Oasis of Night

by J. S. Cook

  “Sam, are you sure?”

  “I am not sure of anything!” He got up and walked several agitated steps toward the filing cabinet, his back to me. “Jonah and I… I had not seen nor heard from him for years and years. Suddenly, a few months ago, he appears as if out of the sky, wanting to renew our childhood acquaintance.” His shoulders were raised, his back stiff; he looked like he’d forgotten to take the hanger out of his coat before he put it on. “I am not a fool, Jack.” He turned slowly. “He must have known I would take precautions, that I would check. He must have realized that presenting himself to me was dangerous. I have never made any secret of my profession.”

  “Except to me.”

  He winced. “That isn’t fair.”

  “You’re right. It isn’t fair.” It occurred to me that maybe Tareenah was taking all the blame for something Octavian had cooked up, and that didn’t seem right. “Can I… would you mind if I tried talking to her?”

  He gestured at the door. “You may try. Ali!” A baby-faced cop appeared at the door, clutching a notebook. “Please take Mr. Stoyles to see Mrs. Halim. That is all.”

  I started to say something but Sam had opened a thick file folder and was pretending to read it, so I decided to let things lie. I followed Ali downstairs to where the cells were. Tareenah was near the end of the row in the women’s block, sitting on the bunk with her head down. Ali unlocked the door, and I slipped inside, sitting down on the opposite bunk. The cell was small and oppressively hot, and smelled overpoweringly of stale cigarettes and old urine and fear. What light there was entered through a tiny, barred window set high up in the wall.

  “Mrs. Halim, Sam asked me to come and talk to you.” Not precisely true, but I was willing to make a nod to diplomacy. She ignored me completely. “I’d like to hear your side of things.”

  We sat there in silence for maybe fifteen minutes, and I was beginning to think I’d wasted my time when finally she stirred. “He does not understand.”

  “Sam doesn’t?”

  “There are things….” She clenched her hands. “Would you happen to have an American cigarette, Mr. Stoyles?”

  “Sure.” I fished one out and lit it for her. “What doesn’t he understand?”

  “This man, Octavian. He is dead?”

  “Yeah.” I remembered the clean arc the big Greek’s knife had made, the spray of Octavian’s blood against the white wall of the house. “Yeah, he’s dead.”

  “My husband does not know the full scope of my relationship with Jonah Octavian. He sees me only as a traitor, a betraying wife.”

  “What was in that file folder was pretty damning, Mrs. Halim, as far as evidence goes.”

  “I did it, Mr. Stoyles. I will not lie to you. Oh yes, I did it.”

  “Why?”

  She held my gaze and didn’t flinch. “He threatened to kill my children if I did not help him.” I made a face, but she stumbled on. “No, you can smile if you wish. One day I went to collect Stamos and Tabia at their school. The teacher said my children had already gone—their uncle had picked them up and taken them home. My children have no uncle.”

  “Octavian.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why not seek Samir’s help?” I didn’t understand why she hadn’t gone to the police immediately. “Surely you knew Samir would help you. Why not go to him?” Samir was loyal to Sam; she could hardly compromise her husband by confiding in his subordinate.

  “Do you think Octavian is stupid?” She shook her head. “I had reason to believe I was being closely watched. He would know I had gone to the police.”

  “So you just went along with him.” Sam deserved better than this.

  “Think of me what you will, Mr. Stoyles, but I did what I had to do in order to protect my children.” She drew hard on the cigarette, her expression ravaged. “Now go. Persuade my husband to return to Canada with you, or wherever it is you are going.”

  “Newfoundland,” I said quietly. “Not Canada. It’s not quite the same thing.” I drew a deep breath, wishing to hell I knew how to proceed. “Mrs. Halim, I understand why you did this. If Octavian was threatening to harm your children—”

  “If! You do not believe me either.” She shook her head. “It does not matter.”

  I didn’t have to wonder how she rationalized all this to herself; I knew. But I wondered if she really understood the implications of what she’d done. Did she realize there were men out there in the desert, men who would die because of what she’d done? “Yeah, I believe you.” I stood up to go. “And I’m trying to understand why you did it. I really am.”

  I called for Ali. He came and let me out, and I went back up to Sam’s office. He was on the phone when I got there, but he motioned me in, so I sat down across from him and waited till he was done. Sam’s conversation was in Arabic, and I didn’t understand any of it, but he seemed agitated. Finally he put the phone down and looked at me. “What did she say to you?”

  “Octavian was threatening the children.”

  “She claims.” Sam’s composure wavered for a moment, and he pressed a hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes from me. “Jack, I confess I do not know what to do.”

  “Sam, are you sure she’s safe here?” I saw his look and hastened to explain. “I mean, if Octavian’s boys are still around, they’re bound to know she’s let the cat out of the bag. Don’t you think they might come looking for her?”

  “Cat?” He tilted his head on one side. “Jack, my wife does not keep a cat. Ah, yes, I see. This is one of your American expressions.” He was silent for a moment, stroking his mustache. “There is a chance Aaltonen or someone might come looking for Tareenah, yes.” His gaze met mine. “You are familiar, I take it, with the phenomenon of using bait to lure a predator?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Your expression says you despise me for using my wife in this manner.” He was trembling. “Allah protect me! My back is against a wall, and I swear on the heads of my children, Jack, I do not know what to do.”

  I shut his office door and turned the key in the lock. Then I went around his desk, knelt down on the floor, and took him into my arms. He was trembling the length of his body, shuddering like a leaf in the wind, and I turned his face and kissed him. “We’ll figure it out. We will, Sam. You and I. We’ll get through this together.”

  It was fine and good to make such lavish promises, but in reality, I didn’t know a damned thing about espionage, and I sure as hell had no idea where to start.

  MY FIRST thought upon waking was that somebody was in the room. It wasn’t even a thought as such, just a general and immediate impression. My body was up and halfway out of the bed before my brain had even registered I was awake. “All right, start talking.” I reached for the bedside lamp and switched it on. The man known as Mukbar sat in the chair beside my bed, his arms neatly folded in his lap.

  “Did you know, Mr. Stoyles, your snoring is unduly loud for a man of your age and physical condition.”

  “What the hell do you want? How’d you get in here?”

  “To help you. As to how I got in—” He traced the crease in his trousers. “Far too easily, I expect. Even considering the Acacia Court is a first-rate hotel, you would do well to put the chain on your door before retiring.” He smirked. “I might have killed you in your sleep.”

  He was holding a small pistol fitted with a silencer, and it was pointed right at my chest. “You gonna do me in with that, Mukbar?”

  “It shoots, Mr. Stoyles. Please, you will get dressed and come with me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with y—” There was a sound like a firecracker popping deep down inside a well, and a small hole appeared in the wall next to my shoulder.

  “You will get dressed and come with me.” His large eyes blinked once or twice, slowly; he was easy in himself, and endlessly patient. “Come with me now.”

  My watch read half-past three when Mukbar and his tiny gun escorted me down the back stairs to a waiting car. The moon hung
above us, huge and ponderous, and immediately I thought of Sam. I’d hoped to have at least one more intimate interlude with him before I went back home, but if Mukbar’s intentions were what I thought they were, I could forget about that.

  “Go on, get in.” He prodded me, and I slid into the back seat beside a tall, thin man I immediately recognized: the Finn, Errki Aaltonen, the same man who’d taken Sam to the bank the day I’d shown up with the key.

  “So nice to see you again, Mr. Stoyles. I fear our previous meeting was under less-than-salutary circumstances.”

  “So you’re in on this too, huh? I might have known. How’d you get out? Sam’s jail is supposed to be one of the tightest in Egypt. Pay somebody off, did you, for a little inside job?”

  He laughed, showing white, faintly feral teeth. “You’re a smart man, Mr. Stoyles. Tell me what else you know, hm?”

  “You and this creature were involved in killing Pasha Nubar. Where’d you learn to use a blow gun?”

  The car jolted into motion, and Aaltonen chose to ignore my question, focusing his gaze on the view through the windshield. Cairo was quiet at this hour, but Mukbar was an indifferent driver, and more than once we nearly ran up onto the sidewalk as he veered away from some obstacle. I started thinking that if only I could distract Mukbar long enough to make him drive into something, I could easily get away from Aaltonen. I wasn’t stupid, I knew both of them had guns, but maybe I could escape down an alley and….

  And what? Lose yourself in the native quarter? It was almost like I could hear Sam’s voice in my head. Get yourself knifed to death? Strangled? It was better to stay put, and maybe if I kept my wits about me, I could get to a phone and alert Sam, and he could come charging in and arrest Mukbar and Aaltonen on the spot. That is, if they didn’t kill me first, and if they didn’t see Sam coming, and he and his men were able to approach without being seen, and thus ambush—

  Skip it, my mind said. Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, and you might still get out of this alive.

  We were heading north out of Cairo, toward the desert. That wasn’t good. I didn’t see any provisions in the car and neither Mukbar nor Aaltonen were carrying water. My guesses might be good or they might be crummy, but it looked like I was being brought out into the desert, where they intended to leave me. Yeah, the heat and thirst would make short work of me, and by the time Sam or his men found me, I’d be nothing more than a shriveled husk. “So what is this, exactly? You boys planning to do away with me, or are you just giving me the scenic tour?”

  “Mr. Stoyles, I dislike cliché almost as much as I dislike cheap sentiment, therefore I will be honest with you.” Mukbar sighed like he was genuinely sorry for me. “You know too much to be allowed to live. In Egypt, as in much of North Africa these days, knowledge is a dangerous thing. Your knowledge makes you extremely dangerous indeed, as does your ability to, shall we say, assemble the pieces.”

  “So you are gonna knock me off.”

  “Why don’t you sit back and enjoy the ride, Mr. Stoyles? There will be no need for you to talk.”

  Mukbar’s command was punctuated by a jab in the ribs from Aaltonen’s gun, and I did as I was told. My mind kept going back to Tareenah, sitting in her jail cell. What would happen to her? I knew the penalty for treason during wartime, but surely Sam wouldn’t condemn his own wife. If Octavian had been blackmailing her, then she’d given him the information under extreme duress, and wasn’t there some proof of that somewhere? As it stood, she was being railroaded, and she didn’t seem to be doing a lot to defend herself. Why was that?

  Eventually my musings and the early hour got the best of me, and I fell asleep leaning against the car door. I dreamed I was on a boat, sailing on some unfamiliar body of water, alone. The boat was fitted with a sail, but there were no oars; I seemed to be drifting in a fathomless fog. I cupped my hands around my mouth and called out, but my voice went nowhere; the fog closed in around the boat, and I was smothering, I couldn’t breathe—

  “Aaltonen, you fool, not yet.” Mukbar and the Finn held me upright between them, and we were moving rapidly down a set of stone steps toward a narrow door set into the side of the hill. The horizon had begun to lighten, and the stars were beginning to go out. I longed viciously for Sam and wondered if I would ever see him or my Heartache Cafe again. “In you go, Mr. Stoyles, I am sure you will find it very comfortable.” They shoved me in, the heavy door was swung into position, and the bar dropped across it. I was in utter and absolute darkness, with not so much as a crack showing anywhere. I raised my hands above me and my palms hit solid rock a few inches above my head. This was bad. This was very, very bad. I had no way of knowing how large or small my prison was, and so I couldn’t calculate how many cubic feet of air I would have the privilege of breathing before my supply ran out. The important thing, I knew, was to stay calm. Getting excited would increase my heart rate and respiration, hastening my death.

  I felt for the floor and lowered myself down, sitting with my back against a rock wall. The air was warm but not uncomfortably so, and I guessed the thick stone insulated the place against the worst of the desert heat. I laid my head back and concentrated on calming myself by taking slow, even breaths. After a while, I began to drift off into that queer place between sleep and wakefulness. I dreamed I was lying in bed beside Sam, and the low rays of the morning sun had just begun to show over the horizon. The room was white, and the bed in which we lay was also white and crowned with a huge mosquito net made of some diaphanous stuff. Sam was naked except for a white silk sheet, and I leaned over him, watching his sleeping face and waiting for him to wake. His dreams swam across his features and fluttered his dark lashes, and his mouth was curved in a smile. He turned his face and, without opening his eyes said, “My beloved is mine and I am his, who is delighting among the lilies….”

  Then we were standing at the bar in my Heartache Cafe, and Chris was mixing us a drink; no, that was wrong, Sam didn’t drink, he was a Moslem, and I hadn’t touched the stuff in ages. “It’s all right,” Chris said, “there’s only soda water in this one.” The sun was setting in a blaze of scarlet and gold, lighting up the windows of houses along the South Side. “You have to go now.” Chris came out from behind the bar and took me by the arm and walked me to the door of my cafe. “You aren’t supposed to be here. You have to go.” And then I was standing on the bridge again in Philly, the freezing wind slicing through my clothes and cutting into my skin. The cold was cutting off my feet and hands, sawing through my legs at the ankles—

  I woke with a start. I was sitting with my legs folded in front of me, my hands dangling in my lap. I couldn’t be sure how much time had passed, and I might have been there for hours or for merely moments. That wasn’t what woke me, however. I had registered something in my sleeping state, something different enough for my subconscious mind to remark upon it and thus draw my attention to… what? Dammit, what was it? I had to remember. I was lying with Sam, and he was quoting the Song of Solomon; then we were in the Heartache Cafe with Chris, watching the sun set. I was cold: my hands and feet were cold; the cold was cutting through my legs at the ankles.

  I put my hands down and let them dangle for a moment and then I knew: a veritable torrent of cold air was streaming in from somewhere to the right, cooling my feet and hands. I got down on my belly and put my face into the stream and sure enough, it was real. Cold air in the desert usually means there’s water somewhere nearby, an underground spring or aquifer. This could mean the difference between life and death, provided I could find the source. I dug my index finger into the earth to the last knuckle and found nothing but dry sand, but I wasn’t giving up just yet. I followed the stream of air back farther, always keeping it in front of me, stopping now and then to dig into the soil but so far, I had found absolutely nothing.

  After about an hour of this, I sat back to rest. Maybe there wasn’t any water. Maybe the cool air was a trick, designed to make me wear myself out looking for a stream of water that didn�
��t exist. Aaltonen had probably rigged it himself, as some kind of sick joke, and I couldn’t help thinking that these were the kind of people Frankie had chosen to play ball with. He’d probably signed on figuring he could capitalize on the benefits without getting caught up in the nasty parts, but he’d figured wrong. Guys like Aaltonen and Octavian didn’t play fair; they played dirtier than anybody, and they’d kill whoever happened to get in the way, including each other.

  “All right,” I said aloud, “one more go.” I lay down on my belly, put my face into the stream of air, and started forward. I had gone maybe six or seven feet when my outstretched hand touched something—something cold and rubbery and faintly fleshy.

  I didn’t need light to tell me I was touching a human foot.

  Chapter 8

  I SAT there in the dark for a long time, hunched over and trying not to breathe too fast and use up all the air. My mind was jabbering away a mile a minute, and I spent a helluva lot of energy just trying to make myself shut up. Whoever owned the foot was dead, because they sure as hell didn’t move, even when I reached out, grabbed them by the ankle, and shook. I figured this was probably another one of Octavian’s operatives, bumped off because they didn’t behave like the big boss wanted. I couldn’t think who this could be: Mukbar and Aaltonen seemed pretty tight, and as far as I knew, Octavian had no reason to kill Ibrahim Samir. One more Cairo policeman more or less meant nothing much to him or his cronies. It was Sam they were after.

  I guess maybe I’m a lot dumber than I give myself credit for, because the other possibility didn’t occur to me until a long time afterward. I remembered the conversation Sam and I had in his office before Mukbar showed up in my hotel room to take me for a ride. If Octavian’s boys are still around, they’re bound to know she’s let the cat out of the bag. Don’t you think they might come looking for her? I reached farther up the leg and felt the unmistakable contours of a woman’s hip, the indentation of her waist and then, finally, her long hair. There was no light for me to see, but I knew it could be no one else but Tareenah Halim. How they had gotten her out of jail was one thing—surely Octavian’s boys had operatives on the inside, things being the way they were—but did they think Sam would let them get away with this? He was bound to come looking for his wife, and Sam was too much of a policeman to let a trail stand long enough to get cold.