The Old Boys by Charles McCarry Read Free Book Online Page B

that.”
    Heaven help me, I found this fellow entertaining. How in the world had Paul done without his company for forty years? This did not mean I was prepared to become a co-conspirator in whatever tangled web he was weaving. For all I knew he had sent Paul Christopher to his death with an irresistible lie and was hoping to do the same for me.
    I said, “Where is Ibn Awad now?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “Who does know?”
    “The people who are with him. But you will have to find them before you can question them, and if you find them you will have found him.”
    “And if I don’t find them?”
    “Then you must do what one does when lost in the desert,” Kalash replied. “Go back to where you started and begin again. Do you have pen and paper?”
    I handed over my Bic and a page from my notebook. Kalash scribbled a man’s name and the name of a place, Manaus, on the paper.
    “You should go talk to this man,” he said. “He knows interesting things, and he has seen Paul Christopher quite recently.”
    Kalash stood up. The conversation was over. Apparently the negotiations were not.
    He said, “Your demand for cash for the Hicks is ludicrous. Nevertheless I want it. I offered Paul one million dollars for the picture. I will have that sum deposited in Switzerland, if that’s acceptable. Do you have an account there?”
    It so happened that I did. I gave him the particulars.
    He said, “Very well. Have you a phone number?”
    “Yes.”
    Iwrote it down for him. He recited his own number—rapidly, of course, saying
naught
for
zero
and repeating it only once.
    “And one more thing,” he said. “Ibn Awad has caused a fatwa to be issued against you. You understand what a fatwa is?”
    “I think so.” I attempted a smile. “Is there a reward?”
    “Paradise is the reward. But money is also involved. You have to be a believer to collect, so you should avoid zealots with beards and wild eyes, but I’d be wary of all strangers if I were you. All you have to do to convert to Islam is say that there is but one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. There are good Christians in this world who would speak those words into a tape recorder, then pull the trigger and bring my cousin your head.”
    I said, “Is your man in Manaus one of them?”
    “He loves money and hates Americans and thinks that Ibn Awad did good work in the world,” Kalash said. “Whether he knows about the fatwa is another question. The fatwa is quite recent. Word of it has not seeped down very far.”
    I was passed along the avenue Wagram by loiterers with cell phones, just as I had earlier been handed along O Street, and when I boarded a Métro train at the Étoile, a thug with furry eyebrows got on behind me. He called whoever was next in line as I disembarked near the Gare Saint-Lazare. On the train to Geneva, I sat beside a very large Russian who smelled of unbrushed teeth (or maybe he was a Chechen, a Bosnian, an Albanian—the world was full of Muslims who looked like you and me). Across the aisle, a virtually fleshless woman with scarred wrists hiked her skirt and stared at me hungrily, stroked her meager leg, and talked Swiss-German to herself in a low incessant murmur. Or was she speaking to me, who couldn’t understand a word, or maybe into a concealed hands-free telephone?
    As far as I could tell, no one awaited me at the train station in Geneva, but I could not be sure because of the crowd and because all Genevese give the impression that they have us aliens under surveillance. I checked into a hotel behind the station and ate a gummy
truite au bleu
for dinner in its appalling restaurant. Thewaiter was an Arab. So was the cook; everywhere I looked I saw an Arab. They had always been numerous, of course. I just hadn’t been so keenly aware of them as I was now. I decided not to go for a walk along the lake after dinner.
    From my room I called Charley Hornblower. Had he ever heard of a man called Simon Hawk, Kalash’s man in