There was no doubt in my mind that Erkhard had intervened to get me the necessary visas. But why? The day before he had made it clear that he didn’t intend to help me. And after the way I had cross-examined him I hadn’t expected it. And yet here he was giving me a free ride on a Company plane. I sat on my bed and smoked a cigarette whilst the hot evening breeze blew in through the open window, and the only conclusion I came to was that they had sent my note to Gorde and he had given the necessary instructions. Whatever the reasons, it was a great relief to me and I got up and started to pack.
I had just closed the larger of my two suitcases when there was a knock at the door. It was one of the house-boys to say there was a young Arab asking for me at the desk. ‘It is a boy from the bazaar, sir. From the al-Menza Club.’ And he grinned at me.
I had a wash and then dressed. The boy was still there when I got down quarter of an hour later. He was little more than an urchin and none too clean, and when he realized I didn’t speak Arabic, he seized hold of my wrist, pulling at me and hissing the words al-Menza and girl-want. Girl-want seemed to be the sum total of his English and I told him to go to hell. He understood that for he grinned and shook his head. ‘Girl-spik. Spik, sahib.’
I got hold of the house-boy and then he said the boy had been sent by one of the girls at the al-Menza Club. ‘She wishes to speak with you, sir.’ This time he didn’t grin. And he added with a puzzled frown. ‘It is a personal request. This boy is from the house where she lives.’
I didn’t like it. ‘Tell him No,’ I said and I went over to an empty table and ordered a beer. It took two house-boys and a lot of argument to get rid of the boy. I drank my beer and then went in to dinner, a solitary, dreary meal. I had just finished when the waiter came to tell me a taxi-driver was waiting outside for me. It was Mahommed AH. ‘There is a boy in my taxi,’ he said. ‘Is wishing you to go to the al-Menza to meet a girl.’
‘I’ve already told him I’m not interested.’
‘You should go, sir. She ‘as something to tell you.’
I hesitated. But after all the man was a taxi-driver attached to the hotel. ‘You’ll drive me there, will you?’
‘Okay, sir.’
It wasn’t far to the bazaar area and we finished up in a side street that was barely wide enough for the car. The al-Menza was sandwiched between a cobbler’s shop and a narrow alley, the door guarded by a turbanned Sudanese. I told the driver to wait and the boy took me by the hand and hurried me down the alley and through the black gap of a doorway into a dark passage. He left me there and a moment later footsteps sounded, high-heeled and sharp, and then a girl’s voice, low, with a peculiarly resonant quality, almost husky. ‘Monsieur.’ She took my hand, her fingers hard, not caressing. ‘Through ‘ere, pleez.’
A door was pushed open and there were soft lights and the faint beat of Western music, a jive record playing somewhere in the building. A beaded curtain rattled back and we were in a little room no bigger than a cell. The floor was bare earth with a rug and a few cushions. A naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling showed me my companion.
I don’t know quite how to describe that girl. She certainly wasn’t beautiful, though I suppose that is a matter of taste, for she was obviously Arab; Arab mixed with something else — European, I thought, with a touch of the real African. She stood very straight with a lithe, almost animal grace. She was the sort of girl you could picture at the well drawing water and striding across the sand with a pitcher on her head. She was that, and she was the other sort, too — the husky voice; dropped a shade it would be totally erotic, a vicious invitation. No point in dramatizing; she was just a Middle Eastern tart, but I’d never met one before and it made an impression.
We sat cross-legged on the cushions, facing each other.
She wore a queer sort of dress and I had a feeling that at the touch of a secret button she’d come gliding out of it like a butterfly out of a chrysalis. Her hands were pressed tight together and she leaned forward, her eyes, her lips devoid of invitation, hard almost and urgent. ‘You know why I ask you to come ‘ere?’
I shook my head.
‘You do not guess?’ There was the ghost of a smile on her half-open lips. But when I said, ‘No,’ she snapped them shut. ‘If you are not the man,’ she blazed; ‘if you ‘ave come ‘ere because it is the sort of place-’ At that moment she didn’t look at all nice. ‘All right,’ she said, biting on her teeth. ‘You tell me now — is it because of David you come to Bahrain or not?’
David! I stared at her, beginning to understand. ‘Did David come here then?’
‘Of course. He was an oilman and this place is for oilmen. They ‘ave the same devil in them as other men where the sun is ‘ot — but David was nice, a vair nice boy.’ She smiled then and the hardness went out of her face leaving it for a moment like a picture of Madonna-with-child, despite the slightly flattened nose, the thickened lips. It was a queer face, changeable as a child’s. ‘How did you know I was here on account of David Whitaker?’ I asked her. ‘It is David Whitaker you’re talking about?’
She nodded. ‘One of them from the GODCO Office is ‘ere las’ night. He tol’ me about you.’ She didn’t say anything after that, but sat staring at me with her big, dark eyes as though trying to make up her mind about me. ‘You like some coffee?’ she asked at length.
‘Please.’ I needed time, and I think she’d guessed that. She was gone only a few moments, but it gave me a chance to collect myself and to realize that she was perhaps the one person in Bahrain who could tell me what sort of a man David had become in the four years since I’d seen him. She put the coffee down between us, two small cups, black and sweet. I gave her a cigarette and sat smoking and drinking my coffee, waiting for her to start talking. I had that much sense. If I’d rushed her she’d have closed up on me.
‘Have you seen his sister?’ she asked finally.
‘Not yet.’ It wasn’t the question I’d expected.
‘But you ‘ave ‘card from her, no? Does she think he is dead?’
I sat there, quite still, staring at her. ‘What else could she think?’ I said quietly.
‘And you? Do you think he is dead?’
I hesitated, wondering what it was leading up to. ‘His truck was found abandoned in the desert. There was a ground and air search.’ I left it at that.
‘I ask you whether you think he is dead?’
‘What else am I supposed to think?’
‘I don’t know.‘She shook her head. ‘I jus’ don’ know. He is not the sort of boy to die. He believes too much, want too much of life.’
‘What, for instance?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘I don’ know what he want. Is a vair strange boy, David. He have moods; sometimes he sit for hours without saying nothing, without moving even. At such times he have a great sense of-of tranquillite. You understand? I have know him sit all night, cross-legged and in silence without moving almost a muscle. At other times he talk and the words pour out of him and his eyes shine like there is a fever in him.’
‘What did he talk about?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘So many words. I don’ understand half of what he say. About the desert mostly, and the Bedou. Water, too; he loved water — much more than oil, I think. And the falajes; he often talk about the falajes and about Saraifa — how the desert is moving into the oasis.’
I asked her what the word falaj meant, but she couldn’t explain it. ‘Is something to do with water; tunnels I think under the ground because he say it is vair hot there, like in a Turkish bath, an’ there are fishes. And when you look up you can see the stars.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t know what it is, but he say once it is like the wind-towers at Dubai — something brought from Persia. But I have never seen the wind-towers at Dubai,’ she added.