New Decameron Sixteen: James L. Cambias (Patreon)

The Code of the Expats

by James L. Cambias

I was in . . . let's call it Katakand, the capital city of . . . Anystan. One of the ex-Soviet republics in central Asia, best not to specify. It was 1992, and I was fresh out of the Air Force with my Southwest Asia Service Medal, a basic fluency in Arabic and Russian, and an endless supply of money-making schemes.

Those were great days to be a young expat. A friend in Houston bought used oilfield equipment at a steep discount because the Texas oil patch was going through a down cycle. He shipped it to me and I sold it to the newborn state oil companies who were delighted to get gear which hadn't been made by drunk Communists while Stalin was still alive. (This was before the Mafiya and the Chinese crowded everyone else out.)

That gave me a grubstake, and let me diversify. I bought a hundred tons of copper and sold it to a Japanese buyer, and a thousand tons of cotton to sell to the new textile companies opening up in Vietnam. I helped set up a tour company and told them what my Mom would expect if she came to visit. I managed an all-girl Uzbek pop group and a Kazakh rapper.

I passed up several chances to make tens of millions in the poppy-extract business, because I've seen the jails in that part of the world. I had to walk away from a nightclub I invested in, because the Mafiya wanted it. I laid out about ten percent of my income in bribes, and everywhere I went I tipped with nice new U.S. hundred-dollar bills. It's important to be known as a generous man. A mumbled warning from a waiter saved my life once.

What was it like? It was like . . . being a Dungeons & Dragons character. I went wherever looked interesting on the map, I hunted for gold pieces, I met a few people who wanted to kill me, and I always had a getaway plan.

And, like a D&D hero, I did a lot of my business in taverns, hanging around with other odd characters from distant lands. There was a club called, I kid you not, Discotecca Miami Lambada, where the expats hung out. The mullahs hadn't closed all the bars yet, so we'd hammer back vodka, raki, Kingfisher beer, local sweet wines, champagne, and occasionally a rare and coveted Seagrams Golden Wine Cooler. Sometimes all the same night, with epic consequences.

One of my regular drinking pals was Selim, a tall skinny Turk with a mustache that looked too big for him. In those days the Turks were making a big push to establish business connections in Central Asia, trying to play on the ancient ties of shared heritage and so forth. Turns out that ancient ties of shared heritage and four bucks will get you a latte at a Starbucks in Central Asia just like everywhere else. 

Selim's company was building a hotel in downtown Katakand, replacing some old Soviet pile of "worker housing" which had started falling down shortly before it was finished. The new hotel was going to be a blatant ripoff of John Portman's Atlanta Marriott, and Selim was going nuts trying to make sure the girders were real steel, the concrete wasn't just sand, and the electrical wiring wouldn't go up in flames the first time somebody turned on a lamp.

Put four or five vodka shots and a couple of Kingfishers into Selim and you'd get an epic rant about whatever crisis he was dealing with at the moment. One of his recurring problems was the Ministry of Antiquities. 

"The Russians dig up everything on the site fifty years ago and dump it in a ravine!" he said after his fourth shot. "The old basements go down ten meters! If we dig below maybe we find giant lizard bones or prehistoric fish, not artifacts. But this little sahte from the Ministry keeps telling me he wants to do a survey of the site. Eight weeks it will take! I am behind schedule five weeks already! I give him cigars and a bottle of cognac and a real Rolex but he keeps coming back! If I find so much as a broken flowerpot he wants to shut me down. I guarantee," he said, pointing his finger at my nose, "No one who works for me finds anything. No more shakedowns by the Ministry!" 

The funny thing was that I knew the "little sahte" from the Ministry of Antiquities Selim was bitching about. His name was Dr. Jasur Juraboev, and he was probably the most honest guy working there. (All the higher-ups had been paid off by Selim's bosses long before the work started.) Jasur really did want to preserve his country's archaeological treasures. He wasn't one of the expat club, but I sometimes played chess with him at a tea shop near the Ministry building. He could practice his English and I could work on my Russian.

"Humans have lived here forty thousand years," he told me. "Possibly longer. A Russian dig in the 1960s found canals as old as the Pyramids of Egypt. We know almost nothing about our ancient history. Who were they? No one can say. You will lose your rook if you do that."

"Come and take it," I told him. "But aren't there records? Histories?"

"Katakand is mentioned a few times in Persian chronicles, and there is a passage in Antipater which might refer to this city. The Seleucids left some inscriptions, but nothing survives from the Bactrian kingdom or the Parthian Empire. It is only with the Sassanids and then the Caliphate that we get a continuous and reliable written chronicle. That is less than two thousand years. Oh, bok — that was cunning. I did not see that."

"Ready to resign?"

He studied the board a little longer. "Yes, I think so. We might attain to a couple of pieces chasing around the board, but that is tedious to play out."

"Good, I've got a guy from Japan coming in tomorrow and I want to get a good night's sleep. Thanks for the game," I added, extending my hand for a shake.

"It was a pleasure. Shall we meet at the same time next week?" 

"I'm looking forward to it."

I had to meet Mr. Ishii. He was the guy buying the copper I had stored in a warehouse guarded by three guys with AK-47s. He flew out to Katakand to make sure the metal, and I, actually existed before cutting a check. As this was not long after the Japanese golden age of the 1980s, he expected to be entertained during his visit. 

I met him at the gate when his plane arrived, only two hours late — which was pretty good for Anystan's state airline. I waited for him just outside the Customs gate, holding a neat cardboard sign with "Ishii" carefully lettered on it in Kanji. 

He came through the gate, we bowed to each other, then shook hands, and I helpfully took his suitcase for him and led him to the cab I had waiting. "I got you a room at the Emir Palace hotel. It's a nice place, very modern."

Mr. Ishii lit a cigarette. "I read the night life here is colorful," he said as the cab pulled away from the terminal.

"Katakand's a great city," I said.

"I enjoy colorful places very much," he said.

"I know some very colorful places," I said, trying to figure out if by "colorful" he meant hash or hookers. "Have you had dinner yet?"

"Only on the airplane. It was not very good."

"Well, it's not too late to get some food, and then maybe we can see some local color. Do you need to rest or anything?"

"Yes, I wish to change my clothes before going out," he said. 

So while he went upstairs to get cleaned up I made a couple of quick calls from the pay phone in the lobby — no cell phones back then! — and then waited outside, looking at Selim's construction site across the street. The workers were just finishing up, and I saw Selim himself in a hardhat swing the gate shut behind the last of them.

I was about to go over and invite him to join us — he was pretty colorful — when Mr. Ishii came out looking exceedingly sharp in an Italian suit and shiny black shoes.

Hookers, I decided. Nobody dresses up to get stoned. So I took him out for a nice big dinner of yogurt soup, stuffed grape leaves, roast lamb, grilled eggplant, rice, and pastries filled with nuts and spices. All washed down with plenty of local wine. And then we hit the Miami Lambada, sitting at the bar where the girls were.

They weren't hookers, really. Just amazing-looking Anystani girls from poor families, who had discovered that lonely foreign men with too much money would buy them basically anything they wanted. They all had vague plans of becoming fashion models or airline stewardesses, but that was in the undefined future. 

Mr. Ishii was an instant hit. He was actually pretty smooth, playing it cool and buying drinks for half the girls at the bar, until he had them all crowded around him competing for attention.  

I put away a series of vodka-and-tonics, not enough to get falling-down drunk but enough to maintain my cred in front of Mr. Ishii, so I was feeling pretty colorful myself after a couple of hours. When he finally found the girl of his dreams about half past one a.m., I rode back to his hotel with them to make sure he got in safely. (I sat up front with the driver and made sure he kept his eyes on the road instead of watching the goings-on in the back seat via rearview mirror.)

Once the two of them were inside the hotel, I was about to tell the driver to take me home, but then I noticed something: lights shining beyond the fence around the construction site across the street.

I asked the driver to wait and went over to check it out. If Selim was around maybe he'd like a nightcap. And if some local crooks were trying to steal some of his equipment, I'd be doing him a favor by alerting the cops.

The gate was locked — and the padlock on the chain was inside the gate, not outside, but I didn't think about that at the time. I was young, dumb, and full of vodka so I was thinking about how to get over the fence without wrecking my second-best suit. Over on one side the construction site abutted an existing building, and there was a gap between the fencepost and the corner of the building just big enough for me to squeeze through.

Inside there was a lip about three meters wide and then the big pit where they'd dug out the foundation of the old apartment block. At the bottom, ten meters down, one work light was on and I could see someone moving around. I recognized Selim's slightly stooped posture so I decided to go down the truck ramp and surprise him.

The glare from the work light was dazzling so I couldn't really make out what he was doing until I got close. At the bottom of the big pit where the building was going to go, Selim was excavating something. He'd obviously been at work for some time because most of it was exposed.

It was . . . nothing I'd ever seen before. It wasn't a clay urn or a stone sarcophagus or a statue. The material looked like pale blue frosted glass, and it positively glowed under the light of the work lamp. It was teardrop-shaped, about three meters long and maybe two meters across at its widest. Half of it was still embedded in the sandstone bedrock, but Selim had dug out the upper surface and the tip of the teardrop, which pointed up at an angle.

"Hey," I said. "What'cha got there?"

Selim started and almost dropped the maul he was using to break up the sandstone. When he saw it was me he relaxed a little. "Nothing," he said. "Just a funny rock. Tomorrow we pull it out."

"That doesn't look like a rock, Selim."

"Of course it is! Look — it is stuck in stone. It is inclusion. Big piece of quartz or something."

"It's too symmetrical. Somebody made that."

"Impossible!" He banged the head of his maul on the sandstone surface. "This is Pliocene rock, two million years old."

"Maybe someone buried it later?"

"It is not an artifact," he said.

We had a kind of a code, we expats. Don't fuck with someone's business. Unless you were competitors, of course. But I knew three guys who dabbled in the coke trade, and one guy who sold stolen motorcycles brought in from Germany, and I kept my mouth shut about them. All of us paid out bribes and did business in cash to hide it from the tax man, and nobody said anything. 

Plus Selim was breathing heavily and it was just the two of us down in that pit and he had a digging maul in his hands.

So I spread my hands and smiled and said, "Okay, fine. I just wanted to know if you want to get a drink before the bars close."

He relaxed a little bit. "I am sorry. Maybe we have drinks tomorrow."

"Sure. Sorry to bother you."

He followed me to the gate and undid the padlock to let me out. My cab was long since gone so I wound up walking back to my place. As I lay on the bed watching the room spin around me I promised myself I'd call Jasur first thing in the morning. And then I passed out.

"First thing in the morning" turned out to be nearly eleven, which was when a call from Mr. Ishii woke me up. I had to scramble to get cleaned up and out the door to meet with him and a Chinese trucking-company agent to close the deal and get the copper to Japan. And naturally we had to have lunch and some drinks before anything got signed. I had a lot of money riding on that deal, and I didn't want to screw it up.

When it was all done I was a lot richer and felt like I never wanted to see a glass of anything alcoholic ever again. I bowed and shook hands with Ishii, then left our rented conference room and went out to the cab stand in front of the hotel, squinting in the late spring sunlight.

That was when I remembered what I had seen. I waved off the cab pulling up and sprinted across the street. 

I kind of knew what I was going to see: the hole where the thing had been was empty. One of the trucks carrying dirt out of the site clinked like it was full of broken glass as it went by. Selim glanced up and saw me but didn't wave.

I stood at the entrance to the site for a few minutes getting dust in my face, trying to think of anything I could do. Reporting Selim now would just screw with the hotel project. It wouldn't bring back whatever the teardrop-shaped thing had been.

So finally I shrugged and went back to the house I had rented. I had drinks with Selim a few days later and he was a bit subdued. I played chess with Jasur the following week and I was a bit subdued. And after unloading my cotton two weeks later I moved on to another city in another country.

What was it? I have no idea. Maybe it was made by a forgotten civilization in Central Asia during those unrecorded centuries. Maybe it fell from the sky before humans existed. I never asked Selim if he found anything inside it.

I did stay in that hotel once, a few years later. It was okay. 

***********************************************************

"So was it an alien thing?" Maya asks.

He shrugs. "It could have been anything."

"A spaceship? A faster than light drive?"

"My writer had an idea like that, once. What if we found an alien space ship under Rome, so that to get it out we'd have to clear away Rome."

"Nobody would do that!" Maya says.

"No. Well, a working alien spaceship?" 

"What shall we read next?" she asks.

"There's a story by Elizabeth Wein called Haunted House. Looks good." He hands her a plate of stuffed grape leaves, fragrant with dill. 

"Elizabeth Wein who wrote The Winter Prince and Code Name Verity? Wow. This is the best library ever." She eats one of the grape leaves, which are bite-sized.

"The best magic library ever," he corrects her.

"I like these. I haven't had them before, but they're really good. Is this lunch or what?"

"Or what. I'm just having a honey pastry." He is dropping crumbs into a napkin.

"You'll still have to wash your hands," Maya reminds him. 

"Washing hands is a theme. Not that there's anyone in here to catch it from, but we keep getting them sticky." Maya glances at the window, seeing the courtyard, the curve of the dome and rooftops beyond, and the sky, full of billowing clouds. "Do you want the news?" He gestures in the direction of the tables where the computers are. "We could go online, check what's happening."

"No, let's just read," Maya says.

So they wash their hands, singing, and come back and read.