Removing the money-belt from under her pajamas she opened its pockets and drew out the remaining four photos. Extracting a book of matches from her travel kit she walked into the bathroom and placed the snapshots on the sink. She had studied and memorized them at home and on the plane but just to be sure she closed her eyes and whispered again the names and addresses: of Omar Mahbuba who could be found selling fossils and various tourist items in a tiny shop below a certain tourist hotel in Tinehir . . . Muhammed Tuhami the barber in the old section of Ourzazate . . . Sidi Tahar Bouseghine, a seller of fine carpets in Zagora, and Khaddour Nasiri the bathhouse keeper in the last town, Rouida, at the edge of the desert. Opening her eyes she held each one to a lighted match, set fire to them and watched them slowly curl under the heat. When they had been reduced to ash she ran the faucet hard into the basin and saw their remains swept away.
The job completed she heard a rooster crow outside the bathroom window, signaling the official dawn. Quickly she dressed in slacks, sandals and sweater and repacked her bags. Assuming that Janko would have no difficulties in picking her lock again to retrieve his moustache she locked it behind her, surprised to face a cold and drizzly morning. It was already six o'clock when she walked the long dim corridors to the lobby and found a man on duty at the desk.
"I want to place a call to Er-Rachidia, to the Gharbee Cafe," she told him.
He looked at her curiously. "Yes, of course—an 057 area, so it will take a few minutes."
"I'll wait," she said.
He carried the phone to the smaller counter on the side and began talking into it, rather sharply she thought, his fingers tapping the counter impatiently. She saw him reach for a memo pad and write down a number, and just as he picked up the phone again she glanced toward the dining room as its doors were opened by the headwaiter. Beyond him Youssef was carrying a tray of cups to the long table near the door. As he set down the tray she reached a decision, and gave in to the impulse that swept her. To the man at the desk she said, "I'll be right back," and walked across the lobby, entered the dining room and strolled over to Youssef.
In a normal voice, "What time do you begin serving breakfast?"
He smiled, bowed, said, "We serve now, madame."
In a low voice she said quickly, "I must tell you that if you know the name of Hamid ou Azu in Fez—"
His eyes widened and he sucked in his breath audibly.
"—he has been murdered. Killed. In his souk."
Youssef turned white. "Who are you?" he gasped.
So he knew the name of Hamid ou Azu . . . She said grimly, "The hand of fate."
"Shukren—I go," he whispered.
"Go fast," she told him, and aware that she was being summoned back to the desk she hurried across the lobby to the phone that was held out to her. Grasping it she said, "Cafe Gharbee? Do you speak English?"
"Yes, yes, a little. What is this?"
"I wish to speak to Ibrahim, the cafe waiter—he served me espresso yesterday and—"
She was interrupted. "Ibrahim? Not here."
"Later?"
"Not later."
"When, please?" she demanded.
"I am sorry, madame," said the voice. "We do not know why—it is most sad—but the police took him away yesterday. A good man, too."
Police, she thought, shocked. Hamid ou Azu dead and Ibrahim arrested . . . She said, "But please, why—"
A hand suddenly reached out from behind her and cut the connection. Janko said smoothly, "Good morning, aunt—you are attempting a long-distance call?"
She spun around in anger to find his eyes blazing at her with fury. "That was rude of you," she said, and saw that he was fully moustached now.
To the man at the desk Janko said, "You will kindly tell me who my—my aunt was phoning?"
Mrs. Pollifax said sharply, "Don't, this is a private matter."
The desk man looked from one to the other, perplexed.
"Tell me," repeated Janko with authority.
The man said, "It was a call to Er-Rachidia, to a cafe named Gharbee."
"Yes," said Mrs. Pollifax indignantly. "I left my scarf there, my very best one, it must be there, it's missing."
Ignoring this Janko said curtly, "Prepare our bill, please, and send a man to my aunt's room 306 for her bags. We will not stay for breakfast."
Mrs. Pollifax said hotly, "I insist on breakfast!"
The manager had turned away to summon a porter. In a low voice Janko said, "You will insist on nothing, I am holding a gun at your back, not visibly because it is in my pocket but my hand is also in my pocket ready to pull the trigger if you don't walk at once to the car."
Mrs. Pollifax thoughtfully considered this command. It had always distressed her that so frequently the threat of a gun cowed people into early submission, and that in some cases it was kinder to risk being shot in public than to be carried off to an uglier death in private. She was very tempted to call Janko's bluff and defy him, finding it difficult to imagine him using the gun—if it was a gun—in a public place with witnesses. The attention of the police would be disastrous. Unfortunately, however, she knew that she was denied the luxury of choice. She had accepted this assignment and it was a commitment, and she mustn't think of home and Cyrus now but of four lives it was her job to save—Insh'Allah, she thought wryly—for she must learn why Hamid had been murdered, and why Ibrahim had been taken away, either by genuine police or by men masquerading as police. Above all she had to learn why Janko wore a false moustache, and hope that she had the wit and the resources to survive; it was one reason that she'd been chosen for this job.
And so—reluctantly—she moved away from the desk and began walking toward the entrance, wondering if she could somehow extract the Moroccan dagger from her bags, wondering just how she might preserve this life of hers that she was no longer sure of saving. As comfort she remembered that at least she'd been able to warn Youssef. What's more he had known exactly what she was talking about, which was more than she knew herself, and she marveled at the impulse that led her to speak to him before she'd even learned that Ibrahim had met with trouble .., as if, she thought, something deep inside of her had been picking up small clues all along the way, to be admitted to consciousness only when Janko had lost his moustache in her room.
Janko had warned her that he worked alone but there was more to it than that: something had gone horribly wrong without anyone knowing it, and there was no one to appeal to now, and no one to save her except herself.
6
When she hesitated a moment before climbing into the car Janko prodded her in the back with what he had described as a gun, and feeling the solidity and the weight of what pressed against her spine she saw little reason to doubt him. She slid into the front seat and when he joined her in the car it was impossible to overlook the fact that for the first time since they'd met he was not inquiring the name and address of the next informant. To quell the stricken feeling in the pit of her stomach she continued her masquerade of innocence, saying indignantly, "I resent very much your interrupting that phone call, it was my favorite scarf that was left behind at the cafe. I'm also hungry and I want breakfast and I also resent all this macho talk of a gun."
Pretend, she thought fiercely, pretend that he doesn't guess your suspicions, forget knowing that he's finally—at last—going to demand the photos at gunpoint and when he learns they've been destroyed. . . . Aloud she said coldly, "And now we drive to Tinehir, stopping en route for breakfast, I trust. May I see the map?"
"In the glove compartment."
This is pretending I will live to see Tinehir, she thought . . . / will have to aim at his temple, the most vicious karate blow of all, used only when it's a matter of lije or death and it's certainly going to come down to that . . . Once near him there are middle knuckle punches, slashes, snap kicks . . . I'm good at blocking . . , there's the wrist grab and the front choke and the back strangle . . . which? . . . and then the blow: to the temple.
But fir
st she must find out who he was working for, and what was behind his betrayal. She must accuse, talk and learn, and hope to survive to expose him.
She busied herself unfurling the map and locating the Erfoud they were just leaving, and was startled to see how close they were to the Algerian border, separated from it by roughly a hundred miles of desert. Today the)- were heading north, she noted, returning to route 32, the highway down which they had driven yesterday and which wandered like a red necklace down the map through Tinehir, past a small town called El Kelaa—back in the mountains again—and then to Ourzazate, which was printed in very large letters. After Ourzazate a sharp turn to the south would take them again toward the desert and the Algerian border on their way to Zagora and then down to their last informant in Rouida. They were operating now inside the shape of a crescent, or a spacious alphabetic C.
Cas in captive, she thought; C as in catastrophe, as in cancel or calamitous, and she folded up the map and put it away, determined to concentrate on the countryside. It had been too dark on their arrival last night to see the desert and they were surrounded now by signs of it; she was actually seeing palm trees, and gardens not yet planted but framed in squares of heaped-up earth to contain the scanty rainfall, and along the road were low barriers fashioned out of straw to hold back the sand that blew in from the desert to threaten the road. This was flat and tawny country, with only the occasional scattering of houses the same color as the pale sand, and always in the distance the mountains that hemmed in the land. It made a charming low-key melody of color and she tried to fix it in her mind as an antidote to her growing tension. A truck passed them, hauling wood, but cars were scarce again. They sped through a tiny village where three women in shapeless black garments and veils huddled in a doorway, looking very much like overgrown black crows, and barefooted children stood idly in the sand to watch them pass. As the sun moved higher the distant mountains turned rose-pink and the sand began to darken from pale beige to a harsh and pebbly yellow-brown.
Suddenly Janko slowed the car, braked and brought it to a stop. Turning her head to see what had caught his attention Mrs. Pollifax felt her heart constrict: the countryside that had struck her as empty was not entirely so, after all: two small dun-colored buildings occupied a rise in the ground, with a vaguely defined path leading up to them. The smaller of the two was a crumbling and roofless hut, its neighbor a solidly built and windowless structure crowned with a dome, a single palm tree shading it.
Janko backed the car and drove into the path leading up to the pair of them. She said lightly, "Are we sight-seeing?"
"It's a saint's tomb," he told her, and his voice was almost cheerful.
She sat very still, thinking, A tomb, how very appropriate.
"It's called a koubba," he added, "and you really ought to see one while you're here." There was excitement now in his voice and his ejes were shining with a kind of madness of anticipation that belied the calmness of his words so that she wondered if there would be time to learn about him at all.
He drove the car into the shade of the solitary palm and stopped the engine. Looking over the koubba she saw that it was sealed and inpenetrable, and she understood that it was the hut to which she'd be taken, with its empty shadowed doorway and crumbling square of window.
"Out," said Janko and now he produced the gun, a snub-nosed shiny M52 pistol.
"So it is a gun," she murmured, and looking him squarely in the eye, "Perhaps you plan to kill me here?"
He seemed taken aback by such directness. "Don't be absurd, I just want those photos," he told her. "Damn it, get out."
Her throat was dry and her heart beating fast but she was familiar with these symptoms, they were old friends by now and she knew their value; there were high costs to the heart in facing death many times but its imminence brought with it, as an act of kindness, the compensation of heightened awareness. She knew that she might die in the next hour but that she had been fortunate in living such a full life; she had also understood a long time ago that Carstairs' people did not always die in their beds. She opened the door and stepped out. Hearing the sound of a car on the road below she turned to look, but even if their presence was noticed she realized its driver would suppose they were only a pair of tourists examining a saint's tomb. Watching the small green car speed out of sight down the empty road she lifted her gaze for a last glance at the distant mountains, pale mauve in the sunlight, and then with Janko's gun at her back, and praying that he wouldn't shoot her from behind, she stepped over the rubble in the doorway and entered the hut.
The roof had long since collapsed but the rafters remained in place so that sunlight fell in stripes across the litter on the earthen floor. She found the hut larger than it had appeared from the road, with a matching window at the opposite end, and she brightened at this discovery: there was room for some maneuvering here after all .., if she kept her wits about her .., if he didn't shoot her first, before demanding the photos she no longer carried on her person. She picked her way across the room, stumbling a little over bricks, and looked for a space where the floor was clear of rubble. She found it not far from the rear window; only then did she turn to face Janko.
His glance was embracing the room, measuring its size and possibilities, too; his gaze returned to her and he said flatly, "You will give me the photos now."
He stood at least ten feet away from her—too far—and she knew she had to think of a way to close the distance between them so that every blow, block and counter blow could be let loose in one great jiyu kumite, for she yearned to see him surprised, overcome, his arrogance humbled, plans smashed, his body dealt a blow to the floor. She was surprised by the vehemence of this longing but the problem lay in how to approach him until she remembered that she still wore Cyrus' money-belt around her waist, empty as it was now.
"Yes, of course the photos," she said, and began to loosen the waist of her khaki slacks. She reached under her shirt and detached the money-belt, her gaze fixed on Janko in case he might choose to kill her now that she was revealing their hiding place. Extracting the belt she walked toward Janko, holding it out to him.
He suspected nothing. As she came to a stop in front of him he reached out a hand for the belt and just before he grasped it she dropped it to the ground with a gasp of "oh—sorry!"
Automatically he bent to pick it up, and with her right hand she aimed a side hammerblow at his temple.
But she had miscalculated. He had moved so swiftly that as he retrieved the belt and straightened up the blow missed his temple and struck the side of his head, sending him sprawling flat across the rubble but still fully conscious and only a little dazed, the gun firmly in his hand and pointed at her. "You bitch!" he shouted, and lifted his gun.
She said quickly, "The photographs aren't in the money-belt."
"Not in the—Move! Get back," he shouted, stumbling to his feet, waving the gun at her with one hand and with the other fumbling at the pockets of the money-belt. "Back!" ha shouted again and to emphasize his command he pulled the trigger and she felt the swhish of a bullet over her head.
She took a few steps to one side but she had no intention of moving back toward the window behind her. She was planning her next move, preparing herself for a high stamping kick with the heel of her foot, a strike aimed at the groin that could yet save her life, except that he would be wary now that he knew she was not defenseless, and she must be quick. His eyes remained fixed upon her as he began clumsily zipping open the pockets in the money-belt, one after another, and as he found each of them empty he waved his gun more wildly.
"Where?" he shouted, eyes livid. "Where are the photos?"
"I'll show you," she told him, taking a step toward him and concentrating mind, body and cunning on a leap to destroy him. But Janko's gaze had moved past her to the window behind her and she saw a look of utter bewilderment sweep across his face.
"No!" he gasped, and then he screamed, "No! It's not possible, you're dead!"
"Yisad
da—believe," said a voice behind Mrs. Pollifax, and she spun around in astonishment.
7
A man stood framed in the window and what was even more astonishing than his presence was the fact that she recognized him because not so long ago they had met in a small shop in Er-Rachidia and he had helped her buy a Koran box: it was The Man With The Blue Eyes. Now he stood outside with a gun in his hand, and lifting it he fired twice; Janko fell to the ground,
gasped once, and was still. Climbing over the sill he walked past Mrs. Pollifax and knelt beside Janko to examine him.
"He's dead," he said.
"D-d-dead," she repeated, and abruptly sank down on the rubble-strewn floor.
"Totally, yes." He nodded grimly. "I don't usually go around shooting people but this s.o.b, did his best to kill me a few days ago and I've no interest in seeing him try again." With a narrowed glance at her he added, "You all right? Not in shock or anything?"
She said fervently, "On the contrary I'm terribly grateful to you—you seem to have just saved my life, but how—who—"
"Your karate's damn good," he told her. "I'd have shot him earlier but you kept getting in the way. Black belt or brown?"
"You've been outside all the time?" she gasped, and pulling her thoughts together she remembered what she'd seen just before entering the hut. In a surprised voice she said, "Do you happen to drive a small green car?"
"Very observant of you." He rose to his feet and she watched him carefully wrap his turban more closely around his tanned face with its thin black moustache and blue eyes. "But— who on earth are you?" she stammered. "He said you were dead and he believed it."
"Never mind that, let's get out of here," he told her. "Whether you realize it or not the police have been keeping track of you all day."
"Police?" she faltered. "But why the police? I thought—"
"He's police," he said, pointing to the dead man.
"Janko?"
He smiled. "Sorry but I'm Janko." He held out his hand and pulled her to her feet, saying abruptly, "I left my car several hundred yards down the road between two huge boulders." Leading her to the door he pointed. "See them? Climb into it while I hide his blue Renault behind the koubba. It'll be found soon enough, but—what color's your luggage?"
Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish Page 6