by John Roeburt
“Sure, sort of a pidgin-English babe. You know, Me-Tarzan? In her case she must be a hot number, you say Me-Lucy and add a sigh.”
“How do you spell it?”
“Come on, Colette, I can barely say it. Why?”
“The dead man, how do you spell his name?” There was a new eagerness in her voice.
“My trouble started when I asked for a Willy Sowor. S-o-w-o-r. Why are you interested?”
“He was a friend of yours?”
“I never saw him in my life. I only wanted to ask if he could tell me anything about a guy called Fedor, who…” I’d been feeling so good I’d let my big mouth run away with me, again. I stared at Colette, full of suspicions.
“Mickey, don’t you know what Melouza is?”
“Some gal who… You know?” My guts began to tighten. Would I ever get out of this endless trap I’d walked into?
Her big eyes were bright with excitement as she nodded. “You’re pronouncing it correctly, but it is not a woman. It is—or was—a village in the mountains of Algeria. A terrible crime took place there.”
“A village? What crime?”
“Mass murder. Every man, woman, and child in the village was deliberately hacked to pieces. Mickey, how can you be involved in this?”
“Involved? I didn’t know it was a town until now. And I can’t wait to forget it. Look, I hate to cut this short, but I have to go. Where’s the nearest public phone booth?”
“Go to your left on leaving the house. Turn at the corner and you will see a newspaper store. Can’t you use our phone?”
I shook my head. “Thanks again for everything and tell…”
“Mickey, make your call and then return here. I must make you something to eat. I’m a fine cook. I will also give sandwiches to take with you.”
“I can’t…”
“I insist! I will be insulted if you do not at least try my cooking. What’s another half hour or so? Don’t be rude.”
“Well, let me make this call and see…er…what’s doing.” I walked to the door and she grabbed an old cap from the closet and said, “Wear this to protect your wound. Please come back. It isn’t the food alone. There is something important I must discuss with you, about Hal.”
“I’ll be back,” I said, inspecting myself in a mirror near the door. I looked like Joe-Average-Citizen in Hal’s old clothes. But I couldn’t disguise my size.
It was very dark outside and that helped my nerves, until I realized the darkness could be a cover for whoever was after me. Had the superintendent reported to the cops that he’d been slugged? He must have. The police might still be checking the neighborhood. But I was too excited at the thought of talking to Rose to think of anything else. Not even the astonishing news that Me-Lucy-ah was a city in North Africa. Like the rest of the merry-go-round I was on, it didn’t make much sense. Of course, Colette could be wrong, too.
I cased the newspaper and candy store as best I could, walked in and bought a couple of cigars to get some change. Dialing long distance and the boatyard, I waited anxiously for the guy to call Rose to the phone. It seemed to take an awfully long time. I sat there restlessly; an icicle of uneasiness growing inside me. It melted in a flood of warmth with Rose’s throaty, “Mickey?”
“Yeah. Honey, I’m in the big city and on my way…”
“Oh Mickey! I’ve been worried out of my living mind! You should have been here hours ago. Anything wrong?” There was a kind of thickness in her voice. Maybe it was the phone connection. Or, Rose had hit the bottle and was cranked-up.
“No, no, everything is jake. I had a small accident I…”
“You’re hurt!”
“No, honey, I lost my wallet. I had to scrounge around to get enough money to even phone you. But I’m set now and I’ll be on my way in a few minutes. How’re things at your end?”
“Quiet, except for worrying about you. Please, Mickey, make it fast. Darling, I want you to be near me so. Oh, Mickey, I’m lost without you!”
“Sit tight, babes, and don’t get lost in a bottle. We’re not in the clear yet, for all I know,” I said, maybe blushing—I was that pleased. For some silly reason I told myself Hal could have his Colette with all her bright efficiency. She could never be half the woman Rose was.
After telling her to stay on the Sea Princess and be careful, that I should be out by midnight, I hung up. I started to dial the bus terminal when I saw a short squat man standing to one side of the booth. He kept glancing at me. I got this sudden lump of suspicion until I noticed he wasn’t wearing a tie under his overcoat. He looked as if he’d rushed out of his home to make a call.
Still… I thought of the poor janitor I’d clobbered. I’d been pure lucky, but another slugging and I could be jammed-up. I decided to bluff, play ’em like you got ’em, as poker players say. When I got the bus terminal I hung up and opened the booth door. “You waiting for the phone?”
“I certainly am!” he shrilled. “I have an important business call to make but that doesn’t stop my daughter from tying up the phone. It’s a plain outrage when a man can’t use his own phone for…”
I stepped out of the booth. “Make your call. I have to use the phone again.”
“I have to make several calls. I shall make one and let you…”
“That’s okay, I can wait.” I lit a cigar and walked over to the phone books, figuring they might have a map of New Jersey in them. They didn’t. When Shorty left the phone I dialed the bus terminal and found the last bus to Asbury had left a half-hour before. The clerk was a talker and when I said I had to get there, he gave me directions for taking a train to Newark, then connecting to a train or bus going to Red Bank. A cab from Red Bank he said would only be a few bucks. I phoned the train station and found I had ninety minutes before the next train to Newark, and after that, they seemed to run every half-hour.
I sat in the booth and smoked. I had enough money, it would be safer for Colette and myself if I didn’t return. She was making this food, and Lord knows what she expected me to tell her about Hal. I didn’t want to be a crude jerk but this wasn’t the time for playing at manners. But I did have time and hanging out at her place was better for me than the streets.
I thought about buying her kids a box of candy: that might be like a guy borrowing money to bet against you in a crap game. I walked toward her house slowly, looking up and down the street to see if I was being followed, and feeling like a guy who hasn’t the smallest idea of what he’s doing.
She had some long-haired junk on a record player and said the food would be ready in a moment. I studied the chair she was fixing, and wondered why you never heard of women carpenters. She called me into a kitchen full of a hundred gadgets and I sat down to a plain cheese sandwich and a cup of coffee. She had also packed some food in a bag for me to take, which was fine—it would make me look a working stiff on his way to the night shift. When I finished the sandwich she insisted I have another cup of Java but I said I had to go.
“Your call. Everything is all right?”
“Sure. Listen, I’ll send you the money.”
“Mickey, you can’t leave! A few more minutes, please.”
“Colette, I’m a lousy gossip. I don’t know what you think I can dish out about Hal, but I don’t know a thing that…”
“That was a lie to make certain you returned. Mickey, you must stay a few more minutes. It’s very important! Somebody wants to talk to you. He’s on his way here.”
“Somebody is coming? How did…?”
“I phoned Jacques. You must talk to him about Melouza. You can trust him.”
“Aren’t you the real live doll!” I said, trying to keep my voice down, remembering the cop downstairs who owned the house. “I don’t trust anybody! In the last dozen hours I’ve been shot at, slugged, and pushed around. From now on my sole hobby in life is keeping my nose clean! Did you tell him my name?”
“I think I said Mickey. You can trust him, trust me. You must!”
I coul
d see the red line of danger streaking toward us; once they knew my name and the boat, we were finished! I started for the living room. Colette flung herself on my shirt. She said fiercely, “I trusted you! When you came here I didn’t ask if the police were after you, or if you were bringing danger to me and my children! You are Hal’s best friend, why should I harm you?”
I stared down at her for a moment without talking. I mumbled, “You don’t understand, I can best help you and your kids by taking off—now.”
“Mickey, you are the one who lacks understanding. I don’t know if you are only pretending or you really don’t know what this is all about. Jacques is a good man, very smart, a member of one of the French diplomatic staffs. He will know what to do.”
“Do about what? Colette, if you have any sense, let well enough alone.”
“No, no, you see I know a little—about Willy Sowor, and more about Melouza. Mickey, you may have something very big for us.”
“Who’s ‘us?’”
“The decent people of the world. The true story of Melouza is so important!”
“Important? I don’t get your message—what are you trying to sell me?”
“To wait for Jacques, he can tell you much more than I know. Mickey, you have nothing to fear from either Jacques, or myself. Believe that!”
“Damn it, how do you know what I have to fear?” I asked, pushing her away, wondering if Hal had mentioned what I’d told him in Haiti about Rose. Two other ideas were rattling around in my sore head. I had wanted to see Sowor to find out what Rose was in. Strange as it seemed—and nothing about this set-up could actually surprise me any more. Colette and this Jock could give me the info. The other idea, the bigger one, was that if I ran now, Colette might give this Jock my real name. And then he would trace me to the boat, the island. Ruin our last hiding place.
Colette was standing with her back to me, blocking the door neatly. I said, “Sure I trust you, I have to. But one thing I insist upon: under no circumstances are you to tell this Jock, or anybody connected with him, my full name or anything about me. I have my reasons. A deal?”
“Deal? Of course, anything you wish. Mickey, I would no more hurt you than I would expect you to harm me or my children. I…”
“But you can be hurting the hell out of me without knowing it! Like now, asking this Jock in without first even asking me.”
She looked away for a moment. “I simply refuse to believe you are on the other side.”
“The other side of what?”
“Of humanity and everything that makes life worth living.”
I never was good at riddles. “I don’t know about sides, but let’s settle two things: no mention of my real name, and I’ll wait ten minutes for this…”
There was a knock on the downstairs door. Colette actually raced down the stairs and returned with a compactly built guy dressed like a conservative fashion-plate. His face was vaguely familiar as he took off his homburg and black overcoat with the velvet collar. He stared at me, blowing on his finger tips, as Colette talked to him in runaway French. His hair was completely white and the tired eyes had tiny wrinkles around them, yet I had an idea he wasn’t much older than me, maybe younger. He nodded as Colette talked, now rubbing his thin hands together slowly. I once knew a knife thrower who had hands like that; sort of delicate but strong, like thin steel wire. Sitting on the couch, he pointed toward a chair and said, with a kind of clipped, and perhaps phony, British accent, “Now let us talk, Monsieur Mickey.”
As I put it down, the accent reminded me of the old man in the turtleneck. This Jock was staring at me and I looked him smack back in his eyes. And knew where I’d seen the face before: he was one of the Maquis in the snap on the bedroom wall, although his hair hadn’t been white then. And from the way he’d been standing in the picture, he’d been their officer. I said, “Okay. You do the talking.”
He gave me a weary smile. “As you wish, Monsieur Mickey…?”
“Mouse,” I added, brightly.
“Ah, yes, Monsieur Mouse,” he said without a smile. “Very good. He is a jovial chap who tries to make the world laugh. But enough of small talk. It will save us both time, and I understand you are in a hurry, if you will kindly tell me why you were trying to contact the late Monsieur Sowor?”
“Nothing to it: I was looking for a gal I once knew. She’d mentioned Sowor. As I told Colette, it was an easy name to remember, being she said the guy was a German…Sauerkraut. Of course I thought it was spelt s-o-u-r, but took a chance this Willy Sowor might be the same guy, might know where this gal is now. Or where Me-Lucy-ah is and she might know. I thought she was an Oriental gal. Colette says she’s—it’s—a town. Very confusing.”
“Indeed. It is hard to believe anybody could be that naive in these times. But the woman you look for, why do you want to see her?”
“Talking about being naive—what does a fellow generally want to see a babe for? We spent a hot week together in Canada last year. I’m all for an encore, if I can find her.”
“Is her name Rose and was her husband Josef Fedor?”
“Her name is Mary and we didn’t talk about a husband.”
He waved his manicured hands as if clearing the air, and I thought I saw the outline of a shoulder holster. “Was she a tall, statuesque woman? Beautiful? An actress?”
“She was a big blonde and very pretty. Come to the point. What’s this all about?”
“Basically it is about good and evil, right and wrong, Monsieur Mouse. In the early summer of 1957 while civil war was being waged in Algeria between the French army, the colons, and the Algerian ‘rebels,’ the world was shocked to learn the entire population of an obscure village of mechtas—the mud huts found in the Algerian mountains—had been ruthlessly slaughtered. It was the village of Melouza. Over three hundred people, including children, had been literally butchered: throats slashed, bodies hacked. Paris claimed the ‘rebels,’ or the FLN as they are known, were responsible for this madness because the people of Melouza were said to lean more toward the Algerian National Movement, a group far less nationalistic than the FLN. Understand, I merely state what was charged, not what happened.”
“Sure,” I said, wondering how this could possibly have any tie-up with Rose. She was neither French nor Arab. If she’d ever been in Africa, even with a USO show, she would have told me.
“The FLN charged Melouza was a village of no known political sympathy or importance. They claim French soldiers in the uniform of the FLN were the mass killers, that it was done to terrorize other Algerian villages from aiding the FLN. They said that in a raid on an Oran cattle fair the year before, French soldiers were alleged to have been captured disguised as FLN guerrillas. These are all mere charges. To this day the truth is unknown.”
“But what’s all this to do with me, or the gal I knew?”
Jock held up a thin finger. “Monsieur, let me first fill you in on the European scene before 1957. There were many stateless men roaming about. Ex-Nazi soldiers and the victims of the Nazis still snarled in the red tape of rehabilitation camps. There were exiles from various countries. There were many decent men, along with out-and-out adventurers, and scum. All had one thing in common: they were desperate and hungry. Many such men enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and fought in Indochina, in Algiers, wherever they were sent. Being desperate they fought bravely, ruthlessly, and many of them died. Now it is known that a unit of chasseurs, about a dozen Legionnaires, were in the area of Melouza, which proves nothing, you understand, and is merely a fact. Among these Legionnaires were Willy Sowor, a former tank driver in Rommel’s Afrika Korps; Josef Fedor, who had been an officer in the Hungarian army; a Dutch thief named Gootsraat; a Turkish carpenter known as Subec; an Italian called Massina, born in Libya; and an Egyptian thug known as Lister. There were others, but these names we know. The Algerians accused this squad of the Melouza massacre. This has never been proved. It has also been established that several detachments of FLN were in the area at the
time of the killings, too.
“In giving you a detailed picture, I am trying to stick to as many facts as we know. The duty tours of the men mentioned expired shortly after the Melouza incident and they were discharged from the Legion. They were said to be well fixed. However, it is possible they had found jewels or money—a great deal of looting goes on in these ‘small wars.’ The men quickly scattered over the Middle East, Europe, and America. And within two years they had all been killed. Perhaps more than a coincidence.”
“Killed or murdered?” I asked.
Jock gave me a thin-lipped tight smile. “Two were actually killed in bar brawls. Fedor was openly murdered. Sowor was killed by a car, perhaps an accident. The Turk is said to have drunk poison by mistake in Athens, and Subec was knifed by a brothel keeper in London. However it should be obvious all these men were on the run. They were constantly on the move and…”
“On the run from whom?” I cut in.
“Again, I have no proof. Certainly the agents of the FLN wanted to put their hands on them, perhaps other Arab groups. It might also be certain French officials didn’t want these men to talk. Mind you, Monsieur Mouse, this is speculation on my part. That is the picture, a horrible crime and the six suspected men on the run—and dead. Some time ago it was rumored Fedor had written a book, an expanded diary. We know now it was a fact and not a rumor. This diary has never been found. The truth about Melouza may very well be in its pages, then again, it can also be pure fiction, or a pack of lies. Or it may have nothing to do with Algeria. It is said Sowor arranged to purchase this diary for $50,000. I have no proof of where or how he was able to raise this sum of money, or what parties he was acting for. The fact is, all this could have been blackmail on the part of Fedor. We are certain Sowor gave Fedor the money and then Fedor somehow doublecrossed him and never handed over the diary. It is assumed this was the reason Fedor was stabbed to death. Now we also know Fedor married a minor American actress. As the situation stands, his wife, the diary, and the money have vanished. For a time we thought she and the diary had vanished into the sea last year, and the search for the diary was given up—only to be revived today.”
