Assignment Madeleine (10 page)

All at once panic took her beyond control. She tried to drag
the strangling hand from her mouth, but the man’s fingers were like ropes of
steel. She lurched to her feet, striking, kicking. There was an odor to the man
that urged further terror in her. Her brain screamed at him to let her go.
There was a roaring in her ears and she knew she could not break free. A great
wave of despair broke darkly over her. She stopped fighting. She let her
weight grow suddenly limp.

Her collapse took the man by surprise. He released her, and
she slumped to the floor.

The last thing she remembered was his rough hands violating
her body, picking her up with ease and carrying her off somewhere into welcome
darkness. . . .

Durell returned to the hotel ten minutes later and found the
guard sprawled in the corridor in front of his door. He had left Felix, the
manager, down in the lobby locking up the hotel. The fat proprietor had told
him that DeGrasse had phoned and wanted him to call the command post again, at
once.

It was quiet in the hallway. Durell knew that an American
couple occupied the room farthest from the stairway. He didn’t touch the young
soldier once he saw that the man had been slugged and wasn’t dead. He wondered
what DeGrasse wanted from him that was so urgent. In the jeep, just before
leaving the prison where he had talked to L'Heureux, DeGrasse had asked if it
would be possible to take the Larkins to the coast with him if they were
willing to risk the trip. Durell had not committed himself. He looked at the
Larkins’ door as he stood beside the unconscious guard. There was no sound in
the hotel except a muted radio from the kitchen area below, spewing forth
propaganda from Cairo.

He listened to the rasp of the soldier’s irregular breathing
and turned slowly. He took his gun from his pocket and walked quietly to his
door, then paused. Madeleine’s door, next to his, was shut and the guard had
been assigned to keep an eye on her. He turned to the girl’s room instead of
his own.

This door was not locked. He eased it open and moved in
behind the swinging panel, his gun held low so it could not be taken from him
by surprise. Nothing happened. A lamp shone dimly beside the empty bed. The
girl wasn’t here. His eye quickly noted the connecting door that stood ajar to
his room. There was nothing but silence and darkness beyond. He moved that way
in silence and stood against the wall beside the door, listening.

He heard the sound of quick, frightened breathing. He
decided that would be Madeleine. Then he heard a man’s soft, controlled sigh.
He tried to estimate how far the man was standing from the connecting door. Not
more than three or four feet, he decided. Durell went in.

It was easy, after all. The shadowy figure of a man
was facing the opposite way, tensely watching the corridor door. Madeleine was
on his bed, the coarse sheet held around her. He saw her skirt and blouse in a
soft heap on the floor. He wasted no time wondering about it. He held the gun
ready and spoke in Arabic, “If you are waiting for me, I am here. Drop your
knife.”

The man turned. In the dim light, his face was like that of an
angry hawk. He dropped the poniard. It made a sharp clattering sound on the
tiled floor.

“I come in peace,” he said.

“With a knife?”

“Are you Monsieur Durell?”

“I am.”

“Then I have come for you,
m’sieu
.”

“To kill me? Why?”

“Not to kill you. I have orders to take you to a
conference.”

“With whom?”

The man’s eyes were pale crescents sliding toward Madeleine
as she sat on the bed. The girl was rubbing her throat and mouth with one hand.
She held the sheet around her body with the other. “It would be best if we
discussed this privately. An old friend of yours has learned of your arrival in
Marbruk. He is anxious to talk to you.”

“News travels fast in Marbruk.”

“Events match the pace of the news, like two running
camels.” The man’s voice was sardonic. “You do not need the gun,
m'sieu
.”

“But you came prepared for violence.”

“Only because it is necessary that you agree to come on our
terms. You must come with me blindfolded and give your word you will not
attempt to discover where I take you.”

“I have nothing to discuss. Suppose I say no?”

“It will be to your advantage. It concerns your prisoner.”

Madeleine's whisper was harsh. “Charley?”

Durell looked at her. Her face was dim and lovely, but it
was also traced with uninhibited savagery in the dim light. “Go back to your
room, Madeleine,” he said quietly. “It would be best.”

“She was in here waiting for you," said the Arab.

“This harlot, this traitor.”

“Go on, Madeleine,” Durell said.

The girl slid off the bed and stood up. Her body looked soft
and rounded as she walked past him into the other room. Durell scooped up her
skirt and blouse and tossed them through the doorway after her, then closed the
door and turned the key in the lock. “Stay here,” he told the Arab.

He Went into the corridor. The French soldier was stirring
on the tiled floor beyond the threshold. His eyes held a dazed, wild
look. Durell went to Madeleine’s corridor door and locked that and pocketed the
key.

The Arab stepped into the hallway across the guard’s body.

Durell said, “Who wishes to speak to me?”

“It is the Hadji, my commander. El-Abri.”

“Does he remember me?”

“He remembers you with friendship,
m’sieu
.”

“How can I be sure you’re telling the truth?”

“He said to remind you of a favorite quotation of his, which
he is sure you will remember. It is this: In this life, one must either be the
anvil or the hammer. The strong man tries to be the hammer.”

"I'll go,” Durell said.

Chapter Ten

THEY LEFT the hotel by a back door. The lobby was empty and
there was no sign of Felix. The Arab led the way for a few hundred yards,
through one alley and then another, each redolent with smells. The moon
provided the only light. Durell kept his gun in hand until they came to a
small, battered Renault 4-C, a
Quatre
Chevaux
model, parked in a courtyard. Tramping feet came to
them from the opening of a crooked street nearby, and they stood in silent
darkness until a U.T. patrol passed. The Arab took out a long scarf while he
listened.

“The territorial units fight terror with terror. It is
like a darkness on the land. You agree to be blindfolded?"

“How far must we go?”

“It will take no more than fifteen minutes, if we are
not stopped by patrols.”

“The Hadji is reckless to make his headquarters so close to
the French.”

“One can hide in the nest of the adder better than on the
open rock. You may keep your gun,
m’sieu
. You have
el-Abri’s word that you will be returned safely in one hour.”

The trip was no longer than the Arab said it would he.
Durell tried to mark the twists and turns of the Renault’s course, listening to
the changing sound of the tires as they rumbled over stone, asphalt, and finally
a gravelly roadway. Once they stopped abruptly, and he heard a truck lumber
along not far away, and he assumed it was another U.T. patrol. He heard French
voices, and then the truck went on; after a moment the Renault proceeded again,
turning left, then bumping over a wooden bridge, to judge by the hollow
rumbling under the wheels. Then they stopped abruptly.

"We are here,
m’sieu
. You may
remove the blindfold."

For a moment Durell felt a confusion of time, as if the fifteen
years since his last assignment in the OSS had never been. For two months he
had worked in the desert with el-Abri, who then had not yet made his pilgrimage
to Mecca to earn his title of Hadji. They had been operating a radio unit then,
exploring the sentiment of Arab and French settler alike, preparing for the
North African invasion. He had lived in the desert as just another Berber with
el-Abri, had risked capture by a Nazi counterintelligence unit, had avoided
Rommel in a long swing through the deserts of Tunisia. They were both younger
and wilder in those days, Durell remembered. And the postwar years had seen too
many changes in this country to expect things to have remained as they had been.

When he stepped from the Renault, he saw the huddle of a
douar
, a native
village of about eight
mechtas
,
the mud-walled Arab houses. There were a few straggling date palms and the
high, windy pressure of the mountain slopes to the north. He looked back and
saw that the road they had followed twisted along the edge of a rock wadi. An
armed guard in ragged khaki lowered his rifle and nodded to the Arab and
Durell.

“The Hadji is waiting. Is the American armed?”

“Yes,” Durell said.

“Ah, you speak our tongue.” The guard moved closer.

“One does not know how the years will change a man, the
Hadji says. He remembers you as a man of courage and honor. But a long time has
passed since he saw you last.”

“The knife cuts both ways, Durell said. I keep my gut“

As you say."

Durell stepped into the largest of the
mechtas
. El-Abri got up from a
chair behind a wooden table, where maps had been spread in apparent disarray.
Durell remembered him at once. He was gray now, where he had been dark and wild
and unkempt. And there was a veneer of culture over the tall Berber that hadn’t
been there fifteen years ago.

“Durell.” His hand was hard and lean. "It is good to
see you again.”

“And good to see you, too,” Durell said.

El-Abri smiled. “We could have enjoyed our reunion under
happier circumstances, I fear. For me, it would be better if I were no longer a
renegade guerrilla chief, hiding in my own land. For you and your people, the
world has turned upside down, has it not? You Americans no longer walk the
world in pride and arrogance.

“Humility can have a cleansing effect,” Durell said.

“Would you like a drink? For myself, of course—”

“No, thank you. You asked to see me, Hadji, but not in
friendship. Only in a state of truce.

“We have no quarrel, you and I. Please sit down. Forgive me
if you think I greet you with a taunt and a jeering phrase. But what I said is
true, is it not? Between East and West, the balance has tipped against you. You
no longer have the comfort of complacency. The world walks on the edge of a
knife.”

“We can use that knife to pare some of our fat, Durell said.
“We respect our rivals now, and that is good.”

He sat down. “Your war with the French is not my war, and I
am not permitted to take part in it or even to venture an opinion on it. If I
am ere under terms of truce, then I must warn you not to tell me anything I
should not know. I may be considered a neutral, yet most of my associations are
with the French. Do you understand?”

El-Abri smiled. “You are here as a friend, then, unless you
choose otherwise.”

“Agreed.”

“You look well.”

“And you, too.”

“Much time has passed since our old victory, Durell.”

“The war is not yet over,” Durell said.

There was a single, smoky kerosene lantern in the one-room
hut, and the Berber chieftain turned it up slightly so that its yellow light flared
out in the bare room. His teeth gleamed whitely as he smiled. His face was the
face of the desert, lean and dry, scarred under a thin gray beard. He wore a
khaki uniform, the trousers stuffed into American paratrooper’s boots. El-Abri
was armed with a German
Schmeiser
and a long,
wicked-looking knife in a leather scabbard. His pale brown eyes were brooding
and intelligent.

“Did you know I spent four years in Paris after the
liberation?” the Berber asked abruptly. “I learned the ways of the French and
then I went to Mecca and then I attended the Arabic University of
Zitouna
, in Tunis. By that time the resistance movement was
in full swing and I joined it. Your war has not ended, and indeed, is going
badly for you, Durell. My war is the same. But today we fight, if not on
opposite sides, at least in different directions.”

“I wish it were otherwise,” Durell said.

“But you and I are not enemies, and never will be.”

“Let’s hope not.”

El-Abri sighed. “Yet the fighting will go on. The relationship
between Arab and Frenchman must not
he
that of horse
and rider.”

“You don’t hate the French, then,” Durell said.

“No. I hate the extremists of both parties, if you must
know. The French territorials, the settlers, the proprietors call us gooks and
want to continue the attitude of treating us as inferior people, using terror
and violence to prolong the war between us, just as much as the rebel factions
have now become intransigent and refuse to treat or negotiate.”

“You didn’t send for me, though, to give me a political
lecture,” Durell said.

“You wonder why I sent for you. The French would like to
know about this
douar
.
I should tell you, first, that tonight’s raid on Marbruk was not my
operation. It was the extremist faction.”

“You don’t work together?”

Something flickered in the Kabyle’s tawny eyes. “No.
It has not been so for some time. This is my territory and my people live here,
and I have been in command since the fighting began. But recently the extremists
came in and demanded jurisdiction. Until then, I managed to keep things
peaceful. There was no terror, no murders.” El-Abri’s eyes darkened. “Unlike
the extremists, I refuse to kill Arabs who remain loyal to the French. We owe
much to France and will owe more before our legitimate aims are achieved. And
long afterward, as well.”