The Anubis Gates

In any case, Romanelli reflected as he opened a door that quite soon would be securely locked, we may not even need the Anubis Gates. There will be further bold political strokes like the one that will occur this afternoon, and with as strong a leader as Mohammed Ali taking the Master’s council, we might be able to re-establish Egypt even without being able to rewrite history. The question of when to arrange a secret assassination and substitution by a docile ka can be deferred for at least several years.

Before stepping into the hall he glanced up and down the narrow, empty street between the high walls. Quiet right now, he thought.

The Mustee, at an hour past noon, was at its most crowded, with heavily laden camels pressing stolidly through the throng, and the shouts of the veiled women selling oranges rising in jarring cacophony over the song of the rat catcher—on whose broad-brimmed hat six trained examples of his prey, each wearing a little hat of its own, formed a pyramid—and the yells of the fish and milk vendors and the chanted prayers of the beggars. But the mob parted hastily before the relentless hooves of the procession riding down the center of the street at a relaxed but indomitable walk. In hopes of a tip at the end of the ride, a street boy had taken it upon himself to serve as the—in this case unnecessary—sais, or runner-ahead;

“Riglak!” he would warn some Nubian merchant, whose foot had been snatched out of the way even before the boy called, and “Uxrug!” to two ladies from a harem who had already crowded up against a wall and were shrilly and indignantly protesting this usurpation of the street.

But everyone was as eager to see the parade as to get out of its way, and the British elfendis turned their palm-branch chairs around on the sidewalk in front of the Zawiyah Cafe to keep an uneasy eye on the procession as they took somewhat deeper sips of their drinks, for this was a formal procession of the Mameluke Beys in all their finery. The hot sun glinted on the precious stones that studded their sword hilts and pistol butts, and their colorful robes and feathered turbans and helmets made the rest of the street seem drab by comparison; but in spite of the grandeur of the jewelled weapons and the rich cloths and the gorgeously caparisoned Arabian horses, the most striking aspect of the parade was the lean, hawk-nosed brown faces and the narrowed eyes that remained haughtily above the crowd.

Not least impressive of the faces was the helmeted, black-bearded one that belonged to an impostor; and though many of the people who scurried out of the way or peered down from windows knew the cobbler Eshvlis, whose place of business was a niche in the outside wall of a mosque two blocks away, none of them recognized him in the gold-chased armor of the Mameluke Bey Ameen.

And none of them knew that even in his daily routine of repairing shoes Eshvlis was an impostor—that, before choosing that name and dying his hair and beard black, he had been called Brendan Doyle.

* * *

Over the past few months Doyle had got used to being Eshvlis, but he was far from confident in this role he’d assumed today, and he averted his face whenever he noticed one of his patrons in the crowd. The impersonation that he’d agreed to so cheerfully this morning was beginning to make him nervous—was it, he wondered, a crime to attend the Pasha’s banquet by arriving disguised as one of the invited guests? Probably. If his friend Ameen hadn’t been counting on the success of the deception, Doyle would have spurred the borrowed horse out of the parade, divested himself of the sword, daggers and fine clothes, and sneaked back to his cobbler’s niche to enjoy the show from a comfortable distance.

He glanced at his niche as they rode past it, and, although he had booked passage out of the country on a ship that would weigh anchor tomorrow, he was surprised and angry to see another cobbler perched there in a nest of dangling shoes. Absent one morning, he thought bitterly, and the competition moves in like rats.

Up ahead was the square where he’d first encountered Ameen. Doyle smiled grimly, remembering that hot October morning, which had begun to go wrong when Hassan Bey’s shoe buckle broke off during a meeting with the British governor.