The Spice Route Contract by Philip Atlee

Author:Philip Atlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

The black renegade heaved up unsteadily, told me to meet him outside in ten minutes, and ducked through the low doorway. I heard a car start somewhere on the wadi side of the mud-hutted enclosure and come coughing toward the compound. When I followed Richards outside, I bumped my head on the low doorframe, because I was still turned like a tall dog by the tasty qat leaves. I also had a raging thirst, and, going to the well, drank and spat several times.

A dusty Renault sedan of ancient vintage was drawn up at one side of the square, with a tribesman-driver lounging behind the wheel. Dawn was smudging the sky behind the jagged rampart of mountains to the east, and by its pale light I could see a lounging sentry with a canted rifle. Edgar came striding out of a hut across the way; he had changed back into his ragged robes, and after drinking and hawking sputum into the dirt he motioned me into the old sedan.

The track to the road was rough, but once we had turned right and downward toward Mocha it smoothed out. After dropping through another dry wadi, we passed a village of square stone huts, and Edgar said it was al-Aryish. A few miles further on we stopped beside the wrecked Mercedes truck with its front end smashed into the euphorbia grove.

Telling Edgar to wait, I climbed into the back end of the truck, and brought him back the two metal containers of currency, after palming the receipt-draft for the fifty thousand in Maria Theresa dollars. He thumbed through the wrapped packets quickly.

“If they kept a serial list on these numbers,” he said quietly, closing the box, “you might come to crying time.”

“If we get them from an interior bank,” I explained, “we always ask that no serial record be kept. Usually, the bills are brought in from outside. On this one, we didn’t have much time. There could be a record in Taiz or San’a.”

Richards nodded. “You wouldn’t lie to an old suthrun colored boy, now would you?”

“Not unless it could help me,” I answered. Richards laughed, reached into the front seat, and we started nibbling at those electric leaves again. The Bedu driver swung the car around and we drove back to the compound. After we stopped, Richards said “sleep,” and got out, flourishing a bundle of qat leaves. I went back into the room I had left and collapsed beside Inger on the clean dirt floor.

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