Mother Nile Read online

  Praise for Warren Adler’s Fiona Fitzgerald Mystery Series

  “High-class suspense.”

  —The New York Times on American Quartet

  “Adler’s a dandy plot-weaver, a real tale-teller.”

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  Praise for Warren Adler’s Fiction

  “Warren Adler writes with skill and a sense of scene.”

  —The New York Times Book Review on The War of the Roses

  “Engrossing, gripping, absorbing… written by a superb storyteller. Adler’s pen uses brisk, descriptive strokes that are enviable and masterful.”

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  “A fast-paced suspense story… only a seasoned newspaperman could have written with such inside skills.”

  —The Washington Star on The Henderson Equation

  “High-tension political intrigue with excellent dramatization of the worlds of good and evil.”

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  Warren Adler’s political thrillers are…

  “Ingenious.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Diverting, well-written and sexy.”

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  “Exciting.”

  —London Daily Telegraph

  Mother Nile

  by Warren Adler

  Copyright © 1979, 2016 by Warren Adler

  ISBN (EPUB): 9780795349645

  ISBN (Kindle): 9780795349775

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form without permission. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination based on historical events or are used fictitiously.

  Inquiries: [email protected]

  STONEHOUSE PRESS

  Produced by Stonehouse Productions

  Cover design by Alexia Garaventa

  Published 2016 by RosettaBooks

  www.RosettaBooks.com

  To Sunny who was by my side in Egypt and everywhere

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  More Books by Warren Adler

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The dark-skinned concierge at the Hotel Genaina rubbed his moustache with the crook of his finger, contemplating the young man with shrewd, dark eyes. With his other hand, brown gnarled fingers poking out of the sleeves of his faded blue djellaba like chicken legs, he circled the approximate location of the necropolis, the City of the Dead.

  To the older man, who had, at first, frowned to the rim of his gray woolen skullcap, it was obviously an unprecedented request.

  “There is nothing to see there,” he had assured the young man, who, in jeans, T-shirt, and sandals, still had the air of an American tourist.

  “Nevertheless, that’s where I want to go,” Si Kelly said in Arabic, underscoring the original request and displaying his mastery of the language. The accent, he knew, was distinctly foreign. But Cairenes were used to all accents. The man showed him a row of rotted teeth and busily sketched the route.

  “Muhammad Ali’s mosque in the Citadel is a good landmark.” Then he paused. “No more than fifteen minutes by taxi.”

  Si Kelly thanked him with a ten-piastre coin—“baksheesh”—and the older man’s hand opened and closed quickly, a snapping maw. But he could not resist his curiosity.

  “A relative?”

  Si Kelly nodded, closing his eyes, deliberately illustrating the solemnity.

  “May Allah grant eternal life,” the older man said respectfully.

  “Thank you,” Si said, turning and heading through the dank lobby into the people-clotted street.

  What greeted him was an unprecedented assault on his senses. Engulfed in a soup-like smog overheated by the mid-July sun was a hodgepodge of vehicular traffic moving like a river of molasses around Ezbekieh Gardens, a dust-coated green spot in a vast sea of crumbling brown and gray buildings. Scrawny donkeys pulling flatbed carts competed for space with ramshackle buses choked with people, trucks belching dark exhaust, cars of every vintage, motor scooters, bicycles, barefoot men on little gray donkeys, and human-propelled transport as well, the young dark boys in filthy pajamas pushing huge nondescript burdens, cigarettes dangling from their lips. In all, a giant swarm of refugees escaping, it seemed, from some monstrous persecution.

  The images drained his energy, and he stood in the shadow of the hotel entrance, unable to find his bearings. On the edges of the vehicular swarm, people moved like a pencil scribble out of control; women in clothes that described five thousand years of women’s fashions, chic girls in high heels side by side with bulky women in long somber black abayas, burdened with children and packages; barefoot boys in ragged pajamas, men in sleek French-cut fashions as well as every style of djellaba, turbans, and woolen skullcaps. Animals were everywhere; dogs, cats, donkeys, goats, and sheep.

  The initial assault on the eye masked the attack on the ear, rising like a symphony orchestra tuning up. No car seemed to be able to function without perpetual horn blasts; vendors hawked, children shouted, babies howled, radios blasted Arabic and Western music. The nose, too, did not escape. Gas fumes permeated everything, and a saffron-coated chickpea stink laced with vague odors of human waste larded the air.
A single inhalation, and it could be tasted like some noxious medicinal brew. He was now digesting Cairo, and it lay like lead in his gut.

  Gathering his courage, he moved into the current, retreating again to a slatted chair of what passed for an outdoor café, a dingy hole in the wall where men sat around smoking water pipes, playing backgammon, or arguing. Others sat staring into space. Kayf, his mother had called it. Looking into the eye of emptiness. He had seen her doing it many times. It was a talent he would have liked to call upon at that moment.

  He ordered a Turkish coffee, brought by a man in a tattered djellaba who patted his arm as he laid the cup on the table. Si noted that everybody seemed to touch each other in this human warren, as if the connection of the flesh was not merely accidental, but necessary.

  Could this be the Egypt of his mother’s memories? he wondered. In her green eyes, which he had inherited, he had assumed that he could actually visualize what she persistently refused to reveal of her early life. Because she wouldn’t discuss it with him, he had to invent images of this strange land for himself. Feluccas, like graceful swans slipping soundlessly along a green Nile, depthless and flowing, a mirror of those eyes; sun spangles on the minarets, the soft colors of an orange sun against an azure sky, timeless and beautiful.

  And more. The blue Mediterranean kissing the golden sands of Alexandria. Morning dew on the wadis. The perpetual rhythm of the Archimedes’ screw worked by the blindfolded water buffalo, lifting the life-giving water of the river to the verdant soil, the soft plaintive rhythm of the tarabooka floating in the perfumed mysteries behind the Mashrabiyas, the latticed screens that hid the curious veiled women. And dominating all, the glories of the ancient monoliths, the old kings and queens of the timeless kingdoms, sitting solidly on their stone thrones, living proof that they had conquered time forever.

  Seeing what he saw now, Si learned what really had been in the crucible of his mother’s dying brain. Certainly not his romantic speculations. She hadn’t given him a clue. And he had gotten it all wrong.

  “What was it like?” he had asked her, a perpetual refrain.

  “What?”

  “Egypt. Your childhood. Growing up.”

  What she had given him, he knew finally, were evasions, stuff that he extracted from books. The temples of Karnak and the Valley of the Kings wasn’t her Egypt. Abu Simbel wasn’t her Egypt. Ramses II, his domains and megalomania, wasn’t her Egypt.

  “Tell me what it was like, for crying out loud!” he had remonstrated. He knew she had grown up in Cairo. She had admitted that. She’d had to, because he’d needed to provide his family’s background information for school. Mother’s birthplace: Cairo, Egypt.

  “What do you know about it?” he had asked his father many times.

  “Nothing, kid. She doesn’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  His father had wrinkled his Irish thin-skinned freckled face into a broad sunny smile. “Who gives a damn?”

  His father had met his mother in Tripoli in 1953, while he was stationed there before Qaddafi had kicked the Americans out of Wheelus. She had been a belly dancer in a nightclub.

  “You should have seen her,” his father told him often, usually after he had drained two six-packs or a fifth of whiskey.

  “You should have seen her up there on that dance floor with those veils floating around her and the music pumping out the Arabian beat, and her long black hair flowing. Poetry. The first time I saw her, I said to myself, ‘Tom, you black Irish bastard, there’s your mate.’” He stared inward and shook his head, as if in disbelief that he had won her. “She was something.”

  Si could never imagine her that way. By the time he’d arrived, she had grown plump. Occasionally, she had performed for them, briefly and privately, just to please his father.

  “You should have seen her.” His eyes would grow moist, wistful. “Up there in front of all those gaping guys. God, I love that woman.” His mother had giggled when he said this, thumping him playfully.

  She had taught Si Arabic. It had annoyed his father.

  “He’s an American,” he would tell her gloomily when mother and son chirped together in that alien language. It had been a needless concern, and when Si finally started school and did well, his father let them talk together without commenting.

  They had named him Osiris Sean Kelly. His father had always called him Si, but his mother never used the diminutive. It wasn’t an embarrassment to him until the other kids taunted him.

  “What kind of stupid name is that?” some kid invariably said when a teacher called it out in class.

  “Egyptian,” he would say aggressively in self-defense. Later, he would learn it was the name of an Egyptian god, but he would never tell them that.

  “They call me Si,” he would say. “Only my mother calls me Osiris,” he would explain.

  “He was the most important Egyptian god of all,” his mother told him. It was only later that he found out about Isis.

  Because he was an only child, she smothered him with maternal excess, invoking a thousand don’ts, can’ts, and be carefuls, as if he were perpetually walking a tightrope across some dark abyss. Danger was everywhere, except near her watchful eye. As he grew older, he became guilt-stricken because he was vaguely ashamed of her. The Arab woman, they called her behind her back. She hadn’t made much attempt to assimilate. Even his father had abandoned any attempt to help her achieve that, although he’d tried to make Si a Roman Catholic. But his mother’s invocation of Allah confused him and finally became the despair of the priests.

  “When he gets old enough, he’ll choose for himself,” his father said. By the time he was old enough, he forgot to make a choice, preferring to be nothing.

  “Praise be to Allah,” his mother would say often. “For giving me the gift of Osiris.” She could never get enough of touching him, watching him, fussing over him. That, too, embarrassed him, especially if others were around, particularly his friends.

  “Allah, shmallah,” his father would say, mimicking the stereotype.

  They were an odd triumvirate. To most people, he was a Mick, and he liked it that way. The Israeli victories had made the Arabs seem like bumblers. For most of his life, the Egyptians were pariahs. Only when King Tut’s treasures made their rounds and Sadat went to Jerusalem did it become acceptable to be an Egyptian. He made a point of telling people that he was, as he called it, a half-breed, an absurd combination at that.

  Farrah, his mother, had olive skin. Her green eyes were almond shaped. She had bequeathed that to him, along with her jet-black curly hair and wide mouth. He’d gotten his height from his father as well as the wide shoulders and thin hips. His nose was a hybrid, straight like his father’s, with flared nostrils like his mother’s.

  But most people took him for an Irishman. He was, after all, a Kelly. And he had long since stopped asking her what it was like in Egypt.

  Then, suddenly, it became the most important thing in his life.

  Her Allah had picked a terrible time for her to die. Worse, he had made the going painful and consuming. Si was certain she was thinking that, sitting propped up in the bed they had moved to the sunniest spot in the living room of their little apartment in Brooklyn Heights. He had come down from Cornell in the spring, just two months from graduation, hoping that the deathwatch would not inhibit his preparation for finals.

  “I can’t sit up there, knowing what is happening,” he told his father, who had lamely protested. The distraught man was glad that Si came, although his getting his degree meant a great deal to his parents. Tom Kelly had never gone to college, and Farrah could barely read Arabic, no less English. He had promised them both that he would study and take his finals.

  “It’s only a B.A. in liberal arts,” he told them, not daring to reveal that it didn’t matter much to him. He was swimming in indecision.

  There were o
ther things he could not tell them as well. He felt, as he put it to himself, estranged. For some unknown reason, he could not run with the crowd, could not find peers. He felt foreign in what should have been his own milieu. It wasn’t thrilling to douse his mind with pot or booze, or his body with indiscriminate sex.

  He tried to put up a brave facade of evaluation. But that grew difficult and boring. He blamed it on the times, then on himself. Perhaps, he decided, he needed something to prove himself, to display his courage, his martyrdom for a brave cause, his superior goodness. Something!

  How could he tell them that?

  By the time he had arrived home, his mother’s skin seemed to have turned to thin gray paper. Her eyes had sunk into their almond-shaped hollows, although, when the sun filled the room, the green shone like emeralds. They had placed two chairs beside the bed and took turns embracing her, sitting on the bed, while she remained lost in a perpetual kayf, a blank mental haze. Now it was drug induced.

  “She was something, Si,” his father repeated as they sat in the quiet room, as if she weren’t present at all. “Standing up there on that stage, a soft lovely beauty, like a flower. I was so proud of her. So damned proud.” Then he turned to her and caressed her hands, squeezing them. “You were something, baby.” It had been his “moment,” the high point of his life.

  Grief consumed him now and, already, there was a hint of his future as he sipped whiskey endlessly, giving in to the curse that somehow she had helped him avoid until now. In many ways, Si had thought her passive in her relations with his father, and only now could he glimpse her silent power over him. They belonged to each other. His father had actually said that many times, but, up to then, he hadn’t absorbed its meaning. So that is love, he thought.

  When her mind was lucid, she spoke very little. He knew she was resigned to death. Yet something he saw in her nagged at him, some shadow, even stronger than the specter of impending death. Occasionally, in her pain-racked sleep, she would mumble a single Arabic word, “Battal.”

  “What did she say?” his father asked.

  “I don’t know,” he lied. Battal meant bad. She was too young to die, forty-three. To Si, she had been a good, blameless, and loving woman. Watching her now, he realized how little he knew about her. Except that she loved him and he loved her. Yet even as he observed her agony, he felt that she had cheated him, had left him too much in the dark about herself.