He extended a hand with rings on three fingers to Gideon. “How do you do, Mr. Smith? I am Ali Hassan.” His voice was an odd, not-unfriendly growl, his accent a hodgepodge of Cairo and Marseilles, and maybe a touch of Belgrade too. Mr. Ali Hassan had been around.
“How do you do?” Gideon said. It hadn’t been lost on him that “Ali Hassan” was the Arabic equivalent of “John Smith.” Was it a couple of fictional characters who were greeting each other so politely? Maybe yes, maybe no. There were, after all, plenty of people really named John Smith, so why not an occasional Ali Hassan?
“The blindfold didn’t inconvenience you? No?”
Hassan peered up at him, directly into his face, with unsettlingly bright, piggy eyes. “You understand. When it’s someone I don’t know, I have to take my little precautions. You can’t be too careful these days. It’s terrible, what goes on.”
Gideon managed a tolerant smile. “I understand completely.” Only with an effort did he resist a near-overwhelming impulse to make sure his beard was still on straight.
“So, come, sit down, Mr. Smith.”
Gideon perched uncomfortably on the cot-the only other place to sit-while Hassan resumed his seat in the chair. He was a sleek, squat man, not quite obese but certainly overfed, with a flat, broad face and an ongoing, muttering chuckle from deep in the back of his throat. Jalal was motioned over and sent downstairs with a few brusque words.
Hassan smiled hospitably at Gideon. “I have sent the boy down to bring us some-”
Not coffee, Gideon prayed.
“-coffee,” said Hassan. The rumbling chuckle was heard again. “Tell me, Mr. Smith, where are you staying? The Winter Palace?”
“The Hilton,” Gideon said, thinking it sounded more like John Smith’s kind of place. He regretted it immediately. A call to the Hilton would tell Hassan that there was no John Smith registered there.
On the other hand, so would a call to the Winter Palace or anyplace else. He was going to have to be more careful, take more time before speaking. What, he thought suddenly, was he going to do if Hassan asked for a business card?
“Next time,” Hassan said, “try the Winter Palace; the old wing, not the new. Tell Mr. Shebl I personally sent you. Tell me, Mr. Smith, why haven’t I heard of you before?”
This one Gideon was ready for. “This is my first Egyptian venture,” he said smoothly. “Until now I’ve been active in the South American trade. Mostly Peruvian. Moche and Chimu artifacts, mainly.”
“Oh, yes? Well, that’s not an area I know much about.”
A good thing too, Gideon thought.
Hassan folded his arms. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“I’m interested in art from the Amarna Period. Statuary, in particular. Jalal seemed to think you might help me.”
“For yourself or is there a client involved? It helps me to know.”
“A client,” Gideon said carefully. “He’s looking for something, not too large, for a place in his library.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I’m not at liberty to tell you his name.”
That was good, Gideon thought. It sounded like something John Smith would say, and it established that secrets were acceptable between them.
“No, no, no, no, of course not,” Hassan said quickly. “Sometimes it’s best not to know these things. Well, here is our coffee.”
Jalal had returned with two tiny cups and set them on the table. Then he had gone to stand off to one side, just at the edge of Gideon’s vision, while Hassan sipped and Gideon pretended to. They made stilted, ceremonial chitchat for a few minutes-about the weather, of all things. An unchallenging topic in a land where 363 out of every 365 days were the same: hot, dry, and utterly cloudless. Hassan remarked that the evening breeze was pleasant. Gideon agreed that it was quite pleasant.
In truth, they weren’t getting much benefit from the evening breeze. Hassan’s precautions against Gideon’s knowing where they were had extended to his having had the junk on the roof stacked in such a way that it formed a screen around the edges. Gideon could hear sounds of village life-the creak of a wooden cartwheel, the complaint of a cranky camel, the continuing shouts of children, the amplified call of a muezzin-but all he saw was mattresses on end and bundles of tall, dried reeds.
Jalal cleared away the cups and was sent back to stand just out of Gideon’s sight again. Hassan rubbed his hands briskly together. Time for business.
“Well, I think I have some things to show you, Mr. Smith. A few things that have come my way lately.”
“Fine.” Gideon became a little easier. If Hassan trustedhim enough to lay out his goods, then an awkward demand for a business card wasn’t likely to be forthcoming.
Hassan took a thick packet of cards from his breast pocket, separated a few, and offered them. Gideon came close to asking what they were before remembering that men like Ali Hassan didn’t make a practice of publicly demonstrating their wares like the less discriminating el-Hamids. They carried Polaroids, not baskets of artifacts.
There were about a dozen, poorly lit and badly composed, and Gideon longed to rip through them in search of a yellow jasper head. Instead, he thumbed through them with agonizing thoroughness, peering at them in the fading daylight the way John Smith probably would have, one at a time, with pauses and nods and grunts, thoughtfully laying each one out on the table next to the one before, like a hand of solitaire. First were several miniature, whole statuettes of varying quality; then a few fragmentary heads-chins and lips, mostly- made of what appeared to be quartz and obsidian; then a statuette body of a seated woman made of coarser material, probably sandstone. And then two small, finely made faience figurines of animals: a goose and a fish.
And that was it. No yellow jasper head.
He put down the last picture. “These are quite nice, but I was hoping you might be able to find me-”
He paused, frowning, and turned back to the twelve photos spread on the table in two rows. He picked up the third one from the right in the nearest row. The sandstone figure. The headless body.
It was a female dressed in a simply depicted gown and seated on a boxlike support with hieroglyphic symbols carved into its side, her hands resting palms-down on her thighs. It was Amarna style, all right, early Amarna, just beginning to move away from the stiff, conventionalized pose of former times to the more relaxed, natural posture that would be a hallmark of Akhenaten’s reign. Between the shoulders was a square-carved recess to accept the tang that would have projected from the underside of the separate head and neck.
A composite statue.
The hairs on the back of his neck stirred. Was it possible that he had gotten to what he was looking for by the back way? He had come looking for the head that went with the body. Had he found the body that went with the head? He felt his heart pick up its beat.
“I don’t know, this might be fairly interesting,” he said indifferently, flipping it back onto the table. “What can you tell me about-”
“Har, har, har,” said Hassan.
Gideon looked up sharply. “I beg your pardon?”
“Har, har, har,” said Hassan. He was sitting with his hands over his belly, the left wrist clasped in the right hand. His feet were flat on the floor and his shoulders were shaking. As far as Gideon could tell, he was genuinely amused.
Gideon waited.
Hassan used a handkerchief to wipe tears from the corner of his eyes. “I thought that one would get your interest. Oh, yes.” The handkerchief was wadded up and stuffed away somewhere and with it went Hassan’s sudden burst of mirth. “Let’s not mince any more words. It’s what you came for, isn’t it? The statuette that was taken from the Horizon site across the river four years ago. I’m afraid I’m not at liberty,” he added with heavy-handed sarcasm, “to tell you how it came to me.”