card. That is all there is to it.”
“Hell, I thought maybe you were going to knock off some guy and leave my prints on the job.”
“No, no, nothing like that. I swear it.”
“I think you’re nuts, Mr. Hassam, no crap. I never ran across such a wild scheme before.”
“Trust me, Harsh.”
“Well, okay.” Harsh held out his right hand. “I guess I got very little choice.”
When Mr. Hassam had stripped the set-up mastic off Harsh’s hands, he left the kitchen at once with it, leaving Harsh to do some second-thinking. He immediately wished he had not consented to having the hand casts made. Why had he been such a sucker, anyway? Mr. Hassam was a slick one, talking him into it. If they were going to make some gloves that anybody could wear and leave his fingerprints scattered around, that was serious. They could rob Fort Knox if they could figure out a way to get the job done, and hang it on him if they wanted to.
He felt something wriggling down his forehead. He struck it a hard blow with his palm, but it was just a drop of sweat, which he splashed to nothing.
He went over to the kitchen sink and washed the oily film off his hands, taking care not to get the cast wet. He had to use quite a lot of soap powder to get it off. Then he examined the gunk still left in the jar. There was not much of it. No label on the jar, no way to tell who made the stuff. Well, he had made another sucker move, that was what he had done.
He looked at Mr. Hassam narrowly when the latter rejoined him almost two hours later. “Them things you made of my hands, were they all right? They satisfy you?”
“Perfectly.”
“Could I have a look at them? I’d kinda like to see what they look like.” If he got his hands on the casts, he was going to destroy them.
“I’m sorry, Harsh. I have already sent them off to New York by air mail.”
“Oh.” Harsh rubbed the side of his nose with his finger. “Well, I guess that’s that. What else is on the toboggan for today?”
“More Spanish lessons, if you feel up to it.”
“Why not.”
“Shall we go down to the beach, then? More comfortable there.”
The sea with the early morning sun falling across it looked licorice black, with swatches of scintillating brilliance following along on the wave crests.
“Not that you ain’t good company, but I would rather sit on the beach with Miss Muirz, if you know what I mean.” Harsh took off his shoes and socks and dug his bare feet into the warm sand. “What happened to that dish anyway?”
“She had a business trip to make. I imagine she may return today.”
“Yeah?” Harsh grinned. “I hardly got to know her, she was in and out of here like the Irishman’s flea. So she’s gonna be back, huh? Well, that should pick up things around here.”
Mr. Hassam looked at him with amusement. “You have my felicitations.”
Harsh eyed him. “Yeah. What in the hell’s a felicitation?”
“A blessing.”
“Yeah. You mean with your fingers crossed, the way you sound.”
A wave came swelling in and fell on the ash blond beach at their feet with an audible grunt. Mr. Hassam kicked some dry sand out of the wet sand. “Maybe we should get at the Spanish lesson.”
“If you say so.”
“How much do you remember of what we have already gone over, Harsh?”
For some time they practiced what Mr. Hassam called the lilt of the Spanish tongue, which Harsh decided was mostly a way of pronouncing each vowel with great clarity as if he was attacking the sound. He learned how to take the fuzzy edges off his vowels, and how to put vowel glides in certain places so as to lay a special emphasis. A lot of noodle soup, Harsh thought, but he kept at it.
“You are progressing excellently, Mr. Harsh.”
“Yeah. Well you would have a time proving it by me. This stuff is way out of my line. Say, am I supposed to be able to spout this stuff like a native? I’ll never make it.”
“A smattering will do.”
“Maybe this
“That will come later.”
“Okay.”
They watched a small plane come down the shoreline. The plane had its nose down to within fifty feet of the surf and was making time down the beach. The pilot waved when he went past. Harsh waved back. “That’s a lucky bastard, that pilot. You know I always wished I could fly one of them things. Lot of ’em by here. Must be twenty, thirty, a day. Lot of sightseeing.”
“Tourists, I imagine.” Mr. Hassam was not much interested in the plane.
“Yeah, I suppose. A treat for them poor tourists, I bet, getting a look at a palace like this. It ain’t every day you see something that fancy.” The plane had passed on, dragging a broom of sound over the beach. “Take my old man, he wouldn’t believe this. He was a farmer. He had his feet in the clay all his life. He never knew he was sweating his guts out so some people could live high on the hog in places like this. I wonder what he would have thought, give him a look at this.” Harsh glanced at Mr. Hassam. “Maybe it ain’t nothing unusual to you, though.”
Mr. Hassam looked sober. “I, too, had a humble beginning.” He lay back on the sand and began to talk. He said Harsh might not believe it, but this was a far cry from his own youth also. All but the sand. The sand was the same. Sand was sand, and Mr. Hassam’s had been in dunes, hot as a furnace by day and as nice as a woman at night. “Mr. Harsh, I was born on the sand in a rug tent, begat by a father who bred white asses of fine quality which he exported to Mecca. He bought my mother in a market for a sum of silver piastres the equal of about twenty-five dollars American. Mr. Harsh, does that sound romantic, picturesque? It was not, believe me. I cannot remember a time when I was not hungry there in that desert, and you should have seen me, a skinny teenage kid riding a white ass or a camel. I was seventeen when my father sent me to sell a herd of the asses to a Mecca dealer, and do you know what I did? I took the money the dealer paid and I never went back. I have not seen my father nor my mother again until this day. I went to Damascus, became a fat boy in Damascus. You know what is a fat boy in Damascus? No, nothing nasty. Just a boy the desert has given a permanent hunger for food. I went to work for an importer. In time I found the importer was doing a smuggling business and paying off the local police and bigwigs with a bag of Dutch gold once a month, a bag of gulden left discreetly at the house of the girlfriend of an official. That Dutch gold intrigued me. For decades Dutch gulden have been the most dependable of the world currencies. Anyway, I befriended the girl, we tipped off the military, and we came out of it with one bag of Dutch gold. Or rather, I did, because I left the girl behind but not the gold, and went to Cairo for schooling, and then to Oxford, a great university in England, and then to South America to be a college professor with a specialty in finance. So you see, Mr. Harsh, one thing leads to another and here we are.”
Mr. Hassam fell silent and his eyes were shiny with memories.
Harsh waggled his toes in the sand and scratched his face around the edge of the bandage and wondered what was the pitch. He could not think of anything that could have put Mr. Hassam in a reminiscing mood. They had not been drinking or anything. The fat little slicker is leading up to something, Harsh decided.
“Yeah, Mr. Hassam, here we are.”
“Two men perhaps more alike in environmental molding than you at first presumed, eh, Mr. Harsh? Two men with the same greed and the same needs.”
Harsh watched a wave march up the beach. “So you figure I’m greedy?”
“Well, are you not?”
“Sure. I guess so. Who ain’t? When you come right down to it, who ain’t?”
“No one, I imagine.”
Harsh dumped sand out of one of his shoes.
“I don’t mind talking to you, Mr. Hassam. You’re a very interesting talker. But ain’t you afraid of wearing the bush out by beating around it? What I mean, why not come to the point?”
