Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  D.J. stepped out, .45 extended, and backed the Arab up on his heels. The Arab flattened against the fender and opened his palms. “I am fighter for Comité d’Action Marocaine.”

  The “Comité d’Action” were Moroccans—some Communists, some not—looking to take back their country from Spain and France. This Arab’s accent fit neither. D.J. said, “Al Gorab, the Raven.”

  The Arab reacted, then recovered. “The place of our meeting is there.” The Arab pointed north on the road between the sea and Mount Teide. “We have Eddie Owen. You will follow me now or he will be sold to Berlin or London.”

  “What is it you Moroccans want?”

  “His life depends on a ransom you pay.”

  D.J. nodded. “So will yours, son,” then waved the Arab away from the truck. “Make your radio call. Tell the Raven I’m on my way.”

  D.J. allowed the Arab a mile lead.

  Hopefully the Arab had no idea who or what Moshevsky was back at the dock—the Raven would not see a Zionist involved with Eddie, here, as anything but a massive threat. It was out of D.J.’s hands, no matter what. For two hours of coast and mountain road, the Arab’s and D.J.’s headlights dipped and turned in tandem, hugging the southern and western slopes of Mount Teide. If the electricity was working anywhere, D.J. didn’t see it. And when the wind didn’t gust in off the sea, the air smelled and tasted like a sulfur mine. No tremors, though. That was probably good. D.J. checked his mirror on the switchback turns. Occasional reflections in the dim moonlight might be a vehicle . . . Moshevsky without headlights. If Moshevsky were the professional he seemed, he’d lay back and watch for opportunity. Once Moshevsky saw Arabs, he would know that Zionists in person would add nothing to the discussion but bullets. Those conditions might, or might not, stop him.

  Approaching the ransom location, D.J.’s lone headlight swept across a long black-sand beach with white lines of waves breaking. Dead ahead, a light gray convertible was parked alone on the road’s seaside shoulder, lights off. D.J. pulled Doña Carmen’s truck to the mountain side of the road and stopped opposite the convertible. Good place for a kidnap or killing. Spanish PJs were good killers and they had no soft spot for Americans who might be with the Brigades. The PJs would be happy to collect the British bounty on one D.J. Bennett.

  With his back to the taxi and road, D.J. slow-scanned the myriad of places where kidnappers could be hiding. If he hadn’t passed Eddie’s kidnappers coming in, then Moshevsky’s tail car couldn’t run into them either and get everyone killed. Unfortunately, all D.J. could make out was a volcanic, scrubby ridgeline, then another, rising higher in a hurry. A gust laced with sulfur and iron blew down from the mountain. The roadside trembled. Somewhere in the dark a far-off, low-pitched rumble shook his feet. D.J. started to turn.

  Movement to his right—

  Saba scrambled over the seawall rocks toward the man she believed was D.J. Bennett. Erich Schroeder would be somewhere close. After her aborted attempt to kill him in Santa Cruz, Saba had dispatched one of her partisans to speak with Erich Schroeder. As anticipated, the Nazi was vehement in his denials of Haifa. He would see Saba tonight after her successful kidnap of Bennett and bring absolute proof that the bombing in Haifa had been the Zionists. Making herself plain, Saba walked toward the convertible taxi her men had stolen. The man she believed was D.J. Bennett stood at the taxi’s fender, his pistol facing her. In the dim moonlight, he looked unafraid, although Bennett could not know the figure who approached him was a woman. Nor would he know that Erich Schroeder had been radioed when Bennett’s contraband boat had docked at Los Cristianos or that Nazi submariners were at this moment rafting in from a U-boat waiting a half mile offshore.

  “You are D.J. Bennett?” Saba closed the distance. He was the same man she had seen with Eddie in Dhahran.

  “Where’s Eddie?”

  She began her answer. He aimed. “Where’s Eddie or I put a bullet in your head.”

  Saba stopped, just her eyes visible under the keffiyeh. “That will not bring your friend.”

  “Can’t hurt. They send the expendable ones out to talk.”

  Behind her keffiyeh, Saba smiled at the truth. Bennett was her second American and he did not disappoint. “I am his friend . . . from Iran and Lebanon.”

  “You? You’re the Raven?”

  “Yes.” She had maneuvered a knife into her right hand, the blade tip up and resting on the inside of her forearm.

  Bennett stepped right and removed her options. “Too bad. Drop what’s in your right hand or we’re both dead.”

  Saba sensed Bennett was about to fire and dropped the knife. This American had little of Eddie’s naiveté; he would know others aimed weapons at him.

  “I am not here to harm him. He is bait for a bigger fish.”

  “Get him up here.”

  “No. We talk first.”

  “Got no burning desire to go fishing. Get his ass up here. I ain’t asking again.”

  “If it is true that you know who I am, then you know dying with you does not frighten me. And you know others will still have Eddie. They do not feel about America as I do; they are better, only Palestine matters to them.” She paused to let Bennett fire. He did not and she added, “Like you, we are at war and our friends are also our enemies. Our fight is not with you.”

  “Since it ain’t about a free Morocco, what’s it y’all want?”

  “From you, we want—”

  The flash from the water reflected in Bennett’s eyes but he didn’t look. He said, “That Eddie’s ride to Germany?”

  “The ride is for you.”

  “For me?” Confusion, then understanding lit his face. Bennett frowned. “Then we’ll be going together, honey.”

  “Return to your truck. There will be shooting. Eddie is safe. I mean him no harm.”

  Bennett blinked, his eyes searching for the target if it wasn’t him.

  Saba said, “I do this for Haifa. Those who come for you. I come for them. You were my bait. If you do not wish to be swallowed, now is your time to leave.”

  Bennett wrinkled his eyes. “The Nazi, right?” Bennett cracked an honest smile behind the .45. “Guess my boy Eddie ain’t that stupid after all. No wonder the sumbitch acts like a teenager about you.”

  Saba grinned with her eyes, something like a teenager’s response captured in a soldier’s moment. All these gifts on the day of her death. “Eddie will be returned to you one kilometer south. On the beach. Go now. Our fight with the Nazi will kill him and likely us as well.”

  D.J. Bennett stared at her and didn’t move. “You really twenty-five like the Brits say?”

  Saba nodded.

  “You’re a goddamn handful for twenty-five, honey. You survive the next twenty minutes and got any interest in comin’ to America, we got plenty of places could use you. That’s a bona fide offer, ma’am, any way you’d like to take it.”

  Saba registered the compliment and an old dream she would never attain. “We will free Palestine first.”

  “Well, that one may take some doin’. Win or lose, my offer stands.”

  Another signal light flashed from the ocean, this one closer to the beach and bright.

  Saba said, “The Nazis from the submarine. Go now. Our friend Eddie Owen must be kept from them.”

  D.J. Bennett squinted at the water.

  Behind Bennett, a shape lunged for him and his weapon. Saba sidestepped but slipped in the oily gravel. Bennett slammed his .45 into the attacker and fired. Two more attackers knocked Bennett off his feet. Boots landed square to his head, then his groin. Saba rolled to her knees. Erich Schroeder faced her, Luger in hand, shielded by his men. One of Schroeder’s men flashed a light to the approaching submariners. Saba expected to be shot by the other man and was not. No one leveled weapons at her. Schroeder pointed his Luger at Bennett’s prone body, then glanced through his men at her as she climbed to her feet, her pistol behind her leg, heart pounding, waiting for Schroeder to move from behind his men so he could pa
y for Haifa. Saba stepped sideways for a headshot. A third man materialized and blocked her.

  “Well done, Saba, as usual,” said Schroeder, then shot D.J. Bennett in the spine.

  Saba shifted her weight to one heel. Her first shot knocked the man blocking Schroeder off his feet. Schroeder pivoted. The man next to him stepped in front and took her next two shots. Schroeder fired twice. Both hit Saba. She pancaked, unconscious before she landed.

  Schroeder kicked at Saba’s pistol but it stayed death-gripped in her hand. Rifle fire exploded at him from the beach. Schroeder jumped over the bodies and behind Bennett’s truck. Bullets banged into the metal. Saba’s partisans. A line of Nazi machine guns charged in from the ocean, engaging the Arab rifles on the beach. Flashes lit the beach—stop-action stills of Arabs and Nazis fighting in the blood puffs and roar.

  Then it stopped. Cordite lingered; Schroeder couldn’t hear. He crawled into Bennett’s truck. Bennett’s starter wound and wound, then finally engaged. Schroeder ducked below the dash and steered blind. The truck left the road and veered uphill into the scrub where he wanted it to go. His shoulder throbbed; his ears rang and he could taste copper. The truck stalled. Schroeder rolled out and ran scrub until he found the small car he and his men had hidden an hour ago.

  The driver’s seat was tight but it offered a clear view of the road and littered beach. Best Schroeder could tell, he hadn’t been hit, but everyone else had. As planned, Saba was supposed to die here, as was Bennett, leaving Eddie Owen isolated and alone on Tenerife. The dead submariners were an unanticipated cost. Reichsmarschall Göring would be angry. The evidence of the submariners and their involvement would be cleared quickly by the sailors from the submarine. There would be police and PJ cars soon. Fear would grip the island that an attack of some kind was imminent. Schroeder released the brake, coasting out of the scrub and onto the road. Before he could fire the engine, two men in the road waved at him to stop. One was five-foot-eight and shouted in English. Schroeder slowed, shot them both, fired the engine, and steered without headlights. At the first steep curve uphill into the mountains, he allowed himself the headlights and a smile. Eddie Owen was the prize, the final card, the trump card for a kingdom. And now Eddie was all alone.

  At the seawall rocks, Eddie clutched Saba’s ring in his fist, ears ringing from the machine guns. He squinted behind him. No movement on the beach—five, maybe seven corpses. Eddie pocketed the ring, fingertipped up the rocks, and eked just his head above. No movement on the road. More corpses were scattered facedown on the pavement. Jesus. Eddie felt at his torso, then the lava chips in his face; somehow the crossfire of bullets had missed him. He swallowed a breath, then another, then crawled along the rocks, staying just below the road, moving toward the bullet-riddled taxi.

  Saba was sprawled near the front fender, pistol tight in her hand. Eddie jumped up onto the road, then fell to his knees. “No, baby, no.” Both hands patted her face. No reaction. Saba was sheet white but breathing and not spraying arterial blood. Eddie scooped her off the pavement into the convertible’s front seat and ripped open her bloody shirt. A hole bled lightly above her collarbone and one below the breast. The chest shot was aspirating. Eddie wadded her singed keffiyeh over both holes, tore off his belt, and cinched it around her torso.

  “Don’t die, baby. Don’t die.”

  Eddie fished out D.J.’s .45 he was sitting on and mashed the gas downhill, swerved to miss two more bodies in the road, realized he was going the wrong way, braked hard, spun the wheel, and headed back uphill. Saba’s head bounced in his lap, Eddie trying to shift and steer the mule-cart road, no clue what to do other than find D.J. Did D.J. know someone had paid Saba to kidnap him? Where the fuck is he?

  Whorehouse? No, no one at Les Demoiselles had ever heard of D.J.—But, but that was right after things had begun to get ugly. D.J. wouldn’t risk using Doña Carmen’s place and her name if he didn’t know her—D.J. was in country illegally and wanted for murder by the Brits just like Eddie was. The road dipped left. Eddie missed the curve. The convertible’s headlights fanned the ocean. A boulder banged the front wheel and saved them. Saba’s head rolled limp on her neck.

  “Sorry, baby. Sorry.” Eddie tried to steer and think. And breathe. Doña Carmen was said to be a chicharrero, a mixed-bred native. Someone like that could put her hands in a lot of pots, get a doctor for sure. If she wanted to help hide Saba from . . . just about everybody. Big, big if. Anywhere else that Saba went for a doctor she’d be dead in an hour. Eddie patted Saba’s neck. “Doña Carmen will help. She will, trust me.”

  Eddie mashed the gas again. Doña Carmen and her whorehouse would find a doctor. Doña Carmen would have to, because she was the only chance Saba had.

  At four a.m., Santa Cruz was a mob scene. Eddie weaved and honked, then looped back out of the narrow streets and finally into the alley behind Les Demoiselles. Half the population of Tenerife’s capital city seemed to be in the streets and pointing at the sky. Inside Les Demoiselles, everyone who wasn’t horizontal by drink or choice was yelling back at the huge wooden radio set up on the front bar. Eddie fought through the crowd while the radio confirmed that spacemen were attacking America in huge fiery balls. Saucer landings and death-ray massacres continued in New York and New Jersey. Eddie found Doña Carmen, cut the patrona from the hysterical crowd by using D.J.’s name and an American accent, then fast-talked her and him into her private quarters in the basement.

  Doña Carmen did not comment on Eddie’s bloody clothes, his accent, or his offer of money. Eddie didn’t have to fake desperate; he told her he needed a room and a doctor now and no PJs. PJs would kill him on sight. After a too-long inspection that lasted sixty seconds and included her sniffing his collar, Doña Carmen asked who Eddie was to this man D.J. Bennett. Eddie explained while the patrona dialed her radio to the same broadcast as upstairs. Unable to locate the broadcast, Doña Carmen quit, pointed to a small bedroom, and told Eddie to lie down, she would return in a moment. Eddie allowed Doña Carmen to disappear into the bar and hysteria above, then climbed the stairs and out a back door into the alley. Eddie carried Saba in from the car and had her on the bed when the patrona returned.

  Doña Carmen balked at a second person and almost spilled the bowl of water. Eddie said, “I can get two hundred dollars, I think, back at the refinery. D.J. has more. We need a doctor or she’ll die. Please, it’s my . . . wife.”

  The patrona frowned at a heartfelt lie, set the bowl on a table, pushed Eddie aside, and sat on the bed. After a tentative look at Saba’s wounds, she stopped, then traced the wings tattooed under Saba’s eye. Doña Carmen carefully removed the chestnut hair matted in Saba’s face.

  “Your wife, yes?”

  Eddie nodded, edging sideways to block the door.

  “Do you know who your wife is, Señor Friend of D.J. Bennett’s?”

  “She’s a friend of D.J.’s. His best friend. His sister, I think.” Eddie touched D.J.’s .45 he’d stuffed in his belt.

  “You threaten me, godo?” Godo was an insult reserved for the Spanish high-and-mighty of the mainland.

  “Not unless you make me.” Eddie’s hand stayed on the pistol. “She needs help; I’ll do whatever you ask. If you say no, I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Doña Carmen huffed. “Americans. As you say, she requires a doctor . . . the lung. There is a mora conejo at the Hotel Mencey, a rabbit from French Morocco.” She cupped her breasts. “If he could be persuaded.”

  “Great. Good.” Hope rushed into Eddie’s blood. “Wait, he can’t talk, though, can’t say we’re here, to anyone. D.J. wants us to hide until he arrives.”

  “This man D.J. told you this?”

  “Yeah.” Eddie kept lying. “Said to bring her here and that you’d help.”

  Patrona Doña Carmen swore quietly, said men are children in Spanish, and told Eddie to apply pressure on both wounds. And do not answer her door. And cover your woman’s eyes completely when I return with the doctor. And do not talk no mat
ter what you are asked. Doña Carmen wheeled for the door. She pulled it open—tumult roared in from the ground floor above—she slammed the door behind her and the silence returned. Saba rustled. Eddie kissed her face and pressed her chest with his weight. She moaned.

  “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. Doctor’s on the way.” He pressed harder, trying to believe it. “Don’t die. Hold on.”

  Upstairs, the whorehouse crowd hammered boot heels across the ceiling and dragged furniture like someone was building barricades or bonfires. Eddie remembered spacemen were attacking America. Must be the Italians or the Japanese somehow—maybe dirigibles like the Hindenburg at night or something.

  Saba moaned again and stuttered. One eye opened then shut and opened again. “Dead.”

  “You’re not dead, baby. Quiet, okay? Don’t worry. I knew you weren’t there to kidnap D.J. I knew you wouldn’t hurt me or him.” Eddie patted her forehead and felt the air leave her chest. “Shit.” He pressed back hard with both hands. “Don’t worry, okay? I trust you . . . Hell, I think I love you.”

  She rustled, trying to breathe.

  “I know, I know. Kinda surprised to hear it out loud myself.” He stumbled for words, needed to talk, burn time, keep the injuries busy, keep Saba from dying. “So there it is. I said it. First time for me. Not saying it again, either. So don’t ask.” He waited for a response, something. “Okay . . . I love you . . . naked, swimming. Head-to-toe naked. Go ahead, get mad.” He bent to her lips and kissed her, tasting blood and sand. “Don’t die.” Eddie started to choke because that’s what was about to happen.

  The door opened before he could draw.

  A man, dark and nervous, possibly the French Moroccan. Eddie had the .45 out in the man’s face as the door swept shut, Doña Carmen now inside as well. Eddie remembered Saba’s face and covered her eyes with the bloody keffiyeh compress. The doctor pointed Eddie away, spoke Arabic to Doña Carmen, and inspected the wounds, then Saba’s breathing. Eddie slid to her shoulder, one hand still holding the keffiyeh across her eyes.