Torch of Tangier

by Aileen G. Baron

  He moved closer. “You still have to eat.”

  “I have a previous engagement.”

  Get lost, Korian. And take your pipe with you.

  The noise outside became more insistent. She thought she heard Lieutenant Periera’s voice argue with the guard at the door. The ruckus echoed through the hallway and grew more strident. She dodged under Korian’s arm, feeling the wrench in her shoulder when she straightened up. From behind her desk, she watched Lieutenant Periera and his sergeant march down the hall and burst into Boyle’s office. Korian slithered after them and stood right outside the door.

  She heard Boyle ask Pereira, “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Last night,” Periera said in an imperious voice that reverberated through the corridor, “someone killed one of the sentries at Cape Spartel, wounded the other and stole a patrol car.”

  “How does that concern me?”

  “The wounded officer made his way to the lighthouse and contacted us from there.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that happened. It is not a matter for this office, however, and is no excuse for you to storm in here unannounced.”

  “I am conducting a serious police investigation. The van was found in the street outside the Legation, and the man was seen entering this building.” Lily could hear the impatient slap of Periera’s baton against the leg of his trousers. “He fell, or was pushed, from your roof into the alley behind the building.”

  “You must be mistaken,” Boyle said. “The roof is locked. He fell from another building.”

  Lily moved into the hall and peeked around Korian. She saw Boyle rearrange the pens on his desk, lean back in his chair and contemplate Periera. “No one from the Legation has been to Cape Spartel recently.”

  “The man appears to be a Riffian.”

  “Well, then,” Boyle spread out his hands, “you have no business here. Check next door or one of the buildings in the alley. Good day, Lieutenant. You know the way out.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving. I must go to your roof. Then I’ll decide what to do.”

  “No.” Boyle picked up one of the pens and began to write on a pad. “You may not.”

  “You would impede the operation of justice? Your roof may be the scene of a crime.”

  “The Legation is United States territory,” Boyle said without looking up. “You have no jurisdiction here. I will thank you to leave.”

  Periera lifted his hands to remonstrate. “Colonel Yuste will hear of this.”

  “I’m sure he will.”

  Pereira turned on his heel and strode down the hall, signaling his sergeant to follow.

  Lily ducked back into her office. Pereira passed Lily’s door.

  “Five o’clock tomorrow, Miss Sampson,” he said without missing a step and continued down the hall.

  She watched him swagger out of sight. When he was gone, she strode down to Boyle’s office and sank into the chair across from his desk. He waited, his head resting against his left hand, scratching a pen along the pad with his right.

  “The roof,” she said.

  “What about the roof?”

  “The door needs to be repaired.” She craned her neck to scrutinize the pad. He was doodling.

  He turned to a fresh page and scribbled something. “Any other damage?”

  “No. Yes. A broken flower pot.”

  He made another note. “Do I want to know what happened on the roof?”

  She took in her breath. “No.”

  He replaced the pen on the desk, arranged his hands on the blotter and looked across at Lily. “I have some news for you.”

  “About Suzannah?”

  “She left for Fez, has some distant relatives there. Drury left her a small trust fund, but she may not be able to get it until after the duration, when the war is over. I was able to give her some money to tide her over.” He looked down at the desk and straightened the pen. “It’s your friend Lalla Emily.”

  “What about her?”

  “Lalla Emily, Sheerifa of Ouezzane, is dead.”

  Lily leaned forward. “How?”

  “She died peacefully in her sleep last night,” Boyle said. “Her funeral is tomorrow. The Moslems here think of her as a saint, and there’s talk of making her tomb a marabout, a holy place of pilgrimage. Also, I have a message for you from Major Pardo.”

  “A message?” There was one on the Teletype, too. She’d forgotten.

  “Your replacement, Warrant Officer Blufield, will arrive Sunday, tomorrow, early afternoon.”

  “Oh?”

  “According to Yuste, you must leave by Monday.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “I made reservations for you at Hotel TransAtlantique in the Ville Nouvelle in Meknes. It’s only a few kilometers from Volubilis.”

  She stood up. “You told me.”

  “And since you are our current cultural attachee,” he raised an eyebrow in emphasis and paused while she took in the new title, “I was able to requisition a jeep for your use.”

  Boyle stood up and came around the desk. “You know, I was skeptical when you first showed up here.”

  “You advised me to go to the beach, as I recall.”

  The message on the Teletype, still unread, nagged at her. From Adam? About Torch? Impatient to leave, she was almost at the door of Boyle’s office.

  “About Korian,” Boyle said before she reached the door.

  “What about him? He said he’s leaving.”

  “He’s been kicked upstairs. He’ll be in charge of his own mission.”

  “He’s being rewarded?”

  “We don’t like to make a fuss.”

  “Where is he going?”

  “Brazzaville, in French Equatorial Africa.”

  “Brazzaville?”

  “He speaks French.”

  “It’s out of the war zone,” Lily said.

  “And he’ll be better off there. It will be more difficult to feed his little habit. He’ll have to find another hobby. Cirrhosis of the liver, maybe.”

  She backed into the hallway. “I have to go upstairs.”

  At the entrance to the roof, she paused on the landing, a pulse beating in her ears. Suppose Zaid is still there? Suppose he hadn’t died when he fell off the roof?

  She opened the door and stepped onto the roof. She listened, edged toward the back and looked down into the alley.

  Zaid was gone. Two men from the Guardia Civil stood over a dark stain on the pavement.

  She backed away, unlocked the shed, and stared dumbly at the table, staring at the Teletype.

  Finally, she pulled the dispatch from the platen. It took only a few minutes to decode it.

  “Warrant Officer Blufield of CIC will arrive Tangier Sunday, November 8, at fourteen hundred hours. Give him your recipes for blueberry pies,” it read. “Return to station for additional transmission this p.m. at twenty-one hundred hours.”

  She locked the shed and went back downstairs. She washed and packed. She checked supplies for her survey, making sure everything she would need was ready. Spirit levels, stakes, plumb bobs, surveyor’s pins, mason’s twine, measuring tape, record forms.

  Record forms. She had forgotten record forms.

  She found mimeograph stencils in the secretary’s office, prepared forms for measurements and architectural features, houses, and burials.

  Graph paper! She forgot to buy graph paper. She made a note to stop at a stationer’s in Meknes.

  She placed the mimeograph stencils on the drums, remembering the smell of ether and alcohol and the cold paper from her early days as a graduate student when she had been a T.A. at the Oriental Institute. Just as it happened then, her hands were smudged with purple stains from the toner.

  When she finished, she washed, went back to her room, and fell exhausted across the bed. When she awoke, it was dark.

  She had dinner by herself in the wine bar at the El Minzah and returned half an hour before nine o’clock. The night was chilly. She fi
shed a jacket from the top of her suitcase and climbed to the roof.

  The door had already been repaired.

  The stars were clear and radiant in the night sky; last night’s sliver of a crescent moon had disappeared.

  Tonight was the dark of the moon.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  She unlocked the shed, opened the Ethnology of the Kwakiutl, and wrote out the code for November 8. While she waited, she turned on the radio next to the bar, just loud enough to make her feel less alone. The only station working was the French language BBC, where a throaty singer, crooning a song about a lost love, was interrupted. A man’s voice intoned, “Ecoutez Yankee Lincoln. Ecoutez Yankee Lincoln. Robert arrive. Robert arrive, ”and then the singer continued to mourn his lost love.

  At 00:00 Greenwich Mean Time, on the morning of November 8, she received a transmission from Casablanca. Decoded, it read: “The Torch is lit.”

  The radio still played. La Mer. The white noise kept her going.

  At 06:17 she transmitted a message from Allied headquarters in Gibraltar to General George S. Patton aboard the Augusta, lying off the coast of Casablanca.

  “Play ball,” it said, the signal for the task force to disembark.

  Operation Torch was underway.

  At 08:00, the Marine from downstairs came up to the roof to raise the flag.

  Once, the radio crackled and a voice in German filtered through the music. “Achtung—Achtung—Achtung. Ein Americanishes kraftsheer ist auf den nordwest Kuste Africas gelandet.”

  She continued working furiously, with hardly enough time to decode one dispatch before encrypting another and sending it off.

  Wind began to whip at the pages. She held them down with the heavy ethnography, found cups and saucers on the cupboards in the shed, and used them as paperweights. Anything that worked.

  By noon, the back of her neck was stiff, the space between her shoulder blades ached. When the pace of the dispatches slackened a bit she paused, bent her arms at the elbows and rotated them to relieve the tension.

  A knock sounded at the door of the roof. She stiffened. The knock sounded again.

  What was she afraid of? Zaid was dead, taken away in an ambulance by the Guardia Civil. Periera had left the premises.

  She opened the door and found Warrant Officer Blufield on the landing.

  “Blufield reporting for duty.” He began to salute and hesitated, not sure of what to do.

  “Am I glad to see you.” Lily waved him onto the roof and started toward the shed. “Sink any ships lately?” She turned back to make sure he followed.

  He was right behind her. “The Major really reamed me out for that. But I wasn’t talking about Enigma.”

  “That’s the name of the operation at Bletchley Park?”

  “No. That’s called Ultra. Enigma’s the name of the German code.”

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “Sorry. You won’t report me to the Major, will you?” He ducked his head and smiled. “I was thinking of the peacetime applications.” The glow of the future still glimmered in his eyes.

  “You talk like this to everyone?”

  “No, ma’am. Just you, and only because we talked about it before.”

  “It’s a bad habit, Blufield, discussing security matters, with me or anyone else, even people in G2.” His face flushed, suffused with embarrassment. He shuffled his feet and looked down, abashed.

  “Especially in Tangier,” Lily went on. “It’s an international community, full of Axis spies. People’s lives, the outcome of the war, could be placed in jeopardy.”

  “I get the message. Casablanca’s no better. I’ve been careful.”

  “You come from Casablanca? What can you tell me about Torch?”

  “Some opposition from the Vichy French. There was a naval battle; they bombarded the Massachusetts. The landing force ran into resistance, especially at Port Lyautey. We suffered some casualties. But the French had more. We’re beginning to thrust inland. Should clean it up in a week, two at the outside.”

  Behind her, the Teletype continued to spill out new dispatches. “Time to get back to work. You know the code we use here and the broadcast frequencies?”

  He nodded. “I was the one at the other end in Casablanca between midnight and 06:00.”

  She felt a twinge of disappointment. “I thought it was Major Pardo.” She reached into her pocket. “I leave for Meknes this afternoon. Have a few things to do before I go.” She held out the keys. “The round one’s for the roof; the hexagonal one for the shed. It’s easy to remember. ”R‘ for ’round‘ stands for roof, “S’ for ‘six sides’ stands for shed.”

  “The Major told me to tell you to report to him in Casablanca when you’re finished at Volubilis.”

  She felt color flood her cheeks and was surprised at how much she looked forward to seeing Adam again. She turned to go, hoping Blufield didn’t notice. He was already at the Teletype and encrypting the next communication. He worked quickly, able to send and receive messages with remarkable speed.

  She left the roof and went downstairs to Boyle’s office. “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

  He looked up from the paper he was reading. “You look terrible. Better get some rest.”

  “Can’t.” She’d had no more than short snatches of sleep in the last forty-eight hours. Her eyes were gritty, but she had to keep moving. “Too much adrenaline.”

  “The jeep is parked outside. Ask Jessup to help you load it when you’re ready.”

  Suddenly she was hungry. “Going to get something to eat first.”

  She headed for the last time for the Petit Socco, found a table that overlooked the square and looked over the menu. The thought of food made her queasy. She ordered a poached egg, some toast, and tea.

  Tired beyond rest, she sipped the tea—too sweet, too hot, the bright taste of mint suffusing her mouth and nostrils. She stared in a daze at the swirling crush of people funneling through the square and raised the glass of tea in salute to the city of drifting souls—the leftovers of Europe and America—remittance men, black sheep, drunks staggering too early in the day, addicts with blank eyes and lost faces, Berbers who moved among them like medieval conjurers.

  Lily would never see Lalla Emily again, would never see Drury nor MacAlistair. Phillipe, Lalla Emily’s grandson, had arranged for them to be buried in a small, weed-choked lot across from her villa. Suzannah had already left for Fez. In a month, a few weeks perhaps, Lily would be in Casablanca with Adam.

  With the jeep loaded, she drove south, past Chaouen, over the Rif Mountains and past Fez toward Meknes.

  She stopped at Volubilis and left the jeep, strolling through the ruins of the triumphal arch, past the forum and its tall columns, still standing, past the basilica where Roman officials once sat in judgment, and down the Decumanus Maximus, past the Roman villas with their mosaic floors barely visible under the dust—where Orpheus charmed wild beasts dancing in an endless round, where Bacchus drove a chariot pulled by panthers, where Venus bathed with her nymphs. This was the house where the bust of the king of the Berbers, Juba II, descendant of Hannibal, was found.

  Once, Moroccans, convinced that the site was built in Biblical times by the pharaoh of Egypt, called the site Ksar Faraoun, The Pharaoh’s Palace. From here, the wise and kind Juba II ruled the Berber kingdom, Roman procurators ruled Mauretania, and Moulay Idriss, descendant of the Prophet, brought Allah to the Latinized Berbers and Jews and Syrians and established the Sultanate of Morocco.

  Lily could see his tomb from here in the holy town of Moulay Idriss, a little more than a mile away. Flat-roofed houses of the town climbed the hills beyond Volubilis, and cascaded through narrow lanes. The tomb of Moulay Idriss and his shrine dominated the elevation between two hills.

  She thought of the poster she had seen so long ago in Drury’s office that said, “What matters most is how you see yourself.” Did Moulay Idriss see himself as the savior of Morocco?

  It was gett
ing dark now. She went back to the jeep and wondered how Drury saw himself. In the end, Drury had seen himself as an unconquerable hero, and maybe he was.

  She had one foot in the past, in the Roman world where conquerors came into Africa and brought their engineering genius, their villas with mosaic floors, their law courts and Byzantine churches. The past was her reality, with its surge of conqueror after conqueror that fashioned Morocco.