Stewart, Angus (30 page)

'Neither the drugs nor the Arab boys,' Caroline said, laughing.

'That sounds like Mary Simpson.'

'It was! She telephoned last night with a few little things I ought to know, and strongly advised my not getting involved with you.'

'I'd have backed her there.'

'You'd have been happy to see me go alone?'

'You're coming over all woman,' Brown said. 'Bad discipline for the trigger-finger.'

'As a matter of fact a gun was on offer for this job.'

'Did you accept one?'

'No.'

Brown stamped on the accelerator, but missed a snake. 'I now know you're paid at least seven hundred pounds a year.'

'That's really why I refused it.'

'Oh?"

'You wouldn't have been permitted to touch it, and might have felt offended, even unmanned.'

'I can see I might well have been wounded.' Brown smiled faintly. 'Still, it's creditable that considerations of mutual survival should be abnegated out of deference for an assistant's sensibilities. All we'll need is some suitable epitaph to stand as an unwritten inspiration to the service. Perhaps: "Tact forbade her to draw" . . .'

Caroline laughed openly. 'I don't think there's danger of shooting!'

'Possibly not. And presumably Nelson had much the same delusion while he paced his quarter-deck in gaily embroidered coat with the musketeers on the poop of the
Redoutable
towering thirty feet above him. As a matter of fact, the night they murdered Dan, Gadston and I happened to hit a military road block. I was praying
he
might have a weapon—he sensed it, I think—so that I might get a few weeks' asylum in a nice, safe gaol.'

'And abandon Manolo?'

'You're getting circular,' Brown said, 'besides avoiding your turn in the game. There's an automatic system for bouncing Manolo out fast.'

'Born in our Embassy in Washington . . .' Caroline began.

'Which makes you twenty-three or twenty-four,' Brown said, placing the name without much surprise. The girl spy had actually coloured slightly, which was certainly incompatible with trigger discipline.

'Educated North London Collegiate and Girton,' Caroline went on. 'And got bored rather like you.'

'From the other end,' Brown said.

‘If you like.'

'Previous assignments?'

'Getting into gossip with Salan's mistresses when he was in Spain.'

Brown looked at her shocked. 'But you totally failed to stop the General escaping to Oran, dear girl!'

Caroline, tucked a leg up beneath her on the hard seat and 'We all did, silly! At least I suppose there were others watching him.'

'Thank God I don't pay income tax,' Brown said. 'And?'

'And that's all!' Caroline was triumphant.

Brown turned mock horror on her again. 'Then why are you in this shooting war commanding a chauffeur?'

'I'm an Arab specialist.'

'An Arab specialist.' Brown savoured it 'That's what Gadston
père
was.
It didn't do him much good.'

'You're jealous of Jay, aren't you?' Caroline asked, smiling.

'Am I?'

'Yes. And it's got nothing to do with background. Or only inversely. What puts you off-stride is that he
doesn't
have the effortless ease you feel he ought to. He's really very like you; yet you can't quite admit him as a friend. There's more—but it can wait'

'I'd love sometime to hear your deductions about the O.A.S. via Salan's
mistresses
,'
Brown said; but felt his cynicism melting a bit, the irony becoming token.

They were running into the great fertile plain that spreads from the Atlantic coast to the northern, imperial cities of Fez and Meknes. Bright, liveried hordes of wild flowers harassed the cultivation, infiltrating among the corn. In May, the first crop on either side of the road was ready for harvest.

'It's funny you don't speak much Spanish,' Caroline began, with the air of someone making a lively change in the conversation.

At the same moment Brown noticed a signpost to Kasbah Tadla. It was still two hundred kilometres to their first night's halt.

  *  *  *  *  *

The pulsing neon sign had long been turned off. Jay awoke from a haunting dream of Naima to find a rectangle of sunlight fallen across his bed from the uncurtained window, and with this awareness there came at first only an uncertain recollection that there was something he must do. It was eleven o'clock

He put the kettle to boil and went downstairs to the
bacal
.
An atmosphere of excitement was apparent as soon as he stepped from the street door. In the normally quiet backwater people were everywhere. Some families of country Arabs were encamped on the pavement, outside the hotel with its offending neon sign. A legacy of uncollected mule droppings in streets usually fastidiously swept evidenced the sudden influx of hundreds more. Even such Spaniards as Jay passed were indefinably more
correcto
.
Where his street joined the Boulevard crowds were gathered ten deep. The green-bereted troops and police were everywhere. Word of the King's imminent arrival must have been given out by Rabat Radio only hours previously. Early off the mark, a white-robed group of Berber tribesmen commenced a war dance in the roadway; their circle contracting and expanding to the rabid heat of a lone drum, until the climactic moment when they all shouted piercingly together, and fired their muzzle-loading rifles in the
air. Profoundly engrossed faces watched them.

Jay dived into  the
bacal
.
By nightfall the jubilant city would have attained that pitch of hysteria when wise Europeans bolted their doors and sat it patiently out beneath their tinkling chandeliers. If the
muy correcto
Spaniards wouldn't abandon the
paseo
,
they
would confine it more tightly than ever to the brightly lit three hundred yards of the Boulevard. But Achmed, Jay reflected, would forgive no one if he weren't begged or bought out before the night's feasting.

The excitement did nothing to unsettle the instantaneous processes of mental arithmetic, working with the invisible certainty of molecular law behind the dark eyes of the
Soussi
shopkeeper's five-year-old son. Today he had made addition of eleven items before Jay could check two. He pushed the parcel of provisions over the counter unsmilingly. As infallibly as a spawning salmon this infant prodigy would return briefly to his southern kashbah to marry. After perhaps another forty years' unsmiling accountancy he would return there to die. If he followed tradition, there would be nothing to spend his wealth on, and the lack of amenity would not greatly bother him. For the next fifteen years at least he would be sleeping under the counter at night and working in that cramped shop sixteen hours a day. So far the
Soussi
shopkeepers had remained careless of their Cadillac potential; were without swimming pool consciousness.

Inspired by what was only curiosity. Jay made an additional purchase. 'A sandwich with butter and honey,' he said.

The child looked at him sceptically an instant. He sliced a small loaf open and tossed it on to the scales. With the addition of the butter, and then the honey, scooped from a giant jar with an implement little smaller than a canoe paddle, the sandwich was rapidly weighed twice more. 'Thirty-four francs,' the child said, as the fine pointer came to rest.

In his flat, Jay spread butter down the length of the longitudinally split loaf. He packed it with tuna. Heaven knew what sort of a spectacle the south would present should the
Soussi
shopkeepers ever decide to spend at home rather than save. He wondered idly where the odd combination of Brown and the girl might have got to. When he had swallowed a cup of coffee, he collected oranges and a bottle of Coca-Cola together with the sandwiches, and set out for the gaol.

The Kasbah he approached circuitously. Already the central streets had been closed to traffic, and pedestrians jostling for a vantage point along the processional route made the Boulevard impassable. Jay's detour was not without interest. The old French Residency, before which the king was to make a speech, stood at the hub of a slight depression, where five roads merged into the
Place de France
.
It was about the outer circumference of some of these axes that Jay was making his way. Each road held something like company strength of light armoured units, prepared, apparently, to swoop down upon the hub of the city as required. Had he not known the dispositions were routine for the king's provincial visits, he must have supposed a military
coup
to
be imminent.

But soon he had left the soldiers behind and was climbing steadily into the Kasbah. Hot sunlight splashed on the tops of white walls, while below, the alleys through which he passed were deeply shadowed, and far too narrow to admit the passage of any armoured car. Up here there were few people, as he had expected. He gave a small coin to a beggar, thinking, not without considerations of magic, that it was what Achmed would have done. For the first time that year flies had appeared in abundance.

Jay came out suddenly into the open square, from where the fort commanded a view down over the harbour, and the sea. The massive whitewashed building dazzled. Above the impregnably studded main gate an unusually large flag was hoisted, the five-pointed star on its red ground unmoving in the hot, airless morning. It was strange to reflect, as was it a nice comment on medievalism, that of the three official residences, the king might well elect to spend the night in this same building as Achmed, though their mode of accommodation might differ somewhat, and the sovereign was unlikely to be much aware of his subject. Jay shuddered. There was no reason why the dungeons at Tangier should be a, different from those only ten years ago, say at Telouet. With the parcel of food beneath his arm, he hurried round to the side gate.

He was in luck. The guard in the glassed office was a man he knew, Rahim. At least he could be sure the food would reach Achmed.

Rahim now recognised both himself and his purpose at once. 'This time, monsieur, you come too late,' he said apologetically, before Jay had even spoken.

'You mean he's been released?'

'But no, monsieur. This morning they sent him to a reformatory with some other boys.'

'A reformatory?' Jay said wildly. 'Where,'

Rahim's shrug was as perfect as his French. 'Near Marrakesh, they say. But he will be well cared for, monsieur,' he went on, reassuringly. 'This is a special place. It is only for boys whose health and strength must be built up.'

Narrowly Jay looked at him. 'There was nothing wrong with Achmed's health or strength.'

Again Rahim shrugged. 'Monsieur, all I know is that this morning they measured and weighed all the
boys, and some of the skinny ones they said must go to this special school . . .'

'You say they
weighed
Achmed?'

This morning early, monsieur. It is quite new.'

Incredulously, Jay's mind was groping back to some chance remark made by Lom at Sidi Ali. Then all at once he had it. But it couldn't be true. Before his eyes reckless swallows flashed above the palace battlements, against the clear sky.

'
Monsieur
?'
Rahim's voice reached him, sharp with concern.

'Can I use your 'phone?' Jay asked after some seconds more.

'For civilians . . .' the policeman began to protest.

'
Please
, Rahim!' Jay cut in.

After an apprehensive glance into the courtyard, the policeman surrendered the telephone to him. '
D'accord
,' was all he said.

The telephone in the Minza seemed to be ringing interminably. Desperately Jay waited for a voice that could tell him whether Lom had yet
left for Marrakesh. The reception desk was in chaos. Then another telephone was purring emptily in what must be Lom's bedroom.

'Yes,' Lom's voice came suddenly.

In the rush of relief, Jay realised he'd never called Lom anything before. 'Harold,' he hazarded now, 'this is Jay Gadston. Look. You're going southish—Marrakesh, I believe. I rather desperately want a lift . . .'

There was a long pause. 'I will have no objection.' Lom's voice came rather formally, drugged Jay felt certain. 'I leave in exactly an hour.'

Then I'll be  at the Minza,' Jay said. 'Rahim . . . he muttered gratefully, and was gone.

'But your food for the boy,
monsieur
!'
he heard the policeman calling after him.

  *  *  *  *  *

To Lom, feeding himself from the bag of '
majoun
cookies' with which his hosts of the previous evening had thoughtfully provided him, the change in Abdslem Kerim was no great surprise. Nevertheless, he stood on the doorstep of the Minza Hotel taking it all in. Abdslem was arrayed as the smartest officer in the Royal Moroccan Army of whom anyone could conceive. Beneath the peaked cap were gold-rimmed dark glasses, while a shiny Sam Browne finished the immaculate uniform, and supported a large, holstered automatic. The Military Police jeep so casually parked in the thoroughfare might have been fresh out of a showroom.

'Quite like a movie, eh?' Abdslem grinned, as if conscious of the thoughts behind Lom's scrutiny.

'Quite,' Lom said, and bit into another cookie. He offered the bag, and the metamorphosed youth sniffed at it before shaking his head.

'You are all ready?' he asked.

'All but,' Lom said. 'I have a young friend who has asked for a lift as far as Marrakesh, and should be joining us here. You won't object?'

Abdslem looked dubious 'There is the aeroplane.'

'Jay Gadston hasn't much money, and I'm indebted for something.'

'Okay!' Abdslem was dismissive; then laughed. But if he is an enemy of the king I must shoot him, you know!'

'Of course,' Lom said solemnly.

Abdslem was looking quizzical. 'This man does not know what you are doing, no?'

'Certainly not.'

'Then it is best you both remember you are guests of the Moroccan Army,' Abdslem said, unsmilingly now. 'Is that understood?'