Read Beyond the Doors of Death for Free Online

him?”
    “No,” she said. She grunted in annoyance and threw her shorts and blouse into a chair. There was a fierce pounding at her temples, a sensation of being challenged, of being threatened, that she had not felt since that awful day at the Newark mounds. She strode to the window and looked out, half expecting to see Jorge arguing with Nerita and Laurence in the courtyard. But there was no one down there except a houseboy who looked up as if her bare breasts were beacons and gave her a broad dazzling smile. Sybille turned her back to him and said dully, “Go back down. Tell him that it’s impossible for me to see him. Use that word. Not that I won’t see him, not that I don’t want to see him, not that it isn’t right for me to see him, just that it’s impossible. And then phone the airport. I want to go back to Dar on the evening plane.”
    “But we’ve only just arrived!”
    “No matter. We’ll come back some other time. Jorge is very persistent; he won’t accept anything but a brutal rebuff, and I can’t do that to him. So we’ll leave.”
    ***
    Klein had never seen deads at close range before. Cautiously, uneasily, he stole quick intense looks at Kent Zacharias as they sat side by side on rattan chairs among the potted palms in the lobby of the hotel. Jijibhoi had told him that it hardly showed, that you perceived it more subliminally than by any outward manifestation, and that was true; there was a certain look about the eyes, of course, the famous fixity of the deads, and there was something oddly pallid about Zacharias’ skin beneath the florid complexion, but if Klein had not known what Zacharias was, he might not have guessed it. He tried to imagine this man, this red-haired red-faced dead archaeologist, this digger of dirt mounds, in bed with Sybille. Doing with her whatever it was that the deads did in their couplings. Even Jijibhoi wasn’t sure. Something with hands, with eyes, with whispers and smiles, not at all genital—so Jijibhoi believed. This is Sybille’s lover I’m talking to. This is Sybille’s lover. How strange that it bothered him so. She had had affairs when she was living; so had he; so had everyone; it was the way of life. But he felt threatened, overwhelmed, defeated, by this walking corpse of a lover.
    Klein said, “Impossible?”
    “That was the word she used.”
    “Can’t I have ten minutes with her?”
    “Impossible.”
    “Would you let me see her for a few moments, at least? I’d just like to find out how she looks.”
    “Don’t you find it humiliating, doing all this scratching around just for a glimpse of her?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you still want it?”
    “Yes.”
    Zacharias sighed. “There’s nothing I can do for you. I’m sorry.”
    “Perhaps Sybille is tired from having done so much traveling. Do you think she might be in a more receptive mood tomorrow?”
    “Maybe,” Zacharias said. “Why don’t you come back then?”
    “You’ve been very kind.”
    “ De nada .”
    “Can I buy you a drink?”
    “Thanks, no,” Zacharias said. “I don’t indulge any more. Not since—” He smiled.
    Klein could smell whiskey on Zacharias’ breath. All right, though. All right. He would go away. A driver waiting outside the hotel grounds poked his head out of his cab window and said hopefully, “Tour of the island, gentleman? See the clove plantations, see the athlete stadium?”
    “I’ve seen them already,” Klein said. He shrugged. “Take me to the beach.”
    He spent the afternoon watching turquoise wavelets lapping pink sand. The next morning he returned to Sybille’s hotel, but they were gone, all five of them, gone on last night’s flight to Dar, said the apologetic desk clerk. Klein asked if he could make a telephone call, and the clerk showed him an ancient instrument in an alcove near the bar. He phoned Barwani. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “You told me they’d be staying at least a week!”
    “Oh, sir, things change,”