose jackets and my long legs in full skirts that flapped around my calves. I had let my hair grow long so I could wind it into a schoolmarmish bun. Nothing seemed to work. If you are tall and blond and blue-eyed and shaped like a female, some people assume you don’t have a brain cell working.

Karl tried to hide his smile. ‘I warned you this approach would not work, Burckhardt. The lady is very astute. I imagine she already suspects why we are making this request.’

I nodded gloomily. It didn’t require a high degree of intelligence. The affair of the Trojan gold was only the most recent of several encounters I have enjoyed with the criminal element, if ‘enjoyed’ is the right word. I do not enjoy being shot at, assaulted, kidnapped, and chased across the countryside. I didn’t want to do that anymore.

‘Something is going to happen on that cruise,’ I said. ‘What is it? Murder, hijacking, or just a simple case of grand theft which could easily lead to murder or hijacking?’

‘If you will allow me to explain,’ Burckhardt began.

‘That’s what I’ve been asking you to do.’

Burckhardt leaned back and folded his arms. ‘The information reached us via a channel which has proved particularly fruitful in the past. How our agent acquired the information we do not know, but he has never before failed to be accurate. He gave us three facts: first, that there is a plot to rob the Cairo Museum; second, the individuals involved will be on the Nile cruise which starts on November first; third, one or more of them is personally known to you. Now obviously we cannot halt the cruise or detain everyone who has signed up for it. We must have an agent on that boat. You are the obvious choice, not only because you – ’

‘Wait,’ I said. My voice sounded quite normal. That surprised me; even though I had half expected it, one of his statements had had the same impact as a hard kick on the shin. ‘Let’s go back over that interesting assemblage of so-called facts, shall we? First, why are you guys involved? Why don’t you pass the information on to the Egyptian government and let them handle it?’

‘Naturally we have notified the authorities in that country. They have requested our cooperation. Are you familiar with the current political situation in Egypt?’

I shrugged. ‘Not in detail. Keep it short, will you?’

‘I will endeavour to do so.’ Burckhardt steepled his fingertips and tried to look like a professor. He didn’t. ‘The modern nation of Egypt did not attain independence until 1922. For over a century it was exploited, as some might say, by Western powers, and many of the most valuable antiquities were – er – “removed” to museums and private collections in Europe and America. Anti-Western sentiment is of long standing and it is now being fostered by certain groups who wish to replace the present government of Egypt with one more sympathetic to their religious views. They have attacked tourists and members of the government. If the historic treasures of Egypt are stolen by a group of foreigners – ’

‘I see your point,’ I said reluctcntly. ‘Okay. Next question. Seems to me your information is very fragmentary. Why don’t you ask this hot-shot agent of yours where he got it and tell him to dig around for more?’

Another exchange of meaningful glances. ‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me this is another of those plots. He’s dead. Right? Found in an alley with his throat cut? Horribly tortured and . . . I don’t believe this!’

‘Believe it,’ Karl said soberly. ‘We had not wanted to tell you – ’

‘I can see why. It might have put a slight damper on my girlish enthusiasm for playing Nancy Drew.’

‘You would be in no danger,’ Karl insisted.

‘And if I believe that, you’ve got a bridge you’d like to sell me cheap.’

‘Bitte?’ Karl said, looking puzzled.

‘Never mind.’

‘It is true. We will have other agents on that cruise; they will guard you day and night. The moment you have identified the individual – or individuals – in question, they will be placed under arrest – ’

‘No, they won’t.’

‘Bitte?’ said Burckhardt, trying to look puzzled. He knew perfectly well what I meant.

I spelled it out. ‘You can’t arrest people because Victoria Bliss thinks they look like somebody who might once, maybe, have committed a crime. You’ll have to wait till they do something illegal. And while you’re waiting, I’ll be sitting there like a groundhog on a superhighway at rush hour. If . . . they . . . are known to me, I’m also known to them.’

‘You will be in no danger,’ Burckhardt repeated.

‘Damn right.’ I stood up. ‘Because I won’t be on that cruise. Auf Wiedersehen, meine Herren.’

‘Think about it,’ Karl said smoothly. ‘You needn’t decide now.’

I was thinking about it. My acquaintanceship with the members of the art underworld is more extensive than I would like, but there was one individual with whom I was particularly well acquainted. His had been the first name that occurred to me – if it was his name. He had at least four aliases, including his favourite, ‘Sir John Smythe.’ I didn’t know – I had never known – his last name, and even though be had told me his first name was John, I had no reason to suppose he was telling the truth. He hardly ever did tell the truth. He was a thief and a swindler and a liar, and he had dragged me into a number of embarrassing, not to say dangerous, situations, but if he hadn’t come to my rescue at the risk of grievous bodily harm to himself – something John preferred not to do – I wouldn’t be in Karl’s office wondering whether he and Herr Burckhardt knew, or only suspected, that the ‘individual’ they were after might be my occasional and elusive lover.

III

It took me a long time to get back to sleep after that grisly dream. I was not in the best possible condition to cope with Munich’s rush-hour traffic next morning – short on sleep, tense with a mixture of anger, anxiety, and indecision. It was raining, of course. It always rains in Munich when somebody offers me a trip to some place bright and warm and sunny.

I’ve lived in Munich for a number of years, ever since I wangled a job out of the funny little fat man who had been a prime suspect m my first ‘case,’ as he would call it.¹ He wasn’t the murderer, as it turned out; he was a famous scholar, director of the National Museum, and he had been impressed by my academic credentials as well as by the fact that I could have embarrassed the hell out of him by telling the world about some of his shenanigans during that adventure. We had become good friends and I had come to think of Munich as my adopted home town. It’s a beautiful city in one of the most beautiful parts of the world – when the sun is shining. In the rain, with fallen leaves making the streets slick and dangerous, it is as dreary as any other large city.

When I pulled into the staff parking lot behind the museum, Karl the janitor popped out of his cubicle to inquire after the health, not of my humble self, but of Caesar, for whom he has an illicit passion. I assured him all was well and hurried through the storage areas of the basement, praying Schmidt hadn’t arrived yet. I had to go to the museum office to collect my mail and messages; if I didn’t, Gerda, Schmidt’s hideously efficient and inquisitive secretary, would bring them to me and hang around, talking and asking questions and ignoring my hints that she should go away, and then I would probably hit her with something large and heavy because Gerda gets on my nerves even when they are not already stretched to the breaking point.

I entered the office at a brisk trot, glancing at my watch. ‘Goodness, it’s later than I thought. Good morning, Gerda, I’ve got to hurry, I’m awfully late.’

‘For what?’ Gerda inquired. ‘You have no appointment this morning. Unless you have made one without informing me, which is contrary to – ’

I snatched the pile of letters from her desk. She snatched it back. ‘I have not finished sorting them, Vicky. What is wrong with you this morning? Ach, but you look terrible! Did you not sleep? You were, perhaps, working late?’

She hoped I hadn’t been working late. She hoped I’d been doing something more interesting. Gerda has one of those round, healthy pink faces, and mouse-brown hair, and wide, innocent pale blue eyes. She is short. I am all the things Gerda is not, and the poor dumb woman admires me and tries to imitate me. She also harbours the delusion – derived in part from Schmidt, who shares it – that men whiz in and out of my life like city buses, only more often. Little does she know. It was questionable as to whether John qualified for the role of my lover – three visits in nine months isn’t my idea of a torrid affair – but for the past two years he had been the only possible candidate.

‘Yes. I was working late,’ I lied.

She didn’t believe me. ‘Ach, so. I thought perhaps Herr Feder – ’

‘Who?’ I gaped at her.

She had sorted the messages, damn her. She waved two slips of paper at me. ‘He has telephoned twice this morning. He wishes that you call him as soon as possible.’

‘Thanks.’ This time when I grabbed my mail she let me keep it. ‘We will have lunch, perhaps?’ she called after me as I headed quickly for the door.

‘Perhaps.’ If I could just get out of Gerda’s office before Schmidt emerged from his . . . I was in no condition to cope with Schmidt that morning. He’s even nosier than Gerda.

I might have known it was going to be one of those days. Schmidt wasn’t in his office. He had just arrived. When I flung the door open there he was, briefcase in one hand, the remains of a jelly doughnut in the other. Schmidt eats all the time. Jelly doughnuts are his latest enthusiasm, one he acquired from me.

He was wearing one of those trench coats covered with straps, flaps, and pockets – the style James Bond and other famous spies prefer – and an Indiana Jones fedora pulled low over his bristling eyebrows. The ensemble, which indicated that Schmidt was in one of his swashbuckling moods, was ominous enough, but that wasn’t what brought me to a stop. Schmidt was singing.

That’s how he would have described it. Schmidt can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he loves music, and he had recently expanded his repertoire to include country music. American country music. What he was doing to this tune would have sent the citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, running for a rope.

It was my fault, I admit that. I had heard them all my life, not the modern rock adaptations, but the old railroad and work songs, the blues and ballads. During the Great Depression my grandad had wandered the country like so many other footloose, jobless young men; he bragged of having known Boxcar Willie and John Lomax, and he could still make a guitar cry. I had once made the mistake of playing a Jimmie Rodgers tape for Schmidt. That was all it took.

In addition to being tone-deaf, Schmidt never gets the words quite right. ‘. . . I sing to my Dixie darling, Beneath the silver moon, With my banjo on my knee.’ Imagine that in a thick Bavarian accent.

He broke off when he saw me. ‘Ah, Vicky! You are here!’

‘I’m late,’ I said automatically. ‘Very late. I have to – ’

‘But my poor Vicky.’ He stood on tiptoe peering up into my face. ‘Your eyes are shadowed and sunken. You have the look of a woman who – ’

‘Shut up, Schmidt,’ I said, trying to get around him. He popped the rest of the doughnut into his mouth and caught hold of my hand. Strawberry jelly glued our fingers together. A stream of water from the hem of his coat was soaking my shoes.

‘Come and have coffee and tell Papa Schmidt all about it. Is Karl Feder annoying you again? Tsk! He should be ashamed, the old rascal. Or,’ – he grinned and winked – ‘or is it another individual who is responsible for the disturbance of your slumber?’

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Gerda was on her feet, leaning precariously across the desk as she tried to overhear. Schmidt had seen her too. Shaking his head, he said disapprovingly, ‘There is no decent regard for privacy in this place. Come into my office, Vicky, where we can be alone, and you will tell Papa Schmidt – ’

‘No,’ I said.

‘No what? It was not Sir John – ’

‘No everything! Nobody disturbed my slumber, no, I will not come into your office, no, Karl Feder is not . . .’ I stopped, clutching at the last ragged strands of sanity. Better to let Schmidt think Karl’s reasons for calling were personal instead of professional. Or was it? The world was dissolving into chaos around me.

‘See you later, Schmidt,’ I babbled, freeing my hand. ‘I have to – I have to – go to the bathroom.’

It was the only place I could think of where he wouldn’t follow me. I locked myself into a cubicle and collapsed onto the seat.

My hand was red and sticky. In certain lights, strawberry jelly looks a lot like fresh blood.

John was certainly a reasonable subject for anxiety dreams. He had more deadly enemies than anyone I’d ever met. Sometimes I was one of them.

When I first ran into him I was trying to track down a forger of historic jewels.² I had no business doing any such thing; it was a combination of curiosity and the desire for a free vacation that took me to Rome, and some people might have said that it served me right when I got in over my head. John got me out. He had been an enthusiastic participant in the swindle until the others decided to eliminate me, but, as he candidly admitted, chivalry had nothing to do with his change of heart. He disapproved of murder on practical grounds. As he put it, ‘the penalties are so much more severe.’

I never meant to get involved with him. He isn’t really my type – only an inch or so taller than I, slightly built, his features (with one or two exceptions) pleasant but unremarkable. I don’t know why I ended up in that little hotel in Trastevere. Gratitude, womanly sympathy for a wounded hero, curiosity – or those exceptional characteristics? It turned out to be a memorable experience, and it may have been the worst mistake I have ever made in my life.

Another brief encounter, in Paris, was both embarrassing and expensive. I woke up one morning to find the police hammering at the door and John gone. Naturally he hadn’t paid the hotel bill.

So why did I respond to that enigmatic message from Stockholm a few months later?³ I told myself it was because I wanted to get back at him for Paris, meeting his challenge and beating him at his own game. (That’s what I told myself.) It was a relatively harmless little scheme to begin with – he needed me to gain access to an innocent old gentleman whose backyard happened to be full of buried treasure – but it turned ugly when a second group of crooks zeroed in on the same treasure. That was my first encounter with the hardcore professionals of the art underworld, and I sincerely hoped it would be my last. John was a professional, but compared to Max and Hans and Rudi and their boss, Leif, he looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy. They disliked John even more than I did, and from my point of view he was definitely the lesser of two evils, so once again we were forced to collaborate in order to escape. My negative opinion of him didn’t change, though, until . . .

It was one of the more lurid incidents in a life that has not been precisely colourless. There we were, trying to row a leaking boat across a very deep, very cold lake during a violent thunderstorm, with an aquatic assassin holding on to the bow and slashing at me with a knife. I had just about resigned myself to dying young when John went over the side of the boat. He was unarmed and outweighed, but he managed to keep Leif occupied until I got to shore. They found Leif’s body later. John never turned up, dead or alive. Everybody except me assumed he had drowned. After eight months without a word I began to wonder myself.

The matter of the Trojan gold⁴ gave me an excuse to contact John, through the anonymous channels that were the only ones I knew. To be honest, I was surprised when he responded. He had once told me I brought him nothing but bad luck.

His luck didn’t improve. He got me out of trouble a couple of times, and the second rescue resulted in a considerable amount of damage to John himself. This was decidedly against his principles. He had once explained them to me: ‘It is impossible to convince some people of the error of their ways without hitting them as often and as hard as possible. I simply object to people hitting me.’

The Trojan gold affair had ended with another event John undoubtedly resented as much as he hated being hit by people. I had taken ruthless advantage of a man who was battered, bruised, and bloody to force him to admit he loved me. He had used the word before, but always in context – Shakespeare or John Donne or some other literary glant. The phrases I had wrung out of him that day were boringly banal and dire. They had no literary merit whatever.

It had been ten months since that momentous event. I had seen John only three times, but almost every week I’d received some message on a postcard or a silly present or a few words on my answering machine – just enough to let me know he was all right.

The last postcard had arrived at the end of August – six weeks ago. There had been nothing since.

I got up and went to the washbasin to rinse the jelly off my hand. I’d have to leave the museum and call Karl from a kiosk or a café; I didn’t want Gerda listening in.

The ‘individual’ referred to in the message from Burckhardt’s agent had to be John. He was the only crook I knew that well, and I was one of the few people in the world who knew him that well, one of the few who had seen him au naturel, who would probably recognize him no matter what disguise he assumed. He couldn’t hide the shape of his hands or his long lashes or . . .

Six weeks without a word. How could he do this to me, the bastard? Love had nothing to do with it. I was inclined to take that declaration of his with a grain of salt, and I had never returned the compliment; but if he meant to end the relationship, the least he owed me was a courteous dismissal.

It had of course occurred to me that John might have planted the message himself. He’d done it before. If that was the case I wouldn’t be in danger. John was no killer. (‘What, never? Well, hardly ever.’) I had known all along I was going on that damned cruise. As Burckhardt had said, it was an opportunity not to be missed.

IV

I’ve never been very good at poker. I quit playing with Karl Feder a couple of years ago. We had agreed to meet at a café. He was waiting when I arrived and before I so much as opened my mouth I saw he was smirking. He had known I’d fall for it.

I said, ‘Supposing I did agree – I’m not agreeing, but supposing I did – why couldn’t I go as a tourist? I don’t want to make a fool of myself pretending to knowledge I don’t possess.’

‘Because there is no way you could have saved the money for such a trip,’ Karl said. His voice was as smooth as the whipped cream on his coffee. (Bavarians put whipped cream on everything except sauerkraut. That’s one of the reasons why I love Bavaria.) ‘Oh, yes, we could invent an aunt who died and left you her fortune, or some such piece of fiction; but who would believe it? Why would you spend your windfall on such a trip? As you said, this is not your main area of interest. No, let me finish.’ He raised his finger and shook it in grandfatherly admonition. ‘The story will be that you agreed to replace a friend who was taken ill at the last moment. You are cheating a little, that is understood, but who would not, given such an opportunity? You will be lecturing on – um, let me see. Ah! On medieval Egyptian art! That will be perfect, nicht?’

‘Nicht,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about . . . Oh, hell, what’s the use? There’s just one thing, Karl. Schmidt.’

‘What about him? Everyone knows he has a fondness for you; he would give you leave of absence for such a chance as this.’

‘No! I mean, yes, he would, that’s just the trouble. He’ll want to come too!’

‘So? He will not know your real purpose.’

‘Oh, God.’ I clutched at my head with both hands. My hair promptly fell down over my face. I had been experimenting with braids that week, and I hadn’t quite got the knack of winding them around my head. No matter how many bobby pins I stuck in, the structure had a tendency to collapse under pressure.

Karl began collecting bobby pins from the table while I tried to explain. ‘Schmidt has the most lurid imagination of anyone I know. Even if I were an innocent tourist he’d assume I had an ulterior motive – something romantic, as he calls it. He’ll poke his nose into everything and screw everything up and get himself in trouble, and I’ll have to get him out of it. If Schmidt goes, I don’t. That’s flat.’

Karl Feder looked thoughtful. He wasn’t as familiar with Schmidt’s peculiarities as I was, but he had heard a thing or two. ‘Ah, I see. Well, my dear Vicky, do not worry. We will think of some way of preventing him.’

I didn’t like the sound of that. ‘You’re not to hurt him, Karl. No hit-and-run or broken legs.’

‘Would we do such a thing?’

‘You might not, but if I read Herr Burckhardt and his crowd aright, they wouldn’t hesitate. I’m not kidding, Karl. If you touch a hair of Schmidt’s moustache I’ll blow the whole deal wide open.’

‘I believe you,’ Karl said.

‘You damn well better. All right. If you can get Schmidt out of the way, I’ll do it. What happens next?’

‘We will handle all the arrangements. Your passport is in order, I assume? Good. Visa, tickets, and other necessary documents will be delivered to you within a few days. My secretary will make the appointments for you, but she cannot take the inoculations – hepatitis, typhoid, typhus – ’

‘Urck,’ I said. I hate shots. ‘Is all that necessary? I thought this was a luxury cruise.’

‘We cannot risk your falling ill,’ Karl said seriously. He took a thick manila envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to me. ‘I must ask you to sign a voucher acknowledging receipt of the money. We will supply a medical kit, camera, binoculars, and the like, but I assume a young lady will want to purchase her own clothing and other personal effects.’

It was a very thick envelope. Karl’s smile was very bland. I sighed. ‘We have already determined what you are, madam,’ I quoted. ‘All that is left is to determine your price.’

‘Bitte?’ said Karl.

‘Never mind.’

‘We will take care of everything,’ Karl repeated. ‘You need do nothing . . . Excuse me, what was it you said?’

He knew perfectly well what I had said. He prefers to believe a lady doesn’t use words like that.

I pushed my chair back and stood up. ‘Anything else?’

Karl reached into his pocket again. The object he withdrew was a slick, brightly coloured brochure. It had been folded once, lengthwise, to fit in his pocket. He unfolded it and handed it to me.

On the cover, under a tastefully designed title, was a photograph of the Sphinx, with the pyramids of Giza behind it. It was a gorgeous photo; the pyramids were a soft pale gold, the sky above them was a bright clear blue. The smile on the face of the Sphinx has been described in a number of ways – mysterious, enigmatic, contemplative. At that moment it seemed to me that it bore a distinct resemblance to the smug smirk on Karl Feder’s face.

V

Two weeks later I sat on a rock at Giza contemplating the real thing. I was trying to avoid the eyes of the Sphinx. It was still smirking.

The actuality wasn’t as attractive as the photograph. The photographer must have been a genius or a magician to eliminate other objects from his composition. There were lots of them, all more or less unattractive. Camels (they are not, at their best, handsome animals), tourists (ditto), guides and peddlers in dirty flapping robes, cheap souvenir shops, scaffolding and barbed wire and makeshift, ramshackle bits of fencing and construction. However, only a pedant would quibble about such minor flaws. The pyramids were wonderful. The Sphinx would have been magnificent, marred and scarred though it was, if it hadn’t been smirking. Was I enjoying the view? No, I was not.

My arms were swollen and sore from too many shots too close together, but that wasn’t what bothered me. The sun was beating down on my head and shoulders, but I didn’t mind that. My stomach felt slightly queasy, but it wasn’t from anything I had eaten.

Some distance away a small group of people had gathered round an individual who appeared to be lecturing to them. They were distinguished from the other groups that covered the plateau like hordes of locusts by the bags they had slung over their shoulders. Many of the tour groups presented their clients with such bags, so that the bright distinctive colours could help identify lost or wandering members of the group, but there were no colours quite as distinctive as these: broad stripes of gold, turquoise-blue and bright red-orange, the shades so often found in Egyptian jewellery. One of the same bags, trimmed in gold braid and bearing my name, lay on the sand at my feet.

My eyes went back to the paper on my lap. It was the passenger list. My name wasn’t on it. I would appear, and be introduced, after the boat had sailed. This was in keeping with my cover story – that I had replaced a friend at the last moment. It was also a safety precaution, to keep my presence from being known in advance. Some safety precaution, I thought sourly. Well, it couldn’t hurt.

Some of the passengers had boarded the boat the day before. I had gone to a hotel instead and spent the afternoon . . . guess where?

A few hours in the Cairo Museum for someone in my profession is like a nibble of fudge to a chocoholic. The place is stuffed, bulging, overflowing with wonders. I was familiar with many of them from photographs and films, but there is no substitute for seeing the real thing. And the ‘minor’ artifacts, the ones that weren’t so often featured, were just as beautiful. I stood for ten minutes studying the inlay on a small box.

Shadowing my enjoyment, however, was my real reason for being there. The more I saw, the more I wondered why people like John hadn’t already stripped the museum.

I don’t mean to criticize. The whole damned country is a museum, and no one knew better than I how much it cost in money and manpower just to maintain the antiquities, much less support additional excavation. Egypt is a poor country, with a soaring birthrate; there aren’t enough schools, clinics, or jobs, or even food; half of it has to be imported. The Egyptians were in a particularly ironic situation, since the hordes of tourists on which the economy depended were slowly and inexorably destroying the treasures they came to see. According to one article I had read, visitors to the tomb of Tutankhamon put out as much as twenty-five pints of perspiration per day, raising the humidity in the small room to a point that damaged the paint and the underlying plaster. The very stones of the Sphinx had been eaten away by pollution and misguided attempts at repair.

The museum was a disaster in progress – dirty, crowded, and dangerously understaffed. Some of the cases looked as if they could be opened with one of my hairpins. There was no air-conditiomng or humidity control; the windows were open, admitting dust and the exhaust fumes from Cairo’s teeming traffic. When I left, reeling under a combination of horror and artistic overload, I had to pick my way through a group of chattering women scrubbing the floor on their hands and knees, and I found myself peering intently at their faces, looking for familiar features – the shape of a neatly curved ear, the outline of a high cheekbone. That was the sort of disguise that would appeal to John’s bizarre sense of humour.

What could he be after this time? His usual modus operandi involved substitution rather than outright theft; this must be something big, so big in size or importance that its absence couldn’t be concealed. God knows there were plenty of possibilities, starting with the golden coffins of Tutankhamon.

I had managed to convince myself there was no immediate danger. The tour group was leaving Cairo next day; it would return in three weeks for a longer stay. That must be when he intended to do the job, using the other passengers as camouflage.

That morning I had sent my luggage to the boat and taken a taxi to Giza; I would join the others when they got on the bus that was to take them back to the boat.

I had already spotted John on the passenger list. It had to be he; no one would have a name as ridiculous as Peregrine Foggington-Smythe. He had even had the gall to use a variation of his favourite nom de guerre. Typical of his arrogance and his sometimes dangerous sense of humour . . .

He wasn’t a passenger. The list included the names of the staff; Foggington-Smythe was one of the guest lecurers, a distinguished Egyptologist from Boston, author of books with titles like Caste and Gender in Ancient Egypt, whatever the hell that might mean. I wondered how John had Convinced Galactic Tours, Inc., that he was the man in question. For all I knew he might be an Egyptologist; he had claimed his specialty was classics, but once or twice he had displayed a fairly esoteric familiarity with matters Egyptological. But I was sure – well, almost sure – he couldn’t be the real Foggington-Smythe. Not that an Egyptologist couldn’t be a criminal; scholars are no more noble than the next man. But not even John would have time to lecture, write several ponderous tomes, and carry on a career as a master thief.

Would he?

I looked up from the list to see someone plodding towards me. One of the bright bags was slung over her shoulder. She must have spotted mine. She was the type that would notice things like that – a woman of a certain age, of medium height and stocky frame, with unblinking grey eyes under heavy brows. She had to be English; her fair skin was already pink, though it glistened with sun shield, and she was wearing a long-sleeved tan blouse and a shapeless khaki skirt that reached almost to her ankles. She looked familiar, and of course I knew why; I had seen her type in a number of British films: the housekeeper, the headmistress, the stocky spinster who is either the detective or a leading suspect.

She stamped up to me, frowning. Suddenly I felt very young. Her expression brought back painful memories of my great-aunt Ermintrude, who had disapproved of everything about me and had never bothered to conceal her opinion.

‘One of us, are you, dear?’ she inquired, indicating the bag. ‘You must be a newcomer, so I thought I ought to make certain you know where the bus is and that it will be leaving shortly; you’d best come along with me, you don’t want to miss it, you shouldn’t be alone in a place like this, these natives will take advantage of an attractive young woman, my name is Tregarth, call me Jen. How’d ja do?’

I said brilliantly, ‘Hi.’

‘And where is your hat?’ Jen looked at me severely. ‘Most unwise of you to come out without one. You have a nice colour, but the sun is deadly here, you risk heat prostration or sunstroke.’

‘I forgot,’ I said meekly. ‘I do have one. A hat. I forgot it.’

‘Well, don’t do it again. What did you say your name was?’

‘Vicky. Vicky Bliss.’ There was no reason for me to be coy about it. She’d find out in a few hours.

‘You are not on the passenger list.’ Her tone made it sound like an accusation.

‘No. I joined the cruise at the last minute. A friend of mine had to cancel, owing to illness, and – ’

‘I see.’ Her face relaxed. The expression wasn’t anything like a smile, but it was probably as close as she could come. ‘Glad to see another young person on board. Most of the passengers are practically senile. My son and his wife will be pleased to have someone their own age to talk to. Not that they . . .’ She looked up, over my shoulder, and the change in her face made me stare. So she could smile. ‘Ah, but here they are. Looking for me, I expect. My dears, allow me to introduce . . .’

I didn’t hear the rest of it. When I turned, my ears went dead, the way they do after a sudden change in altitude.

She couldn’t have been more than eighteen – twenty, at the outside. Her skin had that exquisite English fairness and her hair was a mass of cloudy brown curls framing her heart-shaped face. I saw that much, and the fact that the top of her head barely reached his chin, and that he had gone dead-white under his tan and that his eyes were as flat and opaque as blue circles painted on paper.

The girl smiled and spoke. My ears popped midway through the speech, and I caught the last woods, ‘. . . call me Mary. This . . .’ She tilted her head and looked up at him, her eyes shining. ‘This is John.’

He had himself under control, except for his colour; he always had trouble with that. His voice was cool and steady. ‘How do you do. We’d better hurry; the others have gone on. Mother – ’

She waved away the arm he offered. ‘No, darling. I’m perfectly capable of walking a few more yards unassisted. You look a little . . . Are you feeling well?’ His brows drew together, and she said hurriedly, ‘Oh, dear, I’m fussing, aren’t I? I promise I won’t do it again. Come along, Vicky, you and I will lean on one another.’

She didn’t need assistance; she was a lot steadier on her feet than I was. I stumbled along beside her, grateful for the uneven terrain and the heat and the need for haste, since they offered an excuse for the fact that I couldn’t seem to take a deep breath. From behind me I heard a murmur of voices and a soft, silvery laugh.

The bus was one of those modern monsters, air-conditioned and enormous. As soon as we had settled ourselves an attendant came round with a tray. ‘Mineral water?’ he inquired softly. ‘Orange juice? Mimosa?’

It occurred to my numbed brain that mimosas had alcohol of some kind in them. Champagne? Who cared? I grabbed one and tossed it down.

Jen had taken the seat next to mine. Several rows ahead I saw the familiar outlines of a neatly shaped skull covered with fair hair. Mary’s head wasn’t visible over the back of the seat. She was so tiny.

Have I mentioned I am almost six feet tall?

Maybe it was the alcohol that cleared my head, but I doubt it; the damned thing was mostly orange juice. I turned to Jen – Guinevere? He had told me that was his mother’s name. I had assumed it was a joke.

‘Guinevere,’ I said experimentally. My voice seemed to be working.

She didn’t question my knowledge. I suppose she thought she’d told me. She couldn’t possibly remember everything she said, she had been talking non-stop. Her chin lifted proudly. ‘We are an old Cornish family. Tre, Pol, and Pen – you know the rhyme? Names beginning with those syllables distinguish the Cornishmen. There is a tradition that Arthur himself was our remote ancestor. My father’s name was Gawain, his father’s name was Arthur. On my mother’s side . . .’

‘Mother’s side,’ I repeated, to show I was paying attention. I waved at the steward. Guzzling my second mimosa, I lost the next few sentences.

‘. . . only a distant connection with Egypt, really. So, when I decided to marry, I chose a cousin in order to carry on the family name. Poor Agrivaine. I didn’t see a great deal of him; he was always running off to some war or other.’

‘Agrivaine?’

‘That was what I called him. He had been christened Albert, and I believed his friends referred to him as – as Al. So common! It was he who insisted on calling our son John. I wanted to name him Percival or Galahad.’

I choked on my drink. Jen gave me a hearty slap on the back. Her brow clouded. ‘Oh, dear, I hope I didn’t offend the dear boy. Men are so sensitive about weakness, you know, and I promised myself I would stop fussing over him, especially now that he has a wife to look after him, but he was so ill last winter . . . A skiing accident, and then pneumonia. He seems quite fit now, but I worry.’

‘Skiing accident,’ I repeated, like a parrot. I guess it could have been described that way. John wasn’t the world’s greatest skier, and he had fallen flat on his already damaged face while he was trying to reach the spot where a very unpleasant individual was about to do unpleasant things to me before finishing me off permanently. However, the worst of his injuries had resulted from the hand-to-hand fight that followed his arrival and from the avalanche that had followed the fight. I had not known about his subsequent illness, but I wasn’t surprised to hear of it. If he had stayed in bed for a few days instead of sneaking off the first time I left him alone . . .

Fortunately Jen didn’t notice my abstraction; she was perfectly happy to carry the conversation. I sat slugging down champagne and orange juice while Jen went merrily on, telling me how she had feared her dear boy would never settle down – ‘he is so attractive to women’ – about the whirlwind courtship – ‘he didn’t bring her to meet me until a few weeks ago’ – and about their insistence that she join them on their honeymoon.

‘Honeymoon,’ said the parrot.

‘Yes, they were married last week. Such a lovely ceremony, in the family home, with only their close friends present . . . of course I refused when they first suggested I come along, but Mary was so insistent, and John assured me she would be deeply wounded if I did not agree. Naturally I mean to stay out of their way as much as possible.’

I don’t remember what else she said.

The others had checked in the day before, so I didn’t have to wait unmercifully long before a steward was assigned to show me to my room. I was vaguely conscious of its elegance – a long curved window, with a small railed balcony beyond, a private bath. My suitcases had been arranged at the foot of the bed. I got rid of the steward and collapsed into the nearest chair.

Sometimes, especially in the middle of the night when you wake up and stumble sleepily through a darkened room, and stub your toe or bang your elbow, it takes several seconds for the pain to reach your sluggish brain. I had managed to keep it at bay for much longer than that.