The Djinn (4 page)

Marjorie’s
voice was so soft I could hardly hear what she was saying. Her head had sunk
down and her lips were barely moving as she told us what had happened.

“I was just
filling my glass when I heard people talking in the kitchen downstairs. At
least I imagined I did. I wondered who it was. One of them sounded like Max,
but I don’t know who the other one was. I think now that it was just my
imagination. I had my drink, and I was going back to bed, when I heard terrible
screeching. I can’t tell you how awful it was. I was absolutely paralyzed with
fright I couldn’t move. It went on and on for about three or four minutes,
perhaps even longer. I went downstairs. I don’t know how I had the courage to
do it, but I did. It sounded so much like Max, and I was terrified that
something had happened to him.” Marjorie stopped for a moment.

“Have a drink,”
I said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

She shook her
head. “I mustn’t drink. I’m afraid to get drunk.”

“Come on,
Marjorie. A couple of swallows won’t hurt you.”

She shook her
head again. “It’s forbidden, you know. They don’t allow it.”

“Who doesn’t
allow it?” asked Anna. “What do you mean?”

I held
Marjorie’s wrist “Don’t worry. Just tell us what happened when you went
downstairs.”

Her voice was
almost indistinguishable now. All I could see of her head was the gray-streaked
part in her hair as she mumbled her story.

“I went into
the hall and he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the drawing room, either. It was
silent by then, completely silent, and I was terrified. Then I saw the light
was on in the kitchen. It was shining from under the door. I opened the door
very
slowly,
and . . .” She stopped talking, and
stayed silent and still for almost a whole minute.

“Marjorie,” I
said gently. “You don’t have to...”

But she started
speaking again, in the same hushed, whispery voice.

“I thought he
was all right at first. I don’t know what made me think that He was turned away
from me, I suppose, and the first thing I saw was the back of his head. Then I
realized what he had done.” Again, she stopped.

“What?” Anna
asked. “What had he done?”

Marjorie looked
up. For the first time that day, there were tears in her eyes, although her
voice was almost emotionless. I don’t know why, but that calmness made her
words even more nauseating.

“I don’t quite
know how he did it,” she said. “He had taken the carving knife from the drawer
and cut his face off. His
nose, his cheeks, even
his
lips. He had done it himself.”

Anna sat with
her mouth open in shock. “Excuse me,” she said, leaving the table as quickly as
she could. As for me, I just sat there holding Mar-jorie’s hand, feeling those
lobster tails swimming around and around, fighting like hell to keep them down.

B
y the time we got back to Winter Sails, most of the funeral guests
had left. There was one old lady who was busy talking to Marjorie’s baby-pink
companion with the jutting teeth, and a florid-faced oil executive who was
sitting with his head between his knees (he had brought his own hip-flask), but
apart from those two, the old house was deserted. The guests had left nothing
but tire tracks, empty sherry glasses, and dirty ashtrays.

“I think I’m
going to have a cup of tea,” said Marjorie, leading us to the drawing room.
“Will you join me?”

I shook my
head. “I don’t drink tea. It’s bad for the stomach lining. You know, in China,
they used to make eunuchs drink hundreds of cups of tea every day,
then
they cut them open and would use their stomachs for
footballs.”

Anna gave me a
sharp nudge in the ribs.

“I’m sorry,” I
said. “That wasn’t in very good taste.”

Marjorie
sighed. “Don’t worry, Harry. The quicker I get back to normal, the better it
will be. I feel I’ve been living apart from the world for years with Max. We
were so isolated. I used to insist on doing all my own marketing, just to get
away from the house and meet some ordinary people. Miss Johnson, will you bring
us some tea, please.”

The baby-pink
lady looked up. “At once, Mrs. Greaves,” she said quietly.

“How long has
she been around?” I
asked,
when she’d left the room.
“I don’t remember her.”

“She came from
an agency,” said Marjorie. “She’s very quiet and a little strange, but I don’t
know what I’d have done without her.”

“She reminds me
of someone,” said Anna almost absent-mindedly, “but I can’t think who.”

“She’s very
retiring,” said Marjorie. “Sometimes; I wonder if she’s happy.”

We all sat down
on the uncomfortable settees. The florid oil executive was muttering something
to himself about Jesus Christ, and the old lady who had been talking to Miss
Johnson was rummaging around endlessly in her woven handbag, so there didn’t
seem to be an urgent need to socialize with them.

“This jar,” I
said, lighting a cigarette. “Can you remember where Max originally found it?”

Marjorie shook
her head. “I wasn’t with him on every trip. He bought it in Persia, I think,
from a merchant. He used to have everything crated up and sent back to the
United States, and I was quite used to having all these mysterious boxes arrive
from Arabia. If they arrived when he was away, I just stored them until he got
back, I never opened anything. To tell you the truth, I was never awfully
excited by Arabian antiques.”

“Did your late
husband keep a diary when he was in Arabia?” asked Anna. “I mean, do you think
there might be a clue to what the jar was and where he found it?”

“I really don’t
know. He has hundreds of notebooks in his library upstairs. You might discover
something in there.”

“You haven’t
looked yourself?”

“Well, no. When
he was alive, he never allowed me to. And now he’s dead and-well, I have no
desire. I’ll be very glad when the whole thing is forgotten and finished,”

We changed the
subject while Marjorie drank her tea. The trusty Miss Johnson was as
parsimonious with her lapsang-souchong as she was with her sherry, and the tea
came out of the pot the color of unwashed windows. Still, it seemed to revive
Marjorie, and when she had finished and eaten a leftover piece of cake, she
took us up to Max’s study.

The upstairs
rooms of old wooden houses always smell musty and hot on summer days, and
Winter Sails was no exception, even though the skylights were open and the sea
breeze was blowing through the windows. Marjorie led us along the bare, narrow
hallway which ran the whole length of the second floor (as a boy, I used to
scamper up and down that corridor, pretending to be a B-47 bomber on its
landing strip). She unlocked a door on the landward side of the house and
ushered us in.

It smelled of
dusty old papers, ancient typewriter ribbons, and stale tobacco smoke. I
remembered that Max Greaves used to smoke an immense meerschaum pipe with the
face o£ a scowling Arab on it. Books and papers were stacked haphazardly all
the way up the walls of the room, and the desk under the window was covered
with yellowed documents, leather-bound volumes, pencils, maps, Arabic
dictionaries, and God knows what else. The wastebasket was overflowing with
crumpled pieces of paper, and there were piles of Arabic newspapers and
magazines on the floor. I picked one up and saw that every photograph in it had
been clipped out and presumably thrown away.

“Max was never
very tidy,” said Marjorie from the doorway. She stayed outside the study,
obviously with no desire at all to come in.

“Tidy?” I said.
“It looks like he kept his own private tornado.”

“Look at
whatever you want. It’s of no interest to me. Now that Max is gone . . . well.
. .”

Anna put her
arm around Marjorie and gave her a consoling squeeze. “Don’t worry, Marjorie.

We won’t
disturb you at all.”

I started to
shuffle through some of the papers on the desk. There were news clippings and
diaries, old shipping tickets and folders crammed with carboned sheets. I
really didn’t know where to start. Before she left us, Marjorie handed me a
key. I recognized it from my childhood days, because it was always kept hanging
on a hook next to the turret door.

“This is for
the turret when you need it,” said Marjorie. “I’m afraid Max put seals on the
door as well, so you may have trouble getting in. That’s if you’re still
determined to do it.”

“You’d still
prefer us not to?” asked Anna.

“After what
happened to Max, I think the best thing is to destroy the whole place,” said
Marjorie flatly. “I have no curiosity left.”

“All right,”
said Anna. “We’ll try to be discreet.”

Marjorie stood
there for a while, saying nothing. Then she nodded and walked off down the hall
with the heavy tread of someone who has resigned themselves to their
fate-whatever that fate might be. It didn’t do much to bolster my enthusiasm
for probing through Max’s papers, but on the other hand, I felt we owed it to
Marjorie to discover what had happened to him. One day, when she was over the shock,
she would want to know the truth.

Anna began
combing the shelves on either side of the narrow study. Strangely, she seemed
to know just what she was looking for, because she tugged out various papers
and folders with quick and certain confidence. I stopped raking through the
papers on Max’s desk to watch her, and the more I watched her, the more
convinced I was that she was after something specific.

After she found
a box folder full of background material on Persian pots and jars, I sat down
on the edge of the desk and folded ray arms.

Anna looked up.
She held the stack of papers and files against her breasts and smiled
nervously.

“What’s the
matter?” she said. “You look very anxious about something.”

I nodded. “I
am. I’m anxious to know who you are, and what you’re doing here. It suddenly
occurred to me that you know just what you’re up to, yet neither Marjorie nor I
know who you really are. Apart from Just Anna, of course.”

Anna looked at
me seriously, “Would you believe me if I told you? I mean, I didn’t tell you
because you wouldn’t believe me. You’re a very cynical person,”

I sniffed. “I
don’t think my cynicism is anything compared to yours, my dear. You have just
deceived a grieving widow on the day of her late husband’s funeral. If you can
think of anything more cynical than that, I should send it off, if I were you,
and win a prize.”

“Well,” she
said, “if you really want to know, I suppose I’ll tell you.” “I wish you
would.”

“My name is
Anna Modena. I am what they call a consultant in exported antiquities.”

I shook a
cigarette out of my crumpled pack and lit it “That sounds about as legitimate
as

‘
clairvoyant
’ What exactly does a consultant in exported
antiquities do?”

Anna opened the
box file and laid it on the desk. She leafed through the stale old papers
inside and pointed again and again to lists of Arabian antiquities that Max had
brought back from the Middle East

“Max Greaves
took away from Persia and Saudi Arabia and Egypt some of the most valuable and
interesting ceramics, figurines, brasses, and pots that you can imagine. He
collected most of them in the 1930s and 1940s, when the prices of such things
were comparatively low. At that time many black-market traders could be
persuaded to acquire them from museums, from ancient tombs, and even from the
private homes of Arabian collectors. Most of the antiquities that Max Greaves
brought back to the United States-in fact, most of the antiquities that most
collectors bring back to Europe and America-are technically stolen.”

I puffed at my
cigarette placidly. “Go on.”

“Things have
changed now,” she said. “The balance of financial power favors the Arabs rather
than the Europeans or the Americans. So many Middle Eastern countries are
trying to get their priceless antiquities back to restore them to the national
museums and historic sites where they belong. It is my job to help them track
down their missing property and return it to Arabia.”

“I see,” I said
calmly. “So you knew about this jar all along.”

She nodded. “It
is very old and very valuable. It is mentioned in Abdul Hazw’halla’s Book of
Magic, which was supposed to have been written in the fifth century before
Christ; it is also referred to in the legend of Hassan i Sabah. There is a
drawing of it in the Cairo Museum, and even though the drawing is a copy from
the original sketch, the copy itself is more than a thousand years old.”

“You said it
was mentioned in the Book of Magic” I said quietly. “Does that mean it’s
supposed to have magic properties? You said yourself you believed it was magic.”

Anna sighed. “I
don’t know. The jar is mentioned so briefly that it’s impossible to say. But
that’s the implication in the text”

“Magic?”

She opened her
black pocketbook and took out a folded photostat. Without a word, she handed it
to me and I opened it.

It was a
fragment of Arabic text. Since I don’t read Arabic, or even pretend to, it
looked like a march of cup hooks to me. But underneath there was a typewritten
translation.

“Read it,” she
said. “It’s a little flowery but interesting.”

I took a drag
from my cigarette and then I read out loud. “In the latter days of King Hama,
the court magicians, in the style of old, kept by them certain jars, which were
known as jars of the jinni, and mastered the art of the jars, from which
emanations unknown to mortal men were seen. No one knew from whence these jars
came, and no one save the court magicians themselves knew their mystery,
although it was said that they were bound by certain songs and sealed by
certain incantations. The greatest of all the court magicians was Ali Babah,
and his jar of jinni was said to contain the most powerful of all emanations,
though it was never seen to be opened, and Ali Babah himself said that what his
jar of the jinni contained could not be looked upon. The jar of Ali Babah was
decorated with the horses of Nazwah the Unthinkable and the opium flowers of. .
.” I stopped reading and held
the photostat
up. “Is
this a joke?” I said coldly.