Struggling to hide his astonishment, Laurent looked over his shoulder for some sign that the guards realized their mistake. They would come running any moment, and Grant would appear out of the little office, waving his arms to stop them.
Instead, he watched the barrier lowered behind them and the corporal walk slowly back into the shade of his sentry booth.
“Is something wrong?” Charlotte asked.
Laurent turned around in his seat. “No, I . . . No.”
He wondered if he had somehow misunderstood the plan. Were they instead to be stopped on the Spanish side? It seemed strange to think that the British could persuade the Spanish to interfere with a German smuggling operation, but he could think of no other explanation. Moments later, though, the Guardia Civil manning the Spanish crossing glanced at their passports and waved them through.
Was that a smile on Charlotte’s face as they pulled away from the border crossing and drove into the Spanish sector? Had she known of the plan to arrest her and somehow foiled it? Like a ball ricocheting around a rigged roulette wheel, unmoored thoughts bounced around Laurent’s head. The Germans must have got wind of Grant’s plan and turned it. And, if that were true, it meant they knew he was working for the British.
The shadow of another possibility flitted around the edges of his mind, but he could not see it clearly.
With the border behind them, they would be in Tangier in a couple of hours. He wondered what fate waited for him there. He would have to contact Grant, ask what had happened. Would they refuse now to send him to London?
Like heavy seas frozen in place, the rugged hills rose before them. The powerful Panhard breasted them with ease, hardly straining as it climbed the steep slopes.
They passed through a small, dust-dry valley beyond Chefchaouen and roared up the twisting road on the far side. Nearing its crest, Charlotte looked at Laurent for the first time since they had crossed the border, an unreadable expression on her face.
Laurent hardly had time to wonder at her thoughts before they rounded a bend on the mountain road and found before them, parked on the opposite side of the road, a small car—Grant’s Peugeot. Squinting into the sun, the Englishman leaned against the hood, his arms folded over his chest. As they neared, he stepped forward, almost into the roadway, and raised his hands.
Charlotte eased the touring car onto the shoulder next to Grant’s vehicle, overlooking the valley through which they had passed. She pulled on the handbrake and gave Laurent a queer smile. “You never understood, did you?” She leaned across Laurent, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out a small caliber automatic with mother-of-pearl grips. A woman’s gun, but as deadly as any other at close range.
“Shh,” she whispered as she held the pistol below the dashboard, out of sight. “Now, we’ll both get out of the car,” she said. “Don’t say a word to Grant. Understood?”
The Englishman approached the car smiling, his empty hands still raised. Laurent wondered why Grant was not armed. Did he really think the mere sight of him would be enough to get her to surrender? And why, after making such elaborate plans, had he waited until now to confront her? It seemed both stupid and dangerous.
Laurent opened the passenger door and got out. He watched Charlotte step out onto the dirt shoulder. With the open car door screening her from Grant, she slipped the gun into the pocket of her skirt.
Grant walked toward them, still smiling.
Laurent wondered if he should warn Grant she had a gun. But the Englishman’s peculiar nonchalance made him hesitate. “Hello, love,” Grant said to Charlotte, ignoring Laurent.
Like a sleepwalker suddenly awakened, Laurent grasped the meaning of the scene in front of him. The possibility he had sensed earlier, hidden in the shadows of his mind, had stepped into the light. The two of them, Grant and Charlotte, were working together, on their own. When Wald had claimed he knew nothing about Charlotte’s plans to smuggle currency it hadn’t been smooth spycraft, but the simple truth. Of course the Germans could have arranged such an operation by paying a few Vichy Frenchman to look the other way. But Grant and Charlotte had neither the weight nor the money to swing it themselves. They had needed him.
Now, having crossed the border safely, Charlotte had no more need for Grant and was going to kill him.
In that moment, he knew he wanted no more to do with any of them. He wanted nothing to do with the war or de Gaulle or Harris or Grant or Charlotte or any of it.
Even if he had to hitchhike from this spot, he would go back to Fez and make a new life there, wait out the war as one would wait out a fever. For the first time since he had left Bordeaux—perhaps for the first time since his marriage—all he wanted was to live in some quiet corner with his wife, in peace, relieved of ambition. He wanted a happy marriage. He wanted a son.
When he looked again, he saw something new in Charlotte’s eyes—flat, dead, entirely without pity.
The bizarre tableau suddenly tickled him. It was all such a joke. Though he knew it must appear perverse, he started to laugh. He and Charlotte had come to the same conclusion about the war, but for reasons so different that he could only think of how ludicrous it was, how slow he had been to see it. Just as the war no longer mattered to him, he knew it had never mattered very much to the mistress of the Villa Aeaea, neither the war nor her husband nor Siggy. Whatever mourning she might put on, whatever impassioned words she may have delivered at Volubulis, all she wanted out of the war was money.
His laughter died in his throat. He felt a sweat break out on his brow as he understood for the first time what Charlotte had been trying to say to him in the ruins of the temple at Volubulis. Her plea to join her had not been an invitation; it had been a final warning.
PART VII
FALL 1995
THIRTY-SIX
Christopher Chaffee’s confrontation with Drake at the old spy’s apartment had left him deeply disturbed. The madman’s words whirled in Chaffee’s mind as he lay in bed that night, each word carrying two meanings, one he thought he understood and one he knew he did not.
And the indictment. Ross had told him he was in no immediate danger of arrest. Part of him wanted to go back immediately and fight the charges. He’d paid the money back, had lost his position, suffered public humiliation. What more did they want?
Another part of him said no, he would finish what he had come to do and go back only when he knew what had happened to his father. And if he never found out? Would that mean he would never go back? Tangier was an easier city to get into than it was to leave.
When sunrise began to lighten his room, he called the front desk. Miloud Mansour picked up on the second ring, sounding like a man who had enjoyed a long and untroubled sleep.
“Monsieur Mansour, I need to place a call to the United States.”
“Yes. Certainly.” A polite clearing of the throat. “It is quite late at night there.”
“Yes, I know.”
The alarm in his mother’s voice—it was just past 3:00 a.m. in Washington—ate at his resolve, but he vowed to finish this.
“What? Why are you—? Christopher, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Mother. At least nothing that hasn’t been wrong for a long time.”
She groaned in exasperation. “Don’t talk to me in riddles, Christopher. Tell me, have you found your father?”
“No.”
“Then why—”
“Why did you stop speaking French to me?”
“What?” The cry of her disbelief pierced his ear like a stiletto. “Christopher, you’ve had forty years to ask that question and you have to call me from Africa in the middle of the night with it?”
“Mother, why did you stop speaking French to me?”
“Ah, Christopher, it’s so long ago. How—?”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you started to remind me too much of your father.”
Her answer neither surprised nor satisfied him.
“I’d have thought it wou
ld have been pleasant for you.”
“Well, you’re wrong.”
Chaffee fought against his own building anger. “Tell me, Mother, the truth this time. What kind of man was he?”
“I’ve told you so many times. He was a saint.”
“All you’re telling me is that you didn’t know him.”
“Any better than he knew me.”
She wouldn’t give an inch. Chaffee thought of hanging up, but it was a boxing match now and one of them would have to go down before it was over. It had taken a voyage to Morocco for him to realize he had resented his father his whole life. And only now did he realize that his mother had resented him, too. The poor bastard. No real person could survive the idolatry they had both expended on him in their different ways, and no real man should have to bear their combined hundred years of ill will. Christ, no wonder he didn’t want to be found.
“Mother, tell me why he didn’t want to be with me, why he let us leave without him. Why wasn’t I important enough to him? He could have come to America—”
“Because he didn’t know.”
He hadn’t thought that he would be the one to fall to the canvas first.
When he found his voice, he could not kick it above a whisper. “He what?”
“Christopher, this is a ridiculous conversation. C’est ridicule. I’m going back to bed.”
“No!” Chaffee struggled to put some strength in his voice, to show he would not be knocked out, would get to his feet. “What do you mean, he didn’t know?”
In the renewed silence he feared she might hang up on him, or already had.
“I mean what I said, that’s all. He didn’t know about you. I wasn’t showing yet, and I didn’t tell him.”
Chaffee tried to say something sensible but could only babble, “But . . . but, why?”
“Because I wasn’t sure what to do about you. Christopher? Are you there?”
“You’re saying—”
“Stop asking me questions! You can’t understand the answers. You can’t understand what it was like. There was a war. Everything looked different then. What kind of world could it offer for a child?”
“But my father—”
“What about him? He had disappeared. Oh, yes, now we think we can account for everyone, everything. Like God. We knew better back then. Millions disappeared in that war. Simply disappeared. Under the sea, into the mud, into the flames, into the camps. The war devoured them and they disappeared like they’d never existed.”
“But he didn’t just disappear. He died in a Vichy prison.”
His mother groaned like someone being tortured. “I don’t know that. Not for certain. Back then it seemed as likely as anything, so that’s what I said.”
“Then all those years, Maman . . . ” Chaffee expelled a breath as if he had been struck in the chest. “You just made up that story.”
“I didn’t just make it up. It was possible.”
“True? Possible? They’re not the same thing. You just made something up and told it to me my whole life. Did you think you were doing me a favor?”
“For you? God, no. For Dalton. He loved me. This was after the war. Your father had been missing for years. But if there was a chance he was still alive, Dalton wouldn’t have married me. He was too good a man to do that. So I told myself your father had to be dead. Then I told Dalton the same.” A hollow laugh echoed over the line. “How did I come by such noble men? And, yes, all right, I did it for you. I wanted you to have a father, a good man to raise you.”
“And you loved him.” He didn’t want to ask her, feared the answer, so he told her. “You loved Dalton.”
“All right, if that’s what you want, yes. If I ever had any happiness, it was with him. But I had no peace, because in my heart I never believed your father was dead. Not for a moment. I wanted him to come back, and I was terrified he might. Do you know what it’s like to live with such guilt and fear?”
Christopher Chaffee breathed in, breathed out. “Yes. I do.”
“Fine. Then you know.” She began to weep. “I wasn’t given the chance to love your father, didn’t have enough time. And then he was gone. You have to find him, Christopher. Bring him back so I can finally love him.”
He could hear her sobbing, could see her sitting on the edge of her bed in her room, head bowed, the night lamp on, weeping fifty-odd years of tears. He thought of Julie. Thought of her love for him. Wholly undeserved. A gift. And, like any true gift, it could not be taken, but only returned in kind. What a fortunate man he was. Why had he never seen it before?
“Mother?”
Nothing.
“Mother.”
Raw with pleading, he would not have recognized her voice. “Just come home, Christopher. Come home. I don’t want to know anymore. Let him rest now. Retourne chez moi, mon petit chou. Come back to me, my little boy. I’m old and—”
“I can’t. Not yet. It matters too much to me now. I have to know. When I find out, then I’ll come home.”
“Non. Non. Non. Just come home.”
“I’ve found a woman and a crazy old man. They both know something, and I’ve got to find out what it is.”
Then, with the receiver still in his hand, he suddenly understood what he should have realized the night before. Drake was terrified of discovery, of the thought he might go to prison. And a man like Drake would not go screaming into hell all by himself. He would strike at whoever he thought might know his secrets, anyone who might grasp the depth of his depravity, whose very existence served as a perpetual accusation.
Dread sunk into him like a cold fog. Chaffee understood that in his last conversation with Drake he had inadvertently betrayed to him who that person was, made the murderous old madman think Sands was going to turn him over to the police for his crimes, the ones that Sands knew, and, in Drake’s twisted mind, the unnamed enormities that came before.
“Listen, Mother, I have to get off the phone. There’s something I have to . . . I may have made a terrible mistake.”
“No, Christopher, listen—”
But he had already hung up and was heading for the door.
The taxi could take him only as far as the edge of the medina, its streets too narrow for any car. Chaffee paid the driver and entered the labyrinth of the old city. He was already sweating, not from the exertion, but from fear.
It had been years since Chaffee had asked much of his body. He had gotten heavy and out of shape and now felt a wave of dismay at the clumsy shuffle that responded to his call to run. Surely, he thought, if I could find the house in the dark I can find it again in daylight. But nothing looked familiar without the garland of shadow. He squeezed around passersby, took wrong turns and blind alleys, bumped into men and women and children who formed a moving maze within the fixed maze of the streets.
When the fear had fully gripped him, the terror that he might wander forever, lost in the medina’s aimless passageways, she appeared before him, walking down the narrow street, a basket of groceries in the crook of her elbow.
“Malika!” She didn’t turn around. “Malika!”
Exhaustion gripped his legs, his lungs, his heart and he folded over, hands on knees, trying to regain his breath, his chest suddenly hollow and fluttery.
It was his loss of strength that gave the two boys the chance to run past him. He tried to grab at their pencil-like arms, but they dashed by, weaving through the crowded streets until they came up behind Malika.
They hardly paused, a few seconds, managing the thing so quickly that she did not distinguish it from the normal jostling of the crowded street.
Already she was nearly out of sight. Knowing that a man’s life might depend on keeping her in sight, he summoned from somewhere deep inside a touch of bygone speed and dashed off at a creditable trot.
Perhaps it was the sound of his footsteps, or maybe only the reflex to look behind when passed by someone running, as she had been by the two boys. Whatever it was, she stopped and turned, and Chaffee
, using up the last few good strides allotted to him in this lifetime, caught up with her.
Panting too hard to speak, he could only knock the basket off her arm, spilling its oranges and bread and spices onto the pavement.
Malika recoiled in shock, too astonished by his action to recognize him.
The American pointed to the boys, who had stopped a few yards up the street, looking back to see what had happened.
“Stop!” he gasped, and turned toward Malika. “Stop them.”
Chaffee had recognized the boys from Drake’s apartment, and now they recognized him and took off running. Still panting for breath, he dropped to his hands and knees among the spilled groceries, searching through the fruit and bread and small bags.
“Here!” He held up to Malika a small sack of green tea, its seal broken. While passersby stared at the crazy foreigner scrabbling around in the middle of the street, Chaffee poured the contents of the bag onto the pavement, not quite sure what he was looking for until he found it—an off-white powder that was clearly not tea.
“There,” he said, pinching some of it between his fingers and holding it out to Malika.
“Monsieur Chaffee?” she said in disbelief.
Working to regain his breath, Chaffee tried to speak evenly. “He’s crazy, a madman.” He realized Malika must be wondering why he was speaking about himself in the third person. “Drake.” He pointed in the direction the boys had disappeared. “They put this in the tea. They saw me find it just now. They may still be trying to harm him. Monsieur Sands.” Could she understand a word he said? “We have to help Sands.”
Deeply puzzled, Malika stared at Chaffee, then at the odd powder. She looked over her shoulder in the direction the boys had run. When she turned back to Chaffee he could see she understood; her employer, the old man who loved her, was in danger.
Leaving the basket where it fell, not waiting for Chaffee, she turned and headed up the street with agonizing slowness, her djellaba keeping her from anything faster than a quick shuffle.
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