The bar was closed now. But the courtyard door was open, standing a few inches ajar.
I hadn't seen it like that in the six years that Akhmed had owned the place.
"What's wrong?" the girl whispered, when she saw me hesitate before the door.
"I don't know," I replied. "Maybe nothing. Maybe Akhmed's just getting sloppy and careless with success. But this door shouldn't be open."
I peered cautiously through the crack in the door into the courtyard. The bar itself was dark. There was no sign of movement.
"Should we go in?" the girl asked uncertainly.
"We'll go in," I said. "But not through the courtyard. Not where we make perfect targets for anybody who might be in the bar, hidden in the dark, while we're in bright moonlight."
"Then how?"
Without speaking, I guided her by the shoulder, down the street. Akhmed had an emergency exit too, even if I didn't intend to use it as an exit. At least it didn't involve squirming through an unused sewer. We went to the corner, I held the girl back for a moment while I made sure the street was empty, then we turned right and walked silently to the third building on the street. The words Mohammed Franzi, Spices and Incense were written in Arabic script on a faded, peeling sign over the door. The door itself, of heavy, rusting metal, was locked. But I had the key. I'd had it for the past six years. It was Akhmed's opening-night gift to me: The guarantee I'd always have a safe house when I was in Tangier. I used the key, pushed open the door on it's well-oiled, silent hinges, and closed it behind us. Beside me, the girl paused, and sniffed.
"That smell," she said. "What is that strange smell?"
"Spices," I said. "Arabic spices. Myrrh, frankincense, alloes, all the ones you read about in the Bible. And speaking of bibles…"
I groped my way past barrels of finely powdered spices and burlap sacks full of incense, to a niche in the wall. There, on an elaborately decorated cloth, lay a copy of the Koran, the sacred book of Islam. A Moslem intruder might rob everything in the place, but he wouldn't touch that I touched it. I opened it to a certain page, changing the balance of weight on the niche. Below and in front of it, a section of the floor slid back.
"As secret passages go," I said to the girl, taking her by her hand, "this is a lot more first-class than the one we just left."
"I apologize," said the girl. "God forbid Nick Carter should encounter a tourist-class secret passage."
I smiled inwardly. Whether she was Fernand Duroche's daughter or not, this girl had guts. She was already half-recovered from an experience that would have sent a lot of people into a state of shock for months.
"Where are we going?" she whispered behind me.
"The passageway leads under two houses and an alley," I said, lighting our way along the narrow stone shaft with a pencil flashlight. "It comes up…"
We both halted abruptly. There was a scurrying sound ahead, then a confusion of squealing noises.
"What is it?" the girl whispered urgently, again pressing her warm body against me.
I listened another moment, then urged her on.
"Nothing to worry about," I said. "Just rats."
"Rats!" She pulled me to a halt. "I can't…"
I pulled her forward.
"We don't have time for delicacy now," I said. "Anyway, they're more afraid of us than we are of them."
"That I doubt."
I didn't answer. The passage had ended. We climbed a short, steep flight of stone steps. Ahead, in the wall, was one end of a wine barrel, five feet in diameter. I aimed the beam of the pencil light at it, moved the slender beam in a counter-clockwise direction around the barrel, and found the fourth stave from the top. I pushed it in. The exposed end swung open. The barrel was empty except for a small compartment at the top far end, which contained a few gallons of wine which could be drawn to deceive anyone who suspected the barrel was a dummy.
I turned to the girl. She was pressed against the damp wall, shivering now in her flimsy costume.
"You stay here," I said. "I'll be back for you. If I'm not back, go to the American Embassy. Tell them you must contact David Hawk at AXE. Tell them that, but no more. Talk to no one but Hawk. Do you understand?"
"No," she said quickly. "I'm going with you. I don't want to stay here alone."
"Forget it," I said tersely. "It's only in the movies that you can get away with that I'm going with you' line. If there's any trouble in there, you'd just be in the way. Anyway," I ran one finger down her chin and neck, "you're far too beautiful to be walking around with your head blown off."
Before she could protest again I had climbed into the end of the barrel and swung the lid shut after me. Instantly, it became obvious that the barrel had actually been used for storing wine a long time before it had been made into a dummy. The residual fumes gagged me and made my head reel. I waited a moment, steadied myself, then crawled to the far end and listened.
At first I heard nothing. Silence. Then, some distance away, voices. Or at least, sounds that might have been voices. Except that they were distorted, and the almost inhuman quality told me that the distortion wasn't caused merely by distance.
I hesitated for another moment, then decided to take a chance. Slowly, gently, I pushed against the butt end of the barrel. Silently, it swung open. I crouched with Wilhelmina in my hand at the ready.
Nothing. Darkness. Silence. But by the dim shaft of moonlight that came in through a tiny square window set high in the wall, I could make out the bulky shapes of wine barrels and the wooden tiers of the wine-bottle racks. Akhmed's wine cellar, housing the best collection of vintage wines in North Africa, seemed in perfectly normal condition for this hour of night.
Then I heard the sounds again.
They weren't pretty.
I crept out of the barrel, shutting it carefully behind me, and padded across the stone floor to the metal bars that lined the entrance to the wine cellar. I had a key for those, too, and I used it in silence. The hallway beyond, leading to the stairs to the bar, was dark. But from a room off that hall came a dim, yellow rectangle of light.
And the voices.
There were three. Two, I could recognize now as human. I could even recognize the language they were speaking — French. The third — well, its sounds were animal. The sounds of an animal in agony.
Pressing my body against the wall, I moved toward the rectangle of light. The voices grew louder, the animal sounds more tormented. When I was a few inches from the door I leaned my head forward and peered through the opening between door and doorjamb.
What I saw wrenched my stomach. And then made me clench my teeth with anger.
Akhmed was naked, his wrists were bound together around a meat hook from which he was suspended. His torso was a blackened ruin of scorched skin, muscles, and nerves. Blood ran from his mouth and from the gouged-out craters of his eye sockets. As I watched, one of the two men puffed at a cigar until its tip was glowing red, then brutally pressed it to Akhmed's side, to the tender flesh under the armpit.