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.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I’m not at liberty to tell you his name.”
That was good, Gideon thought. It sounded like something John Smith would say, and it established that secrets were acceptable between them.
“No, no, no, no, of course not,” Hassan said quickly. “Sometimes it’s best not to know these things. Well, here is our coffee.”
Jalal had returned with two tiny cups and set them on the table. Then he had gone to stand off to one side, just at the edge of Gideon’s vision, while Hassan sipped and Gideon pretended to. They made stilted, ceremonial chitchat for a few minutes-about the weather, of all things. An unchallenging topic in a land where 363 out of every 365 days were the same: hot, dry, and utterly cloudless. Hassan remarked that the evening breeze was pleasant. Gideon agreed that it was quite pleasant.
In truth, they weren’t getting much benefit from the evening breeze. Hassan’s precautions against Gideon’s knowing where they were had extended to his having had the junk on the roof stacked in such a way that it formed a screen around the edges. Gideon could hear sounds of village life-the creak of a wooden cartwheel, the complaint of a cranky camel, the continuing shouts of children, the amplified call of a muezzin-but all he saw was mattresses on end and bundles of tall, dried reeds.
Jalal cleared away the cups and was sent back to stand just out of Gideon’s sight again. Hassan rubbed his hands briskly together. Time for business.
“Well, I think I have some things to show you, Mr. Smith. A few things that have come my way lately.”
“Fine.” Gideon became a little easier. If Hassan trustedhim enough to lay out his goods, then an awkward demand for a business card wasn’t likely to be forthcoming.
Hassan took a thick packet of cards from his breast pocket, separated a few, and offered them. Gideon came close to asking what they were before remembering that men like Ali Hassan didn’t make a practice of publicly demonstrating their wares like the less discriminating el-Hamids. They carried Polaroids, not baskets of artifacts.
There were about a dozen, poorly lit and badly composed, and Gideon longed to rip through them in search of a yellow jasper head. Instead, he thumbed through them with agonizing thoroughness, peering at them in the fading daylight the way John Smith probably would have, one at a time, with pauses and nods and grunts, thoughtfully laying each one out on the table next to the one before, like a hand of solitaire. First were several miniature, whole statuettes of varying quality; then a few fragmentary heads-chins and lips, mostly- made of what appeared to be quartz and obsidian; then a statuette body of a seated woman made of coarser material, probably sandstone. And then two small, finely made faience figurines of animals: a goose and a fish.
And that was it. No yellow jasper head.
He put down the last picture. “These are quite nice, but I was hoping you might be able to find me-”
He paused, frowning, and turned back to the twelve photos spread on the table in two rows. He picked up the third one from the right in the nearest row. The sandstone figure. The headless body.
It was a female dressed in a simply depicted gown and seated on a boxlike support with hieroglyphic symbols carved into its side, her hands resting palms-down on her thighs. It was Amarna style, all right, early Amarna, just beginning to move away from the stiff, conventionalized pose of former times to the more relaxed, natural posture that would be a hallmark of Akhenaten’s reign. Between the shoulders was a square-carved recess to accept the tang that would have projected from the underside of the separate head and neck.
A composite statue.
The hairs on the back of his neck stirred. Was it possible that he had gotten to what he was looking for by the back way? He had come looking for the head that went with the body. Had he found the body that went with the head? He felt his heart pick up its beat.
“I don’t know, this might be fairly interesting,” he said indifferently, flipping it back onto the table. “What can you tell me about-”
“Har, har, har,” said Hassan.
Gideon looked up sharply. “I beg your pardon?”
“Har, har, har,” said Hassan. He was sitting with his hands over his belly, the left wrist clasped in the right hand. His feet were flat on the floor and his shoulders were shaking. As far as Gideon could tell, he was genuinely amused.
Gideon waited.
Hassan used a handkerchief to wipe tears from the corner of his eyes. “I thought that one would get your interest. Oh, yes.” The handkerchief was wadded up and stuffed away somewhere and with it went Hassan’s sudden burst of mirth. “Let’s not mince any more words. It’s what you came for, isn’t it? The statuette that was taken from the Horizon site across the river four years ago. I’m afraid I’m not at liberty,” he added with heavy-handed sarcasm, “to tell you how it came to me.”
He looked keenly at Gideon, awaiting a reaction.
Gideon felt himself floundering. Things had begun to spiral out of his control. No, apparently they’d always been out of his control; he just hadn’t known it.
He spread his hands. “Why would I be particularly interested in that?”
Hassan leaned forward, a thick hand on each knee. “Please. Suddenly, from nowhere, you come to me with a story of a client interested in Amarna statues? And this happens to be, by coincidence, one week after a certain missing Amarna head at Horizon House is found again… and ‘lost’ again? You expect me to believe this?”
Gideon did his best to manifest wounded dignity. The pelt adhering to his upper lip didn’t make it any easier. “I assure you, I don’t know what-”
“Please, Mr. Smith, don’t insult my intelligence. You know everything there is to know about the head. Do I look like a child?”
“I-all right, yes, you’re right, I do have it,” Gideon said, figuring that it had to be easier to put over a sham that Hassan believed in than one that he didn’t. “I have it and I’m willing to make you a more-than-reasonable offer for the body.” What, he wondered nervously, was reasonable?
Hassan sat back with a sigh, shaking his head sadly. “Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith. Really.”
Now what? The safest bet seemed to be to wait him out.
It didn’t take long. “Mr. Smith,” Hassan said, his tone revealing sad disillusionment at Gideon’s prevarication, “I happen to know that you don’t have the head.”
“I assure you-”
“Mr. Smith, I know. Now, I don’t know what your plans are for getting it and I don’t want to know. It’s your business, so why should it concern me? I have the body, you want the body. I’m a businessman. If we can come to an agreement, it’s yours. Very simple.”
Gideon’s mind was buzzing. If Hassan knew-truly knew -that he didn’t have the head, then didn’t that mean that he knew who did? And wasn’t that the information this goofy charade had been designed to ferret out? Whoever had the head had surely killed Clifford Haddon. Or if not, if it had already changed owners, then he or she could certainly direct the police to whoever had.
Gideon smiled indulgently. “Tell me, Mr. Hassan, just who do you think does have it?”
Hassan wouldn’t play along. “No games, please,” he said tartly. “Here is my position. I’ll be frank with you.”
But being frank obviously took some forethought (not that Gideon was in any position to look down his nose over a little equivocation). Hassan got briskly to his feet, pulled a pack of Marlboros from an inside pocket, offered one to Gideon, who shook his head, and lit up. He walked the few steps that the cleared space allowed him to, handed the cigarette to Jalal after a single long draw, and turned to face Gideon, his hands behind his back.
“A certain person, an old business acquaintance, offered me $20,000 for it. I accepted. Now, I don’t like to break an agreement once it’s made, I’m not that kind of man, but the truth is, I still haven’t seen the money. If you can double it, it’s yours. Forty thousand dollars. I can give you two days.”
Well, at last Gideon knew what a reasonable price was: something under $40,000. This was bargaining time, and in Egypt that meant that when you were selling you started out at roughly three times what you thought you might come away with in the end.
He uttered an airy laugh. “Mr. Hassan, all I’ve seen is a photograph. I don’t know that it’s what you say it is, and even if it is, how do I know you have it?”
Hassan grinned mockingly back at him. “You’re not interested? Well, well, maybe I should just put those pictures back in my pocket and-”
“Assuming that it’s what you say, I might be able to go as high as $10,000,” Gideon said.
“Har, har, har,” said Hassan.
“Maybe twelve, if it’s in particularly good condition.”
Hassan’s grin turned sly, not an appealing sight. He came back and sat down again, his heavy thighs flattening under the pressure. “You know what I think? I think you do have, what should we call it, the final element, the last part.” He raised his eyebrows and tapped Gideon conspiratorially on the knee. “Yes? Am I right?”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t,” Gideon said. What the hell were they talking about now?
“Oh, I think you do,” Hassan said. The muttering chuckle had started up again, like an idling engine. “So this little item”-his stubby, beringed forefinger came down squarely on the photograph, one, two, three times-“is going to be worth a whole lot of money to you. What’s a measly $40,000? You’re lucky I’m not asking five times as much. Don’t be so stingy, Mr. Smith.”
“All right,” said Gideon, “$40,000 it is.”
Well, why not? Hassan was right: why be stingy? The money didn’t exist anyway. The important thing now was to set up another meeting with Hassan, one that Sergeant Gabra would be in on too. Hassan knew who had the head; he might not be willing to tell Gideon, but he would tell Gabra.
“Well, then, isn’t that more like it?” Hassan said, reaching for Gideon’s hand, grasping it, pumping it up and down. “This way everybody’s happy, right? How will you pay?”
“I-” He caught himself. He’d been about to say he’d pay in cash, but would John Smith really have $40,000 with him? This was no time to blow things with a careless blunder. Besides, did he want Hassan and the Six-Gun Kid thinking he might have all that money on him the next time they met? No, cash was out, and so was a personal check; John Smith wouldn’t be stupid enough to use one for contraband merchandise, and Hassan wouldn’t be stupid enough to accept it.
Beyond that, Gideon was in muddy waters. He barely knew the difference between a money order and a certified check. In the Oliver household it was Julie who handled high finance.
“What would you suggest?” he said.
Hassan plucked at his lower lip. “Well, I don’t think a foreign draft would be a very good idea, and a wire transfer would complicate everything, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, that’s very true.”
“Your bank has a branch in Cairo?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Then why not a treasurer’s check?”
“Fine, good idea.”
“That way,” Hassan said, “you won’t have to use your real name.”
Gideon swallowed. “Mr. Hassan-”
The dealer held up his hand. “I know, I know. You assure me. Listen, Mr. Smith, or Mr. Jones, or Mr. Wilson, I don’t know what your name is, and I don’t care. I don’t ask questions, and I don’t answer them. There’s only one thing I care about: can you raise $40,000 in the next two days?”
“I can raise it,” Gideon said. “I’ll have it for you by tomorrow afternoon. Where shall I meet you?”
Hassan sat back, still pulling on his lip. “Can you find the el-Fishawy cafe again?”
“Where I was tonight? Yes.”
“Good. Six o’clock? You’ll have the money?”
“Naturally. You’ll have the statuette?”
“Naturally. He stood to shake hands a final time, rumbling contentedly, ”Until tomorrow, my dear Mr. John Smith.“