Inside Straight

The half-smile returned, teasing. “I have my ways.”

Suddenly he understood. “You are an ace.”

“I abhor that word. So crass, so common, so American. I prefer to call myself a woman of mystery, thank you very much.”

The world shifted under his feet. Lili of the lamplight, he thought, our beautiful chance meeting, the night we spent making love and talking. All of it suddenly seemed unreal. He could feel it dissolving, melting away like his ghost steel after a battle. An ace, and here in Egypt. “What powers?”

“That would be telling. A gentleman never asks a lady her age, her weight, or whether she can fly. There are some who call me the Queen of the Night. Do you know your Mozart, love? The Magic Flute? No, you are more of a Wagner man, I think. The Ride of the Valkyries, ja? Let me be your valkyrie. I can promise you a ride that you will never forget.”

Klaus had wanted more than a ride. Klaus had wanted all of it, all of her. Now he was not sure. “When this is done—that will be the time for us. Not now. It is like our song, like Lili Marlene. He wants to be with her, the soldier, she is all he thinks about, but he must go to war, he must do his duty. His honor demands it. It is the same for me.”

“You’re wrong. This is not your country. This is not your fight. Go home, Lohengrin. You won’t find your grail in Egypt. Only your grave.” Lili stepped away from him. “I see I am wasting my breath. It is written on that stubborn German face of yours. Auf Wiedersehen, Klaus. I wish you well, truly…though, if I were you, I would start sleeping in my ghost steel. The next time Bahir comes for you, he may be in earnest.”

“Wait,” Klaus called out. “How can I reach you? Where do you live? Your name—is your name even Lili?”

“Close enough, darling. Try Lilith.” And she slipped into the shadows and was gone.

~ ~ ~

The noisy, crowded, festering camp that had sprung up around the Colossi of Memnon had blown away in less than three days. Only trash and night soil remained to show where thousands had lived, loved, and starved for weeks on end. Klaus would not have been surprised to see the colossi themselves rise from their ruined thrones and stride off toward the south.

“‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’” said Jonathan, as the two of them paused for a last look. “Lord Byron, man. I think he wrote it about these two guys. Bad boy Byron. He was like the Drummer Boy of the romantic poets.”

The Pharaoh had departed two days ago, carrying Taweret, most of the other gods, and almost all the priests. She was a large and luxurious boat, rated at five stars by the ministry of tourism, so the Living Gods had found room on her to take abroad five hundred of their followers. They would have taken Jonathan as well, but he did not turn up to board. “I overslept,” Hive kept insisting. “What, am I the first guy who ever missed a boat?” He blamed his cell phone. “Fucking alarm never went off. If I get killed, someone needs to sue Sprint.”

Yesterday Sobek had departed, accompanied by Red Anubis, Min, Unut, Thoth, and several others. The crocodile god had managed to piece together a convoy of seventeen large vehicles: moving vans, semis, school buses, cattle trucks, flatbeds, dump-trucks, and the like. Somehow he’d struck a deal with General Yusuf and obtained petrol enough to get them down to Aswan, two hundred kilometers to the south. Then he crammed them full with children, as many as each vehicle could carry. In some cases he had to tear them from a mother’s arms, but most parents were eager to find their sons and daughters a place on one of Sobek’s trucks.

Gamel and Tut were among the last to climb aboard. “We stay with Lohengrin,” Gamel insisted. “Watch motorbike. One euro.” Klaus slammed the gate shut on his protests, and slapped the truck to send it off. The smaller children were weeping when the convoy finally began to roll. Jonathan took pictures of their tear-streaked faces with his cell phone.

The congestion was horrendous, both lanes thick with old cars, bikes, motor scooters, rusted vans and panel trucks, even taxicabs. Some drove along the shoulders, while others straddled the center line, advancing with fits and starts, bumping people out of the way. Abandoned vehicles sat rusting on both sides of the road, a few squarely in the middle. The ones that had not been abandoned quite yet were all honking angrily at the tangle of foot traffic, like a flock of huge steel geese. Klaus had become convinced that every car in Egypt had its horn wired to its brake pedal, so any stop or slowdown produced a blast of noise.