Spicing Things Up: Friday, Feb. 6, 1925
This club is the center of all culture and life for Egyptians who live in London--Egyptian food, belly dancers, and exotic music. [For full effect, leave that tab open while you read.] Raju takes the lead, since he is the closest thing to an Egyptian in the group, and after shelling out a sizable tip to the bartender ("Stanley"), he and the others are seated at the table of the owner--a fat, fairly quiet Egyptian man named Abdul.
A psychological assessment from Dr. Bruce seems to indicate that Abdul is an innocent (and lazy) businessman who wants the Egyptian murders to stop as quickly as anyone else. He really likes the four guys, and when Raju says that they are interested in traveling to Egypt, not only to see the sights, but to spend a lot of money on antiquities, Abdul says that his brother-in-law owns a hotel in Cairo. Abdul eventually seats the four at a table right in front of the belly dancers for their amusement.
At a pause in the program, one of the lead dancers, Yalesha, sits with the four guys. Once she learns that they are investigating the Egyptian murders, she gets looks around her suspiciously and then starts telling them what she knows. Her boyfriend was one of the victims, and she wants revenge. She does not know who is ultimately responsible, but she knows two things:
1) once a month, a truck comes by the club at about one o'clock in the morning, loads up with people from the club, and drives out of town, off east somewhere she thinks;
2) this endeavor is always led by a certain Tewfik al-Sayed, a local spice shop owner.
The four return to the hotel room at the Ritz, only to find a scene of chaos. Four men lie dead in the hotel room: three cultists, and, sadly, Dr. I. The cultists had suprised Dr. I at the door before anyone knew what was going on. Aside from a nasty bruise on Sullie's arm, the group suffered little additional damage. Each of the cultists was carrying his ritualistic club with a spike in it, and wearing the upside-down ankhs of the Brotherhood of the Black Pharoah.
The investigators remove the ankhs and call Inspector Barrington to clean up the mess. Before the bodies are taken away, Pyle gets pictures of the cultists and sends them off to The Scoop, where he hopes Mickey Mahoney will process them.
The next morning, Pyle, Raju, Bruce, and Pancho head out to the spice shop. It's a very nice, two-story building, the bottom floor of which is wall-to-wall exotic cooking spices from around the world. Tewfik sits at the cash register while a few British people mill around the store. The four guys walk up to him wearing the ankhs and confront him directly. Tewfik appears very angry, but he smiles cruelly and says that they do not know what they are getting into.
Tewfik shouts that he wants everyone to leave, and the other customers do, but the four investigators refuse. Suddenly he begins chanting. Bruce shoots at his neck and hits, causing serious damage, but not before Tewfik starts transforming into a wormy bat-thing with a human head. Bruce gets scratched by the thing before the rest of the four unload their guns and bring it dead to the ground.
Searches of the ground floor reveal nothing, so the group goes to look around Tewfik's apartment upstairs. A bizarre, asymmetrical mirror on the wall gives everyone the heebie-jeebies, and Dr. Bruce has an insight: he knows he's heard of this mirror, and he knows it's powerful, but he does not know how it works. He covers it and takes it. Inside a roll-top desk, Pyle finds a secret compartment: robes, an ankh, a skull-cap, a very ancient scroll with hieroglyphics, a pair of scepters (one ending in a crook, the other in an inverted ankh), and about twenty-five vials. Two-thirds or so contain a red, syrupy liquid (not blood), while the rest contain a black powder with odd rubbery crystals in it.
