blindfolded everybody’s going to see it.”
“They see before,” the boy said off-handedly.
Chapter Twenty-two
Jalal was right. The sight of a blindfolded man being led back through the cafe by the elbow was apparently nothing unusual. If anything it was less noteworthy than his entrance with Phil, because this time the conversations didn’t lapse altogether, but only ebbed a little. Gideon wondered if the two elderly constables were still there and what they made of it.
Once in the street he was turned to the right for a few steps and bundled roughly into the back of a car, his knees jammed against the stiffened fabric of the front seat. Jalal got in next to him and said a few words in Arabic. A bearlike grunt came from the front, and the engine started up. The car smelled unlike the inside of any vehicle he’d been in in Egypt (except for the Menshiya): no fustiness, no mildew, no layer upon layer of stale sweat. What it smelled like was an automobile; a relatively new automobile. As they got under way he felt the cool puff of an air conditioner. That was a first too.
“Nice car,” he said.
“Peugeot,” Jalal said proudly.
Well, he thought with satisfaction, that was something he could pass on to Gabra later if need be. He set his mind to capturing other details of the journey, memorizing the turns and counting the seconds between them-one- Mississippi, two-Mississippi-but gave it up after the fourth Mississippi. There weren’t any seconds between the turns. When they weren’t lurching to the left they were lurching to the right. In this particular part of Luxor there weren’t any nice right-angled corners to help get things clear in the mind, there were only twisting alleys that never seemed to straighten out.
All he could say for sure was that they drove that way, fairly slowly, for two or three minutes, then got onto a straighter, smoother road for another three or four, slowing once to jolt over some bumps. A railroad crossing? If so, they were headed east, away from central Luxor. Their speed picked up. Gideon was starting to get jumpy in spite of himself. It was well and good to conclude that the blindfold proved that foul play wasn’t in the offing, but that had been in a lighted cafe on a busy street, with his pal at his side. Now the blindfold was over his eyes and he was alone in a car with a false beard pasted on his face, a gun-toting thug-in-training sitting next to him, and an unknown goon in the driver’s seat, heading… where?
There was a sharp turn to the left-northward?-and a final, twisting, bumpy stretch of another minute or two. The car stopped. The driver came around, opened his door, and pulled on his shoulder.
“How about taking this thing off now?” Gideon said to Jalal.
“Soon. In one minute.”
He got out, bracing himself for whatever might be coming, but he heard children at play, he smelled garlic and cooking oil. He relaxed a little; at least he hadn’t been taken to the edge of some lonely desert ravine. He guessed they were in one of the sprawling villages that straggled along Luxor’s uneven eastern edge, an uneasy buffer between metropolis and desert, between city slicker and wandering Bedouin.
He was guided by Jalal through a gate. The gate was pulled closed behind him, screeching over rough stone, and he was told, at last, to take off the blindfold.
He relaxed a little more. They were in a walled courtyard with a one-story house of whitewashed clay in front of them. On the right, against the wall, was a low table at which two women and a little girl squatted, scouring pots and pans with sand and paying the newcomers no heed. A partially collapsed outside stairway on the left of the house climbed skeletally to the roof. At its base was a low door.
“This is Ali Hassan’s house?” Gideon asked.
Jalal’s loose lips curled. “Mr. Ali Hassan does not live here. Only sometimes he do business here.”
They went through the doorway-Gideon had to stoop- and walked through an unfinished and probably never- to-be-finished kitchen. On their right a middle-aged man sat at a wooden table glumly watching a laughing woman on a portable black-and-white television set two feet from his nose. Next to the sink an old woman was giving a piece of her mind to an unrepentant-looking goat, shaking her finger in its face while it tore at a juice carton with its teeth. The man glanced incuriously at the newcomers in his kitchen and went back to his television. The woman continued to address the goat.
A narrow flight of stairs against the rear wall took them up to the flat roof, on which they emerged into the usual disorder of the village rooftop: thick, vertically stacked bundles of reeds and sugar cane, disused farm tools, two rotting, smelly mattresses standing on edge, construction rubble in heaps, a doorless refrigerator-and a small cleared area on which stood a cot made up with sheets, a small, Formica-topped kitchen table, and an old cane- bottomed chair.
A short, heavy, olive-skinned man of fifty in a brown, Sadat-style suit and an embroidered, open-collared shirt rose from the chair and came toward them on little feet, lumbering and mincing at the same time, like a pygmy hippopotamus.
He extended a hand with rings on three fingers to Gideon. “How do you do, Mr. Smith? I am Ali Hassan.” His voice was an odd, not-unfriendly growl, his accent a hodgepodge of Cairo and Marseilles, and maybe a touch of Belgrade too. Mr. Ali Hassan had been around.
“How do you do?” Gideon said. It hadn’t been lost on him that “Ali Hassan” was the Arabic equivalent of “John Smith.” Was it a couple of fictional characters who were greeting each other so politely? Maybe yes, maybe no. There were, after all, plenty of people really named John Smith, so why not an occasional Ali Hassan?
“The blindfold didn’t inconvenience you? No?”
Hassan peered up at him, directly into his face, with unsettlingly bright, piggy eyes. “You understand. When it’s someone I don’t know, I have to take my little precautions. You can’t be too careful these days. It’s terrible, what goes on.”
Gideon managed a tolerant smile. “I understand completely.” Only with an effort did he resist a near- overwhelming impulse to make sure his beard was still on straight.
“So, come, sit down, Mr. Smith.”
Gideon perched uncomfortably on the cot-the only other place to sit-while Hassan resumed his seat in the chair. He was a sleek, squat man, not quite obese but certainly overfed, with a flat, broad face and an ongoing, muttering chuckle from deep in the back of his throat. Jalal was motioned over and sent downstairs with a few brusque words.
Hassan smiled hospitably at Gideon. “I have sent the boy down to bring us some-”
Not coffee, Gideon prayed.
“-coffee,” said Hassan. The rumbling chuckle was heard again. “Tell me, Mr. Smith, where are you staying? The Winter Palace?”
“The Hilton,” Gideon said, thinking it sounded more like John Smith’s kind of place. He regretted it immediately. A call to the Hilton would tell Hassan that there was no John Smith registered there.
On the other hand, so would a call to the Winter Palace or anyplace else. He was going to have to be more careful, take more time before speaking. What, he thought suddenly, was he going to do if Hassan asked for a business card?
“Next time,” Hassan said, “try the Winter Palace; the old wing, not the new. Tell Mr. Shebl I personally sent you. Tell me, Mr. Smith, why haven’t I heard of you before?”
This one Gideon was ready for. “This is my first Egyptian venture,” he said smoothly. “Until now I’ve been active in the South American trade. Mostly Peruvian. Moche and Chimu artifacts, mainly.”
“Oh, yes? Well, that’s not an area I know much about.”
A good thing too, Gideon thought.
Hassan folded his arms. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“I’m interested in art from the Amarna Period. Statuary, in particular. Jalal seemed to think you might help me.”
“For yourself or is there a client involved? It helps me to know.”
“A client,” Gideon said carefully. “He’s looking for something, not too large, for a place in his library.”
