Little Cairo. There were coffee shops where men sat and smoked sheesha pipes and food stalls where great columns of meat rotated slowly under flames, fat drizzling down their sides. There were veiled women walking kids down the road or pushing babies in their baby-chairs, and he could smell cinnamon and cumin and the men were playing backgammon, he could hear the constant sound of rolling dice, like thunder.

The blonde-haired girl said, ‘That is so romantic.’ The boy grinned and pulled her to him.

There were Mercedes cars in the street, black and polished, and men in kafeyehs, beards and moustaches, and there were shops selling toys, and clothes, and food, and many signs advertising many bargains. He was looking for Mo’s office, and as he turned for the road he found a street market in progress and smelled fish. He walked down the side of the road, avoiding the main thoroughfare of the market, and passed a bakery and a flower-shop and then stopped and retraced his steps and bought a rose, not quite sure why. The woman who sold it to him smiled as she handed it to him. ‘I hope she likes it,’ she said. Joe smiled, awkwardly. He continued on his way, the purple rose in his hand, passed a sign for Sachs & Levine, Solicitors, passed the straggling fish-tail of the market, crossed the road, and found the building.

There were some cars parked by the curb, none of them new. When he scanned the business names on the side of the door he found Mo’s, in chipped white paint, the words Private Inquiry Agent peeling. When he stepped through the door into the hallway it was dark and quiet and there was grime on the windows, dust on the floor, and it made him think again of entering a sort of sacred tomb, and he wished he had a pith helmet after all. Instead he climbed up the narrow stairs to the third floor and found the door, tried the handle.

It was unlocked. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

loss hovering 

between the dust motes

——

There was no one in Mo’s office. There was a window overlooking the road Joe had just crossed, red-grey brick buildings with washing hanging from the windows. Few cars. There was a desk and a lamp and a box of cigars – he slid open the wooden lid and saw that only three remained inside, and their smell spread out from the box and into the room. Not Hamlets, at least. Romeo and Juliets, perhaps: the Cuban version of Shakespeare.

There was a large chair behind the desk and two smaller ones in front of it. A wastepaper basket, a metal filing cabinet, a shelf on the wall with some books on it. He didn’t have to look too close to know they were Osama paperbacks. It reminded Joe of his own office back in Vientiane. Bare and minimal, a cell more than an office. He began to search it.

He found no scotch, which was disappointing, because he suddenly craved a drink. There should have been a camera somewhere, and probably negatives, but he could find nothing: it was as if the place had been professionally cleaned, or else had never been occupied in the first place. He broke the lock of the filing cabinet but it was empty. In the bottom drawer of the desk, however, he struck lucky. The drawer was shorter, he discovered, than the ones above it. He took it out and inserted his hand in the gap and rooted there. There was something there. He managed to grab it, pulled it out. It was another cigar box, but heavy. He laid it on the desk and opened it.

Close, but no cigars.

There was a small but fat gun in there, a four-shot COP 357 Derringer, and Joe took it and slipped it in his pocket. There was an envelope with five one-hundred pound notes, which he put back. There was a drawing of a woman’s face, badly made. He wondered if it was Mo who drew it. Lines had been erased and retraced until the paper wore out. Joe wondered who she was, why Mo had no picture of her that he had to attempt drawing her, over and over. He left the money and the woman’s picture and put them back in the box and closed it, and returned it to its hiding place.

He took one last look around the office. The books. He went to the shelf and removed the paperbacks one by one. He scanned fly-leafs and endpapers and found nothing but hints of foxing. Next he leafed through them, shook them page-edges down, searching for anything hidden between the pages. He struck lucky, of sorts, on the fourth book he tried. A square piece of light-blue paper fluttered to the floor from within the pages of Sinai Bombings. He picked it up. It was a cloakroom receipt. He pocketed it and returned the book to its place on the shelf.

He took a last look at the room. It had a disused, abandoned air. He went back to the desk and closed the lid of the cigar box, gently. He was glad there was no mirror in the room. He did not want to look at it and see himself. He scanned the room again but Mo still wasn’t there. He saw loss hovering between the dust motes.

There were no sarcophagi in the room; no ancient jars, no decorations of jade and gold. There was not even a calendar.

He left the purple rose he bought in Little Cairo on the desk. Then he left the room.

a hill of beans

——

Something was wrong. He knew it, felt it, but he couldn’t place the feeling with any accuracy. Something to do with the books. He retraced his steps, without conscious thought. Back again through the bustling market, past bakeries and fishmongers and greengrocers’ carts, past cheap plastic toys spilling onto a blanket on the pavement, past loud music in a language he did not speak, past the smells of roasting coffees and roasting lamb kebabs, past men in jalabiyehs, a telephone booth with the handset off the hook, and he thought about cause and effects, and a kind of war that he didn’t understand.

The question that had been niggling away at him was too small and too big at once. It was why.

It had nothing to do with the real world and everything to do with the fictional one, Mike Longshott’s world, the world of The European Campaign and Sinai Bombings and Assignment: Africa. The world of World Trade Center, whatever that was. They were war books. But he did not understand the war, and the feeling that was pressing down on him from the inside, that made the bones of his fingers ache and not stand still, was that he should.

On Edgware Road he found a coffee shop and went inside and sat by the window. There were Middle Eastern men sitting around tables, drinking, talking to each other. Two were sharing a sheesha pipe. The proprietor came over and said, ‘What can I get you?’ and Joe said, ‘Coffee.’

The proprietor was portly and moustachioed with eyes like dark-green olives. He brought over a long-handled pot and a small china cup and then returned with a glass of water and a small plate holding two pieces of baklavah, fine layers of pastry overflowing with syrup.

‘Business is good?’ Joe said. The man shrugged. ‘Inshalla,’ he said. ‘One can’t complain.’

The coffee was bitter and Joe bit into a piece of baklavah and then drank again, the pastry sweetening the black-tar coffee. War, he thought. And then – was mass murder a crime, or was it a political act? And who decided?

There must be more in the Longshott books, he thought. He kept skimming through them, but there must have been something he was missing. For the first time, the books struck him as strangely unreal. He thought of all the attacks described. If you added all the wounded and the dead, he thought, they still wouldn’t amount to how many people died in a single month in car accidents in just one city. It was a war about fear, he thought, not figures on the ground. It was a war of narrative, a story of a war, and it grew in the telling. For some reason he thought of a hill of beans, which was a strange thing to think about. Lives in a hill of beans. He laughed. The sheesha in the next table was putting out thick clouds of cherry-flavoured smoke. And then he thought – if this was a war, how many dead were on the other side?