“Will I see you again?”
Tildy smiled in spite of herself, pulled the door shut and drove.
Karl was in the backyard bouncing a tennis ball off the wall of the house.
“What happened to your foot?”
“Banged it up on a rock,” Tildy said.
He showed her the gauze on the back of his hand. “Sliced it open on a saw up at Keyeses’. Guess it’s been that kind of day all around. But I got the side pieces up, ought to be finished by Monday.”
He underhanded the fuzzless gray ball to her but she didn’t reach; it skittered into the weeds.
“You ain’t up for a catch, huh?”
“I’m exhausted, Karl, and sick to my stomach.”
“Too much sun probably.”
“Much too much.”
“Come on, darlin’, I’ll squeeze a dozen oranges for you.”
Tildy lay in bed with a cool cloth over her eyes and soft pillows under her head. In her stomach all that salt water she’d swallowed could not escape the influence of the tides. Up and back it rolled, up and back, up and back.
“Here. You don’t have to sit up.” Karl guided a straw between her lips. “I left a little of the pulp in. Just the way you like it.”
“Fine. Put it there and I’ll have it later.”
“You goin’ right off to sleep?”
“Sleeping or just lying still. I don’t know.”
Karl touched her naked instep with a cautious finger and she jumped. “Hush now, little sweetness. I’m only thinkin’ you ought to have a bath, give this foot a little soakin’. It’ll soften up the nail so she comes off nice and easy.”
“I don’t want to get up.”
“Don’t you worry.”
Karl filled the tub, undressed her, carried her in and lowered her into the water. Hot, safe water that welcomed her. He bent down very gradually and brushed her lips with his. A dry, fleeting, sober kiss, but the sweetest she’d ever had. She purred softly while he soaped her.
“Lord, it’s so good to be home,” she said.
And meant it.
12
LANDING IN TANGIER AT six in the morning, stiff-necked and bleary with trepidation, Christo was hard-pressed to accept the reality of African soil beneath him and the game now beginning in earnest.
Twelve hours ago, in a Midtown delicatessen lined with celebrity photographs, Pierce had given him a single piece of parting advice: “Be alert.” No problem. Nestled at the bottom of his cigarette pack were two little methamphetamine footballs; a green rabbit’s foot sat in his pocket. He’d be alert all right, at critical mass. He chainsmoked by the baggage carousel and his eyes moved like automatic cameras in a bank, checking every face.
The customs inspection was perfunctory — a heft of his bag, a fast dig around the sides, a squiggle of chalk on top. His phony passport was glanced over, duly stamped by a civil servant with a prosthetic hand. A real work of art, the passport, handcrafted by a woman who had married briefly into the Milbank family, who ran a design studio turning out corporate logos at ten thousand dollars a pop. The new identity was Arno Bester, Professor of Biochemistry, and in a tweed one-button with elbow patches, baggy slacks and bow tie, Christo was trying to look the part.
In the small café by the observation deck he ordered a pot of coffee and turned to the smuggler’s basic activity: waiting. The coffee was strong and thick and made his stomach pucker along with his mouth. Or was that anxiety twisting in him like a parasitic worm?
He took out the Polaroid of his local contact. In front of a wattle-and-daub hut, a brawny, heavy-boned individual with blond whiskers posed, wearing a cable-knit sweater and a bicycle racer’s cap with the bill turned up. He stood at attention, an expressionless mug-book figurine under a sky whose marine hue probably had more to do with developer chemicals than any quality of North African light. Tomas Ulrich was the name. He was a Swedish expatriate who’d had a long and (to insiders) renowned career as an arms dealer: AK-47s to the Turkish Cypriots, grenade launchers to the Pretoria-backed faction in Angola, plastique to the IRA, and on and on. But he was retired now, ran an auto body shop in the heart of the city.
“Tommy’s an absolute no-bullshit pro. A heavyweight,” Pierce had promised. “If there’s any trouble it won’t come from him.”
But Christo didn’t much care for the idea that his envoy and broker, the hinge on which the deal would swing, was a weapons man. Gunrunning, it was agreed even among the hardened, was an unusually demented business. It attracted men interested in more than money, taught them that anyone, even a partner, was ripe for the picking.
Already Christo needed help. He did not want to leave the consoling anonymity of the airport. They’d taught him about synthetic spirit on the inside, where time was measured by the clattering of pills in the bottom of tiny paper cups. He shook out one of the footballs and medicated himself. There now. The moment after swallowing, he felt more hopeful about the task ahead; like starting down the road with a full tank of gas.
He taxied to the American Express office where he converted traveler’s checks into Moroccan francs. In the men’s room of a nearby hotel, he packed everything into a money belt, a thick and cumbersome going-away gift from Pierce that reminded him of the protective crotch gear boxers wore. Bomblets of speed lunacy went off in his head as he prowled the lobby full of international citizens with their guidebooks and cameras, their contented-cow stolidity he now envied. His mouth felt full of sand. It was all coming up too fast, too suddenly. The scam was too big for him. In hurried misjudgement, he was going to give himself the hustler’s bends.
Okay, okay. Just a little stage fright. Deal with it. He sat on the edge of a Naugahyde chair and lectured himself. Now was the time to flush out his system; there’d be no place for this kind of thing later on. Any sign of it and they’d shred him like a classified document. Keep moving, just keep moving. Let yourself go. Half the pressure, twice the quickness. And finally, because there was no other way out, he pulled himself as tight as the money belt and went on to his next appointment.
The purchase of the Land Rover had been prearranged with transatlantic phone calls and a money order. The salesman wanted very much to take him out for a test run, but Christo dissuaded him. He said he had to be immediately on his way to a meeting with government agronomists in Tetuán, and the lie had a tonic effect. Falling back into the old skills centered him. That’s it, just keep moving. He pulled out his Arno Bester driver’s license, signed half a dozen forms, and the salesman handed over the keys along with a complimentary map of the city.
The noon heat was insidious despite the ocean breeze, and Christo shrugged out of his jacket, removed the clip-on tie. Following the written instructions, he went down to the abrupt end of a palm-lined avenue and jogged right. Slow-moving chaos closed in, jumbled buildings and people layered like compost along the brown walls. He gripped the wheel hard. Nasty birdcage voices poured with sticky air through the Rover’s windows. The breeze was cut off here, the salt fragrance replaced by something heavy and unplaceable, though spoiled melon came close. Someone on a motorbike made a sudden U turn in front of him, and Christo trod on the brake, banged his knee on the edge of the metal dash. He considered the grisly upshot of a pedestrian under his wheels: pulled from the driver’s seat and devoured by a raging native mob.
The fright was on him again. He watched bunched faces passing, brown complexions like camouflage, eyes angling toward him. Enough turbulence out there beneath the steady, sullen surface to drown in. He’d been against a foreign venue all along, but Pierce had insisted. Fine for him, Pierce was the strategic whiz who never left headquarters. Christo was smack-dab and defenseless in this human overflow, his only weapon — language — useless here. Hold on and move through it. Keep moving.