Free Merryll Manning Is Dead Lucky by Johm Howard Reid

And if that heart didn’t tip the scales in your favor, you were doomed to spend eternity in hell.
        The Dune-Harrigan of old had not only openly pooh-poohed such superstitions, but actively trod them underfoot.
        Maybe he’d picked up a few scruples in the last thirty years? I raised my arm.
        “ Fermo! Fermo! Stop, I beg you!”
        Puzzled, I examined the little garishly colored god far more closely. Then it hit me. The professor was up to one of his old tricks. No wonder he was so desperate to win that $8,000! He was smuggling genuine relics out of Egypt, disguised as trashy, modern souvenirs.
        But now he had an even better reason to get rid of me! I actually saw him kill a man once. A thief in Cairo who tried to steal what the good professor himself had already stolen.
        Maybe I could bluff my way out? I balanced the powerful little god in the palm of my hand. “Unlock the door, professor, and open it up real wide.”
        He did so.
        “Now let me tell you one little thing,” I continued, trying not only to find the right eyetie words, but even just to speak. “You and I both know you possess a whole boatload of this stuff, both legitimate and smuggled. Both stunningly on display and extremely well hidden in your house. I could have turned you in a thousand times in thirty years and earned myself some real nice, real easy cash rewards.”
        “Why didn’t you?”
        I swallowed hard. The old fool wouldn’t understand, but I told him anyway. “Because I respect you.”
        To my intense surprise, a great light dawned on his ugly – and now bloody – old face. “ Si, io comprendo! ”
        I’d underestimated him. “A man may rat on his friends,” he proposed, “but he respects his enemies, eh?”
        “Yes.”
        He sat down heavily. “You can put that down!” he said, nodding towards Anubis. “I wasn’t going to hurt you anyway.”
        Oh, no! Not half! I pointed at my lacerated throat. My ears were thrumming and my eyes spilling so many tears that I could barely see which way the room was spinning.
        “You’re woefully out of practice, my dear enemy. You’ve forgotten absolutely everything I took such pains to teach you!” He put his fingers to his ear for a moment, and then pulled them away. His fingers were sticky with blood. “Damn! Thanks to you, I’m obliged to take a walk to First Aid.” He smiled – his teeth glittering like a serpent: “You’d better come with me. We can talk on the way. It will be safe enough. Nobody understands Italian in this place. Yes, we do have an Italian department. It boasts all of a dozen students – all twelve of them and their tutor currently confronting their utter lack of knowledge in Little Italy, N.Y.”
        I helped him close up the museum for the day and we then made our way to First Aid. Again, he took the trouble to re-assert that he knew nothing of Brunsdon and his disappearing crossbow. This time, I believed him.
        When we finally reached First Aid, we found the nurse had received a call to the gridiron field and would be tied up for at least half an hour. We sat in her pillbox of a waiting room, jammed in with two students – a gangly youth with broken  spectacles and a bleeding nose, and a young woman who kept us all alert by weeping uncontrollably.
        True to form, Dune-Harrigan paid no heed to his audience, but commenced a hearty account (in Italian) of the joys of living in Ancient Thebes.   
        Even with a clear head, I would have found it a challenge to decipher five or six words out of a breathless ten, but with my brain spinning like a Ferris wheel, I just leaned against the wall and let him talk on and on, undisturbed. But suddenly he said something that bothered me. It was the simple phrase, “Of course, I haven’t been back there since.”
        Where was he talking about? Back where? He’d gone on a few sentences before