“She is not from here. The name is common but she is from the state of Louisiana. But she is a cousin of Golub Narian. He lives in the Syrian colony on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. You know?”
“Sure.” I’d never known there was a Little Syria in Brooklyn.
He gave me the address. “My friends were much disturbed when I asked about her.” Tadross fingered his chubby chin. “She is hiding from someone. She does not wish people to know where she is. And—” he searched my eyes thoughtfully, “you are the second tonight who has tried to find her. But the other — he learned nothing.”
Chapter nineteen:
Explaining a murder
My knowledge of Syria was limited to recognition of the round orange luggage stickers from the Hotel Magnifique in Damascus. Plus the fact that “on my whiskers’ life” is violent cussing in Lebanese. According to Tadross.
Even if I’d been hep to those travelogue talkies, it wouldn’t have helped me to understand the Narians. The house to which I’d been directed, a block away from the Atlantic Avenue section of Little Syria, was an ordinary frame double-decker, outside. Inside — even the glimpse from the hall to which the solemneyed teen-ager in a loose, long-sleeved, ankle-length silk something admitted me — the place was right out of the Arabian Nights.
A sunset of tapestries on the walls. Oriental rugs in rich wine and amber on the floor. More rugs over low divans. Stray scarfs of luscious silk, scattered around. Brass-and-black-marble coffee table with a circle of thimble-size gilt cups. A great glass-and-porcelain contraption with long tubing and a curved ivory pipestem on a copper stand. There were none of the nondescript steel engravings or wishy-washy color paintings such as decorate our soigné hotel apartments. The Narians didn’t miss them; in their place hung rifles with curved stocks and long blue barrels and mother-of-pearl inlay on the locks, scimitars with silver hilts and beautifully engraved blades, daggers with jeweled handles. As the radio commercials say, Mmmmm!
Golub Narian fitted the picture perfectly. About forty. Sharp-featured, long-nosed, thick-lipped; a face hewn out of well-polished mahogany. White fez on top, brown beard at the bottom.
He received me in the long living-room, listened politely with his head tilted, birdlike, while I told him I wanted to get in touch with the Miss Narian who accompanied Miss Tildy Millett. It seemed crass to say “worked for” in that home of splendor.