Two Crosses (9 page)

Rachid regarded his crazed leader with fear and admiration. It was true, he felt sure. The war that had already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and dragged on for seven years was nearing its end. But the death toll would surely climb, faster and faster, like a man escaping a fire only to find that the ladder led him nowhere except to thicker smoke and death itself.

The French had their own group of extremists who launched a campaign of counterterrorism against the FLN and their own French authorities. The brutality of the French OAS matched in every way the cruel schemes of the FLN. Rachid smiled at Ali. The end was in sight, but the war was just heating up.

“Anne-Marie has talked?” Rachid questioned, hoping that he would soon have an opportunity to use his vivid imagination to eliminate this woman and her harki friend.

Ali shook his head. “No. There has been more important business to handle. It is satisfying enough to see them huddle in fear in that stinking room every time we enter. But don’t worry; their end will come soon enough. And the child will be found. We have someone watching. His eyes are very good.”

Anne-Marie listened from her seat on the floor as Moustafa described the Monoprix bombing.

“Half the block was destroyed. Three women and four children dead. Several men are missing. All pied-noir.”

“Of course. I know the neighborhood well.” She sighed. “What is the point of so many innocent deaths?”

“The point is fear, Anne-Marie. Fear. So they will all pack up and leave just as we did. Ironic that we are back where we started from. Only worse off.”

“We’ll never be free of them, will we, Moustafa?”

He looked away. “No. They’re convinced you have more information. Or that we both know about the little operation in the south of France.” He met her eyes.

“Yes, we know. But only the names of the harki children leaving. Thank goodness I cannot tell anything else. Ophélie is surely gone from M. Gady’s shop, and I have no idea where the bag is now.”

“We must escape. They’ll kill us soon, or worse …” His eyes were tender again.

Anne-Marie knew what
worse
meant. She looked down. “They will not torture me, Moustafa. Not like before. They will not have me.” She shuddered, remembering the night five years ago when they had come to take her. Seven Arab men. In the end, Jean-Claude had saved her from being killed. How was she to know that he worked for them too? How was she to know what he could do to a beautiful pied-noir girl who helped the French army?

“We were so foolish, you and I,” she said. “We thought Algeria would stay French. We thought it would never change.”

“You tried to help, Anne-Marie. You did what you thought was right. The pied-noir and harki children must flee to France. Ali’s war is not only Algeria’s war. He murders for pleasure and revenge. And we are in the way.”

After a moment, Anne-Marie pulled out the little bottle inside her sleeve. “I have two. Cyanide. If we die now—”

Moustafa turned away. “Suicide! Your religion does not permit it, nor does mine! It’s wrong, Anne-Marie.”

“You know that I have no religion, Moustafa. My father was Protestant, my mother Catholic, but I follow neither. The church will not have a stained woman. A woman with a child and no husband. A woman who has slept with the enemy to save her skin. A woman who is pied-noir and has betrayed her heritage. My sins are too many for the church and its God. I’m not ashamed of suicide. Ophélie will have a different life. I’ll save her by dying before they force me to talk.”

“No!” Moustafa grasped her shoulders. “Not yet, Anne-Marie. Our fathers died at the hands of a murderer. Their blood runs in the trenches. Perhaps mine will too. But we cannot be cowards. I will die fighting, not by my own hand. Give me another day. Another day to live. For both of us to live.” He held her in his arms, and she wept.

8

Jean-Claude Gachon stepped off the train in the small town of Aigues-Mortes, his muscular frame rippling underneath the deep-green shirt he had chosen that morning. The color brought out the intensity of his hazel eyes. His thick brown hair touched the shirt’s collar.

The scent of seaweed and fish greeted him as he walked along the platform and out into the late-September morning sun. He stared across a canal to the stone tower rising imposingly before him, then walked toward the entrance to the fortified city. The surrounding stone wall, with its towers and drawbridge, made the city look like it belonged in a fairy tale. But Jean-Claude was no stranger to the history of his country, and he knew this city had existed long before the Grimm brothers penned their first story.

He walked briskly across a bridge and made his way through the city gates. In his pocket was a scrap of paper on which a picture of a cross was crudely scribbled—a strange cross, with a dove dangling from the tip. Underneath, written in a hurried manner, were the words
Found on body. What does it have to do with the operation? Something is going on in Aigues-Mortes on the 30th, according to our friend Moustafa. Find out what it is.

As a
porteur de valise
, Jean-Claude had been working clandestinely for the FLN since the war began. There were many other French who, like him, supported the Algerians’ desire for independence, giving their time, money, and brains to the cause. That was how he had met Ali, the brilliant, driven military man with a personal mission that intrigued Jean-Claude. It was a violent plan, and it paid well.

Jean-Claude pulled out the slip of paper and stared at it. So Ali was searching for crosses now. In his four years of working with this madman, Jean-Claude had never had such an easy assignment. He knew all about the Huguenot cross. He remembered seeing one sparkling around Anne-Marie’s neck every night when she had lain close to him. And he could recall her words.
It was my father’s. He was a Protestant, a descendant of the Huguenots. He told me how their pastors were tortured and killed and the women imprisoned in a tower in Aigues-Mortes.…

If something was happening in Aigues-Mortes today, Jean-Claude knew just where to look. He walked confidently into the bustling early-morning marché. At last, another assignment to keep him busy on this side of the Mediterranean until he could cross the sea and celebrate Algeria’s victory with his friends.

“You see, Gabby, it’s not a long drive at all,” David remarked as his deux chevaux rumbled down the road past a small marker that read A
IGUES-
M
ORTES
5
KM
.

“This is real swampland around here,” she mused, observing the white gulls flying en masse toward the open sea far in the distance.

“Yes, well, we’ve followed the Mediterranean since we left Montpellier twenty minutes ago. You know what
Aigues-Mortes
means, don’t you?”

“Dead waters?”

“Exactly. It’s totally surrounded by lagoons. Saint Louis, France’s crusading king, built it in the thirteenth century, making this a port and hoping to attract trade. After his death, his son Philippe the Bold built the walls—you’ll see them in a minute. The Tower of Constance is nearly a hundred feet high and has walls twenty feet thick.”

Gabriella gasped as the perfect walled city with the massive tower he had just described came into view, rising like a mirage on the flat horizon. “It’s like something out of a storybook!”

David agreed. “It’s one of the most handsome and well-preserved monuments from the Middle Ages. The tower is where the Huguenot women were imprisoned. Let’s park the car and have a look around.”

David found a parking spot just outside the city walls. They got out of the car and walked past the vendors selling their wares.

“Saturday morning is always busy. But the city is nothing of what it was back in the Middle Ages. Fifteen thousand inhabitants then, and a mere four thousand now. Marseille, of course, became France’s great port, and the silt from the Rhône River eventually cut off access to Aigues-Mortes.”

David took Gabriella’s arm and guided her through the heavy wooden doors into the cobblestone streets. “We enter here by the Porte de la Gardette.” He looked at his watch. “It’s eleven now. You’ll have plenty of time to visit the tower and walk on the ramparts before lunch.” He grinned. “But be careful. The ramparts aren’t protected. Don’t slip off into some squire’s home.”

“You aren’t coming with me?”

“After a while, even the most fascinating history loses its luster. I’ve been here five times and been through the tower and ramparts every time. You run on and enjoy. I’ll meet you at the main gate in an hour. No, let’s make it twelve thirty. Ah, but we should get the bread first. The boulangeries all close at noon. Here—” He put ten francs in her hand. “Get a
baguette
and a
ficelle
. Do you mind? There’s a good little store with a green-and-white awning on the next road. I’ll slip out to the marché and get us some fruit and cheese. What will you have?”

“A pear, please,” she said, “and some Morbier. I’ll see you back here in a sec.”

Gabriella turned down the side street David had indicated and easily found the shop with its awning and the delicious smells escaping from its door. She slipped inside and waited behind two customers.

“
Bonjour, mademoiselle
,” the hearty baker greeted her when her turn came.

“
Bonjour.
Yes, I’d like a baguette and, and a … now what did he say? Oh yes, a ficelle! Yes, that’s it.”

The baker, dusted in flour, reached behind him to where loaves upon loaves of bread in all shapes and sizes stood lined neatly in wire racks. He retrieved an especially long and narrow one and placed it on the counter. “A ficelle, you said?” His heavy eyebrows rose.

Gabriella blushed. “Yes, a ficelle. And a baguette.”

“You are sure?”

“Yes, quite.” She placed the ten francs on the counter and waited for the change before picking up the loaves of bread, which the baker had wrapped together around the middle with a thin piece of tissue.

Moments later she and David met in the open square and compared their purchases.

“Well done, Gabby! Enjoy yourself, and when you return, I’ll have the most delicious sandwich that your mouth has ever tasted waiting for you.”

Gabriella walked across the drawbridge, which had once obviously led over a moat, and passed through the heavy gates of the tower. The main floor was empty except for a young man in a dark-green shirt. He stood in the center of the circular room looking up at the vaulted ceiling. Reading from her guidebook, Gabriella walked around the room and felt the cool stones.
A prison.

She found some spiraling, narrow stone stairs and made her way up, letting her imagination take her back several centuries. The second floor was where the female prisoners were kept. In the medical school in Montpellier she’d seen a painting of the women huddling together on the tower roof, but standing here, it all seemed more real.

The room looked like an exact replica of the one below. In the middle of the floor was a round opening covered with steel grating. She sat down on a curb of raised stones surrounding the hole and ran her fingers along the top of the curb, noticing what seemed to be writing on one stone.