City of Jasmine. Deanna Raybourn
shook my head. “You’ve no one in the whole world you can trust except the wife you abandoned five years ago? Gabriel, that might well be the saddest thing I have ever heard.”
He flashed me his buccaneer smile. “You have no idea. Now, will you help me?”
“What do you need me to do?”
“Just sit tight in Damascus. I’ve stashed my little find for safekeeping. When I am able to retrieve it, I’ll bring it here. The rest is up to you.”
“How long will it take you? I can only stay in Damascus a fortnight. I have obligations,” I told him, thinking of the tour I had quite possibly wrecked for the sake of what might be nothing more than a chase of the wildest, goosiest variety.
“I’ll leave first thing in the morning for the dig. A day out, a day to get my hands on the item and two days back into the city. I will deliver it to you by the end of the week, inshallah,” he added.
“Inshallah? My God, you have changed. You were an agnostic the last time I saw you.”
His smile was grim. “I’ve learned to hedge my bets. If I don’t show up by the start of next week, forget I ever contacted you. Just go on about your business and get out of Damascus. I’ll find another way to get the thing to you. If that’s the case, I want you to go on, sooner rather than later.” He rose to his feet in languid motion, his shadow stretching as he died.
“How did you know where to find me?” I asked. “Where to send the photograph?”
“Everyone knows the name Evangeline Starke. You’re famous.” He reached into his pocket for the horrid lenses and slipped them into his eyes. Next came the mouthpiece and then the stooped posture. “By the end of the week,” he promised. He slid into the darkness and left, so quietly I might have imagined he had been there at all.
There was not even a crease where he had sat on the coverlet. Only the handful of bullets he had slipped from my pistol betrayed that anyone had been there at all. He might as well have been a ghost, I thought, as I blew out the lantern. Except I had made him bleed. It was a very small consolation.
* * *
The next few days were torturous. Aunt Dove and I visited more of the tourist sites, posing for photographs in all of the souks and palaces and outside of mosques. We met Syrian gentlemen from the interim government and their veiled wives; we dined with French advisors and lunched with British expatriates. It ought to have been a whale of a time, but I kept one eye on the calendar, watching each day creep past in a blur of stone streets and perfumed courtyards. Halliday was often in attendance, always attentive to Aunt Dove, but clearly seeking us out for my company. From time to time his hand brushed mine or he let his gaze linger a moment too long for comfort. The air was thick with possibility and things unsaid. But for the moment I was content not to say them. Gabriel occupied far too many of my thoughts to spare any good ones for another man. Not yet. Not until I had laid his ghost once and for all.
My greatest consolation was the reappearance of Rashid the morning after the dinner party. Aunt Dove and I descended to the main court to find him there, waiting patiently as a dog at the foot of the stairs. He offered no excuses for his absence, but his praise for Aunt Dove was so fulsome, she was eating out of his hand in a matter of minutes. He put himself in charge of Arthur Wellesley, letting the little parrot ride on his shoulder through the streets and feeding him titbits of fruit and teaching him Arabic phrases. He somehow made himself a part of our ragtag household, and he spent just as much time making himself useful in our rooms or running errands as he did acting as our tour guide.
As the days passed, my mood sank lower and lower, and Aunt Dove took me aside to give me a boots-up-the-bum speech while Rashid cleaned out Arthur’s old cage. He had just brought the parrot a ghastly new cage from the souk, a filigreed affair so heavily gilded it looked like something out of an Arabian Nights fantasia. I thought it was horrid, but Aunt Dove merely cooed at him and tipped him lavishly for his thoughtfulness. He set about clearing out the old one and laying out seed and water in Arthur’s new quarters while the bird had a snack on Aunt Dove’s turban.
She pulled me down next to her on the divan, plucking Wally’s latest letter out of my fingers as she pitched her voice low. “Now, dear, you’re a handsome girl. Everyone says so. It is time to close the deal,” she advised me.
“I beg your pardon?”
She waved her hands, scaring Arthur from his dish of seed onto her head. “Damn the kaiser,” he muttered irritably from the top of her turban.
“My darling,” Aunt Dove continued, “Halliday is a patient man. Too patient. He’s let you call the tune and he’s danced it. Now, I’ve warmed him up for you, but I can’t keep stringing him along. It’s time for you to give up the goods, Evangeline.”
I choked down my surprise. “What did you have in mind?”
She shrugged. “Heavens, child, you’ve been married. I should think you know how to get things started. Show him you’re open. Men are the dearest creatures, but none of them is very bright. If you want one, you’ve got to show him. Be direct!” She paused, her eyes brightening. “Do you have a nice collection you could invite him up to see? Coins? Cigarette cards?”
“I’m sure I could think of something,” I said faintly.
She patted my hand. “That’s my girl. Now we’ve cleared the air, I think you ought to have a treat. With Rashid’s help, I’ve arranged something quite special, quite special indeed.”
I narrowed my eyes. Aunt Dove had a unique notion of what constituted a treat. It might be anything from a mule ride to the rim of a volcano to a baby crocodile in the bathroom.
“We are going to have a bath,” she announced.
* * *
To my relief, the bath was a proper Turkish hammam, a holdover from the days of Ottoman occupation. Rashid led us to the bathhouse in the old quarter of the city, another of those sprawling but nondescript buildings from the outside. He bowed low, indicating we should enter while he waited outside, but some secret amusement danced in his eyes. Doubtless the notion of a houseful of nude, fragrant women, I decided with a sigh of impatience. I hurried in, stopping just inside the anteroom with a gasp. It was a virtual palace, gilded and tiled and filled with fragrant steam. The scent of ancient perfumes—cinnamon and frankincense and cedar—hung heavy in the air, mingling with the more delicate notes of the flowers whose crushed petals floated in the various pools.
But the pools, I soon learned, were not the point of the place. It began with a disrobing that left us each a slender towel to cover our modesty. We were hurried into a low-ceilinged chamber where attendants ladled water onto coals so that great clouds of steam hung thickly in the air, leaving us feeling oddly light when we moved into the next room. There, a mixture of beet sugar and lemon juice was cooked up, stirred constantly until it bubbled at which point it was whisked off the fire and pasted onto us. Before I knew what they intended, strips of muslin were applied and then torn away, taking the candied mixture and everything else with it. Aunt Dove then explained about Mohammedans and their views on body hair. A few extremely personal services followed, and then we were hurried off to be stretched and massaged and scrubbed and wrapped in wet sheets and gently flogged with small branches of herbs. Our hair was washed and our nails cleaned, and finally we were sent into the main bath to relax.
Women of every age and description frolicked about, as naked as the day they were born, entirely free of embarrassment, and once I gave myself up to the heavenly sensations of the steaming water I thoroughly enjoyed it. After a long soak, we were wrapped in warm, dry sheets and seated on divans with sweetmeats and glasses of mint tea to refresh ourselves. Aunt Dove promptly fell asleep. I felt as light as thistledown, all of my cares evaporated in the steam. I was dozing gently when I heard my name.
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