The Djinn Read Online Free PDF

in the ribs.
    “I’m sorry,” I
said. “That wasn’t in very good taste.”
    Marjorie
sighed. “Don’t worry, Harry. The quicker I get back to normal, the better it
will be. I feel I’ve been living apart from the world for years with Max. We
were so isolated. I used to insist on doing all my own marketing, just to get
away from the house and meet some ordinary people. Miss Johnson, will you bring
us some tea, please.”
    The baby-pink
lady looked up. “At once, Mrs. Greaves,” she said quietly.
    “How long has
she been around?” I asked, when she’d left the room.
“I don’t remember her.”
    “She came from
an agency,” said Marjorie. “She’s very quiet and a little strange, but I don’t
know what I’d have done without her.”
    “She reminds me
of someone,” said Anna almost absent-mindedly, “but I can’t think who.”
    “She’s very
retiring,” said Marjorie. “Sometimes; I wonder if she’s happy.”
    We all sat down
on the uncomfortable settees. The florid oil executive was muttering something
to himself about Jesus Christ, and the old lady who had been talking to Miss
Johnson was rummaging around endlessly in her woven handbag, so there didn’t
seem to be an urgent need to socialize with them.
    “This jar,” I
said, lighting a cigarette. “Can you remember where Max originally found it?”
    Marjorie shook
her head. “I wasn’t with him on every trip. He bought it in Persia, I think,
from a merchant. He used to have everything crated up and sent back to the
United States, and I was quite used to having all these mysterious boxes arrive
from Arabia. If they arrived when he was away, I just stored them until he got
back, I never opened anything. To tell you the truth, I was never awfully
excited by Arabian antiques.”
    “Did your late
husband keep a diary when he was in Arabia?” asked Anna. “I mean, do you think
there might be a clue to what the jar was and where he found it?”
    “I really don’t
know. He has hundreds of notebooks in his library upstairs. You might discover
something in there.”
    “You haven’t
looked yourself?”
    “Well, no. When
he was alive, he never allowed me to. And now he’s dead and-well, I have no
desire. I’ll be very glad when the whole thing is forgotten and finished,”
    We changed the
subject while Marjorie drank her tea. The trusty Miss Johnson was as
parsimonious with her lapsang-souchong as she was with her sherry, and the tea
came out of the pot the color of unwashed windows. Still, it seemed to revive
Marjorie, and when she had finished and eaten a leftover piece of cake, she
took us up to Max’s study.
    The upstairs
rooms of old wooden houses always smell musty and hot on summer days, and
Winter Sails was no exception, even though the skylights were open and the sea
breeze was blowing through the windows. Marjorie led us along the bare, narrow
hallway which ran the whole length of the second floor (as a boy, I used to
scamper up and down that corridor, pretending to be a B-47 bomber on its
landing strip). She unlocked a door on the landward side of the house and
ushered us in.
    It smelled of
dusty old papers, ancient typewriter ribbons, and stale tobacco smoke. I
remembered that Max Greaves used to smoke an immense meerschaum pipe with the
face o£ a scowling Arab on it. Books and papers were stacked haphazardly all
the way up the walls of the room, and the desk under the window was covered
with yellowed documents, leather-bound volumes, pencils, maps, Arabic
dictionaries, and God knows what else. The wastebasket was overflowing with
crumpled pieces of paper, and there were piles of Arabic newspapers and
magazines on the floor. I picked one up and saw that every photograph in it had
been clipped out and presumably thrown away.
    “Max was never
very tidy,” said Marjorie from the doorway. She stayed outside the study,
obviously with no desire at all to come in.
    “Tidy?” I said.
“It looks like he kept his own private