Then in a blink, the way was empty, like an eerie curfew zone. These walls were whitewashed and topped with broken glass; doors were armored with black wrought iron. It seemed that the air had thinned, the heat lessened, but Christo did not know whether to trust even his own senses. He was so intent on monitoring himself that he nearly missed his turn.
The street had narrowed, gone rough under him, by the time he located the shop. Tomas stood in the doorway sucking on a pipe and looking like a retired fisherman surveying the sea.
Christo parked in the entryway and hopped down. “Hey, partner, J. D. Christo from the New York office.”
Teeth clenched around the pipestem in what might have been a smile, Tomas sidled over and patted Christo’s back, sides, hips — an overt frisk. “Just a reflex,” he said apologetically. His English was without accent. “New York is full of statues.”
“But there are never enough heroes to go around,” Christo replied, fulfilling the witless password requirement.
“Come on, then.” Tomas emptied his pipe on the street and, as Christo steered the Rover inside, pulled a corrugated steel door down behind them.
Not much action under the low concrete ceiling. Two wiry men in newspaper hats squatted on either side of an upended crate playing dominoes. A pie-faced boy in sandals and a canvas jumper drowsily taped over a car’s windows prior to spray painting. An equally drowsy blues sax came out of a stripped-down speaker cone balanced on the disfigured rear end of a Peugeot, accentuating the junk-sick bunker atmosphere.
Tomas bobbed his big blond head, shuffled to the beat. “Your only decent export, jazz. The mighty tree that grew from the death culture. You dig Horace Silver?”
“The most.”
Christo was thrown hopelessly off stride, having expected a razor-sharp pro, finding instead this solemn boho who poked him now, called his attention to the piano passage coming up.
“You hear the genius? It makes me think of a rain forest.”
Solid, Pops. Just as Christo focused his concentration on the skittering chords, Tomas broke away, all business.
“She is brand new, eh? With all the papers?” Without awaiting an answer, Tomas spoke to the pie-face in mongrel Berber French. Stroking the Rover’s flanks, rapping on it here and there, the boy grunted something back. “Abdel is my best man,” Tomas said paternally. “A born engineer.”
“That’s good to know.” Christo could feel himself twitching.
“You’re in some kind of hurry?” Tomas made a treadmill motion with his hands.
“Well, I didn’t come to see the sights.”
“All right. Commerce on an empty stomach, then.” Tomas pulled him around to the rear of the car.” We will cut down through here, you see? By my estimation we will need eight cubic feet of space. If necessary, we can squeeze more up here behind the firewall. Also, a few modifications so that the final weight will tally with what is on your manifest. Abdel will take care. And once the load is in, he will seal up, putty, sand, repaint and you will be ready to go.”
Christo looked suspiciously at the vapid pie face.
“Don’t worry,” Tomas said. “He is paid from my share.”
Feeling tentative, Christo examined oil stains on the floor, listened to the men slapping down their dominoes. “So when do we go to meet the man?”
Tomas had cupped one ear, absorbed in the sound track again. Christo repeated himself, an obstreperous buzz in his voice that hung in the dead air that followed.
Tomas winced. Then, shaking his head as the band picked up its chorus, he growled, “Right away then. But I suggest you calm down on the way. I don’t like strain.”
Calm down, quiet. It was good advice, except the speed had Christo ready to run through walls, his ganglia red-hot and smoking. Get any more alert and he’d crack like a candy egg. But still he needed the friction, knew he operated best that way.
By the time they reached the village, there were indentations in Christo’s thumb from the nails at the end of the rabbit’s foot he’d been squeezing reflexively. He was sweating under a heavy woolen djellabah. The long, tentlike garment made him claustrophobic, but Tomas had insisted.
“No use looking any more conspicuous than you have to. And keep the hood up, it will hide your face.”
Now, as they crossed the dirt road with sun angling over tile roofs and into their faces, he cautioned, “Keep watch on yourself and show respect for these people. Remember, we’re infidels.”
The Swede was calling all the shots; Christo accepted his own docility. He simply wasn’t prepared. It was like an inescapable dream where everything took him by surprise. He felt as helpless as a cork on rough water and more than willing to be led.
They passed under a stone arch furrowed by several hundred years of windblown sand and entered the souk. It was a scene in suspension and the only sound was the buzzing of flies. Goats nosed around in the dust, too listless to heed tethering. The more prosperous merchants had been able to put together stalls of lumber rescued from cooking fires and rubbish heaps, while the rest just sat on the ground with a few articles before them on a cloth — one woman with henna-stained palms offered a rusted flywheel, assorted nuts and bolts, a pile of tiny airline soap bars. Next to her, a crippled boy had loose cigarettes and a half-dead chicken that twitched feebly at the edge of his ragged blanket, its feet bound with reeds.
Christo felt a queer internal tremor as he realized there were no other customers.
“Don’t be fooled by what shows,” Tomas murmured as he stopped to purchase ten centimes’ worth of dried chick peas. “This one here, his real business is in virgin boys.”
Christo lurched as an olive vendor tugged his flapping sleeve. Tomas smiled thinly and said it might be wise for him to buy.
“Good will?”
“A gesture. Gestures and ceremony, these things are paramount here.”
“Back home we call it public relations.” Christo thought: A clever line, I must be doing better.
With olive juice dripping down his arm from the paper cone, Christo followed his guide into a hut that smelled like wet dog. The counter was a plank laid across two kegs, and the little girl behind it (she could not have been more than ten) had a whore’s tired, smirking face. She opened two warm Cokes without being asked, listened with meandering eyes as Tomas instructed her, then dropped the coins he gave her in a cloth sack that hung under her skirts.
Back outside, Christo tossed away his olives and collapsed against the wall, caught by the sensation of a mental fissure through which dizziness rushed in a torrent. He was marinated in sweat.
Tomas gulped Coke, wiped his mouth. “These Arabs love the sugar. That’s why most of them have brass teeth.”
Christo rocked on his heels, touched the crease in his trousers for reassurance. “What now?” he managed.
“Nothing now. We wait. The girl will take my message and after a while they will come for us. For now we just sit.”
“Sorry. I must have left my patience on the plane.”
Christo closed his eyes to the glare and tried to fold his arms and legs into a napping posture. But recent images whiplashed across his inner eye: Tomas’s dank garage, the threatening clutter of the city, aboriginal faces self-righteously blank.
“Maktub,” Tomas said.
“What?”
“Fate. What will be, will be.”