Donkey-Vous by Michael Pearce Page A

busy. Also, they could only see what passed them. Reception was actually inside the hotel, in the foyer, and the people on the desk couldn’t see out on to the terrace itself. Suppose something had happened between the table where Moulin was sitting and the entrance to the hotel: Reception would not have seen it, the snake charmer couldn’t have seen it, and donkey-boys, well, they might or might not have seen it.
    But, surely, if anything had happened on the terrace
someone
would have seen it? Someone at a neighboring table? The tables were, after all, only a few feet apart. If there had been a struggle or anything of that sort—well, there couldn’t have been. The Colthorpe Hartleys, who had been at the very next table, would certainly have seen it.
    But suppose the incident, whatever it was, had been smaller in scale, apparently trivial? Suppose it had occurred at a time when their attention had been distracted, perhaps deliberately? That was a possibility. He would have to ask Lucy Colthorpe Hartley if anything like that had occurred.
    Owen was sitting at a table a little further into the terrace than either the one Moulin habitually occupied or the one the Colthorpe Hartleys had been sitting at that day. The table was right at the front of the terrace, so close to the railing that the street-vendors touched his foot as they poked their wares through the bars. Hippopotamus-hide whips, splendid red tarbooshes, and filmy ladies’ underwear jostled for his attention. A long brown arm with a snake coiled around it was suddenly thrust in his direction; and in an instant a whole pack of postcards of scantily dressed ladies fanned itself open in the air before his astonished eyes.
    “Gracious, Captain Owen!” said Lucy Colthorpe Hartley. “I did not know you were such a connoisseur.”
    “Friends of yours?” he asked, recovering quickly.
    “Intimate,” she replied, sinking into a chair. “Abdul here greets me with a different nosegay every day.”
    A beaming vendor, rather darker than the others, laid a bunch of sweetly smelling flowers on the terrace beside her.
    “They don’t last long,” she said, “but for a while they brighten up the room.”
    She fumbled in her purse for some token piastres.
    “Allow me,” said Owen.
    Lucy put a restraining hand on his arm.
    “Certainly not!” she said. “You are interfering with long-established custom. What you
can
do, though,” she added, peering into her purse, “is help me count up the necessary millièmes as I seem to have run out of piastres.”
    “That’s enough. A little money goes a long way here.”
    “You’d better have a talk with my father. He doesn’t seem to think so.”
    “I’m sure he won’t mind the flowers.”
    “No. But he did mind the turquoises. I took them in to Andalaft’s as you suggested, Captain Owen, and he is going to find someone to make them up for me.”
    “Do you have other regulars among the vendors, Miss Colthorpe Hartley?”
    “I have a faithful following,” said Lucy, “which I attribute more to misplaced hope than to my personal charms.”
    “They follow you wherever you sit?”
    “We usually sit in the same place.”
    “Which is at this end of the terrace, of course.”
    “It is exactly there,” said Lucy, pointing. “How disillusioning! There I was hoping that what had brought you here was the attraction of my big blue eyes when all the time you are merely getting on with your work.”
    “I am combining work with pleasure. A little work and a lot of pleasure.”
    “At least you have the proportions right,” said Lucy. “You were, if you remember, going to tell me exactly what was your work, Mamur Zapt.”
    “Well…” said Owen.
    “How fascinating!” said Lucy Colthorpe Hartley, resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands and gazing straight into his eyes.
     
    “It didn’t look like work to me,” said Zeinab.
    Zeinab, unfortunately, had passed by in an arabeah on her way home from