Flashback by Jenny Siler Page A

I’d find Brian at the piano bar that night, more doubtful still that he’d tell me anything if I did, but Joshi’s tip was the only trail I had to follow and I planned on pursuing it to its end.
    Abdesselom had evidently quit for the night, and a middle-aged Moroccan woman with a bad orange dye-job and too much makeup had taken his place behind the desk. When I asked her what time things usually got started at the El Minzah, she folded her arms across her chest and eyed me skeptically.
    â€œYou are going to Caid’s?” she asked.
    I gave her a look of confusion.
    â€œCaid’s. The piano bar,” she elaborated.
    I nodded.
    â€œTen, ten-thirty.” The woman shrugged. “But you can’t go like that. Caid’s is very fancy, very fancy.”
    I looked down at myself, at my convent work boots, faded canvas shirt, and patched jeans. The change of clothes in my pack wasn’t much better, and certainly less clean. “It’ll have to do,” I told her.
    Making my way up to my room, I locked the door and rummaged in my pack. I pulled out a rumpled black sweater and laid it on the bed, smoothing the wrinkles with the back of my hand, dabbing it clean with a damp washcloth before putting it on. I ran a brush through my hair and pulled it back off my face. With a little luck I hoped I could pull off the slumming-rich-girl look.
    Yes, I thought, giving myself a good once-over in the mirror, it would have to do. I tucked a stray wisp of hair behind one ear, turned, and headed for the door. That’s when I noticed the little book that lay open on my nightstand. I stopped short and stepped toward it. It had not been there before, of that I was certain. The maid must have left it, I told myself, glancing at the two open pages, the Arabic script. And yet if a maid had come while I’d been out, she had not stayed long enough to fold the two towels I’d tucked haphazardly over the chrome bar next to the sink.
    I picked up the book. The text was divided into short, numbered sections, verses, it seemed. A religious book, but not the Bible, the Koran most likely. I closed the cover and, taking the book with me, picked up my rucksack. No doubt it wasn’t appropriate attire for the El Minzah, but I couldn’t leave it, not now, knowing someone had been in my room. Hoisting the pack onto my shoulder, I stepped into the hallway and headed down to the lobby.
    â€œIs this the hotel’s?” I asked the clerk. I set the Koran down on the counter in front of her.
    The woman scowled up at me. “Where did you find that?”
    â€œSomeone left it in my room,” I told her. “Do you know who it belongs to?”
    She slid the book protectively toward herself, then set it on the desk next to her computer. “I will see that it gets back to its owner. Good night, Mademoiselle.”
    *   *   *
    It was just after ten-thirty when I pulled up in front of the sandstone portal and heavy, iron-studded wooden door that marked the El Minzah’s front entrance. I paid my taxi driver, climbed out, and made my way inside. If the Hotel Continental was the geriatric specter of French colonialism, then the El Minzah was its teenage reincarnation, the Versace-clad, cell phone–carrying spirit of the unstoppable empire of twenty-first-century globalism.
    Inside the plush lobby, potbellied oil money mingled with B-list celebrity. American English predominated; a variety of well-crafted accents wafted through the potted palms and up toward the blue-and-white zillij mosaics. The air smelled of Cuban cigars and eucalyptus.
    Conscious of my convent clothes and work-blunted fingernails, I followed one of the doormen’s directions down a flight of stairs, past the rambling Andalusian courtyard at the heart of the hotel to the piano bar. Scanning the sea of faces for Brian, I stepped into the elegant room, found an empty table, and settled in to wait. The piano