by Don Swaim
I said, “A lot has preoccupied me.”
“Apparently so, enough to prompt you to lie to me.”
“My business here has required a degree of anonymity.”
“What’s new about that, Tokol? You’ve always been secretive. In those early days following our first meeting, after you left the Legion, I had no idea where you were half the time. You acquired an unpleasant knack of disappearing for long periods, and then returning unexpectedly, just as you did this time. So I can’t say I was surprised.”
“A man in my work…”
“Just what is your work, Tokol?”
“You know I can’t talk about it.”
“It was diamonds once, correct?”
“Gazala…”
“About Janus, your best friend, the professional knife thrower…”
“The Man With Two Faces.”
“Do you know what’s become of him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Really?”
“An unfortunate mishap in New York.”
“Did his knife slip?”
I chuckled. “You’ve always had a sense of humor, Gazala. Actually, it was a poisoned dart. Blowguns do that.”
She dragged on her cigarette, eyes narrowing.
“Are you certain he’s dead, Tokol?”
“Of course. I saw the dart between his eyes myself.”
“As usual, you’re always so certain.”
“A trait of us Midwesterners.”
When the waiter came I ordered Château Latour Pauillac de Latour 1928, and, fortuitously, there was one bottle remaining, which I tasted and approved.
“Good old Tokol,” Gazala said, “so predictable in your tastes, so American.”
“My Kansan sensibilities.”
We touched glasses.
“Tchin,” she said.
Awkwardly, hesitantly, I said, “You mentioned something about, uh, a child?”
“Your conscience is clear, Tokol.”
I saw the stone, hardly discreet, gleaming on her third finger.
“You’re married now,” I said.
“To a powerful man with many business interests.”
“You also said you’re still living on Rue de l’Abreuvoir.”
“I did not give up my own appartement simply because of a matrimonial bond. There are times when I wish to be unattended or occupied otherwise.”
“Now you’re the one who’s being secretive.”
The fine wine, the shady warmth, and the prepossessing woman before me began to stir the old longing I had for her, which I had been certain was dormant. She reached across the table and took my hand.
“Tokol, I must tell you something.”
“Yes, I feel the same—”
“No, no, no. Do not be stupid. I had planned to tell you nothing, to send you on your way in ignorance—but now, now I can’t.”
She squeezed my hand harder.
“They’re going to kill you,” she said.
“Is that all?” I chuckled. “It’s already been tried. Many times.”
“But before they do they want to know things about you.”
“Such as?”
“Who you work for. Where your superiors can be found. What you know. You can gather the rest.”
She released my hand.
“I betrayed you, Tokol.”
“As if I hadn’t reached that conclusion. And yet, yet I never would have suspected you, Gazala.”
“When I saw you in the Abd al-Qadir Room of Le Saint George, I was angry, as much by your lies in the present as in the past. But now that I’ve been with you again…”
“Some small twinge of regret?”
“Tokol, I married a man with deeply adopted German attitudes. It was clear to me when I saw you again that you were in Algiers to work against the interests of my husband. He now refers to Germany as his Fatherland, something to him his own birthplace never was.”
“Obviously, our meeting here was nothing but a setup.”
She sighed. “But there is still time.”
“For what?”
“For you to escape.”
“You don’t believe I’m worried about the gendarmes, do you? They’re Keystone Kops.”
“Not the police, Tokol. The Gestapo.”
“In Algiers? Gestapo?”
“To fight the Jewish underground. You must go now, but not to the street from here in the garden. They’re waiting for you just outside the gate. They intend to seize you the moment you leave. Enter the hotel from the garden and exit through the back door of the kitchen. The Gestapo has just one man inside.”
“In a way, Gazala, I suppose I should thank you.”
“If they catch you, you will not.”
I was torn between kissing her and tearing out her heart.
“Go, Tokol.”
“In a moment. Let me finish my Château Latour. It’s awful damned expensive, you know.”
“Something tells me you can afford it.”
“Yeah, the diamond business paid off.”
I quietly put beaucoup francs on the table.
Summoning the waiter, I asked for directions to the men’s room. He pointed crudely, as waiters invariably do, and I excused myself and walked leisurely to the door leading inside the hotel, intending to give the impression I was merely headed to the toilettes pour hommes.
Inside, I detoured into the kitchen, where a door led to the rear of the hotel. The chef de cuisine, sous chef, line cook, prep cook, pastry chef, and their subalterns were busy at their fires when I burst in.
Suddenly, I heard a voice shout, “Halt or I will shoot. Hands in the air.”
I turned.
A man in a dark overcoat and homburg was pointing a Luger straight at my heart. Several thoughts ran through my brain concurrently, foremost of which was that the Luger was the ugliest firearm ever made. He advanced, on his face a smile that was more of a scowl, and it was obvious he’d rather pump lead into my body than otherwise. But I knew his orders were to take me alive.
Snarling, he said, “You thought you could escape, eh, Herr Swan. Or should I call you Herr Tokoloshe? In addition, we have evidence that you are also Salaah al-Abdoo, the man who staged a brutal attack with a sword on a Waffen-SS enlisted man, carving into his buttocks a defilement of our hallowed symbol.”
“Golly, where’d y’all hear that?”
“From a certain shopkeeper whom you visited regularly to drink his coffee. Disliking troublemakers who bring the authorities to the Casbah, he led us to the hovel you were sleeping in, and where we discovered a rare nimcha stolen from the Musée National des Antiquités. The reward for your arrest encouraged the coffee purveyor as well.”
I shrugged my shoulders in my best aw-shucks manner.
“Frankly, Fritz, his coffee wasn’t all that good. I prefer coffee thin enough to actually stir.”
“Hans. My name is Hans.”
“Say, I knew a guy named Fritz in New York. He’s now at an exclusive resort called Dannemora. Anyway, Fritz, I don’t think you have the guts to pull that trigger.”
“I am inclined to do away with you here and now, you American pig. In fact… On your knees.”
“Naw, Fritz, I’m not the type who kneels in prayer, but it won’t bother me if you do. I’m gonna scram through that back door, so if you ice me you’ll miss out on the latest Yankees scores.”
“Scores?”
“Yeah, I get ’em by shortwave.”
Pretty gutsy of me, I thought, as I turned my back, counting on the expectation that I was more valuable to the Gestapo alive than dead. Although to be truthful, I’d been wrong about such things before.
I heard a click, the gun cocking, and then a clunk and a thud.
The sous chef had clobbered Fritz on the skull with a cast-iron skillet.
“Merci beaucoup,” I said.
“Mes compliments, monsieur.”
Not all French Algerians were fanciers of Nazis or Pétain.
> Lacking time for further pleasantries, I dashed from the hotel and crossed the street into Le Jardin d’Essai du Hamma, pursued by the four agents positioned near the garden on the opposite side of the hotel.
I stopped under a date palm to retrieve the Smith and Wesson .38 special from my ankle holster.
Deciding to hold firm rather than running and risking a bullet in the back, I took a prone position, waited until I had a good shot, and dropped the first goon who came within firing range. That momentarily stopped them, but the three survivors began throwing iron wildly. Outnumbered, I was deluged by bullets whizzing above and around me. As the lead flew my ammo got low, and I realized I had become a sure bet for the Algerian carcass cart. Clearly, I wouldn’t be able to hold them off much longer. So much confetti filled the air, I saw myself ever closer to the grisly task of worm counting.
Then I heard the rattle of a machine gun sounding a lot like a U.S. Ordnance M60. How did the cavalry happen to arrive just in time?
“Over here, Tokol. Quick!”
Calling to me was a man dressed identically to my dark-suited pursuers, and also wearing a homberg, shouldering an M60. My benefactor, apparently one of Henry Hyde’s operatives, had arrived at the right moment. Hyde must have had him follow me to watch my back. Bless ’em both.
Lugers were no match for the M60, which could bring down a water buffalo herd, so in little time the bodies of all four Gestapo agents, oozing rivers of blood, lay sprawled on the ground.
Cautiously, I got up, holstered my Smith and Wesson, and went to my rescuer, who was loading fresh ammo links into the machine gun’s feed tray, his back turned.
“Hey, fella,” I said, “Don’t know who you are, but you saved my ass.”
“Don’t you remember me, Tokol?” he said, turning.
It was Janus.
The
Man
With
Two
Faces
One of his faces grinned, the other did not.
Now his M60 was pointed directly at my midsection. Overkill, if you asked my opinion. Damned gun could tear apart a brick shithouse, and shitting bricks was something I was about to do.
“But, but you’re dead,” I said stupidly.
My stumbling assertion was imbecilic because he obviously wasn’t, but in 1934 I had seen his staring-eyed corpse with its centrally-located dart following the Carnera-Baer bout in Long Island City, Queens. And here he was, six years after that fact, in Algiers and looking much the same. Only the dart was gone.
“Reports of my termination were immensely exaggerated, Tokol.”
“You were buried in some empty lot by the East River.”
“Obviously, I wasn’t at my peak at that moment. But it’s said all good things come to he who waits. And I’ve waited a long time for this.”
“You’re going to kill me.”
“Of course. But not here. There’s been enough bloodshed in this sublime park, and the gendarmerie will arrive momentarily. We’re going elsewhere, you and I. There’s much to catch up on.”
“How are you going to get away with this? Marching me through the crowded streets of Algiers at the point of a hulking machine gun? That’s nutty.”
“Turn around. Now. Or I will kill you where you stand, much as it would break my heart.”
He lied. When it came to me the man had no heart.
After I turned, I felt a blow to the back of my head, Janus taking me down in the way of George Raft reducing a heavy in a Warner Brothers gangster flick. Everything went black. That’s all I knew until, with a throbbing headache, I came to. I was chained naked to some sort of chair, cold and metallic, and saw Janus standing over me while sipping wine in a long-stemmed crystal.
“It’s a Domaine de la Romanee-Conti Montrachet, Tokol, Nineteen-Twenty-Four. I’m afraid I’ve drunk the bulk of the bottle, so a pity we can’t share. And we once shared a lot, our booze, our women, our two bodies. Anyway, it was about time you woke up, not that I was worried, merely a bit impatient.”
We were in a large room, blighted by the rubble of mosaics and stained glass, broken windows, crumbling walls, the roof intact but sagging.
“Where am I?”
“The ruins of the Tarik Ibn Zeyad Mosque in Hussein Dey, just east of Algiers. Tarik Ibn Zeyad, you may recall, was the Muslim military commander who invaded Gibraltar, then went on to conquer Cordoba, Granada, and Toledo. Alas, this mosque, which was named in his honor, fell into disuse, so I purchased it for my own machinations.”
“What kind of chair do you have me in? Hurts all over like hell, and so do the chains on my wrists and ankles.”
“I call it the Janus chair, my version of the Judas chair, occasionally known as the iron chair. The reason it hurts is that it’s layered with thousands of sharpened needles on every side. By imperceptibly turning a winch, the needles slowly protrude, piercing the flesh of its, ah, seated victims. But worry not. There’s a trough underneath to collect the blood.”
“So you’ve given up throwing knives, Janus. Now you just turn a winch and let needles do your dirty work.”
“Alas, my throwing arm has been irretrievably damaged. Due to you.”
“All I know about your arm is that it enabled your hand to throw knives at me.”
“Shall I tell you why I’m still alive instead, as you assumed, of being far below shoveling coal into the furnaces of Satan?”
“I’m dying to know.”
“Odd choice of words, old boy, but you were always prescient. As you know, I was pierced by a dart launched by your associate, Miss Dryad, who has the reputation of performing with her lips omnipotent acts using a blowgun. It didn’t quite kill me, but left me in a hypometabolic state in which the decay of my body, which gave every appearance of death, was temporarily arrested. The more reasoned among us compare it to hypothermia. Others call it suspended animation. Apparently, the poison on the dart’s tip had that effect on me, something in my metabolism, singularly extraordinary. My rather coarse associates at the Garden Bowl were less lucky, all having been riddled with bullets unleashed by your friends.
“I gave every appearance of being dead, no pulse, no heartbeat, nary a breath. You can imagine my chagrin when I woke up amid a pile of corpses in a dark, shallow, poorly dug grave in a garbage-strewn Queens lot, as if no one cared whether our bodies were found. Somehow, I saw sky through a sliver of an opening in the dirt and rubble, suggesting I was not far from the surface. My throwing arm was contorted under a particularly heavy body, yet with my left hand I was able to claw my way out. My right arm never regained its strength, although my health improved as the effects of the poison wore off. But I was now alone and penniless in New York, my covetous associates quick to cash in on my presumed death, foreclosing on my assets, and abandoning me to the jackals.
“I imagine you were elated, thinking you were rid of me at last, yet I had a few tricks up the sleeve of my good arm, cashing in a number of IOUs, finally escaping aboard a tramp steamer to more hospitable environs in North Africa, our old stomping grounds. I experienced a long recuperation before beginning anew. But not for one second did I forget about you, not only how you destroyed my jungle princess, the love of my life—”
“Our lives.”
“But left me to decompose in a mound of bloody corpses.”
“You tried to kill me first, more than once.”
“I intended to return for you someday, Tokol, encountering you when you least expected me. Then, lo and behold, you miraculously arrived in Algiers and fell into my lap like manna from Elysium. You have so much to pay for.” He paused. “Oh, please excuse me while I adjust your chair’s needles just a wee.”
Instantly, I felt a thousand unrelenting pricks in my back, sides, and butt, although whether enough to draw blood I couldn’t tell.
“Tokol, remind me to keep tightening the winch.” He shook his head in annoyance, not at me but himself. “Chatting with you is so enjoyable, I tend to forget my obligations.”
I said, “You got a fresh start here in Africa, Janus, and I’d almost congratulate you—if you weren’t so despicable.”
“I had many hidden resources here, which allowed me to achieve respectability and to marry well, all while investing in Germany, where the Third Reich has made it attractive for men of my ilk to make a fortune. I opened a headquarters in Frankfort, and commute regularly from there to here. No one is closer to Walther Funk, the Reich Minister of Economics, than I. And I now consider Germany to be my Fatherland—more than the America I came to despise.”
“And yet in the park I saw you blow away those Gestapo thugs. Why save my life? Me, of all people?”
He minutely turned the winch again, and this time I felt even more tangible puncture wounds. I gritted my teeth.
“A pity about those Gestapo fellows, old boy, I being an auxiliary member and all, but I wanted you all to myself with no interference.”
“You? Involved with the Gestapo? Makes no sense.”
“The Jewish thing, naturally.”
“You never had a bone to pick with the Jews. It was those crazy Southern evangelicals you despised. We both did. I mean, who in his right mind wouldn’t?”
“When in Rome, Tokol… Now I’m a bonafide Nazi, founder of the Hitler Senior Citizens Association, President of the Third Reich Chess Club, and an active member of the Algiers branch of the Richard Wagner Society. Although, as you saw in the park, if anyone, Nazi or not, gets in my way… Rat, tat, tat. Overall, I find it advantageous to be on the winning side—and the domination of Europe is only the beginning of the Nazi’s world empire.”
“You always were a prick, Janus. I suspected it even when we were pals. You never told me you played chess.”
“Ah, how young, brash, and impressionable we were. We had some high old times, didn’t we, old boy? I’ll always remember that night in Macau in the Pearl River Delta Hotel and Grill, just you, me, the Mandarin Boys Choir, the entire Macau Bats Rugby Team, and half of the Portuguese colonial military garrison. Everyone of us unclothed. A pity most of the photos didn’t come out.” Again he paused. “Excuse me, Tokol.”
The screws tightened, the pins dug deeper, and now I felt streamlets of blood trickling down my flesh.
