The Mummy by Max Allan Collins Page B

plush cocktail lounges of the Continental and Sheapard hotels to waterfront dives few cultured Englishmen had dared enter (and fewer still had ever exited), Jonathan—and his thirst, and his money—were welcome guests.
    This gave him access not only to alcoholic libation, but information; so it was that he knew a certain Richard O’Connell was a guest at the most dreadful lodgings possible in a city noted for its dreadful lodgings: the Cairo prison.
    So, too, was Jonathan able to arrange—at rather short notice, with a handful of phone calls—an audience with the host of the city’s worst hellhole, Warden Gad Hassan, a thickset greasy man whose porcine features were distinguished by glittering dark eyes, a mustache flecked with the memories of several meals, and black-stubbled cheeks that apparently crossed paths with a razor no more than once a week.
    The warden, his rumpled cream-colored suit stained with sweat, food, and other substances quite unimaginable, had taken Evelyn’s arm in a fashion at once gentlemanly and lascivious as he ushered the Carnahans across a small, penlike courtyard in a sprawling stone structure from which moans of agony and ghastly smells emanated. It was Jonathan’s theory that close proximity to the smells might be creating the moans.
    His sister, hugging an alligator purse, looked rather lovely in another cardigan-and-dress ensemble, topped off by a large flat-brimmed hat that sat at a sun-shielding tilt. Perhaps, Jonathan thought, too lovely to be visiting a pigsty like this . . .
    “Welcome to my humble home, Miss Carnahan,” the warden said. “It is a rare honor to have a woman of your elegance step across my lowly threshold.”
    Despite the musical accent so common when Arabs spoke English, the warden’s command of Jonathan’s native language was impressive. But then again, a man this gross—the chief difference between Hassan and his worst prisoners was that Hassan was in charge—did not achieve so prominent a position without brains.
    As they walked, the warden’s palm cradling Evelyn’s elbow, Hassan gestured with his other hand about the crushed-stone area. “This is our visitors’ area . . .”
    “Charming,” Evelyn said, the sarcasm so faint even Jonathan couldn’t be sure of it.
    Evelyn still seemed to be pouting. She had been irritated, even accusatory, when she learned that her brother had found the puzzle box not on a dig near Luxor, but in an establishment known as the Sultan’s Casbah, a dump catering to European rabble in one of the less reputable corners of the French Quarter.
    “You lied to me!” she had said, sounding wounded.
    Why did that surprise the silly girl? It was hardly the first time. Lying to one’s family, after all, was where the art of fabrication began; if one couldn’t deceive the gullible sods who loved one, how could one hope to pull the wool over a stranger’s eyes?
    Jonathan had explained that he’d lifted the box from the pocket of the unconscious O’Connell, who had been involved in a drunken brawl, after which he (O’Connell) had been arrested. Evelyn—following the requisite expression of shock that her “own brother” could commit such a horrendous act—had insisted the box’s previous owner be interviewed at the prison (but said nothing about returning that box).
    This had seemed a less than smashing idea to Jonathan, having stolen the box, knowing that in Cairo the penalty for picking pockets thereafter made scratching one’s nose (or anywhere else, for that matter) a physical impossibility.
    The warden ushered them toward a barred cage that would not have been out of place in a monkey house at a zoo; the heavily barred pen was attached to the prison wall, where presumably a prisoner would be brought out to meet with visitors.
    Evelyn asked Hassan, “Why is Mr. O’Connell in custody? My understanding is he was arrested after behavior that might be termed ‘drunk and disorderly.’ ”
    The warden shrugged.