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You should have known better than to dress so immodestly, Mumma said. None of this would have happened if you’d just stayed home, where you belong.
It doesn’t matter, Mildred told me. You’ll probably never see those people again. Just wear that nice silk cardigan when you go out. Or the navy linen jacket—that goes with everything.
Exhaustion eventually claimed me, but during that first night, my sleep was disturbed, perhaps by some unfamiliar sound outside. I rolled over in bed and saw—silhouetted by moonlight—a man standing calmly in my room.
Frightened out of my wits, I screamed and sat up, clutching at the covers, and struggled to turn on the bedside light.
By the time I found the switch, the intruder had disappeared into the darkness. With my heart beating violently, I expected help to arrive at any moment. But the minutes passed. No one came, and this upset me more than the initial fright. I had screamed for help! And no one came!
“Why doesn’t anyone ever come?” I wailed aloud.
Rosie awoke at the sound of my voice, and only then did I realize that she’d been fast asleep. How on earth could she have slept through the shriek that still echoed in my own ears?
Still terrified, I lay back, torn between the utterly convincing nature of my experience and indisputable facts: neither hotel staff nor other guests had arrived to investigate my loud distress, and Rosie had missed the entire drama, if drama it had been.
My pulse slowed. Reason reclaimed me. I eased out of bed, pulled on my robe, went outside to the balcony. Serene starlight revealed nothing of note in the blue-shadowed world beyond. I quietly closed the French doors against a chill that had crept across the desert and traveled along the Nile. Rosie watched me curiously from beneath a fold of sheeting.
This is an ancient place, I thought, getting back into bed. There are souls here who ca
It was utterly unlike me to think that way, but I swear that’s what came to mind. From my present vantage, that dream makes perfect sense, but at the time? I shook off the unease and settled onto the pillow.
“A late supper’s nightmare—that’s all,” I told Rosie. “A bit of Mr. Scrooge’s undigested cheese. It was a dream. Just a silly dream …”
“LIE DOWN WITH DOGS, rise up with fleas,” Mumma used to say. She was referring to moral corruption that came of falling in with bad companions, although she also thought that people who let their dogs sleep indoors were asking for trouble.
Ah, but those who lie down with dachshunds rise up with smiles, even if their own night’s sleep has been disturbed. Dachshunds are structural comedians; their very existence is a cause for amusement. In the full light of morning, I awoke to the spectacle of Rosie lying flat on her back: pointed nose in the air, stubby forelegs folded demurely across her chest, hindquarters sprawled in lewd abandon.
“Trollop! Just look at you,” I murmured, stroking her belly. “No wonder Arabs think short dogs are odious.”
Waking, she rolled over. Yawned, her long tongue unfurling like a paper noisemaker. Stretched, a two-part motion: first fore, then aft. A cylindrical shake from one end to the other, and she leapt into my arms, all exuberance and kisses, as though we had been cruelly parted for days, not sleeping in the very same bed all night long.
Someone just outside my door must have heard my laughter, for there was a tiny knock and a piping voice. “Walk you dog, madams?”
I pulled on my dressing gown, lifted Rosie, and opened the door to a small boy wearing a barely respectable white cotton shift and sandals. This little capitalist held up a worn leather leash, probably scavenged from some European’s trash. “Yes, madams? Walk you dog?”
Rosie customarily barked at strangers, but perhaps she did not yet consider the hotel room entirely her own. And this child had, after all, uttered a magical word. She looked at him and then up at me, trembling with anticipation. He said ‘walk,’ Agnes.
“How much?” I asked.
We quickly brokered a price and I attached his leash to her collar. Before I even learned the boy’s name, he and Rosie raced down the corridor toward the stairs.
I don’t know what I was thinking. I suppose I simply presumed that the concierge had sent the boy. When he and Rosie failed to reappear by the time I’d washed up and gotten dressed, dreadful possibilities began to occur to me. Was this how poor Egyptians obtained meat— by walking foreigners’ dogs? What if the boy held her hostage and demanded a ransom? What if the doorman of the Semiramis had sent the boy here to execute the offensive animal? That was absurd, but still …
Idiot! I thought. Why didn’t you call the desk clerk before sending her off with some little stranger?
Five more sickening minutes, and I left the room, hoping at every step to hear a child’s pounding footfalls and Rosie’s scrambling scamper up the staircase. With no sign of them three flights down, I was close to frantic as I approached the concierge. “Sir, I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible mistake,” I began, embarrassed at the quaver in my voice.
Just then I heard a deep male voice cry, “Ein Wursthund!” right outside the hotel door. There was a stream of delighted German followed by a question in Arabic that was answered by the boy, who entered the lobby and lifted his chin toward me.
The German gentleman appeared with Rosie draped happily over one strong forearm. He was a rather handsome person, quite tall, and broad in the chest. My age. Perhaps a bit younger. When he saw me, his smile widened beneath a luxuriant mustache, and he leaned over to place Rosie on the floor.
Crying “Woo-hoo!” she sprinted across the lobby and pirouetted at my feet as if to say, Look, Agnes, look! I found us a new friend!
I picked her up, careful to bend at the knees, and straightened just in time to see the gentleman hand the little boy a coin and dismiss him with a word or two in Arabic. “You are English, miss?” the gentleman inquired cheerily with a slight but pleasant accent.
“American,” I said.
“You must forgive my forwardness, Miss—?”
“Shanklin.”
“You see, Miss Shanklin, I had a dachshund when I was small, just the same as your—?”
“Rosie.”
“Such memories your Rosie brings me! My Tessa was just the same,” he said again, astonished by this coincidence. “Black and brown with markings just the same.” He held out his hands with a pleading look, begging for the opportunity to hold Rosie once more. Disarmed, I passed her to him, and the hussy allowed herself to be transferred without a struggle.
“She is a vamp,” the gentleman said with mock disapproval, as though reading my mind. “My Tessa was the same. But I forget my ma
This meal was included in the price of my accommodation, or it had been at the Semiramis. Uncertain if the same arrangement obtained at the Continental as well, I turned toward the desk clerk to inquire.
Herr Weilbacher must have misread my hesitation. “Please, Miss Shanklin, I assure you that my intentions are entirely honorable.”
The notion that a man’s intentions toward me were anything else seemed improbable but intriguing. I tried to think if I was properly attired for a meal in public, and yes—even preoccupied by Rosie’s fate, I’d taken time to select the longest frock Mildred had allowed me to purchase and had pulled the navy jacket on over it. I wore neither gloves nor hat, but I could feel the marcelled wave that Antoine had created swagging low and becomingly over my wayward eye. And I was in Cairo! I was far from home, you see, and free from all my own ideas of myself. It seemed just possible that—