Too Much Too Soon (28 page)

A thin man in his twenties was rising from a divan.

“This is my nephew, Khalid, home from Oxford,” Fuad said.

Like his uncle, Khalid wore the traditional garments with the regal band of gilt. His skin was smoothly, tautly pale, his brown mustache appeared painted on with a narrow brush, but it was his eyes that Joscelyn noticed. The left eye moved independently of the right, flashing like his aunt’s jewelry.

Fuad draped his stout arm around Joscelyn. “And this is the sister of my dearest American friend, Curt Ivory—Joscelyn Peck.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Khalid,” Joscelyn said.

Khalid averted his gaze from her.

“And this handsome boy, this lucky man, is her husband, Malcolm Peck.”

“Your highness,” Malcolm said, respectful.

This must be the manner in which Khalid desired to be addressed, for he held out his hand to Malcolm. “Good evening, Mr. Peck,” he said, adding tersely, “Mrs. Peck.”

Soft drinks were served. Lelith smiled and nodded, as if urging them to converse without her. Fuad sat next to her, from time to time patting her plump, beringed hand.

Khalid said to Malcolm, “So you are building our new petrochemical facilities.” His regal tone indicated that the construction was on his property.

“I’m only one of the Ivory people, your highness.”

“He’s an engineer on the pipeline,” Joscelyn added.

Khalid sipped his ginger beer while continuing to look at Malcolm. “In the Trans-Arabian
pipeline I’ve heard the steel was fabricated with carbon, manganese, phosphorus, sulfur. Is that information correct?”

Malcolm nodded, his eyes uncertain. It astonished Joscelyn to realize how little he knew about so similar a project.

“It is,” Joscelyn said. “Except we’re using a slightly different proportion.”

“Joscelyn is an engineer, too,” Fuad said. “A Phi Beta Kappa from my old alma mater.”

“But of course she’s not working on this project, your highness,” Malcolm said to Khalid. “Now she’s devoting herself to marriage.”

Dinner, a six-course banquet, was French in flavor except for the entrée, which was the Lalarheini specialty of baby lamb simmered with dates.

Over the coffee—again French rather than the thick, sweet Mideastern brew, Khalid said, “This oil is a benison for Lalarhein. Now we can have the best of your Western world, yet retain the best of ours.”

“Khalid, don’t bore our guests with your political views,” Fuad said, but his voice was fond. “My nephew, like all you young people, is a bit of an extremist. He believes our legal system should be based solely on the Sharia.”

“The same law as the Saudis use,” said Joscelyn. Since her immurement here, she had studied about the Mideast with her old schoolgirl intensity, poring over books and newspapers, erudition that wasn’t worth a hoot in the Ivory enclave, where people had no interest in
the locals. “It’s a bit extreme.”

“The laws were handed down to Mohammed by Allah,” Khalid said.

“But reverting to Sharia would mean scrapping the bulk of your legal system,” Joscelyn said.

“A legal system foisted on us by the British,” Khalid retorted. “In the West you treat morality and behavior as a private matter. Sharia treats them as a social concern, the responsibility of the entire society. There were over a thousand murders in your Los Angeles County last year, less then fifty in Saudi, which has a slightly larger population.” The left eye was flashing wildly.

“Fairly impressive proof of Sharia’s superiority,” Malcolm said.

Khalid made his first smile. “On the other hand,” he said, “your technology is admirable.”

“There we agree, Khalid,” Fuad said. “Our country needs a sanitary system, more roads, more schools, a water supply, possibly a university.”

“And don’t forget a modern airport,” Khalid said. “The Daralam field can’t handle the new jumbo jets. Or the new fighter planes.”

“Fighter planes . . .?” Joscelyn asked, her voice trailing off as Malcolm gave her a quick, hard glance.

She picked up her Limoges demitasse cup with trembling fingers, smiling at Lelith.

As soon as they were in the house, Malcolm hit her on the hip. It wasn’t a hard blow, but like the preliminary jabs a boxer feints at his sparring partner. “Bitch!”

“Okay. So I opened my mouth at a friend’s house.”

“You’re such a fucking genius—don’t you know where you are?”

“I’m in a prefab with plasterboard walls, and if you yell any louder, the entire block will tape us.”

“You’re in the Mideast.” Now his pitch was low and dangerous. “That’s where you are.” He landed another restrained punch on her arm. “You’ve had your genius nose buried in enough books about the goddamn area, so how come you haven’t read someplace that women don’t mean shit here?”

“It bugs you that I spoke to that twerpy religious fanatic?”

“It bugs me that you meet one of the royal family and call him by his first name then tell him his religion goes in for barbarism.”

“I never said that, I’d die before I hurt Fuad, but since you’ve brought it up, Sharia does include public whippings and beheadings, lopping off a hand or two.”

Another slap. “Khalid—his highness to you—is hot to build an airport. Talbott’s has
been doing a preliminary plan, and so have we.”

“That’s no big secret. What I fail to see is the connection with his royal highness.”

“I intend to see we get the job.”

“Through him?” She gave a snorting laugh. “He just finished college, he’s hardly one of the powers that be.”

“He’s an Abdulrahman.”

“Exactly the logic I’d expect from an engineering authority who doesn’t know whether to lay pipe above or below the ground.”

His eyes glazed, his mouth quivered: he looked like an unjustly whipped child. She sucked in her breath, wishing she could recall her words. Then an angry flush spread across his tanned face to redden his ears. He swung again. This time his blow landed full force in the pit of her stomach. She had no sensation of falling; she was suddenly asprawl on the speckled yellow linoleum. There was no immediate pain. She was too filled with hatred—she had never hated anyone as intensely as she hated Malcolm at this minute.

He went into the kitchen, returning with an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker. His footsteps reverberated through her, and her sudden fury evaporated.

“Malcolm, please don’t go,” she whimpered from the floor. “You know what a mean fighter I am. Please?”

He didn’t glance at her. The flimsy walls shook as he slammed out. In the reasoning sector of her brain Joscelyn knew her husband
had gone to a house identical to his and was ingratiating himself with a group of Americans in various stages of inebriation, but her panicky fear at losing him refused this logic. Was this what she had feared since they had first started dating, the big split?

Struggling to her feet, she lay down on the bed, breathing shallowly so as not to intensify the stabbing pain below her ribs. The fluorescent green hands of the alarm clock were pointing at ten after two when Malcolm got home. She listened to him go to the bathroom, then fall on the daybed in the other bedroom. Only then did she drop into an uneasy, pain-filled sleep.

*   *   *

One of Malcolm’s most endearing qualities, though, was an inability to hold a grudge. The following Thursday he arrived home from the Q’ram whistling. He hugged her gently, bending to contritely kiss the broad adhesive that the sweet old English doctor in Daralam Square had taped around her rib cage.

While she was rinsing the dinner dishes, the phone rang. Malcolm took it in the next room. After a minute he pushed open the swinging door.

“That was Khalid,” he said, grinning triumphantly. “He’ll be here in a half hour.”

Kalid brought another guest. Though he himself was again dressed traditionally, his companion wore cheap Western clothes that were immensely large for his scrawny frame. The sleeves of his faded blue shirt were rolled
up to show small, knotty biceps, his trousers belled out around a waist so thin that he’d wound his belt around twice. Into the worn leather was thrust a revolver that appeared to be a German army surplus, circa World War I.

“This,” Khalid said with a casual wave of his hand, “is Harb Fawzi.”

The one-sided introduction told Joscelyn that skinny Harb Fawzi was unimportant, probably a servant. She amended this to be a bodyguard as Fawzi narrowed his eyes to give her and Malcolm a visual frisk.

Under the intensity of his gaze, Joscelyn frowned uneasily. Then, without a by-your-leave, Fawzi prowled into the dinky bedroom hall, opening the doors and closets before going into the kitchen, where he spoke in sharp Arabic to Yussuf. Joscelyn took a step to rescue her “boy,” but Malcolm’s glance halted her. She remained on the couch, very aware of the tight taping around her ribs.

Fawzi returned, nodding. Khalid shot him a flashing glance and he sat on one of the ladderback dinette chairs, fingering his gun butt.

Yussuf served coffee, his head bowed respectfully as he approached Khalid. Joscelyn, as she and Malcolm had prearranged, took her cup to the bedroom, where through the thin walls she could hear voices but no words. After about an hour the big black Lincoln started, purring away in the direction of the mansion-strewn hills.

Malcolm burst into the bedroom, exhilarated.
“Hey, under that costume Khalid’s a regular guy. We got along fabulously.”

“Know something? Outside of the movies, I never saw anyone wear a handgun tucked into his belt.”

“Harb Fawzi, you mean? He’s Khalid’s driver. At Oxford Khalid gave some speeches and the Zionists got rambunctious. No violence, but ever since Fawzi’s played bodyguard.”

“Talk about paranoid. How many Zionists can there be in Lalarhein?”

“Joss, Khalid’s more important than you think. He has enemies among his own people.”

I’ll bet he does
, Joscelyn thought. “Was there any reason for his visit?” she asked.

“We hit it off the other night.” Malcolm spoke a touch too easily. “He likes to shoot the bull, and we’re about the same age.”

*   *   *

Over the next weeks, Khalid returned five times, and the procedure was always the same: Fawzi, armed and watchful as a lean hound, searched the house while she retired to the bedroom. After the duo left, Malcolm was invariably very up. Joscelyn not only accepted the odd friendship, but exploited it, basking in Malcolm’s sunny mood.

Once she heard them laughing, and later asked what it was about. “It cracked him up, how Heinrichman settled that problem at the pumping station site with a judicious smear to the right guys from the slush fund.”

A slush fund was kept by every company doing business in the Mideast, where it was the
custom to hand out small sums of cash to expedite business and to prevent harassment. While the pilferage at Pumping Station 1 was not major, every piece of supplies had to be shipped in, and the cost of waiting for replacements was monstrous. Heinrichman’s solution was to give the workers he suspected of robbery extra wages to be “night watchmen.”

*   *   *

As part of their additional benefit package, Ivory employees in Lalarhein had a month’s vacation with a travel bonus.

In February, Malcolm took off two weeks. He and Joscelyn flew to Paris. At the Orly airport they rented a sardine-can Citroën and carved leisurely through the winter-struck Loire Valley. Malcolm, who had never been in Europe, studied the red Michelin for starred restaurants, he bought stacks of illustrated guides to châteaux, he learned enough about the local wines to order judiciously.

The second week they returned to Paris, giving up the car and staying in the Hôtel d’Antin, a small, inexpensive place near the Opéra. They strolled, gloved hands entwined, along the Seine embankments, they climbed the steep hills of Montmartre, they gazed entranced at the bright, glowing Impressionist masterpieces in the Jeu de Paume.

After their visit to this small, magnificently endowed museum, Malcolm invented one of those silly games that lovers play in Paris, taking Joscelyn into art galleries to pretend to select a memento of their vacation, a choice
they both knew was vastly out of their range.

One afternoon as they circled the Place de la Concorde he halted before a window display, a single Impressionist rendering of wispy plane trees along a canal.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Malcolm, see that name on the frame? It’s a mere Sisley. What about the little Renoir nude you promised me on the rue St. Honoré?”

“Let’s see how cheapo it is,” he said.

The stout, cordial salesman told them two hundred thousand francs—“That is only fifty thousand dollars. It’s a very fine work, Monsieur—Sisley’s an excellent investment.”

“We’ll think about it,” Malcolm said gravely.

When they were again on the Place de la Concorde, Joscelyn whooped, “Only fifty thousand dollars!”

“But an excellent investment,” Malcolm said, putting his arm around her waist, squeezing her.

They laughed the rest of the way to the Hôtel d’Antin.

*   *   *

Back in Lalarhein, the khamsin winds blew hot, rattling the mass-produced windowpanes and setting the nerves on edge. At first Joscelyn attributed her drowsiness to the weather, but then her breasts became tender and sourness churned her stomach. She made an appointment with Dr. Bryanston, the gray-haired English physician who practiced in his five-story home overlooking Daralam Square. Dr. Bryanston liked Joscelyn because despite her American
accent she was English born, and Joscelyn liked the doctor because he had taped her broken rib without a lot of embarrassing inquiries.

Medical men in Lalarhein were obligated to keep two waiting rooms: she sat amid veiled, heavily scented women and groaning children impatiently awaiting her turn.

After his examination, Dr. Bryanston said in his quiet voice, “Mrs. Peck, you have the only happy ailment there is. You’re pregnant.”

It must have happened that snowy night in Tours, when she had forgotten to put in her diaphragm and then hadn’t wanted to leave the cozy
lit matrimonial.

Driving home, she kept bursting into an off-key rendition of “Yes sir, that’s my baby.” In the house, though, sipping a ginger ale to quell her nausea, she was abruptly hit by the fact that she and Malcolm had agreed to postpone even talking about a family until his three years in Lalarhein were up.
What if he’s angry? In this situation, men have been known to run out on a woman.