Torch of Tangier

by Aileen G. Baron

  Struggling for breath, MacAlistair rasped out, “Enough, Zaid.”

  “More than enough,” Drury said. He started into the dining room with a disgusted shrug and plopped himself into a chair.

  A paroxysm of gasps and coughs wracked MacAlistair. His cheeks flushed to bright pink as he clapped a handkerchief to his mouth. Zaid rose, reached into his pocket and pulled out a fresh handkerchief.

  He leaned over MacAlistair. “Sorry. So sorry.” He patted MacAlistair’s shoulder and handed him the handkerchief.

  “The bouillabaisse grows cold,” Suzannah called from the dining room. Her hand rested on Drury’s shoulder.

  Drury gestured to the others to join him inside. “Let’s eat.”

  Cradling MacAlistair’s arm, Zaid led his friend to his place at the head of the table and held the chair for him.

  In the seat next to Lily, Russ leaned toward her and asked what she was doing in Tangier, asked how she enjoyed digging in the Caves of Hercules, asked why she became an archaeologist.

  Suzannah emerged from the kitchen carrying an empty bowl. “For the bones,” she said and managed to brush against Drury as she bent to set it on the table and brushed against him again when she straightened up.

  She patted him on the head and slithered back to the kitchen with a wiggle. Drury’s gaze followed her. Russ kept talking to Lily, and across the table, Adam watched Drury silently.

  Zaid hovered over MacAlistair for the rest of the meal—as MacAlistair ladled the bouillabaisse into bowls, as they passed them around, as they piled fish bones into the basin in the middle of the table.

  Before dessert, Russ told Lily, “I’d love to show you the Rock sometime. Whenever you’re free.”

  “She has tomorrow off,” Drury said from behind the mountain of bones from the bouillabaisse. “How about a day trip? Tomorrow.”

  They’re talking in code, Lily thought. “You also work at the British Legation?” she asked Russ.

  “Sometimes. I return to Gib tomorrow on the nine o’clock ferry.”

  “That’s settled then,” Drury said. “She’ll meet you on the dock.”

  Lily looked across the table at Drury.

  “It’s a nice outing.” Drury’s head seemed to float over the basin of bones, as if he were presiding over a funeral for fish. “Ferry takes about two and a half hours.”

  Lily added a bone to the pile on the table.

  “By the way,” Drury said to MacAlistair. “Those Germans I told you about. They’re getting impossible, follow us everywhere.”

  A glance and a nod passed between MacAlistair and Zaid, then between Zaid and Drury. That was all. But enough for Lily to understand the silent gestures.

  Drury turned back to Lily and talk about Gibraltar.

  “Gorham’s Cave has everything. Neanderthals, Phoenicians, Carthaginians. Someday maybe you’ll dig there.” He looked off into the distance. “Last refuge of the Neanderthals before they vanished. From Gorham’s Cave, the last Neanderthal, dying and alone, the end of his race, disappeared into the sea.”

  “Not quite the last Neanderthal,” Adam said, with a look toward Lily and a smile at Drury.

  “Russ will show you all that tomorrow,” Drury told her.

  “Delighted.” Russ pushed back from the table and stood. “Looking forward to it.” He bowed a farewell to Drury and Adam and turned to MacAlistair. “Lovely dinner. Have to get back to the British Legation.” He smiled down at Lily and held out his hand. “Tomorrow morning then?”

  Drury rose. “Just a minute.” He signaled to Zaid. “We’ll go with you. We have some business in town.” Before he left the table, he said to Adam and Lily, “You young people should go up on the roof. Beautiful moon tonight,” then called to Zaid, “You coming?” as he sailed out the door.

  Lily and Adam climbed the flight of stairs that led from the corner of the garden to the roof. Adam paused at the landing and reached into his pocket.

  “They lock the door to the roof?” Lily asked.

  Adam jiggled the key in the lock and turned the knob. “The moon and stars on this roof are private property. I’ll show you.”

  Two chairs and a table sat in a shed built against the far corner of the roof, with a typewriter and radio on the table. Adam crossed to it, attached an antenna to the radio, and lifted the lid of a box next to the typewriter. Inside were two large volumes of Bureau of American Ethnology publications bound in brown cloth and a pad of graph paper.

  Lily read the title. “Ethnology of the Kwakiutl by Franz Boas? The ethnography with a hundred and forty-seven recipes for blueberry pie? What’s it doing here?”

  “We bake pies.”

  “I see. And the typewriter?”

  “The pie pan.” He flipped through the pages of the top volume. “It’s plugged into the transmitter and receiver over here. It’s a Teletype. Messages are typed directly onto the keyboard and typed out at the other end. In code, of course. That’s where the Kwakiutl come in.” He opened the book. “Like this. Today is the first of November. So we open the ethnography to page 1,101—11 for November, 1 for the day of the month. The first word on the page is matrilineal. ”He sat at the table and reached for the graph paper. “So we make a chart in which m, the first letter, equals a; a, the second, equals b; and so on.” He began to fill out squares on the pad, writing the alphabet along the top line, then m, a, and t under the first three letters.

  Lily looked over his shoulder. “I see. R becomes d. What happens when you get to the second occurrence of the r, or the a, for that matter?”

  “Ignore it and keep on going.”

  “And if all twenty-six letters aren’t on that page?”

  “Just use the regular letters of the alphabet for the tail end. Here, try it.”

  Lily sat down at the table and moved the book toward her. She picked up the pencil and, reading down the page, filled in the rest of the alphabet.

  “Seems pretty simplistic to me. Like the code ring you get in a box of cereal. Isn’t there a better way?”

  “In the Pacific, they send messages in Navaho. We can’t do that in the European Theater. German linguists run the codes. Some of them are experts in American Indian languages. The Brits use a method similar to this, but they use Rebecca. The trick is to change the code every day.”

  “Rebecca! The novel?”

  Adam nodded. “The Germans use a complicated machine for their code, Enigma. It’s more direct, already encrypted into the Teletype. They change the code every day, but there are a limited number of permutations.”

  “What happens if someone finds the code book?”

  “Then we might be in trouble—if they can figure out Drury’s convoluted thinking.”

  “Now that we have today’s code, how do we send a message?”

  “Just turn on the radio, this switch to receive, this one to transmit. Mostly, when you operate this, you’ll be relaying messages between Gibraltar and Casablanca. We use FM bands. They have a shorter range. That’s why we have to relay. But FM is more secure. The Krauts use regular AM bands, not FM, m there’s less chance of their intercepting us.”

  “Why?”

  “No more questions. You’ll understand it better tomorrow, after you go to Gib.”

  He picked up the paper she had written on, tore it into small pieces, and dropped them in a large brass ashtray.

  He pulled a Zippo lighter from his pocket and set the scraps of paper afire. “Afterward, you burn the notes.” He waited while the paper flared up. “Crumble them when they’re finished burning. Sometimes there’s a palimpsest from writing on charred paper.”

  When the flames died out, he stirred the brittle black snippets with the tip of a pencil. “And make sure it’s out, that there are no sparks, especially if there’s a wind. We don’t want to set the house on fire by mistake.”

  He pocketed the lighter and pulled out a set of car keys. “I’ll drive you home. Zaid is busy tonight.”

  Lily slept in spurts, wondering
about Gibraltar, letters and codes weaving through her waking thoughts.

  In the morning, Lily noticed that the Germans were not waiting for her when she left the hotel.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Gateway to the Mediterranean,” Russ said. “Whoever controls the Rock controls the underbelly of Europe.” The limestone cliffs of Gibraltar loomed in front of them. “This is where the Berbers under Tariq ibn Ziyad swept into Andalusia when the Moors conquered Spain.”

  “And Moulay Yousef’s brave soldiers brought peace and Allah to the Iberian continent,” Lily said, imitating the Mekraj’s voice, reciting his extraordinary version of history.

  Russ looked puzzled. “Indeed. The Moroccans named the mountain after ibn Ziyad, called it Jebal al Tariq. Hence, Gibraltar.”

  The ferry cruised nearer and nearer to the rocky silhouette outlined against the sky.

  “The Rock is one of the Pillars of Hercules. The other is Jebal Musa on the Moroccan side of the Strait, near Cuesta.”

  “There’s a Jebel Musa in Moab,” Lily said. “Near Petra.”

  “No relation. Hercules himself set up this pair of mountains as the gateway to the Great Ocean.”

  “And beyond here was the end of the world,” Lily said.

  For a moment she could believe it, could see the curve of the earth along the horizon, falling off to oblivion.

  “In the Miocene, there was a land bridge here between Europe and Africa.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Before the Ice Ages. The Mediterranean was two vast, landlocked lakes, the sea level lower, with high rates of evaporation. Africa and Europe were connected here. Also further east, from Tunisia to Sicily.”

  Russ continued to stare at her.

  “It was a different world then.” She tried to imagine it. A world without people, just the primitive ancestors of the animals we know today. “Eventually the limestone rock eroded, the Atlantic spilled in and swirled around the Pillars.”

  “And you were there?” Russ asked. He faced her, looked at her intently. “You’re frightened, aren’t you?”

  “A little. Should I be?”

  “Sometimes. Not today.”

  The ferry swerved with a light breeze and the sea surged around the base of the Rock.

  “It looks like a lion, crouched for the kill,” Lily said.

  “It is. The cliffs are pockmarked with gun emplacements.” Russ squinted into the sun. “Can you make out the cannons?”

  Closer in, the ferry negotiated around warships assembled for maneuvers inside the moles that formed the harbor. “The light-colored ones are from the Mediterranean fleet,” Russ told her. “Dark ones are local.”

  They moved slowly into the dock, to a bustling English presence. British Tommies in khaki and jack tars, lorries, noisy machine shops, all crowded the pier.

  “We have everything we need right here on our little island. Restaurants, cinema, pubs, good shops—and palm trees. We even have a racecourse. No need to travel out of the colony. English village life and a Mediterranean climate. The best of both worlds.”

  With a grandiose gesture he swept his arms toward palm trees, tile-roofed houses with their geranium window boxes rising along the hill. “It’s the stepping stone to the Orient, with afternoon teas and red phone booths, Union Jacks and Barbary apes.”

  A file of blue-helmeted Bobbies marched along the palmetto-lined esplanade toward the town.

  “They’re on the lookout for spies?” she asked.

  “Just keeping the peace.”

  A tawny furred creature leaped from the roof of a car to the brick pavement.

  “A Barbary ape.” Lily pointed. “There, behind the taxi.” She turned to Russ. “They’re not apes, you know. Tailless monkeys, the only ones in Europe. Besides humans, of course.”

  “You’ll see more on Ape’s Rock in the center of the peninsula,” Russ said. “We say that Gibraltar will remain British as long as Barbary apes live on the Rock.”

  A member of the crew bounded onto the dock to secure the ferry. Lily and Russ moved along the gangplank while bundles of netted cargo swung above their heads. Involuntarily, Lily ducked.

  Murky water, dotted with orange peels, slapped against the keel and the gangplank swayed.

  Russ watched her from the dock. “Don’t have on your sea legs today?” He held out a hand. “Jump.”

  Lily balled her fists, her arms stiff against her sides, and hurtled onto the dock.

  They took a taxi into town along narrow streets through a jumble of houses scattered against the lower slopes, passing carts on squeaky wheels that competed for space in the cramped lanes.

  The sleepy little town contrasted with the lazy bustle of Tangier. Neat gardens surrounded cottages; doors trimmed with polished brass caught the glare of late morning; shutters garnished the sun-drenched brightness of walls. Ahead of them, a man carried a basket of bread on his shoulder, trudging uphill.

  And over it all, the Rock.

  The taxi stopped at Casemate Square at the entrance to Main Street. Russ gestured toward a company of Scottish guards in green and yellow tartans lined up in formation before Government House.

  “Gordon Highlanders,” he said. “We’re safe here on the Rock. Don’t let the kilts fool you. They’re brave and bloodthirsty. We call them the Ladies from Hell.”

  They hiked up through the narrow streets of the town, climbing higher and higher, following a path along the hill.

  “This the way to Gorham’s Cave?” Lily asked.

  “That was just window dressing. We’re going to the Northern Tunnels.”

  “To meet Drury?”

  “No. He’s at HQ this morning, in Dockyard tunnel.”

  “Where?”

  “HQ. Eisenhower is managing the whole operation from headquarters set up in the tunnels at the far western end of Gib. Drury has to be back in Tangier this afternoon. Came in on the early ferry. We have other work to do.”

  “Such as?”

  “You’ll see when you get there.” Russ continued up the hill. “You coming?”

  Lily puffed up the incline after him, still curious and a little resentful about the lack of explanation. She paused when she spotted a monkey sitting on a high rock, nursing a baby folded in the crook of her arm. The infant waved its legs in the air and clutched at its mother’s fur.

  Russ maneuvered along a path marked with cart tracks and along the hill to an arched cleft cut into the rock. She turned away from the Barbary apes and trudged after him.

  A Highlander at the opening in the rock watched their approach. He moved aside, shifting the bayonet smartly to his left shoulder, and saluted.

  “You’ll come with us, Peters,” Russ said.

  “I’ve been waiting, sir.”

  They entered a passageway eight feet high and just as wide hewn into the rock. The Highlander followed. The deafening bray of a donkey reverberated through the gallery.

  Russ pulled a flashlight from his pocket. “We dug out the Northern Tunnels during the Great Siege. It was the only way we could transport the guns to set up a battery on the steep northern face of the Rock.”

  “The Great Siege?”

  “In the eighteenth century. While you Yanks were fighting us in your Revolution, the Spanish and French took advantage of our distraction and surrounded the Rock. Eventually, we prevailed.” Lily followed the eerie echo of his voice. “In spite of scurvy, starvation, constant bombardment.”

  The beam from Russ’ lantern bounced off the walls. A fusty animal odor permeated the clammy air.

  “There’s a lesson there,” he said. “Hitler should take it to heart.”

  They picked their way over the slippery limestone floor, past side rooms and stone staircases into a connecting passageway.

  A hobbled donkey wearing a burlap sack tied under the tail to catch its droppings was hitched to a cart that blocked the narrow passage. Behind it, light moved back and forth through an aperture cut into the rock. A sign over the openin
g read “Hanover Gallery 1789”.

  A resounding voice rumbled out, “In here.”

  They squeezed around the donkey cart into a small chamber hacked out of the rock. Wooden boxes were stacked against the walls of the gallery, some the size of fruit crates, some as large as coffins. One had been pried open.

  Adam was wearing a headlamp and jamming Enfield rifles and straw into a gunnysack stamped with a Union Jack and the legend OFFICIAL BUSINESS.

  He bent over it, his head tilted at an awkward angle, his khaki shirt smudged, his face streaked with dust and sweat.