Volterra wore a battered field jacket. Paramilitary drab had always been his color, I realized. He had about two weeks' growth on his face and looked crafty and drawn. We embraced silently. He looked at me, nodding, his biblical gesture of friendship and memory and elapsed time. Then we went into the restaurant.It was an Indian place, empty except for us and two boys, the waiters, who took our orders and then stood motionless at the end of the long dark narrow room. We sat in tall chairs and talked about Kathryn. It was she who'd given him my number in Athens. When I told him I expected to be in Amman in three weeks' time he said he would try to meet me there. He was calling from Aqaba."I thought you had a traveling companion, Frank.”"She's in the room watching TV.”"Where are you staying?”"Small place near the fourth circle. You've been to Amman?”"First time.”"Transit cranes," he said. "Beeping taxi horns.”"You've spent all this time in Aqaba?”"On and off. It's our base. We make three-day trips into the Wadi Rum with a guide and a LandRover. We camp out, in our fashion. Then we go back to Aqaba to water-ski.”"I don't see you on water-skis.”"That's an abbreviation. 'Water-ski.' It's shorthand. It means everything in the world that doesn't involve looking for a bunch of crazy people in a barren waste with a guide whose true purpose is to lead us in circles.”"Why are you looking for them?”Frank laughed. "Is this an interview?”The boys pushed a large and elaborate serving table along the carpeted floor. On it were two cans of beer."Owen seemed to think the cult struck a romantic chord somewhere deep in your breast.”"When you put it that way, Jim, I don't think I'm obliged to discuss the matter further, friends or not.”"I take it back.”He poured the beer into his glass, watching me."I'm looking for something outside the range of expectations, you know? It's just a probe. The Wadi Rum's been filmed before, wide screen, soaring music. The place intrigues me in a totally different way. It has to be linked to this homicidal calculation. These small figures in the landscape. Brademas says these people are stalkers. They pick a victim and they watch. They wait for something. There's a particular logic.”"You've walked away from three or four projects, Kathryn told me.”"They were safe, " he said.Something came into his eyes, a cold light I recognized as the contempt he often summoned to respond to challenges."They weren't worth sticking with. They were exercises. I found myself getting interested in things because they presented a familiar theme or subject I thought I could handle differently, I thought I could give a sweet twist to. Genre crap. I was trying to force these ideas to deliver up riches they didn't contain.”His mood softened, one word to the next."I've been feeling the pressure. I admit it. People alighting in helicopters. Clapped-out producers. Lawyer-agents in Nazi sunglasses. They come down out of the sky. Nobody likes the way I work. I don't talk to anybody. I ban people from the set. Do you know what a dumb little napoleonic thing that is? But I do it. I like to do things in secret. I don't say a word to people who want to write about me. Two good films, made money. It happens I like doing deals. Today we do deals. You don't have to pretend money is dirty. Or a deal memo is too complicated for your sensibility. It's a Jewish science, movie-dealing, like psychoanalysis. Only what's the connection?”"I don't know.”"Intimacy. They involve intimate exchanges. The point is I was starting to hear things. I was reading things about myself, hearing footsteps. I was the man who walks off his own set, the man who closes down productions. I started getting the feeling that my downfall was being plotted in the major capitals of the world. Volterra's time had come, you know? They weren't even going to extend me the courtesy of a finished disaster. I was wasting away above the line. Let's cordon off the area and watch him die in relative privacy.”"What have you come across out there?”"Not a whole hell of a lot. First the desert patrol knows what I'm about. They don't like me sticking my head in every black tent in the area, asking questions. Second my guide is no help at all. Salim. He sees himself as a Swiss banker. Terrifically discreet and guarded. 'One does not speak of these things.' 'I cannot ask these people such a question.' Then there's Del, the traveling companion. She calls the Arabs rag-heads. Another big help. But there's something going on. These Bedouins talk to Salim, I see something passing between them that doesn't get translated. There's a rest station at a place called Ras en-Naqab. We went in there once on our way back to Aqaba. The place is on a hill and the wind comes out of the desert like a jet exhaust. Del wasn't with us that trip and Salim made right for the toilet, so I go in alone. There's only one person in the place, a white man. At first I figured he was Circassian. He's huddled over his food, eating with his fingers, right hand only, dressed in layers of loose shirts and tunics, bareheaded. I sit down, take a closer look at the guy, say to myself this guy is European. So I address him. I ask some harmless question. He says something to me in Arabic. I keep talking to him, he keeps eating. I went to get Salim that useless bastard to translate. When we got back the man was gone.”"A sighting.”"I think I made a sighting.”"Do Circassians speak Arabic?”"I asked Salim. Yes. But I still think I made a sighting.”"Are you sure it was Arabic you heard?”"First you interview me. Then you make an interrogation out of it.”"What do you do now?”"Brademas gave me a name at the Department of Antiquities. When we first got to Amman I went there. This is a very soft-spoken, very cultured man. Dr. Malik. He's working with a Dutch team that's surveying sites right outside the city. He tried to discourage me. All I could get from him was the general area where the murder took place.”I said, "It stands to reason they'd move on after killing someone.”"Brademas told me they stayed. They're somewhere in the Rum.”"He didn't tell me that.”"They changed locations but they're still there, he said. Dr. Malik told him they'd been spotted. But he wouldn't tell me that. I went to see him again this morning, soon as we arrived. He told me if I really want to learn something about the cult I have to go to Jerusalem. 'You must ask for Vosdanik,' he said.”Volterra liked to show skepticism by tilting his head to cast sidelong glances at the figure opposite him. Now he described his talk at the Department of Antiquities, repeating the aggrieved and disbelieving looks he'd communicated to Dr. Malik.He was told to go to the old city, the Armenian quarter. He must ask for Vosdanik. This man has three names, four names. Vosdanik is apparently the first name of one of these three or four full names. He is a guide in the old city. This was the absolute limit of Dr. Malik's knowledge.Frank liked doing accents.He asked Dr. Malik to give him some names here in Jordan. He didn't want to go to Jerusalem. He didn't want to get involved with another guide. He was told Vosdanik knew about the cult.He would be easy to find. He was Armenian. He lived in the Armenian quarter. Frank asked for more information on the Wadi Rum. There'd been a murder, after all. More than one in fact. Dr. Malik said, "Itis best we do not speak of these things. “Volterra let his gesturing hand drop out of the air. The boys brought our food, then stood in the dimness at the end of the room. No one else came in."I can't surrender myself to places," Frank said. "I'm always separate. I'm always working at myself. I never understood the lure of fabulous places. Or the idea of losing yourself in a place. The desert down there is stunning at times. Shapes and tones. But I could never be affected by it in a deeply personal way, I could never see it as an aspect of myself or vice versa. I need it for something, I want it as a frame and a background. I can't see myself letting it overwhelm me. I would never give myself up to the place or to any other place. I'm the place. I guess that's the reason. I'm the only place I need.”He wanted to know about my travels. I told him I was a traveler only in the sense that I covered distances. I traveled between places, never in them.Rowser had sent me out to these jurisdictions to perform various good works, to fill in here, do a review there, restructure some offices, see to sagging morale. It was a season of small promise. Our Iranian control was dead, shot by two men in the street. Our associate for Syria-Iraq was sending cryptic telexes from Cyprus. Kabul was tense. Ankara lacked home heating, families were moving to hotels. Throughout Turkey people could not vote unless they had their fingers dyed. This was to keep them from voting more than once. Our associate for the Emirates woke up to find a corpse in his garden. The Emirates were overbanked. Egypt had religious tensions. Foreign executives in Libya were coming home from the office to find their houses occupied by workers. It was the winter the hostages were taken in Tehran and Rowser put the entire region on duplicate. This meant all records had to be copied and sent to Athens. One of our vice-presidents, visiting Beirut, came out of his hotel to find his car being disassembled by militiamen. I opened an office in North Yemen.Frank ordered two more beers. We talked about Kathryn. When we finished dinner we wandered around for an hour. Taxis followed us, beeping. We were in a residential area, empty, no one else on foot. A man in uniform came out of the darkness and said something we didn't understand. Another figure appeared twenty yards along the sidewalk, holding an automatic rifle. The first man pointed across the street. We were to continue our walk over there, "Something tells me we've come upon the palace," Frank said. "The king is at home.”
It took two days to get permits for the trip to Jerusalem. When we reached the Jordanian security area, Volterra and our driver took all the documents inside. I leaned against a post under the corrugated roof, watching Del Nearing blow on the lenses of her sunglasses and wipe them in circular motions with a soft cloth."There's an Arabic letter called jim," she said."What does it look like?”"Don't recall. I gave the language about an hour's study.”"It could be important," I said. "It could tell me everything I need to know.”She looked up, smiling, a slight figure with a finely drawn face, her dark hair short and slicked back. She'd spent the fifty-minute drive ministering to herself, catching up on the precautions travelers take against the environment. The coating of hands. The moistening of face and neck. The delicate release of eye drops from a squat bottle. She went about these tasks apart from them, deep in thought. She gave the impression she was always behind schedule, accustomed to doing things in layers. These moments of sealed-in physical busyness were meant mainly to be spent in reflection."I have a disembodied feeling about this whole trip," she said. "I've been floating, like. I didn't know we were going to Jerusalem until we got into the taxi and went to pick you up. I thought we were going to the airport. He claims he told me last night. I don't use drugs anymore. Frank helped me with that. But I am disembodied, regardless. I miss my apartment, my cat. I never thought I'd miss my apartment. That must be where my body is.”Volterra came out."Look at her. Those oversized glasses. With her thin face and that short hair. All wrong. She looks like a science-fiction insect.”"Suck a rock, Jojo.”We got on a bus with a group of Baptists from Louisiana and rode across the river to the Israeli compound. Elaborate procedures. Del came out of the booth where women were searched and joined us at passport control, scanning the area."Look how they lean on those M-16s. I thought they'd be different from the Arabs and Turks. They're sloppy-looking, aren't they? And they wave those guns around, they don't care who's standing in front of them. I don't know what I expected. Neater people.”"It's going to rain," Frank said. "I want it to rain.”"Why?”"So you'll take those glasses off.”"I don't know what I expected," she said."So we'll get drenched walking in the old city. So you'll catch another cold to match Istanbul. So I'll know the disaster is complete.”We shared an eight-seat taxi with Russian Orthodox nuns. The sun broke through heavy cloud as we neared Jerusalem, half gold on the tawny hills, on the limestone buildings and Ottoman ramparts. Our hotel was north of the old city. Volterra lingered at the desk to make inquiries.We entered through the Damascus Gate and were caught at once in the polyglot surge. I felt crowded by languages, surprised and jostled as much as by donkeys loaded with produce, by running boys. Soldiers wore yarmulkas, a man lugged an eight-foot cross. Volterra spoke Italian to some people who asked directions. Merchants loaded bolts of scarlet cloth, sacks of potatoes onto wooden carts which boys would use to batter through the crowds. Coptic priests in blue, Ethiopian monks in gray, the White Father in his spotless soutane. Was religion the point or language? Or was it costume? Nuns in white, in black, full habits, somber hoods, flamboyant winglike bonnets. Beggars folded in cloaks, sitting motionless. Radios played, walkie-talkies barked and hissed. The call to prayer was an amplified chant that I could separate from the other sounds only briefly. Then it was part of the tumult and pulse, the single living voice, as though fallen from the sky.Del was the first to wander off, disappearing down a twisted alley being torn up by workmen. Then Volterra muttered something about the Armenian quarter. We made vague plans to meet at the Western Wall.I found a café and sat outside to sip Turkish coffee and watch shopkeepers in idle talk. Their windows were full of religious souvenirs, rows of mass-produced objects. I found this presence a bolstering force. All the crippled pilgrims in the Via Dolorosa, the black-hatted Hasidim, the Greek priests, Armenian monks, the men at prayer on patterned carpets in the mosques-these streams of belief made me uneasy. It was all a reproach to my ardent skepticism. It crowded me, it pressured and shoved. So I tended to look with a small ironic measure of appreciation at the trashy objects in the shop windows. The olivewood, glass and plastic. They counteracted to some extent the impact of those larger figures who milled in the streets, coming from worship.I saw Del talking to an old man leaning on a cane outside a spice stall. He was white-bearded, wearing a knitted cap and sweater, a robe with a black sash, and there was an aura of stillness about him that was a form of beauty. His eyes were soft, a half-dreaming gaze, and in his face, which looked like a desert face, was an age of memory and light. It occurred to me that she was telling him something very much like this. I barely knew her, of course, but it was a thing she would do, I thought. Approach an old man in the street and tell him that she liked his face.She saw me and came over, making her way past a group whose leader carried a banner with the letter sigma on it. Del had propped the sunglasses on her forehead and was peeling a green orange. There was an element of street flash about her, a winsome toughness. She moved like a shambling kid in a school corridor, raggy and sullen. I hadn't seen till now how good-looking she was. The face was proportioned and cool, eyes disregarding, a moody curve to the mouth. She gave me a slice of orange and sat down."I don't think he understood me.”"What were you telling him?”"How nice he looked, standing there. What beautiful eyes. That's what I'll remember. The faces. Even those macho faggots in Turkey. You see incredible faces. How long are we staying here?”"I leave in the morning. I have an afternoon flight out of Amman. I don't know about you two. You'll have to check the permits.”"Why are we here?”"I'm sightseeing. You're looking for an Armenian.”"I like that jacket. That jacket's loaded with character.”"It used to be tweed.”"I love old stuff.”"It's been worn down by erosion. You can have it.”"Too big but thanks. Frank says you're lonely.”"Frank and I don't always understand each other. Our friendship depended largely on Kathryn. When he and I were alone together, even then, the subject was Kathryn, the missing link was Kathryn.”"Can't you get laid in Athens?”"I've developed a preoccupied air. Women think I want to take them to museums.”"I don't like museums. Men always follow me in museums. What is it about places like that? Every time I turn there's a figure watching me.”"I love Frank. It's not that I don't love him. But we don't really live in the same world anymore. I love the times we had. We were in our twenties, learning important things. But it was Kathryn, really, who made the whole thing work.”I was expecting Del to ask if he'd slept with Kathryn. She had a way of looking through one's remarks, waiting for them to end so she could get to what she thought was the point. Her voice didn't quite match the blankish face. It had a sultry little disturbance in it, an early morning scratch. We looked at each other. She asked about lunch instead.Later we waited for Volterra in a light rain. Men washing at the fountain outside el-Aqsa, arrayed barefoot at the taps. Men swaying at the Wall, beneath the long courses of masonry, moon-scarred limestone with finely chiseled margins, with rock-dwelling plants cascading out of the cracks. We stood near a fence adorned with stylized branch candlesticks. When he showed up finally, jacket collar raised against the chill, he took Del off to one side, where they had a brief unhappy exchange. He seemed to want her to go to the Wall, the section reserved for women. She looked away, her hands deep in the pockets of a nylon parka.On the way back to the hotel he told me he'd found Vosdanik.