The Torch of Tangier

by Aileen G. Baron

  She moved away from the desk. “I’m busy.”

  “Have to wash your hair again?” He tried an unctuous smile. “All work and no play.” He moved nearer and rested a hand on her shoulder.

  She backed away. He edged closer. She could feel his breath on her face, panting, smelling of yesterday’s garlic.

  Drury appeared at the door. He cleared his throat, brandished a fist, and Korian threw up his arms in a gesture of surrender before he scurried out.

  “Thanks,” Lily said.

  “He’s a pea-brained idiot.” Drury closed the door and reached into his pocket. “Time for you to earn your keep.” He handed her a ticket. “Tomorrow you go to Gibraltar. You’ll be leaving on the nine o’clock ferry.”

  “Did Adam talk to you about the Dead Man’s Hand?”

  “He told me. Nothing to worry about. Just some joker trying to frighten us.” Drury began sorting the pages on Lily’s desk. “There’s a leak. I think I know who it is.”

  “You’re not going to do anything about it?”

  “Of course I am. I’m going to use it to our advantage.”

  Lily turned over the ticket in her hand, wondering what she was supposed to do in Gibraltar. “About Gibraltar…” She looked up to ask Drury. But he had already left and closed the door behind him.

  He wouldn’t have answered anyway.

  ***

  By four o’clock, Drury had gathered the remaining scattered pages of the report together, arranged them in sections with a paper clip, and typed out a table of contents.

  “We’re done,” Drury said. “That’s it.”

  He carried the draft into Boyle’s office. Lily followed.

  Drury flung the manuscript on Boyle’s desk with a flourish. “Our pamphlet. A masterly work, if I say so myself. With this pamphlet in hand, victory is guaranteed.”

  Boyle put on his glasses, held the battered manuscript at arm’s-length, and looked skeptical.

  “Your office can do the final typing,” Drury told him.

  Boyle placed his glasses carefully on his desk and turned to Lily. “Thank you, Miss Sampson.”

  “About Korian—” Drury said.

  “Glad you brought it up. What about Korian? I don’t take kindly to fisticuffs against people on my staff.”

  “It’s the bulletin he’s supposed to be putting out.” Drury slammed his hand on Boyle’s desk and Boyle sat upright, eyes blinking. “He only gets about twenty copies printed up, doesn’t distribute them to anyone.”

  “Where’d you get that idea?” Boyle waved away Drury’s hand and scooted his chair toward the filing cabinet. “I have the invoices. He gets five hundred copies of each issue. We also pay for delivery to all the shopkeepers in Tangier.”

  “It’s a scam.”

  “You have evidence?”

  “Not yet.” Drury drew a finger across his upper lip and clicked his tongue. “But I’ll get it.”

  “So you decked him. Just like that. Without proof, just on a gut feeling?”

  Drury nodded. “I had my reasons.”

  “This is a venue of the State Department. We have other ways of handling things here. For now, I’ll thank you to get out of my office.”

  Back at his desk, Boyle picked up a pen and began writing furiously on the pad in front of him. Lily noticed he was doodling.

  “Keep a close eye on Korian while we’re gone,” Drury said to him. “We’re taking the next few days off.”

  He left Boyle’s office, pulling Lily along behind.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “You don’t trust Faridah. You don’t trust me, your friend,” Zaid was saying to MacAlistair. “But you trust a Jewish prostitute.”

  Suzannah was setting the table in the dining room. Adam sat in the garden with a man Lily didn’t know.

  “I trust you, Zaid. I trust you with my life,” MacAlistair said.

  “Well then—”

  “It’s for your own safety, Zaid. Too dangerous for you to know.”

  Suzannah finished at the table and left in the direction of the kitchen.

  “And Suzannah? You trust her?”

  “I would trust almost anyone in the mellah.” MacAlistair strode toward the courtyard.

  “Don’t be too sure,” Zaid said.

  “Maybe he’s right,” Lily said.

  Zaid gave her a grateful look. “Besides, Suzannah probably can’t cook.”

  MacAlistair turned back and took Zaid’s arm. “Of course she can. Bouillabaisse tonight. Tariq brought fresh fish when he came into town today. Couscous tomorrow.” He gestured in the direction of Adam and the stranger on the patio. “Shall we wait in the garden?”

  The stranger stood up with an expectant smile.

  “My nephew,” MacAlistair said. “Barrett Russell.”

  He had a trim British moustache and dark hazel eyes.

  “This is Lily,” MacAlistair said. “I told you about her.”

  The Englishman reached for Lily’s hand and clasped it in both of his. “My friends call me Russ.”

  “Russ works in the governor’s office in Gibraltar,” MacAlistair said. “Comes over from time to time on government business.”

  “Been there since ’39,” Drury said. “Knows Gib inside and out.”

  Suzannah came back to the dining room, rosy-cheeked with the heat of the kitchen, carrying a steaming tureen of bouillabaisse. The aroma of garlic, fresh tomatoes, seafood and cilantro wafted behind her.

  “Ah. I smell something fishy,” Adam said.

  “Fishy?” Zaid said. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You people are too sensitive,” Drury said, waving Zaid’s words away as if he were shooing a fly.

  “You people? You people?” A current of impatience emanated from Zaid, palpable, filling the garden. “To you, Berbers are animals in a zoo. You come here to observe us in our natural habitat.”

  Suzannah placed the tureen on the table in front of MacAlistair’s setting and listened from a corner of the dining room.

  “I forgot.” Zaid’s tone had turned to anger. “You’re more interested in the Rif, the blue-eyed, blond Arabs.” He added Lily to his disdain with a sweep of his arm. “Blue-eyed blondes like her are the only people you can trust, aren’t they?”

  Embarrassed, Lily looked away toward the dining room. Suzannah studied them, eyes narrowed in thought.

  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 bone
s 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, so 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.”

  “Be
g 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.