The Weapon of Night Read Online Free Page A

course in the Seven Lively Arts. Details will follow at your request, but at this stage I do not wish to inflict upon you too much of what you may regard as trivia. Yet, I have encountered something which caused my crime-sniffing nose to twitch and my eyes to cross swords even more valiantly than usual, and I thought at once of you and your own talent for sniffing out the odd and apparently inexplicable.
    Last night I attended a dreary off-campus party in honor of some even more dreary on-campus individual. I arrived late, deliberately, for I have no patience with those affairs, and when I got there the wine was flowing indiscriminately and tongues were flapping. To my great disgust I was buttonholed immediately by Doctor Wilhelm von Kluge of the College of Medicine, who proceeded at once to bore me with his miraculous exploits in the medical field. Then all at once he ceased to bore me. Soon he became almost as cross-eyed as I myself and the words spilled from his mouth. He is a surgeon, I must tell you, brought to Egypt by our estimable Nasser, and it was when he began talking of his recent carvings that I pricked up my ears and listened.
    It seems that he is an expert in cosmetic surgery, a fact that he had not previously confided to me. It further seems that, over the course of the past few months, he has been doing a series of operations to alter the facial characteristics of a number of men who paid him vast sums of money for his skills. His greatest triumph, professionally speaking, was in the area around the eyes, and in the hormonal inducement of hair growth where hair was reluctant to appear before. In the course of his babblings it emerged that none of these men — some eight or nine in number, so far as I could gather — was disfigured in any way so that they actually required surgery. They merely wished to alter their appearance, and according to him he did so with unparalleled brilliance. I got the impression from him, though he did not say so directly, that they all knew each other and that the treatment of each was very similar. Some required more or less work on the nose; one or two demanded his greatest skill in the transformation of the cheekbones. But on the whole their requirements were the same.
    I then asked him — as who would not? — exactly what they had looked like before. And then, my friend, he most regrettably clammed up, as you would say, and began talking very rapidly about something else. Nothing I could do or say would bring him back to discussion of his surgical brilliance. Yet, I thought I saw him glance around the room with a kind of nervousness, and, soon after that, he left.
    I see that, as usual, my “quick note’ has become a chapter, and in it I have offered you nothing but intangibles. But I find they interest me strangely, and I shall pursue the matter. I see, too, that it approaches the hour for me to lecture to my budding crime-fighters, so I will leave you with this little puzzle.
    The term will soon be over — Allah be praised for my criminologist’s holiday. You do not propose to vacation in Egypt this year? Alas, I thought not. But write me at your leisure and tell me what you think of von Kluge and his drunken ravings. In the meantime, my best greetings —
    Forgive the interruption. A phone call from the Chief of Police. No class today; I am on call as a consultant.
    Von Kluge was found dead in bed this morning. At first glance it looked like natural death. On investigation he was found to have been deliberately smothered.
    I must go.
    In haste,
    Your friend, Hakim Sadek.

    Hawk let the letter fall onto the table top and lit his cold cigar with great deliberation. He chewed it, puffed, leaned back and puffed again. At last, he spoke.
    “You want me to assume that there is something more here than a criminal group at work in Egypt. Very well, I will dispense with a discussion of all such possibilities and make your assumption. And that is that this affair has