Magic Terror

by Peter Straub

  N moved past the dining room to a counter and an untidy little office—a desk and table heaped with record books and loose papers, a worn armchair. Keys linked to numbered metal squares hung from numbered hooks. A clock beside a poster advertising Ossau-Iraty cheese said that the time was five-thirty, forty-five minutes later than he had been expected. “Bonjour. Monsieur? Madame?” No one answered. N went to the staircase to the left of the office. Four steps down, a corridor led past two doors with circular windows at eye level, like the doors into the kitchens of diners in his long-ago youth. Opposite were doors numbered 101, 102, 103. A wider section of staircase ascended to a landing and reversed to continue to the next floor. “Bonjour.” His voice reverberated in the stairwell. He caught a brief, vivid trace of old sweat and unwashed flesh.

  Leaving the carry-on at the counter, he carried the satchel to the dining room doors. Someone beyond barked out a phrase, others laughed. N walked down the rows of tables and approached the door with the stained-glass panel. He knocked twice, then pushed the door open.

  Empty tables fanned out from a door onto the parking lot. A man in a rumpled tweed jacket and with the face of a dissolute academic; a sallow, hound-faced man in a lumpy blue running suit; and a plump, bald bartender glanced at him and then leaned forward to continue their conversation in lowered voices. N put his satchel on the bar and took a stool. The bartender eyed him and slowly came up the bar, eyebrows raised.

  In French, N said, “Excuse me, sir, but there is no one at the desk.”

  The man extended his hand across the bar. He glanced back at his staring friends, then smiled mirthlessly at N. “Mr. Cash? We had been told to expect you earlier.”

  N shook his limp hand. “I had trouble driving down from Pau.”

  “Car trouble?”

  “No, finding the road out of Oloron,” N said. He had driven twice through the southern end of the old city, guessing at the exits to be taken out of the roundabouts, until a toothless ancient at a crosswalk had responded to his shout of “Montory?” by pointing toward the highway.

  “Oloron is not helpful to people trying to find these little towns.” The innkeeper looked over his shoulder and repeated the remark. His friends were nearing the stage of drunkenness where they would be able to drive more confidently than they could walk.

  The hound-faced man in the running suit said, “In Oloron, if you ask ’Where is Montory?’ they answer, ’What is Montory?’”

  “All right,” said his friend. “What is it?”

  The innkeeper turned back to N. “Are your bags in your car?”

  N took his satchel off the bar. “It’s in front of the counter.”

  The innkeeper ducked out and led N into the dining room. Like dogs, the other two trailed after them. “You speak French very well, Mr. Cash. I would say that it is not typically American to have an excellent French accent. You live in Paris, perhaps?”

  “Thank you,” N said. “I live in New York.” This was technically true. In an average year, N spent more time in his Upper East Side apartment than he did in his lodge in Gstaad. During the past two years, which had not been average, he had lived primarily in hotel rooms in San Salvador, Managua, Houston, Prague, Bonn, Tel Aviv, and Singapore.

  “But you have spent perhaps a week in Paris?”

  “I was there a couple of days,” N said.

  Behind him, one of the men said, “Paris is under Japanese occupation. I hear they serve raw fish instead of cervelas at the Brasserie Lipp.”

  They came out into the lobby. N and the innkeeper went to the counter, and the two other men pretended to be interested in the tourist brochures.

  “How many nights do you spend with us? Two, was it, or three?”

  “Probably two,” said N, knowing that these details had already been arranged.

  “Will you join us for dinner tonight?”

  “I am sorry to say that I cannot.”

  Momentary displeasure surfaced in the innkeeper’s face. He waved toward his dining room and declared, “Join us tomorrow for our roasted mutton, but you must reserve at least an hour in advance. Do you expect to be out in the evenings?”

  “I do.”

  “We lock the doors at eleven. There is a bell, but as I have no desire to leave my bed to answer it, I prefer you to use the keypad at the entrance. Punch twenty-three forty-five to open the door. Easy, right? Twenty-three forty-five. Then go behind the counter and pick up your key. On going out again the next day, leave it on the counter, and it will be replaced on the rack. What brings you to the Basque country, Mr. Cash?”

  “A combination of business and pleasure.”

  “Your business is . . . ?”

  “I write travel articles,” N said. “This is a beautiful part of the world.”

  “You have been to the Basque country before?”

  N blinked, nudged by a memory that refused to surface. “I’m not sure. In my kind of work, you visit too many places. I might have been here a long time ago.”

  “We opened in 1961, but we’ve expanded since then.” He slapped the key and its metal plate down on the counter.

  N put his cases on the bed, opened the shutters, and leaned out of the window, as if looking for the memory that had escaped him. The road sloped past the auberge and continued uphill through the tiny center of the village. On the covered terrace of the cement-block building directly opposite, a woman in a sweater sat behind a cash register at a display case filled with what a sign called “regional delicacies.” Beyond, green fields stretched out toward the wooded mountains. At almost exactly the point where someone would stop entering Montory and start leaving it, the red enclosure of the telephone booth he had been told to use stood against a gray stone wall.

  The innkeeper’s friends staggered into the parking lot and left in a mud-spattered old Renault. A delivery truck with the word Comet stenciled on a side panel pulled in and came to a halt in front of the old stable doors. A man in a blue work suit climbed out, opened the back of the truck, pulled down a burlap sack from a neat pile, and set it down inside the kitchen. A blond woman in her fifties wearing a white apron emerged from the interior and tugged out the next sack. She wobbled backward beneath its weight, recovered, and carried it inside. The girl in the blue dress sauntered into view and leaned against the doorway a foot or two from where the delivery man was heaving his second sack onto the first. Brown dust puffed out from between the sacks. As the man straightened up, he gave her a look of straightforward appraisal. The dress was stretched tight across her breasts and hips, and her face had a coarse, vibrant prettiness entirely at odds with the bored contempt of her expression. She responded to his greeting with a few grudging words. The woman in the apron came out again and pointed to the sacks on the floor. The girl shrugged. The delivery man executed a mocking bow. The girl bent down, slid her forearms beneath the sacks, lifted them waist high, and carried them deeper into the kitchen.

  Impressed, N turned around and took in yellowish-white walls, a double bed that would prove too short, an old television set, a nightstand with a reading lamp, and a rotary phone. Framed embroidery above the bed advised him that eating well would lead to a long life. He pulled the carry-on toward him and began to hang up his clothes, meticulously refolding the sheets of tissue with which he had protected his suits and jackets.

  A short time later, he came out into the parking lot holding the computer bag. Visible through the opening, the girl in the blue dress and another woman in her twenties, with stiff fair hair fanning out above a puggish face, a watermelon belly, and enormous thighs bulging from her shorts, were cutting up greens on the chopping block with fast, short downstrokes of their knives. The girl lifted her head and gazed at him. He said, “Bonsoir.” Her smile put a youthful bounce in his stride.

  The telephone booth stood at the intersection of the road passing through the village and another that dipped downhill and flattened out across the fields on its way deeper into the Pyrenees. N pushed tokens into the
slot and dialed a number in Paris. When the number rang twice, he hung up. Several minutes later, the telephone trilled, and he picked up the receiver.

  An American voice said, “So we had a little hang-up, did we?”

  “Took me a while to find the place,” he said.

  “You needum Injun guide, findum trail heap fast.” The contact frequently pretended to be an American Indian. “Get the package all right?”

  “Yes,” N said. “It’s funny, but I have the feeling I was here before.”

  “You’ve been everywhere, old buddy. You’re a grand old man. You’re a star.”

  “In his last performance.”

  “Written in stone. Straight from Big Chief.”

  “If I get any trouble, I can cause a lot more.”

  “Come on,” said the contact. N had a detailed but entirely speculative image of the man’s flat, round face, smudgy glasses, and furzy hair. “You’re our best guy. Don’t you think they’re grateful? Pretty soon, they’re going to have to start using Japanese. Russians. Imagine how they feel about that.”

  “Why don’t you do what you’re supposed to do, so I can do what I’m supposed to do?”

  N sat outside the café tabac on the Place du Marche in Mauléon with a nearly empty demitasse of espresso by his elbow and a first edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in near-mint condition before him, watching lights go on and off in a building on the other side of the arcaded square. He had used the telephone shower in his room’s flimsy bathtub and shaved at the flimsy sink, had dressed in a lightweight wool suit and his raincoat, and, with his laptop case upright on the next chair, he resembled a traveling businessman. The two elderly waiters had retired inside the lighted café, where a few patrons huddled at the bar. During the hour and a half N had been sitting beneath the umbrellas, a provincial French couple had taken a table to devour steak and pommes frites while consulting their guidebooks, and a feral-looking boy with long, dirty-blond hair had downed three beers. During a brief rain shower, a lone Japanese man had trotted in, wiped down his cameras and his forehead, and finally managed to communicate his desire for a beef stew and a glass of wine. Alone again, N was beginning to wish that he had eaten more than his simple meal of cheese and bread, but it was too late to place another order. The subject, a retired politician named Daniel Hubert with a local antiques business and a covert sideline in the arms trade, had darkened his shop at the hour N had been told he would do so. A light had gone on in the living room of his apartment on the next floor and then, a few minutes later, in his bedroom suite on the floor above that. This was all according to pattern.

  “According to the field team, he’s about to move up into the big time,” his contact had said. “They think it’ll be either tonight or tomorrow night. What happens is, he closes up shop and goes upstairs to get ready. You’ll see the lights go on as he goes toward his bedroom. If you see a light in the top floor, that’s his office, he’s making sure everything’s in place and ready to go. Paleface tense, Paleface know him moving out of his league. He’s got South Americans on one end, ragheads on the other. Once he gets off the phone, he’ll go downstairs, leave through the door next to the shop, get in his car. Gray Mercedes four door with fuck-you plates from being Big Heap Deal in government. He’ll go to a restaurant way up in the mountains. He uses three different places, and we never know which one it’s going to be. Pick your spot, nice clean job, get back to me later. Then put it to some mademoiselle—have yourself a ball.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Hey, we love the ragheads, you kidding? They’re customers. These guys travel with a million in cash, we worship the camel dung they walk on.”

  The lights at the top of the house stayed on. A light went on, then off, in the bedroom. With a tremendous roar, a motorcycle raced past. The wild-looking boy who had been at the café glanced at N before leaning sideways and disappearing through the arcade and around the corner. One of the weary waiters appeared beside him, and N placed a bill on the saucer. When he looked back at the building, the office and bedroom lights had been turned off, and the living room lights were on. Then they turned off. N stood up and walked to his car. In a sudden spill of the light from the entry, a trim silver-haired man in a black blazer and gray slacks stepped out beneath the arcade and held the door for a completely unexpected party, a tall blond woman in jeans and a black leather jacket. She went through one of the arches and stood at the passenger door of a long Mercedes while M. Hubert locked the door. Frustrated and angry, N pulled out of his parking spot and waited at the bottom of the square until they had driven away.

  They did this more than they ever admitted. One time in four, the field teams left something out. He had to cover for their mistakes and take the fall for any screwups. Now they were going two for two—the team in Singapore had failed to learn that his subject always used two bodyguards, one who traveled in a separate car. When he had raised this point afterward, they had said they were “working to improve data flow worldwide.” The blond woman was a glitch in the data flow, all right. He traveled three cars behind the Mercedes as it went through a series of right-hand turns on the one-way streets, wishing that his employers permitted the use of cell phones, which they did not. Cell phones were “porous,” they were “intersectable,” even, in the most delightful of these locutions, “capacity risks.” N wished that one day someone would explain the exact meaning of “capacity risk.” In order to inform his contact of M. Hubert’s playmate, he would have to drive back to the “location usage device,” another charming example of bureaucratese, the pay telephone in Montory. You want to talk capacity risks, how about that?

  The Mercedes rolled beneath a streetlamp at the edge of the town and wheeled left to double back. Wonderful, he was looking for a tail. Probably he had caught sight of the field team while they were busily mismanaging the data flow. N hung back as far as he dared, now and then anticipating the subject’s next move and speeding ahead on an adjacent street. Finally, the Mercedes continued out of Mauléon and turned east on a three-lane highway.

  N followed along, speculating about the woman. In spite of her clothes, she looked like a mistress, but would a man bring his mistress to such a meeting? It was barely possible that she represented the South Americans, possible but even less likely that she worked for the buyers. Maybe they were just a lovely couple going out for dinner. Far ahead, the Mercedes’s taillights swung left off the highway and began winding into the mountains. They had already disappeared by the time he came to the road. N made the turn, went up to the first bend, and turned off his lights. From then on, it was a matter of trying to stay out of the ditches as he crawled along in the dark, glimpsing the other car’s taillights and losing them, seeing the beams of the headlights picking out trees on an upward curve far ahead of him. Some part of what he was doing finally brought back the lost memory.

  From inside the telephone booth, he could see the red neon sign, AUBERGE DE L’ETABLE, burning above the walled parking lot.

  “Tonto waiting,” said the contact.

  “I would have appreciated a few words about the girlfriend.”

  “White man speak with forked tongue.”

  N sighed. “I waited across from his building. Hubert seemed to be doing a lot of running up and down the stairs, which was explained when he came out with a stunning young lady in a motorcycle jacket. I have to tell you, I hate surprises.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “He dodged all over the place before he felt safe enough to leave Mauléon. I followed him to an auberge way up in the mountains, trying to work out how to handle things if the meeting was on. All of a sudden, there’s this variable, and the only way I can let you know about it is to turn around and drive all the way back to this phone, excuse me, this location usage device.”

  “That would have been a really terrible idea,” said his contact.

  “I waited for them to go into the lot and leave their car, and then I pulled up beside a wa
ll and climbed uphill to a spot where I could watch their table through the glasses. I was trying to figure out how many reports I’d have to file if I included the girl. Remember Singapore? Improvising is no fun anymore.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then they had dinner. The two of them. Basque soup, roast chicken, salad, no dessert. A bottle of wine. Hubert was trying to jolly her up, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. The place was about half full, mainly with local people. Guys in berets playing cards, two foursomes, one table of Japanese guys in golf jackets. God knows how they found out about the place. When they drove out, I followed them back and waited until all the lights went out. In the midst of all this wild activity, I remembered something.”

  “Nice. I understand people your age tend to forget.”

  “Let me guess. You knew about the girl.”

  “Martine is your background resource.”

  “Since when do I need a backup?” Seconds ticked by in silence while he struggled with his fury. “Okay. Fine. I’ll tell you what, that’s dandy. But Martine does all the paperwork.”

  “Let me work on that one. In the meantime, try to remember that we’ve been mainstreaming for some time now. Martine has been in field operations for about a year, and we decided to give her a shot at learning from the old master.”

  “Right,” N said. “What does Hubert think she is?”

  “An expert on raghead psychology. We positioned her so that when he needed someone to help him figure out what these people mean when they say things, there she was. Doctorate in Arab studies from the Sorbonne, two years doing community liaison for an oil company in the Middle East. Hubert was so happy with the way she looks, he put her up in his guest room.”

  “And Martine told him that his partners would have him followed.”

  “He never laid eyes on you. She’s impressed as hell, Kemo sabe. You’re her hero.”

  “Martine should spend a couple of days with me after we’re done,” N said, almost angry enough to mean it. “Let me advance her education.”