East of Suez

by Howard Engel

  A steady drone of sound was coming from somewhere, but the place was so large inside that I couldn’t locate it. It was a sound like incense, if incense had a sound. It passed on the message of piety and dignity. I was filling my eyes with the wonder of the place when Billy whispered in my ear: “There’s a little gem of a baptistery next door. You game for that?”

  “I can do only one monument per day, Billy. After ten minutes my eyes close up and my brain cries ‘Uncle!’”

  On our way out, Billy put some coins into a jar held out to us by a bearded old-timer and we were once again back on the street. Alley, really.

  “Fancy a drink then, Cooperman?”

  The English use of last names stung me for a moment. I never went to private school—I don’t suppose Savitt had either—so I was often caught off guard when called by my last name. When I heard the name “Cooperman,” I always suspected that a detention was on its way.

  “Lead on!”

  It was a hole-in-the-wall place. But that’s the only sort of room that was available at this minor intersection where five streets came together crookedly, like the spokes in a circle game played in the snow at home. I tried to imagine three American cars trying to maneuver their way past one another, and failed. It was hard enough for scooters and the odd tip-top, or whatever. A man with what looked like a stocking round his head brought mint tea to the table we’d settled at. This was far from the French-influenced part of town I was becoming familiar with. It was a recessive characteristic of the town. Like the big church-mosque itself, there was something not quite ready for public scrutiny about it.

  There was a sudden bang. Another! And then two others close together. Shots! “What the …?”

  “Too late to leg it, now. Keep your loaf close to the table.”

  “Is it a robbery?”

  “More likely the boys from the local nick.” The waiter was standing very tall with his face turned to the light of the street. The glasses on his tray were clicking against one another. The hand holding the tray was unsteady. “There’ll be three of ’em on bikes come along the way we came, and another two come down from the other direction. They’ll be after someone they’re on to.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been here before, Vicar. They only do it one way. To box ’em in like.”

  “They?” I felt the grip of panic on my spine.

  “Government police.”

  “Right, the Tuk-tuks or Tam-tams. Not the taxis.”

  Neither of us noticed when the waiter was standing next to our table. It seemed to announce that the crisis was over and that life was being invited to go on. Savitt ordered a hot drink, I made it two. Some kind of steamed brandy, I think. It came in a very local-looking bottle, with a label that gave it seven stars. Savitt finished his with a single gulp and then mopped his forehead with a blue and white bandana. I may have done the same, but I forget.

  “Does this sort of thing happen all the time?” I was beginning to feel perspiration running down one arm.

  “Up here it does. Not usually where the tourists prat about. Bad for business. You all right, Vicar?”

  “It’s the heat. Still getting used to it.” It wasn’t the heat: it was the old panic from my hospital room. Confusion was waving its red flag at me. I mopped my forehead with a spenttissue that was inadequate to the job and finished my drink.

  “Don’t let the Tams get to you. They’ve got their own agenda and you’re not on it. Will you have another drink, then?” I looked and my glass was certainly empty. Had I just heard the shots or had some time now elapsed? I couldn’t tell. I don’t remember whether Savitt had been talking all this time or whether no time at all had passed.

  I got up and walked to the bead curtain of the door and tried opening it without letting the damned thing rattle too loud. I wasn’t in the mood for local color. A little man in cast-off army fatigues was being dragged down the street by two uniformed men. Two more followed them, lighting cigarettes and grinning at one another. I needed to find my chair again.

  “I know you’ve told me about the Tam-tams, but how do you know so much about them?”

  Billy took his time. He took a sip, looked around for the waiter, and, giving me a lopsided grin, said: “If I lead any of my Orthodox readers into a foreign nick, I might as well go back to the old Golders Green Echo. I’ve legged it this far, mate, don’t want to go back. I’m too old and I enjoy the life. Where else would I meet a bloke like His Holiness, now? Never in a million years.”

  “Father O’Mahannay? Yes.”

  “Decent old skin. Knows every rat-hole in this kip. Though you wouldn’t think it, him being a man of the cloth and all. And fat besides.”

  Savitt was looking as tired as I felt. From the angle of the light, I could see where his hair had been dyed. He looked like an old man. And what was he doing here at his age?

  One of the policemen came into the café to buy cigarettes. A real Tam-tam! Lean and wearing sunglasses, he looked over the people in the place with his back to the bar. I felt my stomach heave. I tried to figure out where the menace lay: was it his boots? No, I’d seen more frightening boots on a marching band. His shoulder strap? The uniform in general? That was ill-fitting and unpressed. It may have been his face. There was an unearned certainty there that scared me to the small bowel.

  Our drinks were cold the next time we picked them up. By then all the visible signs of menace had gone: the room looked like it had when we first walked in. But now there was a band of coldness under my ribs, a chill I couldn’t shake off, even with another of Savitt’s hot toddies.

  TWELVE

  IT WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN DIFFICULT for a real detective to break into the apartment of my client, Vicky Grange, née Pressburger. I’d had the idea when I brought Bev Taylor home, but she watched me off the property. So I’d missed the chance. I had to restage it later, after the worst of the afternoon heat. It only took me about twenty minutes to locate the building where I’d left my diving companion, but I wasn’t so lucky with the lock on the front door. In the circumstances, I left a few marks on the door. The important thing is: I did get in.

  It was a large, bright space with lots of room but little furniture. The largest bedroom was divided in half to accommodate the kids, who were of different sexes. There was a big double bed in the second bedroom, and a couch and stuffed chairs in the other room. A kitchen and bathroom appeared as well: in fact the perfect set-up in a town like this. I thought of moving in myself, and, now that I imagined it, why hadn’t Vicky thought of it? Still, there were advantages to being where I was: no association with my client, for one thing.

  I started my search, making it as scientific as I could. After checking to see if there were notes stuffed behind the pictures on the walls, I looked under the wooden blinds and gave the windowsills a going-over. I glanced at all the horizontal spaces, hoping to find anything of importance that had been left in sight. There are lots of people who don’t read Poe nowadays. Then I went on to the drawers. Here I found the clothing of a couple who could have been my client and her husband. I confirmed this when I found a drawer full of papers. Here was their apartment lease agreement, bank books, old plane tickets, a telephone book with scribbled notes on the covers and underlined names on the inside. I kept checking my watch: the reading of the papers took time. And the concentration tired me out. I recognized the lawyer with the German-sounding name: Bernhardt Hubermann. Vicky had given the name to me. Why hadn’t I called him first thing? I wrote down the numbers that didn’t involve pediatricians or plumbers. Like I said, this all took time and concentration. In the kitchen I found all the usual things where you would expect to find them. Nothing of interest in the drawers, except for a French hachoir: a curved blade for chopping parsley and other things. Anna had one. On the wall was a calendar with large numerals, phases of the moon, and high and low tide readings. It was a giveaway from Caramondanis, Frères, a local marine insurance outfit.

  On the front o
f the refrigerator, I found the usual magnetic letters. One set spelled out IOEOLVYU. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Was it Greek? Probably the kids at play. I made a copy of the word, just in case it meant something in one of the local languages. A couple of photographs, clinging to the door magnetically, caught my eye. They looked like holiday pictures. Here was Vicky with the children in front of a cottage or chalet of some sort. It looked to be in the mountains. Another, showing Jake with both of his kids sitting on his shoulders, with a view of the ocean from high up. A holiday? An oasis from the city heat? I’d have to check it out.

  My first time around yielded nothing and so I went around a second time, trying to attend to the details better. In the bathroom, for instance, I noticed that a tube of toothpaste was nearly empty, but beside it lay a fresh one, ready to be opened. There were two bottles of mouthwash, one nearly empty, the other unopened. Same story with deodorant. Jake, Vicky, or both of them were well-organized people. They thought ahead. Their moves were calculated. I was sure that I had a profile of my quarry, when I found, in the back of a drawer, a bundle of documents: birth certificates, vaccination registrations, and about two hundred Canadian dollars. This cache could be the things that Vicki had asked me to watch out for. But they were supposed to have been in a suitcase. I couldn’t find a suitcase, the damned suitcase Vicky was so secretive about, but in the closet, in the dust on top of a large green trunk, there remained a clean, dust-free rectangle, such as a box or maybe a suitcase might leave. The trunk was empty, except for a plastic horse and a handful of glass alleys and marbles. I next came upon a duffel bag, which was empty except for a couple of ounces of loose tea leaves in the bottom. Tea! Dusty and smoky-smelling, like wet straw. A kid’s toys and tea. Tea in a closet! Why in a duffel bag and not in the kitchen? Why loose and not in a bag or tin? Why in the bedroom?

  The trouble with searching a place is that almost everything you find is irrelevant. Take the folded piece of paper I found with a poem written on it. Was a poem a clue or was it just some writer’s private business? This one began:

  Whose wife this is

  I think I know …

  It went on for a few more lines—it wasn’t very long: with a little concentration, even I could read it—and ended up with a repeated last line:

  … And pills to take

  before I sleep,

  And pills to take

  before I sleep.

  What was I to make of that? A bit of bitter whimsy? No more? It ran from randy to geriatric in just a few lines. Not the sort of thing I was looking for, anyway. I returned to the search and doggedly worked at it, cupboard by cupboard, drawer by drawer.

  I was on the point of giving up when I found a set of keys that fit the drawers in the desk. Here were a few letters from Vicky’s mother, a draft of a short story about a runaway couple, and three poems about underwater swimming. These I returned to their locked repositories. Then I made another trip through the T-shirts and other small cotton wear. This is where I got my biggest treasure-trove: a key hidden in some rolled-up socks. Quite a find. After tidying up after myself, so that the place didn’t look blitzed, I left the apartment rather proud of my half-hour’s work.

  The key was a peculiar one. It didn’t look like it opened a front door, being a lot smaller than the sorts of house keys I’m familiar with. I knew as I walked down the street that I would have to search out a locksmith, one who spoke English. I was stumped about where I would find one.

  I walked for several blocks. (I say “blocks” because I’m used to talking about streets that way. In fact, there were no predictable street lengths. So the concept of blocks as a gross measure of space didn’t really apply here, where some blocks were long and others short. Still, I can’t suppress the habit of a lifetime in forty-eight hours.) The insides of my shoes were picking up sand or dirt from somewhere. The street was clean, wide, and paved, with the usual tired palms looking down at me. Scattered along my route were dropped fronds from wind-stripped trees, an indication of the power of the wind in these parts. The street was lined with Japanese and French cars. Some of the roads were too narrow to admit the average American Ford or Chevy, but I did see one or two General Motors products near one of the big tourist hotels. I suspected that local stamps and telephone calls cost more here than they did across the street.

  The big hotels. I’d forgotten about them. There I might find people with local knowledge and English. I flagged down the first taxi to cross my path and told him to take me to the Hilton. Luckily, it wasn’t a long ride. I counted out the money and added a tip. This was the first time I had tried this. The driver even smiled back at me. This dealing with foreign currency was like playing Monopoly: it wasn’t real.

  The hotel lobby was daunting. It took me right back to big hotels in New York or Montreal: big lobby, well-dressed people in rather theatrical conversations, carts heavy with incoming and out-going bags and suitcases. As people came and went around me, I sauntered over to the desk and waited my turn under the high ceiling.

  “May I help you, sir?” It was a young man with a dark mustache and slicked-down black hair.

  “Yes. I wonder if you know what sort of key this is.”

  He took it from me and examined it closely. “It looks like a safety deposit box key. Not a local bank, but one of the internationals. There’s a code printed on it—you see?—but I can’t read it. Maybe a locksmith?”

  I thanked him and leaned on his indulgence another moment to ask him where I might find such a locksmith. He came out from behind his desk, ignoring the people in line behind me, and pointed through a front window to a spot further down the street. When I tried to tip him, I got a big smile and a waved hand. The service was free, it seemed.

  As I stood outside the revolving door, I was once again besieged by a phalanx of taxi drivers all calling at once. I shook my head and waved them away.

  The locksmith was closed when I got there, but a handwritten sign was hung in the door: I assumed it was the Miranam version of “Back in ten minutes.” I couldn’t recognize any Western numbers, so giving it up as a bad job for twenty minutes or so, I crossed the street for a cup of French coffee and a whatchamacallit—a croissant. They both went down well. While I was wondering which way led back to the Alithia Hotel, I gradually realized that it was not three streets away from me, and that what I thought was a city stretching along a straight line actually bent in the middle and joined up in a circle smaller than I could have guessed.

  I escaped for a time into my guidebook. From the corner of my eye, I thought I spotted Mrs Brewster and her husband. I buried my face in the seven paragraphs devoted to the Black Virgin.

  “Mr Cooperman! Mercy, I never expected to see you again in this life. Are you having fun? Milt and I are having a ball. Everything’s so different out here. I just eat it up! We’re staying at the Hilton. Where are y’all staying?”

  “Well, this is a surprise!” I said, getting to my feet. At the same moment the two of them sat down, like we were bouncing on a teeter-totter. I sat down again. “Will you join me in a drink?”

  “I can’t take any more of those damned fruit cocktails they call drinks. You never know whether they wash the fruit before they squeeze it. I need a real drink. Milt brought a suitcase full of bourbon. He takes it everywhere. Ain’t he the devil, though? He just leaves a twenty-dollar bill on top in case they open it up going through customs. It never fails. Now, Mr Cooperman, what’s your first name? I’m Ruth-Ann and this is Milt. Oh, you already know that. Where are you from? Somebody said Canada! I never!”

  “That’s where I come from all right. But not too far from Niagara Falls.”

  “Why that practically makes you one of the family. But how can you be in Canada and near Niagara Falls? The falls are in New York State. At least they were when I went to school.”

  “That’s right. One of them is in New York State and one is in Ontario, in Canada, not eleven miles from where I was born.”

  “We
ll, isn’t that a remarkable thing! I never knew that! You’re not kidding me, are you? I was sure the falls were in New York. Upstate, but New York all the same. What is your name, Mr Cooperman?”

  “Call me Ben. That’s what my friends call me. Where are you folks from?” I asked, getting into the mood.

  “Why we’re from Minneapolis now, but we come from Iowa. Milt’s from Des Moines and I’m from an itty-bitty place called Winterset, where John Wayne came from. Only his name was really Morrison. So, you’re from Canada! Well! My sister, Pauline, stopped in Victoria on her way to Alaska. Victoria, she said, was very clean.” I wondered whether she was going to run out of nickels to keep the conversation going. But I misjudged her. She needed no encouragement from me or from Milt.

  “Have you eaten? I can’t recommend this place; I don’t know it. But—”

  “Oh, we’re fixed up for meals. Part of the tour. We’ve been window shopping, that’s all. I found a wonderful postcard for our daughter back home. When she sees it, she’ll just scream. It’s so funny.”

  “What line are you in, Mr Cooper?” This was the first I’d heard from Milt.