Notorious Read Free

my cuffed hands. ‘Can you make these tighter?’
    He stared at me.
    I said, ‘Make them hurt.’

I

THE
ASYLUM
AT
ABU N’AF

PRESENT DAY

THE FIRST MORNING
    R ené Laforche, the Administrator of the Asylum at Abu N’af, is a small man with gleaming black hair, toffee-coloured teeth and a row of shiny medals pinned to his grey suit. His Anjou Rose medallion for public service has white polish clumped like beetle rot to the silver. He keeps running his thumbnail around the grooves, trying to shift the polish, frowning at me. I sense a breakdown in communication which Mitch’s solution for problems like this – the fat envelope filled with dirham notes sitting in my briefcase – will no doubt exacerbate.
    Laforche flicks out what he thinks is the last bit of polish – it isn’t, and he will dislike me even more when he realises – and sits up straight.
    ‘I’m sure you are aware, Monsieur, that the Asylum is where they brought Rimbaud in from the desert.’
    So this is the game: humiliate the hick foreigner.
    I assume my blandest expression and say to the irate puffball opposite, ‘Rambo? The American action man with the red headband?’
    The puffball swells further. ‘The famous French poet, Monsieur! Le symboliste , follower of Baudelaire, un ami du Verlaine . He came to the desert to die.’
    I nod as though I am pretending to know what he is talking about, even though I do know what he is talking about and am just pretending to pretend to know.
    I eat a date – and another two – and drink the mint tea. Dust irritates my ear drum.
    ‘So Monsieur Deviling – ’
    ‘Devlin.’ I extract my business card. ‘John Devlin.’
    Laforche holds the card by one corner, away from him. ‘Our doctors – ’
    ‘ – are very, very qualified.’ I reach for my briefcase. ‘But – ’
    He raises his voice. ‘Monsieur, how can you talk to this poor disturbed woman? A woman who runs into walls because she says she wants to climb inside a pebble? She is in the hospital now.’ He shakes his head.
    I look at Laforche’s gleaming hair. Is it dyed? Maybe not. He is in his middle fifties – the same age as the husband of the woman – but older than me by a decade. I wonder if he is in love with her.
    ‘What she did to her face . . . ’ His voice is actually fading.
    I bite my lip as if shocked. It is not completely an act. I did see the photos.
    ‘How you can talk to her if you do not even know who Rimbaud is?’
    Baffling. I am ground between two intractable ways of thinking: the hard, cutting lines of the stars and bars of the great US of A, with its aisles of pills in neon-lit mega-stores, and this land of endlessly shifting curves and veiled ambiguities, of ancient herbs in tiny cut-glass bottles. I imagine living in a world of sand where footprints are constantly erased. I suppose our symbol would be the moon’s crescent too. Something that reshapes itself. Disappears.
    I pat the briefcase. ‘Monsieur.’ It sounds like “mon sewer”. I say, ‘Her family authorises – ’
    ‘How do they know who she is?’ he says. ‘She does not know. We do not know.’
    ‘Well, the people who are interested believe they know.’
    He looks through the window, past the helicopter parked in the shadow of the high stone walls, to the Kabir Massif. Sheets of sullen orange hang over the stubby peaks and tremble there. The pilot is rubbing furiously at the smears of marmalade dust dulling the chopper’s shiny panels. He is having to go over the same spot every few moments.
    ‘Abu N’af is famous for its storms,’ says the Administrator maliciously. ‘A grain of sand will bring down your fine machine.’
    ‘Not a grain, surely.’ I hunch lower in the chair, try to look like a dutiful messenger, a low-rung grunt. ‘Monsieur, you must see what is at stake here. The smuggling of priceless artefacts. Heinous traffickings. Lootings of culture by the father of the Australian woman you are sheltering.’
    Laforche smiles.