Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2012

Marley’s Rescue by John C. Boland

Charles Marley was not a romantic, but when he was assigned to Casablanca he went looking for an American bar. It wasn’t Rick’s that he found but Bleecker East, owned by two émigré New Yorkers who had rented space on the ground floor of a hotel near Rue Foucauld. Whatever romance they had once felt for the city had worn off. The Moroccan currency was weak, capital exports were blocked, and the business the two men had built had become their captivity. If they left Morocco, it would be without their money. “It’s only been twenty Junes,” the younger owner said. He added, longingly, “Did you come from New York?”

“Paris,” Marley replied. He lied so reflexively that he barely noticed anymore. He hadn’t considered lying to be a character flaw since boyhood, and he had perfected the habit after joining the intelligence service in 1961. Twelve years later, that September in Casablanca, Marley would have been embarrassed if any truth had slipped out.

“Dennis Hyde,” the owner said, extending a hand across the bar. “Don’t believe anyone who tells you Casa is the Paris of North Africa.”

“I won’t,” Marley said. The commercial part of the city was French, but the architecture was blunt and charmless, the avenues wide and dusty. He had passed Customs twenty hours ago and already had decided he didn’t like the city. A few hours before that he had been in Cairo.

“They spot you as an American, half the people on the street will try to sell you hashish — or their sister or brother or mother,” Hyde said. He wasn’t more than forty-five, with a squarish face, deep-set blue eyes, curly hair. A side door of the saloon was open to the street, from which flies coasted in on afternoon light. The flies always came back, Orwell had said, but he’d been in the mountains, in Marrakech. In the port, from what Marley had experienced trying to eat lunch, the flies never left.

“Another beer?”

“Does Philip Rule ever stop in here?”

“There’s a Phil who comes in, probably not who you’re looking for.”

“Frizzy red hair, a beard?”

Dennis Hyde shook his head, but it was in disgust. “You’d find him down the street. He comes to Casa for the whores.”

There were three of them, standing together half-encircling Rule, who had his hands in his trouser pockets as he spoke to the young women in broken French. He noticed Marley and nodded him in. One of the girls, about five feet tall, shifted part of her slight weight, accepting him. She had curly black hair, a thin face, pale skin, small, graceful hands. “Her mother was turning her out when she was ten,” Rule said. “I was here two years ago, covering the regional econ meeting. You should have seen her then.”

The girl smiled at Marley. She had sweet eyes.

He patted his pockets and said, “No dirham.” The dirham was the local currency.

She smiled tolerantly. “No dirham, no nothing.”

Marley smiled, too, showing that he regretted the situation. At thirty-three, he had made it into adult life without having engaged a prostitute. There hadn’t been business with many women of any sort that went beyond flirtation. What he lacked, he knew, was the finesse to close a transaction. But he was without peer — so the people running him said — at seducing spies. Sometimes they said it in a sly way that seemed to imply something about him that Marley believed wasn’t true. He would know, wouldn’t he?

The other girls were older. He wasn’t a good judge of street-worn faces, couldn’t guess their years. They understood that he didn’t have any dirham, so they were ignoring him and joking with Philip Rule, who was lighting a cigar and puffing the smoke in their faces. If they minded they didn’t admit it. The tiny dark-haired girl had joined in. There was something elegant about her gestures, which Marley watched while he wondered which movie actress she had studied, how long it had taken the ten- or twelve-year-old mind to absorb the techniques that were meant to be charming, wondered if her mother had beaten the affectations into her, wondered if she believed any of it, if she actually hoped she was elegant as she stood on the dirty sidewalk and made her deals. He had a fanciful thought, which lasted no longer than it took to form, that he should take her away to somewhere safe. He didn’t know that it was too late for her, couldn’t be sure...

He felt the weight of the sunlight pressing on the back of his head, closed his eyes, opened them, as Phil Rule patted an older girl on the shoulder, broke off with his laughter already dead on his lips, and walked slowly, sharing the sidewalk with Marley, looking in doorways, smirking through his beard when he turned a glance on Marley. “I haven’t been paid in four months,” he said.

“You haven’t been producing.”

Puff on the cigar. “All you care, I could starve.”

“For all I care,” Marley said, “you can sell your body on the street like your friends. Your cable said you had something worthwhile.”

“And you came all the way from Cairo.”

It had to be a lucky guess; Rule couldn’t know where he had come from. There hadn’t been time enough in Cairo for anyone but the Russians to spot Marley, and they wouldn’t share information so quickly.

Rule went on, “There’s a Yugoslav freighter due in port in two days. The name is Tuhobic. There’s something on board you should see.”

“What is it?”

“A corpse.”

Marley said mildly, “A corpse. Why should I want to see it?”

“He was going by the name John Larkin,” said Rule, who glanced over and then, feeling confident, smiled at Marley the way he had smiled at the whores. “I thought you would be interested,” he said.

Phil Rule had a room several blocks away, at the Georges V, where he had tea brought up and sat with Marley in stifling heat with the balcony windows closed. “Larkin died at sea a couple of days after the ship left Havana, according to his wife. She’s a dancer, remember, Julianne Helgeson?”

Marley nodded. She had been dancing with a German company when she met Larkin, eight years ago, months after he’d broken with the CIA: bolted from a Central America station and begun spilling secrets. Marley wondered if she’d had any idea what she was getting into. Part of him wondered if John Larkin had.

“He wouldn’t have been buried at sea?” Marley said.

“Julianne wouldn’t hear of it. The other passengers wouldn’t have been happy, either. There must be fifty or sixty of them, expecting to get where they’ve paid to go. Bad advertising to dump bodies overboard.”

“How did you hear about this?”

“Julianne sent a wireless. We’re still friends.”

Rule had interviewed Larkin for an American wire service soon after his break with the agency. It had been a sympathetic interview. Good, from Phil Rule’s perspective, for establishing his credentials in anti-CIA circles.

Marley asked, “Did Julianne ask you to sell the news to us?”

Rule set about lighting another cigar. “That’s between you and me. All right?”

“Of course.”

“She doesn’t know you. You can be another journalist.”

“Do you mind if we open a window now?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

Marley undid the latches to the balcony, which was ornamental, too small to be functional. The view onto a side street that twisted toward the old city was softened by suspended dust. The outside air was as hot as that inside the room. But the enclosed smell of Rule’s cigar had begun to make him ill. It couldn’t have been the man himself. Apart from a few niceties about prostitutes, Marley knew that he and Rule were brothers under the skin.

Larkin had been different, according to the people at Langley who had known him in the field. Enthusiastic but squeamish. He’d had a different name with the agency, not that it mattered. By the time he gave his first interview about torture in Central America, everyone knew him as John Larkin, ex-Marine, ex-case officer driven by conscience to separate himself from his employer. The agency did its best to make his new career uncomfortable. After two years of being expelled from European countries, Larkin had ended up in the arms of the Cubans. Some said that was where he had been all along. Marley wasn’t certain. He’d thought some of Larkin’s claims were non sequiturs. Latin American dictators hadn’t needed CIA training to know how to torture. It would, he thought, have happened without us.

As for his Cuban comrades, did Larkin really believe they had clean hands? Or did they get a pass because they were fighting for the progressive cause?

He wished he’d been able to ask Larkin. Weren’t you squeamish about that?

“I’ve got to notify some people in Amsterdam,” Philip Rule said. “You know, keep up appearances. Julianne would assume I’ve done it. We have friends there. Progressives.”

“All right,” Marley said. There was no stopping Rule. Nobody at Langley would make it worth Rule’s while to damage his image. “Let me know who to expect.”

“It’ll probably be Donny Simmons. He was closest to Larkin.”

“Let me know when you’re certain.”

Marley took the elevator downstairs. A very fat man in a jeballa was checking into the hotel in the company of a boy who couldn’t have been ten. Marley walked out onto the street, feeling tight in the gut and angry, and walked a few streets to relax. It was impossible. Street children understood the meaning of his khaki suit and followed him, proposing to shine his shoes. Predatory adults closed in with offers that began, “Are you from America? My cousin works in New York. Would you like to see erotica?” At an avenue in the new city, he got a taxi that took him to his hotel near the port. His meeting with the Moroccan security officer wasn’t until eight that evening, and the man wanted to be bought dinner at the hotel, where the wine might be respectable. He was a thin, angular man in his forties who didn’t wear his uniform, but something in his eyes and manner alerted the service staff that this man meeting with the American should be treated well. He spoke to Marley, whose name he would never know, as if they were old friends, battered comrades in the war against Communism. King Hassan II might flirt with Moscow, but they both knew where his interests lay and, as important, who had trained his security service.

What would John Larkin have had to say about that? Marley wondered. That they needed us to teach them how to torture Bedouin rebels?

The security officer ate well and drank lavishly, and Marley gave him a name and said there might be more names. If any of Larkin’s friends arrived from Amsterdam, they would be held for the next plane out.

* * * *

The Tuhobic, a bulk carrier out of Rijeka, arrived late, after dark, and the customs officials boarded first. It was close to midnight when the ship was cleared, donkey carts trundled up to the dockside beside Mercedes sedans, waiting for baggage, and Marley and Philip Rule went aboard.

Julianne Helgeson was waiting in the ship’s lounge. Rule hugged her and said that Donny had gotten hung up at the airport, how was she holding herself together?

“I’m all right, Philip. I’ve had nine days to adjust.”

“John Larkin was on the side of the angels,” Rule said fiercely. “What happened?”

“His heart...”

Rule’s glance barely touched Marley. “Everyone’s going to ask — our friends in Amsterdam are bound to suspect — was it the agency? Did the bastards finally settle the score?”

“No, Philip. It was his heart.” Her face sagged. “He ran out of time. Perhaps he knew he wouldn’t have much, and that is why he worked so hard.”

“There are plenty of us ready to take up where John left off.” Rule’s color was high, his voice intense. If Marley hadn’t known him, he might have believed the man’s pretenses. Rule laid it on a bit longer before remembering to introduce Marley by the name on his passport. “Jim is a stringer for the Monitor. He’s read your husband’s books.”

Julianne Helgeson turned to Marley. “Have you, Jim?”

“With interest,” Marley said. “It must have been difficult for him, exposing CIA agents he’d known in his career.”

She nodded slightly. “It was necessary.”

“But it took courage, didn’t it?” Marley said with a sympathy he didn’t feel.

“Yes, it took courage. Our lives have been very difficult.” She turned to Philip Rule. “Philip, the purser was hoping to talk to you tonight. I want you to handle the arrangements. John would want to be buried in the United States. I’ll fly back with him.”

Rule popped up. “I’ll go find that purser.” He stopped. “What are you going to do? You could return to dancing.”

“I’ll continue John’s work,” she said. “Once we’ve taken care of things at home, I’ll go to Amsterdam. See if there’s a place for me in the organization.”

“I’m sure there will be,” Rule said.

“The gallant widow?” Her smile was bitter.

Rule shook his head. “No. You know your husband’s work better than anyone. I’m sure Donny will put you in charge.”

“Then I will do my best,” she said.

After Rule was gone, she leaned back on the sofa. Her eyes were wounded, but not that deeply. “Well, Charles.”

“Well,” Marley said, sizing up the woman he hadn’t seen in years. “Do you have anything for me?”

“We were on our way to meet two Russians in Rijeka. They were going to run John in Europe. I have their names.”

“Good girl.” He couldn’t help asking, “You didn’t — ah...?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Eight years is a long time.”

“You didn’t know John.” She smiled. “I loved him despite everything.”

The words passed him as if he hadn’t heard. Leaning forward, speaking more intensely than he meant to, almost like Rule, he said, “Julianne, I can bring you in. We’ll walk off the ship. You’ll be in New York tomorrow. In a safe place.”

Her look might have held some of the professional’s contempt for the amateur. “I don’t need rescuing. I’m where I want to be.”

Seeing his expression, she softened her tone. “I’m where you want me to be. I’ll have access in both Havana and Amsterdam. There will be plenty of goodies for you.”

Nodding, Marley looked around the lounge to hide his embarrassment. Twice in two days he’d had the same foolish thought. Suddenly he felt grateful that he hadn’t said anything to the girl on the street, who also would have recognized him as a fool.

He watched from a distance as Julianne Helgeson accompanied a coffin off the ship. Philip Rule was carrying two bags, bending toward her solicitously, perhaps hoping that he had a chance with her, or that he could glean a tidbit of information that could be sold somewhere. Marley didn’t care. He didn’t follow them to the airport. His friend in security would see that she got on the plane.

Philip Rule came around to the American bar two days later and seemed surprised to see Marley. He got a beer from the disillusioned owner and came over to Marley’s table. Before he sat down, Marley said, “Were you in on it?”

Rule hesitated, decided not to pretend. “Not until we got to the ship. I made the mistake of asking the purser to see the body.”

“And it wasn’t John Larkin.”

Rule put his beer on the table, slid into a wooden chair. “Crew member had a heart attack two days out of Havana. Julianne and Larkin improvised. Ten thousand dollars to the family, they didn’t care where Papa was buried. The captain needed less.”

“You let them get away with it.”

“Charles, I don’t know what they’re trying to get away with. Julianne called me this morning. The sailor’s body was cremated. John Larkin is officially dead. She plans to join him somewhere. Talks about living quietly.”

“She told me she would stay in the field.”

“She told you what you wanted to hear, that she was dedicated. She did eight years, Charles, probably decided that was enough.”

“Does Larkin know she worked for me?”

Rule grinned, as gently as he grinned at the whores. “You’d have to ask them. Julianne told me you’d offered to bring her in. But she didn’t need you, did she? She figured a way out by herself. That’s how it’s done, you know. We figure a way out by ourselves.”

Copyright © 2012 John C. Boland