“And that was the last you heard from him?” I had added.
“Right, Nick,” Hawk went on. “He never made the next usual contact with us. He just vanished. Our tries at contacting him have all failed. I smell something has gone wrong. These old bones are creaking and that means trouble.”
I had passed over the old bones bit. Hawk was one of the ageless ones. The “old bones” was a euphemism for one of the canniest noses for trouble on the planet Earth. Over and over I’d been involved in that personal sonar system he operated for AXE.
“That part of the world has been amazingly quiet for us,” he had said. “Oh, the Israelis and the Arabs have been erupting on the other side of Africa and we know the Russians are all over, trying to stir up things, but Northwest Africa has been quiet. Morocco has almost been a Moslem Switzerland, a meeting place, a neutral area. In fact, the entire Mediterranean basin has been kept relatively quiet. And now, this. I don’t like the feel of it.”
Hawk’s face faded away, and I thought of the task before me. Find the man Karminian, if he could be found. Maybe he was in hiding. Maybe he was dead. If I couldn’t find him, try to find out what it was he had come onto and contacted Hawk about. A series of closed doors in a vacuum. A pursuit of questions wrapped up in a man known only by name.
I had reached the outskirts of the city, sauntering with a certain nonchalance. I walked down the Boulevard Moulay Abderhaman, past the port, the waterfront with its rows and rows of ships nudging each other in careless profusion. Tankers, freighters, passenger liners, ships from every land in the world, the spanking clean, newly painted ones and the rusted old veterans of a million pounding waves.
The waterfront, like all waterfronts everywhere, was a mountainous series of boxes, crates, barrels and bales. Casablanca, Dar-el Beida in Arabic. It was the Portuguese who had originally given the city its name of the White House in the 16th century, and I noted that the medina, the Arab quarter, that crowded, teeming, swarming mass of humanity, edged the harbor itself. I smiled inwardly as I wagered that a helluva lot of cargo quietly found its way into the bustling souks of the medina.
I turned from the waterfront to cross over the boulevard, down the Place Mohammed V to the Rue Quedj where, I’d been briefed, Karminian had his store. I found the place quickly enough, shuttered and locked. Going to the back, in a small areaway, I found a side doorway. Putting down my paint box, I tried the door. It held but moved slightly. The lock was a simple one and I had it open in minutes.
The store itself was cluttered with the vases, statuary, paintings and bric-a-brac of an importer of objets d’art. The place had the musty odor of a small area that has been closed for at least a week. It revealed nothing and I left the same way I’d entered, locking the door behind me.
We knew he had an apartment not far away, and it was my next stop. The building was a second-floor walk-up, an old, narrow place with the usual arched doorway.
The door to his apartment swung open gently as I knocked. I entered, carefully, and immediately saw the place had been ransacked. Clothes were pulled out all over, personal items scattered around, furniture overturned, dresser drawers emptied onto the floor.
I roamed through the three small rooms that made up the apartment. From the living room, one window looked down on the street. It seemed that I was not the only one looking for Karminian. But then, I had to remind myself, this mess could have been the result of an ordinary garden-variety robbery. It just could have been but I didn’t buy it.
My own sixth sense told me differently and what I saw told me something else. If Karminian had left to go into hiding he had done so very quickly and taken almost none of his clothes.
Examining the lock, I saw that it hadn’t been broken but only slipped. I closed the door and sat down, pushing aside a bundle of sheets, and thought about my next move. My decision was made for me by two items I found. One, lying on the floor beside an overturned dresser drawer, was a small address book. Inside there were only a few names, most of them other importers or buyers. But there was one name, “Athena,” and a phone number alongside it. I made a mental note of both.
Then, beside an ash tray a book of matches leaped out at me. “The Club Bedouin,” they announced. “25 Rue du Kassim.” I opened the matches and read the announcement on the inside cover. “Athena the Exotic,” it read. “The Belle of Athens.”
I left my paint box in the apartment, slipping two tubes of paint into my pocket, and headed for the Club Bedouin. I was much too early for the evening’s festivities but I did get to talk with the bartender. He was helpful, confirming that Karminian was a frequent visitor at the club and a constant escort of Athena, the exotic dancer. Karminian, he said, was an extrovert, a gregarious sort. I told him I’d be back to see Athena and I wandered back to Karminian’s apartment.
A thought was forming in my mind and I was warming to the idea fast. Instead of holing up in some hotel, why not stay at Karminian’s apartment, I asked myself. With time to really go over the place, I might turn up some even better leads. And, even more intriguing, something could turn up of its own.
Making a fast decision, I spent the rest of the afternoon straightening up the place. By the time I was ready to return to the Club Bedouin, I had the place looking quite neat and presentable.
While the Club Bedouin wasn’t exactly a dive, it wasn’t very far from it. But I slipped on a necktie as a concession to their desire for dignity. I got a spot at the head of the bar with a good view of the small stage. I waited through two singers and a miserable magician whose best trick was to make himself disappear at the end of his act.
Then Athena came on in the usual swirl of veils that only partly hid a jeweled bra and sequinned panties. In the changing lights it was hard to really get a good look at her, and the heavy makeup didn’t help much. But, as she started to shed veils it was plain that she had a firm, youthful body, a little too short-waisted to be really graceful, but with beautiful, round, high breasts.
I’d seen exotic dancers all over the world. The good belly dancers, when they weren’t using their fancy name, had a natural sinuousness, a native grace. The rest all worked at it and never did more than that.
Athena, I quickly decided, was one of the latter. She did everything they all do, the sensuous posturings, the hip-shaking, the belly thrusting, the slidings, the simulated orgasms, all of it. But in my book she got A for effort and that was it. The natural ones established their claim within minutes. The others only established that they were imitators, some better than others, but still imitators.
But the crowd at the Club Bedouin were far from connoisseurs, and they drank in Athena’s performance. Finally, sweating hard, and down to only bra and panties, she ended her dance and disappeared through a small door at the back of the stage. I left my drink, followed along the walls of the club and arrived backstage.
Backstage was a dingy, dreary hallway with an open door leading out into a back alley and a closed door off to the right. I knocked politely at the closed door and waited. In a few moments it was opened and Athena peered through the crack, suspiciously, cautiously. She was still in costume, but she had doffed the false eyelashes. Without them, and close up, she looked much younger and less the femme fatale, her eyes a soft blue.