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5. MAJOR JARLID
Arthur went through the same solitary, forlorn routine as every other day. He shut down his accounting program and turned off the computer. He put on his heavy, dark wool coat, gray felt Homburg, and paisley scarf. He picked up his black umbrella with the lacquered walnut handle, turned out the lights, and locked up his private fourth-floor office.
The hallway outside was cramped and musty, with bare brick walls visible by the light of a single sickly-weak, bare light bulb. Arthur peeked from an upper window and saw the long black limousine waiting by the curb-its amber parking lights glowing under fresh snow, and exhaust coming in a cloud from its tailpipe.
Arthur trudged down the narrow wooden stairs, past the third floor administrative offices, and down to the second floor bookkeeping department. The corridor here was a bit more modern, but still worn and plain with green linoleum floors and scratched aluminum doors. Arthur set alarms as he went. He owned the building, and it rustled familiarly around him. He strode through the marble-floored main lobby with its circle of dark mahogany teller cages. It was an old bank, and by day the tellers stood behind black iron bars topped with gilded scrollwork, as bank tellers should, so Arthur felt rather strongly. He resisted all entreaties to modernize, to expand, to make the staff more comfortable. Besides, all that cost money.
Outside, the snow had let up a bit. The wind had blown knee-deep drifts against the bank building. Now it whirled feather-like flakes about, which had landed on the drifts but not yet become part of them.
Arthur clutched his umbrella close with one elbow and hung on to his hat and scarf as he leaned into the wind.
A minute later, he was in the warmth of Jarlid's limousine, and peeling his scarf off in the dry heat. The two men shook hands. Jarlid's grip was still strong, but he looked jaundiced and emaciated. The once robust features were gaunt, the fiery eyes sunken and hollowed, the skin sallow and gray. Arthur didn't express his shock, but Jarlid had become a rack of bones, wearing a plaid green shirt and baggy jeans.
Jarlid grinned, showing large yellow teeth. "I don't eat well these days. I'm afraid my stomach doesn't tolerate much any more. I contracted something strange back during my last service years."
Arthur voiced concern as they prowled down streets blinded by snow whirling around street lamps while the occasional pedestrian disappeared here in a doorway, there into a car to go home for the holiday. Then he recalled their phone conversations in recent days. Jarlid had reintroduced himself after many years, and offered a fabulous clock. "In which war was it that you found this thing?"
"It was the Mesopotamian War."
"Oh, which one of the many?" Arthur asked.
"One of the more recent ones." Jarlid leaned forward and regarded Arthur with haunted eyes. "I was still in good health then, a vigorous man with a long future ahead. One night, I was driving from a town on the Tigris to a town on the Euphrates with a small infantry convoy. It was one of those moonlit nights when the desert seems to glow, and a chilly wind sweeps down from the north. We were attacked, and the two men I was riding with in an armored car had to make a run across a field. A mine exploded, overturning the car, and the other two were killed. I managed to stagger to my feet. With gun in hand, I kept moving along. I could hear the enemy converging on the burning car behind me, and that drew their attention away while I crawled away through a muddy ditch. I continued on, running and staggering, until I fell down in a dead faint.
"When I awoke, people had carried me into a house and I lay in a bed. What a house it was, a small palace with all the latest conveniences, but it was a very old place. You could tell from the wear in the wooden paneling on the walls, and the mosaics in the floors that looked almost Roman, and statues with broken noses standing around bubbling fountains. I tell you, Latchloose, the very air smelled different, faintly fragrant like a spring garden, yet faintly musty as if it was pent up somehow a long time. The people here looked different than those I was used to seeing. They seemed concerned, but languid and without fear. Everyone else I'd met had that dark, gnawing worry that people do who live in a land of perpetual war. These people seemed languid and unconcerned. It became clear that they had rescued me, taken me into their estate, and that I was quite safe. And yet nobody spoke, at least not a language I could understand.
"I wasn't badly injured and mended quickly, but I felt very weak and slept a lot for some undetermined time. I spent most of the while in a small apartment unit overlooking palm trees and a river in quite a lush garden. As soon as I felt a bit better, I demanded to leave, so I could return to my unit. Finally, a tiny little dark-haired woman appeared in the doorway and beckoned me to follow her. She wore an intricately designed silk dress much like a mustard-green Indian sari, with many delicate little flowers printed into its folds. She brought me to a garden in which sat a very odd man upon a large burgundy pillow with tassels on each corner. He was dressed somewhat like a pasha of the old Turkish regime, with a red fez wrapped in a turban. He was wrapped in a robe and had a broad sword by his side in a lavishly embroidered leather and linen sheath. My guest, he boomed at me in our own language, as plainly as I speak with you now. My guest, you are feeling well enough to leave?
"I thanked him for his hospitality and told him I was indeed ready to rejoin my unit. To that he replied, I will gladly do what I can for you, and I have already done more than you know. For that I thanked him, and asked what I might do in return. He shook his head and took me down a long, dark hallway into the bowels of his palace. What a place this was! No Western person would ever live this way. The floors were of marble polished to a high luster, inset with marginal mosaic patterns in semiprecious stones. Silk and brocade draperies hung down, too long for the walls, and piled in stiff folds on the floors. The halls were carpeted with the finest Oriental rugs, sometimes four or five deep. In wall niches stood statues of all kinds, from mythological heroes and writhing cherubs to beautiful goddesses like Diana with her bow and arrows, and her deer."
At that, Arthur laughed. "You must have been hallucinating!"
"Maybe, Latchloose, maybe; who knows? I had been injured and sick, and who knows what drugs they poured into me to help me mend? I glimpsed a room with pillars surrounding a pool steaming with perfume and littered with flowers, in which pale nymphs laughed and splashed each other. The air had an odd, incense-like tinge, and I saw flickering candle-flames in wall sconces shaped like seashells. The whole thing was like a dream, I tell you, as my host led me from one hall to the next, until we came to a simple room in which stood nothing but a large clock."
"A clock?" Arthur said. "Our clock?" At last the major seemed to broach the object of this trip in the middle of the night during a winter storm. They passed through intersections, past billboards, past darkened buildings, as Jarlid drove with a slow and steady hand. Now he fumbled in a trouser pocket and pulled out a shiny object.
"Yes, our clock, and also this watch," said Major Jarlid. He pressed into Arthur's hands a large vest pocket watch of the kind long ago worn by train conductors, and earlier by men like Benjamin Franklin. It felt cool to the touch, and Arthur weighed it idly from one hand to the other. It was moderately heavy, and finely tooled in beaten silver and brass with elaborate, well-worn scrollwork. Flicking it open, Arthur saw an antique watch dial in Roman numerals under thick glass.
"That," said Major Jarlid "is the heart of the thing. There I was, in the company of this strange pasha, in an empty room with fine oak floor boards and simple wall paper in a delicate design of tiny flowers, not unlike the woman's sari I just described. We walked up to the clock and we each tapped a fingertip on its broad base. It was, of course, hollow. It was intricately made, with many fine touches.
"That's when he told me it was made at the Court of the Sun King in France, Louis XIV, around 1710. Of course they didn't call them grandfather clocks then, but floor clocks or long case clocks."
Latchloose nodded. He too knew this story. An American composer, Henry Work, in 1875, had written a little ditty called "The Grandfather Clock." He was staying at the George Hotel in Piercebridge, North Yorkshire, England, which had a remarkable-and dead-floor clock some seven feet tall as was customary because of the required pendulum length and the drop need of its weights (as the weights slowly dropped, the mechanism unwound, so to speak; raising the weights back up reset such a clock). Two very aged brothers named Jenkins owned the hotel, and their clock was renowned for its accuracy. When one of the brothers died, the clock however seemed to become sick, eventually losing up to an hour a day. No clockmaker-and plenty came to the challenge-was ever able to fix it, and the clock totally froze the minute the surviving Jenkins brother died, 90 years old. Like that, the clock sat in the hotel lobby for many years, and it was the world's first grandfather clock.
"So there it was," Jarlid said of his own clock that he was selling to Arthur. "What a beauty. Made by an English clockmaker in Paris, and remade in some Turkish atelier to add various Moorish and Saracen touches, not to mention Ottoman flowers of delicate soapstone mosaic, mother of pearl inlay, and carved scrolls in sandalwood and other fine woods, inlaid and lacquered, so that it made one dizzy to look into its many facets and faces.
"That strange little pasha said to me, This I must give you so you can be on your way. I protested, of course, saying I couldn't possibly carry this thing with me, which was taller than I am, and weighed as much I did at that time, a strapping healthy fellow. Oh no, he said, it was light as a feather, and in any case I'll send it ahead where you are going. So I began to grow perturbed, and not a slight bit scared. Who are you anyway? Why do you care about me, and how do you know where I am going? I asked, shuddering at the sound of my own voice.
"Don't worry," he said, "I have it all covered. Here, you must sign for the clock." So saying, he had me walk to a marble table, and scratch my name on a parchment with a quill pen dipped in a silver inkwell. He assured me it would cost me neither money nor effort, and I saw no reason to protest.
"As soon as I had signed, he grinned and stood with his fists on his hips. Haven't you guessed? I am the djinni of this place. The clock was now yours, and your fate and its fate are entwined. I am of the djinni who saved you when you lay dying at the edge of our twilight realm. Don't be afraid, we have no intention of harming you. He then reached up into the silvered and ornately scrolled, shining clockface, twisted a lever, and pulled off this watch I gave you to hold. He handed it to me and said, This was the heart of the thing, that which beats and makes the time flow through its veins the way blood flows through yours and the magic desert sand flows through mine. Through his watch, the great clock gives you time enough to do what you must. When your time was just about over, you must pass it along to the next deserving soul, and then his time will be extended just as yours has been.
"Do you know, Latchloose, I have no idea what I said next. Perhaps I fainted. The last I saw of him was his grin and the strange, hard glitter of his very black eyes. I could swear-he seemed to just sort of dissolve into a million golden slivers of light that slowly faded in midair.
"When I came to my senses, I lay in a military hospital bed near Baghdad, on a sunny day with a nice breeze coming in the window and the sounds of traffic and then of course the ever-haunting river of prayer that flows from the minarets and mosques in a flood of praise to Allah. That sound of the muezzin at prayer stays in the mind. It flows like traffic and wraps itself around one's heart and soul. Have you ever been there, Latchloose?"
Arthur admitted he had not. "I have seen it on the evening news," he allowed. "I was lucky enough to serve my Army days in a warm, cozy office looking out the window whenever the urge pressed me. I have been to Rome and Paris and London, mainly to buy old things. I wanted to visit Egypt and Mesopotamia, but those places always seem so far and dangerous."
"Ah yes," the major said in a faint, weak voice. "Nobody who has been there comes back the same as he went." He pointed to the watch in Arthur's hand. "Keep that in your pocket at all times." He added: "I am dying. I need cash very badly to fly across country to be with family, and I have no possible further use for the clock or that watch. All I need from you was five grand, and it's all yours."
"We'll do it all in good order," Arthur said.
"That we will," Jarlid said, "that indeed we will."
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