“Tell me the truth.”
“That is the truth!” Drake stuck his chin out, but its trembling spoiled the effect.
Chaffee raised his hand, ready to slap Drake in the face, to force him to come clean. It felt so righteous. The man was a murderer, Sands had told him. What was a slap in the face? Not even down payment on what he had coming to him.
For the first time, it occurred to him that Drake might have murdered his father. Why else would he be so terrified in his presence? He pushed the thought away, as desperate now as his mother to believe Rene Laurent was still alive.
With his open hand poised above the terrified old man, Chaffee stopped himself. In that moment, poised between the idea and the act, he saw it clearly. Despite his cringing facade, this sick old man wanted him to hit him, longed for it, had maneuvered Chaffee into doing exactly what he wanted him to do—become as depraved as he was himself.
Chaffee resolved not to give him that satisfaction. From somewhere deep inside, someplace he had not touched in a long time, he made a shaky vow to be the better man.
A look of disappointment crossed Drake’s face. The worst thing a sadist can say to a masochist is “no.”
The charged air in the room, the swirling currents of unrealized violence, broke a spell, and the boys dropped their controllers and ran from the apartment, leaving the door hanging open behind them.
Chaffee, fighting for self-control, still traversing dangerous ground, both for Drake and for his own soul, lowered the photo and looked into Drake’s face. “It’s you.”
Drake gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. “No, Grant.” He looked at Chaffee. “He’s a killer, Grant.” He was smiling.
“Jesus,” Chaffee muttered, overcome with the horror one feels at seeing a dying insect with its legs pawing the air. “And you?”
Frightened to the verge of sobbing, he whimpered, “I’m Drake.”
On Chaffee’s first visit to this madhouse the old spy had been defiant, vulgar, angry, insisting he wasn’t Drake. Now he insisted he was. In a startling stab of insight, Chaffee understood; on his last visit he had been talking to Grant. “And it’s Grant who kills people?”
“Yes, Grant.”
Though he struggled to maintain an air of insouciance, the old man had aged a decade in the few minutes since Chaffee had come through the door, like the mummy in an old horror movie who in a matter of seconds suffers two thousand years of times’ retribution.
Whatever horrors haunted the former spy’s soul, Chaffee told himself he was not dealing with the devil, but only with an old man whose years of playing the spy’s double game had split his mind in two. Who knew how deep his sickness went? To deal with him in that state, to stoop to his level of depravity, was to enter into his sickness.
A sudden calmness came over the American. “Okay, tell me, is Grant still around?”
“I don’t know.” The old man started to weep.
Remembering Sand’s warning, Chaffee wondered how much of Drake’s seeming madness was a pose—and which one of them he was trying to fool, Chaffee or himself. Again, he stuck the picture in the Englishman’s face. “And who is this?”
“Charlotte. Charlotte Wald.”
“No. Her name’s Dubois. She owns the Crepuscule in Asilah.”
“Yes. You’re right.”
Drake was ready to say anything now, play any role, making it impossible to know how much to believe of what he said.
Chaffee looked at the photo and put his finger over another of the seated figures. “And who is this?”
“Some German.” Drake chuckled. “A German soldier. Fair game.” Chaffee saw his eyes wander to the image of the beautiful woman in the silk dress. Drake whispered, “She owes me—”
His eyes widened and he stopped himself.
Chaffee leaned into him. “The woman? She owes you what?”
“Nothing.”
Unsure to what degree Drake was any longer in his right mind, Chaffee decided he had to let it go, allow the old man to recover his addled wits. He pulled up a chair and leaned toward Drake, but at arm’s length now.
“Okay,” he said quietly, “who is he, the German?”
“I don’t know.” A glance at the American’s face told Drake to change course. “Charlotte’s husband. Wald.”
Wald. The man who had told Spanish security to stop following his father. Why? For the passage of several slow breaths, Chaffee’s eyes bored into the man in front of him and searched his heart for pity. He found none. Instead, he looked into himself and thought, this is how the Gestapo works. Hold enough contempt for your enemies—and for yourself—and it crowds out any humanity, any trace of mercy.
From where it had been sleeping since his disgrace back home, the familiar poison of certainty and power over others had for a few moments coursed through him. It was an addiction as powerful as any drug. He knew, whatever his intentions, he hadn’t kicked it yet. And this time it had carried with it the urge to violence. Chaffee vowed not give in to it—not to give in to a part of himself so dark he had never before seen it clearly. The knowledge that it dwelt somewhere deep inside frightened him. Drake’s terrified whisper broke through his thoughts. “You’ve been talking to Sands!” He might have been accusing Chaffee of consorting with the devil. “He’s going to have me arrested, isn’t he?”
Taken aback, Chaffee could only ask, “What?”
“Gordon Sands. He knows what happened. He’ll tell them to throw me in jail before I can get my money, or—” He shut his mouth like a trap springing closed.
“Money? What money?” Chaffee searched the old man’s face for some clue to where his twisted mind was taking him now.
“He knows. He’ll pretend he doesn’t, but he knows enough to put me in prison for the rest of my life.” He leaned into Chaffee and murmured almost inaudibly. “He knows I’ve done terrible things.”
“I thought that was Grant.”
Drake put a finger to his lips. “Quiet, or he’ll come back.”
Chaffee looked at the reptilian creature before him. Everything Drake said carried its own warped logic, but Chaffee had neither the knowledge nor sufficient madness to riddle it out. There were the poisonings. Coupled with some previous run-in that Sands said he knew little about, they had led to Drake’s professional banishment. Looking at the man in front of him, Chaffee understood that, whatever those previous sins were, they haunted him even now.
Chaffee saw his chance to leverage a bluff. “You’re right. He knows everything, and he’ll throw you in prison unless you level with me.” He cocked his head at the spot where the boys had been sitting. “And you know what they do in prison to people like you.” Again, he waved the photo at Drake. “Now tell me, how did you know these people?”
“We all knew each other,” Drake said, lifting his chin defiantly. “That’s all.” Drake was enjoying this, luring him toward promising doors then shutting them in his face. There was no point in continuing.
Chaffee had a last question to ask, the one he had put off until now. Holding the photo in front of him, he pointed to one more figure, the one with his back to the camera, a man with a certain bearing and a refined cut to his suit. Through some black art, Chaffee wanted to will this man, sitting in a club on a night in 1940, to turn around, to look at him and speak. Instead, he was forced to pose one more question to a madman. “Tell me who this is.”
With a contemptuous smile Drake said, “Don’t try to fool me. That’s you.”
A swirl of untethered and still dangerous emotion twisted through Chaffee’s chest. He was near the truth now.
His manner calm, Chaffee pointed a last time at the photo. “You know who this is. This is Rene Laurent, my father.” Though he meant to rattle Drake, he was the one left shaken by his own words.
With the paranoid’s sense of the frailties of others, Drake searched for Chaffee’s weakness. Chaffee felt the old spy’s eyes running over his face, trying to smoke out the vulnerability that he co
uld latch onto and flip him.
He saw that he had made a mistake in letting the bastard squirm out of his earlier terror. By so thoroughly frightening him, Chaffee had, through an accidental experiment in existential fission, managed to split Drake from Grant for a few moments. Now, by giving him a respite, he had allowed him to fuse the two back together again.
“This is Laurent?” Drake waggled his head and smiled. “Really? Are you sure?”
Fighting against the old man’s ability to touch this most vulnerable recess of his heart, Chaffee fought to regain his advantage. “This is the French diplomat you knew. My father. What happened to him? Where is he?”
For a long time, Drake gazed at the photo. By the time he looked up, he had recovered. His mask was once more in place.
“No idea.” Renewed, he looked at Chaffee, a dagger of mockery in his eyes. “No. Wait.” His eyes widened theatrically. “Maybe I heard something about him going off to Fez. Not long after this picture was taken. And he never came back. Fez.”
Weary of grasping at the straws swirling around him, Chaffee, to his own surprise, wanted to disbelieve Drake, to spare himself the torture of hope. “What were you doing here with him, in this picture?”
Drake smiled, sure of himself now. “Why don’t you ask Grant?”
Chaffee looked in the old man’s canny, frightened eyes and felt the weariness in his own heart. This was not the way to the truth, at least not any truth worth finding, a truth that went far beyond whatever Drake and Rene Laurent were doing at the Minzah that night in 1940.
Chaffee felt his anger leave, replaced by either exhaustion or peace, he wasn’t sure which. “Just tell me what you were doing there—you and a German officer and this woman, Dubois, and my father. When was this? What were you doing?”
Drake sighed. “I don’t remember.”
The truth? Another lie? Something in between?
That was it. Everything he had learned since coming to Tangier, everything he had seen or been told, lay somewhere between the truth and a lie—ideas, accusations, denials flushed like frightened birds from the thickets of twisted souls, words emerging from that realm where people say the things that they end up needing to believe.
“Will she know? Dubois. Will she remember?”
“She remembers everything.” The old villain dropped his head and murmured. “I’m so tired.” He looked up at Chaffee. “Let me fix us both a cup of tea.”
This was too good. Sands had been so thoroughly right in his warnings about Drake that Chaffee could only laugh. “Tell me. Is this Drake asking, or Grant?”
Caught, the old spy smiled his loathsome smile.
The exhilaration Chaffee felt earlier had evaporated, leaving him empty, feeling dirty. He looked at his watch. Nearly ten-thirty. No train to Asilah until the next day. He had no choice but to wait.
Pushed by a gust of wind, the apartment’s open door creaked on its hinges—a voice telling him it was time to leave. Chaffee felt the eerie certainty that it was his father’s voice, the voice he had been waiting for all these years, asking him to quit the dangerous path he was on before it destroyed him.
He stood up, his legs shaking, his shoulders aching with fatigue.
Without a word of goodbye—no word existed that could put a cap to this sordid interview—Chaffee turned to leave. Weary as he was, he felt a sense of victory. Evil had beckoned him from the moment he had walked into this corner of hell, and he had refused its call. The man he’d been back in Washington would have rushed into it headlong, certain that he had the right to do anything, could justify any act to himself. The man he was slowly, fitfully, becoming no longer possessed such certainties.
Before he could get to the door, Drake’s voice stopped him.
“Sands told you everything.”
Chaffee looked at him, but did not reply.
“He knows everything, Sands. And he knows where I live.”
Chaffee shrugged. “His girl does.”
“Meanwhile he lives in the medina like a gentleman. Probably some nice house overlooking the Straits.”
Sick to death of the old madman, Chaffee said, “And he has earned it; deserves his peace,” and walked out, leaving the door open behind him.
Tired and distracted, he made his way down the steps, having failed to sense that the old man in the squalid room above him could hide behind any camouflage, including his own madness, and that over the last few moments he had no longer been speaking to the querulous old fool, Drake, but to the twisted killer, Grant.
After taking Christopher Chaffee’s order for a café crème, the waiter nodded and walked away, leaving the American at his corner table wondering how he would spot the man he was looking for.
The voice over the phone—polite, non-committal—had said his name was Paul Ross, an officer with the American Embassy in Rabat, and that Ambassador Courtenay had asked him to contact Chaffee. When Chaffee asked him what it was about the man had said he preferred not to speak about it over the phone.
After nearly getting his jaw broken at his last rendezvous, the appeal of clandestine meetings with mysterious strangers had lost its romance, but Chaffee felt he had little choice but to say yes.
Chaffee and Courtenay had known each other for more than twenty-five years, a lifetime by Washington standards, where the half-life of most political hires was four years. They had both worked in the Special Trade Rep’s office when they first came to town. Each had gone his separate way, but stayed in touch, never close, but always friendly. Despite initially squelching the idea, he had thought of going down to Rabat and paying a visit, but knew it would prove an embarrassment for both of them.
Now Courtenay was trying to get in touch with him. How had Courtenay found out he was in Morocco? Maybe Erickson had felt compelled to tell him. The part he didn’t understand was why Courtenay wanted to contact him. It stank of something, but he didn’t know what.
Something about the tall man in the blue suit said American the moment he walked in the door. He must have seen a similar giveaway in Chaffee and headed across the room to his table.
They made introductions and Ross ordered mint tea. He was younger than he sounded over the phone, late twenties, maybe thirty, with blue eyes and a pockmarked face. His manner, polite, informal, carried a collegiate boyishness.
No, Ross said when Chaffee asked, he wasn’t a personal aide to the Ambassador. He worked in the consular section, but he and Courtenay got along well, so the ambassador had picked him to come up to Tangier and talk to Chaffee.
“What about?” Chaffee asked.
“Well, it’s a little awkward, Mr. Chaffee,” the young American said with a rueful smile he no doubt meant to appear charming.
“Then you’d better spit it out.”
Ross shifted in his chair as if he’d expected to trade niceties a little longer. He changed gears, more formal now, a little detached, as he had sounded over the phone. “The ambassador wanted me to tell you that the legal attaché’s office received a cable yesterday evening, an Interpol advisory.”
“Yeah? About what?”
“I’m afraid it was about you, Mr. Chaffee.”
Chaffee felt his stomach drop. Not trusting his voice, he nodded for Ross to continue.
“It appears that an indictment has come down regarding a matter of some disputed funds while you were agency director.”
The delicacy of Ross’s phrasing did nothing to soften the blow.
“Jesus.” Chaffee pushed away from the table and tilted his head back, suddenly unable to draw a clear breath. “I didn’t think . . . Over a lousy . . . Indicted.” He knew he had considered the possibility, but it seemed ludicrous. Now he couldn’t take it in. The next thought hit him in the heart. “And they’re saying I’ve fled the country to avoid prosecution.”
“I don’t believe so. It’s only—”
“Will I be arrested?” He tried to sound calm, but felt the dread in his voice.
“As I say, the Interpol
cable is only an advisory—”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that if you present yourself at an airport or border crossing, Moroccan authorities will insist that you take the next available flight back to the United States.”
“And I’ll be arrested on arrival.”
“I don’t think so. You will only be required to present yourself to—”
“Has this made the papers?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“And you’re here because Phil Courtenay doesn’t want to touch me with a ten-foot pole.” As the initial shock wore off, he felt the anger rising. An old dying part of him said they couldn’t do this to him. The newer Chris Chaffee knew they would only stop when they felt like it.
“I think the Ambassador asked me to come up here because he’s concerned for—”
Chaffee sawed at the air as if he wanted to cut it in two. “It’s all right. I wouldn’t want to be seen with me, either.” He looked at Ross, seeing it clearly. “And he sent you because he can’t have anyone knowing he gave me a head’s up.”
Ross smiled. They understood each other now. “He didn’t exactly say—”
“Didn’t need to.” He took a deep breath. “How did he know where to find me?”
“I believe he called your home, talked to your wife.”
Chaffee felt disembodied, weightless. The table under his hand, this café, Ross, the other patrons, all of it seemed unreal. He ran his hand over his face.
“All right.” It sounded weak. He put a show of strength behind it, counterfeit, a survival reflex. “All right. You can tell those bastards at Justice . . . ” Who was he kidding? Chaffee blew out a big breath, shook his head. “Okay. Message received.” He threw forty dirhams on the table, started to get up, sat back down
Funny, he thought, it seemed like only a couple of days earlier, being fobbed off on a junior staffer had irritated the hell out of him. No longer. He had climbed down from his perch—been pushed from it—at least that much. “Tell Phil I’m grateful. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming all this way.”
“It’s a pleasure, sir.”
Tangier: A Novel Page 18