The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

From The Antioch Review

I.

Layton found himself working on a second week in the city. Everything was supposed to be routine in Tunis, just asking a few questions of an informant named Khaled Khemir. Layton was set up comfortably enough in a white wedding-cake rise of an old hotel on Avenue de Paris, the Majestic.

It was a run-down place but with at least airs of former opulence. The cavernous lobby, all red and white marble, had a sweeping staircase and elaborate chandeliers; there was a splattering of old clock faces on the wall behind the desk giving the hour in various major cities around the world (he kept noticing those clocks, and how it seemed that the one for New York had been replaced recently with a newer one for Karachi, perhaps understandable in an Arab-world country in such an uneasy moment like this internationally). The manager was a handsome guy in his late thirties, muscular and mustached, his hair in a styled shag. Always wearing a tailored French suit, he had once played for the revered Espérance Sportive soccer club there in Tunis, his celebrity status landing him this easy job now.

Layton liked talking soccer with him, and the manager seemed to have no problem with Layton being an American.

Layton probably didn’t need any formal cover in Tunis. Nevertheless, his informal one, in case anybody got nosy, was a line about being an academic researching an article on Flaubert and his time out at the ruins of nearby Carthage, which had resulted in the historical novel Salammbô. It wasn’t the first occasion that Layton had resorted to the fact that he had been a French literature major in what felt like some other lifetime indeed back at Harvard. In truth, not much of the literature stuck with Layton, and often alone in a hotel room somewhere, a ceiling fan chugging, he seemed to recall nothing substantial from any of those novels very clearly, or anything, maybe, beyond the stuff that people who hadn’t even read the books most likely had heard of: the famous black hearse-like carriage rocking away with Madame Bovary and her young law-clerk lover coupling as it rambled around the cobbled streets of Rouen, or even the famous centipede crawling up the famous bare white wall in the modern plantation house, seemingly the main action in Robbe-Grillet’s static slim volume. True, little of that came back to him, yet what did often unexpectedly and repeatedly return was a memory of the construction of the odd covers themselves of the Livre de Poche editions. He remembered 1968 or 1969 and leaving his rooms in Winthrop House on the river, to head over to the Square and the Coop Textbooks on a side street. And what he also definitely remembered was how those imported paperbacks for his French lit courses were coated in clear cellophane, which somehow wasn’t made for the New England climate, the coating soon yellowing and cracking, peeling free completely before long. That always represented some essential flaw to Layton, and in the lavender rain and heading back to red-brick Winthrop House on the grassy banks of that Charles — yes, back then rain could be beautifully lavender in Cambridge, a guy like Layton could once be young and also hopeful that he would be lucky in life, everything would turn out OK and good things were ahead of him — Layton almost asked himself before he cracked the spine of another new Livre de Poche, “How long before this one falls apart?”

Layton knew, though, he had to be careful of thinking of things like that, especially careful of thinking too much when by yourself in a hotel room in a very hot country, a place like Tunis, let’s say.

As for the two blond girls from Montpellier, nearly a matching set and half Layton’s age or less, Layton had noticed them around the downtown even before he got mixed up with them. Actually, how couldn’t you notice them? Any tourists that there were in Tunisia seemed to stay at the resort towns beyond the city and out on the coast, a sleek bus occasionally herding a pack of them in for a morning shopping trip to buy the overpriced souvenir junk (cheaply plated hookahs, tiny stuffed camels, etc.) in the Medina, but little more than that was seen of their presence. And the usual tourists certainly weren’t two svelte five-foot-nine girls wearing platform heels, designer jeans, and halter tops, tanned and made up like dolls there under an umbrella at one of the big cafés along Avenue Borguiba, runway model material — though Layton would eventually learn that they were more than broke, that they had jumped a hotel bill up in ritzy Sidi Bou Said and had originally left France without so much as bothering to book a return ticket back to Montpellier simply because they were sure some playboy in a white yacht (OK, maybe two playboys, in their own nutty daydreaming) would eventually ferry them home, in real style.

The girls at an outdoor café — one of them in oversize sunglasses pushing her long fingers in a raking shove through the spill of blond hair, then the other in oversize sunglasses taking that almost as a cue, as if to say in her whispery French, near baby talk, “Wow, it’s been a while since I pushed my hand through my beautifully lustrous spill of long blond hair that dusts my fine bare and tanned shoulders,” and doing the same.

They were like that, Véronique and Jeanne-Isabelle.

II.

“You shouldn’t have come anywhere near the embassy,” Cunningham from CIA said.

“It was at night, my first one here,” Layton said, “or the evening, anyway. I like to get a feel for a place, if you know what I mean. See where everything is. I just left the hotel and strolled around some. I could have been anybody walking in that well-to-do neighborhood there.”

“Nobody saw you?”

Layton and Cunningham were having a late lunch in a modest enough place on Rue du Caire, good couscous. Layton knew that CIA saw FBI as yokels. And this Cunningham with his front of a job in the embassy’s consular section was no different; he surely didn’t take to the idea that Layton was supposedly needed at the moment, and surely for Cunningham — lanky, bespectacled, and self-satisfied at forty or so — an FBI yokel could only mess things up. Layton continued with the couscous, and he had to hand it to Cunningham concerning the meal: at a few dinars, the heap of the tomato-sauced stuff with its squash and peppers and carrots and potatoes, a tender central chunk of lamb topping the semolina, was maybe proving to be exactly what Cunningham had promised, “Just try it and you tell me, if it isn’t the best fucking couscous of your life.” But cuisine wasn’t the issue at hand there in the cubbyhole, where at the few tables the other men eating sat facing the window and the afternoon glare outside, schoolroom style. Cunningham asked Layton again:

“Nobody saw you?”

“Relax, will you. I walked. I passed that big, sort of Art Deco old synagogue on Avenue de la Liberté that looks like a fortress, all the cops and armored Land Cruisers or whatever around it. Then I got into your embassy neighborhood, upscale and tasteful, where I must say I was surprised to see so little security, except for the concrete barriers in front. The whole operation was closed down for the day. What did I see? I saw the locked glass door to the consular section and a lit waiting room, empty. I saw a sign saying that visiting the consular section was a no-charge deal, and if anybody tried to charge anybody else waiting in line for preferred service or anything else, that it should be reported. A sign like that is a new one on me, and that’s exactly what I saw, all I saw. And I doubt anybody saw me.”

“Don’t worry about the security. It’s totally unseen.”

“What’s the deal on the synagogue?”

“There’s still a Jewish community here, a small token one that’s getting smaller. The police presence outside is just a token, too, trying to put on a good face to show outsiders that Tunisia isn’t to be lumped with the rest of the Arab world.”

“Which, of course, it is.”

“Of course.”

Cunningham appeared to be softening, also appeared to appreciate how it was obvious that Layton was enjoying the couscous.

“Good, isn’t it?” Cunningham said.

“Best fucking couscous of my life,” Layton told him.

That a supposedly retired agent from the Bureau was on assignment in Tunisia was an anomaly, to put it mildly. That Layton had even signed up with the FBI after law school was probably more of an anomaly, bordering on freak occurrence, to put it frankly.

Layton went to law school, UVA, after Harvard. He studied law maybe only because he felt that he owed his uncle who had raised him for all the man’s kindness over the years — the bachelor uncle, a judge, so much wanted to see Layton a lawyer. Layton hated the drudgery of tort and contract courses. And to make matters worse, it was the 1960s, that time of evening news clips constantly showing more frightened American kids in camouflage uniforms being spilled out of teetering helicopters and onto the yellow rice paddies in Vietnam; Layton knew he would get heat from his local draft board in Rhode Island once his law school deferment expired. Layton decided to beat the government at its own game, and he joined the FBI to dodge the draft, if that made any sense. Assigned to D.C., he married a girl who was a secretary for a congressman, they had a son, but the marriage didn’t work out. In fact, nothing was working out for Layton for a while; the snub-nosed girl with red hair who was so pretty and was so much fun as they relaxed on weekends with other couples at barbecues and suburban cocktail parties out in leafy Fairfax, his young wife, well, somehow her prettily snub-nosed, red-headed innate cheeriness wasn’t a good mix with the darkness of Layton soon questioning most everything — the meaningless job, the dead end of claustrophobic family life. After a complicated divorce, Layton didn’t buck the transfer from Washington to Detroit; he needed a change.

Layton was among the first agents assigned full-time to the Arab community there, and seeing that the bulk of the community was essentially Christian then — Lebanese, Syrian — his fluent French was his credential, a language they often shared. His work wasn’t so much a matter of any terrorism, but just dealing with normal crime (often rings for the pilfering from warehouse loading docks of expensive color TVs or a few crates of Cutty Sark, what qualified as a federal offense because it involved interstate trucking). When monitoring of foreign students became a priority during the 1980s and more agents were transferred to those squads, Layton welcomed the reassignment to Boston, a better city than Detroit and one he knew well. After all, New England was home for him, granting it was very different now — his elderly uncle had died, even Layton’s second-rate prep school on the North Shore was long gone, the staid fieldstone buildings in a setting of sprawling green playing fields close to the sea now converted into, wouldn’t you know it, condos. Layton lived in a small Beacon Hill apartment with a lot of windows, which didn’t make it seem so small. He dated an attractive gray-eyed stewardess for the old TWA for a long while, then a divorced art gallery owner for a longer while. Admittedly, Layton didn’t relish putting in time with her at another opening amid the usual empty small talk and the cheap white wine and tasteless canapés lifted off a silver tray. He also didn’t like to hear the woman, Marion, wheeling and dealing in the sale of canvases on the phone, because, as Layton soon learned, the peddling of art wasn’t all that different from the peddling of storm windows, even life insurance to the over-fifties crew. However, he did savor how she had a gift for spotting work by younger artists who might be the real thing, and merely to hear her say something in her raspy, authentically Vassar voice like, “Does anybody know how successful nineteenth-century American painters were at getting at the very essence of black, Heade especially, does anybody have any real idea?” — something like that was enough to convince Layton she was rare, much better company than the attractive TWA stewardess or the several younger, so-called professionals he met in the Newbury Street dating bars, the quintessentially empty chatter of that scene. But he didn’t marry Marion, and they went their separate ways.

There were a couple of somewhat major cases for Layton. One had been in his very first year of service in Washington when he got assigned to a Weatherman bombing squad. The other came through his contacts in Boston; Layton managed to gather solid information after Arab terrorists blew out of the sky a Pan Am jet over the small town in Scotland that gave the disaster its name. But outside of that, there wasn’t much to distinguish Layton’s career with the Bureau. Early on, his superiors had obviously identified him with the play-it-safe foot-draggers, even if he was from Harvard and not the usual type of reliable Catholic-college boy Hoover always had such belief in for his corps; true, while Layton didn’t entirely fit the profile, nobody differentiated him from the common terminally lazy variety of agent, Catholic college or otherwise, just dreaming of retirement and finally paying off a mortgage in some platted neighborhood in a dull suburb like Fairfax. Layton admitted the Bureau had wasted his life, or his professional life, anyway; he often thought he would have liked to have gotten a Ph.D., or done just about anything other than put up with as many years as he did of endless Bureau paperwork and office politics. The set retirement age for agents was fifty-seven, but he never made it anywhere close to that. Layton took a cut in pension early when his grown son, who Layton hardly knew (his ex-wife had remarried), talked him into investing in the son’s own business; it was an internet start-up, a foolish scheme, something to do with selling rock-and-roll trivia to keyboard-clicking, credit-card-wielding fans online. Layton went along with it, invested heavily, probably because he felt guilty that he hadn’t been around to raise his son; Layton saw in him a certain vacant lostness that made Layton want to believe that the bragging kid might turn things around, end up making a success of such a farfetched enterprise in a new media field, another budding go-getter of a Ted Turner, possibly. Increasingly more money was borrowed against Layton’s pension, Layton fell into deep debt, and by the time the Bureau approached him to come out of retirement and do some part-time work — a contractor of sorts, what they referred to as an “asset” — he had no choice but to sign on. The fact of the matter was that after September 11, Layton was suddenly very much in demand, one of the few veteran agents with any substantial time in Arab domestic surveillance; plus, his having handled a Weatherman bombing case and then the Lockerbie bombing case made his dossier more noticeable. He still had his contacts and informants, a list built up through considerable work and despite the legendary FBI stinginess. (While the high-rolling CIA might set up ski lodges and yachts to lure sources, it wasn’t like that for the FBI; more than once at the Boston FBI office Layton had put in for a voucher to bring an informant to a good restaurant — a Brazilian place, specifically, that he liked on a Harvard Square back street — only to have his squad boss balk, suggest he settle for hamburgers at the red formica tables of Charlie’s Kitchen behind the JFK School.) All of which is to say, the game was different now: Layton was badly needed, and sending Layton on an errand to yet another country was almost becoming routine by this time, 2003. Of course, what was called a “no objection” clearance to allow such foreign work was always applied for and always given, albeit begrudgingly, by CIA and State ahead of time. CIA did tolerate activity such as FBI bomb-squad investigations abroad, but, to repeat, it really didn’t appreciate anybody horning in on their own foreign intelligence.

Khaled Khemir had been an informant while a student at MIT. Layton had already established that he was now living in Tunis, but the Bureau seemed nervous about using simple overseas phone or online contact with him, so this trip was arranged.

On the other hand, Layton didn’t like putting pressure on this kid — or a kid back when he had known him, anyway — and he remembered Khaled Khemir in Boston as a rather quiet, brainy sort. He had returned to Tunis and was teaching part-time at the national university in the city.

And in Tunis, Khaled Khemir himself was now reluctant, or so Layton detected in two brief local phone calls from the Hôtel Majestic. Then, to complicate the situation, Khaled Khemir announced that he was leaving Tunis for a few days to visit his ill mother now living with one of his sisters somewhere near Sfax, telling Layton they could get together when he returned. So the French girls from Montpellier, having them around, became a way to kill some time for Layton as much as anything else.

III.

Two mornings later, speaking in French, the hotel manager came up to Layton. Layton was walking through the lobby, returning to his room after breakfast with the copy of Flaubert’s Salammbô in hand. The manager said, “I must say, I admire your taste in women.” The manager’s name was Youssef, possessor of the nickname of El Bey — translated more or less as “The Ruler” — during his days as a striker with Espérance Sportive.

In his good French suits, Youssef was rather dashing. He exuded sheer confidence, like a former rock star or — better, here in football-crazy Tunis — somebody who actually had been a player for Espérance Sportive. He spoke to Layton in a man-to-man way now, practically congratulating him for what Youssef must have seen as Layton’s conquest of the duo of sylphlike blondes. It was all humorous for Layton, who while still lean and athletic at his age, the short military lie-down haircut silver and a perpetual tan from so much travel lately, certainly wasn’t the kind of guy for a conquest of the sort the manager was envisioning. Actually, after having seen the girls a couple of times at the cafés on Avenue Borguiba, Layton was just sitting outdoors at the Café des Deux Avenues there one afternoon, the girls taking the table next to him. One of them, Véronique, eventually asked if he might have a light, an overt ploy to start conversation. There was something in their vulnerability. At first they did put on some about how the little jewel of a village on its cliff high above the sparkling Mediterranean, jet-setting Sidi Bou Said, had bored them and so they decided to move to the city, though before long in the talk they unabashedly poured out their predicament — virtually no money, definitely no return tickets, and barely able to stand another night in a hotel beside the patch of soot and dust that passed for a city bus terminal, a place called (Layton appreciated this connection) the Hotel Salammbô. There followed much talk of the size of the roaches at the Salammbô, the lack of air-conditioning at the Salammbô; there was much talk, as well, concerning how their luggage had been confiscated by the expensive hotel in Sidi Bou Said, and how they had, in fact, left there with little more than the jeans and halter tops they were wearing, plus a couple of dresses and, of course, their cosmetic kits. Without return tickets they had no choice but to try to survive in cheaper Tunis for a while, hope something might happen. Perhaps Layton was the something.

In the course of the conversation, especially beautiful Jeanne-Isabelle, of the bruised-plum lips and high cheekbones, just started sniffling, then her eyes teared up, Jeanne-Isabelle peeling off her big wraparound sunglasses and dabbing those eyes with a paper napkin. Layton, feeling particularly avuncular, told them he would help; he accompanied them to check out of the dismal Hotel Salammbô, and he booked them a room next to his at the Majestic. He knew how to play the expense account game lately, not as tough overseas even with the cheap FBI; it would be easy enough to claim that the girls knew Khaled Khemir, say they might be valuable on that front. But when asked about them now, Layton had to be honest with the hotel manager, “They are simply friends, I’m helping them out.”

“They seemed tired when they arrived yesterday, les jeunes filles,” Youssef said. “They must be sleeping late. Tell them that tomorrow I can arrange for breakfast to be served here, or even in their room, beyond the regular breakfast time, right up to eleven.”

“To be frank, I personally don’t have any idea if they’re still sleeping,” Layton told him. “Though I imagine they might be. Remember, they do have their own room. They’re in 219, and I’m in 218.”

“D’accord,” the manager said.

Layton knew the manager must have been picturing what Layton himself was picturing — the single door, cream-enameled and ornate, probably dating back to the “1911” carved in the Majestic’s whitewashed façade. It was locked, but a twist of the wrist on the tarnished brass knob and an unbolting of the latch would be all that was needed to combine as a single suite the two spacious old rooms; those rooms had long French windows (opening to balconies), grumbling air conditioners, and no shortage of a matching overdone floral patterning (exploding roses, ferns) for the drapes and spreads, even the upholstery on the chairs themselves, with the mismatching old furniture all freshly cream-enameled to give some sense of matching, too. The Majestic was a find, Layton had decided, no denying its authenticity.

Going through the lobby the next day around noon (he looked at those clocks above the desk for the time in different zones again, maybe he had even dreamed of them the night before), Layton thought he heard voices coming from what should have been the empty dining room, which he knew didn’t serve lunch, only breakfast and dinner. He saw the girls with their freshly washed blond hair, loose and stringily wet. They were sitting at a table with Youssef; they were listening, laughing, hanging on every word in his talk surely documenting his legendary soccer exploits, as Youssef made good on that offer of keeping the waiters in their frayed gold jackets around for a very late continental breakfast for the girls.

Though for the moment the man Layton saw sitting there didn’t even seem to be Youssef the hotel manager in the least, and with the girls — for the moment — this Youssef was entirely the star player again, El Bey, the Ruler indeed.

Meanwhile, Layton was beginning to suspect that this errand was maybe not going to be as easy as he had first thought, getting the information on some of Khaled Khemir’s former grad-student teaching assistant colleagues back at MIT; they had been monitored closely for the last four months, were labeled as “chatterers,” possibly linked to Palestinian resistance organizations. Khaled Khemir was still in Sfax.

To be honest, Layton liked Tunis, liked it a hell of a lot.

He liked this newer part of the city, with wide, tree-lined Avenue Borguiba and its cafés, the French district that surrounded it offering plenty more of the frilly white colonial architecture. He especially liked just letting himself wander in the older part of the city and the Medina proper. Dim walkway tunnels, twisting cobbled lanes so narrow you could spread your arms and touch the ancient walls on either side of you. And once you got away from the few main tourist venues and well behind the Grand Mosque, into the real Medina, it was a contained world in itself, with shops and little banks for the locals, always kids playing soccer against the houses, everything suddenly more Arabic — the workers in smocks and skullcaps, the women wearing head scarves — everything suddenly more dreamlike, too, Layton told himself. In a bit of reading beforehand of Flaubert’s letters, Layton learned how on a trip to Tunis and the ruins of Carthage in preparation for writing Salammbô in 1858, Flaubert, when not out at the archaeological sites, spent his own share of time in the Medina, completely walled then, carousing with the French trade consuls and sampling the prostitutes, because Flaubert when young never failed to sample a foreign city’s prostitutes, apparently. The Medina probably hadn’t changed much at all since then, Layton thought: the same smells — sometimes leather from the sandal makers or perfume from the nooks and stands selling their many essences, sometimes just the aroma of bread, the stacked fat loaves pushed in wobbly wooden wheelbarrows through the Medina often making for a traffic jam in itself — and surely the same sounds — the din of tambour and reed-flute music, from boom boxes if not from actual musicians now, or just the quiet tap-tapping of a silversmith’s hammer in a particularly out-of-the-way alley, even the rhythmic rattle of a weaver working a loom for another fine exercise in the geometric artistry of the world-renowned carpets produced here. That afternoon, following the encounter with Youssef entertaining the girls, Layton lingered at a café in the Medina. He drank a strong tea and reread some of the lush sentences in Salammbô (often billed as Flaubert’s worst novel, though for undeniable richness of prose it could have been the best, having served as almost the literary bible for French Parnassiens and Symbolistes, the Décadents later). When he returned to the Majestic, he detected the coconutty fragrance of shampoo even from the hallway, well before he got to his room. The girls had figured out themselves how to unbolt the door connecting the two rooms, or possibly Youssef helped them, and in Layton’s room now, Jeanne-Isabelle was sitting, legs crossed at the knee, on the edge of the made bed while letting the window air conditioner blow-dry her hair, the cooling turned off and the fan on high. Naked except for emerald panties, she was thumbing through a French fashion magazine. She explained nonchalantly, without looking up, that she hoped Layton didn’t mind, and she said that each of them, the two girls, needed a shower and a bathroom of her own to get ready for that evening. Youssef was taking the two of them to a disco.

She kept turning the pages, and, after all, toplessness was for French girls just beach etiquette, so she definitely saw it as no big deal. Her breasts were lovely, pert, her shoulder blades sculpted artistry in themselves, the line of her backbone a delicate chain; she lifted up a hand for one of those raking shoves through the damp mane of hair, chin held high, the gesture she and Véronique had nearly patented, and she continued on with the magazine. Finding her casualness more ridiculous than anything yet, Layton lightly slapped her smack on the derrière, smiling, telling her to scoot and close the door — he said that a phone message had been left for him at the desk and he had a call to make.

Jeanne-Isabelle stood up, pecked a kiss on each of his cheeks as if he were a favorite uncle, then did exactly that, scooted, the two dimples on her backside just above the low line of the emerald panties taking turns winking at Layton, emphasizing the pure absurdity of it all. At the doorway she slowed down, smilingly tiptoed like a kid making a show out of trying to be very, very quiet, the old walking-on-eggshells routine, and returned to the adjoining room, gingerly closing the door.

IV.

The next day Layton met Cunningham a second time at the couscous place on Rue du Caire. Once they disposed of the small talk about whether Layton minded eating at the same restaurant again (“Best fucking couscous of one’s life,” Layton told Cunningham, “why toy with a premise like that?”), the conversation did seem to be veering toward one tack. On Cunningham’s part, anyway.

“What you want to do is see him,” Cunningham said.

They were talking about Khaled Khemir, of course.

“Yeah, it’s what I want to do, all right,” Layton said. “I don’t think he’s dodging me — that thing about his mother in Sfax sounded honest enough.”

“But you have to see him. Talk to him.”

“Of course I have to.”

Cunningham’s horn-rimmed glasses reflected so that you couldn’t quite see his eyes; he was wearing the same seersucker sport coat as last time.

“And not just talk on the phone,” Cunningham emphasized.

“He’s touchy on the phone.”

The waiter brought more bread, Cunningham nodded. Layton got the feeling that Cunningham was a regular here, no doubt, knew it was a safe spot to talk.

“I wonder if it would have been easier,” Layton said, “if I had come to Tunis more officially, if you know what I mean. There’s a contact from the National Police Academy in the city prefecture here, I think, he maybe should have handled my visit, no?”

It was a program left over from the Hoover regime at the FBI. Hoover’s National Police Academy trained a lot of cops from abroad, most of them hanging up on their office walls in police stations back in their own home country framed photographs of themselves with pals from that training course in the States, proud of it, Arab world or not. It gave the FBI, usually wielding only Stateside jurisdiction, international ties, and it was something CIA types considered way out of line. Cunningham didn’t get into that now, but flatly assured Layton the “no objection” approval Layton had obtained from the CIA was a much better way to proceed in this particular case.

“You will see him?” Cunningham asked.

“Yeah, what the hell am I doing here otherwise. Soon, I hope.”

Cunningham seemed satisfied with that.

“Harvard,” Cunningham then said, as if plucking the word out of the heat of the restaurant.

“What’s that?” Layton said.

“You’re a Harvard man?”

Layton hadn’t heard that term in years, and it appeared Cunningham had done a little background checking on Layton since they had last met, knew where Layton had studied. Cunningham talked of his own time at Brown, also emphatically used the term Ivy League, as if it was supposed to install the two of them in some club with a complicated secret handshake perhaps, a shared understanding of life. For somebody like Cunningham in today’s CIA, no longer the depository for fellow graduates of the Ivy League that it had once been, Layton’s stock had apparently risen considerably — Layton not the usual FBI rube but a, well, “Harvard man.”

Cunningham talked about how much he had enjoyed Brown, how the classes were small and you could design your own major, and how the education was decidedly top-notch. It was a standard, to-be-expected spiel from somebody from that so-called Ivy League who hadn’t gone to Harvard or Yale and had to trudge through life with a pressing need (Layton had no idea why) to constantly explain why he hadn’t gone to (which meant hadn’t been admitted to) Harvard or Yale, or at least Princeton.

There was something Layton really didn’t like about this guy.

Layton took the trip around Tunisia for several days because Khaled Khemir still hadn’t returned from Sfax, also because of what was degenerating into the afternoon circus next door. The manager Youssef — El Bey, all right — was spending most of his own afternoons in that room next door with Véronique and Jeanne-Isabelle, keeping room service busy to provide for the ongoing party. Layton saw no harm in that, but the romping made it tough to get some sleep with a nap in the two or three p.m. heat, the kind of napping that Layton had been savoring lately, if truth be known — deep hammer-on-anvil slumber free of the phantasmagoric cinema of constantly dreaming, that playing out of reruns concerning Layton’s admitted mess-ups in life.

Layton traveled to Kairouan and then Sousse, making a loop from Tunis.

He relied on the long-distance louages, dented white Peugeot station wagons with seven others in the three rows of seats, not counting the driver. The passengers were usually all men, some in work clothes and some in robes and dressy chechia caps, “Bonjours” politely exchanged. The drivers liked to convert the dashboard into their own personal “space” with maybe a shag carpet on the deck, also an assortment of objects dangling from the rearview mirror (anything from wooden prayer beads to three — he saw this on one louage — empty American 7-Up cans, seemingly collector’s items here); a beaded covering for the huge steering wheel was mandatory. The drivers drove fast and recklessly, never hesitating to dangerously swerve to overtake any top-heavy, wobbling lorry on bald tires out there on the otherwise deserted two-lane; Layton figured they were paid by the number of runs they could complete each day.

The geography was handsome, constantly changing as you got farther inland. First vineyards and olive groves laid out neatly on the hills, then fields of undulating golden wheat, then the sand flats of the oncoming desert in earnest, the first date-palm groves standing like islands and the occasional robed rustic on a mule gazing at the Peugeot speeding by in but a blur for him, surely.

An ancient city with a golden-walled Medina, Kairouan was a place of pilgrimage, “The Fourth Holiest City in Islam,” rising impressively out of the level plains. Kairouan was entirely different from, almost the direct antithesis of, the next city he stayed in, very modernized Sousse on the return loop; Sousse was a decided tourist trap of gleaming white hotels along the sweeping miles of Mediterranean beach. Different cities, no doubt, but the experience in each for Layton was quite the same. Layton found himself alone in a hotel room in each place. He found himself reading the copy of Flaubert’s Salammbô in French, that epic of the passionate, star-crossed, half-perverse (the Flaubertian touch) love between the beautiful young Carthaginian princess Salammbô and the leader of the revolt of the mercenary troops against Carthage, the confused young Numidian general Mâtho, who should have been a lyric poet and never any combat commander whatsoever. Layton would be reading, yes, he would be caught up in the words, then he wouldn’t be reading. He would be just staring at nothing, as it started again.

He found himself crying for no apparent reason, without the escape of the drugging sleep he had slipped into back in Tunis to ease any of it. And it was little use trying to make some sense or logic out of it, attribute it to a specific known failure, as he did admit to a lot of things — how he had never paid off on what should have been his promise in life, how both his career and marriage had gone nowhere (he should have done something like graduate study in French literature, he shouldn’t have married a woman with whom he had so little in common), while his only child — his son, the one person in life he had always tried to believe in — ended up, if Layton was honest, bilking Layton out of his pension money and what should have been an easier life now, without having to hustle this way for what amounted to pocket change. But there was no reasoning, no cause and effect. It was maybe all one of those nail puzzles that looks like it conforms to the rules of geometry, as you want to believe that if you just concentrate, fully analyze it and slowly work the disentanglement, it will be miraculously solved, even prove miraculously revealing when it suddenly loosens in your trembling hands.

But this puzzle didn’t untangle, everything remained locked hopelessly together, and there was just the overwhelming blank frustration that nothing but nothing made any sense, there away from Tunis.

There was just stupid crying for Layton. There was just crying for no reason at all because he felt so goddamn sad. There was just catching sight of himself in a hotel room mirror again, a ceiling fan chugging through the feeble air-conditioning again, and the near disgust with himself. There was just the old message, “Get a fucking hold of yourself, man.”

“I used to dream so much when young of going to the States,” Khaled Khemir said.

“I suppose a lot of people do,” Layton said.

“No, you don’t know what it’s like. I mean, that’s the problem with being an American, you have no idea what it’s like.”

The contact with the elusive Khaled Khemir had finally been accomplished, the purpose of Layton’s trip to Tunisia, and, if nothing else, Layton felt good about that. They sat drinking leafy, mint-sweet brown tea from small glass tumblers at the outside table of a café up by the university, a cluster of new streamlined buildings on a knoll behind the Medina. Layton was doing what he had to do, and Khaled Khemir was doing what he had to do, too, Layton knew, even if Khaled Khemir didn’t enjoy it. It was the old game, somebody gave you something because they needed something themselves. When Khaled Khemir had been a contact back in Cambridge and a grad student at MIT, his visa had run out and he wanted an extension. He had a German girlfriend he was head over heels in love with; the girl was working on a Ph.D. in philosophy or linguistics at Harvard, and Khaled Khemir couldn’t bear leaving her. In truth, Layton had never gotten much important out of him in Cambridge; Khaled Khemir had known some Libyans in the States who had very vague connections with the Lockerbie bombers, and Layton was never sure whether Khaled Khemir offered the information on them that he eventually did then because he didn’t approve of such tactics at the time or, more likely, there was a long-standing, bad-blood general rift between Tunisians and Libyans. Neither of them trusted the other; why, Khadaffi himself had once tried to annex the other country in another typically mad Khadaffi pipe dream, in 1980. Now it was Khaled Khemir’s brother who needed something, and while the brother wasn’t the scholar Khaled Khemir had been (the brother was taking courses not as a grad student at prestigious MIT but as an undergrad at a state teachers’ college on the Cape to keep his student visa, and presently he had bad-check charges to deal with, about to be deported), Khaled Khemir wanted to see the brother finish his education in America. In other words, Khaled Khemir’s cooperating now had more to do with family than anything else. Khaled Khemir looked different, too. He was no longer the skinny grad student with a reedy voice; he had always seemed so outright scared when Layton was full-time with the Bureau and they met several times amid those, indeed, red formica tables and gum-chomping middle-aged waitresses in uniforms at noisy Charlie’s Kitchen, the Harvard Square hamburger dive. Khaled Khemir now had already told Layton about his part-time lecturing in mathematics at the university, which should lead to a regular appointment soon. He also told Layton of his marriage to a Tunisian woman whose family was a friend of his family (the German girl in Cambridge was only “a stage” he was going through, he laughed); he had two young daughters. His voice more sure, confident, his body having filled out some, yet he still seemed young, with the dark eyes too big in his skull and making him look perpetually startled, the soft smile. He continued with the story about growing up and wanting to go to America very badly, either Miami or Las Vegas, specifically.

“Always Las Vegas,” Khaled Khemir smiled some more, “and Miami.”

“Really?”

“In my village in the Tell, in the north, the old women used to have songs about it. That was the mythically exotic good life for us to which young men supposedly fled, it would even turn up as a romanticized theme at local bazaars, the wonders of Las Vegas and Miami. Not that anybody ever went there. It must have been the movies that gave us the idea.”

“I would have thought it would be France,” Layton said, “if you were looking for an icon for flight. Don’t young Tunisians often go to France?”

Khaled Khemir sipped his tea, laughed.

“No, France was the colonizer, so there was no dream about them, or their country. France was almost a joke, something you’d see as a long trip that you really didn’t want to take, but probably would take. When we were kids, if a kid took a long time going to the shop or whatever, you’d say to him, ‘Where did you go? France?’ ”

Layton smiled. He liked this Khaled Khemir. He also realized, when they got to talking about specific people (the Bureau was involved in investigating a Stateside racket in which Arabs in America were apparently using the widespread wholesaling of knockoffs of brand names — designer handbags, car stereo systems, and such — to raise money for Palestinian resistance activities), yes, Layton also assured himself that when he returned to Boston and filed his own report, he wouldn’t include everything he had been told. Layton had gotten to the point that in this time of a cowboy president and who knows what else equally as crazy, he wanted to believe in an America that was different from the internationally bullying one he saw today, 2003, an America that people still dreamed of, even if those dreams were merely envisioning the glitz of Miami and Las Vegas; Layton really didn’t care about anybody anywhere selling knockoffs of anything. Actually, most of the last hour or so he just listened to Khaled Khemir speak about how lucky he was to have found his wife — she worked in the government Ministry of Women and the Family — how lucky he was to have two such fine young girls, three and five.

“Or five today,” he said, “and I must go back now, the birthday, you know.”

“I understand,” Layton said.

But what was strange, certainly, was Cunningham from the embassy — and CIA — calling Layton for one last meeting at the couscous place, as if he simply wanted confirmation beyond any doubt that it was Khaled Khemir whom Layton had spoken to.

“Don’t be crazy, man,” Layton told him, “I dealt with the guy for a full couple of years back in Boston. I know him.”

Which was about all Layton was going to give him, and Layton, granting he was abroad, had that “no objection” filed formally and properly, so he didn’t have to play this self-satisfied — how should he put this? — “Brown man’s” game any longer.

“Fuck him,” Layton later thought, which made him feel good. “Fuck him, and then some.”

V.

The trio of them were almost at the summit there at Byrsa Hill, the site of the gone main temple for what had once been ancient Carthage. Layton and the two French girls, Jeanne-Isabelle and Véronique.

The narrow suburban road was steep; it snaked up past fine white villas, the velvety black asphalt strewn with fallen orange flower petals. The temperature must have been an even ninety degrees. The girls exaggerated their trudging behind him, and though they had bought big liter bottles of mineral water at the tiny white-and-blue stucco Hannibal train station on this the commuter line (the girls halted every twenty paces or so now to take long chugs), they kept complaining like a couple of kids, in French, about how hot it was, and how steep the road was. That came with accompanying, and comically innocent, old emphasizers, including the functional “sacré” and the more classic “Zut alors!” They didn’t look at all chic anymore, though they had retrieved their wardrobes; having taken the same train on their own farther up to the Sidi Bou Said hotel that they’d originally fled, they had managed to get their suitcases and clothes. Both of them had on simple white T-shirts and camp shorts now, Jeanne-Isabelle wearing sort of a clown’s red-and-yellow socks with her tennis sneakers and Véronique, sweaty and poutier than ever, cursing herself in her whispery French for not having worn socks, red and yellow clown-style or otherwise, with her own chafing tennis shoes. They both wore their big sunglasses but no makeup, looked pretty scruffy by this stage in their travels, if truth be known.

The fun with the hotel manager — El Bey, now simply Youssef once more — had expired while Layton had been traveling. Apparently, Youssef’s wife, a heavy woman in full traditional white robe and head scarf, by no means a typically docile Muslim female spouse, had shown up at the Majestic on the tip of a hotel maid, to cause a noisy scene. And though Youssef was now letting the girls stay a few extra days (he had taken over their tab from Layton), he made clear that it would be no longer than that; the girls had already persuaded Véronique’s soft touch of a grandmother to wire them the money to get back to Montpellier. So they weren’t just scruffy, but somewhat defeated, too, their jet-setting escapade over and both of them having to face the drudgery of their jobs back home — Jeanne-Isabelle a hair stylist and Véronique a secretary in an insurance company, if she could get the position back — there in Montpellier, where they claimed it rained and rained all winter. Layton had a day left in Tunis himself, and he had decided to, in a way, make good on his cover, a cover that he really hadn’t needed, and go out to Carthage, which was now a suburb of Tunis. He wanted to walk through some of the scenes of Salammbô, possibly follow the route Flaubert did in 1858 when he visited, F. bumping along on a mule, to research the novel. Back at the hotel that morning, when the girls heard his plans for the day, they had insisted, again like a couple of kids, that he take them along, pleading that he couldn’t leave them at the boring hotel with “rien à faire” — nothing whatsoever to do. And now, like kids, all right, they complained, but Layton didn’t mind. It was funny. And he liked them, liked their dreaminess in setting out as they originally had and believing they both would meet playboy millionaires while on their confused trip, a jaunt to posh Sidi Bou Said in Tunisia, which they had hoped would solve their own problems back in rainy Montpellier once and for all.

The empty museum there at the top of the hill was housed in a former Christian monastery. And during a bit of strolling through its rooms now, the girls did relax, admiring the Carthaginian jewelry — gold, turquoise, and bursting pink coral — in the showcases. They lingered at the little model of Punic Carthage rebuilt to scale like something in a model train layout, and lingered longer, for the sheer yummy horror of it, at the displays of children’s burial urns excavated from the Tophet, or the sacrificial burial site — there, those children apparently had been offered to the goddess Tanit in ancient times, given in trade for divine assistance in war. On the other hand, maybe the girls were on good behavior at last because they were honestly grateful to Layton, their rescuer; he had also promised to treat them to a good late lunch at one of the seaside terrace restaurants back down the hill and on the other side of the suburban train tracks, by the beach and more of the elegant white villas there.

Outside the museum again, the three strolled around an empty wide esplanade of broken columns set upright — all of that from the later Roman settlement, rather than the Punic — above the tumbledown brown stone ruins of what apparently had been a residential quarter of the city of Carthage itself during Salammbô’s time; not very impressive, and it was true that the original Punic Carthage had left little evidence of its existence — the most powerful civilization of the ancient world at one time had now become the most vanished of civilizations, the heaps of rocks for these unearthed buildings right below the esplanade about the only remaining trace of it, amid the clutter of weeds and giant sunflowers and an inordinate amount of crumpled plastic water bottles tossed about. Layton wandered off on his own, and Layton started feeling much better. No, not simply better, but really good, which is to say, better than he had felt in a long while.

In years, possibly.

He was at the edge of the esplanade. From that vantage point you saw the hill running down to the old Punic harbors, once within the gone, strong city walls, presently just a couple of distant ornamental ponds surrounded by still more villas next to the sea; across the flat Gulf of Tunis that striped alternatingly sapphire and turquoise in the distance, two jutting peninsulas of jagged mountains opened up to the huge Mediterranean. He looked at the sea. Then he looked down to the center of the maze of ruins only a few dozen yards below him, where Jeanne-Isabelle and Véronique now sat on a crumbling brown stone wall, in the welcome shade of a scraggly lemon tree. Véronique had her back turned to Jeanne-Isabelle, who was braiding Véronique’s long and lustrous blond hair into a thick rope, the two of them humming a song together.

Most everybody had a dream, Layton knew, as corny as that sounded. The girls had their dream of the easy life, Youssef had his dream of remaining a soccer star forever. And Layton had once had his dream of maybe being a scholar, maybe actually going on a research trip like this in the course of a long and productive academic career of university teaching somewhere, giving his students something, and writing something consequential himself about a book as great as what was considered by some but a minor effort by the master Flaubert, that Salammbô. Ancient civilizations even had their massive collective dreams, of conquest and glory, and spreading out from this very hill, there had once been an empire equaled by none, what included not only this North Africa but much of Spain and Gaul, and almost the largest prize beyond that, as Hannibal marched his leathery elephants and his thousands of shivering, sandaled soldiers across the snows of the high Alps, with the City of Rome itself, for a moment, anyway, within his grasp. But maybe here was also the overlooked truth about the dreaming, that everything was gone before it started, and now contemplating what had once been triumphant, the scant rubble of Carthage corporeal, Layton realized that it yielded merely the message of nothing to nothing — or possibly nothing all along, the suspected void, because, when you thought of it, everything was inevitably heading toward nothing before it even started, before it even aspired to or had the chance to be something.

Yet the trick, Layton sensed, was to appreciate the few instants of clarity that you are afforded in the brief blur of it all, to be looking out at the most legendary sea of all seas, this Mediterranean that sparkled brilliant, to be looking down to the ruins that could inarguably lay claim to a past of the rarest of glory, though that past adding up to nothing didn’t really figure into it either, didn’t matter whatsoever. It didn’t matter because there was the wonder of a reported here and now that trumped everything else, because there were two beautiful, living, long-legged girls in shorts and T-shirts, both happily humming some tune like a duet now, one braiding the other’s hair in the shade of a crooked little lemon tree. Layton kept looking at the girls, almost a painting.

The day smelled of heat and flowers; a bee buzzed somewhere.

It was perfect, wonderful, and, damn, did Layton ever feel good. Not only this, but knowing that for once he had definitely bucked the FBI and its meaningless treading in circles, the constant lying and the constant hounding of people, which he had grown tired of. He had bucked, too, the smug CIA itself, gotten the better of the likes of that weasel Cunningham. Layton had decided that in his report he would tell nothing significant about information gathered from Khaled Khemir. Or he would tell as little as he had to, just to collect his own contractor’s payment, always straight cash, as well as ensure a visa extension for Khaled Khemir’s brother. Layton knew that Khaled Khemir himself, happy at last with a lovely wife and two young kids, simply deserved to get on with his life. (Layton didn’t know then, of course, how Khaled Khemir would disappear when he traveled to an international mathematicians’ conference in the Czech Republic the very next month. Layton learned of that, and a lot else, only later. As it turned out, the real reason for dispatching Layton to Tunis was basically to confirm firsthand Khaled Khemir’s identity, which was why Cunningham wanted to make sure that Layton did literally “see” Khaled Khemir. Cunningham, who kept pressing Layton for such identification, in the end was satisfied that this young man was, in fact, the Khaled Khemir the government had designs on, who knows why. And with that established, Khaled Khemir could be “taken out,” to use the absurd term thrown about so lightly and casually even on the evening news lately, because that’s the way “potentials” and “suspects” and especially anybody who — as Layton figured in this case — maybe had something on Cunningham’s shadowy CIA was dealt with lately, quickly whisked off to somewhere and imprisoned without a trace or, on occasion, outright gotten rid of. Cunningham was in on it from the start, he was using Layton, and the assignment of Layton’s gathering information from Khaled Khemir on Palestinian supporters was only the ruse needed to bring Layton to Tunis. Rather than finally asserting himself, bucking anybody, Layton would have to admit that he had been suckered, he was the one who actually fingered Khaled Khemir, dealt him what amounted to the classic kiss of death at a point in history when Layton’s own country was bent on smooching the whole world to death, or so it sometimes seemed — but Layton surely wouldn’t learn any of that about Khaled Khemir till later, much later, it coming out when Khaled Khemir’s brother Hosni Khemir was quietly deported, Layton futilely protesting. Plus, to know all of that was getting ahead in time, was to realize how Layton would afterward look back on it, and right now Layton was almost outside of time, somehow absolutely free of its inescapable, persistent thumping.) Yes, in the blinding sunshine on Byrsa Hill, Layton felt more than good.

He felt fucking great.

The girls were both standing now. Véronique twisted her neck to try to glance down over her shoulder, brushing off her skinny behind in the khaki camp shorts, and Jeanne-Isabelle put on an exaggerated studio yawn, extending her bare arms — which themselves looked pretty skinny in the loose, oversize white T-shirt — stretching those sticks of arms this way and that to make her point. Obviously they were ready for the lunch he had promised them.

They looked up to see Layton on the esplanade above, each saying in French something along the lines of, “Can we please go now?”

And Layton, smiling, called back to them in his own French that they all certainly could.