“Not a sound, Mr. Mahmoud,” Kesev said softly in Arabic.  “I have come to rob you, not to kill you.  But I am not adverse to doing both.  Understand?”

Mahmoud nodded vigorously, his jowls bulging and quivering under his chin, his eyes threatening to jump from their sockets.  He looked like a toad that had just come face to face with the biggest snake it had ever seen.

“Wh-whatever it is you want,” Mahmoud said, “take it.  Take it and go!”

“That’s a very good start.”

Kesev allowed him to remove his hand from the drawer.  As the dealer cradled his injured wrist in his lap, Kesev switched on the bedside lamp.  He removed Mahmoud’s snub-nosed .38 from the drawer and tossed it under the bed.  Then he produced the scroll he’d coerced from Tulla Szobel and dropped it on the sheet.

“I want the original.”

Mahmoud stared at the scroll, then looked up.  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Kesev felt his anger flare but controlled it.  He forced himself to smile.  It must have been a disturbing grimace because Mahmoud flinched.

“Before I came here,” Kesev said evenly, “I decided I would allow you one lie.  That was it.  Now that it’s out of the way, you may answer truthfully.  Where is the original?”

“I swear I don’t know what you are talking about.”

He struck the dealer a backhanded blow with the Tokarev.  Mahmoud fell on his side, a mass of quaking blubber, moaning, clutching his cheek.  Blood seeped between his fingers.

Kesev’s arm rose to deliver another blow but he reined his fury and lowered the pistol.  Instead he grabbed the front of Mahmoud’s nightshirt and pulled him close.  He turned the broad face so that they were nose to nose.  He wanted the dealer to look into his eyes, to see the fury there to feel the truth of what Kesev was going to say.

“Listen to me, Salah Mahmoud, and listen well.  The original of that scroll was stolen from me.  I intend to retrieve what is mine, and since nineteen-ninety-one I have been searching for it.  You are merely the latest phase of that search.  Now, you can be a stepping stone or you can be a stumbling block.  The choice is entirely yours.”

Mahmoud opened his mouth to speak but Kesev pressed the barrel of the Tokarev’s silencer against his lips.

“But let me warn you.  I will not tolerate lies.  This is extremely important to me and I have already expended enormous time and effort in my search.  I am out of patience.”

He pressed the silencer more firmly against Mahmoud’s mouth.

“This pistol has a seven-shot clip loaded with 9mm hollowpoint bullets.  Do you know what a hollowpoint does after it enters the body?  It flattens and widens, tearing through the flesh in an expanding cone of destruction.  The bullet enters through a little hole and exits through a gaping maw.  It is not a pretty thing, Salah Mahmoud.”

Sweat beaded the dealer’s forehead, dripping into his eyes.

“So...here are the ground rules: I will ask questions and you will answer truthfully.  The first time I think you are lying I will shoot you in the left knee.”   The dealer stiffened and shuddered.  “The second lie will earn you a bullet in the right knee.  The third in your right elbow, the fourth in your left.  The fifth bullet I will use on your manhood.  By that time I will have decided that you are either a pathological liar, or you really don’t know anything.  I will then leave you.  Alive.  And you will spend the rest of your days unable to walk, unable to use crutches or a wheelchair, unable to feed yourself or wipe yourself, your urine running through a tube into bag strapped to your leg.  Is that what you want?”

Mahmoud shook his head violently, spraying drops of perspiration in all directions.

“Good.”

Kesev straightened and stepped back from the bed.  He had no particular desire to shoot this man, but he would do so.  He had to retrieve that scroll.

He pointed to the forged scroll on the bed.

“Now tell me: When did you get this scroll?”

Mahmoud hesitated.  His nightshirt was soaked with sweat.  His eyes darted about the room, like a rabbit looking for a hole to run to.

Kesev worked the slide to chamber a round.

“No!” Mahmoud cried, trying to curl into a ball.

Kesev pulled the trigger once.  The Tokarev jerked and gave out a phut! as a bullet tore into the mattress near the dealer’s face.

Mahmoud thrust out his hands amid the flying feathers and began to whimper.  “Please don’t shoot!  I’ll tell you!  I’ll tell you everything!”

Kesev lowered the pistol a few degrees.  “I’m waiting.”

“I made that scroll.”

Kesev raised the pistol again.

“It’s true!  I copied it myself from a crumbling original!”

“Really.  And where did you find the original?”

“I-I didn’t.  Two nephews of my father’s uncle’s brother discovered it in a cave in the Wilderness.  I don’t know if it’s true, but they claimed one of Saddam’s missiles uncovered it.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Kesev felt relief begin to seep through him, but he resisted it just as he’d resisted the rage.  He could not let down his guard, not until the scroll was safely back in his hands.

Mahmoud was still talking, babbling, flooding the room with rapid-fire Egyptian-flavored Arabic.

“Their father brought their find to me: a written scroll that was heavily damaged—the boys had been in a hurry and did not know how to care for it—and a sealed jar containing two unused scrolls.  I began reassembling the fragments of the written scroll as best I could.  So many pieces!  It took me years—years—to complete the task.  When I had finished I copied what was left of the text onto the blank parchments.”

“Copied?  Copied how?”

He shrugged, almost apologetically.  “I...I’ve done this before.  I have formulae for all the ancient inks.  I was especially careful with the copying because I knew the parchments would pass the dating test.”  His attempt at a smile was a miserable failure.  “I figured, why sell one scroll when I could sell three?”

“Did you read it?  Did you understand it?”  Kesev held his breath as he waited for the answer.

“I tried.  But my Aramaic is rudimentary at best; there were words I could not translate.  And besides, the scroll was incomplete.  Fragments were out of place and some were missing completely.  I reassembled them the best I could but—”

“Where is that original now?”

“It...”  His voice shrank to a whisper.  “It’s gone.”

Sudden rage crackled through Kesev’s brain.  He leaned forward and jammed the muzzle of the silencer against Mahmoud’s thigh.

“You sold it?”

“No-no!  Please!  It’s gone!  Whisked away into the air!”

“I warned you about lying!”

“Please!  I swear by Allah!  The wind took it!  It happened in the back room, not ten meters from here, just as I was finishing the first copy.  Suddenly all the windows in the building crashed inward and a blast of icy wind tore through the halls and rooms.  The winds seemed to gather in my work room.  They rattled my walls, knocked me to the floor, and upset my work table.  The scroll fragments swirled into the air in a whirling column, then they blew out the window and were gone.  Years of work—gone.”

Kesev’s rage cooled rapidly, chilled by the dealer’s words.  A wind...filling the halls and rooms...stealing the fragments in a miniature whirlwind...

“You must believe me!” Mahmoud wailed.  “Every word is true!”

Kesev nodded slowly, almost absently.  The fat forger wasn’t lying.  He wouldn’t make up something so fantastic and try to pass it off as the truth.

And that meant that the original scroll had been destroyed, reduced to scattered, indecipherable bits of parchment...but not before it had been copied.

“How many copies did you make?” Kesev asked finally.

“Two.  There were only two blank scrolls.  I forged the second copy from the first.”