Shadow realized that he was not alone. A small girl, wearing old tennis shoes on her feet and a man’s gray woolen sweater as a dress, was standing on the sidewalk, ten feet away from him, staring at him with the somber gravity of a six-year-old. Her hair was black, and straight, and long; her skin was as brown as the river.
He grinned at her. She stared back at him, defiantly.
There was a squeal and a yowl from the waterfront, and the little brown cat shot away from a spilled garbage can, pursued by a long-muzzled black dog. The cat scurried under a car.
“Hey,” said Shadow to the girl. “You ever seen invisible powder before?”
She hesitated. Then she shook her head.
“Okay,” said Shadow. “Well, watch this.” Shadow pulled out a quarter with his left hand, held it up, tilting it from one side to another, then appeared to toss it into his right hand, closing his hand hard on nothing, and putting the hand forward. “Now,” he said, “I just take some invisible powder from my pocket . . .” and he reached his left hand into his breast pocket, dropping the quarter into the pocket as he did so, “. . . and I sprinkle it on the hand with the coin . . .” and he mimed sprinkling, “. . . and look—now the quarter’s invisible too.” He opened his empty right hand, and, in astonishment, his empty left hand as well.
The little girl just stared.
Shadow shrugged, and put his hands back in his pockets, loading a quarter in one hand, a folded up five-dollar bill in the other. He was going to produce them from the air, and then give the girl the five bucks: she looked like she needed it. “Hey,” he said, “We’ve got an audience.”
The black dog and the little brown cat were watching him as well, flanking the girl, looking up at him intently. The dog’s huge ears were pricked up, giving it a comically alert expression. A cranelike man with gold-rimmed spectacles was coming up the sidewalk toward them, peering from side to side as if he were looking for something. Shadow wondered if he was the dog’s owner.
“What did you think?” Shadow asked the dog, trying to put the little girl at her ease. “Was that cool?”
The black dog licked its long snout. Then it said, in a deep, dry voice, “I saw Harry Houdini once, and believe me, man, you are no Harry Houdini.”
The little girl looked at the animals, she looked up at Shadow, and then she ran off, her feet pounding the sidewalk as if all the powers of hell were after her. The two animals watched her go. The cranelike man had reached the dog. He reached down and scratched its high, pointed ears.
“Come on,” said the man in the gold-rimmed spectacles to the dog, “it was only a coin trick. It’s not like he was doing an underwater escape.”
“Not yet,” said the dog. “But he will.” The golden light was done, and the gray of twilight had begun.
Shadow dropped the coin and the folded bill back into his pocket. “Okay,” he said. “Which one of you is Jackal?”
“Use your eyes,” said the black dog with the long snout. It began to amble along the sidewalk, beside the man in the gold glasses, and, after a moment’s hesitation, Shadow followed them. The cat was nowhere to be seen. They reached a large old building on a row of boarded-up houses. The sign beside the door said IBIS AND JACQUEL. A FAMILY FIRM. FUNERAL PARLOR. SINCE 1863.
“I’m Mr. Ibis,” said the man in the gold-rimmed glasses. “I think I should buy you a spot of supper. I’m afraid my friend here has some work that needs doing.”
SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA
New York scares Salim, and so he clutches his sample case protectively with both hands, holding it to his chest. He is scared of black people, the way they stare at him, and he is scared of the Jews—the ones dressed all in black with hats and beards and side curls he can identify, and how many others that he cannot—he is scared of the sheer quantity of the people, all shapes and sizes of people, as they spill from their high, high, filthy buildings onto the sidewalks; he is scared of the honking hullabaloo of the traffic, and he is even scared of the air, which smells both dirty and sweet, and nothing at all like the air of Oman.
Salim has been in New York, in America, for a week. Each day he visits two, perhaps three different offices, opens his sample case, shows them the copper trinkets, the rings and bottles and tiny flashlights, the models of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, gleaming in copper inside; each night he writes a fax to his brother-in-law, Fuad, at home in Muscat, telling him that he has taken no orders, or, on one happy day, that he had taken several orders (but, as Salim is painfully aware, not yet enough even to cover his airfare and hotel bill).
For reasons Salim does not understand, his brother-in-law’s business partners have booked him into the Paramount Hotel on 46th Street. He finds it confusing, claustrophobic, expensive, alien.