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But the thought of Theodora brought back the old man's words yesterday morning-You'll probably doubt its validity...this right now, what I'm telling you, is your confirmation-in-advance. If you hate it, it's the genuine instructions.
Too obviously this was exactly what Theodora had been referring to.
Hale closed his eyes and let his thoughts collapse into an unvoiced shrill wail of abysmal dismay; and he didn't realize that he was clenching his jaws until the pain in his teeth made him involuntarily open his eyes, and then he had to blink away tears to see the street clearly.
He remembered wondering who or what Theodora expected him to betray in his script. But apparently it was not to be a script after all, and the betrayal had happened fourteen years ago.
All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale's whole life.
He blotted his eyes on his shirt cuff and took a deep breath and forced his gaze to be blank as he looked back again at the window.
The old man was gone, and the word GO was barely visible in the fading steam. A moment after he had seen it, a wet squeegee drew an obliterating streak of runny cleanness across the inside of the glass.
All you can do now is justify the losses, avenge them, Hale thought emptily. If Declare knows the '48 math was bad, Declare must have some better sort to work with now-there's nothing for it but to push on and further that effort. Lines from a Bartholomew Dowling poem dirged in his head: 'Tis all we have left to prize. One cup to the dead already-hurrah for the next that dies!
He looked at his watch and then began trudging away on down the sand-gritty sidewalk. Forcing himself into the familiar cold professionalism, he considered whether it was likely himself or the welding shop that was being watched. Probably it was the shop-he was fairly sure he had evaded any watchers on the buses, or at the airport. He wondered what the rest of the missed briefing would have consisted of, and what "equipment" he would have been given.
But speculation was useless. He had no choice here but to follow such scanty instructions as he had been given, and look up Salim bin Jalawi and any other covert operatives he could find from among his old networks. He made a mental note to wash the shoe-polish out of his hair in the first men's room he found-it would be counter-productive to seem anxious about anything at all.
And as for equipment, he could make an ankh, if he had to-tinfoil rolled and bent into the right shape would do, since it was the Klein bottle topological shape of the thing that compelled the attention of djinn, not any property of what it was made of.
He filled his lungs with the sea air, then exhaled it all in a deep sigh. Since it might be himself who was being watched, he conscientiously stepped into a carpet shop to ask about some of the waterfront merchants he had known fifteen years ago. After half an hour of this, he could catch a bus back north to Al-Kuwait and call Salim bin Jalawi. Whatever agency might be watching, this would be behavior consistent with his fugitive cover, and the troublesome tail-evading route he had taken down here from Al-Kuwait could only make it look more genuine.
Old, reawakened practice permitted him to nearly forget the intolerable words drawn in the steam-ALL WRONG.
Salim bin Jalawi's house was air-conditioned, and in the aggressive chill Hale sipped a glass of tea and politely ate some cashew nuts from a bowl on the Danish Modern table. A refrigerator hummed out in the white-tiled kitchen next to an electric range, and fluorescent lights held back the dark of the late afternoon. Through the sliding glass door at his right Hale could see, as bright dots on the iron-colored southwest horizon, the beacons of natural gas flares out on the Burgan oil fields.
Bin Jalawi's beard was ivory white now, but his face was still as dark as coffee and as lean and angular as a Notre-Dame gargoyle, and he bared white teeth as he grinned at Hale.
"You must be a director," he said, "or a vice president, by now, of the Creepo."
There was knowingness in the man's voice, but Hale couldn't tell if it meant that bin Jalawi was somehow already aware of his fugitive status or, more likely, if it was just the equivalent of a wink at the long-compromised pretense of the old Combined Research Planning Office.
Hale had called the man from a nearby telephone, and though they had only exchanged the old recognition signals over the wire, bin Jalawi had greeted him at his door with Bedu enthusiasm, holding both of Hale's hands and joyfully shouting, Shlun kum? Kaif hal ak, kaif int, kaif int, kaif int?-and much more, all of which had essentially meant: How have you been?
Hale now put down his tea glass with a soft knock, absurdly wishing it were a cup of the coffee they had made at camp in the old days, harsh with the foul water of the desert wells.
"I've retired," he said in Arabic. "I felt like a change of water and air. Tommo Burks will, I think, begin a new life in the Arab states. And I thought you might be able to help me."
Bin Jalawi nodded, still grinning. "Allah is all-beneficent!" he said. It was one of the standard lines Arabs gave to importunate beggars, meaning Look to God, not to me-the equivalent of the British Tell your troubles to Jesus, mate-and Hale couldn't tell if the man meant it coldly or jokingly. "Many Arabs trusted Creepo," bin Jalawi went on in a jovial tone, "until they learned that the Israelis invaded Nasser's Suez with Creepo help, based on betrayed Arab confidences."
Nasser's Suez, thought Hale bitterly. As if the Arabs could have built the canal, or could even keep it dredged!
"I'm a landless man now," said Hale; "but you know that the British declared Kuwait to be a sovereign nation, more than a year ago." The remark was in character-to be too anti-British here would be to overplay his hand.
" Kuwait was never a long-term commitment, to England," said bin Jalawi. "Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century."
Hale supposed that was true. But he let his face stiffen as he said, "My policy?"
Bin Jalawi plucked several times lightly at the neck of his robe, then lowered his hands, palm down-an Arab gesture conveying something like, You and I have nothing to do with these villains. "I apologize, bin Sikkah," he said quietly, using Hale's Bedu nickname. "You were always a generous friend to the Bedu. 'Honor him who has been great and is fallen, and him who has been rich and now is poor.'"
The radio cabinet had been producing muted conversation for these twenty minutes, but now music started, some Islamic-style single-line melody, and the Arab got up from his couch, crossed to the radio and turned up the volume. The stylized, quavering singing of an Arab woman rang out of the speakers.
"Do you know her?" he asked.
Hale blinked. "Who, the singer? No. I suppose I might have heard her before."
"She is Um Kalthum," said bin Jalawi in a tone of reproof. "Every Thursday evening she is on Radio Cairo. In Cairo you don't even need a radio to hear her, because every set in the city is tuned to her, and her voice seems to emanate from the stones and the sky."
