The Djinn (5 page)

Anna shrugged.
“Do you think it is?”

I flicked the
paper with my fingertips. “Ali Babah? What about the forty thieves-or did you
leave the other thirty-nine at home?”

Anna took
the photostat
back. “That’s unfair,” she said. “I’m employed
by the Iranian Department of Culture to do a perfectly legitimate job. I’m
returning stolen property, not housebreaking. Anyway, if you were that much of
a mystic or clairvoyant or whatever you call yourself, you’d know that Ali
Babah is mentioned in nearly all of the
old
Persian
magical books.

He was one of
the most notorious black magicians in the whole Middle East.”

“You mean, this is for real?
You’re trying to tell me it’s
true?”

She snapped her
pocketbook shut. “I wouldn’t have made the effort to come here if it weren’t,”

she
said. “As far as I can make out, Max Greaves somehow
procured the original jar of jinni and shipped it back to America. You can see
from the description that it’s the same jar.”

“A similar jar.
How many jars have horses and flowers on
them?”

“Thousands, I
expect. But the horses of Nazwah the Unthinkable were very special. If you saw
that jar as a child, you’ll probably remember that they had no eyes.”

I crushed out
my cigarette and blew out the last mouthful of smoke. “Very well, they have no
eyes. But for all I know, there are stacks of jars with pictures of eyeless
horses on them. How do you know that this is the right one?”

Anna lowered
her head. “I don’t know. Not for certain. Not until I see it, anyway. But I
admit that I’m worried.”

“What about?
You think that Marjorie will take offense to
what you’ve done and kick you out?

You have to
admit you deserve it.”

“No, I’m not
worried about that I know she’ll understand when I tell her. What really
worries me is what happens if it is the original jar.”

“Anna,” I said.
“You’re trying to tell me that this jar is something special. I mean, what you’re
trying to say is that it’s magic. Is that it?”

“Yes, that’s
exactly what I’m saying.”

“But how can
you-”

“Do you know
what jinni means?” she said hotly. “Have you any idea what jinni are?”

I shook my
head. Most people have this wonderful knack for making me feel ignorant

“Jinni,” she
said, “are more popularly known as genies. You remember Alladin and his
Wonderful Lamp? You remember all the stories of genies trapped in bottles?
Jinni were
the demons of Arabia, the powerful spirits of the
elements. There
were jinni
in the rocks, in the water,
in the skies, in every part of ancient life. Some were capricious and some were
not, but in those days it didn’t matter so much. The hierarchy of Arabian
magicians had learned how to control and punish jinni by spells and sorcerous
riddles. The worst thing you could ever do to jinni was to take away their
freedom and seal them in some enclosed space-like a lamp, or a jar, or a
bottle. That’s why you have all those stories about people letting jinni out of
bottles and the jinni being eternally grateful and promising to be their slaves
forever. That, unfortunately, was a fantasy.”

I scratched my
ear. “Like everything else you’ve told me?”

Anna turned
away. “I can’t make you believe me. I can only tell you what these stories are,
and that I’ve come across many Iranians who believe they’re true. Just because
all this happened a long time ago doesn’t make it a fantasy.”

“All right,” I
said.
“Supposing it isn’t a fantasy.
What is so
worrisome about our particular jar?

Apart from what
happened to Max Greaves, of course, and I don’t really see the connection.”

“I don’t know,”
said Anna. “That’s what I wanted to find out before we tried to approach it or
open it. Forewarned is forearmed, isn’t it?”

“But how can
anyone know what genies really did, if they ever existed? It says in that piece
from the Book of Magic that the court magicians kept the jars ‘in the style of
old’ and that was written five centuries B.C. I mean, we’re not going to find
anyone who remembers how it was back in the bad old days of genies.”

“We have the
fairy stories and so on. We also have several occult Arabian books.”

“And what do
they tell us?”

“Not a lot. But
they do say that the jinni, once released from their confinement, were usually
angry and vengeful and almost impossible to control. Ali Babah’s
jinn was
supposed to be the most powerful of all jinni, so I
guess he was something to be reckoned with.
The H-bomb of his
day.”

“Nothing else?”
I asked her.

“Yes,” she
said, “There is something else.
Something important.”

“I’m going to
need convincing.”

She shrugged,
as if she didn’t care if I believed her or not “Jinni would do anything,” she
explained, “to coax people to let them out of their prisons-their bottles or
lamps or whatever.

Often, when the
magicians died, their jars of jinni would fall into the hands of people who
didn’t know what -they were, and the jinni would exert tremendous magical
influence on the owners of these jars to set them free. Of course, once the
stopper was out
..”

She opened her
pocketbook again, searched for a moment,
then
handed
me a clipping from the London Daily Telegraph, dated April 26, 1951. It was
headed “Tomb Thieves Suffer Whirlwind Justice.”

It read: “Three
Persian tomb robbers, escaping with ancient glassware and pottery valued at
over $500,000, were all killed by a freak whirlwind which engulfed their jeep.
Eyewitnesses said that the robbers unaccountably took an extremely rough
mountainside road, which smashed several of their stolen jars and plates.
Almost immediately, they were tossed into the air by an instantaneous
whirlwind, one of them up to a height of more than thirty feet
The
whirlwind died away as abruptly as it had begun, and the
men dropped to the ground. All died of severe injuries in the hospital.”

I passed the
clipping back. “It’s interesting, sure,” I told her. “But it doesn’t prove
anything.”

She sighed.
“Nothing, Harry Erskine, proves anything. This is pure theory, and I’m not
pretending it’s anything else. But I wish you’d at least try to keep an open
mind.”

“All right.
Three bandits get caught in a whirlwind. I’m
open-minded.”

“I don’t expect
you to take all this for gospel, not on the face of it,” said Anna. “I’m just
suggesting a little caution, in case there is something about the jar that we
ought to be cautious about. I know the stories about the jinni are ancient, and
they may not be literally true. But the idea of the jinni may be an ancient way
of expressing a fear about something else.
A disease or an
explosion.
I don’t know. I personally believe in magical influences, but
even if you don’t, you ought to take care. People don’t issue warnings for
2,000 years without some good reason. And apart from that, the Arabs in the
Sahara have a name for whirlwinds.”

“Enlighten me.”

“They call them
djinns, or genies, or whatever way you like to pronounce it
They
believe that whirlwinds are evil spirits, dancing in the wind.”

I nodded. “All
right
The
whole thing seems kind of far-fetched, but
if it makes you feel any better, we’ll proceed with caution. The last thing I
want to do is
get
caught up in some freak whirlwind.”

Anna pulled
across an old Windsor chair and sat down with the box file on her rather
shapely knees.

“Since we can
at least agree on that,” she said, “let’s go through whatever we’ve got here
and see if we can learn some more about the jar.”

“All right,’ I
said. “I’ll have a look through these diaries on the desk. Do you have any idea
at all when this jar came into the States? It might help me find the right
diary.”

She was
thumbing through a closely typed report on some Egyptian ceramics. “Around 1948
or 1949, I think,” she said. “It was here when you were a kid, wasn’t it? So
think back to the first time you ever saw it.”

I picked up a
pile of glossy black diaries held together with rubberbands, “I’m only
thirty-three,”

I told her.
“Don’t expect the memoirs of Elizabeth Jane Portman.”

The diaries
went back to 1954. I took a quick look through them, but they were mostly
routine and uninteresting: “Took dogs for walk . . . had lunch with Binney . .
. rough weather today . . .

went
for stroll on beach . . . English muffins for tea.”
Hardly the stuff that great biographies are made of.

I heaved a pile
of Arabic papers across to the other side of the desk to see if there were any
more diaries around, and tucked beneath them, I saw Max Greaves’ old meerschaum
pipe, its stem well-chewed and its bowl stained with tobacco. I lifted it up,
turned it around, and got a cold shock that hit me like a wet towel. The face
that was carved on the front, the snarling Arab that had delighted me so much
as a
boy,
had been knocked clean off. Where the face
once was, there was nothing but a broken flat edge. I stared at the pipe for a
while,
then
I said, “Anna.”

“Yes?” She was
engrossed in some bills of lading from Port Said.

“Anna, look at
this.” I held out the pipe.

“What about
it?”

“There used to
be a face on here.
A carved face, of an Arab, kind of
grimacing.
Someone’s knocked it off.”

Anna peered at
the pipe. “Perhaps Max Greaves did it He seemed to have a thing about portraits
and pictures.”

“Anna,” I said
patiently, “he used to love this pipe. He would never do a thing like that. And
you don’t break a pipe like this by accident. Not this way.”

Anna stopped
reading, “I wonder
. ..
”

“What do you
wonder?”

“I wonder if
there’s more to this business about portraits and pictures than we thought. I
wonder if it’s got something to do with the jar.”

I laid the pipe
down. “That doesn’t make sense. It was more like a phobia. That painter used to
have the same kind of thing. What was his name?
Goya, the
Spanish painter.
He used to worry that his paintings were coming to
life. Maybe Max went a little screwy and thought his portraits were coining to
life.”

Anna shrugged.
“Marjorie swore that he wasn’t. Screwy, I mean. But he did kill himself, didn’t
he?”

I poked through
some more papers on the desk, “More precisely, he cut his face off. Just like
this pipe. Just like cutting out all these pictures in these newspapers. Just
like taking the portraits off the walls downstairs. Whatever went wrong, Max
Greaves didn’t want a single face in the whole place. Not even
his own
.”

“Try to find
some more recent diaries,” Anna suggested. “Maybe there’s something in there.”

I shifted some
more papers and discovered some more notebooks bound with elastic bands. I
ended up combing through all of them, looking for anything that might give us a
clue to what had happened to Max Greaves or explain the origins of his Arabian
jar. Anna-being more expert than I was-leafed through the official certificates
of export and shipment receipts.

The diaries
seemed to be filled with the usual day-to-day jottings: “Went to Provincetown
for lunch with J; quiet day v. foggy.” But when I was halfway through his
notebook for 1959; I came across an unusually long and closely written entry.
It filled two pages, and parts of it were heavily crossed out and rewritten. It
looked like the writing of a man who has suddenly decided to unburden his fears
and hopes-emphatic and square in some passages, uncertain and tenuous in
others. It almost looked as if it had been written by two different people. I
read it silently to myself:

“This is not
the first time I have been concerned about it. I often wonder if I should have
left it behind. I suppose it is something of a challenge to a collector like
myself
, but on the other hand, it does require a certain
knowledge to deal with such things. The old P. was absolutely right when he
said that it had a resonance all its own. Lately it has sounded like more than
that, and I confess I am tempted to see what’s inside, no matter what they said
about not looking and all those cautions. I don’t quite understand how
something like this could still have any influence after all these years, but I
find myself thinking about it more and more often, and considering whether I
ought to pry open the seal and see what’s what. In some ways it is quite
depressing, and I feel a sort of malaise coming over me whenever I look at it.
I don’t know how I can explain it to Marge, because she obviously thinks of it
as ornament and nothing else. Should I tell her? It seems so ridic.
somehow
, and maybe it’s just old age coming on.”

I passed the
diary to Anna, and after she read it, she said, “That’s the jar all right. He
knew what it was, and he was worried about it. Back in 1959, he was worried
about it. He even knew what it was when he first bought it”

“How can you
tell that?”

She pointed to
the diary with her long, red-painted nail.
“ ‘The
old
P.’ could have been the old Persian. And look here-’no matter what they said
about not looking.’ Whoever ‘they’ were, they were obviously the people he
bought it from.”

“Well,” I said
reluctantly, “I’d have to agree with you there.”

“There’s
something else that ties up,” she said, producing the folded photostat again.
“This bit about “Ali Babah himself said that what his jar of jinni contained
could not be looked upon.’