Wanda Gothar turned around in the seat so that she could face Padillo. “For the last ten minutes I’ve been asking you questions and you haven’t had any answers. You don’t know why Kassim and Scales vanished. You don’t know where they might have gone. You don’t even know how they managed to slip by you.”
“Fog,” I said. “A pair of elephants could have slipped by.”
“They weren’t elephants,” she snapped. “They were two men who’re none too smart and not nearly clever. Something frightened them or forced them into flight and it’s good that it did because otherwise they’d be dead. What’s the matter with you, Padillo? Are you so preoccupied with revenging that dead woman in New York that you can’t keep your mind on the job at hand?”
“I made a mistake, Wanda. Let’s leave it at that.” I couldn’t see his face, but I was sure that I knew what it looked like—stiff and drawn with his mouth stretched into that thin, hard line.
“We’d better find them,” she said.
“It’s a big town,” I said. “By now they could be in Berkeley or Sausalito or even Oakland, although God knows why anyone would go there. I don’t mind spending the night looking, but if I do, I want to know that I’m at least warm if not red-hot.”
“We’ve only got one lead so let’s try it,” Padillo said.
“The Washington phone number?” Wanda asked.
“If we have any other lead, nobody’s told me about it.”
After I let Wanda and Padillo out in front of the St. Francis, I put the car in the underground lot beneath Union Square and joined them in Wanda’s suite. Padillo tossed me a key. “You’ve got a new room,” he said.
“What about the name?”
“It’s your old one. We’re no longer hiding.”
“Did you call the Washington number?”
“Not yet.” He turned to Wanda. “You want to call or do you want me to?”
“You call,” she said. “It’s your lead.”
The phone permitted direct dialing so Padillo got outside and then dialed the ten numbers. We all listened while the phone rang. The room was quiet and I could hear the voice that answered in Washington, but I couldn’t hear what it said. But it said the same thing twice and then Padillo slowly hung up the phone.
“It was the Llaquah Embassy,” he said.
There was a silence that grew until I diplomatically broke it with, “I think I’ll have a drink on that.”
Wanda Gothar nodded and went into the bedroom, reappearing with three drinks on a small tray. Padillo accepted his and moved over to the window which offered a good view of the fog. I sat on the green and white striped sofa. Wanda was in a club chair with her hand that held the drink resting on its arm. Her head was back and her eyes were closed. No one seemed to have anything to say.
After several minutes of silence Padillo turned from the window, his face expressionless.
“As a lead, how good is it?” Wanda asked, not opening her eyes.
“It might narrow the search,” he said.
She opened her eyes. “How?”
Padillo turned to me. “Has San Francisco got an Arab quarter or section or neighborhood?”
“I don’t remember, if I ever knew, but I can find out.” I moved over to the phone and asked for information. “There’s a guy I used to know with UPI.”
“If that intuitive leap of yours is correct, Padillo,” she said, “it may tell us where they’ve gone, but not why.”
He turned back to the window. “There’s a possibility that I know that, too,” he said.
“But you’re going to keep it to yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s still just a possibility.”
There were a lot of representatives of what has been called the Arab world in San Francisco. There were Algerians and Egyptians and a large number of Syrians and Jordanians. There were a few Tunisians, I learned, and some Saudi Arabians.
“What about Armenians?” the man from UPI asked. “We’ve got a lot of Armenians.”
“I’d say that they’re geographically unacceptable.”
“Saroyan’s an Armenian,” he said, trying to be helpful.
“I thought there might be a section or a neighborhood where they congregated.”
“Not really,” he said. “They’re all sort of scattered around.”
“Do you know of any from Llaquah?”
“Where the hell’s Llaquah?”
“Not too far from Kuwait.”
“What do you call somebody from Llaquah?”
“A Llaquahian,” I said. “It rhymes with Hawaiian.”
“Well, I don’t know of any Llaquahians, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some. If you really want to find out, there’s a restaurant that a lot of the Middle East types hang out in.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Arabian Knight. That’s knight with a k.”
“I was afraid of that.”
We hung up after promising each other that we’d get together for a drink before I went back to Washington. Both of us knew that we wouldn’t.
The Arabian Knight restaurant was near Eighteenth and Querrero Streets in the Mission District and I remembered it as an area of German bakeries, Greek and Italian restaurants, a couple of Russian bars, and a sizable number of people who claimed to be from Malta. Now there was a rash of Se Habla Español signs in the shop windows so I assumed that a lot of persons of Spanish descent had moved back into the area which was named for the Misión San Francisco de Asís, founded five days before a group of malcontents in Philadelphia got around to issuing their Declaration of Independence.
Despite its name, San Francisco has about as much Spanish flavor as a bagel. Although widely admired for its high suicide rate, its nicely rising incidence of alcoholism, its occasional riot, and its cosmopolitan atmosphere, the city hasn’t done much about promoting its Spanish heritage. No doubt it will as soon as somebody figures out how it can bring a fast dollar.
We parked the car and walked back to the Arabian Knight which occupied the lower half of a two-story building whose front someone had gussied up with Permastone. Inside it was smoky and dark and crowded. There was a long bar, a row of high-backed booths, and some tables covered with red and white checkered oilcloth which helped cut down on the laundry bill.
The door to the kitchen was open and either customers or waiters wandered in and out. I couldn’t tell the difference. A jukebox blared out some Mideast music, marching songs for all I knew. There were only a few women in the place. The male customers sat in the booths or at tables in groups of three and four, drinking coffee and arrack and beer, their faces only a few inches apart, shouting at each other over the noise of the jukebox, probably conspiring against Israel.
A swarthy, slim man of about thirty who wore a white shirt and a narrow black tie came up to us and yelled to determine whether we wanted a booth or a table. Padillo yelled booth and we were led back to one which was close enough to the kitchen for us to hear the cooks arguing with the waiters.
The waiter handed Padillo a menu and Padillo handed it back, saying that we only wanted drinks—arrack for the three of us. The waiter nodded, left, and when he returned, Padillo asked if the owner was around. The waiter nodded again, pointed to the last booth, bent down, and yelled “Dr. Asfourh!” Padillo brought out a card, the one which said only, “Michael Padillo, Washington, D.C.,” and handed it to the waiter, and asked him to find out whether Dr. Asfourh could spare us a few moments. In private. The waiter looked dubious, but went away, came back, and screamed that Dr. Asfourh would see us in his office upstairs in ten minutes. It came out in a short series of screams really. “Dr. Asfourh—upstairs—he see you—ten minutes.” He held up all of his fingers to make sure that we got it straight.