McGrave's Hotel Read Online Free PDF

sir.” He was anxious to leave. Secrets were a burden.
    Mr. Lesley returned his attention to the sitting room, appraising its antique furniture and elegant appointments. A small wind-up music box rested on an end table next to the sofa. He gave the sofa a little push, took a hard look at the posters of all those Broadway stars staring down, and leaned backward in order to look up into the darkness. James could only imagine his thoughts. Perhaps he wondered what Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula in 1897, might have thought of this place.
    “It’s not exactly Dracula’s lair, but I like it,” Mr. Lesley said at last. “I think it will do. The actresses will be here any minute. We’re on a tight schedule, and we have to cast the female parts right away—Lucy, Mina, and all of Dracula’s wives. He had three , you know? I’m expecting to audition the first before midnight and the rest throughout the night. Perhaps you’ll get the nod to escort them up. Treat them nice. Who knows? You might be arm in arm with Broadway’s next big star.”
    Mr. Lesley punctuated his remark with a wink.
    “Uh, yes, sir,” James said. He couldn’t help staring at Mr. Lesley’s hair, and he smiled at the notion of a bald Count Dracula.
    “Here you go, Ace,” said Mr. Lesley, forcing a final five-dollar bill into James’s hand. “I think you might be a big help to me in the next twenty-four hours. Yessiree.”
    Turning to admire himself in a mirror, he licked a fingertip and traced it across one of his handsome eyebrows.
    “Casting beautiful young women is one of the little burdens we stars have to endure,” he said, continuing to gaze into the glass. “Ah, here comes one now,” he pretended.
    James could almost imagine the actress in the mirror as Victor Lesley draped his cape across his forearm, peeked over it as menacingly as a villainous European vampire could, and uttered the famous line from the movie: “I am Drac-u-la. I bid you welcome.”
    James closed the door to the sounds of a loud, hideous, bloodcurdling laugh.

Chapter Five

     
    The Beautiful One Who Sings
     
     
    “This way, gentlemen,” said James as he led the four men in dark suits and red fezzes away from the Front Desk. When Mr. Nash told the visitors that James had once spent a summer in Cairo, they had shaken his hand enthusiastically and had gladly surrendered themselves to his care. They seemed to accept him as one of their own.
    A blast of cold New York City-in-December air stung the cheeks of the party as they exited the back of the hotel, where a moving company tractor-trailer was parked and running at the hotel’s loading dock. The truck’s engine emitted a deep friendly rumble, and a plume of white vapor rose into the night like a ghost from the mammoth vehicle’s exhaust.
    Mohammed Bey, the leader of the Egyptians, clapped his hands twice, and the great doors at the rear of the truck swung open. “Come,” he said to James. “You are the first in America to see this.”
    After the planks connecting the truck to the dock were in place, the gentlemen and James stepped inside.
    There in the artificial lighting of the vehicle’s interior stood the sarcophagus of Queen Siti, the Great Royal Wife of the Pharaoh Kaphiri II, in the Nineteenth Dynasty. Detailed hieroglyphics, the once-forgotten beautiful sequences of birds and jackals and a myriad of pictographic symbols, deciphered by the Rosetta Stone studies of the early 1800s, covered every square inch with excerpts from the Book of the Day and the Book of the Night .
    Four much taller men, with sun-bronzed skin and huge muscles, stood guard over the mummy of Queen Siti. Mohammed Bey introduced the largest of these royal sentinels as the leader of his guards, a giant of a fellow named Abasi. Upon Mohammed Bey’s command, Abasi and his companions removed the huge lid of the sarcophagus and extracted a human-shaped coffin. They placed this container on the floor and then removed its lid to