Midnight In Madrid

EIGHTEEN

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 7, MID-AFTERNOON

Finally, after a half hour’s wait, Jean-Claude thought he heard something outside. Then he knew he did. The sound of a car engine. Diesel, rattling to a stop.

Friend or enemy, he didn’t know.

Under his shirt, he gripped his gun.

Then, almost on cue, Jean-Claude could tell from Ceila’s reaction who was present. She quickly pulled on a robe and her headwear. To be caught this way by her husband might result in a thrashing and she knew it. She also picked up the child and carried him to another room. Within a few more seconds the garage doors swung wide open.

It was Basheer. His taxi was parked outside. It was an old blue Mercedes Benz, an elderly 300D workhorse of a vehicle.

Jean-Claude stepped from the back of Mahoud’s car. He walked to the street and embraced Basheer. Both men looked around. They saw nothing that didn’t fit within the neighborhood. Old men sitting at the café a few doors down, mothers keeping watch on children. Many parked cars, but only ones they recognized.

Mahoud made a hand gesture from across the street. All clear. He had seen nothing amiss.

Jean-Claude gave a head gesture to Basheer. Basheer helped him retrieve one duffel bag, Jean-Claude carried the other. They loaded them quickly into the trunk of Basheer’s Benz and took off. Mahoud remained behind, moved his own car back to the street, closed and locked the garage, and departed.

They drove across the city to another destination, a pastry shop operated by a Muslim couple named Samy and Tamar.

Samy and Tamar were a likeable young couple in their twenties who operated a pastry shop in El Rastro, a neighborhood named after the Sunday market held within its bounds. The quarter lay within the triangle formed by the La Latina Metro stop, Puerta de Toledo, and Glorieta de Embajadores and was in the larger neighborhood of Lavapiés, an artsy, bohemian section of Madrid. In medieval times, Lavapiés had been the Moorish and Jewish quarter located outside the city walls. The neighborhood has retained an outsider character with visible immigrant communities from Morocco, sub-Saharan Africa, and India. Samy and Tamar enjoyed living there. They had many friends and liked to sit in the cafés until late at night, laughing, drinking tea, telling jokes, and watching sports on television.

Lavapiés was undergoing a process of gentrification as more and more cafés, bars, and galleries opened every day. Samy and Tamar had many friends who worked for the government and even several friends who were British or American. Sometimes this created odd situations as both Samy and Tamar would rail against American and English “colonialism” throughout the world. Yet never, even in their bitterest diatribes, did their friends ever feel the two young Muslims were railing against them. The hatred wasn’t personal, it was political.

Samy and Tamar had been recruited into Jean-Claude’s cell two months earlier. They too hated America deeply for what they felt Americans had done to Muslim people worldwide. This, despite the fact that Tamar loved to dress Western in public, with skirts above her knees, and liked American movies and music. Fortunately, her husband permitted it, within reason. So they lived happily together.

And they too were happy to be conduits for Jean-Claude’s cargo.

So when Jean-Claude dropped the cargo at the bakery, Samy personally stashed both bags in a locked area of a deep walk-in pantry in his bakery.

He was thrilled with what he had and happy to be part of Jean-Claude’s team and mission.