Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 136 - The Pharoah's Ghost

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THE PHAROAH'S GHOST
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page copyright © 2003 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I
? Chapter II
? Chapter III
? Chapter IV
? Chapter V
? Chapter VI
? Chapter VII
? Chapter VIII
? Chapter IX
? Chapter X
? Chapter XI
? Chapter XII
? Chapter XIII
? Chapter XIV
? Chapter XV
Scanned and Proofed
by Tom Stephens
Chapter I
A DOVE, says most dictionaries, is one who is regarded as pure and gentle. The Arabian word for dove
is the word hamamah. And that leads around to the bold-faced fact that whoever named the Arabian
waterboy Hamamah was an awful joker.
Hamamah wasn't really a waterboy. He was—well, it would go something as follows: You would say,
who is he? Oh, that's Hamamah (the Arabian word for dove) you would be told. And who's Hamamah?
Why, he's the waterboy. This would not be very enlightening, so you might ask for whom he carried
water. Oh, Hamamah didn't carry water any more. But it was true he carried a little blood now and then.
Then your informant would laugh like everything, for no other reason than that there wasn't a thing funny
about it.
In Cairo there were quite a few police officials, native and Colonial, who mentioned Hamamah in their
prayers, asking to be bestowed the privilege of shooting or hanging him legally.
Hamamah wasn't even an Arab by blood. He had come from the south, down in the tall somewhere.
The general consensus was, his father had been a jackal and his mother a handsome snake.
Hamamah had been a handsome boy. But he wasn't handsome now because too many knives and fists
and diseases had worked on his face.
He was a lean cur who skulked in alleys from habit. When he was prosperous, he was a great one to
dress up. He bought the finest that Vowels, the store on Gharb Street in Cairo had to offer, and before
the war he would immediately cable Bonfils, the fine gentleman's tailors on Bond Street in London, for a
new wardrobe. Or he varied that by cabling Farques et Cie, Boulevard Haussman, Paris. They were
good, too. Both firms had Hamamah's measurements on file.
At ten o'clock this morning, Hamamah was particularly well-dressed. He strolled out of his hotel, the
Zaibaq Mansion, a shifty dive on Mi'za Street in full glory from dust gray bowler to striped morning
trousers.
He gave old Amil, the doorman at the Zaibaq Mansion, a one-hundred piastre note. It was equivalent to
a little less than five dollars, American, in normal times.
“For you, my dear father,” said Hamamah grandly.
“Thank you, my loving son,” said old Amil.
Hamamah strolled up the street.
Old Amil smiled benignly until Hamamah was out of sight.
Then old Amil spat on the hundred-piastre note. He wiped the spit off as if that cleaned it. Old Amil took
a knife, a frightening knife with a blade like fourteen inches of needle, and stuck it through the note. He
stood there looking at it and thinking how fine it would be if that was Hamamah's heart impaled on the
sticker. Two years ago Hamamah had gone off on a honeymoon with old Amil's daughter, and old Amil
was fairly sure Hamamah had sold the girl to the slave market on the edge of the great and mysterious
country which was labeled Rub Al Khali on the maps. For two years old Amil had been planning to kill
Hamamah, and the only reason he hadn't done it was because he was hoping he could figure out a still
more painful and gruesome way of doing it.
At that, old Amil was probably as good a friend as Hamamah had.
Hamamah was anybody's snake. He could be bought. He usually was.
HAMAMAH discovered the American sucker in front of the Mosque, the big one north of the cluster of
shops on Gharb Street where they sell camel trappings.
The American sap was a long drink of water decked out in a forty-dollar New York suit and a splintering
new sun helmet. He had yap written all over him. He even carried some of the junk jewelry the camel
boys hawked to the fool tourists as a sideline.
Hamamah, who had nothing else to do, decided to clip this guy.
There were no regular Yankee tourists these days, what with the war. There were plenty of soldiers,
American and English, who could be shystered, but the trouble with them was that they had the habit of
beating the hell out of a poor hard working thief when they caught one.
This one was perfect. He was thin and pale-looking, and Hamamah catalogued him as a dopey American
clerk sent over here by some Yankee company handling war material.
Hamamah walked up to the sucker with another hundred-piastre note in his hand.
“La tukwakhidhni,”
said Hamamah.
The American jumped and turned.
“Huh?”
“Wad-darahim ahi tamam?”
asked Hamamah.
The sucker scrooged around and finally said, “Ma atkallam 'arabi —is that the way you say it? I don't
speak Arabic.”
Hamamah bowed and grinned very big.
“The English I speak great,” he said. “Beg your pardon, I am say. The money, is it right?”
The American looked at the hundred-piastre note. “What about the money?”
“You drop her.”
“The heck I did!” The sucker went through his pocket in a hurry. “No, I didn't.” He took out a
bull-choking roll of bills and counted them. “No, I've got all my dough. That's not mine.”
Hamamah tried not to choke as he saw the roll of bills.
“You no drop?” he said.
“Nope.”
“So sorry,” Hamamah acted confused. “Someone drop. Best give to police, they find owner, no?”
Hamamah then called a native policeman to whom he handed the bill and the story that he had found it,
and thought the American had dropped it, but no, the American hadn't. So would the officer find the
owner?
The officer took the bill, put it in his pocket, and said—in Arabic—that now he had seen everything. He
called Hamamah a buzzard who had eaten his mother and a stinking something on a pig's hoof. He knew
Hamamah.
Hamamah bowed and half his face was grin.
“The policeman thanks us and says he will get it to the rightful owner or donate it to the war fund,”
Hamamah told the American, telling a whopping lie.
The object of all this was to establish Hamamah's good honest reputation with the American sucker.
It seemed to have done the job.
“You sightsee, no?” asked Hamamah.
“Yep. Interesting place, Cairo,” said the American. “Darndest place I ever saw. Sure wish the people
back in the Bronx could see it.”
“Bronx? What is Bronx?” asked Hamamah.
“Shucks, that's the biggest state on the Pacific Ocean,” said the sucker, and he laughed uproariously.
“Ah,” said Hamamah. “You sightsee, eh? Have you seen the camel-singing school.”
“The which?”
“The camel-singing school. They teach the camels to music.”
“Say, I'd like to see that.”
“I show you,” said Hamamah. “I am head teacher man in school.”
Hamamah knew darned well the Bronx was a part of New York City, not a state on the Pacific Ocean.
But there was no such thing as a camel-singing school, either, so they were even.
“This way,” added Hamamah.
THE sucker took Hamamah by the throat when they were passing an alley. It was quite a surprise to
Hamamah. The American jerked Hamamah into the alley.
The alley was a stinking deserted gloomy one—gloomy even at ten o'clock in the morning—and it was
the kind of an alley Hamamah should have been at home in. He'd cut more than one throat in such an
alley; alleys were practically his place of business.
Hamamah tried to stick two fingers in the sucker's eyes. Hamamah wore the nails long on the two fingers,
and under the fingernails he kept a concoction—a particularly stinging pepper and some other worse
stuff—which would blind an opponent in a jiffy.
It didn't work. The American sap got the two long-nailed fingers, and quickly and efficiently broke one of
them and disjointed the other.
Hamamah was hurt. He screamed a scream that would have reached the topmost spire of the Rahib
mosque, had the shriek been a success. It wasn't The American sap knocked the screech and one of
Hamamah's teeth back down his throat. Hamamah gagged, and they fought.
They actually went end over end in the alley. Hamamah knew some of the Cairo alley brand of judo,
which was pretty nasty stuff.
The American sucker knew more and better of the same stuff. Hamamah began to squawk and pant and
gasp. He lost hide, another tooth, some hair, his courage.
Now another American appeared. This one came trotting down the alley—he had been concealed
behind a rubble pile a short distance away—to join the scrap.
The newcomer was a wide, short, apish fellow with a remarkably homely face, a big mouth, and an
impressive crop of red hair which looked somewhat like rusty shingle nails.
“Stay with him, Long Tom,” he called.
Hamamah had a piece of luck. He got one of his knives out. He put it into the shoulder of his opponent,
and put the point of the knife on into a wooden door against which they were fighting at the moment. The
American was pinned to the door.
Hamamah turned and ran. He ran as he had never run before. He was scared. He was so scared he was
blue.
The squat hairy American reached the sucker American.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Monk, he got a knife into me,” said the other.
Monk dragged an overgrown and complex looking pistol-shaped weapon from an underarm holster.
“No, Monk! No, no!” yelled the other.
“Listen, the dirty so-and-so stuck you—”
“He just got some hide. Get me loose!”
Monk eyed the other anxiously. “Long Tom, you're sure it's not in you bad?”
“Just pinned the hide, I tell you,” Long Tom insisted.
Monk examined the knife. “Yeah, that's right.” He pulled the blade out, looked at it, said, “Probably a
trillion germs on this thing. I'd rather have a snake crawl through me.”
“You and me both.” Long Tom worked with the wound to make it bleed freely.
“I oughta shot his head off!” Monk said violently.
“Don't be crazy. He's important to us.”
Hamamah by now was out of the alley.
“You think he'll get away?” Monk asked anxiously.
“No,” Long Tom said. “Doc Savage will collect him.”
“Doc better,” Monk muttered.
HAMAMAH was afraid of being collected. He traveled like a goose that had been shot at, rounded a
couple of corners, and sighted a rattletrap of a taxicab. He almost moaned with pleasure when he saw
the cab. It was an old hag of a cab, and Hamamah knew from experience that the drivers of such would
do practically anything for a few piastres.
Hamamah went into the cab like a groundhog into a hole.
“Drive!” he gasped. “Drive like the devil.”
The cab driver was an enormous villain with an almost black skin, a patch over an eye, scar tissue on his
face, and a scratchy voice like a rat running over tin.
“Five hundred piastres,” he said.
“You dog! You jackal! You stinking piece of muck!” said Hamamah. “Drive, you piece of dirt.”
“A thousand piastres,” said the driver calmly.
“A thou—” Hamamah choked. “All right. Drive.”
The driver snorted.
“In advance,” he said.
Hamamah shelled out the money. “You're a damned thief,” he said. “Get going, you pile of camel puke.”
The driver chuckled. “Hang on.”
The old cab took off. Hamamah settled back, wiping off sweat. His scare didn't subside, but at least he
could breathe normally again.
Allah, I was lucky to find this driver, thought Hamamah. The fellow is as big a rascal as I, and exactly
what I needed.
Hamamah's approval of the scamp driver increased as they twisted through Cairo streets. The driver was
from the south, the Nubian country around the Red Sea port of Suakin, concluded Hamamah. The man
had the accent of that district in his speech. It was unusual, thought Hamamah, that he hadn't heard of
such a rascally fellow before.
“You are a stranger in Cairo?” he demanded.
The driver grunted.
“Maybe,” he admitted.
The driver pulled into a side street and changed the identification plates on his car. He substituted a spare
set. Also, the engine cover had been off the taxicab, and the driver calmly produced the cover from
under the front seat, where he obviously must have a special place to store such a large object, and put it
on the car. The addition of the cover would change the most conspicuous descriptive angle of the cab. It
was no longer, “the cab had a missing engine cover.”
“You are a dog who has barked before,” Hamamah said.
The driver—he was really an enormous fellow, although the stoop in his walk made his size
deceptive—grunted again. “I do not bark often at a thousand piastres.”
“You call that a big bark, eh?”
“Big enough to scare me somewhat,” admitted the driver.
He was so obviously not scared that Hamamah laughed with relief. “Maybe I could get you a job that
would really be profitable,” he said.
The driver scratched one of his face scars. “Are you just making a camel noise?”
“La!”
said Hamamah violently. “It is truth.”
“Profitable work?”
“Na'am, aiwah.
Very profitable.”
“I might rattle it in my head for a while.”
“This job is right now.”
The driver considered. “All right, what is it?”
Hamamah grinned. “Take us to the red house at the junction of the Street of Shrews and the new
boulevard.”
The driver nodded. He headed in that direction, taking a somewhat roundabout route which put him past
a certain street corner. He paid no attention to the corner in passing, but an old touring car with curtains
was waiting there.
The touring car pulled out and followed them.
The driver had a grin of his own.
Chapter II
THE house looked in general pretty much like most of Cairo's houses on the outside, which meant that it
was picturesque to some extent, but nothing to make an architect happy. The color of the house was the
color of a soiled white rat, the only red being on doors, shutters and window-bars.
The driver, stopping in front of the place, said, “Here is your buzzard's roost.”
The other car, the touring with the curtains that had been following them, went on past. The man driving it
was tanned and had one large earring. His hat was big enough to make it hard to tell much about his face.
Hamamah got out. “Come on inside.”
The driver laughed. “And give you a chance to knife me and get back the thousand piastres?”
“So you're an old she-camel, afraid of a dog's breath.”
That made the driver angry. He got out, said, “But what is the sense of my going along?”
“I want to talk to you about this job,” Hamamah said.
“Job?”
“Yes. Come on.”
The driver spat. “I want no job that a camel-fly the likes of you could give me.”
“I wouldn't hire you.”
“No?”
Hamamah squinted up at the other. “Ever hear of Jaffa?”
The driver's expression got wooden. He casually gave his robe a hitch, and a dark automatic pistol
dropped out of one fold into his hand and was quickly transferred to a more accessible hiding place. He
was impressed.
“Jaffa?” he said.
“You've heard of him?”
“Naturally not,” the driver said, and grinned without humor. The grin said he had heard, though.
Hamamah gestured. “Come inside. I may be able to get you on the payroll. That is what I was talking
about.”
The driver snorted. “Hire somebody he knows nothing about? So you really want me in there to cut my
throat?”
“Come and see, you goat-smell,” Hamamah said.
The two of them crossed to the door of the house. They seemed to feel quite friendly toward each other.
At least Hamamah was pleased. This turjuman was truly a rare devil, and Hamamah felt as happy as a
buzzard who had just met another buzzard.
A thin boy with a missing ear showed his face at a little barred opening when they kicked on the door.
Hamamah called him “little carrion,” and told him to open the door before he got his remaining teeth
kicked down his throat.
To Hamamah's astonishment, the boy immediately did so.
“Northeast whisker of the prophet!” Hamamah muttered. “So Jaffa is not here?”
“This one has never heard that name before,” said the boy.
Hamamah grunted. “Put it this way: The eagle sits not in his nest today?”
“True,” the boy said, “if you put it that way.”
Hamamah turned to the driver. “The black bird sits in your soup today, my friend. In other words, I will
have to see you another day about that job. The—ah—eagle is not here today, so he can not interview
you.”
The driver spat angrily. “You waste my time like an old dog baying the morn. You are a bluff, a liar, a
braggart, who knows no Jaffa.”
That touched Hamamah's pride. “Wallah, I have not lied!”
“Will you see this Jaffa today?”
“No.” Hamamah shook his head. “It is not likely. I will not lie to you—I am about as important to Jaffa
as one whisker is to the cat. But I will see him. And tomorrow, or the next day, I will see you again
and—”
The driver had been speaking Arabic.
Now he said in English, “That's too long, much too long!”
And for the second time in the last couple of hours, Hamamah was unexpectedly taken by the throat.
THE cab driver underwent a fearsome change, too. He stopped being a cab driver. He seemed to grow
a foot by just taking the slump out of his shoulders and the kinks out of his legs. Hamamah got the wild
feeling the fellow had been doubled up like a folding-rule under the loose burnoose. Anyway, the driver
was suddenly a giant
“U'a!” gasped the door-boy, and got a long-bladed knife out of the back of his collar. The way he drew
the blade gave the suspicion that was where his missing ear had gone. Sometime or other he'd made a
slip getting the knife out and sliced off the ear.
The driver's left arm went out, the edge of his hand chopped the boy's throat, and the boy staggered
back making croaking sounds.
Hamamah tried to stamp the driver's feet and break the foot-bones. He had no luck. He was suddenly hit
behind the right eye, hit so hard the world turned black and ringing.
When the big driver dropped Hamamah, the fellow remained loosely where he landed on the floor.
The one-eared boy, shaking his head, got organized. He shifted his feet like a boxer, readying the knife,
and looked for the bad places on the big driver to cut or stab—the brachial, radial or carotid arteries, the
subclavian or the heart and stomach areas. Somebody who knew had taught him how to use a knife.
There was a spindle-legged European chair made of hardwood to one side of the hall. The big cab driver
got that and advanced.
A chair, next to a bullet, is probably the most effective offensive weapon against a man with a knife, or
against any opponent with a cutting weapon—which is why lion tamers carry them.
The one-eared boy made some slashing motions and danced about a while. He could see that he was up
against an expert.
He didn't exactly lose his nerve. But he began to want very badly to get out of there. The first chance he
got, he ran.
The thrown chair—the boy was quick and lucky—missed him. The boy went on through the door,
slammed it, kept going through other doors. Straight on through and out the back, he went.
And almost into the arms of three men, three Americans.
“Hold it!” barked one of the Americans.
The boy tried to stop his headlong flight, and in doing that caused his feet to slip. He crashed sidewise
into a wall, landing against the point of his knife. The knife blade stuck a steel tongue two inches beyond
the burnoose that covered his back over the heart.
THE three Americans—one was the sucker Hamamah had roped in earlier, another was the hairy man
named Monk who had appeared in the alley, and the third was a dapper fellow who had been driving the
car that had followed Hamamah's machine to this house.
The three of them stared at the fallen boy, shocked.
The boy kicked around some and died.
The driver came out of the house, looked at the boy, demanded, “What happened?”
“He barged into us, tried to dodge, slipped, and fell on his sticker,” said the homely Monk.
The big driver eyed Monk and asked suspiciously, “You didn't trip him?”
“So help me!” Monk said earnestly.
The big driver turned to the dapper man with a questioning look.
“No, Doc, Monk didn't touch him,” said the dapper man. “For once in his life, Monk is telling the truth. It
was an accident.”
“Where is your car?”
“In a side street.”
“Notice anything suspicious, Ham?”
The dapper Ham shook his head. “We were waiting in the car at the corner where you agreed to drive
past so we could get on your trail. We followed you here, saw you go into the house, parked, and were
coming around the back to cover the exits when this boy burst out and accidentally killed himself.”
Monk asked, “Doc, do you think this is the right place?”
The big man said, “No time to tell yet. Suppose you fellows search it.”
The big man went back to Hamamah, who hadn't come out of the fog yet. The others searched the
house. They went over the place thoroughly, pulling up rugs, jabbing at suspicious places, and sounding
walls.
Long Tom—Hamamah's original American sucker—reported the results.
“Nobody home,” he said. “No clues that appear to be worth anything.”
“Then it all depends on this fellow,” the big man said. He slapped Hamamah unexpectedly.
Hamamah, who had regained consciousness, and was faking continued stupor, gave himself away by
dodging as the blow approached his face.
Monk said, “Let's see what this cookie has in his pockets,” and proceeded to strip every stitch of clothes
off Hamamah and tear them to rags. Hamamah's pocket change, a roll of about fifty thousand piastres,
went into Monk's pocket with the remark that, “The local Community Chest can probably use this.”
“You are thieves!” Hamamah screamed.
Monk leaned over him ominously.
“Brother, we are more than that,” Monk said.
Hamamah gaped at him. “Eh?”
“We are friends of Johnny Littlejohn,” Monk said.
HAMAMAH had been fighting as best he could. Now, when he heard the name Johnny Littlejohn—he
gave one violent jump, was fixed and rigid with his lips slowly peeling off his teeth. He looked like a man
who was dying.
摘要：

THEPHAROAH'SGHOSTADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispagecopyright©2003BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXII?ChapterXIII?ChapterXIV?ChapterXVScannedandProofedbyTomStephensC...

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