Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  “Ask for Houari in the next bar on your right, Monsieur.” In French.

  When Lime turned to look the Arab had been absorbed by the throng.

  It was a rancid little room, dim and crowded, filled with the smell of the stale sweat of habitual garlic eaters. The bar was tended by a big man in a fez; his neck bulged with folds of fat. Lime pushed to the bar using his elbows and the bartender spoke in Arabic: “Lime effendi?”

  “Yes. I was told to ask for Houari.”

  “Through the back door please.”

  “Thank you.” He made his way through the heavy mob and squeezed into a passage no wider than his shoulders; it was open to the sky and gave him the feeling he was at the bottom of a fissure created by some ancient earthquake.

  At the end of the passage a car was drawn up in the Rue Khelifa Boukhalfa. A black Citroen, the old four-door model with the square hood. The Arab at the wheel watched Lime come forward and reached across the back of the seat to push the rear door open.

  Lime got in and pulled the door shut. The Arab put the car in motion without speaking and Lime settled back to enjoy the ride.

  The St. George was the state-owned deluxe hotel high on a hillside with a magnificent overview of the city. The Citroen drew up at a service door and the Arab pointed toward it; Lime got out of the car and went inside.

  The corridor was heavy with kitchen smells. He walked toward a small man in a business suit who watched him approach without changing expression and spoke when Lime stopped in front of him: “Mr. Lime?”

  “Yes.” He saw the bulge under the man’s coat; Djelil certainly surrounded himself with protection.

  “The stairs to your right please? Go to the second floor, you’ll find Room Two Fourteen.”

  “Thank you.”

  Djelil’s door was opened by a heavy woman with a well-developed moustache who stepped aside and admitted him.

  Djelil stood in front of an armchair from which he had just risen. He salaamed Lime and smiled a little. “I thought they had retired you, yes?”

  “They should have,” Lime said. Djelil made a discreet gesture and the woman withdrew from the room, shutting the hall door after her.

  Obviously it was not Djelil’s residence. There were no personal possessions. The decor was plastic-Hilton and the window looked out against a hillside.

  “Ça va, David?”

  “Poorly,” he said, doing a quick wash with his eyes. If the room was bugged it didn’t show; if they had company it would have to be under the bed or in the Wardrobe.

  “There’s no one,” Djelil said. “You asked we meet alone, yes?”

  Djelil was swarthy and narrow; he looked less like an Arab than a Corsican hoodlum but his face had authority—the strength of a consciousness that had seen many things and not been changed by them. It was his weakness as well as his strength; he had been fundamentally untouched by his lifetime of experiences.

  Djelil smiled lazily and lifted a canvas satchel onto the chair. From it he produced bottles. “Cinzano or rum?”

  “Cinzano I think.” He needed a clear head.

  “There should be glasses in the lavatory.”

  Lime found a pair of heavy chipped tumblers and realized as he collected them that Djelil had sent him after them to reassure him there was no one in the bathroom.

  He carried the glasses inside and glanced at the greenish turban that lay on the bed. “I see you’ve earned the mark of a Haj to Mecca.”

  “Yes, I went six years ago.”

  Remarkable, Lime thought.

  Djelil handed him the drink and he waved his thanks with the glass.

  “At any rate it’s better than the pinard we used to drink, yes?”

  Lime sat on the edge of the bed; hotel rooms were not made for conversations. “And how’s Sylvie?”

  Djelil beamed. “Oh she is very grown up, yes? She is to be married in a month’s time. To a government minister’s son.”

  She had been four years old when Lime had last seen her. It was not a thought worth dwelling on. “I’m very glad to hear that.”

  “It pleases me you remember, David. It’s kind.”

  “She was a lovely child.”

  “Yes. She is a lovely woman too. Do you know she is acting in the cinema? She has a small part in a film. The French are shooting it here now. Something about the war, the Rommel days.” Djelil smiled broadly: “I was able to supply the producers with a great many things. Practically an entire Panzer battalion.”

  “That must be rather profitable.”

  “Well ordinarily, yes? But persuading them to use one’s daughter as an actress was more important this time. I’ve allowed them to hire the tanks for a beggar’s price. She can’t act of course. But she has the beauty for the camera.”

  Djelil’s glistening black hair was combed carefully back over the small ears; he looked prosperous and content. Lime said, “Julius Sturka has our new President out there somewhere. Probably in the djebel.” Like Lazarus, he thought, just lying in an open grave waiting for a savior to come.

  Djelil’s smile coagulated. Lime proceeded with caution. “My government can be generous in times like these.”

  “Well that is most interesting, yes? But I am not sure I can help.” Djelil’s face had closed up, with guilt or with innocent curiosity; from his expression it was impossible to guess but from experience Lime knew.

  “For information that led to the safe recovery of Clifford Fairlie we could pay out as much as half a million dollars.” He spoke in Arabic because he wanted Djelil to reply in Arabic: when a man spoke a language other than his own you couldn’t be certain of the subtleties of his meaning—his inflections might be caused by his accent rather than his intent.

  “I’m quite sure you can help,” he added gently.

  “What made you come to me, David?”

  “What made you freeze when I mentioned Sturka?”

  Impenetrably discreet, Djelil only smiled. In Arabic Lime said, “Your ears have access to many tongues, effendi. We both appreciate that.”

  “It is difficult. I haven’t seen Sturka since the days of the ALN, you know.”

  “But you may have heard a few things?”

  “I am not sure.”

  “Sturka needed a hideout. He needed transportation and supplies. He needed access to the ministries in charge of government patrols out in the djebel—to make sure the FLN keeps clear of his hideout.”

  “Well I suppose that must be true, if as you say they are hiding in the djebel. But what makes you think so?”

  “We’ve identified Benyoussef Ben Krim.”

  “Surely you have more than that?”

  Lime only nodded gently; he had given away all he was going to give, it was no good adding that through Mezetti they had traced Sturka’s movements as far as the south coast of Spain and had concluded that Sturka must have made the crossing to North Africa.

  Djelil stood up and paced to the door, turned, paced to the window, turned. Lime lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray. There was no hurrying Djelil; he had to think about the money a while. Then he would start to bargain. Djelil was a past master at horsetrading; he had learned his art as a slave auctioneer.

  At the door Djelil turned, stopped, scowled at the wall, tapped his foot a few times and grunted. He walked slowly to the window and stood in front of it looking out. Lime studied his back.

  Abruptly Djelil turned to face him. Djelil’s features were obscured; the twilit sky silhouetted him. “Do you recall the village of El Djamila?”

  “A few kilometers up the coast—that one?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re not holding him there?”

  “No, no. Of course not. I have no idea where they might be. But there is a man in El Djamila, a pied-noir who was a spy in the French camp for Ben Bella. For various reasons I think he may be able to help you in your search.…”

  Lime had not heard the movement behind him because Djelil’s voice had his atte
ntion but when he turned his head slightly he caught a tail-of-the-eye impression imperfectly—the door swinging soundlessly open—and his scalp contracted. With the speed of long-forgotten habit he rolled off the bed and dropped to the floor, hearing the crack of the silencer-pistol and the thud of its bullet into the wall above his head; he dragged the .38 out of the armpit clamshell as he rolled.

  His shoulder blade struck the wall. He saw the squat zigzagging shape across the room and fired the .38 three times very rapidly, recognizing the intruder slowly as he fired.

  It was the woman with the moustache. She died with a kind of low-comedy surprise on her face and Lime spun toward Djelil as she was collapsing.

  Djelil had a curved knife. His arm was swinging up toward Lime.

  Lime parried with the revolver. It cracked against Djelil’s wrist. Djelil didn’t lose the knife but his hand had been numbed and Lime dropped the revolver, snapped a grip on Djelil’s arm at wrist and elbow and broke the arm across his knee.

  He shoved Djelil back out of the way; Djelil fell against the wall and Lime scooped up his revolver and crossed the distance to the woman with four long strides. She didn’t look as if there were any trouble left in her but he stopped to pick up the silencer pistol before he went on to the door, feeling like somebody in a Randolph Scott western with guns in both hands.

  There wasn’t anyone in the corridor. The hotel had thick walls and any guests who might have heard the racket wouldn’t do anything about it; a tourist alerted by sharp noises in strange places would be confused and uncertain, not eager to look for trouble.

  If Djelil had more guards in the hotel they must have been beyond earshot. The one downstairs in the corridor wouldn’t have heard anything.

  He locked the door from the inside and glanced at Djelil. The Arab sat on the floor with his back to the wall, cradling his broken arm.

  Lime squatted by the woman and put one of the pistols in his pocket; plucked a bit of fuzz from his tweed jacket and placed it on the woman’s nostrils and held her lips shut.

  The fluff didn’t stir. She was dead.

  Djelil started to mouth a litany of sibilant invective. Lime swatted him hard across the side of the head with his open hand. Djelil tipped over with a cry of bursting pain, the agony of broken bones grating when his ruined arm hit the floor under him.

  Lime knew the telephone went through the hotel switchboard but he had to risk it. He gave the operator Gilliams’ number.

  “It’s David Lime. I’m at the St. George, Room Two Fourteen. Send a clean-up squad, will you? One DOA and one busted wing, we’ll want a medic. But let’s not be ostentatious about it.”

  The use of the American slang might confuse anyone who had an ear to the line. Lime added, “And put out a pick-up order on Houari Djelil’s daughter Sylvie. She’s acting in a movie the French are shooting somewhere around town.”

  “You sound rattled. Are you all right?”

  “Barely. Make it over here yesterday, will you?” He hung up and collapsed in the chair.

  Djelil was struggling to a sitting position, gathering his shattered arm against him. Lime waited for him to get his breath. Anguish distorted Djelil’s face but Lime knew he had been listening to all of it.

  Finally Lime said, “Now tell me again about that pied-noir in El Djamila.”

  Defiance: “I’m getting to be an old man, David. I haven’t that much to lose by remaining silent.”

  “You’ve got as much to lose as anybody. The rest of your life.”

  “Such as it is.” Djelil was a realist.

  Djelil had been telling the truth about the pied-noir in El Djamila because he wouldn’t have had any reason to lie; he had thought he was talking to a dead man. The monologue had had the ring of truth; it had been designed to hold Lime’s attention while the woman took him out from behind.

  Lime tried another tack. “There are thousands of us on this you know. Hundreds of thousands. What difference would killing me have made?”

  “Of them all I suppose you were the one most likely to find them.”

  “How much did Sturka pay you?”

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  “I’ve told them to collect Sylvie.”

  “I heard that.”

  “I just wanted to make sure you had.”

  “Your people won’t harm her. I know you.”

  “Think about the stakes and then convince yourself of that again.”

  Djelil’s face twisted with agony and then relaxed as the spasm passed. Lime reloaded the spent chambers of his revolver, thrust it into the clamshell and then had a look at the silencer pistol. It was a 7.62mm Luger. He removed the magazine and popped the cartridge out of the breech, put the ammunition in his pocket and the pistol on the bed. “Who was she, your mother?”

  Djelil grunted: That’s not funny. Lime looked again at the dead features. The face had gone gray, ruddy at the underside from postmortem lividity. She must have been about fifty. European, or of European stock; possibly one of the pieds-noirs.

  “All right, you’ve had time to think about it. Now give me a name.”

  Djelil lifted his shoulders and poked his head forward with the Arab gesture known as ma’alesh—the nothing-can-be-done shrug. What controlled Djelil now was the kind of hyper-awareness of masculinity the Arabs called rujuliyah: a mystical thing that steeled your courage. It was always a hard defense to break.

  Lime said, “You realize we’re very short for time. We won’t play with you. We’ll let you watch us work on Sylvie and we’re going to be Goddamned hard on her.”

  Djelil sat on the floor with his pains. It was getting through to him; he was thinking about it and that meant Lime had won. In the end Djelil summoned the bravado to smile. “Well then how do you say it, one has to live.”

  “No.” Lime’s reply was soft. “You don’t have to live, Houari.”

  It was damp in El Djamila.

  They made the trip in two cars. Chad Hill drove Lime in a Simca and there followed an old station wagon—the kind made of real wood—containing a six-man team. In the back of the station wagon was a UHF scrambler transmitter. Its range was limited but all communications were being funneled through the U. S. Naval Station at Kénitra in Morocco.

  Last night’s sleep on the jet hadn’t revived Lime. He felt logy and glazed. Gilliams’ anger still buzzed in his ears; Gilliams had been very upset by the killing and the roust of Djelil and Sylvie and the two guards Djelil had downstairs in the hotel. Gilliams was one of those bureaucrats who pictured a fine balance in things and couldn’t stand having it upset.

  They had to move fast because Djelil’s disappearance would be noticed soon. The thing was to find his contacts before they could go to ground.

  “Turn right and go slow on the coast road. I think I’ll recognize the place.”

  El Djamila was a beach resort where visitors enjoyed uncrowded cheap rates and the natives lived briefly and wretchedly. The moon was up, glinting off the Mediterranean whitecaps.

  Djelil had given him a name: Henri Binaud. A pied-noir who had betrayed his own kind to spy for the FLN; now he ran a charter outfit—three boats and an amphibious plane—and was one of Djelil’s chief carriers.

  Lime was a bit weak with delayed shock from the episode of the woman with the Luger. He suspected that Sturka had got a message to Djelil saying if any investigators got as far along the trail as Djelil it would be appreciated if Djelil got rid of them; appreciated in terms of substantial money. Lime wondered if Sturka knew the identity of his tracker. Not that it really mattered.

  Nearly nine o’clock. Three in the afternoon in Washington. They had about sixty-nine hours.

  A bar. Cinzano signs, an old rusty car up on blocks, its tires gone. Sandy vacant lots on either side of the square little stucco building. The charter pier across the road from it: several boats tied up, a twin-engine amphibious plane tied to a buoy and bobbing on the swell.

  The bar was empty except for two men who sat at a tab
le that was hardly big enough for their dinner plates and glasses and elbows. They were eating rouget, the local fish. Both of them looked up but kept eating. Chad Hill hung back and Lime spoke in French: “Monsieur Binaud? We understand the Catalina is for hire?”

  One of them wiped the back of a hand across his mouth and reached for the wine to wash down his mouthful. “I am Binaud. Who sent you to me?”

  “Houari Djelil.”

  Binaud studied him suspiciously. He was bullnecked and florid. Cropped gray hair, a hard little potbelly. “And you wish to hire my aircraft.”

  “Perhaps we could discuss it outside,” Lime suggested smoothly.

  It was the kind of thing Binaud understood. He muttered something to his companion and stood up and made a gesture. Lime and Chad Hill turned, went outside and waited for Binaud; he came out right behind them and Lime showed his gun.

  Binaud grunted; his eyelids slid down to a half-shuttered secretiveness and he flashed his teeth in an accidental smile. “What’s this then?”

  “Come along.”

  They shepherded Binaud around to the side of the building. The others were standing by the station wagon. Three of them pulled revolvers and they put Binaud in frisk position with his hands on top of the car while they went over him with care.

  The search produced a pocket revolver and two knives. After they had disarmed him Lime said, “It’s a little public here. Let’s take him on board one of the boats.”

  They walked him out onto the pier and prodded him down the ladder into the forward compartment of a cabin cruiser. The boat rode gently up and down against the old tires that hung on the pier as fenders. One of the men lit the lantern.

  Lime said to Binaud, “Sit down.”

  Binaud backed up slowly until the backs of his knees struck the edge of a bunk. Sat and watched them all, his eyes flicking from face to face.

  “We’re looking for Sturka,” Lime said.

  “I don’t know that name.” Binaud had a high wheezing husky voice. Gravelly; it made Lime think of “Rochester” Anderson’s voice.

  “They came to you a few days ago—it was probably Wednesday night. They’d have wanted you to take them somewhere, by boat or by plane.”