Too bloody true! thought Richard, and they were in. Five men sat drinking fragrant coffee on rugs more beautiful than any Richard had just seen. Three big bodyguards almost as tall as Richard stood around them. They all looked up as Salah entered, not unduly surprised to see him.
“Salaam,” he said, and launched into a dialect Richard did not understand. He stood motionless, right fist closed on the gun, ready for action. Only his left hand might betray him. He had hidden it in the folds of the robe, for it was not the right color at all. And his eyes, narrowed in his tanned face half hidden by the kaffiyah.
But then, he thought, as his racing mind explained Salah’s last, cryptic remark, only an Aryan Iranian would have such blue eyes in any case. And such a man would be bound to understand Farsi, the language of other Aryan Iranians. He looked around the room more closely.
The conversation switched from Salah to the others. Their accents were no more comprehensible than Salah’s had been, but their body language was universal. We’d love to help, but…Sorry.
Out in the alleyway he inquired, “Waste of time?”
“Not at all. They seemed to be telling the truth. That was the point.” He glanced either way. They were alone. “The PLO know nothing of the people who took your ship and your wife’s father. I bought the guns from a man with Libyan contacts. Khadaffi had nothing to do with it. The men we have just seen represent the current government of Iran. They, too, know nothing.”
“So, three simple negatives have wiped out almost all the possibilities.”
“Yes. Whoever is doing this to you must therefore be small, independent, and probably unsupported.”
“Just twelve men? No backup…” Richard was shaking his head with disbelief even as he spoke.
“You are right of course. It cannot be quite that simple. There are risks in taking the cover and reputation of terrorists. These cannot simply be criminals in disguise.”
“And there can’t only be twelve of them. There may be twelve on Prometheus, but who has Sir William? And where?”
“Well, let us be off. Time is short.”
“Where now?” asked Richard as they hurried on down the alley, away from the Street of Gold.
“To the Street of Pearl.”
“Why there?”
“To get wisdom.” Salah chuckled in the shadows. “You have a saying, do you not? Wisdom comes in pearls?”
The Street of Pearl was the oldest and narrowest of all; the deepest in the whole market and the closest to its heart. It twisted from its opening at the corner of the Street of Silver down to a gate only slightly smaller than the gate into the Soukh itself. On the pavement sat tubercular-looking men of indeterminate age with hollow cheeks and great bony chests; displayed before them were scraps of silk piled high with the fruits of their difficult, dangerous labor. These were the pearl fishers. In the stalls and little shops there were more pearls, varying in size, shape, color, setting. There was mother-of-pearl, shell of all kinds, coral of every description. And in the window of the greatest of the shops, a display to take the breath away. Seed pearls drifted like dunes of white sand on saharas of black silk. Cultured pearls clustered in piles like tiny tennis balls. Natural pearls, round, translucently white, from the size of a pinhead to the size of Richard’s thumbnail, scattered on beds of black velvet. The huge misshapen pearls they gathered from the sea beds here, twisted into fantastic shapes: drops, vortices, clenched fists; bigger than the others by far. Then, resting on white silk, pink pearls from the Orient. And, placed reverently upon white velvet at the pinnacle of the display, legendary black pearls, from the South Seas and beyond.
A glance was enough to fix it forever in his memory, then he was following Salah, dazzled, down toward that massive door. In the right wing of the great portal there was a smaller entry. Here Salah knocked, and here they were admitted. If Richard had been dazzled before, now he was stunned. They had stepped out of a busy, noisy, smelly street, into a haven of absolute peace. As the tiny door closed behind them, the bustle of the street became muted and a tinkle of falling water replaced it. The hot odor of thronging humanity was alike excluded and in its place a zephyr laden with the scent of flowers. The courtyard must have measured seventy feet on each side. It was paved and colonnaded with marble. At its center stood an oasis in miniature. Above on every side the building rose, story after story, each level having balconies to overlook this quiet, fragrant place. The tall sides of the building were further augmented by towers that Richard could just make out as silhouettes against the star-bright sky. Their domed tops scooped in the high, cool air and funneled it down here.
“Up,” said Salah and they crossed to a stairway and climbed.
The room they entered a few moments later was dimly lit and silent. Empty, except for a frail old figure seated in a tall wooden chair. From the way he moved his head toward them as they entered, Richard suspected at once that he was blind. Proximity confirmed his guess. The old man’s eyes were as white as the pearls in the street below.
“Salaam eleikum,” Salah greeted the old man with something akin to reverence. And received a nod in return.
The two of them stood, hesitating for a moment, until the old man said, “Please be seated, gentlemen.” With a hiss of surprise, Richard snatched out his machine pistol and whirled. This had to be a trap. A micron behind him, Salah mirrored his action. The old man had spoken in English.
Now he chuckled with delight. “No, no. Put your weapons away, please. You have not been betrayed. That is, you will have been by now of course, but not by me. It was a simple trick. A trick, no more.”
They began to relax. The old man continued to speak calmly and quietly. “I have been expecting you of course, Salah. I am not surprised that you have brought your English friend to me. This is, after all, my area of expertise. No one knows the truth of what is going on, so you have come to me for a story.”
As they sat, cross-legged at his feet, Richard asked, “How did you know I was English?”
“European. That was easy enough. Your walk, your shoes, the odor of your body. Your nationality and identity beyond that, Captain Mariner, simple intelligence. Intelligence of both kinds: my informants told me you were here soon after you arrived — and why. So when Salah comes through my door accompanied by a tall man of European extraction with a sailor’s walk, who else could it be? But this is childishness. And arises, I admit, from a liking for the tales of your Sherlock Holmes in my youth.”
The blind eyes smiled again. The voice continued, frail but clearly audible, sibilant, like sand sliding on silk. “And, expecting you, as I was, I have found a story that I hope will be of interest to you. Though I myself, of course, cannot vouch for its relevance or truth.”
Richard glanced over at Salah. The Palestinian was listening, apparently rapt. Richard began to do the same.
“Some thirty years ago in the city of Dahran, a rich young man fathered twin girls. These were the earliest days of the European “swinging sixties,” when London seemed to beckon the rich and the young of all the world. And so the rich young man took his one wife and his two daughters and he went. In London he became seduced by Western ways and at last he sent his girls to an English school, where they were educated after the English fashion. The girls were very close, as is often the way with twins, and the schooling made them closer than ever. In fact they did not separate at all until they went to university, which is, I believe, the natural end of such schooling. One studied to become a doctor, the other to become a journalist, or so I have been told.”