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1951. It was
headed “Tomb Thieves Suffer Whirlwind Justice.”
    It read: “Three
Persian tomb robbers, escaping with ancient glassware and pottery valued at
over $500,000, were all killed by a freak whirlwind which engulfed their jeep.
Eyewitnesses said that the robbers unaccountably took an extremely rough
mountainside road, which smashed several of their stolen jars and plates.
Almost immediately, they were tossed into the air by an instantaneous
whirlwind, one of them up to a height of more than thirty feet The whirlwind died away as abruptly as it had begun, and the
men dropped to the ground. All died of severe injuries in the hospital.”
    I passed the
clipping back. “It’s interesting, sure,” I told her. “But it doesn’t prove
anything.”
    She sighed.
“Nothing, Harry Erskine, proves anything. This is pure theory, and I’m not
pretending it’s anything else. But I wish you’d at least try to keep an open
mind.”
    “All right. Three bandits get caught in a whirlwind. I’m
open-minded.”
    “I don’t expect
you to take all this for gospel, not on the face of it,” said Anna. “I’m just
suggesting a little caution, in case there is something about the jar that we
ought to be cautious about. I know the stories about the jinni are ancient, and
they may not be literally true. But the idea of the jinni may be an ancient way
of expressing a fear about something else. A disease or an
explosion. I don’t know. I personally believe in magical influences, but
even if you don’t, you ought to take care. People don’t issue warnings for
2,000 years without some good reason. And apart from that, the Arabs in the
Sahara have a name for whirlwinds.”
    “Enlighten me.”
    “They call them
djinns, or genies, or whatever way you like to pronounce it They believe that whirlwinds are evil spirits, dancing in the wind.”
    I nodded. “All
right The whole thing seems kind of far-fetched, but
if it makes you feel any better, we’ll proceed with caution. The last thing I
want to do is get caught up in some freak whirlwind.”
    Anna pulled
across an old Windsor chair and sat down with the box file on her rather
shapely knees.
    “Since we can
at least agree on that,” she said, “let’s go through whatever we’ve got here
and see if we can learn some more about the jar.”
    “All right,’ I
said. “I’ll have a look through these diaries on the desk. Do you have any idea
at all when this jar came into the States? It might help me find the right
diary.”
    She was
thumbing through a closely typed report on some Egyptian ceramics. “Around 1948
or 1949, I think,” she said. “It was here when you were a kid, wasn’t it? So
think back to the first time you ever saw it.”
    I picked up a
pile of glossy black diaries held together with rubberbands, “I’m only
thirty-three,”
    I told her.
“Don’t expect the memoirs of Elizabeth Jane Portman.”
    The diaries
went back to 1954. I took a quick look through them, but they were mostly
routine and uninteresting: “Took dogs for walk . . . had lunch with Binney . .
. rough weather today . . .
    went for stroll on beach . . . English muffins for tea.” Hardly the stuff that great biographies are made of.
    I heaved a pile
of Arabic papers across to the other side of the desk to see if there were any
more diaries around, and tucked beneath them, I saw Max Greaves’ old meerschaum
pipe, its stem well-chewed and its bowl stained with tobacco. I lifted it up,
turned it around, and got a cold shock that hit me like a wet towel. The face
that was carved on the front, the snarling Arab that had delighted me so much
as a boy, had been knocked clean off. Where the face
once was, there was nothing but a broken flat edge. I stared at the pipe for a
while, then I said, “Anna.”
    “Yes?” She was
engrossed in some bills of lading from Port Said.
    “Anna, look at
this.” I held out the pipe.
    “What about
it?”
    “There used to
be a face on here. A carved face,