He reached into his pocket and pulled out the photo of the girl, studying it in the faint light from the primus stove. There was something very fragile about her healthy young beauty, almost as if she were pleading for help with those wonderful eyes. Or perhaps he was just creating his own fairy tale, a romantic fantasy that had nothing to do with the real flesh and blood woman at all.

“Kelly love,” the Scorpion said to himself. “I sure hope you’re worth all this.”

The young sailor fell silent as he began to work the ropes. The boat creaked in the night like an old house full of secrets. Ahead, like a low dark cloud brooding against the stars, lay the mainland of Arabia.

Arabia

Arabia

OUTSIDE THE NIGHT WIND stirred the desert to silent life, spinning dust devils that the Bedu believe are the visible manifestations of evil spirits called zars. It was that dark hour before midnight when men are moved by a strange restlessness as old as firelight on cave walls and shadowy sexual fantasies dance across the mind.

In the bathroom of her quarters, Kelly marked the seconds with the rhythmic stropping of the gold letter-opener she had stolen from Abdul Sa’ad’s desk. Relentlessly she scraped the blade against the edge of a pried-up floor tile. Every so often she would test the edge, honed to razor-sharpness, on her finger. Finally satisfied, she went back into the bedroom. She hid the letter-opener in her handbag and walked aimlessly around the room, as though she were waiting for a phone call. In the light of a gold and ivory lamp her eyes appeared to be hollow, like bottomless blue holes in her skull. Soon, she knew, he would send for her.

“How good a slice of bread tastes depends on how hungry you are,” Kelly’s father once told her. They were sitting in his den, the walls covered with plaques and civic awards. Even in a sports shirt he looked distinguished, as if he never sweated. His face was attractively tan and glowing from a recent “fact-finding” trip to the French Riviera with his latest mistress, who was younger than Kelly. He jokingly told her that the trip had been arranged by the famous Congressional travel agency: Boon & Doggle.

That was the time when she had discovered that in exchange for a large campaign contribution from a building contractor, he had agreed to push an important contract the builder’s way. What made it doubly hypocritical in Kelly’s view was that he was running on a reform platform, accusing his Democratic opponent of underworld ties.

“In the real-world jungle, morality is a luxury of the well-fed,” her father had declared in that self-righteous tone of voice she had associated with his lectures ever since she was a little girl. No matter how hard she tried, that tone always made her feel as if she could never do anything right.