Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (13 page)

The ground levels of the three-and four-story buildings were mostly shops, less frequently a hammam—a Turkish bath—or even the gorgeously-tiled anteroom of a neighborhood mosque. Store-front churches were not unique to American inner cities. In one open room, a man shaped chair seats with a draw-knife while two friends argued and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. A shop sold horsemeat, dark and without the marbling of fat typical of even lean beef. That shop was flanked on one side by a display of wicker bird-cages, each unique; and on the other by kitchen equipment of plastic and aluminum, sold by a heavy-set woman in the white gown of a widow.

The passages twisted and forked. Rarely could Kelly see more than ten feet ahead or behind him. At intervals, a step or a flight of steps would mount the grade, making the tracks as impassible by donkeys as they were to motor vehicles. The thought of carrying out a military operation here, where the walls were stone and the twists and turnings left every attacker alone, was chilling. The Germans had found Stalingrad an icy hell. For the French, the Battle of Algiers was a matter of entering a sarcophagus some moments before death. Kelly smiled and clicked his camera and occasionally consulted the French map he held folded in his left hand.

One could see shops only when on top of them. Some, however, announced their presence at a distance with odors as distinctive as display signs. A bread shop flooded one passage with the smell of baguettes, freshly baked on the premises; and the rich, chocolaty aroma of coffee pursued Kelly a hundred feet from where the beans were weighed and ground and blended from burlap bags. There was no stench of dung, of sewage. Once they passed a man urinating against a wall, but defecation was as private a matter as in any American suburb. Further, unlike many Western cities, the Casbah had no population of domestic animals spreading their daily burden of waste.

Near the top of the Old City, Kelly paused at a stone railing to rest and change film. Below them loomed the Safir Mosque. The ground rose so abruptly to them that the Mediterranean could be glimpsed over the roofs and clothing spread to dry. The agent found he was breathing hard. That irritated him. He made a reasonable effort to stay in shape, but age was creeping up on him with its claws out.

“How old are you?” he asked his companion. It was the first real conversation they had had since they left the car.

The woman laughed and tossed her head. “To think I called you gallant,” she said. “But I’m 34, since you ask.”

“It looks a lot younger on you than 38 feels on me,” Kelly said, his eyes on the film leader he was cranking through the sprockets. Carefully, he set the camera back in place, then clicked the shutter twice to bring unexposed film from the cassette. “Well, no rest for the wicked,” he said as he rose from where he knelt. “According to the map, the Fort de la Casbah should be just south.”

“There’s also a section of what Susette—Groener, the Political Officer’s wife—says is a Turkish aqueduct,” Annamaria remarked. She straightened from the rail against which she lounged. “But I’d swear myself that it’s really Roman wall. None of the guidebooks help, even the Guide Bleu.”

“That’s fine,” said the agent with a smile, “but I’ll bet it hasn’t been converted into a nuclear research facility—the way the fort has.” A pace or two later he added, “Might be best if you didn’t pay much attention to the place. I don’t suppose the government thinks of it as a tourist attraction the way the Casbah itself is.”

“
Oui
,
oui
,” said the woman, and the French made Kelly glance at her face in time to catch an impish smile.

The Fort de la Casbah—more recently the Caserne Ali Khodja and now the Institute for Nuclear Research—squatted on the Boulevard de la Victoire. It looked more like a brick-built 19th-Century prison than it did a military, much less scientific, installation. The walls were about ten feet high and topped with triple strands of barbed wire. The wire was electrified, from the look of the insulators between it and the supporting posts. There were low corner towers, the one nearest to Kelly manned by a soldier with an automatic rifle. Staring at the map with his head turned up the street, the agent began snapping pictures.

Annamaria leaned against Kelly’s right arm as he was cocking the shutter. In loud French she said, “Darling, I’m
certain
the National Theater must be toward the harbor. Here, let me see the map.”

The sun was low. She should have needed a coat to stay warm, Kelly thought. But the Lord knew her breast was as warm as it was soft where it pressed against his arm. The agent’s breath caught—like a goddam little kid—before he said, “Well, if we follow this up to the corner and then left on the Ourida. . . .”

They walked south past the riveted steel gate of the Institute. The metal was painted a dusty gray, which made it look as solid as a vault. Not that Kelly was planning an assault. But it was obvious that they would have to play a lot of this one by ear, and the more the agent knew about the surroundings, the better. Annamaria continued to cling to his arm. Every few yards, she would tug him to a halt, facing the Institute and arguing volubly over the map. The map shaded the Nikon and Kelly’s hand working the shutter. Anna-maria’s perfume was floral and attractive in its suggestions.

“And now?” the woman murmured in Italian as they reached the Boulevard Ourida-Meddad and the south face of the Institute. She was very warm against his arm,

“Now, back though the Casbah a different way,” replied the agent. “I think there’s enough light left if we push-process the film. And anyway, there’s plenty of light to see by.”

“You think that you can memorize all the turnings of the Old City in one afternoon?” the woman asked with a smile.

Kelly raised an eyebrow. “You doubt it? Tsk. I can do anything. Just ask the folks in the Pentagon.”

Going downhill, the alleys of the Casbah resembled a bobsled run, steep and narrow. The footing was mostly asphalt, punctuated by low stone steps. In earlier times the Casbah had presumably been paved with cobblestones which would have been even slicker than ice during rain. Annamaria followed as before, but the memory of her was soft on Kelly’s arm.

A soccer ball jury-rigged from a plastic bag with rag stuffing bounced toward the couple at an intersection. Kelly stopped. Three boys with bright eyes and hair cut as short as American boys of the ‘50s bounded after the ball. They caromed from the blank sidewalls of the passage, each blurting an apology to the couple as they darted past. Kelly waited. Annamaria rested a hand on his shoulder, but she did not speak.

A moment later, the boys were back, one of them holding the ball. The agent grinned and called after them in French. “Please, a photograph?” Giggling, the three children skidded to a halt. They arrayed themselves with linked arms across the passage in which they had been playing. As the boys mugged, Kelly raised the camera and checked the viewfinder for the first time that afternoon. He shot, turned the camera for a vertical, and shot again. Finally, he adjusted the shutter speed and f-stop before taking another photo. “Some day you may be famous,” he called to the grinning boys as he lowered the camera again. “Many thanks.”

“Don’t tell me you aren’t utterly devoted to work after all,” said the black-haired woman as they resumed their descent. “An affection for young children, yet!”

“I’m not utterly devoted to work, no,” Kelly said with a smile which the woman could hear in his voice, “but as for those pictures. . . . Did you notice the two back doorways facing each other across the alley?”

After a moment, Annamaria decided to laugh. She squeezed the agent’s shoulder again. “Do you like couscous?” she asked unexpectedly.

“Damned if I know,” the agent said. He photographed the Rue Amar Ali northward, then turned and pointed toward the Theatre National while he shot the southward length as well. “Do I eat it or—” He stopped himself.

“You eat it,” Annamaria said, holding Kelly’s arm again as they darted across the narrow street, “and you feed it to me. I think my guiding you has earned me dinner tonight, don’t you? Not to mention the fact that I’m freezing myself for your duty.”

“Tsk, did anybody make you come?” said Kelly, turning enough to let the tall woman see him grin. “And besides, you—” The agent stopped himself again.

“Doug Rowe couldn’t have looked like anything but a soldier, even if you’d put him in a dress,” Annamaria said. “And do you think
he
was going to make the guards ignore your camera by cuddling you?” She giggled. “Well, he might have at that. . . . Still. And as for my husband”—answering the question Kelly had not spoken—“he’ll be right down there at El Mouggar where the Lovelace Jazz Quartet is playing on their ICA tour tonight.” She waved in the general direction of the National Theatre. “I told Rufus that I’d do my duty at the buffet with the quartet at the Residence Wednesday, but not then and tonight besides.”

“That’s not quite . . .” the agent began. His voice trailed off when he realized he did not care to say what he
had
exactly meant. Nor, he supposed, did he need to. “All right,” he said, “I guess I’m old enough to learn about couscous.”

Or whatever, he added to himself as he let a pair of veiled, heavy-set women step past. Or learn about whatever.

XIII

Kelly walked along the south side of the street where there was something of a sidewalk, albeit not a curb. He had followed Annamaria’s Mustang back from the rental agency in El Biar where the Passat had been transferred to his name. The car was now parked in the GSO Annex, across from where the Mustang had pulled into the Residence gate.

The agent noticed that the Fiat was no longer in front of the Residence. That whole business could lead to bad trouble, international trouble, at the mission—which was about the last thing Skyripper needed. Kelly hoped that if somebody, a Zulu from the Chaka Front or an Algerian guard, were going to be knifed at the embassy, that it would happen after Professor Vlasov had defected—or the operation had failed of itself . . . in which case Kelly would be well and truly at peace with the universe, he assumed.

The agent darted across the street and rapped on the Chancery gate. A different guard opened the door. This one was a heavy-set man in his fifties, with a thick, black moustache and almost no hair above the eyebrows. The loungers seemed to have gone home. Perhaps they had been friends or family to the man on the day shift. “Is Commander Posner or Sergeant Rowe still here?” Kelly asked in French.

“Mr. Ceriani?” asked the local employee. “Commander Posner, no, but the sergeant is waiting for you.” He waved toward the Chancery. As the agent strode down the walk he noticed the guard picking up the phone in his shack and dialing. He waved when he saw Kelly looking back at him.

Doug Rowe was coming out the front door of the building before the agent had reached it. The steel door within was open. The receptionist and another man were examining it.

“Anything wrong with the door?” Kelly asked with a nod toward the building.

“Oh, Henri says three men came asking for visas,” the younger man explained. “He sent them over to the Consulate in the Villa Inshallah, but one of them leaned against the door or something—and it opened. The bolt must have stuck, I suppose. Seems OK now. Henri hit the siren, and I guess the poor guys are lucky they ran off before he dumped CS over them.”

Rowe looked around. “Let’s walk on the grounds,” he said, waving a white cable copy to Kelly. In a lower voice he added, “All this stuff is making me a little nuts. I keep thinking maybe my office is bugged.”

“Planted by a predecessor who was a KGB mole, no doubt,” Kelly joked. The sun had set behind the mountains, but there was enough light to see by.

“KGB, hell,” Rowe said. “I’m worried about Harry Warner. He went through the roof when this came in”—he handed Kelly the cable—“and so, I’ll bet, did the Ambassador. You got a bull’s-eye, Tom, a perfect bull.”

Kelly read the flimsy brief. “They want the job done, they give me the tools to do it,” he said quietly. Flowers, their colors turned to shadow, filled the air with their freshness as the men walked past. Kelly handed back the cable. “Run it through the shredder, then,” he said. “Stapling it to the visa request would be adding insult to injury. Nobody’s going to play silly games when there’s an order from the Secretary of State in the mission files already.”

“You’ll handle it tonight, then?” the sergeant asked, darting a sidewise glance at his companion.

“Can you raise the commander if you have to?” Kelly replied obliquely, looking off toward the wall about the grounds.

“Well, he’ll be at home. . . . Sure.”

“Sorry,” the agent said, noting the expected lack of enthusiasm in Rowe’s voice, “but I want him to do it. And yeah, I want it done tonight. Posner’s had the initial contact. He can follow it up without getting me involved. Let the clerk think I’m being set up, too. At least let him wonder.”

Kelly paused. “And as for you, Doug,” he said, lifting three film cassettes from his coat pocket, “you handle the darkroom work for the office?”

The sergeant nodded, his rueful smile hardly visible.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Kelly agreed, “a goddam all-nighter, and I’m sorry, but. . . . It’s Tri-X and the cans are marked. Develop One standard, push Two and Three to ASA 1200. Then I need prints from every frame, numbered. Eight-by-tens. It’s a bitch, I know, but we’ll need the prints when we talk to the Kabyles tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’ll phone my wife after I get the commander,” Rowe said. “After all”—his teeth glinted—“I wanted the job because of the excitement, didn’t I?”

A car pulled in the gate behind them and made a U-turn. Before the headlights were shut off, their reflection from the wall brought out the car’s red finish. The engine continued to purr at a fast idle.

Kelly gripped Rowe by the shoulder and squeezed. “Here, you best keep my camera for me too, if you would,” he said. He unstrapped the Nikon. Then he added, “At least you know what the hell you’re doing. I swear I don’t. Though I suppose I had to eat somewhere tonight, didn’t I?”