The Red Room (33 page)

M
orning prayers haunt the streets of Amman, echoing, reverberating. A pale but warm sunlight penetrates the small apartment’s neat interior, its walls occupied by contemporary art from a dozen artists.

The smell of coffee blows along with a drape out onto a suicide balcony, only deep enough to hold a chair, turned to allow the occupant to stretch her long legs out of the three-quarter-length terry-cloth bathrobe. She’s taken up smoking again, a horrid habit she’d thought herself free of. But one is never truly free of one’s past.

Victoria sips the coffee, pulls on the cigarette and watches her exhale pinned onto the sky like the vapor trail from a jet. Her laptop is pinched on her waist. She has reread the e-mail six times. Make it seven. Akram’s appeal for unification reads a little too much like a business letter, but rather than trouble or offend her, she warms to it; he tries hard to express himself even though he fails. Connects with her, in spite of himself. The possibility of reconciliation excites her.

This, despite the fact she has found it difficult to stop thinking about the romp with John Knox, the tenderness of a Westerner’s touch; so different from the men of Amman she has known. She thinks about Knox in other ways too: anger, over the lack of payment he promised; intrigue, over the idea of using him to move the occasional art piece she is offered. She shuts the laptop, trying to silence Akram’s voice in her head. Sips more coffee and feels it slide down her long throat. Thinks of Knox again.

She believes she could do business with him. Believes in possibility, like a future with Akram.

The sounding of her apartment’s talk box summons her. She uncoils and crosses back into the apartment, careful not to stub her toes on the lip of the sliding glass doors. Pushes the Talk button and is greeted by an express deliveryman with whom she’s so familiar she recognizes his voice.

“Mailbox or door?” he asks.

“Bring it up, please,” she says, expecting a contract for a show she’s arranging for the gallery.

She pulls the robe shut tightly, checks her face in the mirror by the door. Signs for the delivery and locks the door. The air bill’s return address is Australia, unfamiliar to her.

She opens the express envelope to find another manila envelope inside that’s lined with a metal foil. Not aluminum, something heavier.
Something,
she thinks,
to trick the X-ray machines.
She tips the envelope, loosing its contents onto the maple dining table.

The first thing to spill out is a greeting card with an image of the American president, Barack Obama, by Shepard Fairey. She grins. Shakes the envelope to dislodge the rest of its contents.

Stock certificates. Apple. IBM. Microsoft. Each certificate is marked as a thousand shares. On the back of each is a transfer record
listing her name over a signature line she can’t read because it’s written in Hebrew. There’s a
pile
of them.

She licks her finger, pauses, then begins to pull back the corners, allowing her to count. Her finger moves faster and faster. Her grin grows wider.

And she begins to
laugh.