She rang Andrew, but he was at the site. She rang Eric Parsons, but the clerk who answered the phone said that he was at the Ministry. She asked if anyone knew where Fairfax was; but no one seemed able to help.
Around noon, Andrew called at the Turadup office to see if there was any mail. Hasan was manning the reception desk, overflowing a typist’s chair, legs stretched out before him; he was turning over the pages of a book of “Peanuts” cartoons.
“Hello, Mr. Andrew,” he said, getting up. “You want to drink coffee?”
“No thanks, I’m in a rush.”
“No mail for you today, but one telephone message.” He pushed it to Andrew across the desk.
“I can’t read this,” Andrew said. “Who’s it from?” He handed back the Arabic scrawl.
“Message from Mr. Adam.”
“Good, I wondered where he’d got to.” Hasan said nothing. “Come on then, what does it say? I’m only an ignorant
Hasan read it out, his voice expressionless. “He says, I go up to your roof last night and saw two men with box and down the stairs carrying a person who is dead. I am advise you to leave that place.”
Andrew reached out and snatched back the piece of paper. He stared down at it, the loops and squiggles that defied comprehension. “Did you take this message?”
“No, not me.”
“Who then?”
Hasan shrugged. He seemed to think it might be any passerby.
“Well, it can’t be the bloody tea boy, Hasan, because he can’t write, can he?”
“Perhaps,” Hasan said, “he goes to school?”
“I want to know who took this message, and what time it came in.” Andrew slammed it down on the desk. “I want to talk to whoever took this message, Hasan, and I want to talk to that person now.”
But even as he said this, even as he enacted the part of a furious man, a man horribly alarmed, he understood that he would never find out who had taken the message, or when. It was an unwanted message, as unwanted by him as by anyone else who received it; and just as suddenly he understood that the clerk had done him a favor, had offered him a warning.
“I think,” Hasan said, “that it is a joke.” He spoke carefully, and his voice was full of foreboding. “It is not a very funny joke, but best thing is that you know about it. You want to drink coffee now?”
“You took this message yourself,” Andrew said.
Calmly Hasan held out his hand for it, a creased yellow palm. He rested his eyes on Andrew’s face; they seemed to express sympathy. “Now I put it in the trash,” he said. “You give it me, sir.”
Andrew glanced at it once more. Then he crumpled it up and dropped it into the clerk’s open hand.
“You were having a party last night?” Hasan suggested.
“A party of sorts.”
“Too much mineral water,” Hasan said.
At half past one Frances made herself some coffee. She sat down with her cassette tape and her phrase book. She felt she was making little progress with her Arabic; and perhaps she would not make any this morning either, but it seemed the best thing she could do was to pass the time, to pretend that nothing was wrong and this was her first morning on Ghazzah Street. She opened the book: Lesson Thirty.
Her businessman had worked through twenty-nine lessons. His passage had not been entirely smooth; at various times he had been owed money, he had fallen ill. He had experienced the usual exasperations and delays: “The driver does not know this quarter. He is holding the map the wrong way up.” But on the whole his ventures had prospered: “I have met all the representatives of all the companies. I have made an appointment with the secretary to the Minister. He will sign the contract tomorrow afternoon.”
And now it is time for him to leave; taking with him, presumably, the antique chest he bought in the souk, at the price of such linguistic turmoil. “He prepares his luggage. He closes up the house. He takes a taxi to the airport.”
So Mr. Smith is going home, she thinks. He will see his wife and children again, he will land on his native soil. It is all so simple for him. “He gives his passport to the Security Services. He receives his stamp for exit. He gets on a bus with the other passengers. The bus takes them to the plane.”
Time dripped by. Frances sipped her coffee. She bent her head over her book. She did not switch the tape on; she felt too weak for any unnecessary effort. The wind tossed the leaves on Dunroamin’s tree, turning up their pallid undersides; dust caked the windows, blown into patterns of mountain peaks, into a shifting geology that lived and died in seconds. Footsteps walked overhead.
Mr. Smith has made it then. He is getting out for good. “He has said a sorrowful goodbye to the new friends he has made. The passengers dismount the bus. His luggage has been carried to the plane. The passengers ascend the aircraft steps.”
And in a few moments he will be airborne. There is nothing to detain him. He has settled his affairs, he has honored his commitments. No one wants to keep him here; no one would have a reason to. His passport has been stamped for him: EXIT VISA ONLY.
Now: she can try to persuade Andrew to break his contract. If she could convince him—about the rifleman, about the crate, about the Visitor—if she could persuade him, they could go together, go now, go as soon as it could be arranged. I know, she will say, that I am not offering you a watertight case, a tidy plot, that there is much, almost everything really, still to learn; but let us go, Andrew, before we learn it. They cannot cut and run; they must go through the formalities, or they will not be allowed to leave. What they cannot do is go without attracting attention. You cannot slip out of the Kingdom. You go with permission, or not at all; your intentions must be advertised. Anyone who is interested can find out what you mean to do.
