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one is right in the middle.”
    Husani picked up the top sheet and studied it for a few moments. It appeared to be part of some kind of contract or agreement—the numbers on the left-hand side of the indented paragraphs suggested that very clearly—and he thought the language was Spanish, or perhaps Italian. What struck him as odd was that the first paragraph was numbered “17A,” which suggested that there must be at least two or three other pages that would presumably contain the earlier sections of the document, but none of the pages immediately underneath appeared to be in any way related to the sheet he held in his hand. Some of the sheets were unusual sizes, and the color of the typewritten text varied from blue to black.
    Those pages that had dates on them suggested that the papers had all been acquired at more or less the same time, because they were all from roughly the same period, the early to mid-1960s. But, glancing at the text on each one as he did so, Husani guessed that the typewritten sheets had probably been selected at random. They looked like nothing more than a miscellaneous collection of discarded business documents.
    And that gave him pause for thought. There were two fairly obvious reasons why somebody should have decided to stuff the metal case with such pages. They might be there to protect something, the pages acting as nothing more important than packing material, or perhaps they might be a kind of basic disguise—something to show an inquisitive customs officer if he insisted on the case being opened and checked. Or maybe, he decided, the pages could be performing both functions, acting as a protection and a disguise.
    “This is exactly how you found them?” Husani asked.
    Mahmoud nodded. “Exactly. I lifted the bundle of papers out of the case and examined the sheets just as you are doing now, but I didn’t change the order of the pages, in case that was important for some reason.”
    He paused for a moment and glanced shrewdly at Husani.
    “So is it important, my friend?”
    “At this moment, I have no idea.”
    Husani ran his fingers down the side of the bundle of papers until he felt something thicker and stiffer approximately in the middle of the pile. He took hold of the stack of pages that overlaid it, and lifted them all to one side.
    The object was not particularly impressive. It looked like a sheet of brownish cardboard, but as soon as Husani touched it he realized that it was actually parchment, and it looked old. There were words written on it, the letters barely visible and extremely difficult to make out. He picked up the parchment by its edges and held it up to the dim light streaming through a section of the roof of the souk, angling it to try to make out what was written on it.
    At first, he could only pick out the occasional letter, but then he saw one word fairly clearly, and a tingle—like a shot of electricity—passed through his body. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, what he was looking at was written in Latin.

7
    Most of the forged scrolls and parchments Husani had handled in the past were clearly of recent origin, the ink black and the writing easy to read. The text he was looking at now was barely legible at all, and Husani had not the slightest doubt that it really was old. He’d never heard of a forger successfully fading ink on parchment to this extent and with this degree and feeling of authenticity. What’s more, assuming everything Mahmoud had told him was the truth, and the dates on the papers were accurate, the object had been locked away in a steel box since about 1965, almost half a century earlier, and that more or less ruled out the chance of it having been manufactured as a fake antique. If somebody had made it, they would also have sold it, not hidden it away. Nothing else made sense.
    So it was old. The next question was did it have any value and, if so, what was it worth? And if it was valuable, just how little could he persuade the rascally