“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 consomme, rum in your chocolate mousse, vin in your
“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.”
