The Count of the Sahara (11 page)

“The challenge, you see, is that Tin Hinan’s pelvis was smaller than the average female, leading some to wrongly conclude it might have been the body of a male. What’s been scientifically, unequivocally proven, is that her pelvis,” and here he made a large circle with the tips of his fingers barely touching, “made it impossible for her to have children. Ironic, isn’t it, that the Mother of the Tuaregs was unable to fulfill the normal destiny of women everywhere and have children of her own?” This drew a sympathetic clucking from the audience.

“Like Joan of Arc, or Elizabeth the Virgin Queen, she took that pain and turned it to power. In fact,” he turned to the crate of props and pulled out a snowman-shaped rock with a hole bored through what should have been its head. “This was found next to her body. It may have been a fertility fetish designed to help her conceive in the next world.” He turned to the reporter, “You may, all of you, come take a look afterwards, if you wish. Although, I must warn you there are markings on the lower part of this that make it, uhhhh, undeniably female. Let your sensibilities be your guide.” I smiled at that. They’d be lined up around the block now.

The reporter admitted defeat and closed her notebook. The crowd surged forward to shake the hand of the mighty explorer, and take a look at the titillating hunk of stone. The pudgy Angelica Carter used her sorority organizing skills to herd them into a line. The crowd looked the same as it did in Grinnell, right down to a guy in the same brown hat and coat as I’d seen the other night.

The car idled outside for half an hour before de Prorok appeared. Standing by the door, I watched as he kissed Miss Carter’s hand adieu and gave a quick wave to the stragglers. He pulled on his overshoes, coat and scarf, but didn’t seem to know what to do with his white desert helmet. Finally, he put it on his noggin, hunched down and made a dash for the car.

The temperature had dropped about twenty degrees while we were inside and he uttered a muffled, “Good Christ,” through his scarf as he dropped into the passenger seat. He hunkered down with the bridge of his nose deep in his coat. Only his eyes and forehead showed between the thick woolen scarf and his white African desert pith helmet.

His teeth chattered as he asked, “Why the hell would someone live here? Is it this cold in Muh-waukee?” He loved making fun of my accent, even though I didn’t think I had one.

I grinned. “Colder. And there’s m-m-more snow ’cause it’s by the lake.”

“Why the hell would someone voluntarily live in these Arctic conditions? Are you all mad?”

I gave him one of my patented useless shrugs. “I dunno. Just born here I guess.”

“You’re not a bloody oak tree, you know. You can move any time you like.” Easy for him to say. I tried to leave Milwaukee and wound up in frigging Iowa. I released the clutch and eased onto University Boulevard, then left onto Pammel around the north end of the campus.

We passed a series of barns that made up the School of Agriculture. He let out a tortured moan. “Did we really just pass something called the Ruminant Laboratory?”

“Who’s Ruminant? Do you know him?”

“Just drive.” He pouted silently the rest of the way.

Minutes later, I pulled up in front of the College’s Guest House. De Prorok took two deep breaths and dashed for the warmth and whatever comforts it offered, leaving me to spend the next twenty minutes or so hauling projectors and boxes to the icy steps, then inside the entrance way. I stacked them there so I could reload for Moline in the morning.

I had just managed to pull my feet with their two pairs of wool socks out of my boots when a voice boomed down the stairs. “Brown, are you done?”

“Yeah,” I said, as I stepped into a frigid puddle of melted snow, feeling the thick wool slurp it up like a sponge.

“Come join me.”

After throwing my overalls onto the bed in my tiny second floor room, I went up to the third floor. The count’s room was large enough for a bed and chair, making it the Presidential suite of the establishment. He stood with his back to me, wearing a silk robe of some kind and staring out the window. In his hand was a glass with a thin layer of something amber in it.

“How do you think it went tonight?”

I thought about it. “Pretty good. They liked it a lot.”

“Better than Grinnell?” He turned to look at me and knocked back the rest of his drink.

“Yeah, sure. They clapped louder, and they stuck around longer.”

His glass hit the table with a solid ca-thunk. From the pocket of his robe he pulled out a bottle and refilled his glass. Then he poured one for me and held it out. I took it without thinking.

I didn’t drink much, except for beer. For a German kid in Milwaukee, that was more like a sacrament than actual drinking. As for booze, well it was illegal and I didn’t need that kind of trouble. Second, the few experiences I’d had with hard liquor hadn’t gone very well. Moderation wasn’t taught in our home. People used to say, “Have a drink and be somebody.” I was always afraid that someone was my Old Man, so I usually declined.

De Prorok examined his glass. “Templeton Rye, they call it. Not bad stuff as homemade hooch goes. And it’s from here. When in Rome, eh? Kind of like drinking cognac in Cognac or champagne in Champagne, I suppose. Honestly, how can people live in this climate and ban alcohol? If I were king, I’d make it mandatory.”

He lifted his glass in a toast I nervously returned. I took a little sip, hoping the outside of my mouth didn’t show how much the inside of my mouth burned.

“Brown, why do you think it went better tonight than last time? Except for that harpy of a reporter, dragging up old business. But why was it better than Grinnell?”

I didn’t know what he expected me to say. “It was weird. I mean, you said the exact same stuff the exact same way, but they sure seemed to eat it up.”

His eyes lit up, or maybe it was the rye. “Because they weren’t distracted. Everything worked tonight, so they could stay with me. No breaks in concentration. Last time they’d be in Algeria one minute, then wiggling their bums in hard gymnasium chairs watching someone turn a slide upside right the next. I couldn’t sustain the magic.”

He rattled on, explaining about rhythm, and how a good lecture was like a Beethoven symphony, which seemed like a stretch to me, but I didn’t like long-hair music much more than I liked lectures.

“You can’t have crashing symbols and pounding drums for ninety minutes, you need gentler movements and slow, dramatic builds, but they can’t be interrupted. I mean, you need the big horns and all to keep people awake and excited.” Tonight, according to him, it flowed. Even if Ames was just some cow-college town, it worked. And if they all went like this, well soon it would be real cities.

“What cities?” I asked.

“Would you believe New York City? There’s talk of Carnegie Hall in the spring, maybe June. Would you like to see New York, Brown?” My sudden dizziness was only partly due to the rye.

We talked about what worked (the unveiling of the tomb seemed to really grab them) and what didn’t (that jazz with the robe and the sword looked kind of goofy). He watched me over the lip of his glass as we spoke, listening like I knew what I was talking about, which was completely ridiculous because I didn’t know nothing from nothing and knew it all too well.

“Your glass is empty.” So it was, and he fixed that little problem immediately. I should have stopped him, but he was in the middle of a story about Madame Rouvier. She was the rich lady with the boobs popping out of her dress in the first movie. At least that’s how I remembered her. He recalled her fondly as the one person in all of North Eastern Algeria who could iron out all the permits for their trip.

“A charming woman, Denise, but not subtle,” he said cryptically.

“Did her husband know about you two?” I asked, in that subtle way only an inexperienced, slightly drunk nineteen year old could manage.

“Brown, I’m married. Happily so, if there is such a thing. She was too, although certainly less happy. No, I never slept with Denise Rouvier, much to her great disappointment, I’m sure.”

“Then why did she help you?”

“Because I charmed everything but the pants off her. Charm, Brown—you should try it some time.” Yes, he’d flirted, intimated, cajoled, stroked fingers while reaching for green beans, and stood far too close for propriety’s sake, but he swore up and down her virtue remained intact. At least it was as of the time of his departure.

“Is that why you always kiss the girl’s hand when you leave?” I was thinking about the way he treated our escort. “I thought for sure, you know, with the blonde at Grinnell. Maybe not so much with the pudgy one here…”

“I’ll let you in on a secret, Willy. American men think everything is about either sex or baseball. Flirting isn’t about sex. It’s a game. A fun game, too, if you learn how to play it properly.” My blank stare began to irritate him a little.

“Seduction is complete when you know the other person has given up and you can get what you want from them. Sex is merely the reward for your hard work. Or the price you have to pay. In the case of Denise Rouvier, it would have been a very high price, believe me.”

“How do you do that? How do you know how to talk to people like that?”

He took another sip of his whisky, and threw his head back for a moment, silent. “How did you know how to handle the lantern projector the other night, when whats-his-name couldn’t manage?”

I didn’t see the connection, but he refused to let me off the hook so I just mumbled, “You just feel it. Say it slides real easy. If you push too hard you can knock it off k-k-kilter, or break something so you need to be gentle with it. Sometimes it needs a rough p-p-push. You can tell just by feel.” Anyone who’d ever worked with machines knew that.

“So you know how things normally work, then you adjust based on how it feels, right?” Yeah, that was about it.

“Same thing.” He took a big swallow. “It’s exactly the same damned thing.” It sure didn’t feel like the same thing at all, but then I wasn’t as smart as him.

We talked in easy circles for a long time. The conversation would drift off for a while. We’d gab about Wisconsin, or the South of France, but it always came back around to the lecture that night. Yes, it had gone well, but there were two things that really bothered him, and he couldn’t let them go.

First was that damned reporter. “Why did she have to go and spoil everything? People were having such a good time, and she tried to bring it all… down. Why do some people always feel the need to revisit dead issues? I mean, it’s settled. Why can’t they just give me credit for doing my bloody job?” I had no answer for him, but I don’t think he really expected one.

The second bone he continued to gnaw was the mess with the robe. The real props and relics just didn’t generate the excitement of the movies and pictures. “What I really need to do is bring out a real, honest-to-god Tuareg. Scariest people I’ve ever met, including…” he winked at me as he polished off another drink, “Madame Rouvier. You should see King Akhamouk. Impressive as hell in the flesh. The robes, the swords, all very romantic and exciting. And I wouldn’t need to haul around all this projection gear.”

I wouldn’t have said anything earlier in the evening, but the Templeton truth serum was working its magic on me. “It all looks a bit… girly. The Arabs in movies always look scarier.”

That drew a contemptuous sniff. “Arabs are a small, suspicious, superstitious people. Scary with a dagger if your back is turned, but not someone you’d worry about in a real fight. The Tuaregs, though, are much, much bigger. They’re all about my height. Or yours.”

He stopped and looked me up and down. “Jesus, you are a big one. How tall are you, anyway?”

“About six feet and a bit, I guess.”

He sat straight up. “Right, and you’re bigger across the shoulders than I am, like he is. Wait!” He leapt to his feet, swayed a second while he corrected his balance, then stumbled over to the trunk with all the robes and props. “Stand up, Brown.”

I managed to get to my feet on the second attempt. I wondered what he was doing. Then the light slowly dawned. No way. “Unh uh.”

“Oh come on, I’m making a point here.” He threw the blue robe over my shoulders, and pulled it down over me roughly, while I wriggled like a four year old trying to avoid getting his jammies on.

Finally, he tugged the burnoose into place, then he attempted to wind the turban around my head—the whiskey making a complicated act even trickier. In frustration, he wrapped it around his own head, then pulled it off and placed the finished product atop my big Kraut cranium. It was just like my Old Man would knot my tie around his own neck, then slip it over my head to finish it up.

He gripped my shoulders and spun me towards the mirror on the wardrobe door. Facing me was a six-foot tall, pale, slightly the worse for drink Tuareg warrior. I didn’t look much like the scourge of the Sahara. I looked like Fatty Arbuckle in a Christmas pageant, and told him so.

“Hmmmmm, you’re right.” He inspected me head to toe like a critical haberdasher, then reached into the box and pulled out a scrap of cloth the same deep blue as the robe, lined with beadwork and small metal wires along the top and bottom. He examined it thoughtfully, then wheeled around and held it over my mouth as if to chloroform me.

“Hold still, dammit.” I wanted to stamp my foot and pout, but settled for shaking my head. He grabbed me by the turban long enough to connect the veil across the bridge of my nose. Then he wheeled me back to the mirror. Except for the bloodshot peepers, my reflection looked more like a denizen of the desert than it looked like me.