CHAPTER V
THE CAFÉ OF ABDULLAH
"Well—you got away from them all right?" began the man with the green turban when, according to his roundabout instructions, I met him an hour later at the café he had named, one of the principal resorts of Cairo, where Europeans can consort with natives without attracting remark.
"The real dragoman came and took them off my hands—at least the realer one than you—a dreadful creature with a game eye, who murdered your messenger last night, and gave me your letter and induced the ladies to engage him on the strength of it. No wonder they want a 'looker' to take the taste of him out of their mouths. And you certainly are a 'looker' in that get-up. Now kindly tell me all about it, and everything else."
"That's what I'm here for," said Anthony, running a match-box to earth in some mysterious Arab pocket. "But hold on, Duffer. Something you said just then may be important. Is it true that my messenger didn't give you the letter?"
"If you'd hung about Shepheard's Hotel ten minutes longer, you'd have seen the fellow who did give it. Bedr el Gemály he calls himself —Armenian Mussulman, a sickening combination, and an awful brute to look at—said your messenger was taken suddenly ill; pretends to be a dragoman."
"What is he like?"
"Rather like a partially decayed but decently dressed goat."
"Don't rot. This may be serious."