The Empty Room Read Online Free PDF

Thomas.
    The drinks arrived.
    “What do you think?” Thomas asked as she sipped the dark liquid.
    “Wonderful,” she sighed, and it was.
    “What do you taste?”
    She considered. Brian, his newly installed hair plugs as evident as cornrows, looked on with amusement, but also with something like proprietary pride. She understood she was expected to be more than purely decorative. For that he could have brought any one of the several secretaries with whom he was having sex. She sipped again, flared her nostrils and breathed. It was like inhaling the Highlands, all moody and alive with dark magic that coursed down her throat and into her veins.
    “Richness. Peat. Smoke.” She closed her eyes and rolled her tongue, then chuckled. “Fruitcake … something else, seaweed. Sweet seaweed.” She opened her eyes to find Thomas smiling at her. “You should drink this late at night,” she said.
    “While reading poetry, don’t you think?” He winked. “We should try that sometime.”
    He called her later that week and said he was going out to dinner with his friend, Mohammed, who was the Saudi protocol adviser to the Ontario government. She should come. It would be fun. Mohammed was a wonderful guy. She and Jake had had a terrible fight involving one of his many girl “friends.” She thoughtit would serve him right if she had a few friends of her own.
    “Why not,” she said.
    Mohammed’s apartment was a surprise—sleekly modern, with expensive carpets, but filled with all sorts of trinkets including a number of glow-in-the-dark necklaces Mohammed said were terribly popular among the Bedouin. “I bring them back by the boatload,” he said. They went to dinner, the three of them, at a Middle-Eastern restaurant Mohammed had purchased up the street from his apartment so he could cook baklava whenever he wished without messing up his own kitchen. He ordered for them, wonderful dishes of red lentil soup with cardamom, spiced chicken and rice, cauliflower with cilantro, and for dessert, baklava he assured them he had made himself. She was surprised when he ordered wine with the meal, since clearly he was Muslim.
    “We are not in Saudi now,” he said, catching the expression on her face. “To be a chameleon is a harmless yet most useful talent, no?”
    Throughout the meal he told funny stories about the excesses of the Saudi royal family, such as having to ask the London department store, Harrods, to close down because one of the Saudi princes wished to buy everything in all the windows, right now, and pay for it with stacks of cash he kept in the boot of his Rolls-Royce.
    “And did they do it?” she asked, laughing, unable to imagine that much money.
    Mohammed, his black eyes flashing with good humour, said, “Of course, my dear. That’s what money is for.”
    It was a pleasant evening, but when Thomas said he had to call ita night and Mohammed suggested she might, perhaps, like to stay for a drink, she declined. While he was an interesting and clearly powerful man, he was also at least forty-five, and besides, although the evening had been amusing, there was Jake, wasn’t there?
    Mohammed, ever the perfect gentleman, hailed a taxi for her and kissed her hand, telling her how charming she was.
    The next day, Thomas arrived and asked Brian if he could take her out for lunch.
    “Don’t you think you should ask me?” she said, a trifle miffed.
    He took her not to Winston’s but to a restaurant near the office, and when they were settled with a glass of wine he said, “You made a good impression on Mohammed last night.”
    “He’s a nice man,” she said, noncommittally.
    “We have a proposal for you.”
    She perked up at that. Working for Brian was fine, but she was always on the lookout for a new opportunity, something with better pay, which seemed assured given Mohammed’s stories and his restaurant and his apartment. Travel, perhaps? Something for the government?
    “I’m listening.” She sipped her wine.