Rick O'Connell had calculated that roughly three out of four times that a stranger was looking for him, it wasn't good. Even when it was good, it wasn't great. It was usually an old friend from out of town or someone returning a hat that he'd left in a bar. It was never a beautiful woman or someone telling him he'd inherited money.

So when the owner of one of his favorite clubs told him that a girl had been looking for him, he was not looking forward to finding out why. He was pretty sure that he would end up being slapped by the end of the day, either by the strange girl or by Evie once she heard what the strange girl had to say. (His affairs with women in the past had not been as proper as the one he was currently experiencing with the dignified Miss Carnahan.)

Evelyn was by his side as he ruefully went to find the girl that the owner had described—"dark, kind of short, kind of scary." In Cairo, you really had to be more specific than that.

His task was made easy by the appearance of a girl who fit the bill and walked up to him fiercely. "Are you O'Connell?" Her thin, dark eyebrows were arched in a frown fierce enough to justify his fears.

"Yeah, that's me. Who are you?" He turned to Evelyn. "See, this is a woman I've never met before. At all. Never even laid eyes on her. Have no idea what she wants." Evie made a pruny, skeptical face that she must have learned in librarian school.

"You know someone I'm looking for," the strange girl said, her voice loud, her accent strangely familiar.

"I know a lot of people, sweetheart… I mean, miss," Rick corrected quickly. He really shouldn't worry. Surely Evie wouldn't suspect him of having dallied with this girl. She was scrawny, her cheekbones showing sharply in her thin face and streaked with dirt on one side. Her clothes were worn and matched each other only casually. Her dark hair was rumpled, and her posture suggested someone poising for attack, not posing for seduction.

"Beni Gabor. He talked about you all the time. Have you seen him lately?"

"Beni?" Rick glanced uncomfortably at Evelyn, whose face had quickly gone from annoyance to awkward pity. "He… he's not around anymore."

"What do you mean? Where would he go?" The girl's voice rose shrilly with each question. "That idiot! When I find him, I'm going to kill him!"

"Too late," Rick said with a little shrug, then immediately felt ashamed of his flippancy. "I mean, that is to say… he's passed on."

"What?"

"He got killed, about a week ago, after that little affair you may have heard about with… well, with a lot of things, but mostly… this… mummy?" Rick had never been good at tact.

The girl's mouth fell open in shock, then snapped shut indignantly. She spat out a string of curse words that Rick recognized from Beni's vocabulary. She was Hungarian. His curiosity grew.

"How did you know him?"

She ignored his question, but switched back to English. "Killed?" Her face flushed with anger. "Killed! It's just like him to get killed now!" She slapped her hands over her eyes, suddenly sorrowful. "Oh, my poor Beni!" Then she sank into the nearest empty chair. "What's going to happen to us?" Her voice cut through the bar chatter harshly.

"Who's 'us'?" Evelyn asked cautiously.

"Me, and the children!" The girl burst into noisy tears, and Rick winced.

"Wait, Beni really does have kids?" he blurted out.

"No, not kids, his brothers and sisters. And me."

"Are you his wife?" Evelyn asked, looking doubtful.

"Me? Hell, no, who would marry Beni? I'm his sister. I guess now… the oldest of the family." She launched into more sobs and streams of cursing, then seemed to collect herself a little. She stopped swearing and pulled a silver crucifix on a chain out of her shirt, but the sight of it only made her cry harder, pressing the little cross between her palms as she covered her face. "We're going to starve. We barely made it with the little bit of money we could get out of him, and now we're going to die. And I'm going to become a whore. And all the other girls, too. Even the little ones. Even the boys. Oh Lord!" More Hungarian.

"Aw, now, I'm sure it can't be that bad. I'm sure Beni didn't give you much, that guy was the cheapest son of a—"

"Rick! Be a little more sensitive, please!" Evelyn interjected. She knelt down in front of the girl and put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. "What's your name, dear?"

"Zizi."

"Zizi? Is that short for something?"

"No. Our parents were too lazy to give us whole names." Rick snorted, assuming that she was making a joke, but Evie looked at him reprovingly, as though he'd just belched at the table.

"How many of you are there?"

"Six younger than me."

"How old are they?"

The oldest is seventeen, the littlest is eight."

"Where are your parents?"

"Dead. Or if Papa isn't yet, he deserves to be." She let out a mournful, creaky chuckle.

"Why did you come to Cairo?"

"Beni got caught stealing and ended up in the Legion, and we hardly heard from him. A few weeks ago he wrote us that he'd made some money here, but of course didn't send any, kicsi patkány. I came to get it, and see if I could make any myself … and now I'm going to die in this God-forsaken place, and the children will starve!" She looked ready to resume her wailing.

"No, no, it'll be alright," Evie clucked. "Why don't you come eat dinner with us?"

Rick tried to hide his grimace. Dinner with the whiny, female version of Beni? Not his idea of a good time.

"Could I really?" She looked up, her tears seeming to dry almost immediately. Rick felt a little suspicious. If she was anything like her brother, she would know how to make being pathetic work to her advantage. Beni had been the king of getting people's pity, then stabbing them in the back at the first opportunity.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Rick said hesitantly.

"Why, Rick, this girl is all alone in a strange town, and she's just had a horrible shock. She shouldn't be alone right now, and she's probably hungry."

"Yes, so hungry. Starving." She smiled a little, showing the sharp, white teeth of a predator. "What's your name, kind lady?"

"I'm Evelyn Carnahan. You can call me Evie if you'd like. Come along, we were just going home." She took Zizi's hand and helped her up, as though she was suddenly old and infirm as well as bereaved of an evil brother. She led her toward the door of the club, and Rick had no choice but to follow.

He grumbled to himself as he slipped through the crowd. "Maybe just three times out of four is too low!"