disclaimed gracefully. ‘I just hear the gossip in the bazaars, like everyone else,’ he murmured.
Amer was sardonic. ‘Good for business, is it?’
‘Gossip brings a lot of traders into town, I’m told,’ Hari agreed.
‘Buy a kilo of rice and get the latest palace dirt thrown in.’ Amer gave a short laugh. ‘What are they saying?’
Hari ticked the rumours off on his fingers. ‘Your father wants to kill you. You want to kill your father. You have refused to marry again. You are insisting on marrying again.’ He stopped, his face solemn but his lively eyes dancing. ‘You want to go to Hollywood and make a movie.’
‘Good God.’ Amer was genuinely startled. He let out a peal of delighted laughter. ‘Where did that one come from?’
Hari was not only his personal assistant. He was also a genuine friend. He told him the truth. ‘Cannes last year, I should think.’
‘Ah,’ said Amer, understanding at once. ‘We are speaking of the delicious Catherine.’
‘Or,’ said Hari judiciously, ‘the delicious Julie, Kim or Michelle.’
Amer laughed. ‘I like Cannes.’
‘That shows in the photographs,’ Hari agreed.
‘Disapproval, Hari?’
‘Not up to me to approve or disapprove,’ Hari said hastily. ‘I just wonder—’
‘I like women.’
Hari thought about Amer’s adamant refusal to marry again after his wife was killed in that horse riding accident. He kept his inevitable reflections to himself.
‘I like the crazy way their minds work,’ Amer went on. ‘It makes me laugh. I like the way they try to pretend they don’t know when you’re looking at them. I like the way they smell.’
Hari was surprised into pointing out, ‘Not all women smell of silk and French perfume like your Julies and your Catherines.’
‘Dolls,’ said Amer obscurely.
‘What?’
‘Has it occurred to you how many animated dummies I know? Oh they look like people. They walk and talk and even sound like people. But when you talk to them they just say the things they’ve been programmed to say.’
Hari was unmoved. ‘Presumably they’re the things you want them to say. So who did the programming?’
Amer shifted his shoulders impatiently. ‘Not me. I don’t want—’
‘To date a woman who has not been programmed to say you are wonderful?’ Hari pursued ruthlessly. He regarded his friend with faint scorn. ‘Why don’t you try it, some time?’
Amer was not offended. But he was not impressed, either.
‘Get real,’ he said wearily.
Hari warmed to his idea. ‘No, I mean it. Take that girl down stairs in the lobby just now.’
Amer was startled. ‘Have you started mind reading, Hari?’
‘I saw you looking her way,’ Hari explained simply. ‘I admit I was surprised. She’s hardly your type.’
Amer gave a mock shudder. ‘No French perfume there, you mean. I know. More like dust and cheap sun-tan lotion.’ A reminiscent smile curved his handsome mouth suddenly. ‘But even so, she has all the feminine tricks. Did you see her trying to pretend she didn’t know I was looking at her?’
Hari was intrigued. ‘So why were you?’
Amer hesitated, his eyes unreadable for an instant. Then he shrugged. ‘Three months in Dalmun, I expect,’ he said in his hardest voice. ‘Show a starving man stale bread and he forgets he ever knew the taste of caviar.’
‘Stale bread? Poor lady.’
‘I’ll remember caviar as soon as I have some to jog my memory,’ Amer murmured mischievously.
Hari knew his boss. ‘I’ll book the hotel in Cannes.’
It was not a successful visit to the pyramids. As Leo expected, Mrs Silverstein insisted on walking round every pyramid and could not be persuaded to pass on the burial chamber of Cheops. Since that involved a steep climb, a good third of which had to be done in a crouching position, the older woman was in considerable pain by the end of the trip. Not that she would admit it.
Ever since Mrs Silverstein arrived in Egypt on her Adventures in Time tour, she had wanted to see everything and, in spite of her age and rheumatic joints, made a spirited attempt to do so. When other members of the group took to shaded rooms in the heat of the afternoon, Mrs Silverstein was out there looking at desert plants or rooting affronted Arabs out of their afternoon snooze to bargain over carpets or papyrus.
‘The woman never stops,’ Roy Ormerod complained, looking at the couriers’ reports. ‘She’ll collapse and then we’ll be responsible. For Heaven’s sake get her to slow down.’
But Leo, joining one of the party’s trips, found she had a sneaking sympathy for Mrs Silverstein. She was a lively and cultivated woman with a hunger for new experience that a lifetime of bringing up a family had denied her. She also, as Leo found late one night when the local courier thankfully surrendered her problem client and retired to bed, had a startling courage.
‘Well, it’s a bit more than rheumatism,’ Mrs Silverstein admitted under the influence of honey cakes and mint tea. ‘And it’s going to get worse. I thought, I’ve got to do as much as I can while I can. So I’ll have some things to remember.’
Leo was impressed. She said so.
‘You see I always wanted to travel,’ Mrs Silverstein confided. ‘But Sidney was such a homebody. And then there were the children. When they all got married I thought now. But then Sidney got sick. And first Alice was divorced and then Richard and the grandchildren would come and stay…’ She sighed. ‘When Dr Burnham told me what was wrong I thought—it’s now or never, Pat.’
Leo could only admire her. So, instead of following Roy’s instructions, she did her best to make sure that Mrs Silverstein visited every single thing she wanted to see in Egypt, just taking a little extra care of her. It was not easy.
By the time Leo got her back to the hotel she was breathing hard and had turned an alarming colour. Leo took her up to her room and stayed while Mrs Silverstein lay on the well-sprung bed, fighting for breath. Leo called room service and ordered a refreshing drink while she applied cool damp towels to Mrs Silverstein’s pink forehead.
‘I think I should call a doctor,’ she said worriedly.
Mrs Silverstein shook her head. ‘Pills,’ she said. ‘In my bag.’
Leo got them. Mrs Silverstein swallowed three and then lay back with her eyes closed. Her colour slowly returned to normal.
The phone rang. Leo picked it up.
