Carradine pressed send and put the phone on the table. The waiter returned with the coffees. The espresso was served, as was the custom in Morocco, with a small bottle of water. Carradine opened it and drank the entire contents without bothering to pour it out. The trumpeter was now playing the theme from The Godfather as children ran among the carob trees in front of the patisserie. Carradine’s table was positioned on a busy corner section of the square. Pedestrians were passing all the time. One of them, a frail, elderly beggar, was moving from table to table, holding out an arthritic hand as he pleaded for money. He was ignored by each of the customers in turn. Carradine leaned down to fetch his wallet, which was zipped into a side pocket of his case. He had some worn ten and twenty dirham notes—the equivalent of a couple of euros—which he could give to the elderly man. He retrieved the money and sat up as the beggar shuffled toward him. Bartok came back to the table just as he was pressing the money into the man’s emaciated hand. She said nothing but smiled at the beggar, who thanked Carradine effusively before shuffling off.
“Got the phone?” she asked.
Carradine looked at the table. He knew instantly that it had been stolen.
“Fuck.”
“What is it?” Bartok knew it too. He could tell by her reaction.
“The mobile. The cellphone. Did you pick it up?”
She shook her head, very slowly, coming to terms with what had happened.
“I leaned down for ten seconds to get my wallet.…”
Had the beggar taken it? Surely not. An accomplice? More likely an opportunistic thief had swiped it while moving in the flow of pedestrians passing the table.
“Jesus, Kit…”
They searched the ground beneath the table. Carradine frisked himself. He asked a young mother at the next table if she had seen anyone taking the phone. She shook her head in the manner of one who did not wish to become involved in somebody else’s misfortune.
“What was on the SIM?”
Bartok did not answer him. She withdrew into silence. Carradine could not tell if she was irritated solely by his lapse in concentration or if the SIM contained vital information on which she had relied for months. Every useful number, every precious message: gone in the blink of an eye.
Abdul soon returned to the patisserie. Carradine told him about the theft. The young Moroccan expressed his sympathy but offered nothing in the way of practical solutions; he was keen only that his guests should accompany him to the apartment which had now been prepared for them.
Shouldering his bag, Carradine walked behind Bartok and Abdul as they made their way toward the car. He was furious with himself. The irritation and embarrassment he had felt when Bartok had told him about Mantis returned in full flood. Perhaps he wasn’t cut out for the role in which he had cast himself. For the first time since he had arrived in Morocco, Carradine thought nostalgically of home, of the simple writer’s life that had so frustrated him. He was not a man prone to self-pity; nor did he wish that he could click his fingers and somehow remove himself from the complications of Rabat and Lara Bartok. Nevertheless, he was tired of living so much on the edge of his wits. He wondered how Bartok had coped for so long and could only assume that she had enjoyed periods of time in which she had been secure and safely anonymous. He presumed that she had lost contact with old friends from Hungary or New York, but perhaps this was not the case. Did she have boyfriends? Carradine could not imagine how she would be able to build or sustain a relationship with another man, living as she did. He assumed that she took her pick of men, whenever desire took hold of her, then moved on before love had a chance to take hold. But what could he possibly know? All that was clear to him was that his own life, as problematic and dangerous as it had become, was nothing in comparison to the complexity of her own.
Watching Bartok as she spoke to Abdul, he felt a great sympathy for her, a surge of feeling for which he was rewarded with a smile as she opened the passenger door of the waiting car and climbed in. His sins had apparently been forgotten. The stolen phone was yesterday’s news. Carradine was revived and joined her in the car with a strong desire to prove to Bartok, as well as to himself, that he could get them safely to Gibraltar. He had come this far, suffering only a bruised ego and a swollen right hand along the way. If Abdul came through for them and they could lay low in the apartment, there was every chance of leaving Rabat safely in the morning.
33
The bearded man standing on the crowded rush-hour platform at Oxford Circus was carrying a worn leather briefcase and a furled umbrella. It had been raining hard as he entered the station and his thinning hair was pasted to his scalp. Stephen Graham was a man with a lot on his mind. LASZLO had been found, yes, but nobody had seen hide nor hair of her for twenty-four hours. Ramón Basora had got sloppy, fallen in with the Americans—and paid with his life. Kit Carradine had vanished. Graham’s hastily assembled house of cards had come crashing down. He had an ominous feeling that he would be next.
Graham had come from a meeting with Petrenko. Not so much a meeting as an interrogation. Moscow wanted to know what “Robert Mantis” knew about the search for Lara Bartok. Did he realize that she had been sighted in Morocco? Had he had any dealings with one “C. K. Carradine,” a British writer attending a literary conference in Marrakech? Graham had denied all knowledge, fending off Petrenko’s questions—Is Kit Carradine working for the Service? Is he romantically involved with Bartok?—as best he could. If Moscow knew that he had been trying to protect LASZLO, they would have him killed. If Petrenko came away from the meeting believing that Graham had deliberately tried to undermine a Kremlin-sanctioned operation to find Lara Bartok, he was finished.
What could he tell them? That he was in love with the estranged girlfriend of Ivan Simakov? That no woman had ever made him feel the way Lara had made him feel? That their brief relationship had been the most sublime and fulfilling of his life? They would think he was a fool who had lost his mind.
The discussion had taken place at the Langham Hotel. Petrenko, the master interrogator, playing the trusted confidant, the old friend, the world-weary spy. Masking his suspicion of Graham in lighthearted asides, posing questions that were not quite questions, leveling accusations that were never far from threats. Graham had felt that he had survived it all until the moment Petrenko mentioned Ramón. That was when he realized that he was cornered. If he was going to escape with his life, he knew that he would have to give something up.
So, yes, he admitted that he had sent Basora to Casablanca. No, that had nothing to do with LASZLO. Yes, he had heard that Basora had been found dead in his hotel room from a suspected drug overdose. No, he did not have any idea if third parties were involved in the death. Graham explained that he had an agent in Morocco—one Abdullah Aziz—whom he had instructed Ramón to meet at the Sheraton Hotel. Graham himself had not traveled to Casablanca in person because he had been too busy with other projects in London.
It had been hot in the hotel room. Graham had asked if he could open a window. As he did so, Petrenko picked up a black-and-white surveillance photograph from a table beside the bed. He showed it to Graham.
“Do you know this man?”
The man in the photograph was Sebastian Hulse. Graham could not remember how much, or how little, Moscow knew about the American. He tried to maintain a poker face. Should he feign ignorance? Should he say that he recognized Hulse as the Agency’s man in Morocco? In the end, he settled on a version of the truth.
“I do. His name is Hulse. He works for the Americans. He was staying at the Sheraton. He befriended Ramón in the bar, took him to dinner, pretended he was a businessman from New York.”
Petrenko seemed surprised by the candor of this answer. His wistful smile gave Graham hope.
“You mean Hulse suspected that Ramón was working for us?”
“I can’t say. I assumed as much. I told him to break off contact. Next thing I knew, Ramón was being taken to a morgue in Casablanca.”
He remembered receiving the text from Carradine, the photographs of Hulse and Ramón in Blaine’s. He had wanted to simplify things, to fire Carradine so that he would no longer be in play.
“And you still cannot say who or what may have required him to pay this visit to the mortuary?”
Petrenko’s expression betrayed the ghost of a smile. Graham hesitated. It was a toss-up between Hulse and Moscow. He could hardly accuse his own people of murder; better to lay the blame elsewhere.
“My money’s on the Agency,” he said. “But Ramón was always a maverick. Too much of a taste for fast women, for high-living. Didn’t they say there were traces of cocaine in his room?”
“They did,” Petrenko replied. “There were.”
The distant rumble of an approaching train. Stephen Graham moved forward, pushing through the crowd. He hoped to secure a seat. He was worn out after the long conversation and his thighs were aching after an early morning run.
Two men were standing directly behind him. As the train came crashing through the tunnel, one of them placed a hand on the small of his back. The other put a grip on Graham’s right arm.
He knew what they intended to do. He had been through the same training course; he had sanctioned the same hits. To give them credit, they had timed their movements to perfection. Turning around, Graham saw that the closest of the two men was wearing a baseball cap and what appeared to be a false beard. He had been given no time to react, no chance to duck or to move to one side.
He was finished.
34
The apartment was a large, two-bedroom conversion on the first floor of a house overlooking the ocean. With a firm throw from the roof, Carradine could have landed a rock in the Atlantic.
They had the place to themselves. The building was owned by a middle-aged woman who lived across the landing with her mother and two teenage daughters. The family greeted Carradine and Bartok like long-lost relatives, showing them around with the passion and enthusiasm of vendors trying to sell carpets in the souk. They were offered hot food and laundry, sightseeing tips, even a lift to the airport in the morning. Carradine explained that they would be leaving at dawn and had already booked a taxi with a friend. When asked by the landlady if they would be sharing the same room, Bartok took Carradine’s hand and smiled beatifically in the direction of her elderly mother.
“Thank you, but we are not married,” she said in perfect French. “Until then, we prefer to sleep in separate beds.”
“Of course, mademoiselle,” the landlady replied, her face a picture of admiration for such old-fashioned sexual mores. The teenage girls looked stunned.
“If we could just have some food this evening, that would be wonderful,” Bartok continued. Carradine’s cheeks were flushed with embarrassment. “Perhaps couscous? Some salad?”
None of it was too much trouble. The landlady requested only that they enjoy themselves and then closed the door so that the young couple could have some privacy. Minutes later, however, she came back into the apartment, asking if one of them could provide her with a passport.
Carradine fetched his own, as they had agreed, and watched as the landlady painstakingly transcribed his details—in Arabic—onto a registration form. Meanwhile, Bartok settled into what she described as the “more feminine” of the two bedrooms—a large room upholstered in pink and decorated with floral-patterned cushions—closing the door while she unpacked and took a shower. Carradine accepted the landlady’s offer of tea and drank it on a small, enclosed balcony in his room while smoking a cigarette out of the window. Traffic was constant in both directions and the room was noisy, but he was glad to be in a place that both of them considered secure and relatively anonymous. By sheer good fortune, they had ended up in an apartment that was not overlooked by neighboring buildings. A man was selling pomegranates from a stall beneath Carradine’s window. Across the Corniche, on a stretch of waste ground separating the shoreline from the road, a family was living out of a tent surrounded by oil drums and buffeted by the Atlantic wind. They were otherwise out of sight of strangers. Everything was damp to the touch: the sheets on Carradine’s bed; the towels in the bathroom; even the sugar in the tiny packets the landlady placed beside the teapot. He thought again of the riad, of the festival organizers wondering what had become of him, but reckoned it would be at least forty-eight hours before anyone raised the alarm. There was no television nor radio in the apartment and therefore no means of keeping tabs on the developing story in Warsaw. Carradine laid a private bet with himself that the siege would already have been brought to an end. It was just a question of the death toll.
After finishing his tea, he took a shower. The ceiling was so low that he had to sit on a plastic stool while dousing himself with lukewarm water. He shaved and changed into some clean clothes, risked a blast of aftershave, then knocked on Bartok’s door.
“Come in!” she said.
She was lying on the double bed wearing a pair of denim shorts and a T-shirt. Her blond hair was damp and tousled from the shower. The room smelled of perfume and the warm sea air.
“You packed my bag well,” she said, kicking a leg in the air. He saw that she was reading a book.
“Lots of practice,” Carradine replied.
He wished they were together, that they could spend the rest of the day and night in bed, passing the long hours until it was time to leave for the boat. In any other situation, with any other woman, he would have tried his luck.
“What’s on your mind?” she asked.
“Nothing much.” He walked toward the window, saw the same view he had been looking at while drinking his tea. “We have a lot of time to kill.”
“Lots,” she said.
“Good book?”
“I’ve read it before.”
She flung it across the room. Carradine caught it like a fly-half as it passed behind his waist. It was a French translation of The Sheltering Sky.
“Ah, doomed love,” he said, trying to sound sophisticated.
“The wife is called Kit.”
He pretended to be furious. “Really?” He flicked through the pages, searching for the name.
“Really,” Bartok replied.
“Don’t they end up dying in Morocco?” There was a picture on the back of Debra Winger in the arms of John Malkovich. “She gets sick. Or he gets sick. I can’t remember.”
“Don’t spoil it.”
“I thought you said you’d read it before?”
“Years ago.”
Carradine threw it back. This time the book bounced off the side of the mattress and landed on the floor. Bartok leaned over the bed to fetch it. Her T-shirt rode up on her back. Carradine stole a glance at her waist, tanned and lithe, blond hairs at the base of her spine. She looked up and caught him staring and for an instant the time stopped between them.
The doorbell rang. They continued to stare at each other. Carradine walked to the door. The landlady walked in carrying a tray covered in plates and cutlery. She apologized for interrupting and said that the food was almost ready. One of the teenage daughters followed her in, holding a bowl of salad and some fruit. Carradine noticed how respectful they were toward Bartok, staring at her as though she were a visiting dignitary. Within a few minutes the family had left them in a traditional, tiled reception room at the back of the apartment, plates of chicken couscous, cheese and pasta salad spread out in front of them.
“Do you want to go down to the marina, see if your friends are there?” Bartok asked.
“Together?” Carradine replied.
“No, no.”
Her answer was quick and dismissive, as if the notion that she could walk around Rabat in plain sight was nonsensical.
“I don’t think I should go,” he said. “Even alone. If somebody picks me up, they’ll eventually find you.”
“Only if you crack under questioning.”
Carradine saw her grin as he spooned some couscous into a bowl. “I’d give you up in a heartbeat,” he said. “I b
et you there’s a reward on your head.”
Traffic was growling past on the Corniche. He was still thinking about the lost moment in the bedroom. Yet Bartok’s mood seemed to have changed.
“I don’t want you to be bored,” she said. “You can go for a walk. It would be fine.”
“I’m perfectly happy.”
“You strike me as a trapped person, Kit. Like a caged bird.”
“Is that right?” He was by turns flattered by the description and startled that she had intuited his inner restlessness. “I don’t feel like that at the moment.”
“No, perhaps not. Why would someone do what you have done?”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Become a spy.”
“But I’m not a spy.” He knew that she was referring to his work for Mantis, but did not want to pretend to be something that he was not.
“I realize that,” she replied. “But many people would not have agreed to work for their country as you did. It was an old-fashioned thing to do. Patriotism. A sense of duty. Of course you were not to know that Stephen Graham was a liar, but this does not really matter. You acted in good faith. You wanted to help. You had the adventure inside you, the restlessness. Does your life satisfy you, Kit?”
Several seconds passed before Carradine answered the question.
“In some ways,” he replied, taken aback by Bartok’s directness. “I’m very lucky. I’m my own boss. I make my own rules. Nobody gets to tell me what time to show up for work, what time I can go home.”
“This is important to you? Not to be told what to do?”
It was like being scrutinized by someone who had not yet made up her mind whether or not to like him.
“I prefer it that way,” he said. “But it comes at a price. I’ve started to realize that my life is very solitary. I have no colleagues, no meetings, no team.…”
The Moroccan Girl Page 21
