East of Suez (17 page)

I escaped for a time into my guidebook. From the corner of my eye, I thought I spotted Mrs Brewster and her husband. I buried my face in the seven paragraphs devoted to the Black Virgin.

“Mr Cooperman! Mercy, I never expected to see you again in this life. Are you having
fun
? Milt and I are having a
ball
. Everything’s so
different
out here. I just eat it up! We’re staying at the Hilton. Where are y’all staying?”

“Well, this is a surprise!” I said, getting to my feet. At the same moment the two of them sat down, like we were bouncing on a teeter-totter. I sat down again. “Will you join me in a drink?”

“I can’t take any more of those damned fruit cocktails they call drinks. You never know whether they wash the fruit before they squeeze it. I need a real drink. Milt brought a suitcase full of bourbon. He takes it everywhere. Ain’t he the devil, though? He just leaves a twenty-dollar bill on top in case they open it up going through customs. It
never
fails. Now, Mr Cooperman, what’s your first name? I’m Ruth-Ann and this is Milt. Oh, you already know that. Where are you from? Somebody said
Canada
! I never!”

“That’s where I come from all right. But not too far from Niagara Falls.”

“Why that practically makes you one of the family. But how can you be in Canada and near Niagara Falls? The falls are in New York State. At least they were when I went to school.”

“That’s right. One of them is in New York State and one is in Ontario, in Canada, not eleven miles from where I was born.”

“Well, isn’t that a remarkable thing! I never knew that! You’re not kidding me, are you? I was sure the falls were in New York. Upstate, but New York all the same. What is your name, Mr Cooperman?”

“Call me Ben. That’s what my friends call me. Where are you folks from?” I asked, getting into the mood.

“Why we’re from Minneapolis now, but we come from Iowa. Milt’s from Des Moines and I’m from an itty-bitty place called Winterset, where John Wayne came from. Only his name was really Morrison. So, you’re from
Canada
! Well! My sister, Pauline, stopped in Victoria on her way to Alaska. Victoria, she said, was very clean.” I wondered whether she was going to run out of nickels to keep the conversation going. But I misjudged her. She needed no encouragement from me or from Milt.

“Have you eaten? I can’t recommend this place; I don’t know it. But—”

“Oh, we’re fixed up for meals. Part of the tour. We’ve been window shopping, that’s all. I found a wonderful postcard for our daughter back home. When she sees it, she’ll just scream. It’s so funny.”

“What line are you in, Mr Cooper?” This was the first I’d heard from Milt.

“Ladies’ ready-to-wear,” I lied. “What’s your line?”

“Oh, Milt’s an anesthetist. He’s knocked out more people than Muhammad Ali. That’s what I tell everybody. He works three hospitals in the Greater Hennepin County Area. You may have heard of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. It’s world famous.” I nodded to be polite. “We’ve signed up to go on a trail ride up the mountain. There’s a big waterfall hidden up there. Milt, don’t forget to buy more film. I don’t want to run out again. Say, Ben, you had a nifty camera on your dive. I saw it. Have you had the pictures printed yet? No, of course not—hasn’t been time. You can get it done in our hotel. You were with that pretty Beverley Taylor.
What
’s she like?”

“She knows more about diving than I do.”

“That’s not what I meant! You
men
! Honestly!”

“She comes here for the diving and loves it.”

“There’s no young man in her life?”

“Not that I’ve met. Do you know of one?”

“Milt saw her with a handsome, dashing fellow. But he was an older man. He was in business, wasn’t he, Milt?”

“Import-export is what he said.”

“You can’t get vaguer than that! Maybe it was James Bond! Wouldn’t
that
be a hoot?”

This friendly banter went on for another minute or so and then we exchanged addresses so that she could share her pictures with me. Now I know that there is a bed waiting for me any time I happen to find myself without a hotel room in Minneapolis. We shook hands and I watched them negotiate their way across the street, waving arms and holding up fingers to warn traffic that they were coming.

THIRTEEN

IT WASN’T UNTIL
the following day that I was able to follow up the mystery of the key found in Vicky’s apartment. The locksmith’s door was now open. Sitting behind his counter, half hidden by a glass screen, he was crocheting a cap. As I approached, he gently put his hook and wool to one side and gave me his complete attention. His mustache moved so that it looked curved; I took that for a smile. I showed him the key I’d been keeping warm in my hand and he turned it over in his palm. I made up a story about its being found among the effects of a recently deceased uncle. He turned it around in his hand, still listening to my fiction. “It’s from a bank, sir. Safety deposit.”

“Can you tell which bank?”

“There are many banks in Takot, my friend.”

“But doesn’t the number stamped on it tell you which bank?”

“That is not for general knowledge. The information is restricted.”

“Yes, I know. But I am a visitor in your country. I am settling an estate. Some of your fellow citizens may benefit from the will when it is probated.”

“Are you dealing with a lawyer from Takot?”

“I will be, once I have some idea of the size of the estate. Can you recommend a good lawyer?”

“My son-in-law has just opened an office on Ex-Frédéric-Chopin Street. I’ll give you his card.” He took out a dusty printed card from a top drawer and passed it to me over the counter. He smiled as he took my hand and shook it. “Try the Inland and International Bank on Ex-Charpentier Avenue.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“But you will find them closed at this hour. You see, even I in my small shop am turning away from business for an hour.”

“When will they be open?” I asked with some anxiety.

“At two o’clock we both will open our shutters.”

Before I left him, I held up the scrap of paper on which I’d written the word on the Granges’ refrigerator:
IOEOLVYU
. When I asked him if it meant anything in any of the local languages, he took it in his hand and held it up to the light. At length he handed it back to me, shaking his head. “It means nothing to me, sir. I’m sorry. Speak to my son-in-law. He knows about such things.” I gave him a grin as I left the shop. Once in the street, I quickly wrote the name in my book to secure it in my “memory.”

A few minutes later, I was sitting in the Trois Magots, waiting for my stream of semi-consciousness to be interrupted by a familiar voice or face. I wasn’t particular. Foreign travel seems to be largely a matter of waiting around in cafés. When the waiter told me he didn’t know what a chopped-egg sandwich was, I ordered a local beer and began sipping it. To me it seemed like a damned good beer, and I wondered why—back home—we never saw the likes of it except in expensive Thai or similar restaurants. I let my mind become sidetracked into a reverie about the fortune I might make by introducing Canadians to beer this good. When my glass was empty, the waiter brought a second or third bottle, which was well over my temperate limit. A plate of dried shrimp mixed with nuts made me think about ordering more. I was relaxed and sleepy in the heat when a voice hailed me from behind.

“Ah, Mr Cooperman! You have already become a landmark along the street.” It was my friend the priest. I have forgotten his name for the moment.

“Ah, Father! Sit down. Please join me.” He gathered up his skirts and placed himself carefully into a wicker chair. The priest’s girth was such that he attended to the business of sitting down with elaborate care. He breathed out an audible sigh as he settled up to the table.

“Not off climbing to see the Golden Temple? Or are you newly returned from the statue of the Black Virgin? I’m surprised at you, Mr Cooperman. I should have thought that you’d be weighted down with souvenirs by now, gifties for the folks back home. I am amazed. Where are your battle scars, your trophies of war?”

“I paid those dues this morning long before the bird racket started outside my hotel window. Later today, with a cool drink in my grip, I’ll take in, absorb, and inwardly ruminate this morning’s experience.”

“You borrowed that from
Henry V
, my boy. You show good taste.”

“Did I? The ‘ruminating’ bit? Anna, a friend of mine, is always saying that.”

“A notion and practice I approve, although I may carry it a bit too far. To be honest, there are several of the regular tourist destinations I have never seen. I may never see them at all. Originally, dear boy, I put them aside so that I might enjoy seeing them when called upon to entertain a dozen visiting sisters or a bishop on his travels. But they never come and I have not seen two-thirds of the items in your guidebook there.”

“I think I approve of that sort of sightseeing.”

“You
think
! Then your mind floats in a half-made-up state?”

“No. I’m sure you’re exaggerating. I have to weigh in the modesty factor. Nobody knows this place better than you do. But, be that as it may, I’m just learning to be careless, to be imprecise. In short, to relax.”

“Dickens himself couldn’t have expressed it better. In fact it was Thackeray. No matter. What are you drinking?”

He waved aside my suggestion of a local beer and ordered Black Bush, straight up, which he told me the manager kept for him specially. From what he said, I gathered that this was Irish, rare, and very desirable. When I put down my beer glass, he poured a half-inch of the Black Bush into it. I had to agree; he was right. It seemed to me that there had been others in recent years who had recommended this drink, but now I couldn’t remember who they were.

“Yesterday, Father, I went out to the reef.”

“On one of those tour boats? You must be daft. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, protect me from such insanity!”

“I thought you were an enthusiast for this place.”

“I confess that most of what I know about Takot comes from reading books and listening to the exaggerated stories of active people like yourself. When I hear about their exploits in climbing to the golden dome of the Golden Temple or standing in line to see the reclining Buddha, I take to my bed with exhaustion. Were you that desperate for adventure, Mr Cooperman?”

“Ben, Father.”

“You should have been here during the great flood.
That
would have whetted your appetite for excitement. Thousands washed out to sea. We were burying corpses for days afterwards. You can still see where big ships were washed inland. Terrible!
Terrible!
Are you still avid for reckless adventure?”

“If
I
was out of my mind on the rocks, there were a dozen others out there equally demented. Men, women, and couples. They came from all over.”

“And what is the world coming to then? I suppose you saw all the fishes, great and small, staring back at you?”

“We looked our fill. It’s beautiful down there.”

“For balance, one day you must let me take you to see a baker friend of mine. Just for balance. He’ll give you some loaves to put with your fishes. If you catch the allusion.”

“They were Jewish loaves and Jewish fishes, I seem to remember.”

“Touché! An excellent retort!”

“Is there just the one reef out there,” I asked, waving a hand off in the direction of the ocean, which neither of us could see from where we were sitting, “or is there an island that goes with it? I couldn’t see much in my rubber swimming suit.”

“The reef is exposed only at low water. There’s a light at one end to warn navigation, and there’s a wreck out there as well. So I’ve been told. I forget the name. There are two of them, actually. The
Lady Frances Frazer
was a tour ship which foundered on the reef in 1938. But it rolled into deep water later on. Nobody goes there because of the current. The popular wreck is called
O’Brien
or
Sullivan
or
Murphy
. Something ethnic. I forget.”

“Me too. Is it extensive? The reef, I mean. We saw only a small part, the northern end, I think.”

“Well then you missed the south, where the light is. The whole thing isn’t very long, only about two hundred and fifty meters or so. And you’ve seen the width for yourself: not more than a few dozen meters from the calm water of the lagoon to the outer wildness of the Andaman Current.” His description was so accurate that I found it hard to believe he’d never made the trip out there himself.

“You know more than most people who dive the reef regularly.”

“Don’t try to budge me from my armchair status, sir. I enjoy being an
amateur
of these shores. As you can see, this fat noncombatant thrives on talk, Ben. I have to be a good listener; it’s my profession and my calling. So I sit here, like one of those fish out there, and conversations float around me. Whole life stories. Ah, if only I could write!”

“Who said you can’t? Where is it written?”

“Oh, I’ve done a bit of scribbling in my time, dear boy. Of it, the less said, the better. But I should really like to make a book of the secret life in a town like this.” Here he treated me again to his analogy of ants crawling around a piece of rotting fruit. Then he went on: “Would there be an interest in such a thing back in the world of
E pluribus unum
?”