“What were you going to say to me,” Frances asked, “earlier this evening, before Eric called us the first time? I thought you were going to tell me something?”
Andrew looked at her warily, from the tail of his eye. Road signs swam through their headlights: AL KOURNAICH, JEDDAH CENTRAL, JEDDAH ISLAMIC PORT. STOP! YOU ARE FAST BUT DANGER IS FASTER! “I love you,” he said. “I don’t want you to be frightened. I wish I had never brought you here.”
“That is not what you were going to say.” She turned her head and stared out of her window, into passing cars; realizing, from the response of their occupants, from the winks and nods and leers, that she must have developed the habit of keeping her gaze lowered, of censoring her vision. She said, “Let’s go to the hotel. We might find out something if we persist. Somebody must have seen him leave.”
Andrew did not reply; but he turned the car at the first opportunity. She looked at his face, for his expression of “I shall have no peace till I do this”; but he was not wearing it.
In the foyer of the Sarabia Hotel, a fountain, impossibly blue, tinkled into a marble basin; tropical flowers, made of silk, bloomed in brass tubs. A waiter carried a tray: silver tray, crystal glasses, drinks the color of crushed strawberries. The air was icy and the sweat dried on their skins.
The desk clerk was a small dark round-faced man of some mongrel Near Eastern provenance. He gave them a respectful greeting; or he gave it to Andrew, averting his eyes from Frances with a lofty civility. She put her hands up, scooping her sticky hair from the back of her neck. The clerk’s eyes flickered over her, like some mechanical scanner, noting the slight rise of her breasts, and she saw on his face for an instant a cruel suppressed avidity, a destructive infantine greed. She dropped her eyes.
Andrew put his hands on the reception desk. “May I see the manager?”
She admired him: commanding size, cool voice, overbearing courtesy.
The clerk said, “He is praying.”
“At this time?”
The clerk said, “I regret.”
“Then I should like to see the undermanager.”
The clerk said, smiling, “He is in Kuwait.”
Andrew drew back. He folded his arms. “So who’s running the hotel?”
“Perhaps I can help you?”
And Andrew said, with a fine show of racism, “I doubt it, Ali.”
They looked around the lobby. Laundered thobes strolled to and fro, and smoked cigarettes; glass-fronted lifts carried the patrons to their suites, like prophets assumed to heaven. Frances said, “Do you usually talk like that?”
Andrew said, “I want to be Jeff Pollard when I grow up.”
The clerk fussed with some papers and forms; he seemed unwilling to leave them alone. “You have some complaints?” he asked.
“You had a guest, a Mr. Fairfax.”
The clerk looked interested. “Excuse me,” he said, “we have no guest of that name.”
“He isn’t here now.”
“No. He has left.”
“He has a suitcase somewhere. Things that belong to him.”
“You have papers to collect them?”
“We are friends of his.” Andrew corrected himself: “We were friends of his.”
“It is impossible,” the clerk said, “because we have no guest of that name.”
Andrew ignored this. “Did the police come and take his things away?”
The clerk shrugged. “I did not see them, sir.”
“But if the police had been here you would have heard. You would know all about it.”
“Excuse me, sir, but I think there is a mistake. Perhaps your friend is at some other hotel?”
“No, my friend is dead.”
“Perhaps he is staying at the Nova Park?”
A voice called to them from across the foyer. “Andrew! What are you doing in this neck of the woods?”
Andrew turned sharply. “Raji, it’s you. Come over here, would you?”
Raji slid across the tundra of polished marble, hands outstretched; the light from the chandeliers split and shattered in the diamond of his tiepin. “What, dining out?” he inquired. His eyes passed over her crumpled cotton smock, Andrew’s bush-shirt darkly patched with sweat. “No, I see you are making some inquiry.”
“I want to get hold of the manager. It’s about some things a friend of ours may have left behind.”
Raji took out his wallet. He opened it, and let his plump fingers hover; he selected a note, and handed it to the clerk as if it were a cloakroom ticket. He spoke; the clerk made a little gesture, as if to say “Why did you not ask me before?” He vanished.
“I was trying to avoid that,” Andrew said. “I was trying to employ terror. Here, Raji, let me reimburse you.”
“It is nothing,” Raji said. “Put your money away. It helps, excuse me Frances, if you speak their bloody lingo.”
The manager soon appeared: could he be of any service? His English was impeccable, his mustache clipped, his nails finely manicured; he was the essence of Levantine courtesy, and he kept his eyes from the woman as if she wore an aura of barbed wire. Raji took charge. “The name of your friend?” he asked. Andrew told him. Raji took the manager’s arm and drew him aside.
They held some muttered conversation. A few moments passed. The manager darted a look over his shoulder; he shook his head.
Raji turned back to them. He looked worried. “I understand it is a police matter.”
“Yes. There has been an accident.”
With a little bow in their general direction, the manager melted away.
“My friends,” Raji said, “leave it alone. I advise you from a sincere heart. Once you are embroiled with those fellows then all sorts of misunderstanding may begin to occur.”
“Okay, Raji.” Andrew was downcast. “Thanks. At least they don’t deny all knowledge of him. Did he tell you, have the police been here, and taken his things away?”
“That is possible. But better if you do not press it.”
“We need to know,” Frances said.
Raji looked at her sorrowfully. “My dear Frances, you need not think there is some conspiracy. Because people act as if they have something to hide does not mean that they really do. That is the first thing you must learn about living in the Kingdom. The puzzles are, how shall I put it, more apparent than real.”
“It’s soothing to think so.”
Andrew said, “I feel—Frances feels—that it must be possible to sort out what has really happened.”
“Oh, in a logical world,” Raji said. “But the Kingdom is not a logical world, and besides”—he smiled—“logic is not an ornament for young ladies.”
Frances walked away, and gazed into the fountain’s basin, through the blue rippling water to the mosaic tiles. “Are you meeting someone, Raji?” Andrew asked.
“Yes, I am here to take dinner with my dear friend Zulfikar, he is an old school pal of mine. We have a little notion to open a restaurant of our own. Maybe a rather special one—sherry in your consommé, rum in your chocolate mousse, vin in your coq—oh, it must come to Jeddah. Don’t you think?”
“It sounds a bit risky. Are you really going to try it?”
Raji showed his very white teeth. “I am in the business of pushing out the frontiers of the possible. When we are open you will come as my guests, you will enjoy it. There is no profit without risk, you know. At least, that is what my friend and I were told, when we were at business school in Miami.”
They went back out to their car. Its trapped air was stifling; they moved into the stream of evening traffic. “It will be cooler when we get going,” Andrew said. But they had hardly moved a hundred yards from the hotel entrance when a snarl-up and a traffic policeman brought them to a halt. “We should have stayed and had a drink,” Andrew said. “Lowered the tone a bit.”
The drivers around them put their fists on their car horns. Frances put her head out of the window to try to see the cause of the delay. A pickup truck
was slewed across the intersection ahead, one side bashed in; a curtained limousine disgorged a Saudi gentleman with a pointed, hennaed beard, and a long-suffering expression. Three young Filipino men in jeans and white T-shirts stood mutely by the truck, and a traffic policeman, gun on hip, ripped their documents out of their hands.
“I hope they’re carrying plenty of ready cash,” Andrew said. “Or we’ll be here all night.”
They were in a lineup of cars, five abreast; she turned her head, and said, “Look, that’s Abdul Nasr.”
Andrew looked. “So it is. That’s not his own car he’s driving.”
“I haven’t seen him for weeks.”
Andrew had returned his attention to the scene ahead; she returned hers to the next car, and their neighbor’s bronze unyielding profile. Abdul Nasr took one hand from the wheel and fitted a cigarette between his lips. The man in the passenger seat leaned across and lit it for him. She caught a momentary glimpse of his face, and she knew him at once, even though she had seen him greasy and bareheaded, and he now wore an immaculate white ghutra. She remembered his lugubrious features, and the blank expression in his eyes when she had tried to deter him from knocking on the door of the empty flat. What was it the landlord had said? “I want you to know this Egyptian.”
The backseat of the car also had an occupant; a woman, veiled, and so far shrunken into the dark velour upholstery that until she moved Frances had hardly registered her existence. As the Egyptian subsided into the passenger seat, hidden by Abdul Nasr, the woman hitched herself forward in the seat, as if to speak; she put a hand to her face, holding a square of something white, and for just a second, she raised her veil. How provident she was, on this stifling evening, thunder hanging in the air; Frances envied her for a moment, feeling the cold sting of the cologne tissue against burning skin. As the black cloth fell back into place, she recognized the woman; it was Yasmin.
She said nothing; she did not know what to say. Her mind revolved the possibilities. They drove; the policeman waved them on.
On Mecca Road, still miles from home, they were stopped at a roadblock; but their documents were not checked. Another policeman pressed his face to the windscreen, and then withdrew it. His colleagues flung up the boots of the cars ahead. “What are they looking for?”
“Drugs,” Andrew said. “Or weapons. Maybe a nice consignment of Kalashnikovs up from the Yemen?”
She said fearfully, “Who wants them?”
“Me,” Andrew said. “I could use some violence.”
They drove; behind them, the heart-churning cacophony of sirens, trailing across the bridges and the junctions and the highways in the sky.
When they got into the flat the phone was ringing. She picked it up. It was Eric. “You finally made it home,” he said.
“Yes, we got stopped at a roadblock. The police are everywhere. It was like this at Christmas, remember?”
Eric grunted. “More on that later. First of all, would you tell Andrew to get down to the site by seven o’clock tomorrow? Jeff says the Indians are having one of their mutinies. They’ve got a list of hard questions about their baggage allowances and they want to put them to a high authority.”
“I think Andrew hoped he might catch up on his sleep.”
“Look, we have a contract to fulfill. It won’t help anybody if work comes to a halt.”
“Okay, I’ll tell him.”
“I’m going to the airport first thing. I have to talk to the airline about sending the body home.”
“What body? We haven’t got a body yet.”
“We’ll find it. Meet me at the hospital at ten o’clock. Oh, and one more thing.” What she heard in Eric’s voice, what she realized she had been hearing, was not his usual monotone urbanity, not even the night’s deep fatigue: but a sort of numbness, like shell shock. “There’s a strong rumor that someone tried to kill your next-door neighbor a couple of hours ago. There’s been a shooting at the Sarabia Hotel. So do me a favor. Keep your heads down. Just remember that whatever happens it’s got nothing to do with you.”
3
Next morning dawn did not arrive. The dust, in a dirty brown cloud, blotted out the early sun; bowed figures, subfusc and gagged, groped their way down Ghazzah Street beyond the wall. “I will be back soon,” Andrew promised her. “I must drop by at the site and then I’ll get hold of Eric and we’ll go back to the hospital.” He kissed her. She huddled into the doorway. He coughed as he made his way to the car, the dust peppering his face.
At nine o’clock yesterday’s wind began to blow, out of yesterday’s yellow sky, and plastered the mountain ranges against the windows. It did not blow the dust away; there was an endless supply of it, a continent of dust. She looked out and watched it shifting, banking up. The street cats swarmed over the wall, looking for shelter, and dragged themselves before the glass. She watched them: scared cats, starving, alive with vermin, their faces battered, their broken limbs set crooked, their fur eaten away. She felt she could no longer live with doing nothing for these cats. Slow tears leaked out of her eyes.
When the telephone rang she almost did not answer it. But it might be Eric, with a message about the hospital; or Andrew, to say the Indians had delayed him. It was Daphne Parsons.
“Yes?” Frances said. “What did you want?”
Daphne sounded hurt. “Only to tell you the news. You’ve heard about Raji?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I know Eric phoned you, but more’s come out since then. Apparently he was having dinner at the Sarabia Hotel with some bigwig, a major in the security forces, and as they were leaving, as they were on the steps, somebody took a shot at him out of a car.”
“And?”
“They got the major. He was hit in the shoulder, he’s going to be all right. Raji wasn’t hurt, but I bet it shook him up a bit. Don’t you know anything about it? I thought you would know. Shall I come over there?”
“How do you know they were aiming at Raji? Maybe it was this major they were after.” She put the question; it was idle, academic. Perhaps it was not the time for it, but she felt almost entertained.
“Well, I’m not entirely sure.” Daphne had taken offense. “I’m only giving you the story as it was told to me. Perhaps there’s more to it. Perhaps it’s just the fact that Raji has so many enemies. It’s what he stands for, isn’t it?”
“And what do you think he stands for?”
“Oh,” Daphne said vaguely, “progress, all that.”
There was a low, distant rumble of thunder, as she put the phone down on Daphne. Yesterday’s newspaper had exhorted Muslims all over the Kingdom to join the Isteska, or rain-prayer; the King himself recommended it. Soon those prayers will be answered. She let herself out and crossed the hall.
There was no answer when she rang Yasmin’s doorbell, but then she had not expected it. She rang again; she put her finger on the buzzer and left it there. There seemed no occasion for politeness anymore.
After a moment or two, Shams opened the door. Her head and shoulders were swathed in a dark cloth, and her face itself looked dark and strained. Unsmiling, she held the door open only so far as she needed; her eyes passed over Frances, and then she spoke. “Gone away,” she said. “Everybody gone. Finished.”
When the phone rang again it was Rickie Zussman. “You heard about your neighbor? Jesus, Frannie, what a week for you! This guy they shot was some kind of arms dealer or something, he might have been from Iraq, and Raji was doing some go-between business. Or at least, they’ve found an arms cache somewhere, I don’t know. They say this guy was shot in the stomach, that he’s in intensive care. Raji was lucky, eh?”
And then Jeff Pollard: “Did you hear about Raji? They say some pro-Iranian group took a shot at him while he was out with some business crony. They say they’ve been after him for months, waiting for an opportunity. Did you ever see anybody hanging around the flats? Anyway, they missed Raji and got the other guy. They say he was dead on arrival.”
In daylight, she could
see that the hospital was some kind of government institution; a collection of long low huts, widely spaced, within a perimeter fence. The gateman raised the barrier for them, and they parked the car in a featureless compound, marked out by low concrete blocks. Eric was there already, sitting in his car, with Hasan in the passenger seat and his windows wound up tightly to keep out the dust. It swirled and hissed about his ankles as he got out to meet them, a nest of corroding serpents shaped by the hot wind.
He took her arm, oddly formal, hesitant. “Frances? Did you sleep well?”
“I don’t want to talk about Raji,” she said. “Let’s just do this first.”
“Well,” Eric said, “there’s no connection, is there? Yes, you’re quite right, let’s do this. But you know about the wife, don’t you? Raji’s wife? I’ll tell you later.”
Andrew said, “Did you go to the airport? How did you get on?”
“Oh, it will be okay, the airline will fix it,” Eric said vaguely. His eyes seemed unfocused. “They’ve done it before. People have accidents. But do you know, Andrew,” he shook his head, “I never thought I should land in the middle of a situation like this. When I have been so careful. When everyone has been so careful. When Turadup’s reputation has always stood so high.”
“Fairfax was careless,” Frances said. “Dying like that. He could jeopardize the contract, couldn’t he?”
“Don’t jump on me,” Eric said. He seemed almost cowed. The morning had changed him. “I know you’re not a fool, Frances. I never thought you were.” He took out his handkerchief, crisp and folded; dabbed at his lip, as if he might find blood there. “I just thought that you were rather—pressed upon by your environment, if I can put it like that. I thought from the beginning that you were one of those people who should never have come here.”
“Yes, I know. You accused me of exercising my imagination, didn’t you? Are you trying to tell me that I have been right about something?”
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Page 28