“What’s wrong?” she asked, though he couldn’t miss the indifference in her voice.
“I don’t know. Tired. Distracted.”
“Bored?”
He flicked her hand off his chest. “I want out of Tangier. And I think I know how to earn my passage.”
Charlotte rolled onto her stomach and looked at him. “You’ve been thinking about business. Poison to love-making.”
He ignored her. “When I handed him the money, Laoui said something about expecting a larger sum. He said you were working on a big delivery.”
“Friend Laoui has been indiscreet.” He could sense her wondering where he was going with this. “Maybe I can help,” he said. Laurent felt himself groping down a corridor darker than anything at the Café Agadir. “I still have a diplomatic passport. If your husband can find some embassy plates, I could drive across the border without being searched by the Spanish.”
“Or the French?”
“Why would they search one of their own?”
She shifted on the bed, crossed her arms over her breasts. “You’re willing to do this?”
“Yes. For a share of the money, enough to get me out of here.”
“You’ve lived with Circe long enough.”
“Yes.”
Was he flattering himself that her sigh carried a note of regret?
“But you said they would be looking for you at the border.” Though trying to maintain a façade of intimacy, Charlotte’s tone had turned businesslike, probing.
“It’s been months now. As far as they know, I may be living in the catacombs of Paris or in some farmhouse in Brittany. I’m forgotten.”
“A farmhouse?” She snorted.
“You can talk to your husband about my offer?”
Charlotte fished for a cigarette on her nightstand. “My husband,” she muttered. “Talk to him about what? You and me? Or maybe you think you should have a man-to-man with him, make a clean breast of it. You’re just a big enough fool.”
He ignored the needle. “Yet he still trusts you.”
She rolled over and sat up on the edge of the bed, lit the cigarette and threw the match at Laurent. “Trust? He’d only say he knows me very well. And that’s important. No matter who you are, no matter how awful, it’s good to have someone who knows you—and stays in spite of it.”
“You’re trying to say I don’t know you?”
She blew a line of smoke toward the ceiling. “Oh, how you don’t know me.”
They met at a place deep in the medina, a Moroccan café serving tagines and cous cous and thick soups.
Torrence mused over the menu like a philosopher who has told himself to experience everything but never thought it would come to this. “A man can’t even order a steak frites here?” He regarded the plain wooden tables, the bare walls.
“I was afraid someone at the Minzah would start to recognize us.”
“You mean they might start to recognize you. They already know me.” He regarded the café’s cliental, dark men in threadbare djellabas smoking heavily and speaking in low voices. “And you don’t believe people here will think we’re up to something nefarious?”
Laurent noted the Moroccans busily not looking at them. “For these men, everything we do is by definition nefarious.” He nodded for a waiter who took their orders and went off toward the kitchen. “So, what do you think?”
“About your going to Rabat?” Torrence waggled his head ambivalently. “As I said on the phone, I’m not sure how welcome you would be.”
“Still . . . ” Laurent folded his hands on the table and looked at his friend. Grant had said the British could get him across the frontier, but he felt better checking with Torrence about whether the border guards were still looking for him.
“Still? Meaning, do I think you can get across without being arrested? I asked a few indirect questions. I think they’ve moved on to other matters.”
“So, there’s no reason our people would stop me if I try to cross over.”
“I don’t believe so.”
“Nor the Spanish.”
“I can’t imagine they’re looking for you anymore—though if I were you I’d make a point of crossing at some quiet place in the middle of nowhere, where they’re all smoking kif and don’t give a damn about anything.”
The more Laurent told himself that everything would be fine, the more the pit of dread in the middle of his gut grew.
“Something wrong?” Torrence asked.
“No,” Laurent said with a dismissive wave of his hand. After all, he told himself, he’d made up his mind to go through with it. “Michel, I’m grateful for everything you’ve done. You don’t know how important this is to me.”
“I don’t think I want to know.”
Their orders came and their talk turned to gossip about their colleagues—the common coin of any foreign service—and news of the war.
Torrence poked at his tagine in surprise. “You know, this is rather good.”
“Have you ever received a reply to my message, anything from Marie-Therese?”
Tucking into his tagine with gusto, Torrence shook his head. “I’m not sure I should expect anything if I were you. Even if your letter ever got to the Embassy—and that’s a large if—our colleagues in Washington likely see you as a renegade. I doubt they would pass your letter along.”
Laurent did not mention to Torrence the other letters he had written to Marie-Therese and sent through the regular mails. He knew Torrence would tell him that they had been thrown away, or, worse, opened and studied for clues to track him down. If she had received nothing from him, he feared there would be little left of their marriage when he found her. Thinking of the nights he had spent with Charlotte, he doubted he deserved better.
Torrence dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “So, am I going to see you again?”
Laurent spread his hands and shrugged. “How many times have I promised you I was leaving? Why should you believe me now?”
THIRTY-ONE
It was nearly ten o’clock by the time Laurent returned to the Villa Aeaea that night. He told himself to go straight up to his room, and continued telling himself this even as he turned like a moth toward the light he saw coming from the salon.
But after making his way across the unlighted main room and down the darkened hallway, it wasn’t Charlotte Wald’s voice that greeted him as he entered the salon.
“Ah, Monsieur Laurent, isn’t it?”
Only the strongest act of will kept the Frenchman’s voice at a normal pitch. “Major Wald. A pleasure.”
The German tilted his head in surprise. “Really?” Charlotte’s husband, in his Wehrmacht officer’s uniform, lay on the couch, his stockinged feet propped on its leather-covered arm, a snifter cradled on his stomach. A toe stuck out of a hole in one sock.
He waved his glass in Laurent’s direction. “I think there’s some brandy left in the decanter. Have a seat.”
Every instinct told Laurent to make his excuses and retreat. But a perverse curiosity about Wald and where their conversation might go persuaded him to stay.
“I suppose you were expecting to find my wife here.” The German’s good natured tone didn’t quite hide a dangerous edge. “Ah, I’m sorry. I’ve made you ill at ease. Let us better say you were hoping to run into your landlady. In fact, so was I.”
Laurent poured himself a drink and sat in the armchair. “You are visiting from Tunis again, Major?”
“You know how it is to be in a bureaucracy. Your superiors forever calling you away from your work for some perfectly useless meeting.”
Laurent nodded. “Missing those meetings is one of the few compensations of my current situation.”
“Tell me, what does a diplomat without a country do with himself?”
“I still have a country, Major. But your army is occupying it at the moment.”
Laurent meant to provoke Wald, but the German only smiled faintly.
“At the moment,” Wald mus
ed, wiggling his stockinged toes as if they assisted the thought process. “You may be right. No situation, however pleasant—however bleak—lasts forever.”
“Even a thousand year Reich must end eventually.”
Wald turned his eyes toward the ceiling and laughed. “Thousand year Reich. God forbid.”
“That’s surprising talk coming from a soldier of that Reich.”
Wald turned to Laurent and put a finger to his lips. “Don’t tell a soul.”
The Frenchman realized the Major was a little drunk.
“But you are well on your way,” Laurent said. “Everyone seems to think you have already won this war.”
“Perhaps we have.” Wald extended his lower lip in contemplation. “But I wonder. Britain has not yet sued for peace. Russia won’t always be cowed. The Englischers are trying to get America to enter the war. If they succeed, and Russia turns on us, then it will be just like the last war—fighting on two fronts. Then it will be just a matter of time. And you won’t make the same mistake as in the last war, letting us quit as soon as we see we can’t win. This time, you will destroy us.”
“But if you Nazis truly believe that you are a superior race—”
A warning in his blue eyes, Wald angled his head toward Laurent. “I am not a Nazi. I am a soldier. And I’m bound to obey the orders of my political leaders, no matter my own feelings. My commander, Admiral Canaris, is also a soldier—well, all right, he’s a sailor, but it’s all the same. If, as you say, Hitler wins his war, or has already won it, we will keep quiet and march in whatever victory parade they arrange and speak proudly of our contribution. But if we lose . . . ” He twirled a finger in the air to indicate the vagaries of fortune. “Well, perhaps we will even be a little relieved. Assuming we’re not dead by then.”
“So, you and your wife are of one mind on this.”
Wald brow furrowed in puzzlement. “I miss your meaning.”
“Your mutual dislike of Hitler.”
The German snorted. “I am relieved to find you don’t know my wife well. You see, that is exactly where we part ways. Our relationship is more like an association of compatible souls rather than a real marriage—and I sometimes fear that only one of us has a soul. She idolizes the very man I loathe. She has a vision of a new world order, forged by nature’s supermen. Me? I see my fatherland rendered into smoking ruins by a megalomaniac corporal.”
Laurent tried to hold onto what he thought he knew about Charlotte Wald. “Yet she speaks to me of her contempt for the fascists.”
Wald wagged his finger. “Let us make an important distinction. There are differences between the Nazis and the fascists, between Hitler on the one hand and Mussolini, Franco, their ilk, on the other. My wife sees these latter as weak, vacillating, not worthy to tie the shoes of her avatar of all that’s powerful, ruthless, clear-eyed—her godless deity, Adolf Hitler.”
Sitting in his armchair, brandy in hand, Rene Laurent felt his world slowly turn upside down. “Yet you trust her with—”
“A footloose Frenchman? You misunderstand me at your own risk. Whatever I might say about her, she is my wife. I am a soldier, with a soldier’s sense of personal honor. The night has many eyes.”
Laurent felt a tickle of anxiety trickle down his spine. Wald had joked earlier about the Frenchman’s relationship with his wife, but the joke was over.
“I was only going to say that you trust your wife to carry out your smuggling scheme.”
Wald drew a finger along his lip and made a show of puzzlement. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Laurent admired Wald’s professional discipline. “You needn’t worry, your wife has already—”
The click of high heels in the hallway interrupted the conversation. The two men looked at each other like misbehaving schoolboys about to be caught by a fearsome teacher.
“My God, hasn’t anyone got enough sense to turn on a light?” Charlotte Wald’s voice echoed down the hallway. Muttering her indignation, she entered the salon and stopped short in surprise.
“Uh-oh,” she said without alarm and turned on her brightest smile. “Hello, boys. Did you leave me anything to drink?”
“Ah, darling,” Wald said without sitting up, “we were just talking about you.”
Charlotte poured herself a brandy and lighted a cigarette from the box on the table. “I’m so pleased I wasn’t here to listen.” She kicked Wald’s boots aside and nearly sat on his feet as he pulled them out of the way. She smiled at her husband. “I didn’t know you were coming home, darling.”
“You’ve been at a party.”
“Not really. Just been down at the Rif with Graziano and Helmick and the insufferable Lulu. Too many French down at the Minzah these days. No offense meant, Monsieur Laurent.”
“None taken.”
She eyed her glass narrowly. “I don’t know why I’m drinking this. I’ve been drinking all evening.”
Wald patted her thigh. “It’s all right, dear, so have I, lying around waiting for you to come home. But poor Laurent here”—he gestured toward the Frenchman—“has to take our company sober.”
Charlotte pouted in his direction. “Yes, poor Laurent.”
“He says that you have mentioned to him a little enterprise.” He squinted at her.
For a moment her mask slipped and a flash of panic undercut her usual aplomb. But she recovered quickly. “I’m sure he’s mistaken.”
Laurent saw she had not yet told her husband about folding him into their arrangement. With a jolt of insight, he wondered if it was she, not her husband, who hoped to skim something off the top of the transaction.
Wald looked from his wife to the Frenchman and back again.
If he had previously harbored any doubts, Laurent understood now who had ordered the two men to follow him and why.
THIRTY-TWO
The rendezvous outside Tobey’s bar went as Harris had instructed. Laurent had a drink and came out of the bar to find Grant’s car parked at the curb. Grant drove them out to a spot along the bluffs, beyond the last of the seaside villas. There was a looseness in his driving, an imprecision that told Laurent Grant had been drinking. Again.
“So, tell me,” Grant said, after parking by the side of the road, “how far along is this business?” Beyond the effects of the alcohol, he betrayed a strange agitation, his hands moving restlessly, his head turning as if looking for someone in the surrounding shadows.
The agent’s behavior made Laurent uneasy, wondering if he should be on his guard. “With Charlotte?” he asked. “She’s hardly said a word about it since I first spoke to her.”
Grant tapped his finger against the steering wheel, considered this. If Harris revealed the strains of intelligence work in physical exhaustion, Laurent thought Grant showed it with an unsettling mental excitability. “I think it’ll happen early next week,” he said.
“What makes you say that?”
The Englishman smiled unpleasantly. “We have our ways. Don’t get nosy, Rene.”
Laurent wondered if Grant regretted not getting into a fight with him that evening in the big house and wanted to make up for it right here. No. For all his bluster, Grant seemed to shrink from physical confrontation.
“Listen,” Laurent said, “I think I’d prefer to cross the border at one of the quieter crossing points, perhaps near Chefchaouen.”
“Oh, you’re calling the shots now.” Grant gave an ugly laugh. “What the hell difference does it make to you?”
“The more out-of-the-way places may be safer, the guards less conscientious.”
Grant thought it over. “All right. I don’t give a damn.” Whatever its source, his anxiety made him increasingly boorish, even by his own low standard. The Englishman fumbled for a cigarette in his coat pocket and lighted a match, holding it unsteadily until he had managed to burn himself.
“Shit!” He dropped the match to the floorboard and threw the cigarette after it.
Unable to suffer the other ma
n’s presence any longer, Laurent opened the car door and got out.
“Where’re you going?”
“I need some air.”
He walked to the edge of the bluffs. Behind him, he heard the other car door slam shut and the crunch of footsteps in the gravel. Instinctively, he stepped back from the edge as Grant approached.
“Look,” the Englishman said, “plan on crossing the border next Sunday. It’s quiet on Sundays, like you want. If you want to cross near Chefchaouen, fine, cross near Chefchaouen. We can work it out.” Grant stuffed his hands into his pockets, took them out, clasped them behind him. “You can drive down to Fez from there, spend the night.”
“Fez? I thought it would be Rabat.”
“Where you can find someone at the consulate to help you get to London or Dakar or fuck-all and leave us—me—holding a bag full of shit? Not a chance.”
“And they’ll deliver the currency there, to Fez?”
“We have a friend. He can persuade them to change venues.”
“If you have someone down there I don’t have to try to identify the others after all?”
“Who said we wanted you to identify them?”
“You did.”
“Well, not anymore.”
An indefinable sense of something going wrong nagged at Laurent. “All right, so we get stopped at the border on our way back from Fez. We’re all arrested, but then I’m let free out the back door.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s it?”
“What the hell more do you want?”
“Nothing more we need to discuss, to plan?”
“It’s not complicated. Not your part, anyway. Just do like I tell you. We’ll take care of the rest.”
“Why not just arrest everyone in Fez when they give us the cash?”
Grant turned on Laurent. “Because this is the way we do it, that’s why. If you haven’t got the balls for it, you can walk away now and spend the rest of the war in Tangier picking your toes. Hell, spend the rest of your life here. I don’t give a flying fuck.”
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