I began to suspect that Yasmin had been dipping into my finances. I hate that about women, even the ones whose generic threads in their cells still said they were male. Jo-Mama says, “Just ‘cause the cat had her kittens in the oven don’t make them biscuits.” Take a pretty boy, nip off his cojones and buy him a silicone balcony that could comfortably seat an underfed family of three, and before you know it, she’s digging around in your wallet. They eat up all your pills and caps, spend your money, bitch about the goddamn sheet and the blanket, stare rapturously all afternoon at themselves in the bathroom mirror, make innocent little remarks about the devastating young plushes passing by in the other direction, want to be held for an hour after you’ve exhausted yourself jamming them into the floorboards, and then they climb up your back because you look out the window with a slightly irked expression on your face. What could you possibly be annoyed about, with a virtually perfect goddess hanging around the apartment, decorating your floor with her dirty underwear? You might take something to elevate your mood, but the precious bitch already consumed all that, remember?
Only another day and a half of Marîd Audran’s brain as Allah the Protector in His wisdom had designed it. Yasmin was not speaking to me: she thought I was a coward and a selfish son of a clapped-up ass for not going along with Papa’s plan. One minute, it was all set — on Monday morning, I was going to meet with Friedlander Bey’s surgeons and have my thoughts electrified. The next minute, I was a rotten bastard who didn’t care what happened to his friends. She couldn’t remember if I was going to get my brain wired or not; she couldn’t think back far enough to recall the last argument (I could: I was not going to get my brain wired, and that was the end of it). I didn’t get out of bed all day Friday or Saturday. I watched shadows get longer and shorter and longer. I heard the muezzin call the faithful to prayer; and then, what seemed to me like a few minutes later, he called again. I stopped paying attention to Yasmin and her moods sometime on Saturday evening, before she started to get ready for work.
She slammed her way back and forth across my room, calling me all kinds of innovative foul names, some of which I’d actually never heard before, despite my years of wandering. It just made me love the little slut even more. I didn’t get out of bed until Yasmin left for Frenchy’s. My body alternated between rattling chills and flashes of fever so bad I had to cool off in the shower. Then I’d lie back in bed and shiver and sweat. I soaked the sheets and the mattress cover, and clung with white-knuckled fingers to the blanket. The phantom lizards were on my face and arms now, but crawling around less frequently. I felt safe enough to go to the bathroom again, something I’d been thinking about for a long while. I wasn’t hungry, but I was getting pretty thirsty. I drank a couple of glasses of water, then slid shakily back into bed. I wished Yasmin would come home.
Despite the waning effects of the drug overdose and my growing fear, I had made up my mind about Monday morning. Saturday night passed with more cold sweats and intermittent fever, and I stared wakefully at the ceiling even after Yasmin came back and went drunkenly to sleep Sunday, just before sunset, while she was getting herself ready to go to work again, I got out of bed and stood naked behind her. She was putting on her eye makeup screwing her face into crazy expressions and glossing her eyelids with loveliness from some rich-bitch department store beyond the Budayeen. She wouldn’t use inexpensive paint from the bazaars like everyone else, as if anyone in Frenchy’s could get a good look at her in that dimness. The same makeup was on the racks in the souks, but Yasmin paid top prices for it across town. She wanted to look heartbreaking on stage, when not a juiced-up fool in the place would be looking at her eyes. She was going for a layered effect of blue and green below her narrow, sketched-in eyebrows. Then she worked on a tasteful sprinkle of gold glittery sparkles. The sparkles were the hard part. She put them on one by one. “Get to bed early,” she said.
“Why?” I asked innocently.
“Because you have a busy day tomorrow,” she said.
I shrugged.
“Your brain,” she said, “remember?”
“My brain, I remember,” I said. “It’s not going anywhere unusual. I don’t have anything particularly taxing lined up for it.”
“You’re getting the worthless thing wired!” She turned on me like a nesting falcon on a hawk.
“Not the last time I thought it over,” I said.
She grabbed up her small blue overnight case. “Well, you son-of-a-bitching mother-ugly kaffir,” she cried, “fuck you and the horse you rode in on!” She made more noise leaving my apartment than I thought was possible, and that was before she even slammed the door. After she slammed the door it got very quiet, and I was able to think. I couldn’t think of anything to think about, though. I walked around the room a few times, put one or two things away, kicked some of my clothes from the right to the left and back again, and laid down on the bed. I’d been in the bed so long that it wasn’t diverting to be there again now, but there wasn’t that much else to do. I watched the darkness in the room stretch and reach out toward me. That wasn’t so exciting anymore, either.
The pain had gone, the overdose-induced hysteria had gone, my money had gone, Yasmin had gone. This was peace and contentment. I hated every goddamn second of it.
In this silent center of motionless and mindlessness, free of all the frenzy that had surrounded me for many days, I surprised myself with a piece of genuine intuition. It began by congratulating myself for figuring that the man with the James Bond moddy had a Beretta rather than a Walther. Then the Bond thought linked up to something else, and they hooked together with one or two more ideas, and it all illuminated an inexplicable detail that had been simmering in my memory for a couple of days, at least. I recalled my last visit to Lieutenant Okking. I remembered the way he didn’t seem to be at all interested in my theories or Friedlander Bey’s proposition. That wasn’t so unusual; Okking resisted interference from anyone. He disliked positive interference, in the form of authentic assistance, just as much. It wasn’t Okking himself to whom my thoughts kept returning; it was something in his office.
One of the envelopes had been addressed to Universal Export. I recalled wondering idly if Seipolt ran that firm, or if Hassan the Shiite ever received any curious crates from them. The company’s name was so commonplace that there were probably a thousand “Universal Exports” all around the world. Maybe Okking was just sending off a mail order for some rattan patio furniture to put next to his backyard barbecue.
Of course, the very ordinariness of “Universal Export” was the reason that M., the head of James Bond’s special 00 section, used it as a false cover and code name in Ian Fleming’s books. The forgettable name would never have stuck in my memory without that connection to the Bond stories. Maybe “Universal Export” was a disguised reference to the man who’d worn the James Bond moddy. I wished that I had memorized the address on that envelope.
I sat up, startled. If the Bond explanation had any truth to it, why was that envelope in Lieutenant Okking’s Out box? I told myself that I was getting as jumpy as a grasshopper on a griddle. I was probably looking for honey where there were no bees. Still, I felt my stomach turn sick again. I felt myself being drawn unwillingly into a morass of tortuous and deadly paths.