his insides turn over with nausea and thought, I’m seasick. But then he felt the stone floor under his hands and the hard weave of the fence pressing into his back. I’ve been out less than a minute, he thought. He knew this for certain because there was still the hard muscle pain in his stomach where he had been hit and the blood was fresh and warm on his lip. Also, his breathing was still going deep and heavy.
The other thing he knew for certain was why he had been jumped. He put one hand on his thigh, feeling the money wad still in his pocket. They hadn’t been beggars and they hadn’t been robbers, but Whitfield was in on this thing and the strong-arm business told him, Keep away from the pier. Here in Okar. Not back home, but here in Okar.
He looked at the lamp and saw how close it was and then he looked up and saw who was holding it.
“Are you all right, Mister Quinn?” said Remal.
Quinn set his teeth and did not answer. He heard footsteps running and saw Whitfield come around the side of the building. He was carrying a wet rag. He ran over to Quinn and crouched next to him and offered the rag to him. He tried to say something or other but nothing came out. He was also trying to smile and frown at the same time but was too upset for either.
“Put it on the back of your neck,” said Remal. “It will clear you.”
Clear enough, thought Quinn. Everything is very clear, except that the instinct has gone out of me and I sit here and feel so clear that I’m empty.
“Quinn? Uh, Quinn, I’m most terribly sorry…”
“Let Mister Quinn get up, if he wishes,” said Remal.
Quinn got up. He did this carefully, hooking his fingers into the fence and working up that way like a slow- moving monkey. When he stood he took a deep breath and looked at the other two men. Whitfield looked nervous and even embarrassed. Remal smiled. Quinn felt that he did not know about Remal yet.
“Can you walk?” said Whitfield. “If you can’t, just sit down again. Or come sit in my office.”
“Why sit in your office?” said Quinn, and, “Why are you here?”
“Remal wanted to talk to you,” said Whitfield. “You remember I told…”
“You had left when I came,” said Remal, “so we went out to look for you.”
“Here?” said Quinn.
Remal lifted the lantern he had in one hand and held it so the light shone on Quinn’s face. Remal looked closely at him and squinted a little.
“Bad cut,” he said. “Does not look very good,” and he put his free hand out and poked at the cut with two fingers, causing a sharp pain. “Yes, yes,” he said.
Quinn jerked his head back because of the pain and then wiped one eye, which had started to water. He felt confused again, and therefore weak. The instinct’s gone out of me, he thought. Damn all of them, but I’ll get it back Then they went around the long warehouse and into Whitfield’s office. The walking was not so bad.
Remal held the lamp and Whitfield found the switch on the wall for the light. Remal put the lamp on the floor but did not blow it out.
The office was a place with chairs, files and a desk, but it was not an Okar place, thought Quinn. This is a lot like a picture I’ve seen, illustrating something by Dickens. The desk had a pigeonhole back and there were ledgers with red leather spines. The swivel chair, Quinn thought, will probably creak.
Remal sat down in the chair and made it creak. The big man flounced his long shirt, crossed his legs, and touched the stitched skullcap on his head. This spoiled the illustration of something by Dickens. The Arab did not belong in such an office, the office did not belong in Okar, and Quinn, inconsequentially, thought of the upside-down street which had followed him overhead on his way down. His left eye still watered. That’s why I can’t find a focus, he thought.
“Yes, well,” said Remal, and looked at his hands. Then he folded them and looked at Quinn. “So it seems,” he said, “that your own consul has, one might say, committed you to my care. Does it hurt?”
Quinn took his hand away from his face and looked at his fingers. There was a small stain of blood there and he felt it by rubbing his fingertips together.
“I didn’t like it when you hurt me like that,” he said. “It felt like on purpose.”
“I apologize. Really, Mister Quinn.”
“Was it on purpose?”
Whitfield felt as if the air was suddenly getting terribly heavy. Quinn hasn’t moved and Remal hasn’t moved, he thought, but something has. A mood in Quinn. Everything he hasn’t done while he was getting his beating is now starting to move in him. Like a very slow waking up “Of course not,” said Remal. He even smiled, but without looking at Quinn. Then he said, “What needs to happen now, Mister Quinn, is to take better care of you while you are still here.”
“I don’t need any…”
“Please. You just got beaten up. I also apologize for that.”
“You didn’t do it.”
“I am the mayor. I do feel responsible.”
Whitfield sighed and sat down on a chair. Remal was acting official, which somehow took the black mood out of the room. Or perhaps now the mood could be ignored, the way Remal seemed to be ignoring Quinn. He talked to Quinn as if about routine business.
“And feeling responsible, Mister Quinn, here is how we shall handle this.”
Quinn leaned back in his chair, very slowly and cautiously it seemed to Whitfield. Then he saw Quinn stick out his tongue and touch the tip of it to the cut which ran down to his lip. Quinn did that very slowly too.
“As long as you have no papers,” said Remal, “you must stay here in town. This you know. And as long as you stay in this town, Mister Quinn, you must observe a few rules of safety.”
“Like don’t go out after dark?” said Quinn.
“Why, yes,” said Remal and smiled. Then the smile went again and he cleared his throat. “That is point number one. Point number two, please do not go into the Arab quarter. You are unfamiliar here, unfamiliar with ways and with people. They will find you strange and you will feel the same about them, which is always dangerous. It is best you have nothing to do with them.”
There was a small silence and then Quinn said, “Was there a third point?”
A silence again and Whitfield fingered his chin. He wished he were some place else.
“Yes. Point number three: Do not go near the waterfront after dark. I don’t think I need to explain why.”
“No. That you don’t.”
“After all, you are still suffering the consequences.”
Quinn got up from his chair and stretched himself carefully. He did this mostly to learn where he was hurting. Then he walked to the window which looked from the office into the warehouse, but it was dark on the other side and he saw only his own head reflected.
I don’t know, I don’t know, he thought. I give up Ryder and now I get this. Like a clear jinx riding me. Jinx in the box.
“And now that we understand each other…” Remal was saying, when Quinn turned around from the window.
“Have you got any idea why you don’t like me?” he said to Remal.
When Quinn heard himself say this he was as startled as the other two men. He turned back to the window. Got to get out, out of here. Go see Turk, he thought. See what there’s to see. I need more than my guesswork about cans smelling like booze “I really don’t know what you mean, Mister Quinn, seeing that you and I hardly know each other.”
We don’t, we don’t for a fact, but still I have this feeling “I have no feelings about you, Mister Quinn. Perhaps it is that which offends you.”
And he may be right. He’s the one who makes this vacuum around me, with no feelings one way or the other. I lost the instinct-Get a beating, get the runaround, get the law laid down to me. And nothing happens inside. I’ve lost the instinct “However,” said Remal, “I have not finished. There is this fourth point. If you do not obey…”
“Obey?” said Quinn.
“Perhaps my English is inadequate.” Remal shrugged.
“I think it is good,” said Quinn. “I don’t know what else to think of it but I think it is good.”
Remal looked at Whitfield and frowned. Quinn’s talk was confusing him. Perhaps, this Quinn person himself
