Read Online The Blue Hour by Douglas Kennedy - Free Book Online

opened my bag and got dressed: loose linen pants, a blue linen shirt. Then I opened the wardrobe and spent the next fifteen minutes hanging up and arranging all my clothes, before turning to Paul’s bag. I hesitated for a moment, but also knew how grateful he was whenever I took charge of the domestic details of our lives. So I unzipped his bag and found chaos. Shirts, underwear, jeans, socks, pairs of shorts, all in an unwashed, beyond-disordered state. Dumping them into the room’s wicker laundry basket, I put on a pair of sandals, then, hoisting the basket, let myself out and down the two flights of darkened stairs to the reception desk. A different man was asleep behind the counter: rail-thin, brown teeth, dressed in a djellaba, middle-aged, a lit cigarette still fuming away between two fingers, his mouth open wide. I put the wicker basket down beside him and reached for a notepad and pen on the reception counter to leave him a note, asking him to get our clothes washed. But suddenly he mumbled something in his sleep, then snapped awake, squinting at me.
    â€œSorry, sorry,” I whispered. Then, pointing to the basket, I said, “ Linge .”
    The man’s watery eyes began to snap into focus. He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was now four twenty-eight.
    â€œ Maintenant? ” he asked. “ On est au beau milieu de la nuit .”
    Before I could tell him the laundry could wait until later, he disappeared off through a back doorway, returning a few minutes later with a shy young girl—I guessed she was around sixteen—in a simple gingham dress, her hair covered by a head scarf. She looked half awake.
    â€œThere was no need to get her now,” I told the man.
    He just shrugged, then turned to the young girl and pointed to the wicker basket and spoke in rapid-fire Arabic. She answered back, her voice hesitant, demure. The man asked me, “ Laver et repasser ? ”
    â€œYes, yes,” I said. “And I need them this morning.”
    More Arabic to the little girl. She gave a shy, quiet answer. The man turned to me and said, “You will have to wait for the sun to dry your clothes.”
    â€œI can’t argue with that,” I said, smiling at the young girl. She smiled back.
    â€œ Shokran, ” I said, Arabic for thank you and just one of a small handful of words I knew in that language.
    â€œ Af wan , ” she replied. You’re welcome .
    And she disappeared with the laundry basket.
    â€œI have one last favor to ask,” I told the man. “Since all my husband’s clothes are being washed, do you have a robe or something he could wear?”
    â€œ Une djellaba pour votre mari? ”
    â€œ Oui, oui. ”
    â€œ Attendez là, ” he said, and disappeared through the door behind him.
    At that precise moment, the voice began to incant again over the loudspeaker. Allahhhhhh . The ah was held so long and in such a haunting, mellifluous way that I felt compelled to step outside and see if I could discern from where it was coming.
    Leaving the blue carved archway of the hotel I discovered we were in a back alley, unpaved, narrow enough for one vehicle but little else. The amplified voice started chanting again. I moved away from the doorway. Just ten or so paces away from the hotel and I was enshrouded in darkness: hostile doorways, shuttered shops, tiny alleys filtering off this constricted street. I knew I shouldn’t be here. It was like falling into a blackened maze. But the voice kept beckoning me forward, inviting me deeper into the shadows, making me fearless.
    Then I saw the cat. Hanging off a wall directly in front of me, as if he had been glued onto its crumbling stone surface. So emaciated, so grubby, so spooked. Had something terrifying thrown her against that wall? She was now clinging to it, paralyzed perpendicularly. Catching sight of her threw me. The impossibility of her position was so unnerving that I felt as if an