Stewart, Angus (32 page)

The great sense of stillness, of a predestined order that was unchallengeable, but also not worth challenging, remained throughout the long afternoon. An eagle fell from the sky upon a herd of goats with young kids. Even the plunge of the huge bird, and the distant herdsboy's useless hurling of his stave had about them the feel of slow motion, half reality. Afterwards, Jay was to remember the early afternoon as disrupted, only given lively movement and purpose even, as a domestic fowl fled squawking from beneath their wheels in a village street. When that happened it seemed as though the easy apathy, the peace, must be affronted, outraged for quite hundreds of miles around.

They were climbing again. This time the barren hills were more rounded. For nearly an hour the jeep twisted upwards in low gear, and then they were edging down the gigantic escarpment at whose foot the city of Fez huddled, low, and grey against the floor of its mighty valley. The approach, by the northern arc which they had taken, was by far the most dramatic, and for Jay never failed to produce a moment that was like a mystical experience in its intensity, and simple wonder. The lonely wilderness of hills one had first to cross undoubtedly had something to do with it. Descending into the valley, one came suddenly upon arable land, olive groves and young wheat. Another shoulder of hill was turned and there, still below, the city the Arabs built and so tightly fortified against the indigenous Berbers crouched in its own shallow declivity, an impenetrable warren whose broadest thoroughfare scarcely allowed two laden mules to pass one another, and from whose squat, rock-coloured mass of building protruded only the delicate, green-tiled fingers of many minarets. Fez was a locked, secretive city, studiously conscious of being the seat of the world's oldest university, the centre of the country's thought and religion. The gravity of the city's appearance, and of its people, were alike as different as could he from the gay, sprawling southern city of Marrakesh, with its giant, dusty red ramparts, bright groves of palms, and vast fluid and multi-racial population resulting from its Saharan trade. Yet already Jay could make out the faintest outline on the horizon where the snow-capped Atlas began. Marrakesh was still over a hundred and eighty miles away.

The jeep sped on over the hot plain. Jay began to wonder when Lom proposed to stop. So far they had made no pause, and exchanged only passing remarks against the wind of their passage. Lom had not enquired after his purpose. For his own part, Jay was content for the moment to delay his curiosity about Lom's, in particular his evidently organised way of achieving whatever it might be. About the smart army officer he still felt unease. His presence also made him wary of broaching his own problem. The sun seemed to get hotter as it lowered in the sky. Jay closed his eyes and let his head settle back on the hard, flat cushion behind him. Slowly, with the image of Fez still magical on his retina, and Achmed a problem he would face with nightfall, or when the endless motion ceased, all thought dissolved from his mind.

  *  *  *  *  *

Abdslem Kerim laughed when he looked back over his shoulder.

'We were at a late party last night,' Lom said, by way of explanation.

The youth touched the paper-bag. 'Maybe in Kashah Tadla I can find you some real
majoun
. All thick with honey. It is many, many times stronger than when smoke
kif
.'
'Good,' Lom said. His drifting mind settled, amused a moment, upon the unpredictability of Abdslem's English. At least there'd been no opportunity for his being brutally slapped on the back. 'Shall we stop the night there?'

'Is best,' Abdslem said. 'And tomorrow on. Drop your friend in Marrakesh. Then same day into the desert. Okay?'

'Okay.'

Suddenly Abdslem smiled. 'You know by Jews' quarter in Arab town is called
mellah
?
And that word just means "salt"?'

Because we're the salt of the earth, perhaps, Lom thought ironically. He shook his head.

'Is because,' Abdslem was seriously informative, 'when Arabs cut off all the heads in battle, the Jews were expert in salting them. Always they do this work before the heads were put up on the city walls. Clean, not smell then, you see.'

'Do you still cut off heads?'

Abdslem laughed. 'No! Sometimes if a man is very angry, maybe.'

They were silent some minutes. Abdslem glanced over his shoulder once more. 'Some thing I tell you now,' he said. 'If we see the Jordanian irregulars, careful eh? With me is all right. But some these men! Hussein send them to us because they are too anti-Jew. They make too much trouble at home. Is secret, this. They're not officially here. But Hussein is fascist king too. Same interest as Hassan.'

They drove silently for several more miles. Suddenly Abdslem exclaimed. He looked again at Lom; then began braking the jeep.

  *  *  *  *  *

The halt had jerked Jay from sleep, because no echo of a rifle lingered in his cars. Yet he came awake to the conviction that Lom had been shot. Blood had seeped on to the back of his shirt. Extraordinarily, the officer was taking no heed of this. He might not even have noticed it. Instead, he appeared to be pleading apologetically with Lom. Then Jay saw Lom was partially collapsed, that tears ran down his face.

'What happened,' Jay asked urgently.

Startled, the Moroccan became aware of him. 'I don't know. I say—I joke maybe is danger where we go. Suddenly—he cry.'

Afraid of danger, of death? Lom? Jay was uncomprehending. 'But he's been wounded!' he almost shouted.

The Arab returned him a blank stare as though he were demented. Is dream?' he suggested wonderingly.

'Bloody idiot,
look
!'
Jay said savagely, pulling the officer half over
the seat, from where he could see Lom's bleeding shoulder.

In amazement, the Arab looked at the seepage of blood; then uncomprehendingly back at Jay. 'How this thing?' he asked.

Now, slowly, Lom's own hand came up and explored the shoulder. 'Is there blood?' His voice, though tremulous, sounded as surprised as the looks Jay was exchanging with the Moroccan.

'Why, yes,' Jay said. There is.'

'Then it's nothing to worry about' Lom sounded recovered, impatient. 'Drive on.'

Looking still confusedly at Jay, as if for orders now, the Arab removed his dark glasses. In the same moment Jay placed the face. He had seen the man, touting like any other down-at-heel at the Cafe Fuentes in the Socco. In their circumstances at that moment this recognition seemed of little consequence.

'But,' Jay began, 'Captain Kerim seemed to think he had
said
something. A joke about danger . . .'

'Let's just drive on,' Lom interrupted, with what was now almost new-found hauteur. He softened as though conscious of this. 'Eating that stuff can make one over-emotional perhaps—drive on.'

'Well, we know that,' Jay endeavoured clumsily to lighten the embarrassment which seemed to have thickened over the whole inexplicable episode.

The jeep moved off. Awkwardly once more, Jay leaned forward between the seats. 'You sure that shoulder's going to be all right?'

'It's nothing,' was all Lom would say.

With the last splash of golden sunlight they motored into Kasbah Tadla. The small, cross-roads town, with its crumbling mud fort above the river gorge, its imposing mosque forming one side of a huge, dust-surfaced, arcaded square, and its miniature
suqs
,
whose stalls were simple cavities in whitewashed walls, was an intriguingly peaceful place. Old men squatted vacantly in the last warmth of the day. Here and there a lone figure, standing apart like a sentinel, prepared for prayer. Some boys passed a football between the legs of a tethered donkey. The inevitable stork's nest topped the minaret, which the levelling sun had turned a deep, sandstone gold, and the river was still deep between its wide banks. Willows preceded blue gums to the rich water's edge. Jay, deeply preoccupied as he now was, became only half conscious of these things.

The French extension comprised only two streets. They passed the filling station, the dispensary with its smart red cross painted over the door, the tired ornamental garden, and drew up before the hotel. It was a wooden, clapboard structure with a first floor balcony, on whose balustrade it would be inadvisable to lean. The building had an aura of the Wild West. A faded board proclaimed it to be the
Hôtel des Allies
.

  *  *  *  *  *

Lom retired at once to his room, instructing that a meal be sent up. Alone, he sprayed a powder against the roof of his mouth. Then he applied a special plaster to his shoulder. The drugs he swallowed now had been prescribed for him a long time ago in London. The small bottle of belladonna he opened finally had not. With this Lom sought to neutralise the horror of the hallucination he had experienced on the road; an hallucination whose intensity he had perhaps consciously invited with the '
majoun
cookies'.

  *  *  *  *  *

In the echoing bar-cum-restaurant-cum-foyer Jay sipped at a succession of Cinzanos with the Moroccan. He was a centre of attraction. Although a garrison town, it must have been a long time since Kasbah Tadla had seen a soldier quite as elegant as Abdslem Kerim. Youths sidled in to drink Coca-Cola and play darts, but more obviously to stare. Small boys peeped and whispered about the open windows and doorway.

While the Arab basked contentedly in the awe of the country people, Jay drank his
apéritifs
with increasing apprehension. In the back of a closed Land Rover parked to one side of the hotel, he had recognised the light blue coat which Caroline Adam had been wearing the previous evening. It seemed inevitable that she and Brown must appear to eat, or that the Moroccan proprietor, lolling behind the bar, must remark his having other English guests. For the moment, reunion was one Jay was anxious to avoid. He succeeded eventually in persuading Abdslem that they eat elsewhere. Fortunately for the stratagem he had employed, that of claiming he knew of a better place, the town proved, in fact, to have one other restaurant. Soon other admirers discovered Abdslem there, and he was riotously ordering litre after litre of wine.

  *  *  *  *  *

'The army's caught up with us,' Brown said, coming from the balcony. 'There's a jeep outside.'

Caroline combed out her hair. 'The guide-book says "garrison town".'

'Out here, that means a couple of mule-drawn Gatlings. Anyway'—Brown defiantly picked up something he had been saying earlier—'she couldn't complain of lack of
variety
during those few days—however long it was. One night in the dark I utterly forgot she was a girl.'

'You're revolting,' Caroline said; but she sat down nevertheless on the bed. 'And I think you'd better go along to your primitive armoury and borrow a cutlass.'

'Cutlass?'

'To lay down the centre of the bed.'

Brown laughed a little nervously. "That would scandalise the town quite as much as if we'd asked for two beds.'

'Light,' Caroline said pointedly. 'Manolo is not in attendance.'

Wearily, Brown sighed. Manolo does not customarily wait on me.' He flicked the light and climbed between the sheets. 'Have you ever met a man who smoked a last cigarette in bed?' he asked after a moment.

'I'm willing to now,' Caroline said; and he wondered whether there was something in her tone which should prepare him for profound perversity. 'Why not?'

Brown lit two cigarettes and passed one across. 'Should I have said something nice about your pyjamas?'

'Probably.' Caroline's cigarette glowed more brightly. 'Did you remember to check whether Manolo had his?'

'I did.' Brown was exasperated.

'Simon and Manolo are really the same person, aren't they?' Her voice came out of the
darkness. 'Manolito only acts out Simon's long-lost self.'

Further dialogue was abruptly checked. Someone was tapping insistently on the door.

'Wait,' Caroline commanded. 'When you get to the door, turn the light on there. Then unlock.' She had left the bed with a bound.

Brown did as he was told. 'Why you!' he exclaimed stupidly, as the cautious crack revealed Jay Gadston. He opened the door fully. 'Whatever are you doing here?'

'Sorry to knock you up,' Jay said quietly. 'May I come in a minute?' His eyes now fell on Caroline, but more particularly upon the
clumsy, ornate ring on her left hand. If any doubts remained these now dissolved. What had attracted his attention to her hand in the first place was that it had held poised a murderous knife. It looked like Manolo's.

'Goodness!' Caroline now brought her other hand to her breast, looking as though the knife had really been rather silly, and she didn't know what to do with it. 'We thought you might be a thief trying to trick us!'

Jay watched her sceptically as she slipped on a dressing-gown. Brown had closed the door.

'As I say, I must apologise,' Jay began again. But I need
some help—or advice at least—from the secret service.'

The stare Caroline returned him was more successfully blank than Brown's.

'Oh, come oft' it, Simon.' Jay turned to Brown. 'You're no common crook. Your lying about Gurney's death can only have been political. Or look at Manolo. He's Spanish by birth. And Spanish citizens aren't allowed into Gibraltar. Then I see him gaily waving a British passport. Ifni. Where
the Spanish allowed in only a tiny party of international journalists belatedly. Doubtless you were there. Only I don't reckon it was for the press. Finally,' Jay now looked faintly embarrassed as he regarded them each in turn, 'there's Caroline's ring.' He looked at her. 'Somehow you're not the girl to wear an engagement ring a tout has been trying to sell me every morning for nearly a week.—"Found on the beach" is the stock phrase, I think.'

Caroline opened a cigarette lighter with a loud snap. She held the flame very steadily, regarding Jay over it, before bringing it deliberately to
her cigarette. Coldly the said, 'I'm not interested in any impertinent fantasy of yours about the rings Simon gave me.' There was a ruthlessness about it which Jay could never have suspected.