The Torch of Tangier by Aileen G. Baron

have dinner tonight. I know a place in the medina.”
    “I have to wash my hair.”
    “You have to eat too.”
    “Besides,” she said. “You look like you need some rest.”
    Drury’s voice came from the hall. “She’s already made arrangements for dinner.”
    Korian looked up, his hand still on the report. “With you?”
    Drury came into the room and walked over to the desk. “You’re not the only pickle in the barrel.” He lifted Korian’s hand from the pad of paper and jostled him out of the way.
    Korian’s face flushed purple.
    Drury lifted his chin as if standing his ground. “You look angry enough to spit.” He held the pad in one hand, lifted a pencil from the tray on the desk and drummed on the table. “We have work to do. And so do you.”
    He waited.
    Korian turned to go and Drury slapped the pad on Lily’s desk.
    “What happened with Suzannah?” Lily asked after Korian’s footsteps faded down the hall.
    “All taken care of.” Drury sat down and tilted back in his chair. “False alarm. Some papal delegation is visiting. Guardia Civil picked up all the prostitutes. Imagine! Arresting prostitutes in Tangier.” He smiled, snapped the chair upright and stood up.
    He reached over to Lily’s desk and began sorting pages, making corrections, collating them with ones he brought from his own batch of papers.
    Lily cleared her throat. “Major Pardo…” she ventured.
    “What about him?” Drury looked up. “He asked to meet you.”
    “Why? What does he want from me? You know him well?”
    “We crossed paths when I was in graduate school. Came into the anthropology program in Columbia after I came back from my fieldwork.”
    “So it’s Doctor Pardo?”
    “He teaches at Harvard.” Drury went back to the manuscript, correcting lines here, adding words there.
    “What does Doctor Pardo want?”
    Drury kept busy with the papers. “This is pretty good, as far as it goes.” He tapped his fingers against the page he had been reading. “We ought to do a section on Concepts of the Supernatural. People love that.”
    “You mean the five pillars of Islam, that sort of thing?”
    “Djinns, of course,” Drury said.
    “Like the ‘Office of the Djinn’?”
    ***
    Lily remembered.
    Drury had haggled with a djinn in his “office” at the back of the cave during the excavation. Tariq and his brother Hasan had been muttering about djinns since Drury found the Neanderthal jaw.
    Everyone knew, Hasan had warned them, that the djinn lived in old bones and relics. Each time they found a fragment of bone, Hasan would jump away, crying out, “ Ben Adam ? Is it human?”
    Hasan always carried a bag of salt at his belt because, he told Lily, it was well known that djinns abhorred salt. Before he entered the cave each day, Hasan would sprinkle it on the ground, rub it on his clothes, and making a face, would swallow some, washing it down with great gulps of water.
    Once Tariq took Drury aside and explained soberly, “Hasan thinks that the bones are here because this is the bureau of the djinn.”
    “Not to worry,” Drury had told him. “I’ll speak to the djinn.”
    Nothing happened until the day of the djinn, the day after Zaid had injured his eye, the day Zaid—hand on his forehead, a patch over his swollen eye—had remained in the villa in Tangier, lounging on the settee in a room off the garden.
    Remembering what had happened to Zaid, Hasan had refused to enter the cave, lingering on the apron outside. Zaid was injured, Hasan insisted, because the djinn was angry that they had stolen his cache of bones.
    After much argument and waving of arms, Tariq convinced his brother to get back to work. “You go outside,” he told Hasan. “Work at the screen.” The djinn would not venture into the light of the sun, Tariq assured him.
    For most of the day, Tariq, with an air of resigned bravado, dug by himself in the trench. He hoisted the baskets of loose dirt to his shoulder with a groan, staggered out to