Aaron Elkins - Dead men’s hearts

Gideon thought so too. He leaned forward to pick up the vase again. “Let’s start with this. I might be able to find someone foolish enough to buy it. Shall we say, oh…”

Oh, what? He was completely in the dark. In this room, with these humble people, it was worth perhaps a fiftieth, maybe only a hundredth, of what it might sell for in the legitimate or pseudo-legitimate art market, but as to what that was, he didn’t have a clue.

He took a stab. “… oh, fifty dollars.”

The two older men went into a whispered conference, sibilant and heated. Fouad excitedly ticked off points on his fingers while his elder emitted streams of smoke, shook his head, and rapped the table. Jalal remained above it all with an apathetic, slack-lipped smile. After a while he looked at his watch-fake gold band, fake Rolex facegot up, and sauntered out, but not before a gangsterly, showy shrug of his left shoulder and another pat of his breast pocket to adjust what Gideon hoped was a fake gun in a fake holster.

It took a few minutes more before the other two came to a conclusion. The old man shoved his turban out of his eyes again, made his statement, and folded his arms.

“They say it’s out of the question,” Phil said. “They will accept one hundred and fifty, which they say is a very great bargain when you consider-”

“Okay,” Gideon said. The men looked stunned. Phil looked a little pained too; apparently he’d hoped to get out of this with his fifty dollars at least partly intact.

Gideon put the money on the table, bill by bill, before the Egyptians, who were patently too astonished at their good fortune to speak. He knew well enough that this wasn’t the way to bargain in the Arab world, but he was anxious to finish up. If they were going to learn anything about the Amarna head, he had concluded by now, it was going to be through Jalal. And he had the impression that the young man had left only temporarily, to talk to somebody or to make a telephone call, that he would be back with something to say, that progress might yet be made this night.

The men eagerly scooped up the bills, chattering away at Phil to tell the honored gentleman from Cincinnati that they had many more such beautiful items for sale, at equally favorable prices, and if the honored gentleman Jalal eased his way back through the double doors and cut them off with a word. They looked at each other, bobbed their farewells, and hurried toward the exit.

“They’re forgetting their things,” Gideon said. “All I bought was the vase.”

“No, you bought everything,” Phil said. “The basket too.”

Gideon was flabbergasted. “For $150? The figurine alone must be-”

The young man cut in. Phil, instead of translating, got into an exchange with him.

“He knows someone who has Amarna things to sell,” Phil said. He wants to take you to meet him. It’s a man called Ali Hassan. Apparently he’s a dealer, an exporter. According to our young friend, anything decent that comes out of Luxor illegally goes through his hands.“

Bingo. “Terrific, what are we waiting for?”

“No, just you. I’m not invited.” Phil’s face had tightened. He didn’t like the turn of events.

Gideon wasn’t overjoyed either. “Just me? How am I supposed to communicate? I need someone who speaks English.”

“Me, I speak English,” Jalal said, not altogether surprising Gideon. “Let’s go.”

Gideon exchanged a worried look with Phil. He understood what Phil had been trying to tell him a moment ago. A dealer, an exporter-one of the vicious ones, in other words; one of the dangerous ones. But was there really anything to worry about? Why should this Ali Hassan, regardless of how vicious, have any reason to do him harm? Hassan’s business was buying and selling illegal antiquities. And Gideon was John Smith, a rich American not overly burdened by ethical considerations who was looking for just the kind of things Hassan had to sell. Hassan would naturally be a little wary of a new face, but he would be licking his chops over profits to come, not planning assassination.

Or so he hoped.

“Just a minute,” Gideon said. “I have to talk with my associate-privately, if that’s all right with you.” Circumstances had changed on them. Plan A, so airily devised an hour ago, was no longer in effect and there wasn’t any plan B.

“No talk,” Jalal said sharply. “We go now, this minute, or don’t go.”

He was on edge too. He didn’t quite trust them, and Gideon thought he meant what he said.

Gideon looked at Phil, who shrugged. Gideon shrugged too. “All right.”

“Get in touch with me as soon as you get back,” Phil said.

“No talk,” Jalal snapped.

The boy pulled a folded turban cloth from an inside pocket and shook it out. “For to go over you eyes. Sit down.”

“All right,” Gideon said again. Actually, this was a heartening development. If they didn’t want him to know where he was going, at least that meant that they expected him to leave alive. Not that there was any reason, he repeated to himself, that they might want him otherwise.

“Wait a minute,” he said as Jalal began to wind the cloth around his eyes. “If you take me through the caf6 blindfolded everybody’s going to see it.”

“They see before,” the boy said off-handedly.

Jalal was right. The sight of a blindfolded man being led back through the cafe by the elbow was apparently nothing unusual. If anything it was less noteworthy than his entrance with Phil, because this time the conversations didn’t lapse altogether, but only ebbed a little. Gideon wondered if the two elderly constables were still there and what they made of it.

Once in the street he was turned to the right for a few steps and bundled roughly into the back of a car, his knees jammed against the stiffened fabric of the front seat. Jalal got in next to him and said a few words in Arabic. A bearlike grunt came from the front, and the engine started up. The car smelled unlike the inside of any vehicle he’d been in in Egypt (except for the Menshiya): no fustiness, no mildew, no layer upon layer of stale sweat. What it smelled like was an automobile; a relatively new automobile. As they got under way he felt the cool puff of an air conditioner. That was a first too.

“Nice car,” he said.

“Peugeot,” Jalal said proudly.

Well, he thought with satisfaction, that was something he could pass on to Gabra later if need be. He set his mind to capturing other details of the journey, memorizing the turns and counting the seconds between them-one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi-but gave it up after the fourth Mississippi. There weren’t any seconds between the turns. When they weren’t lurching to the left they were lurching to the right. In this particular part of Luxor there weren’t any nice right-angled corners to help get things clear in the mind, there were only twisting alleys that never seemed to straighten out.

All he could say for sure was that they drove that way, fairly slowly, for two or three minutes, then got onto a straighter, smoother road for another three or four, slowing once to jolt over some bumps. A railroad crossing? If so, they were headed east, away from central Luxor. Their speed picked up. Gideon was starting to get jumpy in spite of himself. It was well and good to conclude that the blindfold proved that foul play wasn’t in the offing, but that had been in a lighted cafe on a busy street, with his pal at his side. Now the blindfold was over his eyes and he was alone in a car with a false beard pasted on his face, a gun-toting thug-in-training sitting next to him, and an unknown goon in the driver’s seat, heading… where?

There was a sharp turn to the left-northward?-and a final, twisting, bumpy stretch of another minute or two. The car stopped. The driver came around, opened his door, and pulled on his shoulder.