The Desperate Ones
Carmody had never liked Algiers. It was hot, overcrowded, dirty, and seemed saturated with a permanent sweet-sour stink. But the main reason was that it was full of people you couldn’t trust, people who would cut your throat for a couple of dinars and smile while they were doing it.
In his room at the St. George, on the Boulevard Salah Bouakouir, he stood sourly looking out over the harbor and the Mediterranean beyond. It was washday, and every grillwork balcony on every stark-white, tile-roofed building was draped with laundry: a gigantic open-air dry-cleaning plant. In the hotel garden below, the palms and the olive and acacia trees had a wilted, strangulated look. Like Algiers itself, even on its best days.
Carmody turned from the window, began to pace the room — a lean, predatory man, thirty-seven years old, with flat green eyes and shaggy graying-black hair. A sardonic mouth made him appear faintly satanic. There was a vague air of brittleness about him, as if you could hurt him physically without too much effort; but his eyes told you this was a lie, that he was as hard as a block of forged steel inside.
The room was air-conditioned but he was sweating inside a thin yellow shirt and white ducks. A rum collins would have gone good about now, but he was supposed to go to work soon and he seldom drank when he worked. He glanced again at his watch. Almost four-thirty. The woman, Nicole, was late. He didn’t care for people who weren’t punctual, especially where business was concerned. He was not a patient man.
Carmody was a freelance bodyguard, a supplier of legal and extra-legal services and material, with connections that reached into nearly every country in the world; he dealt with desperate men and desperate women, with profiteers and black marketeers, with thieves and smugglers and murderers — on his terms, according to his own brand of ethics; and he thrived on the action, adventure, danger in each of the jobs he undertook. He worked inside the law and outside it, whichever suited the occasion, and had never failed a client or been arrested for even the most minor of offenses. It wasn’t cheap, going to him, but you were guaranteed results. He was good, so good that in the shadow world in which he operated his reputation commanded the highest respect.
The job that had brought him to North Africa had to do with a quarter of a million dollars in assorted raw gems. The day before, at his villa on the island of Majorca, he had received a call from one of his contacts, an Algerian black marketeer named Achmed. Achmed had been approached by a Frenchman calling himself Paul Tobiere, the man with the gems. Tobiere had come to Algiers from the Sudan, where he had lived for several years; come by way of the Libyan Desert, Tripoli, and the coast of Tunisia. Twice en route he’d nearly been killed by former associates who wanted the stones and their ex-partner’s skin as a bonus. How Tobiere had come by the gems, who the former associates were, didn’t concern Carmody. What concerned him was that Tobiere was so anxious to get out of North Africa, he was willing to pay one-tenth of the gems’ worth for safe passage to France and a new identity when he got there.
Contact with the Frenchman was not to be made through Achmed, as Carmody would have preferred, but through a woman Tobiere had known in the Sudan named Nicole Moreau, now a resident of Algiers. Apparently Nicole was the one providing Tobiere with his hidey-hole here. He hadn’t told Achmed where that was; he was too frightened to trust anyone with that knowledge, he’d said, except Carmody himself.
The meeting with Nicole had been arranged for four o’clock, but there was still no sign of the woman. Carmody would give her until five o’clock. If she hadn’t showed by then, the deal was off. He didn’t need $25,000 that badly. It was the work that energized him anyway, not the money he got from it.
It didn’t come down to a call-off; Nicole Moreau beat the deadline by ten minutes. She was in her late twenties, tall, broad-hipped, with thick blue-black hair cropped short. Dark brooding eyes appraised him coolly as he let her into the room.
He said, “What’s the idea of keeping me waiting so long?”
“I apologize, m’sieu. I was detained.”
“Detained how?”
“With my profession.”
“What profession is that?”
“I am a dancer at the Café Bulbul.”
“Yes? Why didn’t you call?”
“There was not time to use the telephone.”
“What’s more important, your dancing or Tobiere’s life?”
She made a pouting face. “You are not very pleasant, m’sieu.”
“I’m not paid to be pleasant. Where’s Tobiere?”
“A house on the Rue Kaddour Bourkika.”
“Where’s that?”
“The Casbah.”
“That figures,” Carmody said. “He have the gems with him?”
“No.”
“Did he tell you where they are?”
“No. He will tell only you.”
Carmody went to the wardrobe, strapped on his Beretta in its belt half-holster. The woman watched him without expression. He donned a lightweight cotton jacket; with the bottom button fastened, the gun didn’t show at all.
He said, “You drive here or come in a taxi?”
“A taxi,” Nicole answered.
“Then we’ll use my car.”
It was in the hotel garage, a small Fiat he’d rented at the Dar-el-Beida Airport. He knew the steep, twisting streets of Algiers only slightly, so he let Nicole direct him through the congested midday traffic. They climbed one of the hills on which the city had been built, toward the basilica of Notre Dame d’Afrique on Mt. Bouzarea high above. Two-thirds of the way up Nicole veered them to the left and into the fringes of the Casbah.
It had a romantic image, the Casbah, thanks to the Pepé LeMoko nonsense, but the reality of it was anything but romantic. It was a vast, squalid slum in which eighty thousand Arabs were packed like cattle into ancient buildings sprawled along a labyrinth of narrow streets and blind alleys. It teemed with flies, heat, garbage, and vermin both animal and human. Europeans and Americans were safe enough there in the daytime, as long as they didn’t venture too deep into the maze of back alleys. At night, not even Carmody would have gone there alone.
The Arabs had a saying: Thwakkul’ al’ Allah. Rely on God. If you lived in the Casbah, Carmody thought, and you weren’t a thief or a cutthroat, you’d have to rely on God; you wouldn’t have another choice.
The woman directed him into a bare cement plaza crowded with dark-skinned children, veiled women, old men in burnooses and striped gallabiyyas. It was the nearest place where a car could be parked, she said. They went on foot down the Street of Many Steps, into the bowels of the district. On the way a rag-clad beggar accosted them, asking baksheesh; Nicole brushed by him roughly but Carmody gave him a dinar. He reserved his cruelty for those who deserved it.
Half a dozen turns brought them into Rue Kaddour Bourkika. It was no more than three feet wide, the rough stucco walls on either side chalked and crayoned in Arabic and English, in one place marred with old bullet scars — mementoes of the French-Algerian War. They passed beneath balconies supported by wooden poles cemented in stone in the old Turkish manner — some of the buildings in the Casbah dated back to the Second Century — and went down more littered steps and finally stopped before an archway.
“Through here,” Nicole said.
Carmody followed her through a tunnel-like passageway adorned with mosaic tile, walking hunched over to keep from cracking his head on the low stone roof. The passage opened into a small courtyard with a waterless fountain and a half-dead pomegranate tree in its middle. Doorways opened off the courtyard, off an encircling balcony above. The air here was filled with tinny Arab music, the cries of children; the hot, sweet-sour stink, sharp in this enclosed space, made Carmody’s head ache.