The Torch of Tangier Read online

  Today was November 7. She turned to page 1107 in the Bureau of American Ethnography Report XXXV, reached for the graph paper and spelled out a message for Adam in code.

  At eight a.m., she turned on the transmitter and sent the dispatch, “Have cookbook with recipes for blueberry pie. Can start baking.”

  A key fumbled in the lock on the door that led to the roof.

  The Marine?

  Chapter Thirty

  The door handle rattled, stopped, and started again. It couldn’t be the Marine. Jessup was his name. The flag was already raised.

  Lily rose from the table and closed the shed, heard the person jiggle the handle of the door to the roof, scratch at the lock.

  Jessup had a key that worked.

  The door banged and shook; the frame buckled.

  She stepped back, listening, alarms clanging in her head.

  The door exploded open.

  Zaid stood on the landing, glowering at her, spewing hatred, eyes afire. Dried blood trailed down the side of his face from a gash on his forehead.

  “The code book.”

  She took another step back.

  He lumbered onto the roof, dragging his right leg. He elbowed the door shut and waggled his fingers in a gesture of demand. “The book.”

  Fear surged through her. She moved away, felt a scream erupt. He lunged, clamped a hand over her mouth and clutched her wrist, breath heavy against her face.

  Got to get away from him. Get away. She kicked at him, grabbed the fingers that dug into her cheek, forced them back, back, until she heard a snap.

  He grunted, dropped his hand.

  “Bitch.”

  She spiraled to pull away, hit the gash on his head with the back of her hand. He winced. Blood trickled into his eye. He swiped at the cut with the back of his hand, smeared blood across his forehead.

  Like finger-paint.

  She moved out of reach.

  He lurched toward her, snarling, seized her arm with his left hand and twisted it.

  She struggled, writhing, thrashing through a fog of pain. She kicked and missed and kicked again. She bit his sleeve and spit out the sour-salt taste of the cloth.

  She recoiled, and slammed her knee upward between his legs.

  He groaned, doubled over, stumbled back. Her leg shot up again, trying for a second kick and he snatched her ankle. She fell onto her back, clutching air.

  He dove at her. She rolled onto her side and he crashed into her shoulder, panting.

  The Teletype clattered in the shed. He relaxed his grip, rose, and shambled toward the sound. She struggled to her feet.

  Block his way.

  He smirked as if he had won.

  She moved between him and the shed.

  He kept coming, growling, dragging his foot, swinging his arm.

  She backed away, heartbeat thumping in her ears, heaving in her chest, choking in her throat, too afraid to scream.

  A wild howl rose from him.

  She inched further back, arms and legs heavy with fear. He circled her, his right hand limp, his left hand flexing.

  He lunged at her.

  She dodged when he dove forward. He careened against her.

  Can’t let him stop Torch.

  She ran at him, head down, rammed him. Pain jarred through her as her shoulder slammed into his gut.

  The impact knocked her off balance. She scrambled to her feet and slammed into him again.

  He staggered back, back, arms waving, and disappeared off the edge of the roof.

  A cry of terror trailed behind him.

  She heard a thud, an animal sound almost like a sigh.

  Then silence.

  Panting, terrified, she crept to the edge of the roof and peered into the alley. Zaid lay splayed on the cobbles, his head at an odd angle, blood seeping from his nose and gaping mouth.

  She froze, unable to move.

  This didn’t happen.

  He looks like a clown in his bloody pantaloons.

  No one in the building across the way. Shutters on the windows closed. No one in the alley except Zaid. The only movement, on the balcony opposite, a tag fluttering in the wind that was tied to a propane tank.

  A shudder of cold passed through her, rising up her spine. Her teeth began to chatter. Her arms trembled. She crossed them over her chest and grasped her elbows. She pulled tighter, and still her arms quivered.

  She pulled back from the edge, her shoulder throbbing, the skin on her arm prickling where Zaid had grazed against it when he hurtled off the roof. She tripped on a clay pot; it toppled over and cracked, spilling dirt along the edge of the roof.

  She stumbled against the flagpole, felt it vibrate, metal fasteners ringing against the pole as the flag snapped in the wind.

  Got to get away from here, get downstairs.

  She crossed the roof to the door and paused at the landing. She thought of Drury, of MacAlistair.

  Zaid had killed them. He would have killed me.

  She went back to lock the shed and tried to lock the door to the roof. The shattered doorframe blocked the head of the bolt.

  The damn door won’t close.

  She pocketed the keys and hesitated on the landing, exhausted. I killed a man.

  “Killed him in battle,” she heard Rafi’s voice say. “You did what you had to do.”

  Then she started down the stairs, clutching the banister.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Korian stood in the corridor outside her office, sucking on his pipe. “You look awful. What happened?”

  “I tripped on the stairs. I think I hurt my shoulder.”

  Go away, Korian.

  “I thought I heard something,” he said. “A commotion in the alley behind the Legation.”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I was on the other side of the building.”

  Korian leaned one elbow against the wall and drew on the pipe, saturating the hallway with his smarmy presence. Lily’s eyes began to tear.

  He waved the other hand vaguely in the direction of the street. “Something’s going on out there.”

  They found Zaid?

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  Leave me alone, Korian.

  Korian leaned toward her. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

  “I don’t leave until tomorrow.”

  “I’m leaving myself. Got a new appointment. We could have dinner tonight to celebrate.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Have to wash your hair again?” He raised his head and sniffed. “You certainly keep a clean head of hair.”

  She tried to duck into her office. “I don’t have time.” There was no way around him. “Have to pack.”

  He moved closer. “You still have to eat.”

  “I have a previous engagement.”

  Get lost, Korian. And take your pipe with you.

  The noise outside became more insistent. She thought she heard Lieutenant Periera’s voice argue with the guard at the door. The ruckus echoed through the hallway and grew more strident. She dodged under Korian’s arm, feeling the wrench in her shoulder when she straightened up. From behind her desk, she watched Lieutenant Periera and his sergeant march down the hall and burst into Boyle’s office. Korian slithered after them and stood right outside the door.

  She heard Boyle ask Pereira, “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Last night,” Periera said in an imperious voice that reverberated through the corridor, “someone killed one of the sentries at Cape Spartel, wounded the other and stole a patrol car.”

  “How does that concern me?”

  “The wounded officer made his way to the lighthouse and contacted us from there.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that happened. It is not a matter for this office, however, and is no excuse for you to storm in here unannounced.”

  “I am conducting a serious police investigation. The van was found in th
e street outside the Legation, and the man was seen entering this building.” Lily could hear the impatient slap of Periera’s baton against the leg of his trousers. “He fell, or was pushed, from your roof into the alley behind the building.”

  “You must be mistaken,” Boyle said. “The roof is locked. He fell from another building.”

  Lily moved into the hall and peeked around Korian. She saw Boyle rearrange the pens on his desk, lean back in his chair and contemplate Periera. “No one from the Legation has been to Cape Spartel recently.”

  “The man appears to be a Riffian.”

  “Well, then,” Boyle spread out his hands, “you have no business here. Check next door or one of the buildings in the alley. Good day, Lieutenant. You know the way out.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving. I must go to your roof. Then I’ll decide what to do.”

  “No.” Boyle picked up one of the pens and began to write on a pad. “You may not.”

  “You would impede the operation of justice? Your roof may be the scene of a crime.”

  “The Legation is United States territory,” Boyle said without looking up. “You have no jurisdiction here. I will thank you to leave.”

  Periera lifted his hands to remonstrate. “Colonel Yuste will hear of this.”

  “I’m sure he will.”

  Pereira turned on his heel and strode down the hall, signaling his sergeant to follow.

  Lily ducked back into her office. Pereira passed Lily’s door.

  “Five o’clock tomorrow, Miss Sampson,” he said without missing a step and continued down the hall.

  She watched him swagger out of sight. When he was gone, she strode down to Boyle’s office and sank into the chair across from his desk. He waited, his head resting against his left hand, scratching a pen along the pad with his right.

  “The roof,” she said.

  “What about the roof?”

  “The door needs to be repaired.” She craned her neck to scrutinize the pad. He was doodling.

  He turned to a fresh page and scribbled something. “Any other damage?”

  “No. Yes. A broken flower pot.”

  He made another note. “Do I want to know what happened on the roof?”

  She took in her breath. “No.”

  He replaced the pen on the desk, arranged his hands on the blotter and looked across at Lily. “I have some news for you.”

  “About Suzannah?”

  “She left for Fez, has some distant relatives there. Drury left her a small trust fund, but she may not be able to get it until after the duration, when the war is over. I was able to give her some money to tide her over.” He looked down at the desk and straightened the pen. “It’s your friend Lalla Emily.”

  “What about her?”

  “Lalla Emily, Sheerifa of Ouezzane, is dead.”

  Lily leaned forward. “How?”

  “She died peacefully in her sleep last night,” Boyle said. “Her funeral is tomorrow. The Moslems here think of her as a saint, and there’s talk of making her tomb a marabout, a holy place of pilgrimage. Also, I have a message for you from Major Pardo.”

  “A message?” There was one on the Teletype, too. She’d forgotten.

  “Your replacement, Warrant Officer Blufield, will arrive Sunday, tomorrow, early afternoon.”

  “Oh?”

  “According to Yuste, you must leave by Monday.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “I made reservations for you at Hotel TransAtlantique in the Ville Nouvelle in Meknes. It’s only a few kilometers from Volubilis.”

  She stood up. “You told me.”

  “And since you are our current cultural attachée,” he raised an eyebrow in emphasis and paused while she took in the new title, “I was able to requisition a jeep for your use.”

  Boyle stood up and came around the desk. “You know, I was skeptical when you first showed up here.”

  “You advised me to go to the beach, as I recall.”

  The message on the Teletype, still unread, nagged at her. From Adam? About Torch? Impatient to leave, she was almost at the door of Boyle’s office.

  “About Korian,” Boyle said before she reached the door.

  “What about him? He said he’s leaving.”

  “He’s been kicked upstairs. He’ll be in charge of his own mission.”

  “He’s being rewarded?”

  “We don’t like to make a fuss.”

  “Where is he going?”

  “Brazzaville, in French Equatorial Africa.”

  “Brazzaville?”

  “He speaks French.”

  “It’s out of the war zone,” Lily said.

  “And he’ll be better off there. It will be more difficult to feed his little habit. He’ll have to find another hobby. Cirrhosis of the liver, maybe.”

  She backed into the hallway. “I have to go upstairs.”

  At the entrance to the roof, she paused on the landing, a pulse beating in her ears. Suppose Zaid is still there? Suppose he hadn’t died when he fell off the roof?

  She opened the door and stepped onto the roof. She listened, edged toward the back and looked down into the alley.

  Zaid was gone. Two men from the Guardia Civil stood over a dark stain on the pavement.

  She backed away, unlocked the shed, and stared dumbly at the table, staring at the Teletype.

  Finally, she pulled the dispatch from the platen. It took only a few minutes to decode it.

  “Warrant Officer Blufield of CIC will arrive Tangier Sunday, November 8, at fourteen hundred hours. Give him your recipes for blueberry pies,” it read. “Return to station for additional transmission this p.m. at twenty-one hundred hours.”

  She locked the shed and went back downstairs. She washed and packed. She checked supplies for her survey, making sure everything she would need was ready. Spirit levels, stakes, plumb bobs, surveyor’s pins, mason’s twine, measuring tape, record forms.

  Record forms. She had forgotten record forms.

  She found mimeograph stencils in the secretary’s office, prepared forms for measurements and architectural features, houses, and burials.

  Graph paper! She forgot to buy graph paper. She made a note to stop at a stationer’s in Meknes.

  She placed the mimeograph stencils on the drums, remembering the smell of ether and alcohol and the cold paper from her early days as a graduate student when she had been a T.A. at the Oriental Institute. Just as it happened then, her hands were smudged with purple stains from the toner.

  When she finished, she washed, went back to her room, and fell exhausted across the bed. When she awoke, it was dark.

  She had dinner by herself in the wine bar at the El Minzah and returned half an hour before nine o’clock. The night was chilly. She fished a jacket from the top of her suitcase and climbed to the roof.

  The door had already been repaired.

  The stars were clear and radiant in the night sky; last night’s sliver of a crescent moon had disappeared.

  Tonight was the dark of the moon.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  She unlocked the shed, opened the Ethnology of the Kwakiutl, and wrote out the code for November 8. While she waited, she turned on the radio next to the bar, just loud enough to make her feel less alone. The only station working was the French language BBC, where a throaty singer, crooning a song about a lost love, was interrupted. A man’s voice intoned, “Écoutez Yankee Lincoln. Écoutez Yankee Lincoln. Robert arrive. Robert arrive,” and then the singer continued to mourn his lost love.

  At 00:00 Greenwich Mean Time, on the morning of November 8, she received a transmission from Casablanca. Decoded, it read: “The Torch is lit.”

  The radio still played. La Mer. The white noise kept her going.

  At 06:17 she transmitted a message from Allied headquarters in Gibraltar to General George S. Patton aboard the Augusta, lying off the coast of Casablanca.

 
“Play ball,” it said, the signal for the task force to disembark.

  Operation Torch was underway.

  At 08:00, the Marine from downstairs came up to the roof to raise the flag.

  Once, the radio crackled and a voice in German filtered through the music. “Achtung—Achtung—Achtung. Ein Americanishes kraftsheer ist auf den nordwest Kuste Africas gelandet.”

  She continued working furiously, with hardly enough time to decode one dispatch before encrypting another and sending it off.

  Wind began to whip at the pages. She held them down with the heavy ethnography, found cups and saucers on the cupboards in the shed, and used them as paperweights. Anything that worked.

  By noon, the back of her neck was stiff, the space between her shoulder blades ached. When the pace of the dispatches slackened a bit she paused, bent her arms at the elbows and rotated them to relieve the tension.

  A knock sounded at the door of the roof. She stiffened. The knock sounded again.

  What was she afraid of? Zaid was dead, taken away in an ambulance by the Guardia Civil. Periera had left the premises.

  She opened the door and found Warrant Officer Blufield on the landing.

  “Blufield reporting for duty.” He began to salute and hesitated, not sure of what to do.

  “Am I glad to see you.” Lily waved him onto the roof and started toward the shed. “Sink any ships lately?” She turned back to make sure he followed.

  He was right behind her. “The Major really reamed me out for that. But I wasn’t talking about Enigma.”

  “That’s the name of the operation at Bletchley Park?”

  “No. That’s called Ultra. Enigma’s the name of the German code.”

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “Sorry. You won’t report me to the Major, will you?” He ducked his head and smiled. “I was thinking of the peacetime applications.” The glow of the future still glimmered in his eyes.