“Sapristi, Monsieur Steele. I was thinking of you.”
Martin dropped down in a deep chair, stretched out his legs. The aroma of coffee and a whiff of perfumed opium lent a sense of warmth to his chilled body.
“Of me? Are you in trouble again?”
His pipe-dream-visions changed into the cold reality of a check book; he had often helped the man out of his financial difficulties, he earned enormous sums, but the overhead expenses were fabulous.
“The money is nothing; it comes in and goes out like the tide. I am at the end, the compass changes. We must in Life watch for the Warning. We must train our ear to detect the direction of the wind.”
“You are superstitious?”
“We all are, if we knew its true meaning. Superstition is an intense sense of the Invisible.”
Martin drank the strong Turkish coffee, puffing at his chibouk. The man was a “hairdresser,” but that didn’t matter; Martin had no sense of class.
“My time in this business will soon be over. I was the only one for years when it was an ‘elite’ profession. Now it is vulgarized like everything else. There is a clever Russian woman who is taking all my customers; do you know why? The husbands are jealous.”
Martin laughed—he understood that; he would never allow this fascinating, purring Greek to maul his wife about.