• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 937 0

the situation seem less serious than it was. I would have been ready to believe that Tadeusz had just wandered away and lost his bearings. That would have been serious enough, but after all there seemed to be hundreds of people about the palace, so a search party would have been easy to organize. Almost anyone else would have thought it merciful to lie to me. But Paul told me the truth, and told it at once. We met in a small courtyard; it was a hanging garden, really, with vines and shrubs growing up the walls and over the top. There was a fountain—a fountain in that desert! It had some sort of an American device that circulated the same few liters of water forever. The American ambassador had given several of these pumps to the Amir, who quite adored them. It was a cool place. I went there every day, to read and exercise. We never saw the boys, you realize. It was a strict Muslim household where the sexes came together only for breeding purposes.

So I was a little surprised to see Paul, but very glad. I felt close to him. He is a sympathetic type, you know, and strictly speaking he saved my life at least twice in the space of a couple of weeks. As you seem to be interested in such things I may as well tell you that I was madly signaling to him that he was welcome to climb in the window whenever he wanted. I realize that I am not coming to the point very quickly. You must forgive me. I have a tendency to cry when I tell this story. I want to give you the facts as coldly as possible.

Very well. Paul comes into the garden. It must have been very early afternoon. The sun was overhead and strong. The floor of the courtyard was dappled with shadow. Shafts of sunlight, perpendicular columns of white sunlight. Paul walked through these, out of the shadow, into the light. It was a very theatrical effect. He sits down beside me. With no preliminaries—not even speaking my name in a tone of voice that might have warned me—Paul told me. Tadeusz was missing in the desert. Kalash thought he might have been abducted. No trace had yet been found of him. There had been talk about organizing a search party. The Amir had forbidden it. If Tadeusz had been kidnapped, we would hear from the bandits when they demanded a ransom. To approach the kidnappers now, with the threat of force, would create the risk that Tadeusz might be killed.

I just stared at him. What was he telling me? Paul’s face was serious but not worried. He was watching my reaction very closely. I thought, Ah ha! He expects me to get hysterical. I said, “What do you think of his chances?” Paul said, “I don’t know. Kalash says there’s no possibility that your brother is merely lost. He’s sure someone grabbed him. If he was taken by friends of the people we shot a few days ago, obviously his chances are almost nonexistent. But maybe not. I would think that men wanting revenge would simply have killed him where they found him. The other possibility is kidnap and ransom. Kalash tells me the local kidnappers are pretty honorable—if you pay, they give back the victim unharmed. It’s a matter of business ethics. So we can wait and pay if the second possibility is the one we believe in.

I asked him how much the ransom was likely to be. Looking back, it seems insane, this conversation between Paul and me. For all we knew my brother lay dead out there somewhere—perhaps having been tortured—and we sat in a garden by a splashing fountain and discussed price. The fountain smelled of chlorine, by the way. The chemical smell of it made me angry: these damned Arabs with their American fountains, their Cadillacs, their pet lions, their harem filled with children. You know what it was. Subconsciously I was blaming Kalash for everything that happened. He was so supremely indifferent to other people, to life itself. Now he had done this to Tadeusz. To Paul I said, “How much do you think they’ll want?”

“The Amir says that they usually demand only a modest sum. What he considers a modest sum I don’t really know. Kalash guesses it would be a thousand pounds.”

I had a good deal more than that in