Inside Straight

“Wolf Blitzer. Katie Couric. Jon Stewart. Geraldo Rivera. Okay, maybe not Geraldo, he couldn’t bear witness to his dick if he found it in Al Capone’s vault.” The laptop gave a cheerful beep. Jonathan punched a key, read the screen, scowled. “Oh, look, another girl who wants to have John Fortune’s baby. This one’s pretty cute, at least. Why do I even bother with e-mail? All I get is spam, and girls sending naked pictures to the two of you. What am I, your pimp? No offense to your father, John. How come none of these girls ever send me naked pictures?”

“You turn into bugs,” said John Fortune.

“Ja,” said Klaus. “And you are very small, where women want men to be large.”

“That’s cold,” said Jonathan, stung. “I’ll have you know that I’m perfectly normal, Nancy Heffermann told me so in junior high. Anyway, size doesn’t matter. I could show you sites—”

“I was speaking of your heart.” Klaus thumped his chest with a closed fist. “Here.”

“Leave him be,” said John Fortune. To Jonathan he said, “The Pharaoh will take you to Aswan. From there you can a charter a plane to Addis Ababa or Nairobi, and connect to a flight back to Europe. Take my Amex card, I won’t be needing it.”

“The black card? That’s…dude, I don’t know what to say.”

Klaus could not listen to any more. He turned for the door. “Lohengrin, wait,” he heard John say, but he was weary of waiting, tired of talk. Just now, he wanted quiet.

He found it in the maze that was the New Temple, wandering through moonlit gardens and down long marble corridors. Red lamps glowed along the walls, mimicking the light of torches. Temple guards and acolytes watched him pass in silence, and once he turned a corner and came upon Anubis, attended by half a dozen lithe young priestesses. The light was too dim for Klaus to say whether it was Red Anubis or Black Anubis, but from the way the jackal-headed god stared at him it was plain he was not wanted, so he made an awkward bow and backed away.

Finally he found himself in a cavernous hall beneath a towering sphinx. She had a lion’s body and a woman’s face, which reminded him of Sekhmet, but she had the wings of an eagle, too, and ram’s horns coiling from her temples. She was some god, he was certain, though Klaus did not know her name. He wondered if his own god would hear, if he said a prayer to this one. His family was Lutheran, though he had never been especially devout. Church was for Christmas and for Easter. “Father,” he said, in a soft voice, “hear me now. We are lost.”

A pair of slender arms encircled him, and two soft hands covered his eyes. “And found,” a voice whispered by his ear.

Klaus knew that touch, that spicy-sweet scent, that voice. “Lili?” he gasped, incredulous. “Can it be you?”

“Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate, darling I remember the way you used to wait,” she sang. “My Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene.” The lyrics he had taught her. Her voice echoed in the hall, low, smoky, intoxicating.

Klaus ripped her hands away, whirled, and took her in his arms. When he kissed her, her own mouth answered him, no less hungry. The dark red lipstick that she wore looked black in the gloom of the hall, but her eyes shone silver pale. Klaus kissed her on each eyelid and then again upon the mouth, picked her up bodily, whirled her in the air. Breathless with laughter, she demanded that he put her down, and Klaus obeyed. “You are here,” he said. “You are truly here, in Egypt. But…but how?”

A half-smile brushed her lips, full of mischief. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

“No. Truly. Lili, what could you be doing here?”

Her face turned serious. “I could ask the same of you.”

That confused him. “I came for John.”

“And I came for you.”

That made him happy. “I have dreamed of you. But how could you know where I was?”

“The whole world knows where you are, my gallant knight. Every time your friend Hive uploads a new installment of his blog, a million people read about your latest exploits.”

“A million?” Klaus had no idea. “So many?”

“This week. By next week it will be ten million, if Hive is still alive. No one likes to find bugs crawling through their dirty laundry, least of all a caliph.”

“The Caliph will be pleased, then. Jonathan is going home.”

“Is he? Clever lad. He’ll live to blog again. You should go with him, Klaus. And take your friend John Fortune.”

“John will not leave. The Living Gods are his people.”