Carl had awkwardly turned his back to them, slipped a note under his tea glass and run off. He could easily shake the police in the maze of narrow streets. If they even followed him. He hadn’t dared to turn around and look for them, he’d already had sufficient excitement for the day. He made for the Sheraton, going back along the harbor and then up the coast road.
Rich Americans in white clothes posed in front of the ocean. Golden stewards leaned against sleek yachts, and the entrance to the seafood restaurant looked like a Greek temple made of plastic. He felt empty and numb. The sight of a cruise ship heading out to sea with steam rising from its smokestacks prompted the thought of emigrating. He had no past, and if he had one there were signs that violence, crime and legal problems played starring roles in it. The will to resume his previous life was not nearly as strong as his desire for peace and safety. Emigrating to France or America, starting an unencumbered life, slowly finding one’s way at the side of a platinum-blonde woman. Wasn’t that possible?
“Cetrois!” someone called behind him. “Cetrois? Who are you looking for? Cetrois?”
A man in blue coveralls stood in the sliding gate of an auto repair shop, in front of which lay piles of car parts. With a conspiratorial gesture he waved Carl over, took him into the shop and pulled down the gate behind them. A second, very burly man was waiting in the half-darkness and swiftly kicked Carl in the gut.
He slumped forward and felt someone grip his throat from behind. They asked no questions. They seemed to assume that he knew what they wanted from him. That is, if they even wanted something from him and this whole thing wasn’t just the price to be paid by a man wearing women’s clothing, which in a traditional society provoked understandable aggression. The questions he gasped while being kicked, who were they, were answered with further kicks. He tasted blood. They pulled him into the back of the workshop and the burly one pushed him against a workbench with a large wooden box on it. Inside the box, which was open on one side, was a hypermodern-looking, gleaming chrome machine. They hit his head against the machine.
“How’s that? How’s that?” yelled the burly man.
The machine wobbled and Carl slumped to the floor, dazed. They jumped on top of him, choked him, and didn’t stop until a noise from the sliding gate startled them.
A narrow but slowly widening wedge of sunlight flooded across the floor, the workbench, the gleaming chrome machine and the less than traditional three-man wrestling match. For a few seconds silence hung in the air. Then, in a droning woman’s voice with a strong American accent: “Excuse me, can you tell me where to find the tourist information?”
The smaller man jumped up and ran to the door with his arms stretched out in order to block the view of what was happening behind him. The other man held Carl down by his throat. Through a veil of sweat and tears Carl couldn’t see anything more than two shadows silhouetted against a rectangle of light. He heard quiet words, then a nasty crack, and one of the shadows sank to the ground. The second shadow came marching into the workshop with swaying hips and stopped in the darkness. The burly man let go of Carl’s throat and headed slowly, carefully, toward the shadow, kneading his fists.
This time Carl saw the blow with the side of the hand that shattered the man’s larynx with a crack. Ninety kilos writhed on the floor. Without hesitation, without smiling, without a word, Helen hustled over to Carl with a quick, businesslike sideways glance at the machine. She lifted one end of the wooden box from the workbench, braced it with her shoulder and had Carl pick up the other end.
Carrying the heavy box, they stepped over an unconscious man in the middle of the workshop and a conscious man by the door who was holding his throat with both hands and gasping. Helen’s pickup was outside. Together they centered the machine in the bed of the truck and drove speedily away.
“That’s not the thing, is it?” asked Helen when they were inside the bungalow with the gleaming chrome machine on the table in front of them. Standing on its base the device was nearly a meter high, had a slim, cylindrical middle section, pipes running around the outside, a central gauge and, on top, a filler neck. It appeared to need electricity but had no cord to plug it in with, just a two-holed panel plug on the side.
“What thing?”
“The mine.”
“The mine? This? You took it because you thought—”
“It stood out so prominently in the room. And you and the men directly beside it—I thought you had found it.”
“You thought this was a mine?”
“What do I know,” said Helen irritably. She turned a bolt on the filler neck. “So what were you after there in the workshop?”
“What about you?”
“I saw you, you performer, how you went in there. So what is this thing?”
A close examination of the machine brought no additional clarity. There was technical data on a small metal plate in the base—2500 wat, 12 amper—and above that a small amount of text in a language they didn’t know.
“Norwegian or Danish,” Carl guessed.
“Polish. Warszawa, that’s Polish. And those were Adil Bassir’s men?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. The ultimatum hasn’t run out yet.”
“Or the ones from the desert?”
“Nope.”
“Speaking of the desert,” said Helen, “there are no natural resources here. But there is a goldmine.”
30
Hakim of the Mountains
Why shouldn’t it be possible to make gold? We now know from atomic physics that everything is possible. Until recently we didn’t think everything was possible.
SCROOGE McDUCK
IN THE YELLOW HAZE, the yellow mountains. Helen had been assured at the American consulate that there were no natural resources in this area. The friendly officials at the consulate also knew nothing of any pit, excavation or mine of any kind whatsoever.
Helen had already left the consulate when a young man with a scrubber and bucket approached her in the parking lot. He had evidently followed her conversation with the officials from some distance. His English was very bad, and he had apparently not understood everything correctly. But, standing beneath the giant American flag at the entry gate, he excitedly reported that of course there was a mine in the north. Or there had been.
Innocently staring into Helen’s eyes, he waited until Helen had got out her wallet, then told her of an old goldmine on the arterial road to Tindirma. Admittedly, it wasn’t a real mine, as he was forced to admit after several minutes of flowery speech; it had actually been a restaurant run long ago by a Nigerian or Ghanaian, it had been called the Goldmine and contrary to its name had been anything but a goldmine, which is why it no longer existed. There was nothing left but the remains of the building. But you couldn’t miss it, he said, it was only a kilometer beyond the huge brick camels in the desert, and there was nothing else around, just the ruins, right before the little road split off into the mountains.
“And that would presumably all be a bunch of nonsense,” Helen said to Carl, “if it weren’t coincidentally also the place where I picked you up. Or at least, close to it.”
They drove off.
The camels kissed their eternal kiss in the shimmering afternoon heat. The wind blew yellow dust from their backs.
The little road that split off to the mountains was easy to find, but one could hardly call what was left of the building a ruin. A couple of boards between the rocks, a dented bucket. After searching for a long time Carl located the four posts that must at one time have been the corners of the building and even a little sign with peeling Arabic writing on it: part of the word Goldmine. That was it.
Carl, who had put great hope into this lead, and who kicked a rock so hard out of frustration that he thought he had broken his foot, wanted to return to Targat immediately. Helen was opposed.
“If you have an inn and you call it the Old Mill, then normally that means there had been a mill there at one time. Even if it had been
destroyed hundreds of years before and nobody remembered it. Right? Why would someone call his restaurant the Goldmine? Let’s at least try.” She pointed to a trail that snaked up into the mountains, and Carl, who wanted to avoid another disappointment but who was also angry at himself for not hitting upon that same thought, begrudgingly climbed back into the car.
The mountains were lined up next to each other, barren and uniform. Stray hunks of rock had fallen down the bare faces. Here a small rock, there a large one. Yellow and gray and brown monoliths dotted the slopes like a mediocre art exhibition. The Honda crept up the incline at a walking pace.
Helen braked after a bend because she thought she had seen something move up above, in the mountains. She backed up a little and through a narrow crack in the rocks a man in colorful athletic wear became visible thirty or forty meters above the trail. He was looking down at the ground. A handkerchief tied at each corner decorated his hairless skull. A piece of equipment seesawed on his shoulder, and every time he leaned down a pole rose behind him. The gadget consisted of a long fishing pole with a large mesh net on the top. The net was covered by a round piece of wood that was opened and closed using a cable that ran down to the handle of the pole. The man briefly looked down at the Honda and then ambled on.
Helen leaned out of the window.
“Do they bite?” she called out in English. The sound broke against the rocks and echoed back. The man took an uneasy step to the side so he could see them better. With his thumb he pointed over his shoulder at the gadget and called: “My own invention!”
“Do you know this area? We are looking for a—”
“Levi Doptera! Me!” bellowed the man.
“A pleasure, Helen Gliese!” called Helen. She turned off the engine. “For a mine. There’s supposed to be a mine around here somewhere.”
“A shrine?”
“Mine. A goldmine.”
“Do you need money?”
“We’re looking for a mineshaft.”
“I have gobs of money,” called the man, waving.
“Say yes,” said Carl.
“No!” bellowed Helen. “You didn’t happen to see anything, did you? An abandoned mineshaft?”
“Excellent!”
“What is he talking about?” asked Carl.
“I don’t know,” said Helen. And then loudly out of the window: “What is excellent?”
“I’m also searching!” bellowed the man. “Levi Doptera.”
“Fantastic!” called Helen. “But you haven’t seen anything like a mine?”
“Where there are mountains, people dig! Don’t let yourself get discouraged. My experience.”
“Let’s keep going,” whispered Carl. “He’s nuts.”
“Thank you for the wise words!” called Helen. “Shall we bring you a nugget?”
“No, no!” The man laughed and the net whipped around.
“Suit yourself. Jackass.”
The trail became narrower and steeper and ended among crumbling rocks a few kilometers on, in the middle of nothing.
Carl and Helen got out and looked around. Bleak mountain faces to the right and left, lizards in the sun. Dusty thistle plants.
At that point Helen declared the venture a lost cause, but Carl had already clambered fifty or a hundred meters up the slope and was continuing up, looking for signs of human activity. Helen called after him for a while, then sat down in the car and watched the scrambling figure through the windshield. After a while he reached the crest, took a quick look around and then disappeared over the far side with a shrug. Ten minutes went by. Half an hour. Helen slumped in the driver’s seat, both car doors wide open. A mountain peak cast the first shadow into the ravine behind Helen. She took off the emergency brake and let the car roll slowly into the shade. After she set the brake again, she saw a man waving from way up on the rocks. Carl was waving, and he must have been waving for some time. Helen yelled something to him, he didn’t answer and just continued to gesture with his arms.
With a sighing glance at her strappy sandals, she started warily up the mountain.
“Psst,” said Carl when she arrived at the top. He pulled her past a boulder, crawled a little ways on all fours and pointed down into a ravine. About halfway up the opposite mountain face was a tiny cabin. A windmill spun above it, barrels were stacked in a pyramid nearby, and just above the cabin a huge tunnel had been cut into the slope. Heaps of waste rock ran down the slope on either side like a calcified waterfall.
“Soldiers,” said Carl.
“Inside the cabin?”
“There.” He pointed in a completely different direction. “They were marching in formation and moving very oddly. I didn’t realize they weren’t adults until someone showed up who was twice as tall as all of the rest.”
“Children?”
“But they have guns and uniforms and everything. They’ve been gone about ten minutes now.”
“But they weren’t near the cabin?”
“No. There’s nothing happening at the cabin. But if that’s not a mine, I don’t know what is.”
They observed the ravine and the cabin for a while and then decided to walk down on a path cut into the steep slope. As they were crossing the floor of the ravine a shot rang out in their ears. Carl immediately threw himself to the ground. Helen took cover behind some boulders. The sound echoed back off the rock walls. Neither of them had seen where the shot came from.
It was silent for a while. Then they heard someone yelling in poor English: “America! Shitty Americans!”
On a plateau above them, a man was now standing and swinging a Winchester above his head like a leg of lamb. The weapon fell from his hand. He laughed. He picked it up again, fiddled with the breech and then held it out in front of him with one hand, pointing into the air. He pressed his head to the outstretched arm and put the index finger of his other hand in the opposite ear and pulled the trigger. The shot rang out like before. The man hopped around, shouting: “Shitty Americans!”
“This country is beginning to get on my nerves,” said Helen.
She yelled to the man in French from her hiding spot, saying that she was lost. That she didn’t know how to get back to the road and that she could use a sip of water.
In answer the man started swinging the gun around again and it fell out of his hands once more. He was drunk.
Helen climbed up nearly to the edge of the plateau. She was wearing shorts, her blouse was drenched in sweat, and with her hands raised she spoke quietly with the cabin owner.
“American!” he repeated haltingly a couple more times, staring with wide eyes down into Helen’s blouse. Then he yelled in Carl’s direction: “I can see you! I see you! I want to see both of you!”
He made an ambiguous gesture and fell over backwards. Using the rifle as a crutch, he tried to get up again. He had light, waxy skin with tiny wrinkles. He could have been thirty or seventy.
Carl and Helen, who had by then both climbed onto the plateau, grabbed the reeling man under his arms and guided him to his cabin. It wasn’t much roomier than a large car, and its interior resembled the state of mind of its owner: disorderly.
He fell immediately to the floor, trying to gesture to his guests to have a seat, and listened with a childlike expression as they repeated their questions four or five or six times.
No, these days he wasn’t digging, he said, gesturing to a bandage on his calf out of which mud and withered herbs pressed. He couldn’t say with any certainty how long it had been since he last dug, but, as was common knowledge, he was Hakim III, son of Hakim II, grandson of Hakim of the Mountains. And of course, the legendary gold that his grandfather had pulled from the dust with his own hands a hundred years ago on the exact spot where this cabin now stands, thanks to Allah and with the intention of marrying Leila, the flowery, gazelle-like, dark-eyed Leila with the dainty ears, his mother—please forgive me—grandmother… what was the question again? Ah, right. He went crazy, crazy with greed. Instead of having the gold ma
de into bridal jewelry for Leila, the ravishing, small-eared Leila, and happily living out his predetermined life, Hakim, shame on him, had invested all his wealth in hammers and chisels and drills and begun to mine the cursed rock.
Hakim of the Mountains had taken his first swing with the hammer at nineteen, and dug until his hand withered at the blessed age of sixty-eight. Liver. And not a speck of gold in forty years! As a result, the rumors wouldn’t subside that even the first gold had been… but those were just rumors. And Hakim II, the loyal son, began to dig when he was twenty and dug until the chisel slipped from his hand at the age of sixty-four. Heart. He, too, never found a speck. And finally Hakim III, the grandson, truest of true. The man with no doubts. He began to dig when he was thirteen.
“And what became of him?” asked Helen.
“He is still digging,” he said, pounding himself proudly on the chest. And would dig until the end of his days, following the example of his ancestors, and when he died it wouldn’t be his heart or his liver but black bile, and he would shoot himself in this exact spot, in front of the tunnel he had dug with his own hands, his life’s work and the life’s work of his forefathers, he would simply blast away his brain and become a speck of dust among these mountains of dust. He put the muzzle of the Winchester in his mouth, puffed out his cheeks and rolled his bloodshot eyes.
“Do you want to see the tunnel now?”
They did. It was much cooler for the first few meters underground. Then it quickly got hot the deeper they went. And stuffy. Hakim tottered ahead with a carbide lamp and kept telling Carl and Helen to stay close behind him: “You’ll never find your way out of here without me.”
Long, shoulder-width tunnels crisscrossed the rock. Only near the entrance was there a somewhat larger main tunnel that seemed to be a natural cavern that had been widened here and there with a hammer and chisel. With a click of his tongue Hakim drew their attention to a system of markings at chest height that mapped the tunnel system using soot-black handprints. Near the main entrance lots of right hands about half a meter apart; tunnels that branched off had other markings. A left hand, a left hand with just four fingers, the palm of a hand with thumb and forefinger. The deeper they went, the fewer fingers were used in the markings.
Sand Page 14
