THE BOY FROM THE TANGIER SOUK

by Richard Savin

  On the taxi ride back to Cadaqués the full awfulness of her position percolated through her consciousness. She had effectively become a prisoner by her own hand. She had lost control of her life and if Carlos so wished it she would become no better than a slave. By the time she reached the house her anger had become a boiling rage.

  Chapter 19

  Visitors

  There was a sound. It was a noise that should not have been there. Jordan was jerked out of his sleep. In a single move that was born of instinct he rolled off the bed, his hand grabbing the trench gun as he went. Crouching, he ran across the bedroom. There was someone moving in the house. He inched the door open. Across the way he saw Grainger in the doorway of his own room. He held up the trench gun, pressing it to his lips in a signal to be quiet. Carefully he stepped into the hallway.

  In that same moment the door to the kitchen was flung open and the world exploded. A deafening hail of gunfire shattered the air. Muzzle flashes and smoke. Grainger dropped to the floor, firing into the flashes coming from the kitchen end of the hall. He watched Jordan go down, the trench gun clattering across the floor. He dived, got a hand on it and, pumping every round as he went, blasted his way along the hall. As he reached the kitchen he fired the last shell; the trench gun was empty. He knew he was down to maybe the last three rounds in his FN.

  He stood flat against the wall and waited. The air was brittle with silence and the acrid stench of cordite from spent rounds. He flinched as something in the kitchen fell tinkling to the floor. He waited but there was nothing. As his ears became more settled he heard a subdued moaning coming from where Jordan had fallen. He knew it was likely to be bad, and feared the worst.

  Cautiously he inched his way into the kitchen. The trench gun had made a fair mess of it. The door lay shattered on the floor where it had been ripped off its hinges and shredded. The floor was littered with shards of crockery, smashed glass, fragments of timber, metal pots and pans. It was a battle field of debris.

  The door to the garden was open and coming through it he heard the sound of retreating footsteps. Someone was running away. Dumping his caution he dashed out into the night. From across the wall he heard the slamming of car doors, the noise of an engine and then wheels skidding on the road. He got into the street in time to see the back end of a green Renault car before it was swallowed by the dark.

  Back in the kitchen he switched on the light. The first thing he saw was a body. It was Alphonse Bouchard. He was lying flat on his back under the wreckage of the door. Grainger pushed the corpse with his foot then he put a round through its head. He wasn’t taking any more chances.

  The sound of a groan nudged his attention and he remembered Jordan. When he got to him he found he had managed to prop himself up against the wall but he was barely conscious. His breath came rasping and shallow but his mouth was dry and there were no signs of blood in it. High up in his chest there was an entry wound and his singlet was soaked red. It was clear he had lost a lot of blood. He needed help, but where from?

  Grainger looked at his watch: 3:22. The city would be sleeping. ‘Damn!’ He ran into the salon and grabbed the phone. Harriman was his only hope. It rang and rang until the line dropped out but nobody was picking up. He slammed the receiver down and bolted back to Jordan. He was still breathing but it was getting weaker. The only option left was to get him into the car and drive to the nearest hospital. There was one on the way into the city. He had noticed it when they first came to the villa. He would have to pick up Jordan and carry him out to the car.

  ‘Sorry Tommy,’ he whispered, ‘this is going to hurt but I’ve got to get you some help.’

  He got as far as the front door when the phone rang. Dropping Jordan into a chair he ran to the salon. It was Harriman. ‘Sorry,’ the voice said, ‘couldn’t get to the phone before it rang out. I was in the bathroom. At my age you have to get up in the middle of the night to take a piss. Hang in there – I’ll be right over.’

  A station wagon pulled up at the front door. ‘We got a doc, where is he?’ Harriman called out. As he barged through the front door he saw Jordan propped up in the chair, Grainger standing next to him, pressing a towel against his chest.

  ‘He’s bleeding like a stuck pig. I just hope there’s something you can do for him.’

  The doctor lifted the towel away and with a pair of scissors cut through the bloodied singlet. ‘No exit wound. The slug’s still inside him. We need to find it and get it out. Can’t do that here, he needs hospitalisation.’ He took a syringe and two vials out of his bag. ‘I’m gonna give him a shot of morphine and one of phenobarbital. The pheno will stop him from going into spasm. Trouble is, it might just kill him but it’s a chance we’ll have to take.’

  They gave the drugs a few moments to work, then loaded Jordan onto a stretcher and carried him out to the station wagon.

  Before he left, Harriman looked around the kitchen. He crouched down and pulled what remained of the door off the corpse of Alphonse Bouchard. He stood up again. ‘Jesus, this is a mess. I’ll get a team over to clean up. Lock the doors and leave the keys; there’s an urn outside the front door, throw them into that – then get the hell out of here. Stay away from the embassy; we have to distance ourselves. Right now you’re compromised and I have enough problems without you giving me more. Find a hotel and lie low. I’ll be in touch when I can.’

  After Harriman had gone Grainger stood alone in the quiet of the empty villa and ran over in his mind what had happened. How the hell had they got the jump on them – again. There had to be leak, but where? Who? He needed to let London know what had happened. That would be a security issue in its own right. It was clear Harriman was not going to help. He’d just have to take a chance on a cable. His eye drifted down onto Bouchard’s body. ‘Bastard,’ he muttered, ‘we should have done him, Tommy, back there when we had the chance.’

  He gathered up his things, at the last minute remembering the leather suitcase with the guns and ammo in it. That, he said to himself, might come in handy. He lugged his stuff out to the Citroën and stowed it in the boot. He was about to get behind the wheel when his eye was caught by something lying at the side of the road. He walked to where it lay on the parched grass. It was a perfectly good straw hat: a boater with a distinctive striped band around the crown; a calling card dropped in the chaotic haste of the getaway. He picked it up, dusted off some strands of dry grass and stuck it on his head. Now he was sure who he was looking for.

  As he drove towards the city it dawned on him that it was too early to find a hotel; he would just have to stooge around for a bit, probably till midday.

  *

  The Hotel Sidi Alhambra was modest but clean, and it had the advantage that it was stuck away out on the coast. It sat in its own garden, walled around to keep out the unwanted. Better still, it was popular with tourists; he would be an unremarkable guest.

  After he had unpacked he went down to the bar, got a large whisky and soda, and took it back to his room. For the moment he felt like keeping his head down. Tomorrow he would go to the main post office in the centre of the city where he could arrange a telegram. He would, he decided, send it to Gibraltar. They could advise London; that way it would raise less suspicion.

  When evening came he went down to the hotel dining room where the offering was a traditional tagine: a tough piece of goat cooked with salted lemons, and spices he neither recognised nor much cared for. The hotel had some Spanish wine, which helped his mood, though not the stewed goat which he considered beyond assistance.

  After dinner he sat out on the veranda overlooking the sea with no one for company, just a glass of brandy and his thoughts. He wondered how Jordan was and if he would pull through. It had been a bad 24 hours. They had been second-guessed at every turn. He idly picked up the straw boater and examined it. The ribbon banded around it was a candy stripe but the colours were unusual – black and red – and where there was normally a bow that held it to the crown, there was instead an ena
melled pin brooch bearing a geometric insignia, a stylised combination of the letters S and A.

  Whoever was the owner, he was clearly being fed information, on him and probably on the mission too. There had to be a leak, someone on the inside. Then there was that woman. He still couldn’t place her but she stuck in his mind. He knew he had met her, or seen her before, but it wouldn’t come.

  In amongst all this Boukhari. Why was he killed? He had taken Grainger as a prisoner, to be sold he said, but why him, and who was in the market to buy him? And why was someone paying to kill Jordan? Boukhari had stated it plainly, Jordan was to be killed, and now maybe they had succeeded. Well, at least he’d managed to see off the killer; Alphonse Bouchard was as dead as a corpse could get. One nil to us, he thought – assuming Jordan survived, but the mission was coming unpicked and the whole thing was turning into a bloody shooting gallery. The bodies were piling up around him, and he was no nearer to finding Xicluna than he had been when he first stepped ashore at Tangier. The thoughts led him to check his gun. The clip was down to a single round.

  As he reloaded it he let his mind drift off to another place and another person. He picked his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a folded piece of paper. It was the letter Evangeline had left for him at La Vajol, with Harper, after he had sent her with José, safely away, over the mountains and into Spain. By the time he had arrived at La Vajol she had moved on, leaving him the letter. It seemed like a lifetime since then, though in fact it was barely two months. He smoothed the letter out on the bed and read it again.

  Richard,

  mon plus cher amour,

  When you have finished fighting your war come back and find me — I will be waiting for you. I could not find a proper token of my love for you so I am leaving you this. It is half of my heart. I have kept the other half and it will be here until you return to claim it. There will never be another love in my life and I long to have you back.

  Tu seras mon amour pour toujours,

  Evangeline

  At the bottom she had drawn a line of little black cats and underneath each one was a number. ‘I am giving you nine new lives,’ she had written. ‘Please take care of them.’

  He put his fingers into the wallet and took out what she had called one half of her heart. It was his half of a gold Napoleon she had clipped into two pieces.

  He was only days behind her when he had crossed the mountains himself and had wanted to find her, but there had been no time before Charlie Armitage had dragged him off on this half-baked mission, and it had never come about.

  He tapped a finger on the line of little black cats at the bottom of the letter. ‘Well,’ he said half out loud. ‘That’s at least two of you gone for a Burton.’

  Early the next day he drove to the centre of the city and stopped in a quiet street. He parked the car and set out on foot to find the central post office, where he would send his telegram to Braiden in Gibraltar. At every street corner he loitered, looking back and noting who was behind him. Caution, he figured, was his best defence.

  He found what he was looking for in the Place Mohammed V: a statuesque building in white painted stone with porticoed arches shading an open walkway in front of it. Under the shadow of the arches he passed through the main entrance and into the cool of the interior. With its vaulted ceiling and soft echoes of hushed voices it felt like a mosque or a very large library. Across the entirety of its width a long marble counter fronted with cubicles was busy conducting the business of the city. Each cubicle had a sign painted over it. Most of the signs read LETTRES et TIMBRES. At the far end there were two marked PAQUETS and away on the adjacent wall was a line of glass-doored booths marked TELEFON. Beyond these, there was a solid desk with a woman sitting at it. The sign above it read TÉLÉGRAMME.

  As he approached the desk he was hit with a sudden flash of déjà vu. For a millisecond he thought it was the woman he had seen together with Bouchard in the café at the Hotel Excelsior, and he almost tripped over himself. It was not the same woman, but the flash had broken the memory he had been trying to unearth for days. The woman whose face he had struggled with had been the one in Algeciras, the woman who sold him the ticket for the Tangier ferry. He didn’t know what that meant or where it fitted in but he was certain she was a part of the equation.

  Chapter 20

  A gift from the gods

  Evangeline undid the padlock and pulled open the heavy doors of the outbuilding. The shiny radiator of the black Mercedes convertible grinned out at her. ‘Good,’ she said half out loud. She tried to open the driver’s door but it was locked. Of course, Carlos would have locked it. The car was his proud possession and he would not leave it unprotected. She pondered for a few seconds then went back to the house. He may have taken the keys with him but it was just possible he had left them in his desk in the study.

  The study was locked. Of course, he would lock that too. She ran her mind over the problem, then went in search of Tamaya, who she knew had keys for most of the locks in the house so that she could dust and clean all of the rooms.

  She met her coming downstairs, her copious handbag and her suitcase in her hands. ‘Do you have a key for the study, Tamaya?’

  Tamaya shook her head. ‘No, madame. Don Carlos would not allow it. He would watch over me when I cleaned there.’

  Evangeline screwed up her mouth, again raking through her mind for a solution and what she might do. She went back to the outbuilding and when she returned she was holding a heavy mattock. ‘Right,’ she said resolutely. ‘Sorry for the damage, Carlos, but you are not going to get in my way this time.’

  She wedged the blade of the mattock into the door jamb and leaned all her weight against it. The door creaked but held. It was a solid piece of mahogany and it was going to resist. ‘Come on, Tamaya, help me.’

  The two women leaned on it. There was a loud crack as the lock gave up and the door shot open, banging against the edge of a bureau just inside the room. There was the sound of smashing glass as a pane fell out of the front and books spilled onto the floor.

  ‘Oh, madame.’ Tamaya looked shocked at the damage but Evangeline just shrugged and ignored it. ‘He can buy another one. He’s taken my money; he can well afford it.’

  The main desk drawer was also locked and that gave her hope. The keys to the car were valuable and he would certainly put them somewhere secure. She took a paperknife from where it was neatly held in a rack and slid it into the gap between the desk frame and the drawer. The soft metal of the blade was not up to the job and gave way. It bent, then snapped off at the hilt. She tossed the handle into a waste bin and looked around for something else. Her eye fell on the heavy iron firedogs in the chimney breast. Picking one up in both hands she swung it at the desk drawer. The façade scattered in flying shards and the front fell off the drawer. Tamaya stood speechless and open-mouthed at the wreckage of the desk.

  Evangeline dropped the firedog without ceremony and with both hands pulled out the drawer. She turned it upside down on the desk top, emptying the contents into a dishevelled pile. ‘Got them.’ She held up a fob with a Mercedes star on it and jangled the three keys on the ring below. Then she saw something else. A role of peseta notes secured with an elastic band. ‘Even better.’ Her smile was triumphant.

  ‘We should go. Who knows when Don Carlos or his hired men might turn up.’ Evangeline perched the note she had written to her husband on the top of the wrecked desk and the two women left.

  ‘Wait here,’ she told Tamaya, ‘while I get the car out, then we can put the bags in the back.’

  She got in behind the wheel and pulled the seat forward as far as it would go. For a moment she felt swamped. The car was so much bigger than the baker’s van she had been accustomed to driving. The bonnet seemed to stretch for miles in front of her.

  She selected a key, pushed it into the ignition lock and turned it. A red and a green light appeared in one of the dials on the dashboard. ‘Good,’ she muttered. She p
ut her finger on the starter button and pressed. The engine turned over three times then sprang into life. Cautiously she inched the car out. ‘Go and open the gates Tamaya,’

  As Tamaya ran down the drive Evangeline loaded their bags into the boot. She was about to get back in behind the wheel when she stopped. Tamaya was coming towards her. Walking next to her was Cortez. Her heart sank but she was determined nothing would stop her now. For a split second she even contemplated running him down – but common sense prevailed. Instead she decided she would stall him and try to outwit him.

  Cortez had the look about him of a man on grim business and she did not like what she saw. She glanced about, unnerved by the prospect that she might see a doctor with him – but he was alone. He seemed oblivious to the car standing there with the engine ticking over, or the idea that the woman in front of him might be making good an escape.

  ‘I am sorry to disturb you, Señora de Lorca, but we must speak. May we go into the house please?’

  Evangeline reached into the car and turned off the engine. ‘Of course,’ she said warily. ‘Tamaya, stay here for a moment.’

  Cortez followed her into the house. ‘Please, I think you should sit,’ he suggested when they were in the salon. ‘I have a difficult task I must perform.’

  Evangeline sat perched on the edge of the sofa. She had a nasty suspicion creeping into her mind about what this task would be. Her heart had begun to beat more solidly and she eyed the door nervously, expecting the doctor to arrive at any moment.