Like hell, Chaffee thought.
When he got back to the hotel he called Julie. He gave her a rundown on his conversation with Paul Ross and told her she needed to call Deptford and give him a heads up. The memory of a cocktail conversation came back to him from years earlier, someone saying that hiring Russell Deptford was the clearest possible indicator that you were guilty as hell.
“Chris, DoJ isn’t going to indict you over a few thousand dollars.”
“They already have.”
“I mean, you know the AG.”
“And he hates my guts. He knows I recommended Jack Sanford for Attorney General.”
“Well, still, he got the position anyway.”
“Babe, the world’s full of sore winners.”
PART VI
FALL 1940
TWENTY-FIVE
Rene Laurent stood in the entrance of the Minzah’s bar. Harris, sitting at a back table, hadn’t seen him yet.
The Englishman had changed in the weeks since they had last met, the lines around his mouth and eyes had grown deeper, his face thinner. At first Laurent thought he might be ill, but then realized he was only seeing the effect of war on an intelligence agent.
His own blithe declarations about wanting to get into the war sounded so noble when he spoke them, but he had started to face the cost. He would live a false life, betray people who trusted him—after all, who else can one betray?—and if he were to die, it would not be in the heat of battle, facing the enemy, but from the quick knife across the throat, the bullet in the back of the head. He would have no warning and could make no appeal. The thought did not so much frighten him as wrap him in a perverse cloud of apathy.
Laurent thought of turning around and walking out. As a diplomat, he had worked to keep the generals unemployed, to resolve conflicts without bloodshed, taking guidance from well-bred men in quiet oak-paneled offices, maintaining a civilization of which he believed they represented the highest expression.
Now, his occupation gone, Laurent had taken a step onto an unknown path, that of the spy. He took a deep breath and made his way across the room.
“Ah, it’s good to see you,” Harris said.
Laurent noted that the Englishman greeted him without uttering his name, a habit he himself would have to learn.
Whatever the physical toll on him, Harris had retained his air of clubby affability. “Please, sit down.” He waved at the chair opposite him and caught their waiter’s eye. “A gin tonic. That’s right isn’t it? Yes, good. And another whisky-soda.” As the waiter moved off, Harris smiled. “Stop looking around the room. No one here knows who you are, or much cares.”
Laurent wasn’t so sure but made no reply.
The Englishman knew this was the awkward moment, when a recruit suddenly understands the commitment he has made, feels the door shutting behind him.
“I was pleased to get your card the other day, and a little surprised.”
Laurent started to say, “No more so than I,” but understood that his surprise only underlined his own blindness. “I decided I had to contact you.”
“I’m glad you did.” Harris leaned back in his chair. “Now, tell me about it.” The Englishman might have been a country doctor asking about symptoms of some minor ailment.
“I have come to believe that the villa is being used as a clandestine transmitting station by Axis intelligence agents.”
Harris spread his hands in a there-you-are gesture. “It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? A hilltop location. A private home, surrounded by a wall. Not a diplomatic mission or export-import firm that we might very well be monitoring.”
“Or a news agency.”
If Laurent meant to throw a dart, it missed. Harris chuckled. “Exactly. So, tell me, who’s involved?”
“A Moroccan named Snoussi and a Spaniard, a Señor Rivera. They claim to be businessmen.”
“But you believe they are spies.”
“Yes.”
“But not Charlotte Wald?” Harris asked.
Laurent looked into his drink and searched in it for his feelings toward the owner of the Villa Aeaea. He felt Harris’s eyes on him. “I think she is at least aware of what’s going on.”
Harris chuckled. “At least aware? I should think so.”
“I’m not naïve.”
“No?” Harris asked with a fleeting smirk. “Did you know you’ve been followed over the last couple of weeks? No, I didn’t think so.”
“By whom?”
“The Spanish, it appears.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we wished to follow you, too, and found that we had to queue up.”
Harris made it sound like a parade. Laurent had seen no one.
“But why?”
Harris ran a finger through the candle flame and smiled. “Perhaps someone knows you are a footloose diplomat of inconvenient loyalty. Perhaps it’s something else entirely.”
“But what—?”
“Tell me, Monsieur Laurent, have you had a chance to meet her husband? Peter Wald is his name. An officer in the German army, yes? I don’t suppose he told you who he works for.”
Laurent understood he was going to be made to look foolish. “It didn’t come up.”
“No, I shouldn’t think it would. He’s a major in the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Magnificent organization. Yet prone to puzzling lapses. Some believe that, like much of the army, their loyalty to Hitler is a bit half-hearted.” Harris gave a little shrug. “The Spanish often take up little tasks for their German friends.” He eyed Laurent. “Tell me, is there any reason Wald might be particularly interested in you? Perhaps even some personal motivation? How can I put it—any cause for a twinge of animus against you?”
“But how did you know that I had met—?”
Harris wasn’t looking at him anymore, but at someone over Laurent’s shoulder. “Ah, here you are. I was beginning to worry. Sit down. I think you two have already met, yes?”
The newcomer ordered a whiskey-soda, rubbed at a spot on his jaw and tried to appear amused. “Yes. The pleasure was all his. How the hell are you, Laurent?”
Laurent tried to hide his surprise. “It’s good to see you again,” he said, his first lie of the evening.
As he had at their last meeting in the Minzah, Laurent detected a warning behind the man’s smile, though he could not grasp its meaning. And, as before, he had the impression that the Englishman had been drinking.
Harris ordered a whiskey for his colleague and made sure the waiter was out of earshot before turning to Laurent. “I suppose this is as good a time as any to fill you in a bit. You were already known to us, even back when you were staying at the Moulay Idriss. We had heard of you, knew you were in Tangier. And your association with Mendes-France and his group told us something of your sympathies. But when our mutual friend”—and here he nodded at Roger—“went looking for you, he found that you had already flown. Then you returned unexpectedly, and well . . .” Harris smiled and seemed a little disappointed that Roger didn’t smile with him. “Frankly, your ability to catch a trained agent unawares, knock him silly, grab what you had come for and get away cleanly told us you were the sort of man we wanted to know better.”
“Yes, it was a little embarrassing,” the man who called himself Roger said with forced good humor.
Laurent saw the hardness behind the smile, the sense of someone else lurking behind the eyes, someone dangerous. He told himself to be very careful with this man.
The Briton continued. “It’s a mixed pleasure to see you again after our dust-up at the Moulay Idriss.”
This time Laurent understood the veiled look in the other man’s eyes. Harris didn’t know they had seen each other a second time at the Minzah in the company of a German intelligence officer—and Laurent was to say nothing about it.
The Frenchman was familiar with compartmentalization in intelligence work; even one’s closest associates knew no more than needed. But he sensed this was
something more. And he knew that only minutes after agreeing to work with British intelligence he was already concealing things from the man who was placing some measure of trust in him.
“Tell me,” Laurent asked Harris, “what is it you want me to do?”
“Simply continue to do what you are doing now. Keep your eyes open, your ear tuned. Tell us if you see something we should know.”
Laurent folded his hands on the table. “She’s asked me to run several errands for her. They seemed innocent enough at the time—or so I chose to tell myself. Now I wonder. Should I stop?”
“By no means. Continue to do as she asks. She’s been co-opting you, getting you in the habit of assisting her. She’s only waiting for the right moment to tell you what you’ve really been doing—acting as a courier for German intelligence. She will threaten to reveal your activities to your countrymen, disgrace you, have you arrested.”
“Perhaps I’m not so easy to compromise. I’m not unwilling to face a certain amount of embarrassment over these errands.”
Harris picked up a spoon and frowned at his reflection. “She is not accustomed to dealing with people who have retained a sense of decency. That may throw her off-stride.” Without looking at Laurent, he murmured, “She will make sure you are compromised in every way, yes?” In case Laurent had missed his meaning, he added, “She’s a beautiful woman, is she not?”
Laurent flushed red. The silence at the table lengthened until he felt compelled to say something. “And what can I hope for in return?”
“Ah, yes, what’s in it for you?”
“Enough!” He threw the word at Harris. “I am not a professional spy. This is not the work I’m made for.”
The Englishman looked around the room to see if anyone had heard Laurent’s indiscretion. After casting a dark glance at the Frenchman, he continued. “As I said before, we will do our best to get you out of here. To London. Perhaps we can manage to get your wife there, too. She needn’t know anything about what you did here.”
Laurent knew Harris was speaking of more than his work as a spy. He felt a wave of shame roll over him, tried to brazen it out. “What makes you think I am—”
“The ring on your finger, Monsieur Laurent.”
Laurent looked at the ring, talisman of another life, of who he used to be. He was overwhelmed by a yearning for his wife, not a physical desire, but a need to confess that he had never really opened himself to her, or she to him. He wanted to tell her they would have to be better with each other, must be willing to take the risk of loving each other. But that conversation would have to wait for another day.
Still looking at his hand, he said to Harris, “So, you will help me, but first I must pay for my passage.”
“Neatly put, Monsieur Laurent. If you have no stomach for it, then by all means go back up to the villa and let the war go on without you.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”
“No, you didn’t.”
They fell silent for a moment as a boy came by the table and picked up their empty glasses. Roger’s eyes followed him, a peculiar smile on the Englishman’s face. Harris coughed loudly and Roger turned back to the matter at hand as Harris glowered at him.
Like a hooked trout, Laurent felt himself being reeled in. “All right. I keep my eyes open, and I continue to do as Charlotte asks. If I see anything of interest, I contact you. I do it in the same way as before?”
“Yes, but for the most part it will not be me you work with.”
The man he had met at the Minzah, the one he had knocked down at the Moulay Idriss leaned into the table and spoke quietly. “It will be me.”
Laurent smiled at the irony. “Not your first wish, I’m sure.”
“On the contrary. I asked for the assignment.”
“I’m flattered. So, when I send a message, it will be you I meet with.”
“Shake hands with the devil, Monsieur Laurent.”
“You have the advantage of me. I don’t know your name.”
After looking around to make sure no one was listening, the Englishman held out his hand and said quietly, “Grant. Roger Grant.”
TWENTY-SIX
Over the following days, Laurent set his senses to a higher pitch, trying to see everything, hear everything, feel every vibration in the decaying villa. And he discovered nothing. On the infrequent occasions when its inhabitants ate together, Charlotte and her two boarders hid behind a smokescreen of superficial chatter, their discussions touching on nothing more sinister than the rising cost of food and the prevailing winds.
By day, Charlotte seldom appeared, and never Snoussi or Rivera, except perhaps in the back of the Citroen, M’barak at the wheel, going through the gates to unknown destinations.
Two weeks after Laurent had spoken with Harris and Grant the two men left on another business trip. The evening before they departed, they at last mentioned their supposed occupation, claiming they were brokers of agricultural products. “What, we’ve never described our business before?” Snoussi said with an almost persuasive show of surprise. He dropped a sly hint that they might undertake a bit of cigarette smuggling on the side. By Tangier’s standards this made their endeavors all the more above-board.
With their departure, Laurent’s nights in Charlotte’s bed resumed. He tried to tell himself that he was overcoming his loathing of what she stood for in order to keep an eye on her. With each passing night, though, he felt a growing bond with her, all the more intense for his own feelings of confusion and guilt.
He continued his walks through the neighborhood, sometimes roaming as far as the center of town, not so much to expand the bounds of his freedom as to see who was following him. The fact that he spotted no one only confirmed to him their presence.
On the nights he spent in his own bed, he turned his radio dial to a local station, lay with his hands clasped behind his head and let the haunting strains of Andalusian music, wedding Tangier’s Arabic and Spanish souls, coil around him. Sometimes he drifted to sleep listening to their peculiar and seductive rhythms, making for unsettling dreams.
It was from one of these dreams that Rabia’s knock on the door woke him one morning. Madame, she said, would like him to accompany her on a visit.
M’barak drove them to a villa perched high on the bluffs overlooking the Straits, its long circular driveway leading past a flagpole flying the Swiss colors. Shrubs bordering the drive had been shaped into the form of animals, one made to look like a giraffe, another either a very fat horse or a very thin hippopotamus. Laurent nodded toward the flag. “A fellow countryman?”
Charlotte lifted her eyebrows.
The villa’s white walls and red-tiled roof were dazzling in the morning sun. Laurent followed Charlotte to the door, where, with a look, she cued him to ring the bell for her. After waiting some time for a response, Laurent was about to ring again when he heard a rumbling voice calling, “Ali! Ali!” before descending into low muttering.
Charlotte smiled to Laurent. “You mustn’t mind Siggy. He’s a little . . . flamboyant. We pretend to be expiring of unrequited love for each other. You mustn’t mind that, either.”
The man shouted, “Ali!” once more, though his tone made it clear that he had given up on Ali.
Laurent wasn’t sure who he expected to answer the door, but it wasn’t the tall, graying, enormously stout man who stood before him, wearing a white djellaba that made him resemble an enormous scoop of vanilla ice cream, his fez like the cherry on top.
His theatrical frown turned into an equally theatrical smile when he saw who was at his door. “Charlotte, my dove, I didn’t expect you until this afternoon.”
“Yet here I am.” She made her entrance and Siggy began to shut the door in Laurent’s face. “Ah. Excuse me,” he said without quite taking his eyes off Charlotte.
Charlotte nodded toward her escort. “This is Rene Laurent, a resident of my little menage a quatre.”
“A pleasure to meet you,” he lied with a little c
lick of his slippered heels. “Sigismund Lenzburg, at your service.” The demands of good manners taken care of, he turned back to Charlotte. “You look exceptionally well, Charlotte. Full of animal vitality.”
“Oh, I am,” she said, and let her eyes linger on Laurent.
Siggy’s face went slack, either from genuine anguish or because she had broken the rules of their game. In either case, he quickly recovered himself and laughed. “You say this to drive me mad.”
“Is it working?”
“A little too well,” he said, his smile looking a bit sick.
He led them into a room with a large window that faced onto the Straits below. A few miles across the water, Spain sparkled in the late summer sun. To the west, the Atlantic lay like a gray stone.
Laurent stood in the middle of the room, entranced by the view, while Lenzburg called down the hallway for tea.
“It’s quite something, isn’t it?” Charlotte settled into an apparently accustomed spot on the sofa and, with her eyes, directed Laurent to sit next to her.
Irritated, Laurent took an armchair instead. From here, he could see Spain and the Straits, and, through a doorway of a corner room, a view of the medina to the east.
“You must never tire of the view,” he said to their host.
“I miss the mountain vistas of our native Switzerland”—another doe-eyed look at Charlotte—“but yes, you’re right. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, a man tired of these panoramas is tired of life.”
“But terrestrial views are not enough for you,” Laurent added.
Lenzburg gave him a puzzled look.
“I mean to say your telescope.” Laurent nodded toward the corner room. “It looks quite modern. You must be able to pull in every star in the galaxy.”
The large man frowned and turned toward the salon. “Oh, yes. Yes. It’s a wonder,” he said, glancing at Charlotte.
Surprisingly light on his feet, Lenzburg rose and crossed to the other room, where he threw a blanket over the device before returning to the salon. For good measure, he shut the door between the two rooms. “I don’t like the sun beating on it,” he said. “But it’s fascinating. Only last night, I was trying to determine if the moon was really made of cheese from our native country.” He delivered every remark to Charlotte.
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