The Lucifer Gospel

8

She dreamed she saw Baqir dying again and woke up in her room, the light curtains across the balcony doors blowing inward with a soft sound like ghostly wings. She lay alone in the dark listening to the distant sounds of the city and the traffic on the Corniche El Nil far below. How much death and dying had the Nile seen in all the years it had flowed through this place, on its way to Alexandria and the sea?

The curtains whispered again and she sat up a little, pulling the sheet up around her shoulders against the chill. She checked the glowing dial on her watch. Three a.m. She remembered a song her father had played to her mother once, very late one Christmas Eve when she was young, plinking it out on the old stand-up piano in one corner of the living room that nobody ever played. She’d only heard it that one time but the memory was as bright and clear as the love and affection that had prompted her father to sing it:

It’s three o’clock in the morning

We’ve danced the whole night thru,

And daylight soon will be dawning,

Just one more waltz with you.

That melody so entrancing,

Seems to be made for us two,

I could just keep right on dancing

Forever, dear, with you.

A long way from death and the banks of the Nile. Suddenly, lying there, she realized she wasn’t alone in the room. A shadow shifted, and as she stared into the far corner the shadow became a shape, and the shape became a man. He cleared his throat and a match flared for a moment, lighting up a round, sweating face wearing glasses. A man in his sixties perhaps, thin hair the yellow white of nicotine. He had fat lips and a small chin. The cigarette he was smoking was oval. She smelled strong, dark tobacco. She had an image of Hilts with the small black pistol in his hand, but Hilts was a couple of floors down. She glanced toward the bedside table. Wallet, keys, the disposable camera she’d never got around to using. Nothing even vaguely resembling a weapon. Not to mention the fact that she slept in the nude. She pushed back against the padded headboard and drew the sheet up a little higher. How the hell had he managed to get in? Like every other hotel in the world these days, the Hilton used electronic key cards.

“I bribed a chambermaid, they all have master keys,” said a voice from the darkness, reading her mind. The cigarette glowed and reflected off the man’s wire-framed spectacles. “If you stay in Egypt long enough you’ll come to realize that everyone in this country can be bribed. Baksheesh of a sort.” The man’s accent had once been British but had long since become something pale and distant, the lonely voice of the expatriate. “There are several different kinds, you know. There is the baksheesh of the beggar in which the person who offers alms obtains God’s grace, then there is the-”

Finn cut him off. “Can you tell me what you’re doing in my bedroom, and maybe who you are?”

“I haven’t introduced myself, have I? Beg pardon. The name is Simpson, Arthur Simpson. I’d give you my card but I seem to have run out.” He took another puff on his evil-smelling cigarette, then crossed his legs and tapped the ash into his trouser cuff. “I’m a guide of sorts. Tours of the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx, interpreting for Germans and Swiss, deciphering hieroglyphics for old dears from Upper Tooting.”

Finn stared into the darkness. He sounded like John Cleese doing some sort of bizarre monologue from an old Monty Python episode. “You still haven’t told me why you’re in my hotel room.”

Simpson laughed quietly. “Your virtue is un-threatened, Miss Ryan, I can assure you. I’m far too old for that sort of thing.”

“That’s no answer,” said Finn.

“Not an answer.” Simpson sighed. “Simply a statement of fact, I’m afraid.” He paused and dragged deeply on his cigarette. Finn saw that he was much older than she’d thought originally. His rotundness disguised an unhealthy complexion and dark circles under the eyes. His lips were chapped and dry and there was a sprinkle of day-old gray bristle on his chin. Finally he spoke again. “Actually, Miss Ryan, I’m here to warn you.”

“What about?”

Simpson changed the subject again. “I knew your father, you know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We were at Cambridge together.”

Finn stared across the room. The fact that her father had gone to Cambridge on a GI Bill fellowship to do postgraduate work wasn’t the kind of information one could just pick up anywhere. On the other hand, it wasn’t a state secret either. “He never mentioned an Arthur Simpson that I can remember.”

“We shared a set for two years.”

“Set?”

“Rooms at Magdalene. As in a set of rooms. Dodgy university doublespeak, I’m afraid. You can get degrees in the subject. Semiotics or semantics or some such nonsense.”

“Why don’t you try getting to the point so you can get out of here.”

“Yes, quite. Well, as I said, I knew your father and he knew me, which was much more to the point. You might even say that we became colleagues.”

“You were an archaeologist?”

“Good lord, no! I was a spy.”

Finn pulled the sheet higher. The fact that her father had worked for the CIA using his role as a research and field archaeologist as a blind was certainly not everyday information. “What does that have to do with my dad?”

“Don’t be coy, dear, it doesn’t suit you, or serve the memory of your father. You know as well as I do what he was up to in all those jungles he visited.”

“Get on with your story,” said Finn.

Simpson stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and immediately pulled out his crumpled pack and lit another one using a battered old Ronson. He snapped the lighter closed with a hard flat click, then began to talk again.

And Finn listened.