The girl with Tony had listened, frowning in attention to the difficult English words. She looked up sharply as the bald-headed man with the impeccably tailored clothes entered. He spoke pleasantly to the proprietor, glanced at Tony, and then came quickly to his table.
“Good evening!” he said warmly, twinkling through his eyeglasses. “I have hoped to find you again! I cabled my friend in Ispahan, and he is willing to pay you three thousand dollars for your coin!”
Tony reached in his pocket. He put down two gold pieces.
“Here are two of them,” he said. “Send them to your friend as gifts. I had rather hoped to see you again, too.” He slipped into the Arabic he had learned from Ghail. “This is my wife.” To Ghail he explained, “This is Mr. Emurian. You have heard me speak of him.”
“Oh, yes!” said Ghail. She smiled sweetly. “Tony is so grateful to you. And I also.”
“Yes,” said Tony. “I went to Barkut, you see. Met my wife there. In a sense, all due to you. And she wanted to see my world, so we came back here. I’ve a rather interesting business proposition for you. I’d like to have your friend make some contact with us in Barkut and establish a branch of his business there. It would be useful to have a regular commercial contact with this world and with the United States.”
The bald-headed Mr. Emurian sat down slowly, his face a study.
“You say that you went to Barkut?”
“Oh, yes,” said Tony briskly. “Hm… maybe I’d better sketch it out.”
He gave the spectacled man a brief, hasty, and necessarily improbable account of what had happened to him since their last meeting in this same restaurant.