Tangier Bank Heist

by Sean McLachlan

  Electric Eddie remained in the car.

  “Get out of there!” I called to him.

  “I’ll back it up. I still got a good grip with one front tire. Too bad I don’t have four-wheel drive on this thing.”

  “It’s too dangerous. Get out and we’ll call a tow truck.”

  “At this time of night? Don’t worry, I got it.”

  “You’ll get it, all right. Don’t act crazy!”

  He popped the handbrake and put it into reverse, the car jerking forward a heart-stopping few inches as he did so.

  The front wheel skidded, and despite the dark night I could clearly see clods of earth fall away from the cliff edge.

  “Jesus Christ, Eddie, get the hell out of there!”

  The car inched back, and the front right tire caught on the cliff edge. Rubber ground against earth and stone. A chunk of earth as big as my torso sloughed off and I nearly had a coronary.

  Then, a miracle. The front right tire found some purchase and suddenly the car jerked up and shot backwards.

  Right toward me.

  “Stop!”

  I ran, dodging to the side. Unfortunately, that was the direction Eddie took to avoid me. He slammed on the brakes. My sight filled with a vision of screeching metal and glass.

  He ground to a halt just an inch from me.

  “Get out!” I said, opening his door and hauling him out of the driver’s seat in case he didn’t catch my meaning. “I’m driving.”

  I took a look at the cliff and shuddered. I knew this stretch of the coast. It was a hundred foot drop down to some jagged rocks with nothing to cushion our fall except some waves that would suck our bodies out to sea.

  Then I looked again.

  A couple of lights bobbed out on the dark surface of the sea. They were fairly far out, and from the faint illumination the lights gave I saw they were fixed to the prow and stern of a large fishing boat. Vaguely I could see three men standing at the side. Something silver shimmered by the side of the boat and made a long, sustained frothing on the surface, like if lots of small objects were being thrown into the water. This happened in silence. It was too far to pick up the noise.

  Eddie followed where I was looking.

  “Dumping their catch,” he said. “They always do it here.”

  “What? Why?” I asked the question automatically, not because I was interested in the answer but because I always ask questions.

  “There are regulations on the size of fish you can bring to market. If the ones the fishermen catch are too small, they dump them back in the water. They’re too young, you see. They dump them here because the currents keep them in the deep water. Any closer in and they’d be stuck in the shallows. With the currents in the Strait being so strong they might not get back to their regular habitat, and they’d be prey to larger fish.”

  I cocked an eye at him. “How the hell do you know so much about it?”

  “My dad is a fisherman.”

  “I thought your dad was loaded.”

  “He owns a fleet of fishing boats.”

  “Well la de da. So in Tangier you can sleep with a prostitute while injecting heroin but you’ll get in trouble if you dump baby fish too close to shore?”

  “Gotta keep the fish supply up to feed the whores and junkies.”

  “Shut up and get in the car.”

  I drove Eddie to his connection, learning more than I ever wanted to know about cocaine transactions, and then dropped him off at his house. He offered to drive me home but after his stunt that evening I decided to walk. I had some thinking to do anyway. Strolling in the quiet and darkness of the Mountain, with the lights of the Casbah and the medina at my feet, and the cool sea breeze coming in, I could relax and clear my head.

  I’d have to get the books tomorrow night. I couldn’t wait any longer because Chason would keep sniffing around until he found something. I needed to figure out a way to get into the warehouse without him or one of his goons spotting me, and I had to figure out a way to keep Electric Eddie sober while I did it. He nearly gave it all away back there with Chason, and then he nearly drove me off a cliff. I’d have been food for those baby fishes the Tangier government had saved from the frying pan.

  Plus, I wasn’t getting much further on with the bank case. So Ronnie the Pusher had been looking for big boats. Why? To spirit away all the banking gear for his buddy? Did that mean they were going elsewhere? Spain? The French or Spanish zone? Couldn’t be much further than that. Those boats were good in deep water, that’s what they were designed for, but they didn’t have a very long range.

  What was significant was that García hadn’t heard about Ronnie hiring one, and García knew everything that happened on the docks. Had all the captains said no? Unlikely. Smuggling made more money than fishing any day or night. Could they have kept García from knowing they were putting a bank safe and a whole bunch of furniture on a boat? Really unlikely. So they or Ronnie must have bribed García to look the other way, bribed him enough that he wouldn’t tell me. We were old comrades and all, but business was business. He would never put me in harm’s way or do anything to hurt me—the stunt with the packages proved that—but that didn’t mean he had to spill the beans every time I showed up. What he had told me were things I could have easily found out myself. He hadn’t given me what I really needed—the name of the boat.

  I didn’t see how I could get that information without spending a lot of time at the port talking to a large number of people, and García would hear about it. Besides, I didn’t exactly want to be seen hanging around the port at the moment.

  So I figured I should focus on finding out more about those Egyptian businessmen. I didn’t see how they fit into the picture, except that Ronnie was reading Egyptian papers even before those guys were first spotted in Tangier, and the bank and the Egyptians both disappeared at about the same time. The same time that Pieter disappeared and someone, probably Pieter, killed Ronnie and faked his suicide.

  By the time I made it back to town it was getting late, but I knew a place that would still be open, and it would give me a chance to talk to some people who might have a line on the Egyptians, and who also might get me some inside information on what García was hiding.

  Bar la Mar Chica is a dingy little dive set on the end of an old pier just to the west of the port. It’s a working class Spanish place that had recently been “discovered” by Tangier’s trendy set, who used it as an afterhours bar once Dean sent everyone home. They came for the “liveliness” of the bad flamenco that played every night and for the “peasant ruggedness” of the Spanish dockworkers and underemployed hangers-on who they took home with them for the evening.

  The pier was on a little-used portion of the beach a long walk west of the port and around a bend in the shore so that its ever-burning lights did not reach it. Only a few dim lamps shining above the parapet of the Casbah walls high above gave any sign of civilization.

  Clumping along the warped boards of the pier, once used by fishermen and now abandoned to less useful but much more profitable purposes, I came to a building at the end about the size of a cottage.

  “Shack” would be more like it—tar paper walls, warped and moldy shingles on the roof, a few windows with shutters so off-kilter they could barely be closed—the owners hadn’t spared any of their profits for upkeep. They didn’t need to. The dockworkers, the unemployed, and the hard-drinking young Moors who came here didn’t care about the state of the building. For the popular set, its decrepitude was an attraction. It offered that ever-elusive “authenticity” that the inauthentic are always hunting for.

  The door stood open, as it always did on fine nights, projecting a long rectangle of yellow light onto the splintered boards of the pier. Inside I could hear the strum of a guitar and the clop clop of castanets. Carmela and Pablo doing their flamenco routine.

  Inside I found the usual crowd. On the left-hand side of the room mingled the Spaniards, some middle-aged but mostly young. I recognized Mateo
and Juan, two of García’s men, sharing a bottle and playing cards at a small table. Mateo was a middle-aged Asturian who had been in the Republican navy before his ship went to the bottom and he had to swim to shore and eventual exile. Juan was just out of his teens, born in Tangier to exiled parents, speaking the language and drinking the wine of a country he had never known.

  The right-hand side of the room was taken up by the Americans and Europeans who had recently “discovered” this place, it having not existed until they had learned about it. Robert was there, clapping along with the music in as good of time as he could manage, his face suffused with a beatific drunken glow. I’ll say this for Robert—he’s a happy drunk, not a desperate drunk like so many in Tangier.

  Take, for example, Barbara. I will not give her last name because she inherited the fortune of a major corporation back in the States that could crush me if I spilled the beans on her. I may want to smash capitalism but I know how to pick my battles. Barbara was a dangerously thin woman of about forty, fabulously wealthy and living in a glamorous Moorish home in the upper medina, just a few steps from the Casbah itself. She collected jewels, liver complaints, emotional breakdowns, horses, and men, so I was surprised to see her unaccompanied except by her usual crowd of fawning admirers. They were all dressed in evening wear and all drinking martinis, something they had had to teach the teenaged mulatto bartender how to make. All he knew how to do before that was pour wine and orujo.

  The center of the room was left open, and Carmela, who was well past fifty and whose body had been ravaged by alcohol, kept up a desultory dance on the sawdust-covered floor. Perched nearby on a stool, one long leg crossed over the other, dark Gypsy face bent low over his guitar, was her lover Pablo, who strummed out an old tune from Granada.

  No one took much notice of me, which suited me fine for the moment, and I went to the bar to order a beer. The bartender, a husky mulatto boy with a baby face who looked no more than sixteen, served it to me with a blank stare.

  I moved to Mateo’s and Juan’s table and sat.

  “¡Hola, chaval! ¿Que tal?” Mateo said, making room for me.

  “Good,” I replied in his own language. “Who’s winning?”

  Juan shrugged, shuffling the greasy deck with broad, calloused hands. “Neither of us. One is up for the moment, and then one is down.”

  “How would you both like to win tonight?” I asked.

  They turned to me. I glanced in the direction of Barbara.

  “You see that woman over there?” I asked.

  “The rich one? She’s famous. She has a palace,” Juan said.

  “And she gives her lovers diamonds,” Mateo said.

  “You can both share her bed tonight,” I said.

  “Don’t shit me!” Juan said.

  Mateo laughed and poured himself some more wine. “Women like her don’t go with men like us, my friend.”

  “Actually she loves the rough types. The rougher the better. If I can arrange it, will you return the favor?”

  “If you can arrange it, I will dance on the Moon for you,” Mateo snorted.

  “Give me five minutes,” I told them. I got up and strolled across the room to where Barbara was holding court.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Hey Barbara,” I said as I broke through the heiress’s sycophantic circle. Most of them were schemers and parasites, flattering the richest lady in town in the hope of a handout. She was amazingly liberal with her money. Once in a drunken excess of generosity she gave Jane Bowles an emerald the size of a hen’s egg. Jane felt guilty about it and returned it to Barbara after she sobered up. Most of Barbara’s followers weren’t so honorable. Barbara didn’t seem to see this, or more likely didn’t care. She loved everyone. Simply everyone was welcome to her parties unless they made the unforgiveable sin of trying to be the center of attention. Then there would be an epic battle of wills for social influence, a battle Barbara always won.

  “Kent!” she squealed like I was her long-lost best friend. In fact, she barely knew me. She gave me a kiss on each cheek. “How is my little detective this evening?”

  “Everything’s all right, Barbara. But you wouldn’t believe what I uncovered on a recent case.” Then I launched into one of my stories of the back alleys of Tangier, something sordid involving European prostitutes taking endless numbers of Moorish customers in rapid succession. She loved that sort of story.

  Her circle did too, or at least imitated her rapt attention.

  Just as I was getting to the part about the Mauritanian slave market, Barbara cooled herself with a silk fan embroidered with pearls and said, “Oh my, it’s ever so close in here, isn’t it?”

  I leaned forward to whisper in her ear. Some Italian Lothario with slicked back hair tried to lean in to hear. I elbowed him out of the way.

  “Those two dockworkers over there are friends of mine. They don’t like gringos coming to their bar. They say it ruins the atmosphere. In fact, they’re damn angry with you. They were telling me in great detail what they’d like to do to you if they got you alone.”

  She gasped and leaned closer.

  “The brutes!”

  “Brutes ain’t the word, sister.”

  “And what would they do?”

  I shook my head slowly. “Oh, Barbara, what wouldn’t they do? The things they tell me would make the ugliest sights I’d seen since the war. Debased. Low. Dirty.”

  Her eyes widened with each adjective.

  “Oh. My,” was all she managed to get out.

  Flushing scarlet, she detached herself from her circle and moved to the Spanish side of the room. Leaning against the bar, she ordered three glasses of orujo, a nasty Spanish firewater made from the skin of grapes after they’ve been pressed to make wine.

  Giving Mateo and Juan a come-hither look, she raised one of the glasses, toasted them, and downed it in a single gulp.

  Mateo and Juan looked at each other, uncertain. Then they looked back at her. To be precise, Juan looked at her exposed leg, now revealed through a slit in her evening dress, while Mateo stared at her glittering diamond necklace. Mateo was a family man with responsibilities and was much more practical than his younger friend.

  Barbara’s circle had stopped their inane chattering and watched, leering.

  Two. Three. She downed the remaining glasses of orujo, then ordered three more. As the mulatto behind the counter poured them, she took a long look at him, and ordered a fourth.

  Mateo and Juan were beside her now. The bartender tried to move off, but Barbara grabbed his sleeve.

  Together they shared a round.

  They shared three more rounds before Barbara’s lust overpowered her thirst and they moved for the door, the bartender having a quick word with Pablo and then joining them.

  I collared Mateo at the door.

  “I owe you, my friend,” he said, trying to pull away. I pulled back.

  “Then tell me what’s going on at the dock. Did Ronnie the Pusher hire a boat?”

  “Let me go, they’re getting into the car!”

  Indeed, Barbara was showing off her silver-plated Rolls Royce to the other two men while fumbling in her mink purse for her keys. Barbara never used a chauffeur no matter how sozzled she was. I feared for those guys.

  “Then you better hurry up and tell me,” I told Mateo.

  “Come on, friend, García told us it was a secret. We all got a share.”

  I gestured toward Barbara, who had found her keys and was collecting a large wad of dollar bills that had fallen out of her purse. Juan and the bartender were helping her out. Nice fellas.

  “Don’t you want a share of that?”

  Mateo gulped, hesitated, and then said, “Ronnie did hire a boat. Demitrios is the captain. He’s a Greek fisherman who does some work on the side.”

  “Don’t we all. Where can I find him this time of night?”

  “At sea. He comes in with the catch before dawn.”

  Damn. That made it tricky. I was hoping to
sneak onto his boat in the dark and snoop around.

  “I have to go,” Mateo said. “They’re getting into the car.”

  “All right. Have fun.”

  I let him go. He leaped into the backseat of the Rolls an instant before Barbara revved the engine, lurched into reverse, did an impressive 180 considering the number of drinks in her, and shot off into the night like meteor.

  I stood in the doorway and lit a cigarette. If I couldn’t sneak onto the boat, I’d have to try a more direct approach. But what? I didn’t have the money to bribe Demitrios. It takes a lot of money to get a smuggler to talk, and I had no doubt that Pieter had paid him off handsomely. After all, he had a whole bank’s savings to throw around.

  A burst of laughter came from inside. Barbara’s circle was swapping stories of her previous conquests. The Lothario with the slicked back hair was necking with some drunken American in the corner. Another Italian laughed so hard he fell off his chair. Some woman I vaguely remember having met once was slinking up to one of the Spaniards, obviously trying to make her own story to match Barbara’s.

  “Overgrown children being naughty,” I muttered, walking out into the night.

  It’s strange that the most active point of my political career—besides the war, that is—was also the only time in my life I spent any time with rich people. In the steel mill we only saw the boss’s limousine from a distance. In Spain of course I didn’t see any rich people. We’d bivouacked in some of their estates, though, the owners having fled and their tenants now tending the fields and olive groves. During the world war, I was in a British regiment and met a few of the toff officers, but the Oxbridge crowd didn’t like to mingle with some Yank NCO.

  But now I hobnobbed with heiresses and millionaires, and I’m not talking about the endless poseurs who come passing through here, but the real ones. It changed my idea of them completely. Before, they were abstract, some sort of boogeyman that stirred up evil and hurt you from a distance. Now I saw them as big kids, spoiled by getting whatever they want without ever having to push themselves. All this endless social maneuvering they did was their way of having some sort of a challenge. Hosting the best party that month was to them like landing a good job or paying off the mortgage was to people like us.