Oasis of Night

by J. S. Cook

  It was like someone had just upended a jug of ice water down my back. “Sure, if that’s the way the newspapers are playing it.”

  “Shiva El Rawy lived with his sister on the Sharia Eloui. His sister lives there still.”

  “You get that out of the newspapers?”

  “Perhaps.” He held out his hand, palm up, and I put a piaster in it. He glanced down at my small offering with disdain and went back to his comic book. “The Americani Jonathan Stoyles is clearly not a man of wealth.”

  I had just turned to go when I ran face-first into an enormous human torso clad in the khaki drill of the Long Range Desert Group. I looked up. The torso belonged to the huge Greek who’d been at Tareenah Halim’s party. “Mr. Stoyles.” His voice was low and surprisingly soft for a man so large; he had to be six feet six or more.

  “Yeah?” I wasn’t in the mood.

  “You will come with me.”

  “That the best you guys can do? This is getting really old.” I made a break for it but the big Greek caught me around the waist and held on as if I weighed no more than a child. “I dunno what your game is, buddy, but you better lay off!” I kicked and pushed but it was like trying to move a boulder. Maybe I’d be better off saving my strength. Besides, everybody in the lobby had turned to look at the commotion.

  “That is much better. My name is Andros Scala. My colleagues would very much appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.” He didn’t bother holding a gun on me, but he didn’t have to. Those big fists looked like they could pound me into hamburger with no trouble at all—either that, or he’d squeeze me to death. “You will come with me, now.” We went out by the back door, where a Jeep was parked, and I got in. Scala pulled away from the hotel and turned the car in the direction of Old Cairo.

  “So tell me. Who’d I piss off this time?” I fetched out my cigarettes and lit one. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

  He laughed. “I do not mind at all. Please, smoke as you wish, Mr. Stoyles. I am not your enemy.”

  “Yeah. That’s what they all say.” I couldn’t figure his part in all this. Obviously he was military but, unless I’d attracted the attention of the Long Range Desert Group, there was no reason in the world he and I should be having this conversation. Unless…. “North Atlantic Command advised us to expect you.” The young woman at the desk had said that to me as soon as I landed at Shepheard’s, my first day in Cairo. I didn’t think much of it. I just figured somebody had their memos mixed up, or maybe I looked like all the other soldiers. But what if it hadn’t been a mistake? What if she’d meant it? I didn’t know anybody in North Atlantic Command, and I’d surrendered my commission when I’d been booted out of the army. Why the hell would any part of the Allied command be interested in me? “You’re, ah, Long Range Desert, huh? Tough bunch of guys.”

  Scala smiled at me. “Perhaps. If my presence requires a suitable affiliation, that one is as good as any.”

  “Commandos, maybe?”

  His grin widened. “Relax, Lieutenant Stoyles. Enjoy the scenery.”

  The streets were predictably crowded at that hour of the day, but Scala handled the traffic like a pro. We drove through Giza and into the desert, past the undulating dunes that to me always looked like the breasts and thighs of a reclining nude. I sized Scala up: matinee-idol handsome, maybe forty, with black hair that was graying prematurely at the temples, and a suntanned face. His dark eyes sized up the landscape around him and dismissed it, and he struck me as a man entirely at ease in his own environment. “Do you know where we are going?”

  “I’m going to take a wild guess and say the desert. Probably so you can put a bullet in my head.”

  This obviously amused him. “Why would I want to put a bullet in your head?”

  I sat back and drew on my cigarette. “Buddy, your guess is as good as mine, but the way my life has been going lately, nothing would surprise me.”

  He didn’t answer, just looked at me with a quizzical lift of his brows. After a while, we pulled up in front of a modest little house set in the middle of an oasis, near a clump of date palms. Two scabby goats foraged nearby and some items of laundry waved on a clothesline to one side of the house. A woman in a headscarf and with a broom in her hand came to the door and looked out. Evidently displeased by what she saw, she went away again. “This is real nice,” I said. “That the little woman there?”

  Scala got out of the Jeep. “You are a brave man, Lieutenant Stoyles, to joke in the face of the unknown.”

  His pronunciation of the word “lieutenant” was after the Commonwealth fashion: one more irritation in a seemingly never ending series of annoyances. “Just Mr. Stoyles is fine by me, buddy. I left the rank behind a long time ago.”

  “Do you understand the term ‘blue ticket,’ Lieutenant Stoyles? Then get your pansy ass out of my office.”

  Inside there wasn’t a lot of furniture, but there sure was a lot of radio equipment. The woman in the headscarf was actually a WAC, and I saw the two other men Scala had been with at the party standing off to one side, talking quietly to a blond kid with headphones over one ear. A dark-haired, brown-eyed man with the lean, sculpted features of a star athlete got up from behind a desk and came over; like Scala, he was wearing the khaki drill of the Long Range Desert Group. “Lieutenant Jack Stoyles, isn’t it?” His accent was not quite English; I couldn’t place it. “I’m Captain Kevin MacBride. Welcome to our Cairo listening post. We’ve been expecting you.”

  Chapter 5

  I DIDN’T know what the hell MacBride was talking about, and I had no desire to find out. “Listen, this big goon here kidnapped me from my hotel—”

  “You shouldn’t call Colonel Scala a goon.” A third man—a gangly, sandy-haired American—appeared at MacBride’s elbow. “It hurts his feelings. Maybe you ought to gimme what’s in your wallet.” His accent was Appalachian all the way, West Virginia or Kentucky maybe, or I missed my guess. “We’ve been waiting for it.”

  “What the hell is this, anyway? Some kind of a shakedown?” I brought out my wallet. “Here. I got ten Egyptian pounds. Take it, unless you want the piasters in my pocket as well? I dunno what your game is, MacBride, but as soon as I get hold of somebody at the American embassy….”

  “The slip of paper in your wallet, Lieutenant.” MacBride suppressed a smile, but only just. “If you please.”

  “Slip of paper?” This was confusing me all to hell.

  “The one you took from the safety deposit box at the bank.” MacBride held out his hand. “Quickly, man, Berlin’s about to get on the wire. We haven’t got all day.”

  “No use, MacBride. Some Finnish guy with a Luger took it from me. He’s probably halfway to Helsinki by now. The only thing I got in here is this poem… part of a poem.” I handed it over.

  Scala and the American grinned. “Thank God,” MacBride said. “Looks like Captain Halim was as good as his word.”

  “Wait a minute… there was another piece of paper… blue, with writing all over it, columns of numbers and stuff like that. Isn’t that the one you want?”

  “No, this is exactly what we want. What we’ve been waiting for, in fact.” MacBride gave it to the blond kid with the headphones, who fiddled around with some dials on his console. “You see, for some months now, Captain Halim has been… well, he’s been what you might call our point man out here.”

  “Wait a minute. Sam is a cop.”

  “True. In civilian life he is a police officer.” MacBride broke off. “Look, there won’t be much to shout about until Polanski here has finished eavesdropping on the Germans. Why don’t we go into the muster room and wait? It’s more comfortable.”

  A door opened onto a narrow corridor with rooms on either side, and MacBride led us into one of these: a square space crowded with desks and chairs, radio equipment, maps and charts. A row of tall windows let in plenty of bright desert light, and a long sofa at one end of the room kept company with several deep armchairs. I sank into one of these and lit
a cigarette. MacBride gestured to someone at a nearby desk and presently, a pretty WAC appeared with a tea trolley.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering coffee for you and”—MacBride nodded at the gangly American next to him—“Corporal Shelton here. I’ve found it’s usually the colonial types who drink tea.”

  Shelton lit a cigarette. “Goddamn horse piss.”

  MacBride handed me a hot cup of coffee that smelled heavenly and tasted even better. I gulped down half of it in one go. “Lieutenant Stoyles, I won’t waste your time. North Africa is becoming very, very important in this war and has been ever since the summer of 1940. Like everybody else, you probably know Rommel is doing his level bloody best to gain as much ground as he can in northern Africa.”

  “Yeah,” Shelton put in, “but so far we’ve been kicking his ass.”

  “Quite so.” MacBride grinned. “As Corporal Shelton so… colorfully puts it, we’ve been kicking his arse. The whole point of the exercise, Lieutenant Stoyles, is not merely to secure ground, but to do so strategically.”

  “I still don’t see where I fit in.” I tapped ash off my cigarette and accepted a top-off of my coffee from MacBride. “Gentlemen, let me say for myself, and on behalf of everybody else, what you guys are doing out here is amazing and we appreciate it, but I have no idea how I fit into this.” My breath caught in my throat.

  “Do you understand the term ‘blue ticket,’ Lieutenant Stoyles?”

  “I’m not allowed to serve. My commanding officer made that much very clear to me long before we ever got into this war.”

  “Get your pansy ass out of my office.”

  “In point of fact, Captain MacBride, I’m unfit for active duty.”

  “Yeah, we looked at all that.” It was Shelton who spoke; he wasn’t looking at me but at the end of his cigarette. “That don’t apply in this situation. We sorta operate outside the usual parameters.”

  A door opened and closed somewhere along the corridor, and there was a brief flash of a bird’s wing against one of the windows. MacBride sipped his tea and smoked quietly, and the big Greek, Scala, stood behind his chair, his attitude casual but watchful. I got the distinct impression he’d destroy anybody who got too close to MacBride, and I wondered what the story was with the two of them. Corporal Shelton gazed at me, drawing slowly on his cigarette, and I had the sensation of being watched very closely, as a bird of prey watches. They were not men I would ever want to cross.

  “Usual parameters.” I looked down into my coffee cup and saw a tiny replica of my face reflected there. “Which means…?”

  MacBride sat forward. “Lieutenant, you can be eminently useful to your country and to this cause. Newfoundland is of primary strategic importance to the Allies, as I’m sure you know. Now, being a restaurateur as you are—”

  “Uh-huh. So we’re finally getting at it.”

  “You are most ably placed to hear things. And to report them.”

  “You want me to be a… spy?” All I could think of was the desk clerk at the hotel, hunched over his Superman comic, laughing his ass off. “Don’t I get a cape or a special pair of tights or something?”

  MacBride exchanged a look with Shelton. “Lieutenant Stoyles—”

  “Yeah, skip it.” I crushed out my cigarette and stood up. “I don’t know what game you guys are playing, but count me out. I told you, I’m no longer a soldier.”

  Shelton looked up at me. I don’t think he’d moved as much as an inch since he sat down. “You could be. If you wanted to.”

  “Please.” MacBride stood up. There was something in his expression: humility, maybe, or desperation. “You are eminently well-placed to be extraordinarily useful.”

  “Okay.” The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. “What are you guys getting at?”

  Scala straightened. “We’ve already told you.”

  “There’s a dozen other guys in Newfoundland with restaurants—cafes, bars, you name it. They’ve got a whole street in St. John’s with nothing but bars on it! Why don’t you pick one of those guys, huh?”

  “Wait a minute.” Shelton was lazily cleaning his fingernails with a pocket knife. “They got a whole street with nothing on it but bars?”

  I blinked at him. “Yeah. It’s called George Street. North America’s best pub crawl outside of Bourbon, if you care.”

  “Lieutenant Stoyles, we chose you for two reasons.” MacBride looked weary. “You are an American, and although you no longer live in the United States, your emotional connection to your home city of Philadelphia is quite strong.”

  My stomach clenched. “You’ve been talking to the wrong people.”

  “Also,” MacBride continued, “you are a close personal friend of Captain Halim.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t bother to deny it. Obviously these guys already knew much more than they were telling. “I still don’t follow you.”

  MacBride rubbed his forehead, and I found myself wondering when he’d slept last. There were lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes, and his mouth was bracketed with tension. “Sam Halim is an Allied operative, charged with information gathering between here and Newfoundland.”

  “You find it”—Shelton yawned—“and he brings it to us here.”

  “And the fact that I’ve been cashiered out of the army kind of allays any suspicions I might still be fighting the war. After all, I’m unfit.” There was no point in trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice. It and a lot of other things were there, inches below the surface. “Not like you guys, who get the glorious opportunity to be heroes for Greece and Australia and the States.”

  MacBride coughed diplomatically. “New Zealand.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

  “You would be aiding the war effort in a way that will make an enormous difference.” MacBride was deadly earnest. “And you would be making Sam Halim’s work an awful lot easier for him. Your information gathering could conceivably provide us with valuable intelligence, the knowledge we need to shut down men like Jonah Octavian.”

  “Jonah Octavian.” I nodded. “I wondered when we were going to get to him.”

  There was a tap on the door, and the blond kid peered in. “Got that transcript for you, Captain.”

  MacBride nodded. “Thank you.” He dropped his cigarette butt into his teacup. “Lieutenant Stoyles, we need you. More to the point, Sam Halim needs you. For months now, we’ve been trying to find someone we could trust, someone to work with Sam on the other end. Cairo is crawling with Allied agents, but most of the troops who come to Newfoundland are merely passing through on their way somewhere else.” His shoulders sagged. “Whether you believe it or not, the intelligence gathered by Samuel Halim is of vital importance to the war in North Africa. He needs someone he can depend on absolutely, someone who will be there for him at the other end. Someone who understands what curious acrostics mean, and who can get into bank safety deposit boxes as necessary.”

  What else did Kevin MacBride know that he wasn’t telling? “You’re talking like you know he’s going to get out of this, get away from whoever’s holding him.”

  MacBride glanced at his wristwatch. “I’m out of time for now. You’ll be at the Acacia Court if I need to contact you?”

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t frame an appropriate answer; this was all too strange for me. “Yeah, I’m not even gonna ask how you knew that, but I’ll be there. Or you can get Colonel Scala here to kidnap me like he did last time.” I turned to go, but was momentarily halted by MacBride.

  “One more thing, Lieutenant. Be careful what you say to Tareenah Halim. I realize she’s Sam Halim’s wife, but at the moment, she’s something of an unknown quantity.”

  “And Ibrahim Samir?”

  “Proceed with caution, Lieutenant Stoyles.” MacBride exchanged a look with the Greek. “Until we know more.”

  IT WAS quarter to four when Scala dropped me off in front of the Acacia Court. He dipped his head to me, smiled solemnly, and drove away. I darted a qui
ck glance at the surrounding rooftops, just in case the blow-dart guy who’d killed Pasha Nubar was waiting for my return. The desk clerk with the comic book was gone, and in his place was a young woman in continental dress. She handed me a small yellow envelope and advised me a visitor was waiting for me in my suite. I’d been sitting all afternoon, so I didn’t bother with the elevator, but climbed the stairs. I put my ear to my door, listening intently, but could hear nothing out of the ordinary, so I put the key in the lock.

  Ibrahim Samir was lying naked in my bed, wearing nothing except a single sheet riding low across his hips and a look of erotic expectation. I dropped the envelope on the table, crossed the room in three strides, and sat on the bed as he moved into my embrace and kissed me. “I am so sorry.” He buried his face in my neck and I shivered. He was warm and beautiful, and he smelled like cedar and sandalwood. “Believe me when I tell you the arrest was for your own good. I was acting on orders.”

  I captured his mouth again. “Whose orders?”

  “I cannot tell you that.” His eyes begged me not to ask again, and I didn’t.

  “You were protecting me?” I toed off my shoes and got undressed as quickly as I could. “From what?”

  “It was essential we get you off the streets while we searched for the man who murdered Pasha Nubar. Nubar had a great many powerful friends, and so his killer is essentially a marked man.”

  “Who is he?”

  “No one you know.” He shrugged. “He is currently in jail, awaiting our interrogation. Perhaps he will have a trial. Perhaps not.”

  “That sounds kind of grim.” I slipped into bed and lay down beside him. When he took me into his arms, my stomach did this weird little cave-in thing, and I got all shivery, like I was coming down with something. He leaned over and kissed me, and I gave myself to it, telling myself it didn’t matter, he wanted to be here, I wasn’t taking anything away from him and we hadn’t made any promises to each other. We curled together, our bodies wrapped around each other, kissing until the heat between us grew too much to bear. I laid him down and took his swollen cock into my mouth and sucked him while his lean body writhed and shuddered, and he begged me to make it harder, faster, more. He whimpered in Arabic when I licked the insides of his thighs; I took his balls into my mouth and sucked them gently, and he gasped and clenched his fingers in my hair. I drew my tongue up his flat stomach to his chest and teased each of his nipples to hard points, returning again and again to kiss his mouth and suckle gently at the smooth, tanned column of his throat. He guided my hand to his erection and I stroked him, bending to flick my tongue over the head of his cock. He came with a groan, his fingers pressing hard into my shoulders.