Hasul glanced down from the monitor and saw the barely restrained skepticism on Zaheer’s face. “I think of the street dentists in Islamabad, Peshawar, and Karachi,” he said. “I remember their offices are dirty blankets and wooden crates on the open sidewalk. Their tools common pliers, chisels, screwdrivers. They are unlearned, work with grime on their hands, and for anaesthesia plunge needles into one side of the patient’s mouth to distract him from the agony of a rotting tooth being chopped and filed on the other.” He paused, continued to regard the other man. “Their skills are crude, bloody, and yet indispensable to those that require them.”
Zaheer’s face remained tight.
“Are we then among the poverty stricken who must turn to such a one in desperation?”
Hasul looked at him. Again, the partial falsehood. “We are for a higher mission, and above the sordid errands the infidel will be turned upon,” he said.
Zaheer fell silent, switched the monitor to its picture-in-picture mode. The area directly outside the office suite appeared in its main window. Smaller frames on its right tracked Aasim and the visitor as they rose five levels inside the elevator, exited, and then walked along the bends of the corridor to the suite.
Hasul watched them step into the main screen view, Aasim reaching for the buzzer on the electronic access control box beside his door.
He did not wait for the tone to sound.
“Show Mr. Earl through the reception area,” he said.
“Then I would meet privately with him.”
As he rose from his console, Zaheer made another weak effort at masking his unhappiness. Then he bowed his head in formal deference and went to carry out his instructions.
Hasul was standing behind his desk when John Earl came into the office. Zaheer lingered at the doorway only a moment, then backed out to leave them alone.
Earl waited a step or two inside the closed door. Sandy-haired, blue-eyed, sharp-chinned, his nose long and curved with flaring nostrils that gave him a raptorial look, he wore a black leather car coat, gray muffler, and jeans.
Hasul greeted him with a slight nod.
“You’ve arrived right on time.”
“Always.”
“And it is always appreciated.”
Earl stepped forward into the room, paused, and glanced over his shoulder at the wall aquarium. Nothing stirred amid the stony hollows and ledge formations of its habitat.
“Our pal Legs okay in there?”
“Yes.”
“One of these days he’ll have to come out and say hello,” Earl said. “I’ve been here enough so you wouldn’t think we’d be strangers.”
Hasul looked at him. “The blue-ringed octopus is a dangerous but retiring creature,” he said. “Its perception of who is or isn’t a stranger may be be different from yours.”
Earl grunted, still peering into the tank.
“I think maybe Legs just isn’t too fond of the nickname I gave him,” he said.
Hasul’s smile left a barely perceptible stinging sensation in a corner of his lower lip. He touched it with the tip of his tongue, tasted a fleck of dry ointment. Thirty seconds. Might damage to his skin have resulted from only thirty seconds?
He waved Earl into a seat in front of the desk and then settled into his own chair without betraying his discomposure.
Earl looked across at him and unwrapped his muffler. The smallest portion of a tattoo showed on the right side of his neck — just a stroke of red, the actual markings covered by his collar.
“All right,” he said after a moment. “What’ve you got?”
“Two projects for now,” Hasul said. “More accurately, a single project with two distinct and crucial elements.”
Earl had become very still.
“Break it down for me,” he said.
“One of my dealers vanished a week ago with costly inventory in his possession. He may have abused my trust and stolen it, or he may have come to harm during a transaction that was to take place. In either case, something has gone very wrong.”
“His name?”
“Patrick Sullivan.”
“What about the party he was showing the goods?”
“A buyer whose name I do not know.” Hasul shrugged. “As a rule I distance myself from the market chain at that level.”
Earl nodded.
“If your man ran off, you want me take care of him.”
“Yes.”
“If he was hijacked, you want me to track down whoever did it.”
“Yes. I also wish to determine whether the offender was acting independently or on orders… and have my inventory returned to me if possible.”
Earl tipped his head up and down a second time.
“What’s the other part of the job?” he said.
Hasul was quiet a second, his palms flat on his desk.
“Patrick Sullivan’s woman,” he said. “Whatever the reason for his disappearance, I’ve learned he has shared extremely sensitive information about my business affairs with her.”
“And?” “Unfortunately, I cannot risk her passing this information along to anyone else.”
Earl looked at him with a hint of a smile.
“I’m guessing you know her name,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Where I can find her.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, leave everything to me.” Earl paused. “That takes care of the ‘for now’ part…”
Hasul raised a hand, offering his own taut smile.
“The later,” he said, “is for later.”
Silence. They looked across the room at each other.
“Zaheer will give you the pertinent details,” Hasul said, then. “Of course you can expect to be well compensated.”
“Never would doubt it.”
Earl rose from his chair, buttoned his jacket, tugged its sleeves down over his arms.
“Better be on my way,” he said.
Hasul stood to show him from the office, but Earl had already started toward the door as he came around his desk, breaking stride for only an instant to have another look at the aquarium.
Its inhabitant remained gathered in its sheltering hole.
“See ya when I see ya,” Earl said to the glass front of the tank.
Then he turned back toward the door, opened it, and was gone.
Lathrop had noticed Missus Frakes’s waning interest in her ball of yarn for quite some time, but it was just recently that this change of behavior had started to infiltrate his thoughts.
It was another of many signs the coon cat was getting up there in age, signs that were inescapable unless Lathrop deliberately blinded himself to them… and he wasn’t a believer in papering over reality’s moldy walls as if calm pastel colors and landscape prints could stop the decay from spreading underneath, turning it to heaps of dust and rubble. The house hadn’t been built to last, and Lathrop could smell its infectious rot every waking minute of his life, penetrating the framework like an incurable cancer of the bones. He supposed his biggest goal was to keep a step ahead of the rest as it fell apart piece by piece, edge beneath the final section of roof to come crashing down. He wasn’t sure why he ought to care, but there was a certain appeal to the idea of staying on his own two feet to the bitter end and having a good look around at the wreckage.
Now Lathrop sat watching Missus Frakes from the convertible sofa of his studio apartment on the corner of East 63rd and Lexington, a co-op he subleased for a couple thousand a month, no paltry sum for a single room with a view of the faceless high-rise and twenty-four-hour Gristedes supermarket across the street. The cat was curled on the rug near the radiator, warming herself there, her head tucked into her breast, a half-lidded green eye gleaming out from under one furry paw the only discernable evidence that she wasn’t asleep. Nearby lay what used to be her favorite plaything, a ball of brown yarn Lathrop had brought across the thousands of miles he’d traveled with her in the past six years, on the move, always on the move, crossing borderlines he couldn’t even remember anymore, slipping through the darkest of cracks and crannies in the slowly disintegrating house that God built.