The Illusion of Murder by Carol McCleary Page A

about, but his British companion is not in sight.
    Forcing a smile and a “Good evening,” I start to go around him when I spot a scarab hanging from a gold chain around his neck. Not a brother to the one slipped into my pocket, the magician’s amulet is a blood ruby, almost heart shaped and encrusted with precious stones.
    Worth a fortune, I think, as I raise my eyes to meet his. Not at all what one would expect a marketplace magician to be wearing. Neither were his clothes, which were not the simple cotton he’d worn yesterday, but were black silk trimmed with pearls.
    “Do you know the magic of the Heart Scarab?” he asks in heavily accented English.
    “No, but I would certainly like to hear it.”
    “A bearer of the Heart Scarab is assured of rebirth after death.”
    “I see … and how does it do that?”
    “When people die, the gods weigh their hearts. Hearts that are full of sin are heavy and are eaten by the destroyer of hearts. But if the dead person’s heart is replaced with a scarab before it is weighed, the sins are not discovered and the person is reborn.”
    “Is that how Mr. Cleveland managed to get from the marketplace to the beach where he spoke to Mr. Selous? And stare at me through a porthole? His heart was replaced with a scarab?”
    He gives me a glare that would cow a two-ton Tanis sphinx.
    “You are on sacred ground where gods still walk. Their wrath falls upon those who mock them.”
    His staff comes out from where it’s concealed beneath his robe and I flinch back but the rod taps the ground with a solid sound as he sweeps by me, leaving me cold at the bone despite the hot night.
    I shake off the willies and keep an eye out behind me for snakes as I head deeper into the site. What a creepy character. Put him on the front porch and I wouldn’t have to worry about trick-or-treaters on Halloween.
    That he wasn’t surprised when I mentioned a dead man talking to Frederick Selous didn’t astonish me; he probably got an earful of that subject at the sheikh’s dinner table. But he could have at least raised a curious eyebrow about a porthole Peeping Tom.
    More regrets about having come on the excursion start stacking up in my head and I shake those out, too, determined not to let an Egyptian bogeyman keep me from my chance to soak in some more of the land of pharaohs. I’m happy to visit the ruins without Von Reich’s pedantic chatter and Lady Warton’s caustic view of everything, including me.
    Night is falling, the sky taking an ashen glow as an early full moon rises behind a thin blanket of dark clouds. Torches have been placed in a number of places to light significant monuments for guests who wander out for a look, but I see only a man and woman, and I take a path different from theirs to have some solitude.
    Tanis is a ghost city, its greatest monuments shattered, the dusty souls of its ancient dead scattered by the desert wind, but the faint moonlight takes just enough edge off of the darkness for a little imagination to bring its past glories alive. It’s not hard for me to imagine a pharaoh on a golden chariot, his soldiers using their spears to push back crowds staring with awe at the living god.
    My feet take me far enough from the tent for the music and party sounds to fade, taking me past the Great Temple of Amun and beyond to where a short fence has been put up at an excavation site near the Temple of Horus.
    A large cavity has been opened and fenced with stalks of river reeds, but the desert sand that coats everything makes it appear that the whole project had been abandoned years ago. The opening reveals a crudely excavated stone stairway, steep and broken with missing steps patched by wood supports. The broken stairwell disappears into a pool of darkness that the moonlight doesn’t penetrate.
    The crudeness of the opening makes me wonder if it wasn’t done by thieves rather than professional archaeologists, and what priceless treasures the tomb held before tomb