“Spot the tour guide,” Kim said drily, again lifting the Dictaphone. “The light is perfect—evening, gentle, and Bahloul Mountain glows at its touch. The date palms give Bahla a juicy look, even though it is surrounded by bleak, parched hills, but modernity and normalcy have cast their own features across the town. Like a modern extension on an old house, the refurbished section of the fort, with its perfect turrets, seems to grow out of the yet-to-be-treated ancient wall. Scaffolding conceals much of the edifice but, behind it, the old wall runs up one side of a hill, then down another slope and off into the distance, like a convict taking flight.”
After the photo op, Gabriel took them down to the potteries—Bahla’s other dying industry—and showed them hive-shaped mud huts, full of clay pots, where pottery was made and stored. Kim took the requisite photographs, but he knew she was looking out for something a camera would never capture, and she soon expressed disappointment at finding no detectable eeriness, no sense of the other. Even the suq was closed. “I’m not much impressed with your capital of spooks,” she said. “It’s a bit difficult to be creeped out when the sorcerers are keeping such low profiles.”
“Don’t be fooled.” Gabriel walked backward in front of them. “If you wanted to buy a spell and ruin a life, you’d only have to speak too loudly and someone would appear and lead you down one of these alleys.”
“D’ya have to haggle?” Kim smiled.
“Of course.”
“Would they rid me of my unwelcome jinn?” Thea asked him.
“What’s that?”
“You.”
He grinned. She was flirting now. “You’ll never be rid of me,” he said.
Back at the hotel, Thea hesitated to get out of the car after Kim had hurtled inside, desperate for the restroom. “I’m sorry to hear about your family,” she said.
He jangled the keys, leaning his back against the car door. “Hmm?”
“You mentioned a tragedy.”
“Oh.”
“What happened?”
“My brother,” he said.
The parking lot was quiet and dark. He had drawn up in front of a hedge.
“My talented, hard-working brother was . . .” He braced himself. As in an exorcism, he was about to regurgitate the nastiest of all nasties. “My brother was locked inside a grand piano on his stag night. He nearly died.”
Thea’s eyes flickered.
“Yes,” he replied, “you can fit a man inside a piano. A small man and a concert grand, anyway. When Max woke from a drunken stupor and found himself in a coffin made by Steinway, his heart gave out. Turned out he didn’t have a very good one. Heart, I mean. He never played another chord and tried to take his own life a few months later.”
“My God.”
He touched the keys again. They tinkled.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.”
“And the other? You mentioned another—”
“The other tragedy, for my family, was that I was the one who put him in there.”
IV
Out of Range
Lobby. Gardens. Outdoor passage. Room. Minibar.
Thea leaned into the fridge, grabbed a bottle of beer; opened it. There was no sign of Kim. She sat back against her pillows, lifting the bottle to drink. The room was too quiet.
I want to make sex with you.
She jumped up, went to the door to chain-lock it, and turned on the television. Voices, faces. CNN offered good news and bad: a crashed plane with no dead; Gaza strangled; Tom Cruise embarrassed—a Scientology interview leaked, making him seem ever more alien. She paced the narrow space between the beds, one eye on Tom Cruise. Scientologists are the only ones who can really help, he was saying, when they come across a car crash.
We are all mad, Thea thought.
And she thought: Drunken boys, lads. A night out. A prank gone wrong. But from what dark place had come such a plan? She imagined him—this man, Max—imagined him waking, confused, trapped. Boxed in. Blacked-out.
The lid of a grand piano is a heavy thing.
A prank? They weren’t schoolboys. They were drunk. To their addled brains, it must have seemed . . . funny. A laugh. Harmless, stag-night raucousness. How?
The door slammed against its chain. “Thea?”
She hurried over to let Kim in.
“Why the chain?” she asked, coming in with two bottles of water.
Thea went back to sit on her bed, and drank.
“Now you really do look like you’ve picked up a jinn. Please tell me you haven’t.”
“I wish I could.”
“Gabriel, huh?”
“Yup.” Thea longed to say more. If it had not yet been spoken about, this fraternal obscenity, it should be.
“Don’t beat up on yourself, sweetie. So your eyes have wandered a little. It happens. Doesn’t mean you’re going to act on it. And even if you did—heck, a shot of infidelity can do the world for a marriage.”
“Yeah, like wrecking it.”
“Touché.”
“I have no intention of being unfaithful—at least not with him.”
“Gabriel would be very sorry to hear that.” Kim twisted around a little comically. “Is there someone else?”
Thea wobbled her head, slugged back some beer. “Had the postcards come from a delicious Indian we once knew, who knows what might have happened?”
“But I turned up instead. Man, I’m disappointing.”
“Not at all. Not one bit.”
“Hey, maybe I even saved your marriage.”
“It doesn’t need saving.”
“Good, because we’re having dinner with Gabriel tonight.”
“What?”
“I just ran into him and asked him to join us.”
“Kim, no! We can’t have dinner with him!”
“Why not?”
Thea pulled her knees closer to her chest. “We shouldn’t get involved. This jinn stuff. It’s creeping up on us. That old man you saw in the gully, and all these damn stories, we’re getting pulled in. Because of Gabriel. He’s—”
“Deluded, yes. Haunted, certainly. But you can always see the core of a person in their eyes, Thea, and he has kind eyes.”
“I feel exposed around him.”
“Well, of course you do, honey. He undresses you
