Laurent took a deep breath, tried to control his growing irritation. “All right. We do as you say.”
“Damn right we do.” Grant seemed to understand he had aggravated Laurent more than was helpful. “I just need to make things clear, that’s all. We don’t want to make any mistakes.” He started walking back toward the car.
Laurent turned to follow him. “By the way, I saw Wald the night before last.”
Grant stopped and looked back at Laurent. “Wald?”
“Yes. Is that terribly important?”
“No. It’s just . . . I thought he was in Tunis.”
“Apparently, he was called back for a meeting.”
The Englishman walked back toward Laurent. “And you saw him where?”
“He was at the villa when I came home the other evening.”
Grant eyed him. “What did you talk about?”
“Mostly about his wife.”
“Not about me?”
For a moment Laurent thought he was joking. “You?”
“You think that’s funny?” The Englishman unclasped his hands, thrust them back in his pockets, and then took them out again.
“But why would Wald—”
“He’s got it in for me.”
“Wald? For you?” With a sudden jolt of shock, Laurent realized Grant was on the edge of panic.
Something in the Frenchman’s manner apparently made Grant realize how he was coming across, and he abruptly changed back to the brash vulgarian, chuckling nastily. “He must be delighted to have you in the house with his wife.”
Unsettled by Grant’s volatility, Laurent wondered how many people he was talking to. “There are limits to his affability. I think he could be dangerous. Do you think he might try. . . ?” He finished his sentence with a shrug.
“Try to have you killed? I can’t see why not,” Grant said with a coarse laugh.
“I’m glad you find the prospect amusing. Look, I mentioned to Wald something about this smuggling operation of his.”
Grant stiffened. “Yeah?”
“I don’t think he knows that Charlotte has brought me into it. Pretended he didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” Grant looked closely at Laurent. “Did he say when he was going back to Tunis?”
“Not that I recall.”
Grant shook his head and muttered, “Not that you recall. Jesus.”
The inexplicable anxiety that had so roiled the Englishman a few minutes earlier had vanished, leaving him as unpleasant as ever. His sudden calm made Laurent as uneasy as his earlier mania.
A cool breeze blew in off the water. Grant pulled his coat tighter. “Summer’s over,” he grunted. “Let’s get out of here.”
Laurent stopped as he opened his door, and said to Grant over the top of the car, “The funny thing . . . ”
“Yeah?”
“I find that I rather like him.”
“A couple of toffs like you. Why not?” Grant started to get into the car then stood up again. “By the way, you’re not being followed anymore.”
“They’ve decided I’m not important?”
“Or they’ve found out whatever they wanted to know about you. I’d sleep with one eye open if I were you.” He let the comment sink in. “Get in the car. I have other things to do tonight.”
It happened as Grant said it would. The following evening Rabia came up to Laurent’s room and told him that Madame Charlotte wished to see him in the salon.
This time she wore no thin djellaba or silk evening dress, only slacks and a sweater. She sat in the armchair, surrounded by shadows, her legs lighted by spill from the hallway, the rest of her in darkness, a cigarette smoldering between her fingers.
“Everything is ready. We leave on Sunday. Plans have changed. We’ll cross the border near Chefchaouen and go down to Fez.” The tip of her cigarette glowed as she took a drag. The smell of burned tobacco filled the room, and he wondered how long she had been sitting in the dark waiting for him.
“Does the change make you uneasy?” he asked.
“No,” she said sharply. “Why should it?”
“No reason. You have the diplomatic plates?”
“Yes, of course.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Does it matter?” She tried to cover her impatience with a thin laugh that quickly died. “From my husband, of course.”
“You finally told him I was a part of this?”
“He knew all along.”
“He’ll be coming with us?”
“No. He leaves tomorrow night.”
“But he’s not here now?”
Abruptly, she leaned forward, her head and shoulders coming into the light, her mouth glistening with deep red lipstick, wearing a carnivorous smile that chilled Laurent to the soul. “Does it make you uneasy to have him here?”
“Why should it?”
This time her laugh sounded as genuine as it was irritating.
“Did he talk to you about a soldier’s honor?” She read his silence like a book. “You’ve put yourself on dangerous ground.”
“I didn’t get here by myself.”
She ignored the comment.
“I think he’s down at the Rif this evening with the usual crowd. Graziano. Helmick.”
“And the tiresome Lulu.”
“And the tiresome Lulu.”
“The Englishman, as well? What was his name? Grant?”
“Grant.” Charlotte took a nervous pull from her cigarette and affected a casual tone. “I suppose he’s there. Why?”
“No reason.” The attraction of espionage was becoming clearer to Laurent. Secret knowledge held its own fascination, a feeling of power. “So, Sunday. Three days. We leave early in the morning, I assume.”
“Good god, no. Let’s keep this civilized. Late morning. We spend the night in Fez while the shoemaker’s elves load the car. Back on Monday.”
“The Reich grows that much richer, and I get my ticket out of here. A devil’s bargain.”
Charlotte stubbed out her cigarette and got to her feet. “Goodnight, Laurent.” It was the first time in weeks she had called him by his surname.
“Goodnight, Frau Wald.”
She turned in the doorway as if she might say something, but she let it go and walked away.
Laurent woke with a start in the middle of the night, certain he had heard something. A tread on the stairway? He had a sudden image of Wald coming up the steps with a Luger in his hand. Blood rushed to his head and he thought of leaping from the bed and throwing the door open. He would not die lying in bed. But the sound, whatever it was, had stopped.
As Laurent’s head came clear and the room remained silent, he decided it was only something from a dream. Yet he felt, or imagined, a pulsing echo of something real, sensed it reverberating throughout the large house. A fading shout? A sudden cry?
He lay awake for a long time, but heard nothing more before finally falling back to sleep.
THIRTY-THREE
The next morning the usual time for breakfast came and went without any sign of Rabia. Laurent had at first enjoyed having his meals brought to him, as if from room service. Over time, though, he had come to feel more like a prisoner being fed in his cell, the idea strengthened by the clockwork regularity of Rabia’s appearance at his door.
A memory of waking in the middle of the night came back to him. With it came the uneasiness he had felt. Laurent rose and went downstairs, walking along the corridor and through the main room. Mornings in the villa were always quiet, but the stillness carried a different quality than usual.
When he entered the kitchen he found that no one had lighted the stove and the room still held the night’s chill. On a wooden chair in the middle of the room sat Rabia, her eyes red, tears staining her cheeks. Near her, the houseboy, Mohammed, stood silently, as if Rabia’s grief needed a witness.
“What’s wrong?” Laurent asked.
Her voice thick fro
m weeping, she sobbed, “Monsieur Wald.”
“What about him?”
“He is dead.”
“Dead?”
Rabia nodded. Uttering the word had eased some of its burden and she ceased crying.
“Wald? But how. . . ?”
Rabia shrugged, though Laurent could not tell if she meant she didn’t know or that she could not speak. Either way, she could give him no more.
With a glance at Mohammed, Laurent retreated from the kitchen.
As he recrossed the main room, he saw the Citroen pull up in front of the house.
Laurent walked outside through the portico and stopped at the top of the steps.
While the big car idled, M’barak came around and opened the door for the mistress of the Villa Aeaea. She stepped out briskly, like a woman a few minutes late for an appointment, but her face was pale and expressionless, drained of everything but grief. Marching up the steps as if sleepwalking, she would have passed Laurent without stopping, perhaps without seeing him, if he had not reached out and touched her.
She stared at his hand on her arm.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Are you?” she asked, her voice flat—not skeptical or accusatory, only curious.
She allowed Laurent to take her arm and accompany her inside. When he had shut the door behind them she was suddenly like an actress who has walked offstage and is now safely out of sight of the audience. With a fury that startled Laurent she turned on him. “Poisoned! The bastards! Poisoned!” She spun out of his reach and he knew not to pursue her. “He was a soldier. He deserved to die like a soldier, not like a . . . a dog.” She raised her fists in the air as if to call down God’s wrath, but could utter only an animal growl.
“Where? Where did it happen? At the Rif?”
“Who knows? He fell ill on his way back here in the car. M’barak brought him inside, but he went into convulsions and was dead before anyone could call me down.”
She didn’t need to tell him—did she know?—that Grant had killed her husband, though Laurent could not fathom why. Something about the way the Englishman didn’t defend himself, neither when Laurent knocked him down at the Moulay Idriss nor, later, when they had argued at the safe house in Harris’s presence, made it easy to believe him one of those men who lacked the courage to fight and would wait for a moment to get even another way. He would choose poison. Yet, what grudge could he have had against Wald? Maybe Grant was the sort who didn’t need a reason.
“God. To die like that.” Charlotte groaned as if she were breaking apart. “Spies. Who else would kill him like that? Miserable cowards.” Blindly as a top spinning across a table, she propelled herself into the main room. “All these spies think Tangier is their playground, but it’s just the last ring of hell. The place they go to kill each other.” With a violent wave of her hand, she fled toward the stairs, pausing on the bottom step only long enough to turn on Laurent. “Don’t follow me. Don’t you dare follow me.”
That day and the next, the villa witnessed a remorseless series of comings and goings, like rain dripping steadily from a roof. Grim faced men in uniforms—German, Spanish, Italian—others in suits. No police. Only Graziano from the circle at the Minzah. Certainly not Grant. Laoui came, pale and stricken, courtly to Charlotte but not presumptuous, his grief for her sincere. Laurent had never before admired him, but now would never again think of him the same way.
Laurent kept to his room through most of it, running into Charlotte alone only once, when she had come home from one of the several trips she made downtown, wearing a jet black dress that would have made her indescribably desirable but for the stony anger written on her face.
He tried to think of something to say. “There will be a funeral?”
She scoffed. “No. Thank God. The army takes care of that. They flew his body back to Ulm yesterday. They’ll bury him there.” She shook her head and said with surprising vehemence, “I won’t go.”
He had to ask. “And I assume our trip south is off.”
She shook her head. “No. We leave tomorrow at ten.”
Unable to sleep, Laurent left his bed and padded through the empty house to the stairs off the dining room, and so once more up to the roof of the Villa Aeaea. He hoped Charlotte would hear him and come up, though this time he had no wish to take her back down to her bed, or to his. Instead, he wanted to be honest with her. Perhaps he owed her that much. Perhaps he only owed it to himself. He wanted to tell her about Grant and Harris and how she would be arrested if she traveled to Fez with him—and how he suspected that Grant was only interested because he wanted to get his hands on some of the money. He would confess to her that his acquaintance with both Siggy and her husband had led to their deaths. And he wanted to tell her that he loved his wife.
Whether or not Grant was an effective intelligence officer Laurent had no idea, but he was increasingly certain that in the course of a normal life the Englishman would quickly be pegged as a psychopath of the most dangerous kind. Instead, war had given him the perfect camouflage. Not only could he indulge his darkest impulses, he would be rewarded for it. War twisted any cause, any ideal, into one more pretext to spread death. It gave sanction to the most unholy urges—and those who hid their sickness most deeply were the ones who had set the world on fire.
Laurent looked out at the lights of the city and the darkness beyond, but this time the view gave him no comfort. He leaned against the parapet, felt the breeze that no longer cleansed him, thought of the trip he would take the next day and how it would end, and listened to the dry rustle of the palms, like the scraping of dead men’s bones.
Whom should he betray? To whom did he owe loyalty? Only a few months earlier the questions would have seemed to Laurent absurd, the answers obvious. Now they yielded no easy answers as he descended the stairway toward Charlotte’s room, vowing to tell her everything. The government of the country he loved regarded him as a traitor. He had betrayed his marriage vows with a woman who supported everything he detested. Yet he wished to warn this woman of the trap he had helped to lay. What twisted manner of loyalty was this?
The answer came in broken pieces that took Laurent some time to put together; he owed loyalty to what was best in himself, to what decency had survived within him. Whatever his previous feelings might have been toward her, he despised Charlotte now and detested what she stood for. Yet as he walked down the broad corridor toward her room he told himself these feelings could not justify the squalid action he was about to take.
Her open suitcase on the bed, a folded skirt in her arms, Charlotte Wald halted in mid-stride and stared at Laurent standing in her doorway. After a moment she turned away and laid the skirt in the bag. “What do you want?”
He had never before come to her room unbidden. Clearly, she didn’t like it.
“I want to talk to you.”
Without looking at him, she took a sweater from a drawer and laid it on top of the skirt. “Whatever it is, we can talk tomorrow in the car.” With a look of annoyance, Charlotte searched through the contents of her bag. After she had gone through everything twice, she clicked her tongue impatiently and walked past Laurent into the corridor.
In the empty bedroom, Laurent felt his resolve evaporate. He put his hands in his pockets and waited for Charlotte to return. A box of cigarettes stood on Charlotte’s nightstand. He took one and looked for a match. The dish where she normally kept them was empty, so he opened the drawer beneath it, thinking to find some there.
What he found instead turned everything upside down.
Piled neatly in the back of the drawer was a small stack of envelopes. He picked them up and riffled through them, though he knew already what they were. Unstamped, unposted, each of them slit open, they were the letters he had written to his wife.
Why? Why should she care if he wrote to his wife? Was she—the irony almost too heavy to contemplate—looking for hints of betrayal, an indication that he might inform on her? Perhaps it was simple sp
ite, mixed with curiosity. The fact that he made no reference to her in the letters would have proved the ultimate insult.
He thought of the fool he had been, entrusting the letters to M’barak, who, no doubt at Charlotte’s instruction, had handed them over one by one to his mistress.
Laurent told himself he should at least ask M’barak to return the money he had given him for stamps.
How many times had he taken comfort, picturing Marie-Therese reading his letters, knowing he was thinking of her? Now he felt like a marooned sailor who finds his message in a bottle washed up on his own shore.
Harris was right. These people had no decency and deserved none. The scruples he had felt minutes earlier, thinking they required him to tell Charlotte everything, were simply misplaced squeamishness. He had discounted the many warnings Harris and Grant had given him, thinking them simply self-justification for their own sordid actions. It had finally taken a handful of unsent letters to understand the stakes.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Charlotte’s footsteps coming down the corridor. Quickly, he returned the letters to their place and shut the drawer. He was a spy now and these skills came naturally to him.
Charlotte’s indifference toward him was only slightly leavened by surprise to find him still there as she came back into the room, a small makeup bag in her hands.
“You’re right.” Laurent said to her. “We can talk about it tomorrow.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The dawn broke gray with low clouds obscuring the sun. A faint drizzle during the night had dampened the grass and darkened the driveway. Though the calendar had noted the equinox weeks earlier, this was the first time it seemed autumn had truly arrived.
M’barak stood in the drive wiping a few imaginary smudges from the glossy hood of a black touring car with diplomatic plates, an enormous Panhard with a trunk that could have held a lifeboat with plenty of room left for the six million francs Charlotte said they would be transporting.
The boy, Mohammed, came down the steps carrying Charlotte’s overnight case. Laurent let him take his valise as well and he put them both in the trunk.
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