There was a bang from the door, as a bolt was drawn back, and the door was opened by an old woman of what they used to describe as “repulsive aspect.” She was dressed in a baggy black one-piece robe. Her face was wrinkled and pouched. I’ll tell you what she looked like. Did you ever see a picture of one of those cinnamon buns they said looked like Mother Teresa? She looked like that, like a cinnamon roll, with two brown raisin eyes peering out of her cinnamon roll face.
She said something to me in a language I did not recognize, and Professor Macleod replied, haltingly. She stared at the three of us, suspiciously, then she made a face and beckoned us in. She slammed the door behind us. I closed first one eye, then the other, encouraging them to adjust to the gloom inside the house.
The building smelled like a damp spice rack. I didn’t like anything about the whole business; there’s something about foreigners, when they’re that foreign, that makes my skin crawl. As the old bat who’d let us in, whom I had begun to think of as the Mother Superior, led us up flight after flight of stairs, I could see more of the black-robed women, peering at us out of doorways and down the corridor. The stair carpet was frayed and the soles of my shoes made sticking noises as they pulled up from it; the plaster hung in crumbling chunks from the walls. It was a warren, and it drove me nuts. Mr. Alice shouldn’t have to come to places like that, places he couldn’t be protected properly.
More and more shadowy crones peered at us in silence as we climbed our way through the house. The old witch with the cinnamon bun face talked to Professor Macleod as we went, a few words here, a few words there; and he in return panted and puffed at her, from the effort of climbing the stairs, and answered her as best he could.
“She wants to know if you brought the diamonds,” he gasped.
“Tell her we’ll talk about that once we’ve seen the merchandise,” said Mr. Alice. He wasn’t panting, and if there was the faintest tremble in his voice, it was from anticipation.
Mr. Alice has fucked, to my personal knowledge, half a brat-pack of the leading male movie stars of the last two decades, and more male models than you could shake your kit at; he’s had the prettiest boys on five continents; none of them knew precisely who they were being fucked by, and all of them were very well paid for their trouble.
At the top of the house, up a final flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs, was the door to the attic, and flanking each side of the door, like twin tree trunks, was a huge woman in a black gown. Each of them looked like she could have held her own against a sumo wrestler. Each of them held, I kid you not, a scimitar: they were guarding the Treasure of the Shahinai. And they stank like old horses. Even in the gloom, I could see that their robes were patched and stained.
The Mother Superior strode up to them, a squirrel facing up to a couple of pit-bulls, and I looked at their impassive faces and wondered where they originally came from. They could have been Samoan or Mongolian, could have been pulled from a freak farm in Turkey or India or Iran.
On a word from the old woman they stood aside from the door, and I pushed it open. It wasn’t locked. I looked inside, in case of trouble, walked in, looked around, and gave the all-clear. So I was the first male in this generation to gaze upon the Treasure of the Shahinai.
He was kneeling beside a camp bed, his head bowed.
Legendary is a good word to use for the Shahinai. It means I’d never heard of them and didn’t know anyone who had, and once I started looking for them even the people who had heard of them didn’t believe in them.
“After all, my good friend,” my pet Russian academic said, handing over his report, “you’re talking about a race of people the sole evidence for the existence of which is half a dozen lines in Herodotus, a poem in the Thousand and One Nights, and a speech in the Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse. Not what we call reliable sources.”
But rumors had reached Mr. Alice and he got interested. And what Mr. Alice wants, I make damned sure that Mr. Alice gets. Right now, looking at the Treasure of the Shahinai, Mr. Alice looked so happy I thought his face would break in two.
The boy stood up. There was a chamber pot half-sticking out from beneath the bed, with a cupful of vivid yellow piss in the bottom of it. His robe was white cotton, thin and very clean. He wore blue silk slippers.
It was so hot in that room. Two gas fires were burning, one on each side of the attic, with a low hissing sound. The boy didn’t seem to feel the heat. Professor Macleod began to sweat profusely.
According to legend, the boy in the white robe—he was seventeen at a guess, no more than eighteen—was the most beautiful man in the world. I could easily believe it.