Free Relative Danger by Charles Benoit

‘Absolutely Exhausted’ from sightseeing and had power-slid her car into the parking lot of the seaside café three minutes ago.
    “Anything but tea.”
    Aisha ordered two Budweisers and they sat sipping the warm beer as the locals tried to keep cool in the ocean breezes. The beach was littered from one end to the other with fast food wrappers, empty water bottles, and things that looked like car parts. The ocean rolled up the sand, depositing some debris and pulling some back out to sea. The air smelled of salt water and gasoline. It could have been a beautiful place, Doug thought.
    “I’m sorry they wouldn’t let you in the mosque. It really is quite impressive. It was probably because they knew you weren’t a Muslim. You have to be a Muslim to go into the mosques here.”
    “You think it was because of me?” Doug said as he laughed. “You don’t think that the way you are dressed influenced their decision?” She was wearing white shorts, no doubt to highlight her perfectly tanned and sculpted legs, and a man’s button-down oxford with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows. Her’s, Doug thought, or a yet unmentioned boyfriend’s? After seeing her in all those short, wonderfully short, LBDs Doug couldn’t decide if she looked better in black or white. In any case she looked just like she wanted to look—like a model at the beach.
    “What is wrong with what I have on?” she said, looking over the top of her sunglasses.
    “Honestly, nothing.” And he meant it, too.
    “So where were you last night? I called around eleven to see if you wanted to get together but the desk said you were out?”
    Holy shit, he thought, she called me. “I had dinner with a guy I met at my hotel, this older guy from Germany, I think. He used to be a museum curator. We were talking about artifacts and things like that. It was interesting, he seemed to know so much.” Doug took a long pull on his beer before he continued. “It’s funny, he recalls the diamond theft but his details are quite different from your research.”
    “Oh,” Aisha said as she adjusted the thin paper napkin under her glass. “How strange. The story is well known.”
    “Oh yeah, it’s well known, but he seems to believe that it was only discovered this century, someplace in South Africa.” He watched as she continued to re-adjust the napkin.
    “Hmmm,” she said as she finished with the napkin and moved on to removing the label with a thumbnail. “He must not have been a very good museum person if he’d get the basic facts of the story all wrong. He must be thinking of a different diamond.”
    “Maybe,” Doug said, “but he sounded like he knew exactly what he was talking about.”
    “So I guess he showed you all of his research? The eight years of notes put together in dark library reading rooms form Kiev to New York? The accounts he translated himself? From Old French on fucking thirteenth century vellum manuscripts?”
    “Ah, no, he….”
    “Did he tell you how he spent a whole summer in Agra, paying western wages to Indian grad students to transcribe reams of documents, only to find two obscure references to the diamond?”
    “No, but….”
    “And did he tell you how rather than vacationing in Aspen he spent every spring break going from one archive library to the next? Or how he once had to sleep with a Yugoslavian antiquities official just to look at some papers that turned out to be worthless anyway?”
    “Look, Aisha, I’m not doubting you….”
    “It sure the hell sounds like it to me,” she said, looking up from her now naked beer bottle. “What did you do, run out right away to check up on me?”
    “No, no, no. Honest, Aisha, I was just out to dinner with this guy when we got to talking about why I was here and I told him the basics and he just added the information about the diamond. I trust your research and I trust you. I just have to figure out why the guy would have a totally different story, that’s all. Maybe