Seven Lies South

18

Agadir was the last Moroccan port on the Atlantic coast. Beecher had been there years before with the Irishman. They had rented a launch and spent two days fishing for sea bass. The fishing hadn’t been good. Their guide, a talkative, muscular Frenchman, had blamed the wind the first day, the clouds the next. But the water was so clear they could see pebbles on the wavy sand thirty feet below them, and they had had a fine time drinking beer and trying to harpoon a killer whale which cruised around the ship both afternoons. There was enough oil in him to pay for their trip.

The main industry of Agadir was the processing of sardines, and when Beecher and Ilse climbed out of the Goulamine bus, they were exposed to the city’s most characteristic air — the gentle effluvium of rotting fish stirring restlessly in the cool Atlantic winds.

“Let’s go get a drink,” Beecher said.

He took Ilse’s arm and headed for the bar he and the Irishman had spent their time in between the fishing trips. It was a hundred yards from the Grand Hotel, tucked in between the post office and a camera shop. Beecher remembered that it was dark and quiet, with booths in the front near a zinc-topped bar, and a gloomy back room spotted with tables. He had a few thousand Moroccan francs left, about seven dollars, and this would be plenty for beer and sandwiches. But it wouldn’t buy bus tickets to Casablanca. In the morning he could pawn his watch, but he didn’t know what they were going to do about a place to sleep tonight. It would be risky to show his passport to a hotel clerk. Undoubtedly the papers had covered the story of the missing plane. He could say he had lost his passport, but this would mean forms to fill out and possibly an interview with the local police.

Beecher hoped he could think a bit more effectively after a drink.

It was now nine-thirty, and the streets of the souk and casbah were dark, the shops shuttered up for the night, but the French quarter of the city still blazed brightly. Agadir was typical of the peculiar colonizing genius of the French; there was no mixture of cultures, no blending of civilizations. The French section of Agadir was as French as Paris, a quadrangle of hotels, restaurants, shops and sidewalk cafés, which had pushed its way cleanly through the crust of Arabic architecture and customs. Beecher and Ilse walked down a graceful boulevard, passing the wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, the novels of Camus and Mauriac, the cheese of Provence, and frocks and slippers from the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Frenchmen sat at sidewalk cafés with their wives and families, sipping coffee and brandy, and glancing through Figaro and Paris-Match and Les Jours de France.

The few Arabs they saw seemed like strangers in this French community, the men shuffling along rapidly in jellabahs and backless slippers, the women veiled to the eyes and robed from head to foot, as epicene as draped bananas.

Beecher found the café he was looking for. It wasn’t crowded. He and Ilse sat in the back room, which was empty except for a pair of American soldiers.

“Beer?” he asked her.

“Yes, thank you. Could I have a wash, do you suppose?”

“Sure.” He nodded toward the door of the WC. “Go ahead. How about food? A sandwich okay?”

“Yes, please.”

The American soldiers were shooting dice without any apparent enthusiasm. When Ilse walked across the room their heads swiveled in unison, and their eyes moved up and down her back, taking a thorough but polite inventory of her long dark hair and slim bare legs. Then they sighed and returned to their game. They had lined up beer bottles along one side of their table, and the dice cubes made tinkling sounds as they rattled against this backstop. One looked about thirty-five, a sergeant of the career breed, neat, hard and knowing, with short black hair, and a blunt uncompromising face, tanned the color of old leather, and lighted by a pair of cold pale eyes. The other soldier was younger, barely out of his teens, a slim redhead with clean but unformed features, and a bushy, unexpectedly dark mustache. He seemed to be a little bit drunk, but his manner was alert and agreeable and expectant, the reaction of certain very young or very old people, Beecher thought, the kind who waited hopefully and cheerfully for life to fulfill its promises of excitement and mystery.

The waiter brought bottles of beer and a plate of sandwiches to Beecher’s table. Ilse returned looking attractive and tidy, with her face clean and her hair combed, and the white raincoat belted snugly about her waist. But there were blue smudges of fatigue under her eyes.

As they ate and drank, she asked: “What must we do now?”

Beecher had been thinking about this. It had occurred to him that Ilse could check into a hotel, since no one had known that she had been on the flight from Mirimar to Rabat. “We’re going to get some sleep first,” he said. “After you’ve finished eating, go to the Grand Hotel. It’s just down the block. When you get to your room ask the desk clerk to phone here. It’s the Café Rouge et Noir. Don’t use my name. Let’s see, make it Norton. Ask for Mr. Norton. Tell me your room number, and I’ll join you. I can’t take a chance on registering. But I can go up to your floor without any trouble.”

“Yes, Mr. Norton,” she said, and then smiled shyly. “I shouldn’t be making jokes.”

“You didn’t make much of a one,” he said, and patted her hand. “All set?”

She squared her shoulders. “I’ll try my best,” she said seriously.

After she had gone Beecher ordered another beer. When the waiter left he became aware that the sergeant was staring at him thoughtfully, a frown drawing a deep crease down the middle of his forehead. Beecher looked away and sipped his beer, but he realized the sergeant was still watching him; he could almost feel the cold pale eyes boring at him across the dim room.

His heart began to race. He twisted in his chair, and raised the glass so that it partially concealed his face. It’s nothing, he thought, trying to calm his straining nerves. I’m burned from the sun, beat-up and filthy. Naturally he’s curious. And he’s wondering about Ilse. Why did she leave? And why am I sitting here? The inevitable speculations of a soldier on leave with time to kill.

Beecher stared at the telephone booth, which was up front beside the zinc-topped bar. Was something wrong? Was she having trouble getting into the hotel? He remembered, and the shock of it made his hands tremble, that Ilse’s passport wasn’t in order. It hadn’t been stamped when she’d left Spain, of course. And it didn’t have a Moroccan entry date. The hotel clerk might not bother to check this; normally, all he’d want was a glance at her picture and name. But supposing he was one of those nosy, bespectacled ferrets you had the bad luck to run into occasionally? Cold little men, whose pleasure was sniffing through credentials and documents, on the one-in-a-thousand chance of finding some piddling mistake — a blotted word or an incorrect date. Beecher felt sweat start on his forehead. He could almost see the man at work, neat and clean in a blue suit with a pocketful of pens and pencils, sucking on his teeth, and ranging through Ilse’s passport like a hound dog in a tangle of thornbushes and honeysuckle.

“Hey, Mac!”

Beecher’s hand shook, and a trickle of cold beer ran down his wrist.

“Yes?” He turned and looked at the sergeant.

“You an American?”

“That’s right.”

The sergeant nodded complacently. A tough pleased smile broke on his blunt hard face. “I figured as much,” he said. “The redhead here agreed with me for a change.”

The young soldier smiled and raised his glass to Beecher. “I knew you weren’t French, anyway.”

“And damn well no Arab,” the sergeant said, with a heavy accent on the first A. “Where you from in the States?”

“New York,” Beecher said.

The sergeant moved his glass in a slow circle on the top of the table. He frowned again, his cold eyes lighting with interest. “What you doing over here?”

This was par for the course, Beecher thought, trying to control his nerves. A GI reflex. Where you from? Whadda you do? Been in this dump long? He made an effort to steady the smile on his lips. “I’m just a tourist,” he said.

“You’ll be glad to get out of gook land and back to New York, I bet.”

“That’s right,” Beecher said.

“New York, there’s a great furlough town,” the sergeant said, shaking his head.

“They’re all good,” the redhead said amiably.

“What do you know?” The sergeant jabbed the redhead’s shoulder with the heel of his hand. “I’m talking about wartime. That’s when you know if a town’s any good. In New York now, they gave us tickets to plays, I mean plays on a stage. Hell, we’d go into the USO on Broadway, and there was a chick passing out tickets.” The sergeant sipped his beer, but looked intently at Beecher over the rim of his glass. “Funny thing,” he said, wiping his lips. “I got a notion I seen you somewhere before.”

The redhead groaned and pressed his hands against the sides of his head. “Oh no! Here we go! Step right up, folks, the show is just starting. Sergeant O’Doul, the mental marvel! He can make a frigging IBM machine holler Uncle. Try him, folks. The serial number of anybody in the company. Joe DiMaggio’s 1946 batting average. What he had for breakfast eight years ago! Go ahead, folks, he’s never wrong.”

Beecher smiled with an effort. “Maybe we met at one of those plays in New York, Sarge.”

“I don’t think that was it.”

Beecher saw that there was a newspaper on a chair at their table. It was the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. To distract him, he said, “Mind if I look at your paper? I’ve been out of touch for a day or so.”

“Yeah,” the sergeant said, nodding slowly. He seemed to be taking an inventory of Beecher’s soiled clothes and sand-stiffened hair. “Go ahead, I already read it. But I wish I could pin you down, mister. No offense meant, understand. But I got this thing about faces.”

When Beecher picked up the paper, he realized that both soldiers were watching him curiously. Anger streaked through him like a bitter flame. What right did they have to stare at him? With their booze and money and sloppy American superiority, they felt free to patronize anybody who wasn’t as loud and boorish as they were. The anger was like fire burning away his strength. He felt helpless and old and vulnerable. They were suspicious of him, he knew; they saw his weakness and fear, and to their peasized brains this meant something wasn’t kosher. Unless you got drunk and pounded the bar and called the natives gooks and wogs you had no right to pretend you were an American.

“You want a drink?” the sergeant asked him. “Have one on us, eh, Mac?”

“No, but thanks anyway,” Beecher said, and returned to his own table, making a deliberate effort to walk slowly and casually.

The crisis in France was headlined on the front page of the Tribune. A minister had resigned in protest over the defeat of his proposals to stabilize the government’s position in Algeria.

Beecher shook out the paper and turned to page two. It was like snapping on a light while facing an unexpected mirror. His picture glared at him from the middle column. The caption read: “Murder Suspect Lost in Missing Plane.”

Beecher willed himself to sit perfectly still. He made a project of drawing two deep, unhurried breaths. Keep it slow and deliberate, he thought. No panic. He lit a cigarette and dropped the match carefully into the ashtray. The soldiers weren’t watching him; he didn’t risk looking at them, but he could hear the dice rattling on their table, tinkling against the backstop of beer bottles. The sound lent him a fragile confidence.

Beecher looked at the date line of the story and counted back on his fingers. They had left Mirimar on Monday night. This was Thursday. They had spent forty-eight hours in the desert. The story was two days old then, commencing with the discovery of the Frenchman’s body at his villa on Monday morning. Poor Adela, he thought, poor Encarna.

His picture had apparently been reproduced from a Spanish paper, for the printing was bad, and the edges had bled, blurring the distinctive outlines of his face. It was a snapshot Trumbull had taken of him on the beach in the shade of the Casa Flore, a wine shop built against the cliffs below Mirimar. Beecher was wearing swimming shorts and holding a bottle of beer in his hand, although that wasn’t evident in the newspaper cut; the picture had been cropped below his shoulders and enlarged to sharpen the detail of his features.

The story was sketchy, but basically accurate. They had his name and age right, and the details of his arguments with Maurice and that he had left Mirimar in an aircraft, which (at the time of writing) was a dozen hours overdue at Rabat. The crew and passengers were listed parenthetically. (Captain Miguel Davoe, 29, Pilot. Fransisco Menoja, Co-Pilot, 28. James Lynch, Esq., 41, Laura Meadows, 26.) The Esquire was inevitable, he thought.

The “color” on Beecher was tinged with fantasy. He was described variously as a “wealthy sportsman” and a “handsome expatriate” and an “author in Spain to write a book.” Beecher closed his eyes and resisted a nervous impulse to burst out laughing; he could imagine his friends at work, Trumbull, Nelson, the Irishman perhaps, upgrading him out of fierce and final loyalty. Nelson would have contributed the “wealthy”; he wouldn’t want anyone to think Beecher was living in Spain only because it was cheap. The Irishman took his sport gravely, and Beecher could see him shaking his handsome head and saying, “Ah, the lad was a useful hand with a rod and reel.” The “to write a book” nonsense had Trumbull’s touch for he was convinced that authors were mysterious, God-starred creatures drifting serenely above all conventions and commonplaces.

At the end of the story, Don Julio, the constable of Mirimar, was quoted. A murder had been committed, and an aircraft was missing, he said in substance, but refused to speculate on whether there might be a casual connection between these events. There was a significant omission in Don Julio’s account, Beecher saw; he had chosen not to mention that the suspected murderer was also an experienced flyer.

The telephone rang demandingly in the silence, and Beecher’s muscles became tense as the bartender went to answer it. He looked out of the booth an instant later and cried in a singsong voice: “Monsieur Norton. Monsieur Norton.”

Beecher thanked him and hurried to the booth.

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s all right. There was no trouble.”

“What room are you in?”

“It is 841.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Is anything wrong? You sound strange.”

“No, everything’s fine.” Beecher drew a deep breath. “Don’t worry. Relax.”

Beecher replaced the phone and paid his bill at the bar. He was turning with blundering haste toward the door, when the sergeant called out sharply: “Hold it, Mac.”

Beecher looked around slowly, a hand on the doorknob, a fixed smile on his face. “Yes?”

The sergeant was standing with his hands braced on his hips, a tall, purposeful figure in the dim light of the room. He pushed his cannon-ball head forward, as if he were staring down a line of recruits.

“The paper, Mac,” he said, in a deceptively gentle voice. “My paper, if we’re going to be finicky about it.”

“I’m sorry,” Beecher said. He felt stiff and awkward as he walked slowly down the bar. “I forgot. I figured you were through with it.”

Unexpectedly, the sergeant grinned at him. “I’ll tell you how it is. I save Art Buchwald to the bitter end. So if I don’t run into something interesting, well I got Art to keep me company in the sack. And the way this night’s shaping up he’s all the company I’m going to get.”

Beecher fingered the paper under his arm. He had a wild impulse to tear it to bits. The paper was folded open to page two, he realized; his picture was the first thing the sergeant would see. “Buchwald is very funny,” he said, and moistened his cracked lips.

“He sure is. Wild.”

“He’s very original,” Beecher said, and looked away from the sergeant’s eyes; in the gloomy light they seemed to be bright with suspicion. He stared down at the dice on the table. The sergeant put out his hand for the paper.

Beecher said suddenly, “Is the game open to strangers?”

“Hell, yes, it is,” the sergeant said. He punched the redhead on the shoulder. “We got some action, finally. Garsong! Start the beer flowing this way.”

Beecher pulled up a chair and dropped the newspaper on the floor at his feet. The sergeant loosened his tie and nodded at the row of beer bottles along one edge of the table. “No dice unless you hit ’em. Understand?”

Beecher nodded and dropped his last money — three thousand Moroccan francs — in the middle of the table.

“I’ll roll,” he said. “Okay?”

The sergeant stared at the three notes and shook his head slowly. “Gook money. It’s not good, Mac.”

“That’s all I’ve got.”

“For Christ’s sake!” The sergeant sighed. “Okay, what’s it worth? Three thousand gook francs. Say six bucks. That’s giving you a fancy rate. What’s open?”

“All of it.”

The soldiers faded him with six American dollars.

Beecher rolled a seven.

“Damn!” the sergeant said. “A hot hand. What you shooting?”

“Twelve bucks.”

“Roll ’em.”

This time the dice bounded off the bottles with a gay, tinkling sound, and came up six-five.

“Goddamn!” the sergeant said. “Can’t even make a point. Just throws naturals.”

Beecher felt light-headed. The bus fare to Casablanca was lying on the table. And it belonged to him. “I’ll shoot the twenty-four dollars,” he said.

They had to go to their wallets then. “Okay,” the sergeant said. “Now make them bottles ring like a brass band, Mac.” Beecher rolled a six. They offered three to two against it, but he shook his head. “I’m all in the middle.”

“For Christ’s sake,” the sergeant said. “So what are we fighting for? A lousy three thousand Moroccan francs?”

The redhead smiled tentatively. “He offered to shoot it, we said all right. So all right.”

“So all right, balls,” the sergeant said. “So shoot.”

Beecher made the six on his third pass.

“Now ain’t that cute,” the sergeant said, staring at Beecher. “You’re starting to irritate me, Mr. Shooter. There’s forty-eight bucks down now. What you shooting?”

“I’ve got to leave,” Beecher said.

“Ain’t that sweet. You’re going to meet the chick now, I guess. Buy her some champagne with our dough.”

“With my dough,” Beecher said evenly. He reached for the money, but the sergeant caught his wrist.

“Hold it, sweetheart,” he said softly. “I’m starting to wonder about you. You talk American, but that chick of yours never saw Ellis Island, I’ll bet.”

“Forget it,” the redhead said. “He won with our dominoes. So why’re you griping?”

“Maybe he’s a commie agent or something,” the sergeant said.

Beecher was trying to think, to plan, but his thoughts flitted through his mind like erratic bursts of light. He knew a fight or brawl would ruin everything; the Moroccan police would throw all of them into jail. They would want to look at passports. Someone would have seen his picture in the Tribune. And that would be the end of it.

“Keep your money, if you can’t afford to lose it,” he said. “But we had a word for guys like you when I was in the army. It wasn’t a cute one.”

“So you was in the service, eh?” The sergeant nodded thoughtfully. “Well, there’s something you can’t kid me about. What’d you do?”

“I was a flyer.”

“Yeah? What’d you fly?”

“B-17’s,” Beecher said wearily. “They’ve got four engines and a high tail fin.”

“Everybody knows B-17’s. What about your fighter support?”

“We had P-47’s. Its nose is oval-shaped and the leading edge of the wing tapers into a round tip.”

The sergeant’s eyes narrowed. “What German fighter did it look like?”

“The Focke-Wolfe 190, except the 190 had a round engine nacelle.”

“Well, well,” the sergeant said. He looked uncomfortable. “So how come you’re on the bum down here? That’s why I offered to buy you a drink. You looked like you needed it.”

“Those things happen,” Beecher said. “Who knows why.”

“Damn, that’s the truth,” the sergeant said, nodding his head slowly. “The chick — the girl, I mean. She with you?”

“That’s right. I’ve given her a rough time.”

“Hell, she ain’t chained to you, far as I could see. They go along for the ride, they can’t complain about the bumps. How you’d like a lift as far as Casablanca? Me and brick-top are leaving early tomorrow.”

Beecher let out his breath slowly. “Let me buy you guys a drink.”

“Pick up your money. This is on me.” The sergeant stuck out a wide hand. “O’Doul’s the name. Like the old ballplayer Lefty O’Doul. Only my first name is Marty. Hemorrhage-head here we call Bricktop. Bricktop Ladley. But it should be Goldbricktop.”

The redhead grinned. “And up yours, too.”

“Okay, six o’clock out front of this dump,” the sergeant said. “You’re riding with the U.S. Army, Mac. You got no more worries.”

Beecher was discovering that an offer of sympathy could be a destructive gift; in some ways it was harder to take than a blow in the face. You could steel yourself against coldness and suspicion; find strength to fight it. But a warm smile drained all the bitterness and hardness out of you; he felt his eyes stinging, and knew he might make a fool of himself if he didn’t get out of there.

“Six o’clock,” he said.

The redhead suddenly shook the sergeant’s shoulder. “Look!” he said happily.

Two French girls had taken stools at the bar, slender twittering brunettes with foxy faces as empty and brilliant as painted masks, and shaved legs that gleamed like chalk in the soft light. Their wedge-soled sandals twisted with a promise of excitement as they smiled at the soldiers.

“An answer to a lonely soldier’s prayer,” the redhead said softly.

“Yeah,” the sergeant said, standing and straightening his tie. “The one that starts, now I lay me.”

Beecher picked up the paper from the floor and tucked it under his arm. “You won’t need Buchwald tonight, eh, Sarge?”

“Buchwald?” The sergeant looked at him with a frown. “What you talking about?”

Beecher tapped the newspaper. “I’ll take this along. Okay?”

“Sure.” The sergeant laughed explosively. “All of a sudden, I ain’t in a literary mood.”

Ilse had been crying, Beecher saw, when he entered the room.

“Where have you been?” she said, in a soft, rising voice. “What happened?”

Beecher sat wearily on the edge of the bed. The room was clean and large, the windowpanes black squares against the moonlit sky.

“Please,” she said. She stood with her back against the door, staring at him with wide, frightened eyes.

“Everything’s okay,” he said.

“I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to call again.”

It must have been rough, he thought, waiting here alone and helpless, anticipating the worst... But he hadn’t worried about her. He had come to a point where he couldn’t absorb any more emotion. That happened to people, he knew; he had seen it in war. They got filled up to the brim, and developed what amounted to a tolerance for horror.

“I ordered food,” Ilse said. “But you didn’t come. I started to feel afraid. But I didn’t cry. I knew it wouldn’t help.” She seemed very young and vulnerable in the heavy frame of the doorway, with her dark hair piled up on her head, and her throat as fragile as a child’s, ivory-white except for a faint blue vein pulsing against the smooth skin.

“I took a long bath,” she said. “I thought you would be here when I finished. But the room was empty.”

She wore one of Laura’s slips, a white nylon sheath with a delicate filigree of lace about the hemline and a border of tiny pink bows at the throat. Under the crown of thick black hair, her face was still and small and pale.

Beecher put an arm about her shoulders and rubbed her bare arms, comforting her as he might a cold and lonely child. “Everything’s all right,” he said. “We’ve got a ride to Casablanca tomorrow. And I’ve got some money.”

“Your food is here,” she said. “But I think the coffee is cold.”

“That’s okay.” She smelled of soap and toothpaste, and her body was warm and soft in his arms.

“Shall I put some water in the bath for you?” she asked him. But she clung close to him, her voice muffled against his chest.

“Yes,” Beecher said, and patted her arm gently. Then he walked to the table in the window alcove. He lifted the cover from a tray of chicken sandwiches, which were skewered with toothpicks and garnished with lettuce and pickle. The coffee was still hot, steaming in a thermos bottle. He ate two sandwiches and drank three cups of coffee, numb with weariness, and savoring the gradual release of tensions in his body. When Ilse told him his bath was ready, he rose with an effort, his muscles protesting the exertion, and pulled off his jacket and shirt.

The bathroom was large and old-fashioned, with a long tub standing on ball-and-claw feet, and a hand basin of gray-streaked marble. Steam rose from the hot water in the tub, and misted on the full-length mirror. Beecher rubbed the glass with his hand. No wonder the soldiers had stared, he thought. He had cut himself that morning with Lynch’s razor and a theatrical streak of black blood curled along the line of his jaw. His hair was stiff and gray with sand, standing out like spikes from his skull. But there was something in his face which surprised him. For years he had been accustomed to the mildness and resignation in his expression. But that was gone now. He couldn’t quite decide what had taken its place. There was a stubbornness in the set of his jaw, and a suggestion of anger and impatience in his eyes. But it was more than that, the sum of these things perhaps. It was quite simple, he realized finally. He looked alive. That’s all it amounted to.

Ilse had made a neat arrangement of Lynch’s shaving things on the hand basin. Beecher shaved himself, then soaked in the tub for half an hour, soaping the sand and grime from his scalp and body. He scrubbed his teeth with toothpaste spread on the hem of a hand towel. After rubbing himself dry, he twisted a fresh bathtowel around his waist and went into the bedroom.

Ilse was lying under the covers on the edge of the bed, the mound of her body slim and small in the soft lamplight.

Beecher collected an ashtray, matches and cigarettes, and placed them on the bedside table. He stretched out on top of the covers, and sighed with weary contentment as his body sank down into the gentle mattress. For a moment he considered the effort involved in lighting a cigarette. He would have to get up on his elbow, shake one from the pack, light it. That wasn’t all. He would have to place the ashtray so that he could stretch his arm out in the darkness and knock the ash off safely.

It seemed like too much trouble.

“Are you going to sleep now?” Ilse asked him, barely whispering the words.

“Yes,” he said.

A little later he heard her crying. He turned his head and blinked his eyes to bring her features into focus. Tears moved down her cheeks, glistening like quicksilver in the darkness.

She wanted to be comforted, he knew. Made to feel happy and secure with her femaleness attested to and celebrated. But it was like the cigarette. It was just too much trouble. It was a selfish decision, he realized, but sometimes gentleness was a privilege of the strong. Don Willie had probably been gentle to her, he thought. In whatever ways he could. The idea rankled him. He turned his back on her soft sobs and punched the pillow up under his head. But despite his bone-deep weariness, it seemed a long time before he fell asleep.