Seven Lies South

16

At dawn Lynch regained consciousness. His eyes were clear and his fever had diminished, but when he tried to speak a spasm of pain contorted his face. His breathing suddenly became harsh and rapid. Beecher moistened his lips and gave him another grain of morphine. Lynch’s eyes blazed piteously, but he didn’t seem to recognize Beecher. After a few minutes his clenched hands fell open, lay limp and still on the blankets. Beecher waited until his breathing was steady again before giving him more water and penicillin.

There were only two sandwiches left; they had eaten three the night before. He cut one into thirds for their breakfast, and put the remaining one back in the hamper. That would be their supper — and probably their last one if no planes spotted them today.

Beecher and Ilse worked until noon laying out a distress marker. They used rocks to construct a long arrow in front of the tiny oasis. Its tip pointed to the concealed plane. The work was exhausting and discouraging; the sun beat at them like an iron hammer, and their fingertips were scraped raw by the heavy rocks. Laura wasn’t able to help them; she had made it clear that her legs were too stiff and painful, but Beecher saw that she had found the energy to bathe herself, and put on fresh clothes.

With the last rock in place, Beecher straightened and pressed his hands against his back. Perspiration streamed down his face, and the ground swayed like the deck of a ship under his feet. The cool soft colors of dawn had been driven away by the rising sun; it stood in the sky above them like a furious oppressor, glaring savagely at the cringing earth. Ilse stared about at the endless horizon. There was nothing in sight; no birds, no clouds, no suggestion of wind.

“You’d better get some rest,” he said.

She looked at the palms of her hands. They were scraped raw. “It’s good to be doing something,” she said. Then she looked up at the blazing sky. “Even if it means nothing.”

“You were stupid to get on that plane.”

“I know.” She shrugged wearily. Her face was flushed with heat, and her temples glistened with perspiration. “But I thought I could help him. If he killed you, they would catch him for it someday. I didn’t want that. I could make plans against him when I was alone, say anything I wanted. But when he was with me I became confused and afraid.” She sighed helplessly. “It was that way when the plane landed in the desert. I wanted to beg him not to kill you, but when I heard his voice shouting from outside, I was too frightened to do anything but hide from him.”

Beecher rubbed sweat from his forehead. He felt very weak and tired. “You weren’t worried about me getting killed — you were worried about him getting caught.” He smiled faintly. “Well, it doesn’t matter. If we get out of this I’ll buy you a drink.”

“I don’t want a drink.”

“What do you want? A medal to hang around your neck?”

She looked away from him. “His father is still alive,” she said slowly. “I would like his body to be sent to his father, to his home in Germany.”

Beecher felt a thrust of anger, but it died away quickly; he was too weary to sustain any irrelevant emotion. “A military funeral would be nice,” he said. “With a last volley over the coffin, and Iron Crosses pinned to his old uniform.” She turned swiftly.

“He’s dead, can’t you understand that?” she cried. “How can you still hate him?”

“I don’t hate him,” Beecher said. “But I hate the way you’re acting. You’d like to forget what he did. Put up a statue to him, and make his memory sacred. It’s the easiest way to handle people like Don Willie. Because we’re responsible for what they got away with. But when they’re dead we’re too ashamed to admit it. So we put up statues and pretend they were heroes.”

She turned blindly and ran toward the clearing, stumbling over the uneven ground, her sobs dry and clear in the hot silence.

Beecher sighed and went wearily to the plane. He stayed there during the afternoon, but Ilse did not return from the pond.

Lynch was still unconscious, and Laura was sleeping in one of the seats. She had made herself a bed of blankets and pillows. Her hair was damp and clean, and her calm face glowed with cream. She was like a cat, he thought, indifferent to anything but her own tidy comforts.

Lynch’s eyes fluttered open as the shadows deepened in the plane. He seemed in better shape; his skin had lost the flushed, feverish look, and his tough, stringy body was obviously preparing to make a fight for it. A glitter of amusement touched his eyes when he recognized Beecher.

“Classic turnabout, eh?” he said, in a dry whispering voice. “Treated you shabbily, and now you’re playing the ministering angel.”

“I’ve given you two stiff doses of morphine. How do you feel?”

“Give me the lot, what difference can it make? You’re a bloody fool to fuss.” There was a touch of arrogance in his face. “Turn the cheek, do unto others, it’s all rot. Shoved down our throats by the bastards who run things. Fancy them turning the other cheek. Giving up their Bentleys and shares. All rot.”

“Where did you leave the landrover?”

“Five miles south of here, more or less. But it’s done for, I’m afraid.” Lynch’s eyes brightened suddenly in his ruined face. His head turned restlessly. “This isn’t too jolly,” he said, in a straining voice. “Can you do something about it, for God’s sake? Please, old man.”

“Yes, hang on. But keep talking, if you can. What’s the matter with the truck?”

Laura stirred and got to her feet. “We smashed an axle. Bounced into a two-foot hole and didn’t bounce out. It’s done for, don’t worry.” She had changed into brief white shorts, and a snug nylon blouse. “Can’t you give the poor devil the morphine? I can’t stand his brave little squeaks.” She jerked a towel from her suitcase and went down the ladder.

Beecher prepared the syringes and gave Lynch another grain of morphine. For a few moments he stirred restlessly, and his breath came in long, deep gasps. But gradually he relaxed, and the dry moaning noise died away in his throat.

Beecher was lighting a cigarette when Ilse called to him from outside the plane. He was so startled by the urgency in her voice that he dropped his cigarette and leaped to the doorway. Laura was sitting in the shade beside the pond; he had a glimpse of her as he went down the ladder, an incongruous flash of gold hair and white limbs through the palm trees.

Beecher ran around the tail section of the plane and saw Ilse standing in the mouth of the clearing staring out at the desert.

“Look!” she cried softly.

Beecher raised his hand to shield his eyes from the glare on the earth. The sun was going down, and the desert sands were like a quiet sea of silver under its cooling rays. When he saw what Ilse was pointing at he felt a current of shock and excitement streak through his body.

They were less than a hundred yards away, two men on rhythmically swaying camels, the hooded heads of the riders outlined starkly against the clear evening sky. They came toward them at a deliberate, rolling gait, the garments of the men and the hides of the animals merging in tawny unison, making them almost invisible against the beige and silver tones of the desert. Beecher put a hand on Ilse’s shoulder, not quite sure whether he was attempting to comfort her or himself; the riders were a marvelous apparition, and the fact that they belonged to this setting, were natural and appropriate to it, somehow made their appearance even more fantastic and mysterious. They were too right, too good to be true, like angels with harps at the pearly gates of heaven, precisely where they were supposed to be, and doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing, and for these reasons, very difficult to accept or believe in.

The riders stopped a dozen yards from them and looked over their heads to the plane. There was no interest or curiosity in their dark faces, no glint of excitement in their eyes. They might have been looking at the rocks in the desert. The camels twisted their ugly heads about in the air, like haughty females sneering at social inferiors, and their wooden saddles and leather packs creaked faintly in the silence. The men wore jellabahs of dusty brown wool, sacklike garments which made shapeless lumps of their bodies; they might have been fat or thin, puny or powerful, graceful or sluggish — it just wasn’t possible to tell.

But they stank richly. This you could tell from a full mile off, Beecher thought. It wasn’t the innocent odors the soap and mouthwash people warned about in their ads. This was a stench from the ages, a poisonous, corrosive smell which had been a long time in building; layer upon layer of dirt and sweat had caked on their bodies in a smooth, shiny glaze. And it was a toss-up between man and beast, Beecher realized. The hindquarters of the camels were streaked with dung and darkened by swarms of flies. The flies were after the men, too, buzzing at their black beards, which were matted with saliva and bits of decaying food. Mounts and riders steamed like a clogged cesspool under an August sun.

Beecher spoke to them in English and Spanish, but got no response from their eyes or face. He did no better with sign language. Their predicament must be obvious, he thought, and he felt both foolish and irritable pantomiming the crash of the plane before their dark, incurious eyes. But when he completed his posturings and pointings, one of the men punched his camel behind its head, and the beast sank awkwardly to its knees. The rider squatted on the ground and drew a circle in the sand with his finger. In the middle of the circle he drew a cross. Then he pointed at the plane and looked questioningly at Beecher.

Beecher nodded. “I understand.”

The Arab made a mark on the northern rim of the circle. Glancing at Beecher again, he said, “Goulamine,” in a voice which sounded as if it might not have been used for years.

“Yes, Goulamine,” Beecher said.

The Arab remounted his camel. The beast tossed its furry, snakelike head about with a kind of liverish irritation, and then regained its feet in a series of improbable lurches and staggers. The riders looked down without expression on Ilse and Beecher. The one who had dismounted finally turned in his saddle and swung his arm toward the south. Then he tapped his chest and indicated his companion with a nod; the meaning of his gestures was coldly obvious, coldly final. They were traveling south, away from Goulamine.

“They won’t help us,” Ilse said helplessly. “They’re going on.”

“I don’t see how we can stop them.”

“Couldn’t we give them a message to take with them?”

“Like putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the sea. About that useful.” He shrugged wearily. “They’re Berbers, I guess. Some kind of wanderers. They may be heading for Kano, or back to the Atlas mountains. Or into Algeria. They might not see a city for years. In ten minutes they’ll probably forget us.”

“But I have money,” Ilse said. “Ten thousand pesetas, and a thousand American dollars in travelers checks. They understand money, don’t they?”

“Well, it’s worth trying.”

Ilse ran back to the plane, but in a moment she appeared in the doorway and called to Beecher: “I can’t find my purse. Have you seen it?”

The Arabs had made no move to leave; they waited with an air of eternal resignation, like inanimate lumps in their wooden saddles, bodies moving reflexively to the irritable shiftings and twitchings of their mounts. But they seemed to understand that there was some reason to wait. Beecher ran back to the plane. Ilse was close to tears. She had looked under the charred seats, in the baggage and pilot’s compartments. Beecher shook out the blankets, turned the mail sacks over, and searched the racks above the seats. Then Ilse remembered that she had taken the purse with her to the pond.

“It’s there, it must be there,” she said.

They climbed from the plane, and Ilse ran back into the clearing. Beecher walked around the tail assembly, moving slowly and supporting himself with a hand against the side of the plane. It was cooler now, and gentle shadows moved along the ground. But his face felt hot and flushed. He knew he was weak from lack of food and drained by these alternate surges of despair and hope; his heart was laboring like an engine on a steep grade, and the beads of perspiration on his eyelids refracted the soft evening light in dizzy, shooting patterns, transforming his view of the desert into a spangled fantasy.

He shook his head sharply and rubbed the sweat from his eyes.

The riders were gone.

He stopped, breathing heavily. They were moving away, merging like chameleons into the background of brown sand and rock. He shouted at them, but they didn’t stop or turn around, made no move to check the rhythmic, rolling lope of their mounts. Soon they were almost lost in the shifting patterns of silver light and gray shadow.

Laura stood in the mouth of the clearing staring after the riders. The nylon blouse, which she had tucked snugly into her brief white shorts, stretched without a wrinkle across her high breasts. The cool shaded light glistened on her slender bare legs, and the skin at her exposed throat looked as vivid and white as popcorn. A spray of gold sparks gleamed in her damp hair, as she turned and looked at him. She seemed a preposterously incongruous figure against the background of desert heat and sand and flies. The dark, sour men on the camels probably hadn’t believed their eyes, he thought; they must have decided she was some miraculous apparition, a tantalizing foretaste of the blonde and gold houris which Allah had promised to provide for them in the gardens of death.

“I tried to stop them,” she said.

“If you couldn’t, nobody could,” he said wearily.

“Don’t you imagine I tried my best?”

“You don’t leave much to the imagination,” he said, glancing at her swelling breasts.

She smiled faintly. “You are really such a fool,” she said. “What’s the point of acting like a hurt, sensitive child? If you’d just grow up, we might have quite a pleasant time.”

“You put a very fancy price on that body of yours.”

“Why not? I’ve always got it.”

“That’s inflation for you. People don’t give a damn about throwing their money away.”

She turned and walked toward the plane, but halfway there she stopped and looked over her shoulder at him. Her eyes were sharp points of light in the growing darkness. “You’d like to hurt me, wouldn’t you? But you’ve got nothing to use but silly words. You’re not man enough for anything else.”

It wasn’t a subtle appeal, he thought; she was probing at him, hoping to strike something that was sick and vulnerable. “You’d like me to try, I guess,” he said.

She shrugged and walked on to the plane.

Beecher lit a cigarette and tossed the match into the darkness. Ilse came up from the pond a few minutes later. In the fading light, she hadn’t been able to find her purse. They stood together looking out at the desert. Nothing moved or sounded in the blackness spreading out to the horizons.

They ate their last sandwich that evening. The bread was dry, and the ham suspiciously sweet, but they washed down the small portions with cups of cold water. Even Lynch managed to eat his share. Then he lay still and quiet, his chest barely moving with his shallow breathing.

As the night wore on moonlight filtered through the windows of the plane, silvering the smoke-blackened floor and seats. Ilse slept under a blanket, while Laura sat tailor-fashion beside Lynch. She had complained of being cold earlier, and had put on slacks and a sweater.

Beecher had three cigarettes left. He put one in his mouth and settled back against the door of the plane. His mind seemed very clear, and his thoughts meshed together cleanly and logically. He found himself examining his condition with a clinical, impersonal detachment. Now that he was going to die quite soon, it seemed important to put things in order. Who had betrayed him? One answer occurred to him which was neither consoling nor comfortable. He remembered the time in Spain, the fear of failing, the fear of trying, and most of all he remembered the enormous and constant self-pity which, thinking of it now, seemed the most consistent emotional tone he had struck during those thousand reeling nights and thousand brown-mouthed mornings. Don Julio, the philosophical policeman, had talked to him of betrayal from without, the defection of friends, the collapse of ideals and principles. But there was also a betrayal from within, the fear of responsibility, the fear of living up to your potential.

Don Willie and Laura and Lynch had not betrayed him, he realized; that was too melodramatic a word for it. They had simply made a fool of him. He had betrayed himself long before they came into his life. If by some chance he lived, the roads ahead of him would be difficult to travel; without the crutches of fear and self-pity, he would have to learn to walk all over again.

Laura stirred and got up on her knees. She touched Lynch and he groaned weakly.

“What are you doing?” Beecher asked her.

“I’m going out.”

“Why?”

She said irritably, “Do I have to raise my hand to ask permission?”

“What’re you bothering him for?”

“He’s got a packet of Kleenex in his pocket. Any more questions?”

When he didn’t answer her, she said, “Thanks,” in a dry voice and left the plane.

When the door closed and they heard her booted feet on the ground, Lynch called weakly to him. “Come over here, please.”

Beecher knelt beside him. The moonlight was bright in Lynch’s fair hair, and glowed like a gentle salve on the burns that disfigured his face. It created the illusion of relief, nothing more; Beecher could see the pain flaming in his eyes.

“What is it?”

“She took my gun,” Lynch said, in a straining whisper. “She’s going off. I promised her a start. But try to stop her. Please. She wouldn’t listen. She doesn’t understand.”

“Take it easy,” Beecher said. Lynch was trying to sit up, and the effort made the tendons in his throat strain desperately against his scalded flesh. Beecher eased him back against the blankets. “Relax now. She’s got nowhere to go. It’s ninety miles to Goulamine. She wouldn’t last an hour in the sun.”

“She’s not walking. She made some deal with those bloody Arabs who came by. She’s meeting them — going off with them.”

“You’re dreaming all this,” Beecher said. “She was only alone with them a few minutes. How could she make a deal? She didn’t know their language, she couldn’t speak to them.”

Lynch rolled his head weakly. “She speaks a basic language. You should know that. When she came back here I knew something was up. I know her, you see. But she begged for a chance. I couldn’t make her understand it was no good.”

“Does she think they’ll take her to Goulamine?”

“Yes.” Lynch’s eyes burned piteously. “But they won’t, you know. Please stop her.”

Beecher remembered how she had stood watching the Arabs ride into the desert, slim legs spread wide, and the nylon blouse stretched tightly across her high breasts. It was a basic language, all right.

“They won’t take her to Goulamine,” Lynch said.

“That would be kind of fitting,” Beecher said.

“You can’t hate her that much.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Because you’re a gentleman, not a second-rater like me. You couldn’t let it happen to any woman.”

“Where was she meeting them?”

“I don’t know. But they’re waiting for her.”

Beecher pulled open the door and dropped down to the ground. He ran around the tail of the ship toward the mouth of the clearing. The moonlight was brilliant now, and it lay on the ground as it had lain on Lynch’s face, covering everything with the gentle gleam of silver, soothing the hard outlines of rock, and making a fairyland scene of the infinite, sterile desert.

She was running to the south, a slim quick figure in the endlessly expanding seas of sand. He saw the light shining on her blonde head.

Beecher shouted her name.

She turned around swiftly, and the moonlight struck a silver splinter from the gun in her hand. Beecher ran toward her, stumbling on the twisting ground, and the stroke of his heart hammering in his ears.

“Don’t try to stop me,” she cried.

“Come back to the plane.”

“You’re going to die here, but I’m not.” There was a wind rising and her hair streamed like golden wings from her temples, outlining her cold white face sharply in the moonlight. “There’s no chance of anyone finding us. And if they do, it’s the end of the line for me. I’m clearing out, and if you try to stop me I’ll kill you.” She backed slowly away from him. “I’ll get to Goulamine and the police will believe my story. Don’t worry about that. I’ll be the innocent little tourist caught up in an international fuss.”

“You think they’ll believe that story?”

“It’s the only one they’ll get. The rest of you will be dead.”

“How do you know they’ll take you to Goulamine?”

She smiled coldly. “You told me I put a fancy price on my body. And I’ve always got it.”

“You’re a goddamn fool.”

“Aren’t you sick of being the eternal nice guy? Do you want to get shot trying to save me from a fate worse than death?”

“Is that the deal you made?”

“Considering the language barrier, it was the best I could do.”

“You’re sure you aren’t overestimating your stamina?”

She shrugged. “There’s little in that line I can’t forget after a nice hot bath. Don’t come any closer, Mike.”

“Please listen to me,” Beecher said quietly. They stood ten yards apart, and the rocky ground between glowed with soft light. “Don’t worry about me trying to stop you. But listen a minute. You’ve got one notion about the value of that body of yours. They’ve got another. The price tag you’ve pinned on it is based on Western ideas. Dinner with wine, furs for your shoulders, a hand under your elbow as you step into shiny cars. That’s what it says on the price tag. But the Arab world has a different idea about the fun and service you’re selling. You’re livestock, that’s all. And they want more than one ride from their horses, and one pail of milk from their cows. You won’t see Goulamine until they’ve got full value from you. And that might take the rest of your life.”

“You’ve been reading the Arabian Nights,” she said, with a hard smile. “This is the twentieth century, or haven’t you heard?”

Beecher shook his head slowly. “Not the Arabian Nights, Laura. The newspapers. Two years ago a French couple disappeared near Agadir. They haven’t been seen or heard from since. Last year an American girl stopped for a picnic on the road ten miles below Marrakech. They found the car where she left it, within sight of a Berber village. But they never found her. Six months ago the wife of a Belgian consular clerk drove up into the Atlas mountains to take photographs. They haven’t even found her car yet. These hill tribes and desert nomads weren’t raised to hold doors for women. They’ve got their own laws, their own conventions.” Beecher swept his arm around the dark endless horizon. “Do you imagine the Travelers Aid has smiling, sympathetic people out there? And do you think you can blow a whistle for a cop if things get rough? Sure, you may get to Goulamine. But it might be ten years from now. And you won’t look like an innocent little tourist anymore. You’ll be covered with sores, and your teeth will be gone. That would be a damned stiff price to pay for a ninety-mile camel ride.”

For an instant Beecher thought he might have got through to her; she glanced swiftly over her shoulder, and there was unmistakable tension in the twist of her head, and a straining look about her mouth and eyes.

“Come back to the plane,” he said.

“No, goddamn you. I can take care of myself.”

Beecher shrugged wearily. “Maybe you can at that. Maybe I should be warning them.”

“Go to hell!” she said, shouting at him with desperate defiance, and then she wheeled and ran into the silver wastes of desert, her boots slipping and twisting on the deceptively gilded rocks.

Beecher shouted at her to come back, but it was like shouting at a falling star; within seconds her bright blonde head was lost in the pools of light and shadow streaking the rolling sands.

Suddenly two grotesque silhouettes rose against the horizon: an instant before the desert had been serenely still and silent, but then, lurching upward with fantastic deliberation, camels and riders emerged from the sand, stood black and heavy in the silver moonlight.

He saw Laura’s bright head one last time; it gleamed in a pale swift arc as a rider stooped and swung her up into the air.

Beecher stood watching as the camels moved against the bright southern sky. The wind was cool against his hot flushed face and arms. He watched until they faded suddenly from sight, disappearing like phantoms on the rim of the world.