Relative Danger

by Charles Benoit

  “From what I recall you are correct. I’m afraid I don’t know much more than what I’ve told you…. There was a problem with the insurance claim, some nonsense about Nazi soldiers hiding in the Atlas Mountains, and of course the story of how it went on to Egypt—another bloody tale.” Sergei looked across the table at Doug. He waited an uncomfortable minute before he said, “The thieves were not good people, Douglas. I do hope that they are not in any way related to your friend.”

  So do I, thought Doug.

  ***

  Three cups of Turkish coffee—tiny little things with a black sandy sludge on the bottom—counterbalanced the alcohol so Doug was awake when Edna’s call was forwarded to his room. “I’m sorry if I’m calling too late, it’s eleven p.m. here so it’s, what, two there? I just haven’t heard a word from you and I was nervous.”

  “Yeah, I should have called,” and he knew he should have, too, “but I just wanted to wait until I could tell you something besides a weather report. I’m sorry, I mean you’re paying for all of this and the least I could have done was call.”

  “Don’t worry about the money, that’s not important, I thought I made that clear. As long as you’re safe….” Her voice trailed off and Douglas thought for a moment he was talking to his mother.

  “I’ve made some progress. There was a large red diamond stolen here back in forty-eight. I’m getting different stories from my sources and I’m not sure yet which source is most reliable, but I’m going to do some background work tomorrow, try to get to the truth.” Doug was aware that he was sounding like a movie detective, but how was he supposed to report? Tell her everything, down to the way Aisha looked in the white tee shirt and black jeans, not sweating in the ninety-degree heat of the shade? No, follow the role models, even if it did sound strange coming from him.

  “Were my notes of any help? Did you find everything?”

  “It’s interesting reading. I could have sworn, though, that you said you had a plan.”

  “What do you mean? Of course I have a plan.”

  “All you sent me was a list of names and a general idea of what my uncle and Charley were doing at the time.”

  “Well what did you expect, Douglas, a step-by-step map? Follow your leads, ask some questions, and we’ll see what turns up.”

  “I’m not a detective.”

  “Oh that’s obvious,” she said. Doug thought he heard her laugh.

  “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up. I’ll ask around, maybe somebody will know something, but I can’t promise anything.”

  “Of course not, Douglas. But you’re a bright man, I’m sure you could piece things together as well as a detective.”

  “Do you actually know any detectives, Edna?”

  “I’ve run into a few over the years and I wasn’t impressed with what I saw. Any idiot could do their jobs. You should have no trouble.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “Just snoop around and we’ll see what you turn up. So,” she said, “about those notes I sent you.”

  “I can see why my family avoided the guy.”

  “They just didn’t know him. He was a real sweetheart.”

  “Sweetheart? Let’s see, he stole from his friends, smuggled drugs, was involved in a crime where someone was killed….”

  “True. But he was also a lot of fun.”

  “And his friend Charley? Quite the ladies’ man.”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Edna said, “but yes, Charley did chase the women back then.”

  “They were quite a pair, I guess.”

  “Yes, quite a pair,” she said. “Now, what did you find so far? Did you visit the places I suggested?”

  “Yeah, at first. Some were helpful. Listen, do you remember the guy named Mr. Ahmed?”

  “Of course, he was the first name I gave you, a real dear. Did you find him at the café? How’s he holding up? Oh, I wish I could have seen the look on his face.”

  Doug drew in a deep breath. “Look, Edna, I don’t know how to say this but Mr. Ahmed is dead. He was hit by a car the day I spoke with him. I’m sorry.”

  There was a long pause before Edna said, “I see. Thank you.” There was another, longer, pause before she continued. “Did he remember Russ and Charley?”

  “He did, but we didn’t get a chance to talk. We were going to meet at the café today.”

  “Oh Lord,” she said into the phone. “Do you think your visit and his death are related? No, never mind, that’s a silly question, of course they’re related. Douglas, are you sure you’re all right? I mean if you want to come back, I understand.”

  Yes, book me a flight home, get me the hell outta here, I want to sleep through a night without the prayer call blasting me out of bed, I want to hear English, drink a Odenbach beer, hang out with the guys, get my job back, eat food I can pronounce, avoid homicidal drivers, and quit chasing the killer of a lousy bastard who probably deserved it anyway. “No, I’m fine, really. Things are going well here and I feel like I’m making progress. I’m meeting again tomorrow with my main source and I should know better then where this is going. It appears the jewel left here for Cairo. If my leads indicate that’s what happened, do you want me to go there and have a look around?”

  “Douglas, you are amazing. That’s exactly where Russ and Charley went after Casablanca. I didn’t say anything to you because I didn’t want to influence your investigation.”

  My investigation, he thought.

  “Yes, yes of course that’s what I’d like you to do,” she continued. “If you want to. If I don’t hear from you tomorrow I’ll call back to the concierge of the hotel. I’ll take care of everything. If you need anything, just ask him. And Douglas?” She paused. “Thank you.”

  Chapter 7

  “What do you want to drink?” Aisha asked as they settled into their seats at the outdoor café that looked out across the beach and the Atlantic. She had picked him up at the hotel for lunch and, as promised, showed him the sights of the city. It took all of two hours.

  The sights of the city—the sites Aisha felt were worth seeing—were limited to a few older buildings, which she consented to slow down in front of as they raced by, and dozens of shops and boutiques that ringed the city.

  “Everyone should have a Great Quest in life,” she had announced as she cut around a speeding Fiat, her BMW convertible just missing the Fiat’s back bumper. “Being me, I have two. You know about Al Ainab. My other great quest in life,” she said, “is to find the perfect LBD.”

  “LBD? Large Big Diamond?”

  “Little Black Dress. Every woman should have at least one perfect LBD in her wardrobe. I own, well, a lot of them, but I still have not found the perfect one.

  “It’s not just the fit,” she continued, “it’s the fabric, the cut, the color….”

  “What color? It’s black.”

  She raised her eyebrows as she looked at him, amazed at his level of ignorance. “Some blacks,” she said with authority, “are blacker than others.”

  Most of the important sites in Casablanca were potential LBD sites. Aisha tried on different outfits, twirling around a few times in front of the mirror, adjusting straps or raising up on her toes to simulate high heels. She’d sigh, complain that she was too fat for this one or too small breasted for that one, too old to be seen in this style, too young to be wearing that. No one believed her. The salesgirls and other shoppers stared openly at her and even Doug, with his undeveloped sense of fashion, knew she looked perfect. She stopped asking Doug’s opinion after the tenth outfit since all he said was that it looked great. Like a Midas of fashion, she made every dress, every skirt, every blouse look stunning.

  “What would you like to see me wearing?” she had asked, “This? This? Or none of these?” Doug could only smile.

  “So what do you want to drink?” she asked again. She was ‘Absolutely Exhausted’ from sightseeing and had power-slid her car into the parking lot of the seaside café three minutes
ago.

  “Anything but tea.”

  Aisha ordered two Budweisers and they sat sipping the warm beer as the locals tried to keep cool in the ocean breezes. The beach was littered from one end to the other with fast food wrappers, empty water bottles, and things that looked like car parts. The ocean rolled up the sand, depositing some debris and pulling some back out to sea. The air smelled of salt water and gasoline. It could have been a beautiful place, Doug thought.

  “I’m sorry they wouldn’t let you in the mosque. It really is quite impressive. It was probably because they knew you weren’t a Muslim. You have to be a Muslim to go into the mosques here.”

  “You think it was because of me?” Doug said as he laughed. “You don’t think that the way you are dressed influenced their decision?” She was wearing white shorts, no doubt to highlight her perfectly tanned and sculpted legs, and a man’s button-down oxford with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows. Her’s, Doug thought, or a yet unmentioned boyfriend’s? After seeing her in all those short, wonderfully short, LBDs Doug couldn’t decide if she looked better in black or white. In any case she looked just like she wanted to look—like a model at the beach.

  “What is wrong with what I have on?” she said, looking over the top of her sunglasses.

  “Honestly, nothing.” And he meant it, too.

  “So where were you last night? I called around eleven to see if you wanted to get together but the desk said you were out?”

  Holy shit, he thought, she called me. “I had dinner with a guy I met at my hotel, this older guy from Germany, I think. He used to be a museum curator. We were talking about artifacts and things like that. It was interesting, he seemed to know so much.” Doug took a long pull on his beer before he continued. “It’s funny, he recalls the diamond theft but his details are quite different from your research.”

  “Oh,” Aisha said as she adjusted the thin paper napkin under her glass. “How strange. The story is well known.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s well known, but he seems to believe that it was only discovered this century, someplace in South Africa.” He watched as she continued to re-adjust the napkin.

  “Hmmm,” she said as she finished with the napkin and moved on to removing the label with a thumbnail. “He must not have been a very good museum person if he’d get the basic facts of the story all wrong. He must be thinking of a different diamond.”

  “Maybe,” Doug said, “but he sounded like he knew exactly what he was talking about.”

  “So I guess he showed you all of his research? The eight years of notes put together in dark library reading rooms form Kiev to New York? The accounts he translated himself? From Old French on fucking thirteenth century vellum manuscripts?”

  “Ah, no, he….”

  “Did he tell you how he spent a whole summer in Agra, paying western wages to Indian grad students to transcribe reams of documents, only to find two obscure references to the diamond?”

  “No, but….”

  “And did he tell you how rather than vacationing in Aspen he spent every spring break going from one archive library to the next? Or how he once had to sleep with a Yugoslavian antiquities official just to look at some papers that turned out to be worthless anyway?”

  “Look, Aisha, I’m not doubting you….”

  “It sure the hell sounds like it to me,” she said, looking up from her now naked beer bottle. “What did you do, run out right away to check up on me?”

  “No, no, no. Honest, Aisha, I was just out to dinner with this guy when we got to talking about why I was here and I told him the basics and he just added the information about the diamond. I trust your research and I trust you. I just have to figure out why the guy would have a totally different story, that’s all. Maybe he is confused, I don’t know. Maybe he’s senile or been in the sun too long.” Although she had focused back on her napkin this made her smile. “Aisha,” he said, getting her to look up, “I do believe you, you know.”

  “It’s just that when you doubt the story you doubt all my work—my work—and you make my grandfather out to be a liar. And like I said,” she was looking at him again, her voice steady, but softer, “it was his favorite story and it’s all I really have of him anymore.”

  “Don’t forget,” Doug said, “you’re also a rich, spoiled brat. You owe him that too.”

  “Cute, considering that I’m still pissed at you. Want another?” she said holding up the empty bottle.

  “What I don’t get,” she said when the beers arrived, as warm as the last two, “is how you got involved in this. Why look for it now? What’s the sudden interest?”

  “Good question. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I just wanted to learn something about my uncle. The woman who’s funding this little expedition was a friend of my uncle and she has all these old letters about him and I get to read the parts she decides to send me. And I had the summer off. I don’t do this all the time, you know.”

  “Do what? Have a beer at a beach?” she said, starting in on the new label.

  “A beer, yes. The beach, maybe. Morocco, no.”

  “As you can see,” she said, motioning around with her hand, “you haven’t missed all that much.”

  “Not much to you,” he said, “but more than I’ve ever done. You’ve been everywhere….”

  “Hardly.”

  “Close enough. But me? Aisha, this is my Big Adventure. I’ve never been anywhere before, I’m not rich like you, I work in a fucking brewery. No, I used to work in a fucking brewery. I don’t even have that career anymore. So when this woman offered me a chance to actually do something besides sit in a rut, I jumped on it. She thinks I’m doing a great job and I don’t know what I’m doing. Everything I tell her she already knew and she’s all happy.”

  “Hey, sounds good to me. She’s happy, you get a trip. What are you complaining about?”

  “I don’t know, it all seems so weird. Things like this don’t happen to me.”

  “Well they do now. And you get to learn all about your uncle.” She drained her beer and looked around for the waiter.

  Doug laughed. “You know, I don’t know if I want to. It turns out that my dear, sweet, departed uncle was a big dick. I’m glad I never met him and I see why my father never talked about him.”

  “Well? Is it genetic?” she said, standing up.

  “What? His attitude?”

  “No, his anatomy. I’ve got to hit the ladies room, order me another, will you?”

  Holy shit, Doug thought. Holy shit.

  So now what, he wondered? Invite her back to his hotel, to a room the size of her car? Ask to go to the Al-Kady mansion, with the old man wheezing by the pool? Doug quickly ordered the two beers when he spotted her weaving through the crowd, back to their table. Damn, he thought, what should I do?

  “After we finish these beers, I’m afraid I’ll have to drop you off at your hotel. I have some family business to take care of, arranging for some deliveries to be made. I’d take you along but you’d cramp my negotiating style.”

  Damn, he thought again.

  “How long will you be in town?” she asked, taking a long pull on her beer. This woman, this amazing woman, could suck back the beers.

  “Good question. I have to sit down and figure out what the hell I’m doing next.” He didn’t want to sound like he was clueless but that was what he was. But incompetence, he had found, seldom aroused a woman’s passion, and he was halfway there with his brewery story. “I’ve already let Edna know that I’d probably be heading to Cairo next. You said that you knew who ended up with it in Cairo?”

  “Yes, a man named Nasser Ashkanani. My uncle. He owns a shop or two in the Khan al-Khalili. That’s the big bazaar in Cairo’s old quarter. When my grandfather and your uncle and his friend got hold of the jewels they had to get out of Casablanca quickly. I mean everybody assumed they did it, your uncle and his friend, that is. My grandfather was never connected to the theft at all.”

  “The home fi
eld advantage. Was your Uncle Nasser in on the original idea?”

  “I don’t think so,” Aisha said, “but I do know that it was my grandfather’s idea to hook up with him. Our families have been involved in one business deal or another for a hundred years, still are, in fact. But why go to Cairo? Wasn’t your uncle killed in Singapore? I’d think it’d make sense to start there.”

  “You’d think so, but this woman in Toronto….”

  “Ah, the mystery woman!”

  “…she wants me to go to Cairo first. She might have some contacts there she wants me to look up. Maybe a real live clue.”

  “I know some people in Cairo, too,” she said. “Maybe I’ll hook you up.”

  “What about this Nasser guy? He still alive?” Doug asked.

  “Oh very much so. I visited his shop in the Khan just last month. He’d be the person to talk with about the jewel. I’ll make sure to draw you a good map. I can still get lost in the Khan now and then, but I’m usually pretty buzzed when that happens. You almost ready to go?” she said, checking her watch.

  Doug drained the rest of the beer and put a hundred dirhem note on the table, which made Aisha laugh. “You buying drinks for the house? Give him five and he’ll call himself lucky.” They headed towards the car and she slipped her arm through his, ignoring the stares from the old women with their heads covered with black scarves.

  “If you’ve known this ash can guy….”

  Aisha laughed, gripping his arm. “Ashkanani.”

  “Whatever. If you’ve known this guy for years why didn’t you ask him about the jewel? Or your grandfather? I mean, we’re talking millions here, right?”

  “Right, definitely right. I have asked Uncle Nasser but he always tells me to stick to concrete. As for my grandfather, once Nasser passed on the diamond and sent him a small finder’s fee he lost interest in it. He thought my fascination with Al Ainab was a waste of time, but he still loved to talk about it.”

  They reached her car, a silver BMW convertible that she had parked, Doug noticed, as recklessly as any other Moroccan. “I’d really like to see you again before you go, Doug. Can you fit me in somehow?”