Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

stormed Baku and Kokand. He shot many Moslems. I am sure that to Azeris and Uzbeks, he must have seemed like a ruthless Armenian killer.”

“Does that bother you? That he killed so many Moslems?”

“Not very much. I would rather be hated as a killer than as a victim.”

“But people don’t hate victims.”

“Oh yes, they do,” said Antoyan. “For victims, they actually feel something crueler than hate. They feel contempt. And I want none of it.”

Anna was going to protest again, but the Armenian had risen from his chair. A family of gypsies had approached the restaurant, hoping to sell flowers to the diners. The maître d’hôtel was trying to shoo them away, and the ruckus was getting louder. Antoyan reached over the maître d’ toward the gypsies with a ten-franc note in his hand and retrieved a bunch of day-old carnations.

“Please don’t encourage them, monsieur,” said the maître d’.

The Armenian ignored him and returned to his seat. He handed the flowers to Anna.

“Back home in Yerevan,” he said, “on a pleasant evening like this, the road into the city would be crowded with women selling carnations from their gardens, far more beautiful than these. So I give them to you as a symbol of what is alive and graceful in my native city. Perhaps you will come there one day and buy some yourself.”

“Perhaps I will,” said Anna, trying to imagine this strange republic of cognac makers and flowers sellers and brooding tragedians. “But I doubt it.”

Anna paid the bill, without protest from Antoyan, and they set off for a stroll along the Seine. They tiny Ile St. Louis was awash with people. Anna and Aram joined the stream heading toward Notre Dame and the Place St.-Michel. The river twinkled with the lights of the city and the moonlit sky: a sleek bateau mouche slid by underneath the Petit Pont. Aram put his arm around Anna. She let it rest there. Let him believe that he was seducing her, if he liked, she thought. She could still control the relationship and use it for her purposes.

Antoyan led her to a bench along the Quai des Orfèvres, away from the crowd of evening strollers. He took Anna’s hand gently in his, opening the palm toward him.

“I will read your fortune, my dear Miss Morgan,” he said.

“You are a palm reader?”

“That is one of my Oriental skills. The reading of palms. The casting of spells. The divination of water. If I were not a medical doctor, I would be a shaman. Here. Relax your hand and I will look.”

Anna let her palm go limp, while he studied the lines creased across the soft flesh. As he was examining her, Anna looked at his own hands. They were a doctor’s hands. Confident, strong, deliberate. She imagined what his body must look like, without clothes. He was not a lean Thoroughbred, like Taylor. More like a Caucasian horse, close-footed and compact, adept at the narrow paths of the mountains.

“You are a beautiful woman,” he said.

“Thank you,” answered Anna. “But what does that have to do with reading my palm?”

“Everything,” he said. “I can read this hand, and this face, like an open book.”

“All right, Svengali. Go ahead.”

“I see in your hand that you have had many love affairs.”

“Not so many,” said Anna defensively.

“But the men were all too weak for you. They were selfish boys. They wanted a mother, or a sister, or maybe a girl for one night. But they didn’t want a woman.”

Anna wanted to pull her hand away, not because he was wrong, but because he was right. “That’s true,” she said. “But you’re not reading it in my hand.”

“You want to be in love with a man who is mature and confident,” he continued. “A man who knows what love is.”

“Yes.”

“But you are not in love now.”

Anna thought for a long moment about Taylor. “I guess that’s right,” she said.

Antoyan studied her hand for another twenty seconds. The only sounds were the rush of wind in their ears and the honking of far-off car horns at the Place St.-Michel.

“You are worried about something,” he said eventually. “In your work.”

“Yes,” said Anna, becoming more interested and curious. “But what am I worried about?”

He studied her hand, and then looked up at her from under those black eyebrows. On his face was that trace of a smile that seemed to come over him when they veered toward the true nature of her work.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But you are caught in something from which you cannot escape, from which you do not want to escape. And gradually it is becoming your destiny.”

Anna felt a chill, as if from a sudden gust of wind along the river. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’m cold.”

The Armenian removed his coat and put it over Anna’s shoulders. They walked in silence along the quay for fifty yards.

“You’re no fortune-teller,” she said after a while. “You’re just a good guesser. You could have said those same things about anybody. Everybody wants to be in love. Everybody worries about work.”

“Perhaps that is true,” said Antoyan. “But the art of the palm reader is to speak to the heart of one person only. And that is not so easy.”

Anna looked at him, tenderly and warily. In some mysterious way, he was transforming the nature of their interaction, so that it was coming within his control, rather than hers. She could feel the ground slipping from under her feet, and she wanted to reestablish her balance.

“Listen, Aram,” she said. “When are you going home?”

“Two weeks, I am sorry to say.”

“When you get back to Yerevan, would you be willing to stay in touch with me?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I’m interested in what you say about Armenia. So is my foundation. And we’d like to pay you for the help you’ve given us.”

The Armenian was silent for a long while. He looked at the ground as he walked, lost in thought.

“Come have dinner with me tomorrow night, and we will