Waking Caliban

by Mike Cartlidge

  I put my hand on my heart in a parody of innocence. “I thought it would be too risky to take the originals on such a long journey. Anything could have happened to them. So I left them in a safe place-”

  “I hope this place is very safe,” Salim interrupted.

  “They’re hidden where only I can get at them.”

  “My English friend. Do you not trust an Old Etonian?”

  “Most of the Old Etonians I’ve known would have sold their own mothers into slavery for the price of a dry sherry.”

  “Ah, such cynicism. But tell me, do you know what the documents say?”

  I kept my voice neutral. “They’re a little difficult to read.”

  “Indeed,” he said. “Rashid?”

  al-Ahmad, who had been pawing through the pages, looked up at me sharply. “The last page. Where is it?”

  “Oh, isn’t it there?” I asked. “That damn printer of mine can’t have worked properly. Shame, really. It looked rather interesting.”

  al-Ahmad’s eyes narrowed. “What did it contain?”

  “Just a few more lines of Latin.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Oh, and there was a map of some sort.” I was watching Salim as I spoke. He was much too good to give anything away but, from the corner of my eye, I saw al-Ahmad react. Salim glared at him and then looked back at me.

  “So,” he said. “You thought to yourself, ‘It is possible that I could see Ghassan Salim and walk out of this with a cool million dollars. Or…’”

  The reference to the million dollars made me think, given that I hadn’t mentioned the fact that Miranda and I planned to split his two million down the middle. “Or,” I said, “instead of depositing said million into my bank account, you could fit me with a pair of concrete swimming trunks and deposit me in the Hudson river. Yes, I must admit the thought did occur to me.”

  “You need have no fear, Mr. Hastings. You shall receive your money, if and when we can verify that these papers are genuine.”

  Miranda spoke for the first time since we started the meal. “How do you suggest we do that?”

  Salim glanced at her. “We will need the originals to be sure. But Rashid here was my professor at the university in Beirut. He is one of the world’s foremost experts on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and the lives and times of its protagonists. He is also, fortunately, fluent in Latin as well as Greek as well as a dozen other languages.”

  Clever old Rashid, I thought. He stopped his inspection of the papers for a moment and nodded to acknowledge Salim’s compliment. “I shall need to take this parcel away and study it. The writing is, indeed, not easy to comprehend. I shall need to copy it out in my own handwriting and then translate it.”

  “You may retire to my study, Rashid,” said Salim. “I shall have the servants bring your meal to you. And it will take how long?”

  al-Ahmad looked again at the papers and shrugged. “It will be a painstaking task. I shall, if necessary, work through the night on it. “Perhaps we should all meet again tomorrow morning.” He stood and made his way across the room as the servant opened the door.

  ***

  We finished the meal in silence, sipping at a small cups of thick, black coffee as Salim’s servants cleared the table. When the three of us were alone again, I leaned forward and felt our host’s expressionless eyes turn towards me.

  “You realize,” I said, “four men have died for that little bundle of papers I delivered to you tonight.”

  Salim kept perfectly still for a moment before replying. “Ah, yes. Including the much-lamented Professor Roden and the distinguished curator, Dr Marr. I was most distressed to hear about their tragic demises.”

  “They were the third and fourth deaths. Two men from an agency I sometimes work for, men called Young and Thorpe, were also killed.”

  “Ms Smart told me about this when she telephoned me. It is all most regrettable.”

  “Thorpe was a good friend of mine. I’m rather curious to know who shot him.”

  “Ah,” he said. “The soldier’s thirst for revenge. Is that what drives you? Apart from the thought of my million dollars of course?”

  “I would like to have a little meeting with whoever killed Thorpe. You wouldn’t happen to know who that was?”

  “I have no idea who actually pulled the trigger. But I’m quite certain I know who was responsible.”

  Miranda turned towards him. Her breathing had changed and I wondered what she was thinking.

  “So who was it?” I asked.

  He gestured towards a wooden humidor: I shook my head but Miranda leaned forward and took one of the aluminum tubes. As she opened it, Salim stretched his arm towards her and clipped her cigar before igniting its end from a gold-plated lighter and then repeating the process for himself. Sighing, he puffed a mouthful of smoke towards the ceiling. The pleasure he took from the cigar was the first real emotion I’d seen from him. “You are familiar,” he asked, “with a man called Ernst Bakst?”

  “Professor Roden and I were working for him when he was killed.”

  “Actually, it would be more precise to say that you were working for him. Dr Roden was, by this time, working for me.”

  I glanced at Miranda again but her expression gave nothing away. A thin trail of smoke from her cigar twisted towards the ceiling.

  “How did Roden come to be working for you?” I asked Salim.

  “In the few days after the man Marr contacted Bakst and Bakst engaged Roden, I believe the professor came to understand the potential value of the prize he sought. Stephen Marr was in possession of the papers, of course, and it seems that, at some point, he told Dr Roden all about them.”

  “So, Roden went looking for better offers.”

  “The matter came to my attention,” Salim said slowly. “I made him a counter-offer which he found acceptable. Acting on my behalf, he presented Marr with a proposition far more attractive than the one proffered by Bakst. Marr agreed to do business with us.”

  Miranda held her cigar in front of her, staring at the tip. “So Bakst found out he was being double-crossed?”

  Salim stared at her for a moment. “Bakst is a crude man. Despite his legitimate business interests, it is no secret that he has links with less respectable associates on both sides of the Atlantic. Why, here in the United States, his name came up in the proceedings of last year’s Congressional Commission on Organized Crime and he has featured in a number of British parliamentary select committee investigations into alleged corruption in the letting of defense contracts. I can assure you he is not a man to stop at violence. There are those who consider him nothing more than a gangster. I am quite sure that he discovered that Dr Roden was dealing with me and had him killed as a result.”

  “And Thorpe and Young? Why kill them?”

  He picked a shred of tobacco from his lips and wiped his fingers on his napkin. “It’s my guess that they had the misfortune, while attempting to trace Dr Roden, to run across Bakst’s hired thugs.”

  “Young and Thorpe were engaged at Bakst’s insistence. It doesn’t make sense that he would have them killed.”

  “Bakst is a devious man. Perhaps he had them killed to send a not-so-subtle message to Professor Roden. Perhaps he thought Roden would take fright and, like a chastened lapdog, come to heel. Who knows?

  “I see skepticism on your face, Mr. Hastings. Think about what I am saying. We have no reason to believe that Dr Marr was especially discrete when he decided to put the papers on the market. No doubt there are many ruthless people – how would you put this? – in the game? This being the case, Mr. Young and Mr. Thorpe may have met their deaths simply as a result of bad luck.”

  “And Marr? What about him?”

  “From what Ms Smart has told me, and the information I have been able to piece together, I suspect someone – Bakst’s agents or whomever else is involved – traced Marr. It would not have been hard to do. The man was a local government bureaucrat, not a secret agent. It is my be
lief that they followed him and, when he went to your hotel, they realized that he was planning to see you and might be carrying the papers. They killed him and took what he was carrying.”

  “I saw Marr before he died,” I admitted. Miranda turned and looked at me but her expression gave nothing away. “He told me he’d changed the papers his killers took from him.”

  Salim blew a smoke ring, watching as it rose above the table. “Is that so?”

  “You don’t seem surprised,” I said.

  “I had assumed that to be the case. Otherwise, whoever had the papers would have acted on the information contained in them. And there are no indications that that has happened.”

  “How would you know?” I asked.

  The cold eyes turned back towards me. “I have my own representatives in England, Mr. Hastings.”

  Chapter 25

  A few minutes later, Miranda stubbed out her half-smoked cigar and left us, saying that she wanted to have an early night. At Salim’s insistence, I stayed and had a small glass of Ouzo with him before also taking my leave.

  I walked up the broad staircase and along the corridor to my room. I hadn’t bothered locking the door: I always carry my passport and wallet with me when I’m in a foreign country and there was nothing else in the room worth stealing.

  When I walked into my room, I saw Miranda standing on the balcony, outside the sliding doors. She’d changed from the formal gown she’d worn to dinner and was wearing a cotton dress, white and loose around her body.

  I moved through the doors to stand beside her. In the garden below us, the lights cast harsh shadows from the fountains and small bushes and sent shimmers over the water of the swimming pool. There was no wind and the smells of cooking from Salim’s kitchen mingled with the crisp scent of the pine trees and sugar maples on the far side of the wire fences. After a few moments, she stepped closer to me, raising her hand and running her fingers along the line of my jaw. She’d cleaned her teeth but as her lips parted I caught a hint of the cigar smoke, lingering on her breath and mingling with her perfume as a bitter flavor complements sweetness in Asian food. The stray lock of hair had drifted back across her face and I pushed it past her cheek as she lifted her face to mine. When our mouths came together, I felt the tip of her tongue playing on the edges of my lips, uncertain as a young girl’s kiss on a second date.

  After a few moments, she pulled away and stepped back into the room. I hesitated for a moment as the demons of all my years of melancholy raised their heads and sang their familiar dirge, their injunction against my ever again knowing the love of a woman. I stepped over the threshold and, reaching past my shoulder, she pulled the wooden shutters closed, so that the room darkened but the faint night-time breeze could waft through the still-open doors. Taking my hand, she led me to the bed and then turned and came back into my arms, pushing my hands up from the small of her back, over the cotton of her dress to the nape of her neck.

  My fingers fumbled on the clasp of the dress. She pulled away from me, one eyebrow raised quizzically.

  I made a joke of it. “I’m out of practice.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “No, it’s true.”

  She leaned back and gazed at my eyes, then pressed close and kissed me again as she reached her hand back to guide my fingers.

  As her dress fell away, I kissed her neck and she disengaged and pulled back the covers of the bed. In the faint light, she was like the palest ghost of long-remembered beauty. She lay down, facing me, and watched as I undressed. Kicking away my shoes, I stepped towards her. She opened her arms and brought me in, to submerge my sorrows and drown my despair.

  ***

  Later, as we lay together, she raised her head from my shoulder. My vision had adjusted to the sparse moonlight that seeped through the shutters and, squinting, I could see her eyes watching me as I pretended to doze.

  “You’re not asleep,” she said.

  “Not now I’m not.”

  “I bet you never sleep.”

  “I may never sleep again.”

  She nuzzled her forehead into my neck. “What you said before... That you were out of practice...”

  “It didn’t mean anything.”

  “Come on. You’re not such a revolting-looking guy.”

  “You won’t loosen my tongue with flattery.”

  “When are you going to tell me more about yourself?”

  “In a better world than this.”

  She leant back and tugged at my hair. “Come on. Why’d you be ‘out of practice’?”

  I craned my neck so that I could better see her face. “I told you on the plane that my marriage broke up. Eight years ago.”

  “Everyone I know has had a marriage break up.”

  “Mine was rather traumatic.”

  “You think most ain’t?”

  “After the split, I didn’t want to be with another woman.”

  “I guess I can understand that. You’d get over it, though, right?”

  “I don’t get over things that quickly.”

  “Jeez, Hastings, you sure are full of surprises.” She nestled her head back against my shoulder and I could feel her chin moving as she spoke. “It’s kinda nice, though. Like you’re a born-again virgin.”

  Later, we made love again and, when it was over, she locked her leg over my hips and molded the lines of her body into mine. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “I bet you never stop.”

  She moved her head back and blew air across my eyes. “You know, we could push Salim up on the price.”

  “Would that be strictly honorable?”

  “I figure he’d go ten million, easy. We could both find ourselves seriously damn wealthy.”

  “Thinking about ordering your new Rolls Royce?”

  She leaned closer again and ran the tip of her tongue over my eyelashes. “Come on, Hastings. We’re good with each other. Maybe when this is all over and we’re stinking rich, we can go somewhere. Think of the times we could have. Monte Carlo… Bermuda...”

  “Skegness.”

  “I don’t even know where that is but I can tell by the name I don’t want to. The offer still stands for the rest of it, though. Like the man said, I can show you a real good time, baby. You and me, what’d you say?”

  Through the shutters, off in the distance, I heard the yelp of a fox and, closer to home, the crunch of feet on gravel as the guards did their rounds.

  “Try again to persuade me.”

  Chapter 26

  I woke alone to find shafts of sun splintered like bar codes through the cracks in the shutters. Shakespeare talked of love bringing comfort and despair. The memory of Miranda in the night warmed my heart while her absence chilled my bones.

  I gave myself a mental shake and pondered the fact that she’d been able to leave the room without disturbing me. Was I losing my edge or was it simply that she was well practiced in stealth? I swung my legs over the side of the bed and, walking to the balcony door, opened the shutters. The garden was quiet but in the tree line past the fences, the dawn chorus was in full cry, a thousand small birds harrying away night-time as gulls will chase a cat from their nesting grounds.

  We had agreed to meet Salim and al-Ahmad for breakfast at 8am. This time, I made my way downstairs on my own. When Ali showed me into the dining room, I found Miranda already waiting with our host. Salim explained that al-Ahmad had only just finished his translation of the Stratford papers and that he would join us after he had showered and changed. He waved Ali forward and the servant poured fresh orange juice and placed pots of tea and coffee on the table before excusing himself and slipping quietly from the room.

  Salim invited us to sit and settled himself into a chair opposite us, cradling a china tea cup in his hands.

  “So,” I said, “Mr. al-Ahmad must have been keeping you informed as his work progressed. How much has he told you?”

  “So quickly to business, Mr. Hastings?” He frowned and stared into the cup as if the
leaves could provide him with an answer. “Rashid tells me that parts of the papers are interesting, although they contain nothing we did not already know.”

  “Oh, really? So the last page, the one I left behind, wasn’t that important?”

  “Not really.” He leaned forward and poured more tea into his cup from an ornate blue teapot, waving his left hand to waft away the steam. “Although we would like to acquire it, of course. I wish to have the entire original document.”

  “I would have thought,” I said, “that the document would have been more than ‘interesting’.”

  “Oh?” His shark eyes were impossible to read.

  “I would have thought you’d be very interested in the parts that contain instructions that Shakespeare wrote to Hamnet Sadler, describing how he was to hide the full cache of documents he’d given him.”

  “Mr. Hastings, I understood from Ms Smart that you had not been able to have the papers translated.”

  “When I applied myself, I discovered that a bit of the Latin I’d learned at school came back to me. I doubt if my translation would be anywhere near as good as Mr. al-Ahmad’s, but it was enough for me to get the general drift of things.”

  Miranda leaned back, the corners of her mouth turning upwards. “Well, jeez, thanks for sharing that, Hastings.”

  I smiled at her. “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “Well,” Salim said, “and will you enlighten us with the details of your translation, Mr. Hastings?”

  I placed my elbows on the table but, before I could speak, the door opened and al-Ahmad bustled in. He was carrying the papers and a notepad, the top sheet of which was covered with words written in blue ballpoint. The skin around his eyes was dark from lack of sleep but he spoke excitedly to Salim in what I assumed was Arabic. Salim held up a finger and, with a few words to him in his own language, pointed him towards the chair he’d occupied the previous night.

  Even as al-Ahmad was sitting down, his face turned towards me. “Mr. Salim tells me that you already know something of the meaning of these papers.”

  I was watching Salim closely now and I thought I saw the faintest flicker of movement in his eyes. He’d have been a useful poker player, though. al-Ahmad was less composed, his head turning several times between the two of us.