Halfway up the hill, the pavement widened slightly and flattened into a circular plaza with a leafy fountain at the center, which seemed to mark the central point of this vertical city. Coming around the curve, I could see the twisted maze of streets that formed the upper tier of the city. As we swept through the curve, the headlights of a car that had been behind us stayed with us, as my taxi’s weak beams penetrated the suffocating darkness of the upper city.
“Someone is following us,” I said to the driver.
“Yes, madame.” He glanced back at me in the rearview mirror, smiling nervously. His gold front teeth flashed briefly in the reflection of the pursuing headlights. “They have been following us since the airport. You are perhaps a spy?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You see, the car that follows us is the special car of the chef du sécurité.”
“The head of security? He interviewed me at the airport. Sharrif.”
“The very man,” said my driver, becoming visibly more nervous by the minute. Our car was now at the top of the city, and the road narrowed into a fine ribbon that ran dangerously along the ledge of the steep cliff overlooking Algiers. My driver looked down as the pursuing car, long and black, swung around the curve just beneath us.
The entire city was spread out over the corrugated hills, a maze of tortuously twisted streets that ran like fingers of lava down to the crescent of lights that marked out the port. Ships glittered in the black waters of the bay beyond, floating up and down on the tideless sea.
The driver was hitting the gas. As our car swung around the next bend, Algiers disappeared completely, and we were swallowed in darkness. Soon the road slid down into a black hollow, a thick and impenetrable forest where the heavy smell of pine nearly eradicated the dank saltiness of the sea. Not even the thin, watery moonlight could sift through the massive interlacings of the trees.
“There is little we can do now,” said my driver, still glancing behind us, checking his mirrors as he tore through the deserted forest. I wished he would keep his eyes on the road.
“We are now in the area called ‘Les Pins.’ There is nothing between us and the El Riadh but pines. This is what you call the shortcut.” The road through the pines kept going up and down hills like a roller coaster. As the driver got up more steam, I thought I felt the taxi actually leave the ground a few times, coming over the top of a sharp rise. You couldn’t see a damned thing.
“I’ve got plenty of time,” I told him, hanging on to the armrest so my head wouldn’t smash against the ceiling. “Why don’t you slow down?” The lights came up behind us after every hill.
“This man Sharrif,” said the driver, his voice trembling. “Do you know for what purpose he interrogated you at the airport?”
“He did not interrogate me,” I said somewhat defensively. “He only wanted to ask me a few questions. There aren’t many women who come to Algiers on business, after all.” Even to myself, my laugh sounded a little forced. “Immigrations can question whoever they like, can’t they?”
“Madame,” said the driver, shaking his head and looking at me oddly in the mirror, as now and then the lights of the other car caught in his eyes, “this man Sharrif does not work for immigrations. His job is not to welcome people to Algiers. He does not have you followed to make certain you arrive home safely.” He permitted himself this small joke, though his voice was still shaking. “His job is somewhat more important than that.”
“Really?” I said, surprised.
“He did not tell you,” said my driver, still watching his mirror with a frightened eye. “This man Sharrif, he is the head of the secret police.”
The secret police, as described by my driver, sounded like a mix of the FBI, the CIA, the KGB, and the Gestapo. The driver seemed more than relieved by the time we pulled up in front of the Hotel El Riadh, a low, sleek building surrounded by thick foliage with a small free-form pool and fountain at the entrance. Tucked away in a grove of trees near the edge of the sea, its long drive and sculptural entrance twinkled with lights.
As I stepped out of the cab, I saw the headlights of the other car curve away and slip back into the dark forest beyond. My driver’s gnarled old hands were shaking as he picked up my bags and started to carry them into the hotel.
I followed him inside and paid him. When he left I gave my name to the desk clerk. The clock behind the desk said a quarter to ten.
“I am desolate, madame,” said the concierge. “I have no reservation for you. And unhappily, we are fully booked.” He smiled and shrugged, then turned his back on me and went about his paperwork. Just what I needed at this hour. I’d noticed there wasn’t exactly a line of taxis lined up outside the isolated El Riadh, and jogging back to Algiers through the police-riddled pine forests with my luggage on my back was not my idea of fun.
“There must be some mistake,” I told the concierge loudly. “My reservation here was confirmed over a week ago.”
“It must have been another hotel,” he said with that polite smile that seemed to be a national fixture. Damn if he didn’t turn his back on me again.
It occurred to me there might be a lesson for the astute executette in all of this. Maybe this back-turning indifference was merely a prelude, a warm-up to the act of bartering, Arabic style. And maybe you were supposed to barter for everything: not just high-powered consulting contracts, but even a confirmed hotel reservation. I decided my theory was worth a try. I yanked a fifty-dinar note from my pocket and slapped it on the counter.
“Would you be so kind to keep my bags behind the desk? Sharrif, the chef du sécurité, is expecting to find me here—please tell him I’m in the lounge when he arrives.” This was not a complete myth, I reasoned. Sharrif would expect to find me here, since his thugs had followed me to the very door. And the concierge would scarcely telephone a guy like Sharrif to check out his cocktail plans.
“Ah, please forgive me, madame,” cried the concierge, glancing down quickly at his register and, I noted, pocketing the money with a deft movement. “I suddenly see that we do have a reservation in your name.” He penciled it in and looked up with the same charming smile. “Shall I have the porter take your baggage to your room?”
“That would be very nice,” I told him, handing the porter a few bills as he came trotting up. “Meanwhile I’ll have a look around. Please send my key to the lounge when he’s finished.”
“Very good, madame,” the concierge said, beaming.
Throwing my satchel over my shoulder, I made my way through the lobby toward the lounge. Near the hotel entrance the lobby had been low-slung and modern, but as I turned the corner it opened up into a vast space like an atrium. Whitewashed walls curved in sculptural flights of fancy, soaring to the fifty-foot domed ceiling. There were holes cut out that looked up into the starry sky.
Across the magnificent sweep of lobby, suspended about thirty feet up the far wall, was the terrace lounge that seemed to float in space. From the lip of the terrace plunged a waterfall that seemed to spring from nowhere. It tumbled down, a wall of water breaking in spray here and there as it encountered jutting stone slabs embedded in the back wall. At the bottom it was caught in a large frothing pool set into the polished marble floor of the lobby.
At either side of the waterfall, open stairways rose from the lobby to the lounge, twisting skyward like a double helix. I crossed the lobby and started up the left stairway. Wild flowering trees grew through holes cut into the walls. Beautifully colored woven tapis tossed over the stairwells tumbled down fifteen feet to fall in lovely folds at the bottom.
The floors were of gleaming marble set in dazzling patterns of various hues. Here and there were intimate seating arrangements with thick Persian carpets, copper trays, leather ottomans, lavish fur rugs, and brass samovars for tea. Though the lounge was large with sweeping plate-glass windows overlooking the sea, it had a feeling of intimacy.
Sitting on a soft leather ottoman, I gave my order to a waiter, who recommended
the local freshly brewed beer. The windows of the lounge were all open, and a damp breeze blew across the high stone terrace outside. The sea lapped softly, seeming to stroke my mind into submission. I felt relaxed for the first time since I’d left New York.
The waiter brought my beer on a tray, already poured. Beside it was my room key.
“Madame will find her room off the formal gardens,” he told me, pointing to a dark space beyond the terrace that I couldn’t quite make out in the thin moonlight. “One follows the maze of shrubbery to the moonflower tree, which will have strongly scented blossoms. Room forty-four is just behind the tree. It has a private entrance.”
The beer tasted like flowers, not sweet but rather aromatic with a light woody flavor. I ended up ordering another. As I was sipping it I thought about Sharrif’s strange line of questioning, then decided to dismiss all surmises until I’d had more time to bone up on the subject I now realized Nim had tried to prepare me for. Instead I thought about my job. What strategy would I use when I went tomorrow morning, as I’d already planned, to visit the ministry? I remembered the problems the partnership of Fulbright Cone had encountered in trying to get our contract signed. It was an odd story.
The minister of industry and energy, a fellow named Abdelsalaam Belaid, had agreed to a meeting a week earlier. It was to be an official ceremony to sign the contract, so six partners had flown to Algiers at great expense, with a case of Dom Pérignon, only to discover upon their arrival at the ministry that the Minister Belaid was “out of the country on business.” They reluctantly agreed to meet with his second in command instead, a chap named Emile Kamel Kader (the same Kader who’d approved my visa, as Sharrif had noticed).
While waiting in one of the interminable rows of anterooms until Kader was free to see them, they noticed a cluster of Japanese bankers coming down the corridor and stepping onto an elevator. And in their midst was none other than Minister Belaid: the one who was out of town on business.
The partners of Fulbright Cone were not used to being stood up. Especially not six of them at once, and certainly not so blatantly. They were prepared to complain of this to Emile Kamel Kader once they were admitted to his chambers. But when at last they were shown in, Kader was bouncing around the office in a pair of tennis shorts and a polo shirt, swishing a racket through the air.
“So sorry,” he tells them, “but it’s Monday. And on Mondays I always play a set with an old college chum. I couldn’t disappoint him.” And off he went, leaving six full partners of Fulbright Cone with their fingers in their ears.
I looked forward to meeting the chaps who could pull off a Mexican standoff like this with the partners of my illustrious firm. And I assumed it was yet another manifestation of the Arabic bartering methodology. But if six partners couldn’t get a contract signed, how was I going to do any better?
I picked up my beer glass and wandered out onto the terrace. I gazed over the darkened garden that spread between the hotel and the sea, as the waiter had said, like a maze. There were crunchy white gravel paths separating beds of exotic cactus, succulents, and shrubbery, tropical and desert foliage jumbled all together.
At the garden’s edge bordering the beach was a flat marble terrace with an enormous swimming pool, glittering like a turquoise jewel from lamps set beneath the water’s surface. Separating the pool from the sea was a sculptured twist of curved white walls laced with oddly shaped arches through which you caught glimpses of the dim sandy beach beyond and the white waves rocking back and forth. At the edge of the cobweblike wall was a high brick tower with an onion dome at top, the kind from which the muezzin chants his call to evening prayer.
My eyes were drifting back toward the garden when I saw it. It was only a glimpse, a flicker of light from the pool, caught on the spokes and rim of one wheel of the bicycle. Then it vanished into the dark foliage.
I froze on the top step of the stairway, my eyes scanning the garden, the pool, and the beach beyond, my ear trained to pick up a sound. But I heard nothing. No movement. Suddenly someone placed a hand on my shoulder. I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Excuse, madame,” said my waiter, looking at me strangely. “The concierge wishes me to inform you that he received some mail for you this afternoon before your arrival. He’d overlooked to mention it earlier.” He handed me a newspaper in a brown wrapper and an envelope that looked like a telex. “I wish you a pleasant evening,” he said, and departed.
I looked down into the garden again. Perhaps my imagination was playing tricks on me. After all, even if I’d seen what I thought, people undoubtedly rode bicycles in Algeria as well as anywhere else.
I went back to the lighted lounge and sat down with my beer. I opened the telex, which said: “Read your newspaper. Section G5.” It was unsigned, but when I unwrapped the paper I guessed who’d sent it. It was the Sunday edition of The New York Times. How had it reached me so quickly across so many miles? The Sisters of Mercy moved in strange and mysterious ways.
I turned to Section G5, the sports section. There was an article about the chess tournament:
CHESS TOURNEY CANCELED
GM SUICIDE QUESTIONED
The suicide last week of Grand Master Antony Fiske, which raised eyebrows in New York chess circles, has now provoked a serious inquiry by the New York Homicide Department. The City Coroner’s Office, in a statement issued today, pronounced it impossible that the 67-year-old British GM died by his own hand. The death was due to a “snapped cervical column resulting from pressure exerted simultaneously upon the vertebra prominens (C7) and beneath the chin.” There is no way a man can accomplish such a fracture “unless he stands behind his own back while breaking his neck,” according to tournament physician Dr. Osgood, first to examine Fiske and to voice suspicions regarding the cause of death.
Russian GM Alexander Solarin was engaged in play with Fiske when he noticed the latter’s “strange behavior.” The Soviet embassy has requested diplomatic immunity for the controversial GM, who has again made waves by declining to accept it. (See article page A6.) Solarin was the last to see Fiske alive and has filed a statement with the police.
Tournament sponsor John Hermanold issued a press release explaining his decision to cancel the tournament. He today alleged that GM Fiske has had a long history of struggle with drug abuse and suggested police poll drug informants for possible leads to the unexplained homicide.
To assist in the investigation, tournament coordinators have supplied the police with names and addresses of the 63 persons, including judges and players, who were present at Sunday’s closed session at the Metropolitan Club.
(See next Sunday’s Times for an in-depth analysis: “Antony Fiske, Life of a GM.”)
So the cat was out of the bag, and New York homicide had its nose to the ground. I was thrilled to learn my name was now in the hands of the Manhattan fuzz but relieved they could do nothing about it, short of extraditing me from North Africa. I wondered if Lily also had escaped the inquisition. Solarin, undoubtedly, had not. To learn more of his plight I flipped to page A6.
I was surprised to find a two-column “exclusive interview” under the provocative heading SOVIETS DENY INVOLVEMENT IN DEATH OF BRITISH GM. I whizzed through the gushy parts describing Solarin as “charismatic” and “mysterious,” summarizing his checkered career and impromptu recall from Spain. The meat of the interview told me a lot more than I’d expected.
First, it was not Solarin who’d denied involvement. Until now I hadn’t realized he’d been alone with Fiske in a lavatory only seconds before the murder. But the Soviets had realized it and had worked themselves into a lather, demanding diplomatic immunity and banging the proverbial shoe on the table.
Solarin had refused the immunity (no doubt he was familiar with the procedure) and stressed his desire to cooperate with local authorities. When questioned about Fiske’s possible drug abuse, his comment made me laugh: “Perhaps John (Hermanold) has insider’s information? The autopsy makes no mention of chemicals in
the body.” Suggesting Hermanold was either a liar or a dealer.
But when I’d read the description of the actual murder from Solarin’s perspective, I was astounded. By his own testimony, there was practically no way anyone could have got inside the lavatory to kill Fiske except himself. There wasn’t time, and there wasn’t opportunity, since Solarin and the judges had blocked the only avenue of escape. Now I found myself wishing I’d gotten more detail on the physical layout of the premises before leaving New York. It was still possible if I could get hold of Nim. He could go over to the club and case the joint for me.
Meanwhile I was getting drowsy. My internal clock told me it was four in the afternoon New York time, and I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Picking up my room key and mail from the tray, I went back outside and down the steps into the garden. At the near wall I found the lusciously scented moonflower tree with its black-glazed foliage, rising above the garden. Its trumpet-shaped waxy flowers were like upside-down Easter lilies, opening by moonlight to exude their heavy, sensual aroma.
I went up the few steps to my room and unlocked the door. The lamps were already lit. It was a large room with floors of baked clay tile, stucco walls, and large French windows overlooking the sea beyond the moonflower tree. There was a thick woolly bedspread like the fleece of a lamb, a small carpet of the same material, and a few sparse furnishings.
In the bath were a large tub, a sink, a toilet, and a bidet. No shower. I turned on the tap, and reddish-colored water ran out. I let it run for several minutes, but it didn’t change color or get any warmer. Great. Ice-cold rust would be fun to bathe in.
Leaving the water to run, I went back into the bedroom and opened the closet. My clothes were all unpacked and hanging neatly inside, with the bags stacked at the bottom. They seem to enjoy rifling through your belongings here, I thought. But I had nothing to hide that could be concealed in a piece of luggage. I’d learned my lesson with the briefcase.
The Eight Page 28
