“He’s flying a—”
“A Swiss flag, yes. And I could run up the fleur de lis, but that wouldn’t make me the king of France, would it? He’s a German national. When he’s not playing pasha, we think he works for Wald.”
Laurent felt out of his depth. “Doesn’t anyone in this city make an honest living?”
Harris turned to Grant. “I don’t know of anyone. Do you?”
“’Fraid not.”
The two Englishmen laughed, though the tension in the room had not entirely dissipated.
Laurent broke in. “And would you be keeping him under surveillance?”
“Lenzburg?” Harris said. “No. Why?”
“I saw a car with two men parked on the street near Lenzburg’s. No plates. I wondered if they were keeping an eye on Lenzburg. Or perhaps on Charlotte. You’ve also told me I was being followed.”
“I’m sure we’re not the only ones with an interest in Herr Lenzburg,” Harris said, though he appeared far from sure. “I wonder why these men would allow you to see them.”
“They were just two men parked in a car, is my guess,” Grant said with a laugh that Laurent could read as a sneer if he cared to.
Harris rubbed his nose in contemplation, looked at Laurent. “Do you think Madame Wald—Charlotte—saw them?”
“That’s the funny part. I’m certain she did, but she acted like she didn’t.”
“Did she or Lenzburg give any indication they were preparing a further consignment of francs?”
“They spoke vaguely of a bigger shipment. As I said, so did Laoui.”
Harris tilted his head back, as if trying to read something off the ceiling. “Keep an ear tuned to any more such talk.” He smiled. “He’s a character, isn’t he? Lenzburg.”
“Yes.” Laurent nodded, the anger in him finally unwinding. “You know he’s also an amateur astronomer.”
Harris eyed him in surprise. “Really?”
“Yes. Has a telescope in one room. Interesting thing. Never seen one quite like it.”
The Englishman cocked his head, as if he hearing a sound that Laurent had not. “Facing which way?”
“North, I guess.”
Harris leaned forward in his chair, fully engaged. “Toward the Straits.”
“Yes.”
“Did he let you look at it?”
“No. In fact he covered it up, said he didn’t like the sun on it.”
Harris looked steadily at Laurent. “Tell me, was there an electrical cord running from it?”
“I didn’t get much of a look. Perhaps.”
Harris looked at Grant, who nodded back in silent understanding of something that escaped Laurent.
“It’s probably nothing,” Harris said. “But never hesitate to tell us what you see, no matter how trivial it might seem.” He rose to his feet. “Well, we’ve taken up enough of your evening. I suppose we should be getting you home.”
“Should we continue meeting at the Minzah?” Laurent asked.
Harris murmured negatively. “We’ve met there too often. Next time, go to a bar on the rue Voltaire. Tony’s. Have a drink alone. Then step outside. The car will be parked on the opposite side of the street. If you sense you’re being followed, just walk on, and we’ll try another night.” He pulled a wallet from his pocket. “You must be nearly out of money by now.”
“Yes.” Laurent bit the word off.
“Well, here. I’ve got pesetas. Accepted everywhere. They don’t draw attention.” He regarded the Frenchman. “Laurent, there’s no reason to be ashamed about being short on funds.”
“It’s not being short of money that makes me ashamed.”
Harris looked down, embarrassed. “Ah, well yes . . . ”
Grant broke in to ask Harris, “And if we want to contact him?”
“Yes,” Harris said, slowly. “Look, do you walk outside often? Outside the gates, I mean.”
“Now and then.”
“Let’s do this. We’ll leave an empty whiskey bottle—”
“Johnny Walker,” Grant chimed in.
Harris sighed. “A Johnny Walker bottle on the strip of grass outside the gates. That will mean we want to see you that evening at Tony’s. Usual time.”
“Red or Black?” Laurent asked.
Even Harris laughed. “Black,” Grant said. “Only the best.”
Harris closed his eyes, clearly weary of his colleague. “If you can’t make it, we’ll try again the following night. There’s enough rubbish around even the best streets that a stray bottle shouldn’t attract any notice.”
Laurent nodded.
“And as I said before, you’ll likely be working with Grant from here on out.”
Grant smiled at Laurent as if he hadn’t nearly come to blows with him a few minutes earlier. “I look forward to it, Frenchie. We’ll turn you into a real pro.”
Laurent nodded coolly, but said nothing.
TWENTY-NINE
On a blustery night in early October, Snoussi and Rivera returned to the Villa Aeaea. The following evening they all gathered for a welcome-home dinner, the food as delicious and the conversation as anodyne as before. During the day Laurent neither saw nor heard them. He imagined them upstairs, sleeping in their coffins, going abroad only at night.
Laurent still read his newspapers and listened to the radio and tried to make sense of their contradictory narratives. In the Western Desert, the Italian advance had stopped. Depending on which newspaper he read, or even which page, Laurent could learn that the British had counterattacked, rolling up the Italians and heading for Tripoli, or were demoralized and exhausted, with the Italians poised to push them back to the Suez Canal as soon as they could catch their breath. Meanwhile, in the skies over Britain, the RAF had scored a stirring victory over the German air force, or had suffered almost complete disintegration, with the Wehrmacht poised to leap the Channel and subdue the island nation. The local radio station, government-run, dealt with the war by not dealing with it at all, treating it like a rumor of strife on a distant planet, hardly worth mentioning.
Each morning, Laurent took a short walk outside the gates to inspect the grass strip that edged the wall, but found nothing.
With the arrival of autumn, the days shortened and the summer heat began to give way to cooler weather. On one of the seemingly endless skein of quiet days at the Villa Aeaea, Laurent climbed the steps to his rooftop refuge to enjoy the fresh breeze and the wind-washed brilliance of the Mediterranean. He closed his eyes, enjoying the late-afternoon sun on his face and the taste of salt air on his lips. A rare sense of peace settled over him just as a sudden gust of wind ruffled his hair and a rumbling boom rolled over the hills. Startled, he opened his eyes and saw a large plume of black smoke rising quickly against the cerulean sky.
Unlike the sinking of the British ship in the Straits weeks earlier, this explosion seemed to have occurred in the city itself. Folds in the slopes below the villa obscured his view, making it difficult to see exactly where the explosion had occurred. As the smoke turned from black to white, from an explosion to a fire, Laurent heard the rooftop door slam shut behind him and turned to find Charlotte Wald walking quickly across the roof, her arms folded over her chest.
“What is it?” Her voice was tight with anxiety.
“An explosion of some sort. Down by the port, I think.”
She chewed at her lip and squinted into the distance. “No. The port’s over there.”
“Then it’s from the villas near the bluffs off to the—”
But Charlotte had already turned and was running toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
She waved his question away.
“Let me come with you.”
She shook her head, but did not tell him no.
M’barak drove the Citroen up to the front steps.
“Monsieur Lenzburg’s villa.” Charlotte told him and climbed in without looking to see if Laurent was behind her.
By the time they got t
o the villa a crowd of onlookers blocked the road, though they lacked the nerve to advance beyond the end of the drive. M’barak pulled to the curb and got out, pushing and shouting his way through the gawkers. Charlotte and Laurent followed in his wake, walking through the crowd until they stopped halfway down the drive.
Remnants of the shredded Swiss flag clung to the blackened flagpole. Behind it, what was left of Siggy’s villa burned fiercely against the blue sky.
In the distance, Laurent heard the clanging of an approaching fire truck.
“A gas main?” he asked.
Charlotte looked at him with disdain. “This isn’t Europe. There are no gas mains out here.” She turned again toward the burning house and opened her mouth to say something. Before she could speak, though, her eyes fixed on something at the edge of the rubble. Her eyes widened and her mouth continued to move for a moment, but she made no sound.
Laurent caught her as she fainted, lifting her limp body in his arms. He turned to M’barak. “Get us back to the villa.”
As he carried Charlotte toward the car, Laurent looked over his shoulder toward the villa, searching for whatever had caught Charlotte’s eye. It took him a moment before he knew he’d found it—an otherwise unidentifiable mass covered in a fabric that might have once been white, a blackened fez resting near it.
On the long drive back, Charlotte sat in a daze, her head leaning against the side window.
When Laurent put an arm across her back, she shook it off.
“Bastards,” she muttered.
“You think it was deliberate?”
She gave him a look of disbelief before turning back toward the window.
By the time they had returned to the villa and Charlotte had fled from the car and run upstairs to her room to cry, Laurent knew that by speaking to Harris and Grant he had killed Lenzburg as surely as if he had put a bullet in him.
The following morning Laurent made his way down the drive, intent on going into the city to send a postcard demanding a meeting with Grant. As he walked out through the gates, a glint of light caught his eye. He looked down to find an empty whiskey bottle lying in the grass.
As Harris had promised, Laurent saw Grant’s Peugeot parked in the shadows near Tony’s Bar. The Englishman saw him at the same moment and started the engine.
Neither offered a word of greeting.
They drove in silence along darkened streets for perhaps fifteen minutes. With the center of town far behind them, Grant pulled to the side of the road in the darkness of a line of trees.
Once the headlights and dash were extinguished, Laurent could make out only a faint outline, like a ghost, in the seat next to him.
“You’re angry about something, old sport.” Grant’s insouciance sounded as phony as his “old sport” clubiness.
“You killed Lenzburg, didn’t you?”
Grant shifted in his seat. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
“And I don’t need to work with you, either. Was it over the currency smuggling?”
The Englishman barked a hyena laugh. “Christ, no. It was the so-called telescope.”
“The telescope?”
“You’re the one said he was an astronomer, had some fancy telescope. Telescope,” he scoffed. “The German’s have been sinking our ships in the Straits by night. We knew they must have someone on the bluffs with an infrared sensor and a way of communicating with the U-Boats. After talking with you we knew it was Lenzburg.”
“Infrared?”
“Senses heat. You can see a ship, a plane, a tank, even in total darkness. We had to put him out of business.”
“By killing him.” Laurent wanted it to sound like an accusation, but it sounded even to him like the voice of someone finally understanding the nature of the business he was in.
“What do you think we’re going to do, take out a restraining order? Fine him if he does it again? Damn right we killed him. This isn’t the vicar’s tea party you’ve signed onto, Laurent. Maybe you thought he was a charming fellow, mincing around in that djellaba like he was a fucking sheik. I suppose he was well born, had a fancy education. Like you. And we shoulda left him alone, ’cause, after all, he was only killing grocers’ sons.” Grant had put away his toffee accent and spoke with the broader speech of a working class Londoner.
Laurent wondered if this accent was as false as the other.
“You’re trying to sound righteous, Mr. Grant,” Laurent said, “but all I hear is your jealousy of people better bred than yourself.”
Laurent sensed the next word would lead to blows. But Grant abruptly turned away and looked out the car window, and the moment passed.
“Bon, ” Laurent grunted. “You called this meeting.”
Grant took a breath. “You’ve got to help us on something,” he said. “Partly from what you told us, partly from what we knew already. We think your Major Wald is arranging to smuggle a large shipment of francs over the border from French Morocco. Sometime soon. Big shipment. With Lenzburg dead, their pipeline is broken. They’re going to need help. They’re going to turn to you.”
“Me? Why?”
“Because you’re going to suggest it to them. You still have a diplomatic passport. That means the Spanish won’t search you at the border.”
“They may be looking for me.”
“Not that day, they won’t be. We’ll see to it.”
“But my own people, the French—”
“We can take care of that, too.”
Could all of his worries simply evaporate like this? Laurent shook his head. “A private car doesn’t have diplomatic protection.”
“Your German friends can probably find some dip plates lying around somewhere.”
“Why would you want me to help them do this?”
“We’re going to stop them, have them arrested, and take the money on behalf of His Britannic Majesty.” His braying laugh evoked no sense of amusement, only the impression that something in his head had gone adrift. “If you keep your eyes open, we may even be able to arrest some of their network in Rabat.”
Laurent wondered if, all this time, rather than trying to hide from others that he was a spy, Grant was, in fact, trying to hide from everyone that he was mentally unbalanced.
“And why do the Germans think I would help them do this, smuggle the money?”
“You mean your friends, Charlotte and Wald? Because you’re going to ask them for part of the money so you can bribe your way out of here.”
“And they would help me do that? Help me join de Gaulle against them?”
“They would promise to anyway.”
“But you think they might . . . ”
“Kill you? Sure, why not? Did you think there weren’t any risks in this?” Grant shook his head in disgust. “Fucking typical. Look, we’ll see that you’re arrested with them as you cross the border. Try to act outraged. Stand on your diplomatic immunity. That should be good for a laugh. Then we’ll persuade the French to let you go. As I say, there’s a lot of money in this. We can spread it around as needed. Not everyone is as noble as you.” The compliment came with a sneer.
“And after all this is over, you’ll see that I’m sent to London.”
“That’s right.” He waited for it to sink in. “You said you wanted to get into the war. Here’s your chance.”
For a long time Laurent said nothing. The treacherous leap from passive spying to active betrayal was a long one.
It was a funny kind of faith Grant and Harris and Charlotte all had in him—confident that, when the moment came, he would have no more integrity than they did. Charlotte, and by extension her husband, also trusted him to ask no questions as they suborned him into undertaking their work. Did Wald know he was sleeping with his wife? Was that part of their plan? An abhorrent thought.
He looked at Grant’s outline in the dim light.
“Why haven’t you told Harris you’re acquainted with Charlotte Wald, that you’re friendly with that whole circle?”
“What makes you think I haven’t?”
“The way you dance around it when Harris is there. The looks you give me to keep my mouth shut.”
“Standard procedure, old boy. Standard procedure.”
“I notice you’re not taking this job on for yourself. You want me to do it because if it all goes wrong you only lose some amateur, rather than one of the professionals, such as yourself.”
“Yeah, well, training costs are high these days.” His nasty alcohol-fueled laugh grated on Laurent’s nerves. “So, are you in or out?”
“Why don’t they have Snoussi and Rivera do this for them?” Laurent asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe they will. But I see no sign those two were involved in the first delivery, the one you made to Laoui, and I have no reason to think they’ll be used for the second. I don’t think they know anything about it.”
“You’re trying to tell me that both of you—you and Wald’s people—are offering me a way out of here, a ticket to Britain. And you say that the Germans will kill me when I’ve performed my service, but I should trust you when you say you won’t.”
“Yeah. That’s about it.”
Laurent sat silently, feeling naive and outmaneuvered. From the start, he had told everyone what he wanted, allowing them to set their own price for his services.
“Well, in or out, Froggy?”
Laurent’s mouth turned down in disgust. “There isn’t enough soap in the world to get your smarm off me.”
“Fuck you. In or out?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“You know we can’t protect you if you don’t cooperate.”
“If I weren’t already cooperating, I wouldn’t need your protection.”
THIRTY
For several days Laurent persuaded himself of his independence by doing nothing—though he suspected his independence was no more than that of a rat deciding when to enter the maze and how fast to run once he was in.
After several nights’ absence, he returned to Charlotte’s bed, but it didn’t go well. After a few minutes of fruitless huffing and puffing, he gave up and rolled over on his back.
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