The Old Boys by Charles McCarry Read Free Book Online

down on a cobbled courtyard where a fountain played. I heard the muted gargle of midday traffic in the place de l’Étoile. This reminded me of how Paris had smelled at rush hour in my youth, when the proportion of leaded exhaust fumes to fresh air was only slightly lower than the level needed to commit suicide.
    Forty-five minutes passed. An hour. More. When Kalash’s man—a different one this time—opened the door, he was not smiling, he did not speak. He gestured me inside with a jerk of his bullet head.
    He led me to an audience room. One very imperial overstuffedchair faced several smaller, unpadded ones. Also visible were a collection of knives with rhino-horn hafts on one wall, a bronze tray inlaid with silver and copper on the opposite wall, phrases from the Koran in beautiful calligraphy on the back wall. The room was imposing but not overwhelming. However, the surrounding apartment was vast. One felt this spaciousness without actually seeing the rest of the place. It must have cost a fortune. I wondered if Kalash’s impoverished subjects made him an annual present of his weight in precious stones or metals, as did the followers of the Aga Khan.
    After another hour Kalash appeared, wearing Arabian robes and carrying a carved and inlaid ebony staff. He was, indeed, remarkably tall—nearly a head taller than myself. He did not offer to shake hands, nor did he speak. Or sit down. I, of course, had risen to my feet when he entered.
    “I apologize for arriving without notice,” I said.
    Kalash said, “What do you want?”
    “I have a letter for you.”
    I handed over Paul’s letter of introduction. He banged his staff on the marble floor twice. Yet another flunky appeared. Kalash handed him the letter. The flunky bowed himself out and a moment later bowed himself back in, with the opened letter on a silver tray.
    Kalash read the letter. “Is that the painting?” he asked, staring at the rolled-up canvas on the chair beside me.
    “Yes.” I did not offer to unroll it. Kalash was a very annoying fellow.
    He said, “How much do you want for it?”
    “The price that you offered my cousin, plus ten percent. In cash.”
    “Let me see the thing,” said Kalash.
    I unrolled the painting and flattened it on the table. Kalash examined it inch by inch, like the expert he apparently was.
    “This picture is not as it was when I saw it the last time,” he said. “It has been damaged by all this rough handling. Take it away.”
    “Asyou wish.” I began to roll up the painting.
    “Stop that,” said Kalash. “You’ll make it worse.”
    “If the painting doesn’t please you, what difference can that make? You’ll never see it again.”
    “I don’t wish to be an accomplice to this barbarous destruction,” Kalash said. “So stop what you are doing.”
    “I can hardly carry it through the streets like a flag,” I said. Kalash’s face was expressionless, as it had been throughout our encounter. I waited for him to speak again. At last he said, “Why did Paul send you on this errand, instead of coming himself or simply mailing the letter?”
    There was no point in dissembling. I said, “We have a report that Paul died in China.”
    “Where in China?”
    “Xinjiang province. It is very remote.…”
    “I know where Xinjiang is,” Kalash said. “What proof exists that this is true?”
    “The Chinese have sent us his ashes.”
    “Are they genuine?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “But you mean to find out.”
    “If that’s possible, yes.”
    We had been standing throughout this conversation. Now Kalash said, “Sit down.” He himself sat down, not in the larger chair, but in one of the smaller ones. Evidently we were going to be equals for a few minutes.
    He banged on the floor again with his staff, just once. In seconds the household slave appeared with two glasses of very hot, very sweet mint tea on a tray.
    Kalash said, not unpleasantly, “So you are the man who killed my cousin Ibn Awad.”
    “So it