Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (12 page)

After a moment, the beautiful wide smile flashed back across the lady’s face. “In person, Rufus is going to like you even better than he does now, Mr. Kelly,” she said. “Well—the Aurassi at four, then.”

Annamaria strode off without self-consciousness. Her walk had the grace natural to a slim-hipped woman with perfect health and assurance.

“Let’s go call me a cab from your office,” said Kelly, pulling a wad of dinars from his pocket as he led the way to the cashier. “Just in case somebody’s watching, I’d as soon not enter and leave the compound in official cars.” Rowe had taken the check, but the prices were in plain sight on the menu board. Kelly didn’t intend to bum even a cheap meal from somebody trying to make ends meet on a sergeant’s pay. “You know,” he added, “Mrs. Gordon isn’t what you, ah, expect in an ambassador’s wife.”

“A human being, you mean?” Rowe replied with a smile as they stepped back onto the grounds. He sobered. “Yeah, well. I mean, Ambassador Gordon’s a good choice in a lot of ways. He speaks French and he’s traveled a lot, that’s how he met Anna, I suppose. But he’s old money, you see, his family’s got a big ad agency in Houston . . . and a lot of the time, he seems to think the whole mission ought to be outfitted with servants’ uniforms. There’s a swimming pool on the Residence grounds. It’s supposed to be for use of the whole mission and their families, but word got out as soon as the Gordons arrived in country that the hoi polloi had better keep to their own side of the wall, thank you.”

Rowe opened the front door and paused in the Chancery anteroom. “Henri,” he said into the voice plate, “would you call a cab to take Mr. Ceriani back to his hotel, please.”

“I’ll need to rent a car, I suppose,” Kelly said as they walked back toward the gate. “Right now, I need a guide, though.”

The sergeant nodded. “Sure, they’ll deliver one to the Aurassi, just check with the clerk.” He said nothing for a moment, then resumed. “It’s the usual thing, big frog in a small puddle. You see it in army posts, God knows. But maybe it’s worse in an embassy because there’s nobody this side of DC that ranks the Ambassador, even though he’s got only twenty people under him.”

“Few enough higher in DC, too,” Kelly agreed.

“And I don’t suppose it was political contributions to the Secretary of State that got him appointed.”

“Sure, being able to call the President by his first name may—affect how you feel about a sergeant E-6,” Rowe said. “Or a commander O-5, for that matter. But the thing is, I think a lot of the way the Ambassador acts toward everybody else is the way that Anna doesn’t give a hoot in hell for all the crap and ceremony herself. She goes to receptions when she wants to—and she knocks ’em dead in a black dress, let me tell you—not that
I
get invited to many. But that’s when she wants to. And instead of running the mission wives like happens at most posts, charities and garden parties and such, she runs the snack bar. And that’s great for my wife, she’d be at the bottom of the pecking order same as I am with the mission . . . only I think life with his Excellency might be a little easier for the rest of us if Anna didn’t rub it in quite so much.”

Kelly chuckled. “When they come up with a perfect society,” he said, “let me know about it. Not that they’d want my sort anywhere around.”

The group loitering at the gate had changed slightly in composition but not in character. Someone had tuned a French transistor radio to a station that was playing Arabic music. Kelly had never learned the conventions of Eastern music, but tuned low—as this was—he found it soothing. It reminded him of CW traffic received through severe heterodyne, part and parcel of much of his life. “In Nam,” he said aloud to the sergeant, “when I was in base camp on stand-down, the hooch maids used to listen to horse operas while they worked.”

“Westerns?” Rowe said in surprise.

“That too,” Kelly explained with a grin. “There’d be the sound of hoofs as the hero rode up to the ranch. He’d sing to the heroine, she’d sing back, and then the chorus of cow-hands sang to everybody. Eventually the hero would clop off, sing threats at the villain and vice-versa, and then they’d have a gunfight. ‘Bang!’ ‘You scoundrel, you have wounded me, but my love gives me strength to overcome you yet.’ ‘Bang-bang-bang!’ ‘Haughty fool, I have slain your betters a thousand times—see the notches here on my gunbutts.’ This’d go on through what I swear must’ve been a mini-can of ammo before the hero triumphed and married the girl.”

“Jeez, that sounds awful,” said Rowe.

Kelly grinned. “Well, maybe I’m not a good source for opera. I heard
Rigoletto
at La Scala and I didn’t think a whole lot of that, either.”

Voices loud enough to carry filtered in from the street. The North Americans looked at one another. Both stepped through the open doorway.

A Fiat sedan had pulled up near the Residence gate. The driver, a tall black man in a dashiki and slacks, had gotten out and was arguing with the guard. Both men were gesturing and shouting—the guard in French, the black apparently in English disguised by distance and an accent. “That’s part of the Ambassador’s management style, what you see there,” said the sergeant.

The black strode haughtily past the guard and into the Residence grounds. Still shrieking, the man in khaki followed with his fists clenched. “Jesus,” muttered Kelly in amazement, “It’s a damn good thing the guards aren’t issued guns.” Then, “What do you mean about the Ambassador being responsible?”

Rowe stepped out along the wall and motioned the agent to follow him, not that the Algerians within were showing any signs of interest in the conversation. Cars, braking and changing down as they rounded the curve, provided background noise. “The Ambassador’s secretary,” the sergeant said, “Buffy Tuttle. She lives in the guest house right by the Residence gate.”

“I’ve seen it,” Kelly agreed.

“Well,” Rowe went on, “that’s a good place because she has to be on call pretty much all the time. And she dates a lot—she’s single and damned good looking. But his Excellency doesn’t like it that the guys courting her park right in front of his door. He won’t tell
her
that himself, maybe because she’s black and he’s afraid of being called a racist . . . so he tells the guards to make all Buffy’s visitors park across the street in the Annex lot. And they pay about as much attention to the guard as you’d expect.” Rowe nodded toward the Fiat.

Kelly shook his head. “His Excellency’s going to have blood all over his gravel if he doesn’t watch out,” he remarked.

“Sure,” agreed Rowe. “And what’s even worse is, well . . . there aren’t a whole lot of blacks in Algiers, you know. Most of them calling on Buffy are from the Chaka Front office downtown.”

“What!” the agent blurted. A great Magirus Deutz truck passed, its diesel blasting as it climbed the hill. During the interval, while both men squeezed their backs still closer to the wall, Kelly decided he must have misunderstood.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the sergeant said gloomily as the truck disappeared. “Goons from the South African liberation organization. They’ve got an information office here, may as well be an embassy. Which is fine, but . . .”

“But this is the secretary who’s typing and filing most of the Top Secret material in the mission?” the agent said, not really asking it as a question. “Jesus.”

“Neither Harry Warner nor the commander’s real pleased about it,” Rowe agreed. “In the country team meetings, the Ambassador says it may prove a useful channel of information from the Chaka Front. I don’t know. Maybe he’d say the same thing if she was dating Mossad agents, maybe he wouldn’t. . . . Anyway, he’s the boss in this puddle, isn’t he?”

A yellow Renault cab pulled up with a shriek of brakes. “Jesus,” Kelly repeated. Then, as he got in, he called back, “We’ll meet again soon, then, Sergeant, and get down to business!”

XII

It wasn’t particularly a surprise to Kelly that Annamaria Gordon drove up in front of the Aurassi alone. It did surprise him that the Ambassador’s wife was at the wheel of a Volkswagen, not the red Mustang which Kelly had seen parked in the Residence drive that morning.

Annamaria started to lean from her window to speak to the uniformed doorman. Kelly, striding from a bench near the lobby doors, caught that functionary’s eye in time to avoid being paged. He got in on the passenger side, meeting the woman’s bright smile as she thrust the car into gear. “I thought,” she said, “that you might want to be driven around in something less conspicuous than an American car with diplomatic plates, so I rented this. If you want to drive it yourself, though, you have to be approved by the rental agency.”

“Glad to know you’re so scrupulous about legalities,” the agent said with a smile. He adjusted the hang of his camera. “I’d figured we’d park at a distance and walk—”

Annamaria nodded. She was wearing a dress of gray silk, simple enough and rather high in the neck. While it showed little flesh, however, it did nothing to disguise the way her muscles worked beneath its opacity. Her hair was held up by combs of black wood instead of the plastic that had sufficed earlier. Annamaria might be unconventional, but she was not wholly unconcerned with the impression she gave, either. “We’ll have to walk if you really want to see the Casbah,” she said at Kelly’s pause.

“Oh, fine,” the agent said. “Anyway, it wasn’t the end of the world if the car was conspicuous, but that was damned good thinking anyway. I appreciate it.”

They were speaking in Italian. It provided a sort of time slip for both of them. For Kelly, the language returned him to his five most recent years as a civilian, where tension was the success or failure of a sales pitch. For the woman, Italian was a return to her early twenties, before the ten years of marriage that relegated the tongue of her birth to diplomatic gatherings—and that rarely.

Thinking about nothing that he should have been, the agent added, “Not that I don’t think we’ll attract more attention than Doug and I would have . . . but I doubt anybody’s going to be looking at me long.”

“A tourist couple,” Annamaria said. She looked at her passenger and gestured. The habit made Kelly wince internally as they sped south. “And you with your camera for what? Protective coloration? Very clever.”

“I told you I was working,” the agent said, looking out his window at the two and three-story buildings stepping down the gradient of the street. “I might have needed to talk to Doug, you know.”

“Not in front of me,” the woman said. “Not business.” She flooded Kelly with her smile again. “Besides, a couple blends in. Would you scandalize folk with the appearance of a menage?”

Kelly cleared his throat and turned his attention to the car itself on the assumption that he would be driving it soon. It was a standard VW Passat, basically what would have been a Dasher in the US. A decal on the back window announced in large, blue letters, “Made in Brasil”—surely as striking a monument to the omnipresence of English as one could have found. The engine seemed as peppy as the automatic transmission permitted it to be. None of the inevitable squeals and rattles seemed to signal any major mechanical difficulties.

“Unless you have a preference,” Annamaria announced, “we’ll park at the bottom. It’s all a hillside, you know. The natives got the part of the city that the French didn’t want to take over for themselves, and then just enough of them were permitted to stay to be servants for their betters. Not,” she added with a rueful smile, “that we Italians can claim much better.” Swinging right at a traffic light that had already gone red, she explained, “This is the Rue Bab el Oued, you know?”

“The Watergate,” Kelly said, dredging up some fragments of Arabic gleaned during his years in the Med.

Annamaria turned to gesture behind her though there appeared to be nothing but office buildings and apartment blocks. She continued, “Back there in the Bab el Oued was the poor section of the city—but for whites, you see. That’s where the Pieds Noirs lived, that’s where the Secret Army terrorists hid and built bombs to kill Arabs with, to keep France from ever freeing Algeria. . . . But they weren’t French, the Pieds Noirs, except in citizenship, the most of them. They were Italians, like me—or truly, they were Algerians or could have been, were they not so quick to slaughter innocents to prevent that result.”

Annamaria pulled into a parking space. In the near distance sunlight glittered on a fountain which the agent supposed was in the Plaza of the Martyrs. “I guess it’s natural that the people who’re worst off fight the hardest to keep the little they think they have,” Kelly said as he got out of the car. “And I guess it’s natural that they do it in the most self-destructive ways possible, too, because the people with all the experts to advise them generally manage to do the same goddam thing themselves.” He laughed and added abruptly, “They go out and hire people like me, for instance.”

There were no vehicular streets in the Casbah save the Rue Amar Ali which bisected it on a diagonal opposite to the one Kelly and Mrs. Gordon were taking. Access was by pedestrian ways, sometimes covered and always lowered upon by jutting upper stories. Sometimes the passages were broad enough that a traveler could spread both arms and touch neither wall. More often, they were so narrow that two persons passed each other with difficulty.

As the couple worked north and steeply upward from the Ali Bitchin Mosque, Kelly took surreptitious photographs. His old Nikon F was fitted with a 24-mm semi-fisheye lens. The pictures would be severely distorted by the short lens, but nothing longer would have been of the least use in such close quarters. Further, the wide angle lens could be used without normal aiming. Kelly had brazed a stud to the camera’s back. The other end was hooked in one of his belt holes. That kept the slung camera pointed forward and slightly upward as he walked. Whenever the agent was ready to take a photograph, he would turn his head and say something to Annamaria behind him. His right index finger stroked the release unnoticed. The heavy Nikon shutter made more noise than Kelly would have liked, but there was generally background sound chattering through the narrow passages. At any rate, the agent did not now have time to get used to new equipment.