Mysterious Cairo Read Online Free

him the most difficulty. Studying growth powers and gadgets, and other so-called 'pulp' powers, my father theorized that, by using the same weird science that turned mere mortals into heroes, he could produce animals and vegetables that would produce ten times their normal amount of food — without having to feed them more."
    Jennie paused here, reflecting. Her eyes teared up again, but she brushed aside my offering of a handkerchief. "That was what attracted Maxwell R. Burban." She said the name not like the name of a man she'd been married to, nor as if it were the name of a man she despised, but rather as if she was referring to an unmerciful force of nature that had destroyed her life.
    "Burban came to us in his 'civilian' persona as a successful businessman. I was sixteen, and he swept me off my feet by being gentle and charming and attentive, and he was helpful and encouraging to my father. I guess Daddy was too caught up in his work to notice what Max was really like, and I was just happy to have someone paying attention to me.
    "He financed my father's projects in food production, and he acted like a friendly uncle to me." She chuckled wryly. "He spoiled me rotten and I, a stupid kid, let him."
    Now the tears were flowing down her cheeks, but she still refused to notice. She held my complete attention, her green eyes bright and wet, "I didn't know anything was wrong between my 'Uncle Maxie' and my father until ." Her voice broke and then halted. Her head down, she dabbed at her face with a tissue.
    "Until what?" I prompted.
    "Until it was too late," She had been about to say something else, I was sure, but I didn't prompt her. Her face had undergone a radical change. Underneath the makeup and the wetness, her face was granite and her eyes were hollow. "Max wanted my father to perfect his 'Ultragrowth' formula for use in his illegal breweries, distilleries, and opium fields. We didn't find out until it was too late.
    "Max," she continued, acrimony slowly creeping into her voice, "insisted that he be allowed to build my father a laboratory. He invited us to come live with him. He implored us to make his house our own." She chuckled, her voice now full of self-recrimination. "I was a little idiot; a sixteen-year-old girl living in a mansion with servants and clothes and anything else I wanted. I didn't know what he meant by 'everything I have is yours.'"
    Jennie laughed grimly. "But my father did. My father found out rather quickly what Max was truly like, soon after we moved in — but he couldn't say anything. He knew what Max wanted me for, and he hated him for it — but I was a hostage to his silence.
    "So, instead of warning me or trying to escape, my father tried to sabotage his own experiments, slowing them up and then making false 'breakthroughs' when Maxwell got impatient. Just enough, just enough ."
    Her voice died off. I offered her a drink, but she looked at me like I was handing her a dead snake. I put it away, feeling mighty tactless.
    "My father didn't give Max enough credit. He started assigning some of his crooked scientists to pose as my father's guards. My father was careful, but eventually they caught him tampering with his experiments."
    "That was when I found out what Maxwell R. Burban was really like." She chuckled grimly and shook her head. "Yes, the wolf shed his sheep's clothes at last."
    "What happened?" I asked. Despite myself, my curiosity was overcoming my reticence at having gangland's biggest honcho's wife sitting in my office for over an hour — that's usually a bad survival sign, by the way.
    "In the middle of the night, my maid came and woke me up. She said I had to put on a robe and follow her down to my father's lab. I asked if there'd been some kind of accident, but she wouldn't answer." Again, the chuckle, this time followed by a smirk of irony, "I swear, if I hadn't been in such a hurry myself, that little German bitch would've dragged me down the three flights of stairs."
    Now,