“It is a message, then,” I said, feeling as if I were fighting through a jungle of non-communication. “For heaven’s sake, Emerson, stop mumbling. Is that message addressed to you, or to me?”

“To neither. No direction was necessary,” said Emerson between his teeth. “It reads ‘Where were you?’ The meaning is obvious. ‘Where were you when your wife was being murderously attacked?’ And, to continue the equally obvious corollary, ‘It’s a good thing I was watching over her.’”

“That is surely reading too much—”

“Someone was watching over you. Someone stabbed the murderous bastard in the back before he could get to you.” His voice rose to a pitch that rattled the windows. “And it wasn’t I!”

Emerson could contain himself no longer. He leapt to his feet and headed for the door, intent, I assumed, on racing up and down the corridors knocking people down and shouting at them. I was about to call him back when I decided the exercise would do him good and help him work off his annoyance. It would have no other useful effect. Sethos was not likely to be still in the hotel and Emerson would not recognize him if he were. Our old enemy was a master of disguise.

The author of the note had to be Sethos. He must have been in the crowd that morning. No one else could arouse Emerson’s wrath so effectively as the Master Criminal, or, as I sometimes called him, the Genius of Crime. Emerson objected to both titles, on the grounds that they were first, ridiculously theatrical, and second, subtly flattering.

We had never known his true name or his antecedents. The soubriquet Sethos referred, as my Readers must know, to the Egyptian god Set, who was the enemy of the benevolent Osiris and Osiris’s son Horus, and who was therefore regarded as evil. But Egyptian religion is seldom so simple. Set could be evil or benevolent according to his circumstances. He had many functions, which I will not go into here because they would necessitate a long and (to some Readers) boring digression. I refer said Readers to any decent volume on Egyptian religion.

Like his chosen tutelary deity, our old foe had a few good qualities, at least from my point of view. He had a strange devotion to my humble self and on one memorable occasion I had been his prisoner for several extremely interesting hours. I must say he behaved like a perfect gentleman, even after I had struck him over the head in an abortive attempt to escape. One would suppose that a keen observer like myself would be able to identify him after spending so much time in his presence, and such would have no doubt been the case had he not been—as I have mentioned—a master of disguise. Over the years he had appeared as an elderly, irascible American lady, an effete English aristocrat, and a number of other personae. I knew he was tall and well built, but on the occasion I have mentioned his actual features had been obscured by a formidable beard and mustache. I could not even be certain that he was dark haired. Hair color is one of the easiest means of identification to alter.