Across from him, toothless and white-bearded, sat an old Bedouin with skin the color of chocolate from a life in the desert, murmuring of the dying old ways. He was a haji and therefore revered and ignored. In the traditional singsong of the Arab storyteller, he crooned to himself an epic of desert strife and of a brother’s betrayal of brother, the old story. It was filled with the familiar characters who are called forth in every age and every generation to reenact the immemorial tragedies without end. So it is written.
Next to the haji three man talked of the old quarrels among the Shi’a and the Imamis of Iran, the Alawites, the dominant orthodox Sunni, and the ferocious Ismailis of Syria. One poked a finger at the vein in his arm. “Ismaili,” he said. The other two laughed and pointed at their arms.
Georges uttered a comfortable sigh: Two more cars entered the parking lot. It was one-thirty. Only seven more were needed to save his unworthy neck. His mind roved over the different checkpoints on that long route from Paris to Damascus. He knew every mile of it, how many cars had he himself driven over the years? He recalled the few that were impounded. The Turks always gave him the most difficulty. But his driving days were over.
Two more arrived—a total of five cars by 1:45. Four more appeared at two o’clock. That made nine. One more was all he asked. Time passed. Georges squirmed in his chair. Was that all that got through? Nine? Eleven had been taken?
A catastrophe. He sat with his chin on his fist, squinting his left eye against his cigarette smoke, disconsolate. It was now two-thirty. Monsieur Brewer had offended the Fates with his endless rearrangements of the cargo in the pans. At quarter to three, Georges was convinced. Only nine had gotten through. At three, he prepared to leave. It had been an hour since the last arrival.
A red Volkswagen drove up the street and turned into the lot. It was number ten. Georges snubbed out his cigarette, stood up, then sat again. He rubbed his hands on his trousers and lit another cigarette. Saved by a Volkswagen. Red, his lucky color again. God is good.
Then two more cars arrived almost together. Before Georges could draw an overjoyed breath, three more arrived. An incredible total of fifteen cars. Extraordinary. He celebrated with another coffee with cardamom. Any more cars were extremely unlikely. But the sixteenth arrived minutes later, and while he was standing in wonder, paying the waiter, numbers seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen arrived. He tipped the waiter heavily.
After twenty-six years in the business he never permitted a feeling of elation. Resignation, yes. He was always prepared for that when, as expected, things went poorly. There was safety in a little misfortune. But when things went too well he grew suspicious: Too much luck is dangerous. And when things went this well, surely the Great Bestower of Fortune was raising him for a disaster.
As he stood in the doorway, pulling his raincoat over his swelling bulk, the twentieth car turned into the lot. Incredible. The Fat Man’s heart was filled with dread. It had to be the herald of a major catastrophe.
He strolled across the lot in the pelting rain, his eyes counting the cars once more. There they were: twenty cars. He looked at the smirking faces of four drivers.
“How did it go?” he asked.
“Very well indeed, monsieur. Only a few breakdowns, easily repaired.”
“No trouble at the borders?”
No. There had been none. Georges stood looking at the twenty automobiles for a moment and listening to the sounds of Damascus—the chorus of car and truck engines, occasional horns, and the sounds of construction, hammers and riveting—and wondering what went wrong. He threw his cigarette down. Filled with dread, he needed to sit. He went back to the coffeehouse for another cup. Twenty cars. Georges did sums in his head: He had earned a fortune.
He thought of his assignations at the Hotel Taft—Margot and her red umbrella. Would he lose his Wednesday appointment? He yearned for her. A certain stirring in his loins. He hungered for Paris. Having grown old there, he had become a Parisian to his gizzard. Margot. And couscous. And Paris. He would go back there and hide from the baleful eye of Fate.
As he raised the cup to his lips, his client Brewer drove into the garage lot. He remembered how Brewer had agonized over the apportionment of the parts in the various underpans. How the man had tormented Fate. And now, was Fate taunting him with twenty cars?
Brewer walked across the road in the downpour, bearing an attaché case, and entered the coffeehouse. He held a thumb up to Georges as he sat down.
“So,” Georges said. “It went well.”
“Yes,” Brewer said. “Very well. Total success.”
“And now?”
“And now I will load my inventory on a truck and deliver it to my client. The mechanics have already removed a number of the pans.”
When the thin man in the polka-dot tie arrived, shaking his umbrella, Georges knew where the parts were going. Attashah stepped up beside the seated Brewer and leaned forward to whisper a question.
“All,” Brewer answered.
“All? Everything?”
“Everything,” Brewer said.
Attashah clasped his hands together and shuddered in violent joy. Georges thought of the old Arab proverb: “How doth the serpent smile?”
Bobby McCall stood bare-naked before the bathroom mirror of his hotel room in Damascus. Ever since he had watched the red Renault roll through the Turkish-Syrian border check, just when he had almost quit in despair, his luck had changed. He felt invincible now.
With care, he applied the dark-brown makeup to his face, his ears, his neck. He fitted brown contact lenses in his pale-blue eyes. Over his curly brown hair he adjusted a straight-haired black wig. Then he applied the dark-brown makeup to his hands and wrists and midway to his elbows. Next he coated his feet and ankles with the same hue.
From a brown paper bag he took a white pullover shirt with no collar and struggled into it. Then a pair of trousers made of a coarse material and gathered at the ankles. He stepped into them and cinched a woven belt around his waist. Next he took out a burnous, a heavy woolen hooded cloak broadly striped in brown and orange. He pulled it over his head. Lastly he stepped into a pair of leather sandals. As the finishing touch, he wound around his head a flat porter’s turban made of a length of twisted cloth. He tucked in the end just above his right ear.
He examined himself critically in the full-length mirror. A sunbrown Damascus street porter with brown eyes and straight black hair looked back at him. He took a can of makeup remover, plus a large box of cotton pads, and put them in readiness on the sink. On the bed he had laid out his suit, shirt, shorts, socks, shoes, necktie, and personal items including his airline tickets. His suitcase and garment bag waited by the door. He was nearly ready.
From a bureau drawer he took a .38 pistol and broke it and checked it, then snapped the cylinder back into place. He attached a silencer to the barrel, tucked the weapon into his trouser belt, and adjusted the burnous over it.
McCall took a last look at himself in the mirror.
“Don’t miss,” he said to the porter in the glass.
Rock sat in the Cairo café, pretending to read the newspaper. But he kept watching the same corner a block away. She would come swinging around there and then cross the street and walk by the café as she did every day.
A thousand times he told himself she wasn’t coming. She was late. She’d gone another way. He writhed in his chair. And then at last she appeared, walking around that corner, crossing the street, and as he watched she drew closer. Closer. He studied her figure. Her face. Had she changed? It was only a few weeks. No more than two months. She came in brilliant sunlight with her schoolbag slung across her back. Tawny skin. Golden skin. Long tresses. Rock felt poetic. His heart sang. The coast is clear.
She drew closer. Rock laid aside the paper, threw some money on the table, and in his new white linen suit and new white sun hat, stepped out on the sidewalk.
She stopped and gasped and hung her head. He spoke to her. She nodded at her name. He in
vited her to walk with him. They strolled together.
“Are you pleased to see me?”
She nodded her head but kept her eyes averted.
“I have a present for you,” he said. “A very nice present all the way from Paris. Would you like to see it?”
She nodded again with lowered head.
“Let me carry your schoolbag,” Rock said. He walked happily with her to his hotel, the bag slung over one shoulder. It was a blue canvas knapsack with the legend UCLA on it.
Major Mudd sat in the foyer of Peno Rus’s penthouse, facing the door of the elevator. In five or ten minutes Rus would come up to take his regular afternoon nap with his latest bedmate, a seven-teen-year-old boy, a truant from one of England’s best public schools.
Major Mudd sat with the cable-box between his feet. Several electrical lines trailed along the marble floor and up the wall into an open junction box.
He checked the connections for the last time, then looked at his watch. Three minutes before two.
The Caribbean sun never merely rises. It ascends. Majestic and dazzling, it mounts the dawn sky, bestowing its rays like largesse. On this day, November 26, it found the early-morning beach filled with people. The great sea stirred, the surf hissed, and the sound of many people on foot and in vehicles filled the air as they scraped and shuffled and murmured and laughed and slammed and tapped and hammered.
All eyes watched the ocean for the arrival of the landing craft. The grandstand was filled. El Presidente was given the foremost seat; it was a director’s canvas chair with one word across the back: EXCELENCIA. Others—members of his cabinet, his family and close personal friends, including his official biographer, his official photographer, his official recording secretary, his mother, his four children as well as the children of his cabinet members—all were present and murmuring excitedly as they watched for the landing boats.
Servants went among them, passing out picnic foods on paper plates printed for the occasion. With the rising of the sun, El Presidente could now see the crowds extending along the brow of the beach in both directions. They stood obediently behind wooden sawhorses that fenced the beach off from traffic. On the beach, at strategic locations, three cameras and their crews waited.
The crowd cried out and cheered when they spotted the ship approaching. It headed directly toward the beach.
Jamil stood on the roof of a van that was parked on the brow of the sand dune. His slender boy’s body was dressed in a yellow ensemble. On his head was a wide-brimmed straw hat. His binoculars searched the sea.
On the ground beside the van stood a tripod with a camera. Inside the van under a blanket lay an Ingram rifle with a silencer attached.
Next to the van was parked the taxicab that the President had commandeered for the ride to the presidential palace. His cousin who had driven the original cab was waiting today to reenact the drive. The two ladies who had ridden in the original cab were waiting with the cousin to make the same ride again. Slane would emerge from the surf, cross the beach, tumble into the trunk of the cab, and be whisked off to the palace.
Slane’s cab ride to the palace would take fifteen minutes. Jamil’s van ride to the airport and the waiting private jet would take ten minutes.
Jamil glanced at His Excellency and laughed to himself. The man sat there in his official director’s chair with his official Hollywood sunglasses, casting a critical eye on the performance of one hundred troops who were about, to take over his island, topple his government, arrest him, and then execute him in the basement of the presidential palace. He had a front-row seat to his own downfall. Within an hour he should be dead.
Jamil was witnessing an ironic reenactment of the story of the Trojan Horse.
Rock quickly stripped and got on the bed. He held out to her the package tied with ribbon. “Go ahead,” he said. “Open it.”
The girl carefully untied the ribbon and saved it. Then deftly she slipped off the wrapping paper and saved that. Her hands were trembling as she opened the lid of the small box.
“It’s from Paris,” Rock said.
Inside was a gold necklace, and she stared at it with open mouth. It was the first gold she’d ever touched. Rock helped her put it on, fumbling with the clasp like a bridegroom. She stood before the mirror, nude save for the necklace, and gaped at her image. Then she flung herself on the bed and into the waiting arms of Rock.
It was precisely five o’clock, and Rock’s bomb behaved flawlessly. The explosion blew out the wall of the hotel and left a gaping hole where the room had been.
Major Mudd heard the elevator start in its shaft. He looked at the floor indicator above the door, then at the flashing light on the cable box between his feet. He reached down and unclasped the safety cover from the red button. Then he waited.
The little square of light on the floor indicator danced along the numbers: 2 3 4 5 6. Mudd looked at his little black box; 9 10 11 12 13 14 P. The light stopped at P. Mudd heard the two voices murmuring in the elevator and watched as the door slid open. Peno Rus stood framed in the doorway with his right arm draped over the shoulders of a handsome young man. The youth’s eyes widened when he saw Major Mudd.
“Father!” he called. “I can explain.”
Major Mudd reached his right forefinger down to the red button and pushed. The cable brakes short-circuited. The lighted elevator car disappeared in the wink of an eye. One instant it was there, and the next there was nothing but rattling cables against a brick shaft wall. The elevator car fell. If Rus and the boy screamed all the way down the elevator shaft, Mudd never heard them. The only sound was a great whistling rush of air.
A moment later, the major heard the loudest boom of his life. He would hear it ever after.
Slane, in the first boat, brandished a pistol at the beach, then jumped down into the surf. The grandstand broke into prolonged applause and shouts of encouragement. Swaying from side to side, Slane struggled through the surf to the shore.
He took three steps out of the surf, drew back his left arm, and waved the troops forward. The throng was applauding loudly and shouting instructions to Slane and the troops. Everyone was standing. Slane drew back his right arm and waved the troops forward. The crowd cheered as though at a soccer match.
Slane trotted up the beach toward the waiting cab. Jamil stepped forward and waved Slane onward to the open car trunk. Slane came at a fast run. Jamil picked up the rifle and held it out for Slane. Slane came closer at a dead run. Jamil waved Slane on. “Hurry!” he shouted. Slane sprinted.
Jamil nodded at the driver, who jumped into the car with the two ladies. Slane arrived and tumbled into the trunk, holding out his hands to receive the rifle.
“So long, you son of a bitch,” Jamil said.
Slane began to sit up with shocked recognition on his face. Jamil reached the rifle out to put it into the trunk. With scarcely a pause in his motion, he pulled the trigger at point-blank range. Pfft! Pfft! Pfft! Pfft! Four shots into Slane’s head. Jamil pushed the rifle into the trunk and slammed it. He waved the driver off.
17
In the steady downpour Bobby McCall stepped out of the rear entrance of the hotel and walked up the street to the coffeehouse, his ragged costume blending with those of other pedestrians who hurried and skulked on their rainy errands. On his head he bore a nondescript cardboard carton with the legend CHAMPION MOTOR PARTS. The rain made tapping noises on it.
McCall turned into the covered market street, Suq al Hamidiyah, and walked in the semidarkness. Over his head, the steady rain pelted the metal sheeting of the roof. Shafts of gray light lit the bazaar here and there. The street led through the Old City directly to the Umayyad Mosque. The bazaar was impossibly crowded and McCall slowly picked his way through.
Vendors’ voices sang out their wares.
“Almonds.”
“Cuuuuucumbers.”
“Figs. Pomegranates.”
“Walnuts.”
“T-shirts. Japanese radios.”
At the stand of the oil merchant, McCall turned and walked down an alley. He came out into the rain again and walked a wet street to the garage where the twenty cars were being worked on. At the side of the building stood a truck with its back doors open. McCall walked across the parking area to the truck and without hesitation slide the carton from his head into the truck beside a number of other small boxes. His thumb and forefinger gripped a piece of short flat wire that protruded from a hole in the side of the box. He gave a quick tug, then turned on his heel and walked back across the parking area.
He crossed the road to the coffeehouse, glanced inside, and saw Brewer sitting with Georges. He stood against a wall and waited.
It was a very good bomb. It exploded within three minutes. The entire back of the truck went up, carrying with it all of Brewer’s parts. A great black ball of smoke tumbled skyward and soon a shower of smoldering debris fell on the parking area and the street.
McCall stepped away from the wall and looked into the coffeehouse. Brewer and Georges were standing, staring at the burning truck. McCall pulled out the weapon from his gown, held it in both hands, drew a bead on Brewer, and pulled the trigger twice. With the silencer, it barely made a sound. Brewer flung his arms up and tumbled backward over his chair. No one noticed; they were all staring at the bombed truck.
McCall turned and quickly walked back the way he had come into the jammed bazaar. In the crush he pitched the pistol under the oil dealer’s stand and blended into the crowd, picking his way back to his hotel and the makeup remover.
An hour later he was airborne on a flight to Paris.
As if in celebration, the weather in Paris had finally turned magnificent. The street cleaners were sweeping up the last of the chestnuts from the Champs Élysées, and the streets were crowded with people enjoying the last good weather before the wet winter set in.
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