The Adventures Of Indiana Jones by Campbell & Kahn Black Page B

have the decency to tell me how long we’re going to creep around like this,” Marion said.
    “Is that what we’re doing?”
    “It would be obvious to a blind man that we’re hiding from something, Jones. And I’m beginning to wonder why I left Nepal. I had a thriving business, don’t forget. A business you torched.”
    He looked at her and smiled and thought how vibrant she appeared when she was on the edge of anger. He reached across the small table and touched the back of her hand. “We’re hiding from the kind of jokers we encountered in Nepal.”
    “Okay. I buy that. But for how long?”
    “Until I get the feeling that it’s safe to go.”
    “Safe to go where? What do you have in mind?”
    “I’m not exactly without friends.”
    She sighed and finished her coffee, then leaned back in her chair and shut her eyes. “Wake me when you’ve made up your mind, okay?”
    Indy stood up and pulled her to her feet. “It’s time,” he said. “We can leave now.”
    “Brother,” she said. “Just as I was trying to get some beauty sleep.”
    They went out into the alleyway, which was almost deserted.
    Indy paused, looking this way and that. Then he took her by the hand and began to walk.
    “You want to give me some idea of where we’re headed exactly?”
    “The house of Sallah.”
    “And who is Sallah?”
    “The best digger in Egypt.”
    He only hoped Sallah still lived in the same place. And beyond that there was another hope, a deeper one, that Sallah was employed in the Tanis dig.
    He paused at a corner, a junction where two narrow alleys branched away from one another. “This way,” he said, still pulling at Marion’s arm.
    She sighed, then yawned. She followed.
    Something moved in the shadows behind them, something that might have been human. It moved without noise, gliding quickly over the concrete; it knew only to follow the two people who walked ahead of it.
    Indy was welcomed into Sallah’s house as if only a matter of weeks had passed since they last met. But it had been years. Even so, Sallah had changed very little. The same intelligent eyes in the brown face, the same energetic cheerfulness, the hospitable warmth. They embraced as Sallah’s wife, a large woman called Fayah, ushered them inside the house.
    The warmth of the greeting touched Indy. The comfortable quality of the house made him feel at ease immediately, too. When they sat down at the table in the dining room, eating food that Fayah had produced with all the haste of a culinary miracle, he looked over at the other table in the corner, where Sallah’s children sat.
    “Some things change after all,” he said. He placed a small cube of lamb into his mouth and nodded his head in the direction of the kids.
    “Ah,” Sallah said. His wife smiled in a proud way. “The last time there were not so many.”
    “I can remember only three,” Indy said.
    “Now there are nine,” Sallah said.
    “Nine,” and Indy shook his head in wonderment.
    Marion got up from the table and went over to where the children sat. She talked to each of them, touched them, played briefly with them, and then she came back. Indy imagined he saw some kind of look, something indeterminate yet obviously connected with a love of children, pass between Marion and Fayah. For his part he’d never had time for kids in his life; they constituted the kind of clutter he didn’t need.
    “We have made a decision to stop at nine,” Sallah said.
    “I’d call that wise,” Indy said.
    Sallah reached for a date, chewed on it silently for a moment and then said, “It really is good to see you again, Indiana. I’ve thought about you often. I even intended to write, but I’m a bad correspondent. And I assumed you were even worse.”
    “You assumed right.” Indy reached for a date himself. It was plump and delicious.
    Sallah was smiling. “I won’t ask you immediately, but I imagine you haven’t come all the way to Cairo just to see me. Am I