Bart worked late. The surgery was in a side-turning off the Al-Imam Abdul Aziz ibn Muhammad street. The glass-faced block was easy to find, half-way between the Central Hospital and the Riyadh museum.
He reassured the German banker that his stomach pains came from ulcers in the lower gut, not from bowel cancer, prescribed the necessary remedies and showed the grateful man to the door. The banker would pay his receptionist, and the fee would be generous.
No expatriate was using his own money: it was either from an insurance policy or from the company employing him. The banker wrung his hand in thanks at the diagnosis, then headed for the receptionist and ferreted in his pocket for either his cheque book or his wallet with the credit cards. Bart smiled balefully after him, then closed the door. He washed his hands at the sink, then stared out of the window, through the slat blinds, at the evening traffic. In the morning, the reward for his diagnosis, not a life-threatening tumour but a simple ulcer, would be electronically moved to a numbered, nameless bank account in Geneva, then its trail would scatter via Liechtenstein and Gibraltar to the Cayman Islands… It was his nest-egg – but where would he spend it? He assumed that, one day, when Wroughton had no more use for him, he would be cast off and allowed to drift away, but he did not know where he would eke out his last days. Then, wherever, he would be alone at the mercy of a conscience. Oh, yes, Samuel Algernon Laker Bartholomew had a newly developed conscience: in the nights it gnawed at him – he would wake sweating – and in the days it stabbed him. He dried his hands. His buzzer went.
She was shown in by the Malaysian nurse.
Bart beamed. 'Good evening, Miss Jenkins. I hope you haven't been waiting too long.'
'It's Beth, remember? No, not too long.'
'How was the shopping in Bahrain?'
'Bought a couple of pairs of jeans, some smalls, some pasta, a new pair of sand boots. Oh, I read a bit, swam a bit – crashed out, really.
It was just good to feel the sea.'
Her voice, Bart thought, was money – educated money and class money. She was one of those young women, he felt, who had only certainties in her life, for whom things happened because she wanted them to. There was about her that same confidence he had seen at the party. She was, he recognized it, a little breath of freshness in the daily routine that cocooned him in the sealed consulting room.
'Good, glad it worked out/ he said vacantly. 'Well, how can I help you?'
'I'm hoping you can't help me at all.'
She was rocking on her feet, staring back at him. She might have been gently mocking him. She wore the same skirt and the same blouse as she had at the party. He wondered if she had stayed for the
'brown tea', but doubted it. She didn't look to Bart to be the sort of expatriate who needed slugs of Jack Daniel's or Johnnie Walker for survival in the Kingdom.
Bart said, 'Very few people come to see me merely to indulge in conversation.'
She laughed. 'Sorry, sorry – I've been here just short of two years.
I 've never had a check-up. I live down south and I'm the only woman there. The quack's used to dealing with men falling off drilling platforms. I just wanted to make sure I was all right before going back. I hope I 'm not wasting your time.'
'Very wise, a check-up. You're not wasting my time. Anything that's worrying you?'
He was glad he hadn't to ask her to strip: her directness frightened him. He took her blood pressure. He listened, through the material of her blouse, to her heartbeat. Women who caught his eyes and held them had always frightened him – Ann had, and the senior partner in the practice at Torquay, and his mother. Her blood pressure was good and her heartbeat was fine. He tapped her chest, poked her a little with his finger and felt the solid wall of her stomach muscles.
Nothing wrong with her reflexes. The stomach muscles told him she was as strong as an ox, and he saw that her biceps bulged against the cuffs of her short-sleeved blouse. He went through his check-list.
Menstrual problems? She hadn't any. Pains in the kidneys? None.
Ten minutes later, he stepped back from her. 'Nothing to worry about.'
'Thanks, it was just that I don't know when I'll next be up here, in civilization.'
Something about her disarmed his caution, as it had at the party.
The examination finished, the nurse had left them.
'Not that I wish to contradict you, Miss Jenkins, but we have differing ideas about civilization. I would think you have to be fresh out of a cave to regard this place as civilized. In my book the construction of glossy buildings, wide roads and an extravagant spending power bordering on the obscene do not add up to civilization. The culture here is of corruption – it's a society of skimmers, fixers and intermediaries, one bloody great family freeloading off the oil resource. I'm here, like every other expatriate, to feed the greed.'
She asked, with that inbred directness, 'So why do you stay?'
Bart blanched. 'We don't all have options, Miss Jenkins,' he stammered. 'Right, any problems and you don't hesitate to call me.
Oh, if it's not impertinent, how did you hear of me?'
'I was down at the embassy, logging in with the new people. I was talking to one of the second secretaries and asking him about a doctor, a check-up. Another chap wandered up to us, must have heard what I was asking for. He gave me your name.'
'Oh, I must thank him. It's always good to know the grapevine works. Who was he?'
She paused, seemed to trawl in her memory, then smiled. 'Got it. Wroughton, Eddie Wroughton. That's who you should thank.'
Bart stiffened. She had made him reckless. He hardly knew her, but she had weakened all the defences he arrayed round himself.
'He's a parasite. He feeds off people. No, I'm wrong, he's worse than a parasite. Wroughton is as poisonous as a viper.' He caught himself.
'Have a good journey back, down south.'
Later, when his waiting room was empty and the nurse and receptionist had gone, he looked through the papers she had filled in.
She was twenty-seven years old. Her handwriting was like her personality – b o l d. He rather hoped he would never see her again. Her address was a post box, c/o Saudi ARAMCO, at Shaybah. He knew where Shaybah was, and that little morsel of knowledge comforted him – he would not see her or hear of her again. He rang for a taxi, ft seemed to him that when he'd touched her, her chest, muscles and organs, he'd touched danger – and when he'd looked at her, into the sparkle of her eyes, he'd looked into the depths of danger.
Before the sun had dipped far away to the west over the Asir mountains, the pilot had called Marty and Lizzy-Jo forward, had parked them in a jump-seat and the co-pilot's and had given them the bird's eye view. They had flown over the desert, and the map, devoid of recognizable features or the green of vegetation or any sign of habitation, had been on Lizzy-Jo's knee. The red sand, lit by the falling sun, had been scarred only by the dune formations, and what the pilot called their 'slipfaces', and he'd talked about 'crescentic dunes', 'star dunes', 'fishhook dunes' and 'linear dunes', and had identified all the strange and naturally made shapes at twenty-eight thousand feet below them. And he'd pointed out the sabkhas, the salt-crusted playas of sand between the dunes. He'd told them, his dry Texan voice clear in their headphones, that the Rub' al Khali covered an area of – close to – a quarter million square miles, and that trying to map the dune features was time wasted because they moved, prodded and reshaped by the winds. He'd said that, right now, down there and under the sun's blaze, the current ground temperature was well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Three years back an F-A18 Hornet, overflying the Rub' al Khali, had gone down out there in the middle of nowhere and a sandstorm had prevented helicopters with long-range tanks getting in. The rescue party from the Prince Sultan airbase at Al Kharj, on the northern fringe of the desert, had finally reached the wreckage using Hummer four-wheel drives, and had been too late. 'It was like the sun had burned him to death, dehydrated him, taken every last drop of juice out of him, and he was a trained guy, and the last day he'd been alive it was reckoned the temperature had hit one hundred and forty degrees, ma'am.' Then, the light had gone and they'd started a gradual descent.