One girl he took to his apartment frequently, the other he never brought there.
According to Fatasha in the medina he was a regular patron of far-out sexual pleasures, a connoisseur of the erotic.
To the barkeep at the Chez Caliph he was hardly ever seen with women.
And one more fascinating item kept rolling around in my head. Karminian had been an AXE contact man for years but the Russians were here, trying as desperately as I was to find him. Of course, this could be because they’d found out he had something on them but somehow, in the back of my mind, that didn’t seem to hold water.
I went over the list quickly again and once more told myself that these were more than just contradictions.
Of course, I’d known people who were split personalities, contradictions within themselves. Such people were indeed studies in contrasts, their surface traits often directly opposed to each other.
Karminian could have been one such person. Or, he might have deliberately given himself two totally different personalities, one for Marina and one for Aggie. But right there is where I had to stop, where I couldn’t take it any further.
A man could, for his own reasons, give himself two faces for different people. He could actually have a personality split very deeply but even a split personality only splits so far. If the guy were really a devotee of weird and wild sex, as both ben Kashan and Fatasha testified, I’d be damned if I could see him sitting around with something like Marina and holding her hand. It just didn’t add up. And, conversely, if he was an ascetic, a strange duck who took his sex intellectually, vicariously, then I couldn’t see him inside Fatasha’s house of pleasure.
I just couldn’t see anybody’s split personality splitting that far. And yet, I had to admit that the sonofabitch seemed to have done it. It was my assignment to find him, or find out what had happened to him. But it had become more than an assignment.
Karminian had become a minor obsession with me. The man had become a figure of fascination and, in a way, admiration. He was leading two lives and doing the damnedest job at it too.
As I reached the medina, I put aside all thoughts of how he did it or why he did it.
Even at night, the Arab quarter was a busy, hustling place but in the dark it took on an added dimension.
The narrow, twisting, cobbled streets looked ominous, each of them, and the small, yellow lamps on the outsides of the houses added an eerie, shadowy glow to the place. The cry of the muezzin had given way to the soft, sensuous sounds of reed instruments, and, here and there, a prostitute’s voice raised in a strange sing-song cry, not quite a call and not quite a song.
I passed the small shops, now closed and shuttered, their gifts put away for the night. I rounded the corner of a winding street that led to the old stable where I’d met Rashid and halted abruptly. Rashid had company.
Five horses were tethered outside the house, five pure-blooded Arabian stallions, unmistakable to anyone who knew horses by the sturdy, broad back, the high tail and large upper head with the added brain capacity, the slight bulge over the forehead called the jibbah by the Arabs.
I decided to circle around to the side of the house where a small, arched window beckoned invitingly some three feet over my head. I glanced around the narrow passageway and saw I was alone. I leaped, got a hold on the ledge and pulled myself up.
The window was open and I moved silently into what once must have been a grain or oats storage room. Four narrow crossbeams ran from the wall with the window across to the opposite wall where the door to the adjoining room stood open, the light streaming into the dark storage room.
I heard the sound of voices from the adjoining room, voices raised in angry urgency.
One of the narrow beams, the nearest one to me, ran to the top of the doorway. I edged my way out on it, keeping a precarious balance, inching my way across the narrow piece of wood. It was slow going, and I took a few painful slivers of dry wood in the belly, stopping each time to pull them out.
Finally I reached the end of the beam where it met the wooden lintel across the open door. The lintel had a small, curved space above it and through it I peered down at a room where the five Rifs stood around a small table with Rashid.
A sixth man, his back to me, wore trousers, a shirt and a small, high peaked cap. The others were all wearing their djellabas and, like Rashid, decked out in cartridge belts, pistols and the curved Moorish daggers.
The Rifs, I knew, spoke a Berber dialect called tarrafit and I thanked the Lord they weren’t using it. They were speaking French, a choice dictated by the presence of the sixth man in western clothes, I presumed. One of the Rifs, taller than the others, was arguing with Rashid, whose piercing eyes were glittering in anger.
“Karminian is dead,” Rashid was saying. “I killed him myself, I tell you.”
I almost lost my balance at that one. It appeared I had at least some of my answers at last.
“Then why do so many seek him?” the tall Rif asked. “They do not think him dead.”
“They do not know it,” Rashid argued. “But they will not find him. He is done with.”
“So you say, my brother,” the tall Rif answered. “But El Ahmid knows that if the jackals stir up enough dust, the vultures will be attracted. We cannot take chances, not now.”
The sixth man spoke.
I wished I could get a look at his face.
“Indeed we cannot,” he agreed. “Things have been put in motion. It is too late to stop now or to have something go wrong now. My people would be terribly upset if something went wrong now.”
“Nothing will go wrong,” the tall one answered. “It is a long ride from the Casbah at Tangiers but we have come here to eliminate the jackals. They will join the one they seek, each one of them. That way we will be rid of them all, and there’ll be no more questions and attempts to find Karminian.”
He turned to Rashid. “You do not argue the wisdom of El Ahmid’s decision, I hope,” the tall one said. “I can tell him of your cooperation?”
“Of course, of course,” Rashid complied quickly. “There is this girl, the dancer, and the artist who seeks Karminian. Then there are the four Russians who also look for him.”
“We will take the whole list from you,” the tall one said. “As you know, those I have brought are specialists in our task.”
The five killers from the Casbah would, I could see, go about their business with ruthless efficiency.
I was wondering how much Rashid actually knew. Obviously, I was on the list. So was Aggie, but he hadn’t mentioned Marina. Perhaps only because he hadn’t gotten around to her yet.
I was just starting to inch my way backward along the narrow beam when it decided to give up. It did so with only a sudden sharp crack as a warning. I only had time to leap forward, seize the crossbar of the lintel and hang there. The beam tore loose at the end and crashed down with the sound of splintering wood.
The Rifs came racing into the dark of the storage room. Hanging on with both hands, I couldn’t reach either Hugo or Wilhelmina.
They were in a cluster just below me, looking at the fallen beam in the cloud of dust. It would be only seconds and they’d turn their faces up and see the figure hanging there.
I did notice that the sixth man in western dress was not among them. He’d taken off, apparently, and I was sure it wasn’t because he was naturally shy.
There wasn’t much choice left to me so I decided to get the advantage of surprise, at least. I let go, dropping straight down atop the small, robed cluster. I felt my feet take out one of them, landing hard on his head. The fall sent me sprawling and tumbling onto the others and I went down in a welter of robes and flying djellabas.