by Janice Law
I certainly needed the latter, because with four paintings in his possession, Goldfarber not only had no more need of me, he might even see me as a liability. Enough noise from the British consulate could still push the protectorate police into action, and that would complicate whatever rackets Goldfarber had going at the moment. As I began adding a burnt-orange octagon to the centers of the basic motif, I realized that I needed an exit soonest.
That afternoon, I told the Moroccan that I needed a break. The hallway was not well ventilated, and with the paint fumes and a little effort I managed to start wheezing. You can bet I played that up. His face remained stoically immobile, but after I really did stagger getting off the scaffold, he held up his hand and disappeared into the back. He returned almost immediately with the addition of a large and lethal-looking knife in an ornate scabbard.
His weapon produced an all-too-vivid image of the dead “Spanish boy,” my predecessor. I might have been wrong about Goldfarber, who was all blunt instruments and brute force: a thump on the head or manual strangulation seemed to be his MO. His Moroccan employee, on the other hand, was maybe the hand behind the knife.
When he gestured toward the door, I was so loath to turn my back on him that I moved sideways toward the exit. This amused him considerably. He made a brusque gesture, strode to the door, and unlocked it without another glance as if I presented no threat at all. Annoying, but I had no time for vanity. To be underestimated might turn out to be an advantage, and I certainly had few other resources at the moment.
We stepped into the brilliant North African light and walked along a white gravel path to the garden, which in its own way was quite splendid, being full of spiny, twisted shapes, at once fleshy and thorny. Picasso must have known similar gardens, and I might have been inspired, too, if I hadn’t been checking the high wall and the locked gate. We did two circuits of the garden, at the end of which I had narrowed my possibilities to a lone palm tree that grew at an angle toward the wall. Though I detest exercise, I’ve always climbed very well. Onward and upward, Francis!
The pleasing idea that if I could leave the house, I could escape the garden got me through the rest of the afternoon. Of course, there were less pleasing thoughts, like speculations about Goldfarber’s return, the destination of my “Picassos,” and the possibility that the Moroccan was tipped to be my executioner. I did my best to ignore them.
Around six o’clock, the servant returned to signal that I was done for the day. He’d produced a respectable goat stew and a salad with oranges and the inevitable mint tea. I was just finishing when I heard heavy steps in the hall. Goldfarber came into the kitchen and sat down. The Moroccan brought him a plate of food, and he looked at it for some time in silence. The gallery owner often created an oppressive atmosphere, but this time I detected something different. He seemed less angry and more depressed, as if some plan had turned out other than expected.
Perhaps I was right, because he sighed, and without touching his meal, lit a cigarette. “You do nice work,” he said after a moment.
“Another two days maximum—well, maybe three. That cobalt blue pigment is very cheap and thin.”
Goldfarber grunted. “Pity you won’t get to finish it. Decorators are hard to come by.”
I thought that he should be more careful with his artisans, but I didn’t say anything.
“You’ve done enough so that I can finish up myself.” He drew in the smoke, exhaled, and watched the plume ascend to the ceiling.
“You’ve done decorative painting?”
“I’ve turned my hand to a lot of things,” he said in a reflective tone. “Few of them congenial. But the war …” He made a vague gesture.
“Needs must,” I said, and I was reminded of Tony. I wondered if he was recovering from a bad headache or if he was even now gathering flies in some protectorate morgue.
“You in the West have no idea,” Goldfarber said. “The possibilities for disaster were infinite and the possibilities for survival miniscule.”
“Yet here you are.”
“Yes, and I intend to survive, even with regrets. Some—even some of the best—chose otherwise. Not me.”
He leaned forward and fixed me with his stony eyes. If nothing else, he was an unusually forceful and energetic personality. I could believe that he would survive at all costs, and I expected that nothing good for me was going to come from this extraordinary prologue. He leaned back again and took another drag on the cigarette. “I genuinely love art,” he said after a moment. “In another, better life, I’d be running a gallery, strictly legit, and you’d be happy to have me handle your work.”
I thought that it would have to be a very different life, and I’d have to be a very different painter. Still, I appreciated that there might be more to Goldfarber than a temper with muscle. “And in this imperfect life?” I asked.
But Goldfarber was lost in reminiscence or fantasy. “I packed paintings,” he said. “That was one of my jobs. And appraised artwork. There was a lot floating around.”
“Stolen?” I asked.
“Appropriated. The Nazis had a taste for euphemism. And no, I’m not German.”
“Not Jewish, either.”
“Few people know that,” he said complacently. “I’ve found a flexible identity a great asset. But Samuel Goldfarber is not going to be around much longer, thanks to your admirable work. The ‘Picassos’ need only a signature, and I am doubtless more adept at that than you are. A few sales and I can start over, perhaps in South America. I think I could fancy Argentina.” He tapped the ash off his cigarette. “So I am grateful to you, Herr Bacon. Very grateful. I want you to know that. I would genuinely regret it if you thought otherwise. And that has put me in an awkward position regarding your future.”
I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. I almost preferred the brutal and exciting side of Herr Goldfarber to this glimpse of something reflective but still sinister underneath.
“You present a problem for me.” When he tipped his head to one side, I felt I was being assessed by some large and indifferent carnivore.
“Nothing like the problem you’ve presented for me. Even if I walk out of here tonight, I am still entangled in a murder case in the Zone.”
Goldfarber shook his head regretfully. “Not enough trouble, unfortunately. But I have a solution for both of us. I wash my hands of you, and you will, in all probability, never hear about the Angleford case again.”
“What have you in mind?”
“Not in mind, in motion: I am turning you over to the Soviets as a British spy.
Chapter Twelve
I took a moment to digest this bizarre idea. “You can’t be serious. You know I’m not a British agent. Never was, never could be. I’d be considered a security risk guarding a slit trench never mind the secrets of the realm.”
“You’d be surprised,” Goldfarber said. “You really would. But just as you are, you’ll do fine. You are traveling under fake documents.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out my Jerome Hume passport. That mix of desert asceticism and Scottish rationalism had never been a good idea. Goldfarber opened it with ostentatious care and read off the name. “We both know you are a painter named Francis Bacon.”
I couldn’t disagree with that.
“And you have been living in a British safe house, guarded—not too efficiently, I must say—by the British agents who are hot on the trail of whoever killed Jonathan Angleford. The KGB will know all of this already,” Goldfarber said. “They will be prepared to believe that you are deeply involved. By the time they decide you are of no importance—and thanks to the inertia of the Slavic mind, that will be quite some time—Samuel Goldfarber will long have ceased to exist.”
“I’ll tell them that you’re sick of Reds and dealing forgeries.” I was embarrassed at how feeble and schoolboyish that sounded—please sir, he’s been smoking in the W
C—and yet it was the absolute truth.
“Of course you will,” Goldfarber said. “And you will deny being a British spy and all the rest of it. But you see, they will know different. They will have made up their minds.”
“They’ll still suspect you.”
“They suspect everyone, and given their methods, they usually confirm the worst.” Goldfarber assumed an expression of distaste. “I truly regret this for you. In a better world, all would be different.”
“In a better world, would we all be good?” I asked.
“Ah, Herr Bacon, I see you are a philosopher as well as an artist. This is why I feel bad. Were there any other way, believe me, I would take it. But there is not, and my imperative is survival. In this world, that is the only commandment.” He stood up and called for the Moroccan in Berber. The man appeared behind me, and before I could react, he slipped a pair of handcuffs on my wrists.
“They will be here soon,” Goldfarber told me. “Ayoub will hand you over. This is auf wiedersehen, Herr Bacon. We will not meet again.”
“Don’t count on that!” I dredged up a few choice German phrases from my misspent, if enlightening, youth, but Goldfarber slammed out the heavy front door. A moment later we heard the car start up and not more than a quarter of an hour later—a quarter of an hour in which various fantasies of escape and retaliation were quashed by the Moroccan’s impassive face and impressive dagger—another vehicle crunched over the gravel drive and stopped.
Ayoub led me into the hallway. He unlocked the door. Two men stepped in and stood shoulder to shoulder like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Both were cut from the same pattern, short and wide shouldered. They had bad haircuts and worse suits. Their broad, Slavic faces were marked by weather and age and hard living, and their eyes were fathomless. These were the men that Goldfarber had feared, and it struck me that I should be frightened, too.
They said nothing, but the older of the two motioned with his head. Ayoub seized my arm and hauled me outside to a large black car. I braced my feet and said, “This is ridiculous. You are kidnapping a British national. My consulate—” but I didn’t get any further, because either Tweedledum or Tweedledee gave me a tremendous blow to the right kidney. I dropped with a gasp onto the gravel, only to be jerked upright by the handcuffs and thrust into the backseat—so much for the power of the empire.
The older man got in on my right side. His companion walked around and slid in on my left, the seat of the car sinking under his weight. The doors slammed shut. The driver, thinner and darker with a narrow mustache and a long scar across his forehead, put the car in gear and hit the gas, spraying stones right and left as we passed through the gate and out onto the road.
I leaned back against the seat and struggled to catch my breath without disturbing the sharp pain radiating across my lower back and exploding with every bump and pothole. When my heart rate dropped, I risked a glance at first one and then the other of my companions. They stank of tobacco and unwashed shirts and some strong, low-quality alcohol. Both sat staring straight ahead, looking tough and remorseless.
I seemed to be descending the abduction ladder, with captors of greater viciousness on every rung. This was more than my usual sort of pickle, and I struggled to focus on how I should act and what I should tell them—and when, too, because I had the feeling that I would soon be talking more than I’d ever intended.
We left the port road and headed toward Tetouan, raising brief hopes of a traffic slowdown and a lucky escape. But no, our route lay toward the mountains, where the moon rising over the Rif touched the ridges, leaving the stony slopes deep in shadow. Our car lights picked out woods and fields and the dark tents of the occasional Berber encampment, and I felt my heart sink: the countryside never brings me luck.
Not this time, either. The car pulled up at a stout and isolated building with a couple of decayed sheds and some crumbling fencing. One window had the faint golden glow of an oil lamp; no other lights were visible. We were a long, long way from anywhere, and another look at my companions suggested that not much civilization could be expected. They dragged me out of the car and into the house, which smelled of damp and old fodder and domestic animals. I started to sneeze the moment we stepped over the threshold.
The driver, whose name was Kirill, lit another lamp. We were in a sort of dining room/dormitory, with three camp beds arranged along the back wall and, in the center of the room, a large table holding papers, a short-wave radio, and several bottles of vodka. Chairs doubling as a resting place for a variety of garments were arranged around the table; there were no other furnishings. This was strictly a place for work, and I didn’t like to dwell on what that work might be.
Two doors opened off the room. One, I guessed, would lead to a kitchen. The other, I soon discovered, was a cell, pitch-black after the lamplight. I was frozen until I located the wall nearest the door, where I stood, back against the bricks, waiting for my eyes to adjust. The only light came from a sliver seeping under the door and a tiny square of moonlight from a barred window near the roofline.
After several minutes, I could take note of my surroundings. My new lodging came with both a bucket latrine and a water bucket—backcountry mod cons—what proved to be a straw mattress on the floor, and an immensely heavy straight chair whose arms, I realized with a shock, were fitted with leather straps. Nan spoke in my ear plain as day, “You’re in for a bad time, Francis.”
How right she was. But first my captors had a meal. I smelled the now familiar Moroccan spices and heard shouted commands in bad Arabic. They had a servant, maybe more than one. The agents themselves talked back and forth during the meal, but quietly. Of course, I was right next door, and I was supposed to be a British counterintelligence agent who would know Russian and all the tricks of their trade.
If I could convince them of my ignorance, they might see that they’d been fooled. I’d have to be very clear about my role and very willing to be helpful. Yes, I thought that best. I didn’t owe either Richard or Harry heroics or stiff upper lip stuff. Besides, I had no secrets to reveal. None whatsoever.
I sat down on the mattress, which was every bit as thin, rough, and dubious as I expected, but I wanted nothing to do with the chair with its echoes of dentistry and electrocution. I knew that they were going to hurt me, and all too soon, the door opened and the two Russians appeared with an oil lamp. The older one motioned toward me, and his companion grabbed my handcuffs, jerked me to my feet, and transferred me to the chair with practiced efficiency. I was clearly not the first to share their accommodations.
“I am Colonel Lev Yegonov,” said the older man. He did not introduce his junior, who I deduced must be the one they called Aleksey and who busied himself undoing my handcuffs and fastening the leather straps in their place.
When all was in order, he went into the front room and returned with a chair for his boss. The colonel turned it around and sat down with his forearms resting comfortably on the back and took a long drag of his cigarette. He stared at me for some minutes, during which time his shadowed features were deeply imprinted on my mind. His large face, looming against the dark wall of the cell, might have slipped from one of my canvases, and I had an odd sense that some of my art had been premonition.
“You are a member of MI6, operating out of Tangier,” he said.
“I am a British painter with no connection to MI6.”
The colonel made the slightest motion with his head, and Aleksey struck me in the face. Not a slap, but a real blow that sent my head back against the chair.
“Do not waste my time,” said the colonel. “Who is your control?”
“I was asked to contact—” I was not allowed to finish before Aleksey hit me again. This is how we progressed. I was torn. I owed Richard and Harry nothing; at the same time, I refused to be coerced. And for someone who lies as easily as I do, it was exasperating to be asked to lie at a moment when the truth might s
ave me. I’d lost a tooth and was spitting up blood before I muttered, “Richard Alleyn.”
The colonel leaned back in his chair and studied me. He seemed to be a connoisseur of pain if not of veracity. “Richard Alleyn is a rich socialite in the Zone.”
“And I am a painter from London.”
I expected to be hit again, but the colonel seemed to be taking this idea under advisement. I was unprepared when he suddenly leaned forward and stamped the red tip of his cigarette against my forearm. “Do not joke with me,” he said.
“Working undercover,” I gasped. “Has been since the war.” A nasty smell of burned meat hung in the air. The colonel drew on his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke. I felt my lungs seize up. There is something to the “straw that breaks the camel’s back” theory. Amid the mildew, straw, old animal hair, and the smoky oil lamp, the colonel’s vile tobacco was that last straw. I began to cough and then gasp. Aleksey hit me twice, but my lungs put me beyond their reach. I needed air so desperately that even my present circumstances counted for nothing. My brain screaming for oxygen, I strained against the straps, attempting to inflate my chest and suck in more air.
My condition must have alarmed them, because Aleksey undid the straps. By then I was semiconscious. He moved me over to the mattress, and when that proved ineffective, he picked me up and carried me with a shout to the other room. Kirill opened the door and let the clean night air flood in. That and a little vodka helped, but we had no more questions that night.
In the morning, I had recovered enough for another session in the chair. It did not go much better. I should have listened to Goldfarber and dropped what I now realized was too high a regard for truth. But though I gave them Harry at the consulate—the only detail that fit their preconceptions—and attempted to describe Goldfarber’s forgery racket, they were not content. They wanted some elaborate plot. They wanted me to be someone important shipped in from London, and deadly serious men themselves, they didn’t like the idea of anyone as seemingly frivolous as Richard. I really think they found him an offense to their profession.
