Read Garment of Shadows for Free Online Page B

longer.
    My clockwise route along the city walls was hit and miss, the public routes often losing sight of them entirely. As I turned south, the air began to smell less and less salubrious; indeed, had it not been for the studied nonchalance of the locals, the stench would have tempted me to cover my face.
    It was a tannery, built along the river. A trio of peculiar-looking women went by, under the care of a French-speaking Moroccan, and only when they had passed did the reason for their bizarre appearance occur to me: They were Europeans. I turned immediately to follow, meandering along in their wake, where I thus learned that the stink was indeed a tannery, the source of all that gorgeously coloured Moroccan leather, and the reason for its stink was the pigeon droppings used as part of the process.
    Or so the guide claimed.
    But then, he also claimed that his very brother was the shopkeeper selling leather goods, and that the prices were especially low just for his clients, and that the Prince of Wales had bought a cigar-case of precisely that design, Madame.
    But I ambled along within hearing for two reasons. First, their language. Since coming to this place, I had heard several tongues. Some were a closed book to me. My Arabic had been rusty, although it was improving rapidly, and in French I was relatively fluent. But the language these ladies spoke amongst themselves slid over me like a well-worn glove: English.
    The other reason was a pair of names one of the ladies said after a couple of aeroplanes flew noisily over our heads, headed north like a pair of worker bees tracking a source of nectar.
    “Oh look!” the stout grey-haired lady exclaimed. “It’s the French RAF!”
    “Ivy,” the tallest of the trio said, “I don’t believe the French have a royal anything.”
    “Oh, you know what I mean. Are they bombing someone?” she asked the guide. The tall one translated, then gave Ivy his answer. “He says, they’re not bombing yet, just watching. What they call ‘aerial surveillance.’ ”
    “Oh, is it Raisuli?”
    “No, Ivy, it’ll be that Krim fellow. Now, what do you say we ask the fellow to take us to lunch?”
    “Here in the medina? Do we dare?”
    “We should go back to the hotel, where we know it’s safe,” the third one worried.
    But I did not listen to the debate. I wanted to seize the tall one and demand further information: the name Raisuli—or Raisuni—made the guide as uncomfortable as it had the three café intellectuals. But since physical assault on an Englishwoman was not a good idea, I had to make do with following—close enough to hear, but distant enough not to alert their guide.
    Fortunately, they turned back towards the crowded parts, pushing past the big mosque and madrassa that swelled into the myriad of tiny lanes like a pair of queen cells distorting the rigid lines of the comb—I caught my thoughts. What was this fascination my poor brain had with bees?
    In any event, the mosque was banned to the three Unbelievers (indeed, even I would not care to risk an entrance, despite my present dress), although all three went past as slowly as possible, craning their heads at the forbidden land. While in those crowded lanes I decided that I had probably not in fact been a pick-pocket—or if so, a raw amateur at the game. Surely an experienced professional would not have been able to resist the rich pickings available, literally brushing her fingertips?
    But I came out of these tightly-packed alleys with nothing more than one withered apple.
    The trio, on the other hand, came out more than a little flustered. The worried one seemed not far from tears, and even the tall one was short-tempered. Time, she demanded, for luncheon.
    The guide jollied them along to the establishment of a cousin, which turned out to be in a sort of plaza where two roads came together, very near the first gate I had seen on the previous afternoon. I thought, by the expressions on his clients’ faces, that