Tongues of Fire (29 page)

“Three,” the clerk said without opening his eyes.

He settled for two. Rehv handed him the money. He tucked it inside his T-shirt and rolled over. “I can't sleep with the light on,” Rehv said.

The clerk shrugged.

“Twenty-five piasters.”

“Seventy-five.”

Rehv gave him fifty, switched off the light, and lay down on the couch near the stairs. He waited. The clerk's breathing soon became slow, quiet, and even. A bedspring squeaked somewhere above. The clerk muttered something and sighed; and went on breathing slowly, quietly, evenly. Rehv sat up. Enough moonlight came through the window in the front door for him to see the clerk huddled on the couch with his hands tucked between his knees, and the billy club hanging on the wall. He slipped off his sandals and stood up.

The clerk did not stir. Rehv walked softly across the hall and went behind the desk. He took the billy club off the hook, glanced at the sleeping clerk, and very slowly started up the stairs. With each stair he left the moonlight farther behind; when he reached the top he was in almost total darkness. He paused there, waiting for his pupils to expand. After a minute or two he could see a corridor leading away into blackness. Several doors opened off the corridor. Under one of them a little light leaked out and formed a pool on the floor. Crouching down on his hands and knees, he crept closer.

On the other side of the door he heard the woman say, “No, really. That's all for me.”

Major Kay said: “Come on, Jill. A nightcap. There are a few things we should go over.”

The woman said: “All right. But please, it's Gillian.”

Major Kay said: “Whatever you say.”

Glass clinked against glass. Liquid gurgled. After a pause the woman said: “What did you want to go over?”

In a voice that was suddenly low and throaty, Major Kay said: “This.”

The woman said: “Don't do that.”

Major Kay said: “Why not? Got a boyfriend some place?”

The woman said: “It's not that. I just don't know you very well yet.”

Major Kay said: “Can you think of a better way?”

The woman said: “And also I'm not sure it's very professional.”

Major Kay said: “What are you talking about? I've seen your reports. I know how you get information.”

The woman began to get angry: “That's different and you know it. You're my boss—that makes it unprofessional.”

Major Kay's voice turned cold. “I'll be the judge of that.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said.”

“I don't understand. Are you threatening me about my career?”

“Who said anything about your career?”

“But you'll be writing a report about me when you go back.”

“I write reports about a lot of people.”

“You see? You are threatening me.”

“You're starting to bore me, Jill. Why don't you go back to your own room?”

A floorboard creaked. Quickly Rehv moved away into the darkness. The door opened, and the woman came out. She was fully dressed in jeans and a shirt cut like a man's, but she no longer wore the kerchief around her head. She turned back toward the room, and in the light that shone from within Rehv saw her thick chestnut hair, streaked yellow in places by the sun, and her strong profile, which might not always look as angry as it did now. “It's not sex I object to, Mr. Krebs,” she said. “It's you.”

The woman slammed the door and entered the next room. Rehv heard a key turn in the lock. Then he heard a key turn in the lock of Major Kay's room. The pool of light vanished. He stood in the darkness and listened.

For a while the woman paced back and forth in her room. Then he heard her shoes fall to the floor. After that she was silent. From Major Kay's room he heard nothing.

He waited a long time. It was very quiet. In the shadows behind him a small animal ran across the floor. Rehv began to worry about the clerk waking up.

When he had worried enough he walked to Major Kay's door and knocked on it very lightly. He turned his ear against the door and listened; he heard nothing. He knocked again, a little louder. He heard a sound that might have been a foot brushing the floor; the key turned in the lock; he felt hot stale air touch his face as the door opened; he smelled gin. He could see nothing.

“Changed your mind?” said Major Kay in the blackness.

Rehv swung the billy club at where he thought Major Kay's head should be. It cracked something hard. A heavy body slumped against him: warm skin, slightly damp. He pushed the body into the room, laid it on the floor, and closed the door behind him. Kneeling, he rested his hand on the bare chest and felt Major Kay's beating heart, strong and regular.

Rehv stood up and ran his hands over the walls until he found the light switch. He turned it on. There was blood on Major Kay's forehead, just over his left eyebrow; and swelling beneath the blood. But his chest rose and fell as though he were in a deep tranquil sleep.

Rehv searched the room. All of Major Kay's possessions were in a small vinyl suitcase at the foot of the bed. Rehv found lightweight clothing, a black case containing powerful binoculars, a book called
Great Moments in Cartoon History,
car keys, 2,500 American dollars, most of it in hundreds, 1,463 Sudanese pounds, and a British passport in the name of George Provin with a photograph of Major Kay inside. Rehv tucked the keys and the money into the leather pouch he wore around his neck.

Stepping over the naked man, he opened the door, switched off the light, and dragged him into the hall. Then he bent his knees, set his shoulder against Major Kay's waist, and hoisted him off the floor. It hurt his back so much that he could not keep in a little cry. He stood motionless in the dark corridor with Major Kay on his shoulder, listening. No one jumped out of bed, or ran up the stairs, or opened a door, or shouted. He carried Major Kay down the corridor. He was very heavy. The floor creaked with every step. So did the stairs. He came down into the moonlight. The clerk was just the way he had been. Very slowly Rehv walked past him and out the door.

He laid Major Kay on the hood of the jeep and went back to close the door of the hotel, gently. Then he unlocked the jeep, shoved Major Kay into the passenger seat, and sat down behind the wheel. He found the ignition, turned the key. The engine caught immediately: The noise of gasoline exploding drop by drop and steel whirling and pounding filled the night. Quickly Rehv drove across the square and into a narrow street, which grew into a wider street and became the southern road out of town. For a few miles he followed it, until he saw a small track leading west across the plain. He turned onto it; and drove by the light of the moon.

At first there were villages here and there along the track: some of them no more than a few huts beside a tree, others much larger, protected by low walls of mud and straw. All of them were dark and silent, asleep under the fat yellow moon. Once a dog barked; that was all.

After a while there were no more villages. In all directions the plain stretched away, flat and unbroken except for a few clusters of trees that seemed to be moving away from him very quickly, like galaxies in an expanding universe.

Major Kay moaned. Rehv glanced at him. He had slipped off the seat and lay curled on the floor with his head resting against the base of the gear shift. Turning off the track, Rehv drove toward the nearest cluster of trees. Low brittle bushes that he had not noticed before grew on the plain. They tore at the underside of the jeep. Major Kay moaned again.

The trees stopped trying to run away, grew bigger, loomed in front of him. Rehv parked in their shadow. There wasn't a sound except a soft rumble in Major Kay's throat as he breathed. Rehv climbed out and opened the back door of the jeep. Inside he found two large cans of gasoline, a spare tire, tools, and a coil of nylon rope. He slipped the rope over his shoulder, pulled Major Kay out of the jeep, and dragged him to the foot of a small acacia tree. It had a straight narrow trunk. Major Kay moaned, and mumbled something incoherent.

He went back to the jeep and searched through the tools until he came upon a pair of wire cutters. He cut three short lengths from the coil of rope. One of these he tied around Major Kay's ankles; another around his knees. He knew nothing special about knots or how to bind a man: He just drew the ropes very tightly around Major Kay's legs and doubled all the knots. He sat Major Kay against the tree and tied his wrists together behind the trunk. After looking at him for a few moments Rehv cut two more pieces of rope. One he wrapped around Major Kay's chest and upper arms and knotted behind the tree; the other he tied around his waist. As he pulled it tight he felt it sink into the soft flesh of his stomach until it met the hard muscle underneath.

Then Rehv placed the wire cutters on the ground in front of Major Kay, and beside them a screwdriver and a tire iron. He waited.

In a little while Major Kay moaned again. He said, “Don't.” He vomited. It ran down his chest. Rehv smelled souring milk. Major Kay opened his eyes. Rehv remembered those pale brown eyes and how they had gone soft and dreamy on a night long ago. The night of the permanent damage.

The pale brown eyes were not soft and dreamy now. They were dull; then they looked up at Rehv, and for a moment were frightened; finally they were watchful. They examined the jeep, the tools on the ground, Rehv.

Rehv squatted in front of him. “These things follow a pattern,” he said. “First you deny everything. Then, when the pain starts you make up a long and clever story that often resembles the truth quite closely, but never really says anything. Finally you tell the truth. Everyone does.”

He waited for the frightened look to reappear in the pale brown eyes. It did not.

“Who are you? Kay? Provin? Krebs?”

“What difference does that make?” Major Kay said in a tone that sounded genuinely puzzled.

He didn't like the way Major Kay was watching him. It was detached, professional, trained: Was Major Kay slotting him somewhere among the types of interrogators? Could he do that—naked, bound, with a bloody bump on his forehead and vomit on his chest? “I asked you a question,” Rehv said.

Major Kay laughed.

Rehv punched his face. Major Kay's eyes went dull. He vomited again. But Rehv did not know what to do next. Finally he asked: “How did you find me?”

Major Kay spat something out of his mouth. It landed in the dust at Rehv's feet. “Routine,” he said.

Rehv thought of hitting him again, or breaking his leg with the tire iron, or jabbing the screwdriver into his eye, or slicing off his ear with the wire cutters. Or his testicles. But he knew he could do none of these things: not with Major Kay tied there to the tree. He tried remembering the night of the soft dreamy eyes, he tried thinking about Major Kay and his son, but it wasn't enough to make him do what he would have to do to discover how much Major Kay knew about the boy. And that was really all that mattered: Did he know that the boy had come with him? Did he know why?

“Who do you work for?”

“The U.S. government. You know that.” Major Kay looked up at the moon; perhaps he was trying to estimate the time. Its light glistened on the hardening blood over his eye.

“What do you want with me?” Rehv asked.

“You killed a man on U.S. soil. Abu Fahoum. Remember? We have laws against that kind of thing.”

Major Kay was thousands of miles from home, Rehv thought, naked and helpless, but somehow still in authority. “I didn't kill him.”

“Fine. You and I will go back to the States, you'll be acquitted and walk away a free man.” Major Kay spoke sarcastically.

Rehv knew he could not interrogate Major Kay. How could he make him tell if he knew or suspected anything about the boy? He could not scare him; he could not hurt him the way he would have to hurt him. In the end he would probably untie him and let him go. He was a clumsy amateur and Major Kay knew it.

So there was nothing to do but be a clumsy amateur and go on making mistakes—the kind of mistakes that would lead Major Kay far from the boy. Rehv wrinkled his brow in thought. “I know you're lying to me,” he said. “You wouldn't come here because of a murder so long ago. You don't give a damn about that.” He paused; then blurted: “It's the Jeddah drop, isn't it?”

Major Kay did not answer, but for the briefest instant his eyes flickered in the moonlight.

It was enough. More talk would gain nothing. He raised his voice: “Answer me.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” There was a tentative sound in Major Kay's tone that had not been there before.

Jerkily, like a man on the edge of panic, Rehv grabbed the tire iron and jumped up. “What do you know about the Jeddah drop?”

“Nothing.”

“You're lying,” Rehv shouted. He lifted the tire iron above his head. “I'm asking you for the last time.”

“You're making a mistake,” Major Kay said.

“I said that once, too.” With the blunt end of the tire iron Rehv struck down at the side of Major Kay's head, firmly, but with much less than all his force. A hoarse grunt climbed partway up Major Kay's throat. His head slumped forward on his chest.

Rehv let the tire iron fall to the ground. He jumped into the jeep, turned the key, and drove away with the accelerator pressed to the floor. He felt the contents of his stomach rising inside him. He fought them down for one mile, two miles, three. But in the end there was nothing he could do about it.

He drove east. The yellow moon watched him in the rearview mirror. Lena liked Peter Lorre. Naomi would make popcorn; they would sit around the television. He tried to picture them around the television, but all he could see were shadows of bodies and faces with no features. He could not even picture his own face. Lena's face, Naomi's face: decayed, decomposed in his memory, as they were in the little grave on Mount Carmel. Peter Lorre had been dead much longer than they, yet he could see his face very clearly. Of course he had the moon to remind him of Peter Lorre. All he had to remind him of Lena and Naomi were screams.