A Foreign Country

28

A knock at the door, a soft tap-tap from the corridor. Kell slipped the security chain and invited Sami to come inside. A strange midnight encounter between men. Kell opened the door of the balcony to allow fresh evening air to blow into the room. There was a bottle of Macallan on the floor beside his bed, imported duty free via Nice, and he poured three fingers into two glasses from the bathroom. As he did so, Kell made a point of apologizing for the ‘atmosphere of secrecy’, a phrase that he had difficulty translating into Arabic.

‘Not a problem,’ Sami replied. ‘I understand.’

A long evening at the wheel of the cab had left the Tunisian looking hunched and slightly immobile, but as he shuffled across the room, compacting himself on to a low-sprung sofa, Kell saw that his eyes were glinting with excitement.

‘So they had a nice time?’ he began, an ambiguous question that would allow Sami to fill in the blanks.

‘Yes. An incredible story.’ Sami was leaning forward in his chair, bald and squat and full of news. ‘You know about them?’

‘Tell me,’ Kell said. ‘I’ve forgotten a lot of the details.’

And so it began. Thirty years before, ‘Amy’ — that was the name Amelia was going by — had been working in Tunis when she had fallen pregnant outside of marriage. Because she was still a teenager, and the daughter of strict Catholic parents, it had been decided that she should give up her baby for adoption. That baby was François, who was subsequently taken to France and raised in Paris by Philippe and Jeannine Malot. Tragically, his adoptive parents had been murdered only weeks earlier during a holiday in Egypt. It was only while reading his father’s Will that François had been made aware, for the first time, of the circumstances of his birth. Without hesitation, he had contacted the agency in Tunis that had arranged his adoption.

Kell listened with less astonishment than might ordin-arily have been the case; he had suspected as much. The story, after all, made sense in all the right places. The sole surprise was that Amelia had only met her son for the first time in recent days. For some reason, Kell had assumed that the relationship between them had been growing for several years. Why had he made such a baseless assumption?

‘Who told you all this?’ he asked. ‘How did it come out?’

‘François. I asked him what they were doing in Tunisia, so soon after the revolution, he tells me the whole story.’

‘Amy didn’t say anything? She left it to him?’

Kell wanted to know why Amelia was allowing François to be so indiscreet; perhaps her guard was down and she had seen no reason to distrust Sami.

The driver nodded. ‘The lady, she is much quieter. He does most of the talking.’

‘But she seemed happy? They were content together.’

‘Oh yes,’ Sami replied. He had seen off the three fingers of whisky and proffered his glass for more. ‘So, can I ask you a personal question?’

Kell picked up the bottle from the carpet and obliged him. ‘Sure.’

‘Why did you want me to follow them around?’

Sami was a straightforward man, palpably kind and biddable, with a strain of romanticism in his nature that had evidently responded to the pathos of François’ story.

‘Someone is paying me,’ Kell replied. In the next room, a man began to cough. He tried to move off the subject. ‘You must be tired.’

Sami shrugged. In operations of yesteryear, even with Elsa in Nice, Kell had often tried to imagine the private circumstances of his contacts. It was one of the diversions of the trade, a way of passing time during the long periods of waiting. Elsa, he presumed, was into rock music and would take grateful, long-haired men with abundant tattoos to bed. But what about Sami? Who was he? An observant Muslim? Most probably not, judging by his thirst for whisky. A sports fan? A lover of women and food? Certainly his girth and bonhomie, the speed with which he had sunk his drink, spoke of a man with large appetites.

Kell returned to the conversation.

‘Did François say why they were staying in separate hotels?’

‘Yes.’ The reply was quick and almost startled, as though Sami suspected Kell of intuiting something from his private thoughts. ‘The Ramada was full, so she took a room here.’ He nodded in the general direction of the lobby. ‘She leaves tomorrow. I’m taking her to the airport.’

‘And they told you all this in the course of one cab journey?’

Was Amelia playing him? Did she know that Kell was in Tunis and had recruited Sami?

‘Two,’ he replied, making a stubby Churchillian ‘V’ with his fingers. ‘People always tell me things. I like to ask questions. Tourists come to Tunisia, they tell you their secrets because they think they are never going to see you again.’

Kell’s smile disguised his private doubt. ‘And so now you’re taking Amy to the airport?’

Sami suddenly looked embarrassed, as if he had spoken out of turn.

‘Is that OK, Stephen?’

‘Of course. It’s fine.’ He waved Sami’s concerns away and thought about Marquand. What was he going to tell London in the morning? How was he going to finesse Amelia’s secret? ‘Just be careful not to slip up about our arrangement. We’ve never met, OK? You’ve never seen or talked to me. I’ve never given you money. The people who are paying my bills would be very angry if Amy found out that I was following her.’

‘Of course.’ Sami put his empty glass on a table beside the sofa and looked offended at being castigated for a sin he had yet to commit. ‘Perhaps it’s time I went home and got some sleep.’

‘Perhaps.’

Moments later, Kell was ushering the Tunisian to the door, telling him to relax until it was time to take Amy to the airport. He watched as he shuffled down the corridor, wondering what he would say to François if they bumped into one another in the lobby, wondering if it would even matter if they did. The mystery, after all, had been solved. Kell’s work was done.

He switched off the overhead light and lay on the bed, listening to the rasping coughs of his neighbour, to the fragmentary and indecipherable conversation of a man and a woman talking beneath his window. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. Unable to relax, he put on a jacket and walked down to the lobby, half-imagining that he would encounter Amelia in the bar. But, save for a young man at reception, the hotel was deserted and the bar already closed. On a whim, Kell went outside to the taxi rank. A driver asked if he wanted to be taken to La Marsa and Kell, surprising himself, agreed, because he needed to be away from the hotel, away from the claustrophobia of concealment and strategy. Besides, it was time to celebrate. His driver, who did not utter a word during the ten-minute journey along the coast, dropped him at Plaza Corniche, a fashionable bar in the centre of La Marsa where the waiters dressed like pilots on a layover and caramel-tanned Italians made eyes at gangs of beautiful Tunisian girls. Kell had forgotten how much he disliked going out alone: he was too old for nightclubs, too wired to go to bed. Half an hour later, having drunk a single bottle of imported German beer, he went back outside to find his taxi driver waiting for him on the opposite corner of the street. As they were pulling away from the kerb, Sami called his mobile. The music, the belly dancers. Then:

‘Mr Stephen?’

‘Sami?’ Kell looked at his watch. ‘What’s up?’

‘I am sorry to ring so late. It’s just that I forgot to tell you something important.’

‘Go on.’

‘Tomorrow. The ship. François is booked on the ferry from La Goulette. He is leaving, travelling overnight to Marseille.’