Tangier

The Code Machine

Sitting in his office one Sunday afternoon in August, waiting for Peter Zvegintzov, Lake felt that he was finally putting things in order, and that the climax of everything was near. For weeks he'd thought of his life as a film in which two opposing stories were intercut: his descent into a pit of sensuality with Jackie, and the execution of his plan for Z.

He'd tried to simplify, had taken certain steps. He'd sent his wife and sons back to Minnesota for the month, on the pretext that his mother needed company and that the boys would profit from a change of scene. Then he'd distracted Foster, inventing all sorts of time-consuming tasks. He'd sent him into the city to study social currents, and several weeks ago on an inspection tour of northern Morocco which, he hoped, would last at least a month.

Lake sat back in his swivel chair, smiled, and closed his eyes. Now finally rid of his wife and his lover's husband, he could concentrate on the great adventure of his life. In less than an hour the Russian would be closing up his shop. Lake had invited him to the empty air-conditioned Consulate to mount the final stage of his assault.

The telephone rang, harsh, abrupt. Lake was startled. He sat up straight. Who the hell was it, he wondered, reaching for the phone. Not some stranded tourist, he hoped, or Zvegintzov begging off.

"Hello."

"It's me."

It was Jackie, her voice mellow and breathy. She called him all the time now, day and night.

"Is that you?" she asked.

"Of course it's me," he said. "Who else would be here on a Sunday? Who'd you think it was?"

"Just wondered how the work's going," she said. "I'm lying here in bed now, absolutely stark. Gosh, I'm horny, Dan. My legs are thrashing. I'm just dying for you to come."

"Well," he said, pleased by the image of her spread out, tempestuous with desire, "you're going to have to wait quite a while, Jackie dear. I've still got a hell of a lot of paperwork to do."

"Okay, Dan. That's Okay. Just wanted you to know I'm waiting for you here." She made a squeaky little kissing noise just before hanging up.

Horny! Christ! When was she not?

She was a man-eater, insatiable. There were marks all over him that testified to her passion. When she was excited she clawed him like a tigress. Though she proclaimed herself a vegetarian, she devoured his flesh like meat. They'd screwed, he guessed, over every chair and table in the office, on top of his big State Department desk, even against the dictionary stand. Her gymnast's body was capable of incredible contortions. Sex to her was joyous exercise.

It was marvelous to be involved with such a creature, not much good for anything, he thought, except to screw. He'd been contemptuous of her at first, had found her utterly moronic, but after a while, when she'd reduced him to the state of a happy animal, he began to find great virtue in her guiltless pursuit of sex. He let her lead him then, turned his body over to her to use. And use it she did, pleasuring and exhausting him, restoring his vigor, curing his insomnia, sweeping away the worries that had been cluttering up his mind.

She even had him doing calisthenics now. ("Got to work off all the flab, Dan! Got to get yourself back in shape!") She taught him how to jog in place and stand on his head against the wall. He did a dozen pushups every morning and skipped rope nude at night.

At first her addiction to athletics put him off. They'd be screwing away, lost in a rhythmic daze, and then he'd begin to hear her counting off the strokes. "One, two, three, four!" Christ! It was like being in boot camp or training at a YMCA gym. But eventually he got used to it, and her athletic imagery too. The more he thought about it, the more impressed he was by her imaginative powers. Going to bed was "going to the mats." Afterward they'd "hit the showers," then have a "skull session" to figure out "new plays." When she wasn't ready, and needed more oral stimulation, she'd suggest he "take another lap."

She was full of tricks too, such as fondling his organ through the rough mesh of her pantyhose, or taking the rubber band off her ponytail and letting her long hair fall upon his genitals like a gentle, tickling rain. She'd shake her head slowly then, side to side, using her hair to arouse.

Sometimes she called him up at the office to ask if he was "horny" or to make an obscene suggestion in her cheerful, breathy voice. She was a maniac for oral sex, and would suggest it to him at the oddest times. "I want to give you head, Dan," she whispered once at a reception for the officers of a Sixth Fleet submarine. Christ-she was unbelievable. He couldn't think of anything but her golden pubic fleece. Once she came into La Colombe when he was down on his hands and knees helping Zvegintzov fix his ice cream freezer. At the sight of her calves (she was wearing shorts) he trembled so much he dropped his screwdriver on the floor.

From the beginning he'd been worried about Foster, and what he'd do if he found out. But Foster was obtuse. Or, as Jackie put it: "He doesn't know his ass." She said awful things about him, revealed intimate details that made Lake wince, such as how, after jogging, he "couldn't get it up," or describing how she'd caught him once "whacking off in the john." Their marriage sounded as rotten as his and Janet's, the difference being that they'd tried to spice it up. She told how the Codds had approached them about the possibilities of "doing a quartet," and then how negotiations had broken down when she and Foster had viewed them in bathing garb beside Percy Bainbridge's pool.

Still he was wary, and one time badly scared. Shortly after the beginning of the affair Foster burst into his office clutching a copy of the Depeche de Tanger. He plunked the paper down in the middle of the desk, then stabbed at Robin Scott's gossip column with his thumb. "Get a load of this," he said, pointing to a passage underlined.

Lake read it slowly, then looked up, expecting Foster to punch him in the teeth.

But Foster was laughing. "Get it?" he asked. "Uganda! A major power! Jesus-what a joke!"

"Uganda?" Lake searched his face. He couldn't follow Foster's drift.

"It's Fufu, Dan. Hell-I thought you knew. He's got mistresses all over town."

Lake was incredulous. Was Foster really such a fool? There it was in black and white, a clear reference to Jackie and himself. "A senior representative of a major power," Scott had written, "making whoopee in a big black car." Could anything be more incriminating than that? He wondered if Foster was playing dumb. But that night Jackie reassured him. "He doesn't know shit from shinola," she said, handing him a kif cigarette.

She'd been trying for a month to turn him on to pot, but he'd been resisting as best he could. "It's groovy," she told him, "prolongs orgasms, stuff like that." She showed him how to inhale the smoke, then hold it in his lungs.

He didn't like it. It made him dizzy. He much preferred to drink. "Come on, Dan-don't be a stiff. You've got to smoke the local grass to understand a place." He told her he didn't give a damn about understanding Tangier, but when she convinced him finally to share a joint, he felt like a buoy floating loose at sea.

In the early days he'd picked her up on street corners, then driven her out to the lovers' lane at Rimilat. But after they read about themselves in Robin's column, they began meeting in his office late at night. They'd screw like crazy there, while Janet slept in the adjoining residence, and Foster, dozing in his flat, assumed Jackie was out for an evening jog. After a while, however, these quick, impassioned meetings were insufficient to their needs. They longed for more subtle, extended sessions, free of fear that their spouses might intrude.

It had been easy persuading Janet to take the boys to Minnesota. Getting rid of Foster had been something else. Lake devised the political reporting project to get him out of the building. Then he met with Jackie in the empty residence and made love to her for hours at a time. Foster, however, was energetic, and began to turn up at odd moments with hysterical reports. He claimed conditions in Tangier were not so placid as they seemed. He said the city was ready to erupt.

"Nonsense," Lake told him, evading Foster's eyes, his own hand in his pocket nursing his sore cock beneath the desk. "Where do you get this stuff, for Christ's sake? The town's prosperous. The lousy tourist season's at its height."

"Well-I've been sniffing around, Dan, just like you said. I've been getting the Moroccan point of view."

"And?"

"And they're pissed, Dan. There's too much corruption. And the government's started up a draft. Seems the King's Saharan initiatives chewed up his army. He needs new recruits, so they're drafting them like crazy-one man from each family, they say, to fight dissident tribesmen in the south. There's a lot of tension now. The people don't like it, especially in Dradeb. A lot of anger in the city now. The lid's about to blow."

"Jesus, Foster, how many times have I got to tell you? In the foreign service we don't use words like 'pissed.' "

"Sorry."

"You've got to be specific. Impressions aren't enough."

"I've got specifics. Like this business about the soup."

"What business? What soup?" Lake shook his head, annoyed.

"This Ramadan thing," Foster explained. "It's really got Dradeb riled. See-there's this tradition. On the first night of Ramadan the King gives soup to the poor. Harira soup, to break the fast-it's supposed to be rich, full of vegetables and meat Anyway, this year the King paid for it, but as the money trickled down all the middlemen took their cut. By the time the soup got to Dradeb it was nothing but this thin brown goo."

"So, what did they expect? Everyone knows there's graft."

Foster shook his head. "They're agitators down there, Dan. Like this surgeon guy, Achar. He went around with the soup truck making speeches. Ladled the stuff onto the ground. Said it symbolized the country's rot."

"Yeah? What else did he say?"

"A lot of stuff against the regime. Very antiforeigner too. Like it was all a plot or something, and the people didn't have to take it anymore."

"Hmmm," said Lake, taking all this in. "Maybe you're on to something after all. Write it up and we'll report it to Rabat. Put it in decent English if you can."

It was Jackie, finally, who came up with the idea of sending Foster out of town.

"Just get rid of him," she said. "Get the jerk out of our hair."

The idea of traveling alone across northern Morocco, making contacts and reporting on the political scene, should have intrigued Foster, if only because of the adventure involved. But for all his jogging he turned out to be soft. He balked at the idea, claimed he was needed in Tangier, to handle visas and visit arrested Americans in jail.

"He's really a schnook," Jackie said after Lake had ordered him to go. "I'd like to divorce him, but then I wouldn't know what to do. Join the Women's Army Corps, I suppose, or maybe take a masters in phys. ed." Lake felt touched by her limited ambitions. Something about the contrast between her naivete and her expertise in bed struck him as entrancing and profound.

With Foster finally out of the way, he was free to zero in on Z.

At the beginning he had no idea why he was cultivating the man. He'd been fascinated, of course, by his file-Zvegintzov's past as a Soviet agent and the warning that "personal contact by consular officials" was specifically "not advised." There'd been something contrary, he realized, about his pursuit of Z, something deliberately disobedient that drove him on. Assigning Foster to watch the shop, then going there nearly every day, inviting the Russian to dinner at the Consulate, spying on him through his window late at night-it was as if all of that was a way to thumb his nose at the Department, which had exiled him so unfairly to Tangier.

Yes, he'd been fascinated by the idea of becoming friends with a Russian agent, ignoring instructions, doing what he pleased. It was a way to assert his independence, but still, he felt, there was something more. A link-that was it; the link he felt with Z. Two men used up, two old cold warriors stationed in the backwater of Tangier. There was much in common, he thought, though they were employed by opposing powers. Two men mired in boredom, thrown on the ash heap by superiors indifferent to their fates.

The trouble was that despite a veneer of intimacy, the Russian never really opened up. His fleshy face remained noncommittal. He sidestepped Lake's overtures and kept himself aloof.

But then one day it came to Lake-the real reason behind it all, an explanation of what he was doing, a justification for his pursuit. He'd seen it in a moment, a revelation that struck him like a bullet and exploded a whole new level of ideas. It was very simple really, a mission he'd been destined to fulfill. The reason he'd been pursuing Z was to cause the Russian to defect.

Once he realized that, everything started making sense. He became flooded with fantasies of such intensity that even his interest in Jackie began to wane. He knew it would not be easy to cause defection. Russian agents were known for their fanaticism, their resistance to reason and the soft life styles of the West. But still he imagined himself engaging Z in a debate. They would wrestle together over the salvation of his soul.

Z would waver at first, then pull back. The struggle would teeter this way, totter that. But Lake would prepare himself well, laying the groundwork for a solid friendship while dropping increasingly unsettling hints and boning up on crucial Marxist texts. In the end he would send Z off to Washington, where for months the Russian would spill his guts.

He'd have much to tell of the intrigues in Indochina, and vital information on the North African spy nets. With luck he might even be converted into a double agent, then used to feed back false information to the Soviets. Or he might opt for a new identity in some Midwestern state, where he could begin his life again, perhaps open up another shop.

Lake knew it was a grandiose idea, and also treacherous with risk. He'd be putting his entire career on the line-if he failed he'd be fired for sure. But still, it seemed to him, he had very little choice. Better to end in glory or defeat than to die slowly of boredom and despair.

The day after he got the idea he began to intensify his assault, extending his visits to the shop, stopping in at odd hours when no one else was there, buying paperback espionage novels on Peter's recommendation, reading them and then returning to discuss the intricacies of their plots.

"Now, Peter," he'd ask, "if you'd been the spy here, would you have done the thing this way?" The two of them would then talk it out, their conversation laced with friendly tension and double entendres. Z would dance about behind his counter, hopping from foot to foot. His eyes would dart back and forth behind his spectacles. He'd cough and sputter and try to change the topic to something else.

"Now, Peter," Lake had said another time, apropos of nothing at all, "if I were a spy and wanted to set up a network in Tangier, first thing I'd do would be to get hold of a little shop like this. Place is a natural, a crossroads, great situation for a drop. I could keep an eye on everything, position myself in the center of the web. Like a spider, Peter, spinning wider concentric circles all the time."

Z had stiffened at that, but then Lake had smiled, and the Russian had relaxed. Lake wanted him to wonder whether he was merely being teased or whether he was being snared in a complicated plot.

One day he came in and spoke blandly about the weather. Then, as soon as Peter let down his guard, he threw him a tricky curve. "When I read about these deep-cover agents," he'd said, "I feel sorry for them, their loneliness, their difficult, dangerous lives. How tempting it must be for them to turn themselves in, to 'come in from the cold' as the expression goes-"

Peter, Lake thought, had betrayed himself, grasping one hand in the other, blinking involuntarily, turning to straighten merchandise on the shelves. Lake felt he'd touched a nerve and resolved to keep the pressure up. When, finally, he offered the alternative of defection, Z would be grateful and relieved.

The trouble was he didn't get much feedback, nothing but these occasional signs of strain. The Russian would stare at him attentively, or glance up with a grin, but he never countered with a quip of his own and sidestepped when Lake became direct. It was impossible to know what the man was really thinking. Lake felt he was working blind. The more unsubtle he became, the more Z backed away. Often when he left the shop, he felt the pieces weren't falling into place.

It was getting to be time, he knew, to make his move, time to stop pussyfooting around. The previous Friday, when he'd dropped in at La Colombe, he'd asked Peter to meet him at the Consulate Sunday afternoon. "Come on over after you close," he'd said, "after the church crowd's passed on through. I'll show you around the building. Then we'll have ourselves a little talk."

Now it was Sunday, nearly four o'clock. Peter, he guessed, would just be closing up La Colombe. He took the elevator down to the Consulate's lobby floor. He wanted to be there waiting when he arrived.

The glass that faced the street was one-way, mirrored, put in at great expense. The object was to cause confusion in case there was a terrorist attack. Lake paced the lobby, pausing every so often to straighten a stack of "customs hints" brochures. On the wall by his order was posted an enormous sign listing the Americans languishing in Malabata prison on account of drug arrests.

Lake loved this building, so antiseptic, so clean, an air-conditioned American oasis, his fortress against Tangier. Here the corridors were straight, the elevators were silent, the city was hermetically sealed off. Everything was new, made of glass and steel, so unlike the teeming streets outside.

A few minutes later he saw Z pull up, then watched, unseen, as the Russian locked his car. Peter mounted the Consulate steps, struggled with the locked front door. He paused, pulled out a handkerchief, and applied it to his dripping face.

Christ-if he's afraid to ring the bell, then I've really got him by the balls.

Peter did ring finally, and Lake waited a full minute before he opened up. He just stood there, ten feet away, face to face with Z, feeling powerful because he was invisible, carefully inspecting the Russian's face. Z was stubborn, all right, crafty, but he looked vulnerable outside his shop. Lake enjoyed the idea of watching coolly from the lobby while the Russian perspired in the sun.

"Peter." He opened the door. Z edged his way inside. "No one here," said Lake, "just the two of us. Come in-I'll show you around."

He led Z through the building, down corridors, into offices, even into the garage. Finally he brought him upstairs to the Consul General's suite, then seated himself behind his desk, before his ensign and the American flag.

"You're the first Russian to get the grand tour, Peter. VIP treatment-nothing less."

"Thanks, Dan." Peter peered around. "You Americans know how to live."

"Yes," said Lake. "No little grubby cubbyholes for us. And the whole building's regularly debugged. We don't want anyone listening in, you know, listening in to all our secrets from some back room behind some shop."

He grinned. Zvegintzov tightened up.

"Come on, Peter. I'm only kidding around. Let's face it, it's terrific the two of us are friends. Here we are, citizens of opposing powers, yet we really like each other, so to hell with the struggle out there." He motioned with his arm toward the Straits of Gibraltar, indicating Europe and the world beyond. He was pleased by this extravagance of gesture, and the perplexed expression on Peter's face.

"There is something between us, isn't there, Peter?" he asked, narrowing his eyes. "This little wedge of suspicion, this little game we've been playing since we've met."

Z smiled weakly, then he shrugged. Lake sat up straight. Suddenly he slapped the desk.

"Oh, hell, Peter-drop your guard for once. Let's forget all this cat-and-mouse stuff. Christ-don't you see? We're buddies now. We're pals."

Z nodded cautiously and stared down at the rug.

Work the old seesaw. Keep him on edge, Lake thought. Change the mood. Don't let him settle down.

"You know, Peter," he said, trying to work some sympathy into his voice, "when you think about it there's a limit to the things a man can be expected to endure. There's only so long a man can go on living with deceit. Know what I mean? Ever think of crossing over? What a terrific feeling that would be?"

Peter stared at him quizzically. Lake toughened up his eyes.

"Defection, Peter. That's what I'm talking about. Defection. Giving yourself a second chance."

Z was staring very curiously now. Lake congratulated himself-he had the Russian hooked.

"Of course, the question in such a case would be-well, there'd be many questions in a man's mind. Such as how he'd be received by the other side, and how well he'd be protected from the people he'd worked for before. How much would he be expected to betray? How many of the old beans would he be expected to spill? And then there'd be the question of confidence, the person he'd defect to, the guy into whose hands he'd, quite literally, be placing his life."

He looked at Z again, highly attentive now. Is there a Russian agent anywhere, he wondered, whose mouth isn't full of rotten teeth?

"And motivations! Let's not forget about them! A man who'd defect-he'd have to have a motive for doing that. It might be a matter of high moral principle. Maybe it would have to do with his political beliefs. Or it could just be that he wanted to change the nature of his life. An escape maybe from something in the past. A complicated personal situation, say, involving his wife, or someone else. Comfort. Money. Change. It could be a combination of any of these things. Or all of them. Or even something else. You see, Peter, the possibilities are infinite, but the end is pretty much the same. I wonder how many men wouldn't jump at a chance to start everything over, with a clean slate, without the stigma of a past-"

He felt himself becoming increasingly excited, more and more manic as he talked on. He was pleased by his eloquence and stunned by his daring. His voice, he noted, was steady as a rock. For a moment it occurred to him to pause, give Peter a chance to reply. But having achieved a certain momentum he had no choice, he felt, but to gush on.

"Now speaking theoretically, Peter-and, of course, theoretical is what this conversation is-let's assume for a moment that there were two men who were quite good friends, and let's assume further, simply for the sake of this discussion, that one of these men wanted to defect to the other's side. Now the first one, the spy, say, the guy who wanted to make the change, he'd have certain apprehensions, as we can both well imagine, about the credibility of any offer from his friend. I mean-that would be perfectly natural. Spies are human beings, after all. He'd have made his decision, you see, completely on his own, but still, being human, he'd be stupid not to have some doubts. The change would be voluntary, a product of his will. But he'd have to be certain he could really trust the other guy. He'd have to have great confidence and not think he was being used. Confidence. Mutual confidence. That's basic to what I'm trying to convey."

He sat back then and smiled. "You understand me, don't you? Yes-I think you do."

"Well," said Peter after a while, "I think I understand you. More or less."

"Good. Good. That's very important. It's vitally important that we understand each other today. Frankly, I wasn't sure we'd reach an understanding so very fast. Sometimes I've felt, well, there's been this-a certain strain."

Zvegintzov cleared his throat. "You haven't always been so candid with me."

"But you find me candid today?"

"Oh, yes. Today I do."

"And?"

"Well-"

"Yes?"

Zvegintzov shrugged. "Let's just say-I think I understand."

"Good!" Lake jumped to his feet. He had Peter now, balls to the wall, but still there was something missing, a commitment, an act of faith. Confidence-that was it. If he wanted Z to have confidence, he would have to show that he had confidence in him.

A sign. He needed a sign. Something that would cinch it, sew the defection up. Suffused by a sense of well-being, convinced that success was within his grasp, he began to search for a solution, while his heart beat thunderously inside his chest.

Of course! He had it now.

"Come, Peter," he commanded softly, startled by the brilliance of his idea. "Come. I want to show you something. A special section of the Consulate. A section no foreigner's ever seen."

He moved decisively toward the rear door of his suite, into the secure area, the little corridor through which only he and Foster were allowed to pass. He paused at the vault, knelt to turn the knobs. When finally he heard the click, he stood up, motioned Peter back, then swung open the steel door.

He was breaking security, he knew, breaking every rule in the book. But if his plan worked, none of that would matter. It was impossible to live without taking risks.

"Look, Peter. Look!" The two of them peered inside. Lake gestured toward the bank of green steel filing cabinets that lined the inner wall. "Our files, all our secrets, everything we've done in Tangier since 1935. It's all here-even our extensive dossier on you. See that computer thing over there? That's the gadget we use to crack messages and put them into code."

They stared, both of them, at the gleaming cryptographic device.

"What do you think? Come on, Peter! Tell me what you feel?"

"I–I'm flabbergasted," Peter said.

"Of course. Of course you are! A man like you, a man with a well-trained eye. Just to have a look at a machine like that-Christ! Your people would give a fortune to be here now. You can't put a price on a moment like this, but here I am showing it to you. I trust you, Peter-I want you to understand. Now I ask you to put your trust in me."

A pause then as they stood side by side staring at the code machine. Lake could hear Z exhaling in heavy gasps. Suddenly he felt weak, overwhelmed by what he'd done.