Nick walked back into the sunlight and sat down. Five past twelve. He scanned the sidewalk with what he hoped looked like controlled eagerness.
An unusual number of soldiers and police constables mingled with the brightly robed figures who were passing by. A beggar with shriveled arms stopped at his table with his outstretched hands. Nick shook his head sternly and turned his face away. The man whined and shuffled off.
At a few seconds before ten past twelve a tall man with hunched shoulders walked slowly past the café and turned back. He ignored the one free table and came over to Nick in a curious sideways shamble, and the face that darted about suspiciously was one that would have been conspicuous for its villainy even in an Arab bazaar. The cast in his eye, the cruelly curved thin lips and the dingy, pitted skin all added up to a picture of unbelievable malevolence.
He sidled closer to Nick.
“Feelthy pictures?” he hissed.
“Later, perhaps,” Nick muttered. “Got anything else?”
“A question. You are Carter?” One surprisingly limpid eye stared down at Nick. The other went off on a trip of its own.
“Uh-huh. You have a message?”
The newcomer nodded. “From Cousin Abe.” He glanced around furtively. “Are we alone?”
“We are surrounded. Sit down and hiss me a message of great import, stopping only to demand money in the middle of it. But tell me first what I can call you.”
“You can call me Hakim, because that is my name. And you will have to plot the moves for me because I am new at this sort of thing.”
He pulled up a chair and sat down close to Nick, contriving by his manner to suggest some hideous conspiracy. The back of his head faced the watcher in the cafe. His unmatched eyes struggled valiantly to peer at Nick.
“I have been sent by my superiors to bring you news that the enemy would give their balls to hear,” he said darkly. “But I am not a ball-collector and therefore I have come to you. You must understand, though, that the information has great value. I cannot speak until I have your promise to pay my price.” He leered horribly at Nick.
Nick frowned and shook his head.
“I refuse to be intimidated,” he said coldly. “You may frighten me to death with that ferocious leer, but your demands will get you nowhere. My Government has instructed me to lose my virtue rather than their money.”
“Then buy me a drink, at least,” Hakim said threateningly.
“I do not buy drinks for informers,” Nick answered stuffily.
Hakim pushed back his chair. “I do not inform unless I drink.”
“All right, all right, stay where you are. Why didn’t Abe warn me you’re a blackmailer?” Nick signaled a waiter. “Better order for yourself. I’d feel shy, asking them for human blood.”
Hakim ordered a double shot of an ill-reputed local painkiller.
“I hate the stuff,” he confided after the waiter had looked at him with loathing and gone back to the bar. “But I feel it fits the part.”
“What do you actually do for a living?” Nick asked curiously.
“How nice of you to put it that way. Many people ask me — ‘What did you do when you were alive?’ Unkind, are they not? I teach. In fact, I am a professor at the University of Cairo, God help them.”
“What do you teach? Medieval Eastern Torture?”
The incredible face split into an even more incredibly attractive grin. “I call my course The Seven Lively Arts.”
His drink came. Hakim threw back his head and swallowed.
“Now the message?” he asked, his shoulders hunching suggestively.
“Now the message,” Nick agreed.
Hakim talked. His eyes flickered off in impossible directions and his evil-looking head bent low like a striking snake. Beyond him, in the café, the man with the froggy lids fidgeted impatiently. Hakim talked of his long friendship with Abe Jefferson and of the promising students in his course — all the while hissing and crooning in an astonishingly evil way that gave the impression of a grasping man acting as a go-between for two extremely important principals. It was a masterly performance.
Nick cut him off at last.
“That’ll do it. Now I have a message for you. First, though — I gather you can handle a tail. Are you willing to do it now? I warn you, it may be dangerous.”
The awful eyes rolled lasciviously. “Time now for feelthy pictures?”
“Enough, Hakim.” Nick kept himself from grinning. “Keep ’em for Cairo. This one is a little green-faced man, watching us right now. He’s inside going crazy because he couldn’t listen. Five foot six, globs for eyes with shutters over them, slightly handsomer than you but somehow much more horrible...”
“Unbelievable,” hissed Hakim.
“Yeah, you’d think so. Now he may want to follow me, but I don’t think so because he knows where he can find me. I want to follow him. So I give myself an opportunity. You. And I give him a reason, in case he doesn’t already think he has one. I give you a message to take back. Take back where, I don’t care. Shake him as soon as you can.”
Hakim cocked his head over one hunched shoulder while Nick reached into his pocket and drew out an envelope that contained nothing but a blank sheet of paper.
“Invisible writing?” Hakim suggested helpfully.
“Of course,” Nick agreed. “A new, permanent process. I will now add something to it.”
He wrote swiftly, inscribing a meaningless message in a meaningless cipher on the innocent sheet of paper.
“I feel something slimy on the back of my neck,” Hakim murmured. “Is that the way it feels when he watches?”
Nick folded the paper and put it back in the envelope. He sealed it decisively and thrust it at Hakim.
“Be sure not to guard this with your life,” he said. “Yes, that’s the way it feels when he watches. And I thought I was being over-sensitive.”
“Sickening,” said Hakim, putting the envelope into his pocket. “I’ve felt this way only once before. And the fellow who was watching then turned out to be slightly more revolting than Jack the Ripper. He went for little boys.”
Nick stared at him, surprised that anyone else could share his own inexplicable revulsion without even having seen the man they both meant.
“Well, we’re not little boys. How long are you free from the University?”
“One week,” Hakim answered. “If you’re thinking of asking me to join you again in something like this, the answer is yes.”
“Thanks,” said Nick. “I was. I’ll check with cousin Abe. Now get lost. Literally.”
Hakim pushed back his chair. “You don’t think you should give me money?”
“I do not,” Nick said firmly. “You might keep it, for one thing. For another, I don’t want to get you mugged for money. Let’s not cloud the issue. Go lose yourself. I have dates for this afternoon.”
“A pox on you and all your dates,” Hakim growled sullenly, pushing back his chair. “Thank you for your lousy drink.”
He sidled away without a backward glance. Nick watched him for a moment with apparent distaste and then let himself sink deep into thought.
When the man who made snakes slither down Nick’s spine sauntered on to the sidewalk and strolled off after Hakim, Nick was staring thoughtfully into space and drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Nick let him walk as far as the crosswalk before he placed a bill and some change on the table and slowly started after him.
Nick crossed to the far side of the street and paused for a moment at the window of a curio shop. Hakim’s tall figure was two blocks away and moving with surprising speed in spite of the shambling gait. His follower stayed well behind him. But the man’s short legs made sudden little toddling movements as if he had underestimated Hakim’s walking pace and had to hurry to keep him in sight.