Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels

by David Drake

  “Jeez, that sounds awful,” said Rowe.

  Kelly grinned. “Well, maybe I’m not a good source for opera. I heard Rigoletto at La Scala and I didn’t think a whole lot of that, either.”

  Voices loud enough to carry filtered in from the street. The North Americans looked at one another. Both stepped through the open doorway.

  A Fiat sedan had pulled up near the Residence gate. The driver, a tall black man in a dashiki and slacks, had gotten out and was arguing with the guard. Both men were gesturing and shouting—the guard in French, the black apparently in English disguised by distance and an accent. “That’s part of the Ambassador’s management style, what you see there,” said the sergeant.

  The black strode haughtily past the guard and into the Residence grounds. Still shrieking, the man in khaki followed with his fists clenched. “Jesus,” muttered Kelly in amazement, “It’s a damn good thing the guards aren’t issued guns.” Then, “What do you mean about the Ambassador being responsible?”

  Rowe stepped out along the wall and motioned the agent to follow him, not that the Algerians within were showing any signs of interest in the conversation. Cars, braking and changing down as they rounded the curve, provided background noise. “The Ambassador’s secretary,” the sergeant said, “Buffy Tuttle. She lives in the guest house right by the Residence gate.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Kelly agreed.

  “Well,” Rowe went on, “that’s a good place because she has to be on call pretty much all the time. And she dates a lot—she’s single and damned good looking. But his Excellency doesn’t like it that the guys courting her park right in front of his door. He won’t tell her that himself, maybe because she’s black and he’s afraid of being called a racist . . . so he tells the guards to make all Buffy’s visitors park across the street in the Annex lot. And they pay about as much attention to the guard as you’d expect.” Rowe nodded toward the Fiat.

  Kelly shook his head. “His Excellency’s going to have blood all over his gravel if he doesn’t watch out,” he remarked.

  “Sure,” agreed Rowe. “And what’s even worse is, well . . . there aren’t a whole lot of blacks in Algiers, you know. Most of them calling on Buffy are from the Chaka Front office downtown.”

  “What!” the agent blurted. A great Magirus Deutz truck passed, its diesel blasting as it climbed the hill. During the interval, while both men squeezed their backs still closer to the wall, Kelly decided he must have misunderstood.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” the sergeant said gloomily as the truck disappeared. “Goons from the South African liberation organization. They’ve got an information office here, may as well be an embassy. Which is fine, but . . .”

  “But this is the secretary who’s typing and filing most of the Top Secret material in the mission?” the agent said, not really asking it as a question. “Jesus.”

  “Neither Harry Warner nor the commander’s real pleased about it,” Rowe agreed. “In the country team meetings, the Ambassador says it may prove a useful channel of information from the Chaka Front. I don’t know. Maybe he’d say the same thing if she was dating Mossad agents, maybe he wouldn’t. . . . Anyway, he’s the boss in this puddle, isn’t he?”

  A yellow Renault cab pulled up with a shriek of brakes. “Jesus,” Kelly repeated. Then, as he got in, he called back, “We’ll meet again soon, then, Sergeant, and get down to business!”

  XII

  It wasn’t particularly a surprise to Kelly that Annamaria Gordon drove up in front of the Aurassi alone. It did surprise him that the Ambassador’s wife was at the wheel of a Volkswagen, not the red Mustang which Kelly had seen parked in the Residence drive that morning.

  Annamaria started to lean from her window to speak to the uniformed doorman. Kelly, striding from a bench near the lobby doors, caught that functionary’s eye in time to avoid being paged. He got in on the passenger side, meeting the woman’s bright smile as she thrust the car into gear. “I thought,” she said, “that you might want to be driven around in something less conspicuous than an American car with diplomatic plates, so I rented this. If you want to drive it yourself, though, you have to be approved by the rental agency.”

  “Glad to know you’re so scrupulous about legalities,” the agent said with a smile. He adjusted the hang of his camera. “I’d figured we’d park at a distance and walk—”

  Annamaria nodded. She was wearing a dress of gray silk, simple enough and rather high in the neck. While it showed little flesh, however, it did nothing to disguise the way her muscles worked beneath its opacity. Her hair was held up by combs of black wood instead of the plastic that had sufficed earlier. Annamaria might be unconventional, but she was not wholly unconcerned with the impression she gave, either. “We’ll have to walk if you really want to see the Casbah,” she said at Kelly’s pause.

  “Oh, fine,” the agent said. “Anyway, it wasn’t the end of the world if the car was conspicuous, but that was damned good thinking anyway. I appreciate it.”

  They were speaking in Italian. It provided a sort of time slip for both of them. For Kelly, the language returned him to his five most recent years as a civilian, where tension was the success or failure of a sales pitch. For the woman, Italian was a return to her early twenties, before the ten years of marriage that relegated the tongue of her birth to diplomatic gatherings—and that rarely.

  Thinking about nothing that he should have been, the agent added, “Not that I don’t think we’ll attract more attention than Doug and I would have . . . but I doubt anybody’s going to be looking at me long.”

  “A tourist couple,” Annamaria said. She looked at her passenger and gestured. The habit made Kelly wince internally as they sped south. “And you with your camera for what? Protective coloration? Very clever.”

  “I told you I was working,” the agent said, looking out his window at the two and three-story buildings stepping down the gradient of the street. “I might have needed to talk to Doug, you know.”

  “Not in front of me,” the woman said. “Not business.” She flooded Kelly with her smile again. “Besides, a couple blends in. Would you scandalize folk with the appearance of a menage?”

  Kelly cleared his throat and turned his attention to the car itself on the assumption that he would be driving it soon. It was a standard VW Passat, basically what would have been a Dasher in the US. A decal on the back window announced in large, blue letters, “Made in Brasil”—surely as striking a monument to the omnipresence of English as one could have found. The engine seemed as peppy as the automatic transmission permitted it to be. None of the inevitable squeals and rattles seemed to signal any major mechanical difficulties.

  “Unless you have a preference,” Annamaria announced, “we’ll park at the bottom. It’s all a hillside, you know. The natives got the part of the city that the French didn’t want to take over for themselves, and then just enough of them were permitted to stay to be servants for their betters. Not,” she added with a rueful smile, “that we Italians can claim much better.” Swinging right at a traffic light that had already gone red, she explained, “This is the Rue Bab el Oued, you know?”

  “The Watergate,” Kelly said, dredging up some fragments of Arabic gleaned during his years in the Med.

  Annamaria turned to gesture behind her though there appeared to be nothing but office buildings and apartment blocks. She continued, “Back there in the Bab el Oued was the poor section of the city—but for whites, you see. That’s where the Pieds Noirs lived, that’s where the Secret Army terrorists hid and built bombs to kill Arabs with, to keep France from ever freeing Algeria. . . . But they weren’t French, the Pieds Noirs, except in citizenship, the most of them. They were Italians, like me—or truly, they were Algerians or could have been, were they not so quick to slaughter innocents to prevent that result.”

  Annamaria pulled into a parking space. In the near distance sunlight glittered on a fountain which the agent supposed was in the Plaza of the Martyrs. “I guess it�
��s natural that the people who’re worst off fight the hardest to keep the little they think they have,” Kelly said as he got out of the car. “And I guess it’s natural that they do it in the most self-destructive ways possible, too, because the people with all the experts to advise them generally manage to do the same goddam thing themselves.” He laughed and added abruptly, “They go out and hire people like me, for instance.”

  There were no vehicular streets in the Casbah save the Rue Amar Ali which bisected it on a diagonal opposite to the one Kelly and Mrs. Gordon were taking. Access was by pedestrian ways, sometimes covered and always lowered upon by jutting upper stories. Sometimes the passages were broad enough that a traveler could spread both arms and touch neither wall. More often, they were so narrow that two persons passed each other with difficulty.

  As the couple worked north and steeply upward from the Ali Bitchin Mosque, Kelly took surreptitious photographs. His old Nikon F was fitted with a 24-mm semi-fisheye lens. The pictures would be severely distorted by the short lens, but nothing longer would have been of the least use in such close quarters. Further, the wide angle lens could be used without normal aiming. Kelly had brazed a stud to the camera’s back. The other end was hooked in one of his belt holes. That kept the slung camera pointed forward and slightly upward as he walked. Whenever the agent was ready to take a photograph, he would turn his head and say something to Annamaria behind him. His right index finger stroked the release unnoticed. The heavy Nikon shutter made more noise than Kelly would have liked, but there was generally background sound chattering through the narrow passages. At any rate, the agent did not now have time to get used to new equipment.

  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 blurti
ng 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.”