“Will I fit in one of your trunks, Mr. Professor Emerson?” asked Latif. He turned his large brown eyes on me. “I do not know where this England place is, but I am sure that I will like it. I will be a servant and sleep on the floor of your cellar. I will be very good at scrubbing floors after you teach me, ya Sitt.”

“Come stand beside me,” Ramses said. “Selim and I had a long talk about your future. He has become very fond of you, and believes that his sister and her husband will welcome you into their family. You will go to school to learn how to read and write. You will study geography, history, and science. It is vital that a great archaeologist is educated about the world.”

“I will run away,” Latif vowed with a dark look.

“If you do, you will risk the displeasure of the Father of Curses. You will also disappoint me.”

I smiled at him. “You will remain here for Christmas and the rest of the season.”

David held up his glass. “Let us offer a toast to Latif’s future. He will have an opportunity to become the greatest Egyptologist of the latter part of the twentieth century.”

Nefret raised her glass. “We should commemorate this moment with a solemn ceremony on the deck.”

“An excellent idea,” Ramses said. “I can carry two of the busts, and David will bring the other. They were created by Egyptian ingenuity. It is only fitting that they will always reside within its boundaries.”

“Wait just a moment,” I said as they all stood up. “From what you told us earlier, you and David found one of these in a locked cabinet in the office of the German ambassador’s attaché. Morgenstern was too addled to have told him anything. The only other person who knew of its existence was Dullard. There is the link.”

Emerson stroked his chin. “This attaché stole the drug when he was included in the tour of the Merck laboratory. He wanted Dullard to experiment on the Coptic community to find out if they could be useful in a war. Dullard must have had a vial of it when he saw what Morgenstern had discovered. I am beginning to think kindly of the denizens in the swamp.”

I was prepared to admonish him for his lack of charity, but chose to stand up and follow the rest of our group out to the deck. David and Ramses threw two of the blatant forgeries into the water and offered the third to me. When I declined, Latif mentioned that he had spent hours searching for shops all over Cairo that specialized in antiquities. He crowed at the sound of the splash.