Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

11.

Mauritania, 1942

Tim Nordhall awoke feeling stiff and numb, to find that a woman sat beside him who was covered from head to foot in black robes. Over her face she wore a black veil with gilded decorations around eerie looking eyeholes.

A fire crackled nearby, and he could smell the sea. He could hear the surf curling and crashing faintly, and he could hear a light wind keening through rock formations scoured by eons of light grit blown about in faint winds like this. He smelled camel dung and the greasy smells that went along with camp life. He smelled charcoal and tea and tobacco. The woman looked up toward a knot of men around the fire and let out a low, quick yell. Then she spoke softly to him, offering him a broad shallow cup. He rose effortfully onto one side and accepted the cup, sipping a hot tea that tasted faintly like butter, cloves, and goat fur. It was salty to the taste, and he drank it in quick, short, eager sips. Anything to get salt and fluids into himself. There must be some food value to this stuff. “Thank you,” he said, “sukran.”

“Ah,” she said in the shadows of her veils, “sukran.” It was almost the only Arabic word he understood. She seemed appreciative, and let forth a small torrent of praise for God and kind words on Tim’s head.

A man rose by the fire and came close. He was tall and wiry, a mix of Black and Caucasian like so many North Africans. He had quick, intelligent eyes and a sharp mercenary mien. He spoke with Tim in the same desert dialect. Tim couldn’t understand any of it, but sensed that he was in roughly the same bargaining position as the lion cub mewling in its net cage 100 feet away, or its dead mother lying beside it. Tim made beseeching sign language with his hands, with his entire body, promising peace, offering the sky if they took him to a police station.

The Berber laughed—a knowing and dirty snort—and pulled a gun out with his right hand. He bent over and in a flash had a knife at Tim’s throat. He held the gun on Tim while scraping the knife’s razor edge loudly through the unshaven stubble on Tim’s neck. Tim felt the pressure of the blade’s edge moving over his skin, just strongly enough to indent the skin without breaking it, but he could feel each tiny nick and dent on the delicate nerve endings around his carotid artery as that blade slowly moved from one side to the other. The message was clear, and he looked up into the Berber’s eyes with utter fear and submission. He had never felt so helpless in his entire life, even while nearly drowning with his shipmates a day earlier.

Two other men tied Tim’s feet together at the ankles so that he could not run. They laughed as they tied a small goat-collar around his neck. Every time he moved, the unevenly shaped hand-formed iron balls inside those steel bells would roll around with a rattling noise. Not only was he not going anywhere, but he was noisy as a London bus every time he breathed in and out. The men laughed, and one made a bleating noise. To them, he was something of a goat. He began to get the dreadful feeling that he was about to be sold along with the lion cub. Was there still slavery in this part of the world? Would he ever seen European civilization again, such as it was?

His stomach was full, and he belched uncomfortably as he sank into an exhausted slumber. The last thing he saw was the coppery faces of the men regarding him from around the campfire, and he had the twin impressions that they were debating about what price they could fetch for him, and that he had been drugged.

Tim awoke, retching. His head was filled with fumes from poorly burned gasoline fuel, and his bones ached from being banged around on the steel floor of an old, tiny Citroen truck. Only a faded, worn carpet scrap separated him from the hot metal floor of the truck. A canvas awning over the top shielded him from the hot sun that shone through pinholes in the canvas, blinding him and searing his skin wherever the sunrays struck. The air was dry and hot, like inside a furnace. His stomach seemed to want to jump out through his mouth, and found himself on all fours retching. Already, a thin watery puddle full of clotted milk bits covered the floor near him, and the smell was like rotting baby vomit baked in animal urine and old diesel spillage. At least, that was his muddled sense of what was coming out from inside him and mingling with the already not very charming contents of the truck. The truck, in any event, had stopped moving. He’d been dimly and sickeningly conscious of movement throughout the early dawn hours and into the ever-hotter daylight as the vehicle bumped over old French military roads.

Each time he retched, the goat collar around his neck gave a series of spastic rattles, almost in a musical rhythm. It made men laugh harshly outside the truck where he couldn’t see them. He didn’t need to see them—he remembered their cruel faces from the night before.

His ankles were tightly bound together, and rubbed raw where they touched. Sand had gotten in the wounds, and flies buzzed mercilessly around the serum and hopped around over his vomit, annoying his eyes. The flies buzzed hungrily around the cream stuck to his cracked lips, and he made sputtering, spitting noises to blow them away.

When the men outside heard him, their tone changed from laughter to serious haggling. One threw aside the canvas flap on the back of the cargo container, letting in harsh sunlight. There was a crash as the tailgate went down, and a common roar of disgust at the sight and smell of him. A hand reached in harshly, grabbed him by the collar, and yanked. He slid out over his vomit and landed on a mixture of hot sand and gravel and sharp little protruding rocks outside.

He was in a souk, a market square. All around, two and three story mud buildings cast merciful shade, and he crawled out of the hot sunlight into the shade of several men’s hems. A stick descended on his back, in a half-hearted whipping motion, as a white-bearded man negotiated unyieldingly with a shadowy man in a gray wool robe.

He was thirsty, and tried to get the man’s attention.

The man hit him sharply on the back with the stick, making him cringe with pain, trying to double over backwards which was physiologically impossible, but he writhed with his hands reaching behind his back and his mouth open in pain. The goat bells rattled, and people around him laughed.

Oddly, at that moment, he found himself swept in a kind of delirium, and he saw again the shark dismembering his fellow sailor under the water. He saw again the awkward pose of body—was the man already dead, or just numb with shock?—and then the plier-like attack of that needlenose fish, the darting, snapping grab, the floating pieces of the torso...

He found himself sobbing helplessly at the loss of all his shipmates, the realization that he hated Hitler for the first time in a flesh and blood visceral way for causing all this when he could be sitting in a miserable damp drafty factory by the Quinnipiac River in Fair Haven toiling over a Seth Thomas engine and listening to the alcoholic shop supervisor rambling about not taking a full hour for lunch...it was all jumbled together in a blender of sobs and emotions and thirst and despair...

The man who purchased Tim was a wealthy merchant from Atar, far inland in the desert from the coastal city of Nouadhibou. Tim hardly ever got to see his owner, in the time that he was a slave, because he was kept in a dark room in chains. It was not as unpleasant as the truck ride, except for the pain where his ankle was chafed by the cold iron.

He woke up in Nouadhibou, and found himself chained to a wall, though the goat collar was gone. His hands were manacled. He knew where he was because a skinny Arab with a French accent and graying hair came to see him. “I am the school teacher Selim Bey of Nouadhibou, Mauritanian city. What is your name, Sir?”

“Timothy Nordhall, Lieutenant Junior Grade, U.S. Navy, serial number...”

“Very pretty. British?”

“American.”

“Yes, very pretty, thank you.” The schoolteacher sat on a wooden chair at a scratched dark oak table with a glass top and smoked a cigarette. His features half-stayed in amber shadows. He had pale, delicate hands and a bit of a nervous tic. He had big dark puffy eyes and a paunch. Evidently he lived fairly well, but had a lot of stress. “Mr. Omar Nasr Tandileh has paid to have you here. He is wealthy man who owns much property in Nouadhibou. We are deep in the desert and there is no place to run. You will stay here until your embassy calls.”

“Calls or comes?” Tim said. He sat in a corner, leaning against the coolness of a whitewashed mud wall. The floor was hard packed dirt, but had some frayed old oriental rugs thrown haphazardly over it. Tim pulled together a kind of soft seat for himself. The chain on his ankle was attached to a wrought iron grating inset over a small fireplace. It was mortared firmly in place, and a little probing told him it would not come loose. No matter—where could he go, in the middle of the desert near the Mali border not too far from Timbuktoo? It was laughable.

“Calls, comes, they will negotiate. Very pretty. You stay here quietly and if you have concerns you call for teacher Selim Bey, yes?”

“I understand, Mr. Selim Bey. Thank you.”

Selim Bey had a way of mugging his cigarette, getting half of it wet while it hung with a long ash under his nose. Tim, who rarely smoked, didn’t understand how the man could tolerate the smoke drifting through his eyes. Selim Bey rose and hitched his white pants up. He tucked his shirt in and came close, bending down to run a speculative and feminine pair of fingers up Tim’s spine. “Very pretty. You lucky, Mr. Nasr Tandileh does not like sleep with men. If you stay quiet, Mr. Tim, it will be easy. If you make trouble, Mr. Nasr Tandileh will cut your foot off, then your tongue. You won’t run far.” He made a horrified face and pointed his index fingers at his own eyes. “Or he take your eyes out. Be careful. Very pretty.” Selim Bey tilted his head to one side, with big eyes and a protruding tongue. He ran his fingers up and down Tim’s back, grunting, while holding his other hand over his own thigh. Tim recoiled, throwing himself against the wall and raising his manacled hands to ward off the dirty old man.

Bey looked at his fingers as if to inspect their tips for possible damage. Shivers ran up and down Tim’s spine. Still with that cigarette dangling like a physical appendage, Selim Bey reached behind the desk for a walking stick Tim had not noticed before. He gave the desk a sharp whack, and Tim shrank back at the clear threat, the ominous sense of beatings and other abuse to come if he did not cooperate.

Bey walked to the door. “You smart, Mr. Tim. Be very still and wait until negotiations complete. Nothing happens to you if you are smart.” With that, he saw himself out. The door clapped shut, and a latch descended with a slam. Tim had an instantaneous vision that Bey was being cut in on whatever Tandileh hoped to get from the Embassy for his investment. Everything had its price.

Tim tried mentally to throw off the aura of slime the man had left in the room. He reached for the tin dog bowl nearby and splashed water on his dirty, stubbled face, feeling the warm droplets dribbling like thick blood off his chin and down his chest, into the hairs under the ragged tunic they’d given him to wear.

It was quiet in this empty room with its torn little carpets. Tim felt sick and exhausted, and he rested against the wall until he slumped down and started to go to sleep on his rugs. He heard layers of noise outside the quiet nucleus of this gloomy little room. Just beyond the confines, he heard the clatter of pots and dishes in a kitchen, and the laughter and conversation of women. Beyond that, he heard the noise of the city, the braying of camels and other animals—no dogs, for those were considered unclean—but he heard a cat meowing someplace. Those animals all had more freedom than he did, but then again he reflected, he was alive and all the men he’d served with were dead, gone painfully to a watery grave. He listened to the haunting song of the muezzin pouring like a dark and frightening river of words through the air every few hours—"God is great. There is no God but God. Mohammed is the Messenger of God. Come to prayer and be saved."

Tim dozed as much as he could, but five times a day he awoke to the nightmarish sound of that call droning away. He began to tell apart the voices of the men who made that call to prayer from the highest minaret in the city. One was a higher, brighter voice, like that of a man happy with his work; the other, a dour and gloomy voice like that of a man who wished upon the world the same penances and reproaches crushing his own heart.

It was during one of the latter episodes that Tim grew tired of waiting in his prison, and started to plot his escape. He was still shackled and chained to the wall, and his ankles had developed weeping wounds that caused him considerable pain. His legs kept growing numb, and he kept having to shift painfully around. This dance of the hours, coinciding with the passage of shadows across white walls like shadows on a sundial, kept him occupied.

In all of this time, he only met his owner once. Mr. Nasr Tandileh was a brown-skinned man of Egyptian origin (so said Madame Noualah, a dumpy middle-aged wife of his who came in twice a day to rub fats and oils into Tim’s wounds, and she spoke a little bit of English; apparently Selim Bey gave English lessons to Nasr Tandileh’s four wives). Tandileh came in one day, wearing a khaki and brown uniform of his own design, which was a cross between that of the French Foreign Legion (Vichy) and the Spanish Legion. He carried the French-style kepi, but it was black with red piping instead of white like that of the Legion. He wore a cape, evidently borrowed from the Spaniards not far up the line in Morocco’s western Sahara district. And, on his arm, was an armband with a French tricolor but in the middle of that was a small red rectangle with a white circle, and superimposed in that a black swastika. He wore highly polished brown boots, yellow puttees, jodhpur riding trousers, and a dark green-brown wool British battle jacket associated with Eisenhower.

Evidently weighing his loyalties, Mr. Nasr Tandileh no doubt understood the British and Americans were wresting Africa back from the fascists, but there was always the danger of Adolf and Benito’s return. Besides, western Africa was largely a French operation, since the French were situated just across the Med. The French had staked their claim in North Africa around 1830, after the end of their Napoleonic follies, and Louis Philippe had created the FFL to do the heavy lifting in the invasion of Tunisia and Algeria at the time. In the 1920s Spain had followed with its own FL, and between the two nations they’d broken the back of Barbary’s Rif warlords in the 1920s—the French attacking from below, the Spaniards from above.

Two swarthy thugs accompanied Nasr Tandileh during his inspection of his prisoner, while Tim lay moaning on the floor from an infection he was developing from the shackles. Turning up his nose, Nasr Tandileh had left the room after just five minutes with his bodyguards. Tim had heard a powerful engine start up outside, and this began to give him a sense of the layout of the sprawling house with its harem.

Tim got to know his surroundings. He was alert and scared, torn between the need to escape and the fear of what lay beyond the walls of his prison.

He noticed that Nasr Tandileh appeared to be a man of habit. As near as Tim understood, Nasr Tandileh owned a carpet factory and some other industries in Atar. The only light in the room came from natural sunlight pouring in through high windows during the day. Fortunately, there were no windows on the south side, and these houses were efficiently built of thick thermal bricks and mud, so that it stayed relatively cool inside. Much of the day, Tim rested on his carpets in semidarkness; then there were the long, black nights during which his eyes grew sensitive enough to see in the dark.

Most of all, Tim began to rely on his senses of smell and hearing. He knew what time of day meals were, and what was being served, just by the smells of vegetables, cabbage, couscous, peppers, onions, garlic, being fried in the kitchens. The routine of the house was easy to learn and was based on the comings and goings of Nasr Tandileh first, and secondly on the living patterns of his four wives. Apparently his first wife was the kind, soft-spoken gray haired woman who came twice a day to care for Tim’s feet and to feed him. Then there were two younger ones who had loud voices and argued a lot. Those two had teenage children who also carried on. Finally there was another loud one who sounded Senegalese, from just south of the border, who sang when she worked in the kitchen.

Beyond these sounds and smells, Tim began to triangulate—in a way, it was like Huff Duff all over again—so that he knew there was a wall about a foot thick separating him from the garage where Nasr Tandileh kept the powerful French limousine with which he left early in the morning and returned late in the evenings. There was a chauffeur who puttered in the garage for another hour, apparently cleaning the car and sometimes having assignations with a giggling young woman (Tim suspected it might be the young Senegalese, but he couldn’t be sure; it was just another scrap of information he stored up for the future). Most importantly of all, he noticed that airplanes flow overhead, and he learned to triangulate their flight paths. He would walk around the room, at least the part where his chain would allow him, and he’d look up, rapt, with his arms spread and his fingers splayed like antennas, and he’d listen. He would follow, by body language, as a plane flew in or out. At times he was so light-headed that he almost felt like a plane himself, or a bird, flying in the darkness under the larger machine’s prop wash. Once, while doing this, he fell down and banged his head, but the earthen floor there was forgiving, and he awakened sometime later when the old lady came to bring food.

A few times, while the old woman was in the room and the door was open, Tim could see into the house. He saw the gloomy corridors of packed earth, the rounded ceilings, the distant kitchen with its black oven doors and hanging pots. Once, he saw two men in the hallway on prayer rug while the muezzin’s call still echoed in the air, and the direction of their obeisances told him roughly which way was east, since they always prayed facing toward Mecca. From that he put together a mental map of the city. He stood under each window at various times of day, listening to the varying gradients and types of sound, and surmised that the main souk was about two or three blocks east. From there, he heard the lowing of camels, the shouting of hawkers, and the constant hammering of metal smiths.

One day, after the woman had come to rub his ankles in soothing balm, and after she’d left, he discovered that he had lost so much weight, and the shackles were so slippery, that he was able to slide first one foot and then the other out of his shackles. Worse, he couldn’t get them back in because of the pain and swelling after the acrobatics of twisting his feet around.

He had no choice. He must escape that very day, his seventh or eighth, or face some worse method of confinement. Already, his captivity was making him stir crazy. He was feeling stronger, more rested, from the feeding and the inactivity. He had a fairly decent roadmap of the town in his head—and his only plan was to reach the airport. He knew that was about a mile away through twisting alleys and streets. From there, he had to hope that he could bluff his way onto some type of European plane, be it Allied or Axis, and make his way back to the world he had grown up in, not this primitive and alien desert existence of 1,000 years ago.

His evening meal, of couscous with rolled up flatbread and mint tea with honey and milk, came at the usual time, when the house grew still as the family ate. The old man was home, and from a quiet niche he presided over a roomful of women and children seated at their cushions somewhere in the house. A servant usually brought the food and tea in two tin dishes, left them near the door, and retreated locking the door behind her. She also changed the slop bucket, which sat in a corner with a lid on it.

Tonight, Tim barely touched the food. He must make every second count, and he had a desperate plan. The chauffeur had finished cleaning the car, the giggling had come and gone, and the garage door had been rolled down as the man and the girl left for parts unknown.

For days, Tim had been examining a crack in the wall. Using his spoon, he began gouging at it, loosening the plaster and the underlying sand. Every few minutes, he’d freeze and listen to the noises in the house. He had a carpet ready to put against the wall in case anyone came to check on him, but nobody ever had.

Within a few hours, he had managed to loosen a few bricks. There was no turning back now. Feverishly, with bloodied hands, he gouged and dug into the wall. Slowly, one by one, he dug out the long flat bricks embedded in the mortar. To his dismay he discovered another layer of wall beyond this one, but he kept digging. He was going on blind faith, hoping his ears had told him truly what lay beyond. Sweat ran down his face, dribbling into the piled debris around his ankles. He took off his clothes so they would not become soiled with a mix of sweat and dust, so he was digging almost nude in near total darkness.

A moment of truth came when he had a hole about two feet in diameter. He edged close on his buttocks, steadying himself by pressing his work-raw hands on the floor by his sides. Slowly, with his heel, he began to push and tap at the wall. Every few minutes he’d stop and listen. His heart pounded in his ears. He remembered the admonitions he’d received—that the master would order his foot or a hand cut off in punishment.

There! He worked a section of brick loose.

Abruptly, a chunk of masonry and brick fell out and landed with a clatter in the dark room beyond.

Tim lay back, sobbing for breath, fighting his slamming heart while trying to listen for sounds of running feet, but nobody came.

Tying his clothes in a bundle, Tim crept through the opening. He was out, at least this far. Every step from here would be filled with terror as he sought to outrun the harsh code of justice by which he would be mutilated for life if caught. Not killed—he suspected his owner was holding out while bargaining for a good price—but certainly made to regret his rash attempt to outwit Nasr Tandileh.

Heart pounding, Tim furtively washed at the sink in the garage.

He did this without turning a light on, but there were windows on the side overlooking a leafy, dark garden, and starlight shone down into the brooding darkness with its long, elegant limousine. In the garage, he found a rather typical Berber cape of soft white wool with a pointed hood. He slipped into his, and pulled the hood up over his head. He also found the chauffeur’s wool socks and scuffy brown shoes, but his ankles were too painful to pull the socks on, and the shoes hurt, so he settled on sandals.

The doors were locked from outside, and Tim had to break a window and throw an old diesel-smelling blanket over the sill to climb out. But he was in the yard. No dogs! What a blessing. He clambered through a bush, over a wooden fence, and stood in a dirt alley among looming houses whose windows threw light out upon the darkness. He heard radios playing Arabic music, the lilting wail of a woman singer praising God or lamenting a lost love or commenting on the eternity of the desert.

He walked quickly in the direction of the airport. He was surprised at the smell of flowers in the air, and realized the town must have grown up around an oasis. There were no streetlights, but here and there a corner lantern in a glass case threw light on the next turn or the next alley. Occasionally he passed another night pedestrian, sometimes an old man with a donkey, sometimes a young boy hurrying along with a package. A few times, someone would greet him, and he’d mumble back in the local dialect, salaam aleikum, “be well, go with God.” A hooded shape got in his way, a woman, saying something, and he brushed past her saying his greeting, adding sukran, “thanks,” and he heard two or three young prostitutes giggling behind him.

The airport was little more than a long dirt strip with several buildings along the side. A windsock fluttered in the chill night wind from the desert, above what looked like a small warehouse and was probably a hangar. Next to that blazed every light on earth inside an office building that carried the French and Mauritanian flags (a tricolor, and beside that a green banner with a yellow star above an upturned yellow crescent).

Inside at a desk he spied several men in military looking uniforms, hunched over forms and engaged in conversation. He hurried past them, looking toward another building that had a sign, “New-York City Bistro.” Loud music and laughter emanated from there, and he thought he heard a man’s coarse voice bellow something in English.

Tim waited in the shadows with his hood up. Being dark-haired and unshaven, he looked a bit like a Moorish northerner of Caucasian stock. Many of the guest laborers were Fulani or Wolof, brown-skinned Senegalese, with occasional black-skinned tropical Africans from further south and inland. The French West African territory of Mauritania had been administered from Saint-Louis in Senegal since 1920.

Tim craned his neck, looking past the half-open blue wooden door, and into the interior of the establishment. Smoke from hookah pipes floated out, as did smells of strong, sweet black coffee and an occasional sour whiff of strong French cigarette smoke.

How long could he stand here like this before being challenged, discovered, thrown in jail, perhaps shot? It was all or nothing. He started walking. He kept his hands in his pockets and his hood up to keep his features in shadows.

He crossed the threshold onto the bistro’s wooden floor. He smelled cooked lamb, cabbage, a dozen other pungent vegetables. It was a rich, gamy smell with a strong undertone of wood fire, but he had no appetite.

A pair of men in khaki clothing, semi-military, with airline caps and shoulder patches, were just leaving with bundles of food under their arms. The bundles were wrapped in blue and white-checkered tablecloths, and each man also had a wooden container of drinking material (tea, probably, Tim surmised) in hand. “Fellas, you’ve gotta help me,” he said, confronting them in the narrow hallway.

“Was sagt er?” said the one to the other. “What’d he say?”

Krauts, Tim thought, just my luck.

The other, the older and stockier with the redder face, shrugged. “Engländer, wahrscheinlich.” Probably an Englishman.

The younger man, who was so blond he seemed almost albino, and was thinner and frailer looking, said: “You speak English?”

“Yes, I’m an American. U.S. Navy. I surrender. Please take me with you.”

They laughed. “We are noncombatants, Jack,” one said in good though thickly accented U.S. idiom, pronouncing ‘Jack’ like ‘Check.”

“Make that Tim.” He began to see some hope.

One of the Arabs in the place shouted a question, probably asking if some Rif baggage was bothering them. “Schon gut—alles klar.” the younger man waved. No problem—take it easy.

“Keine Sorge, alter Chef,” the older man told the Berber. Not to worry, old boss.

“You didn’t kill or rob anyone, did you?” the younger man asked.

“I was shipwrecked and sold into slavery.”

The old man laughed. “Anywhere else, I’d say you are spinning Märchen, telling fables, but not here.”

They took him between them, protectively, one at each elbow, and guided him along toward the landing strip.

The older man introduced himself as Willi Märzig, owner of a one-plane airline called Südstern (Southern Star). The younger was his cousin, Walther Märzig. They were originally from Kiel, but Rommel had brought them to Africa. Now Rommel had gone one way, and they had gone another, taking with them one of his cargo planes.

They climbed on board a Junkers 52 and pulled the steel ladder up. Willi locked the main door of the plane, while Walther climbed among the stacked crates and packages under a row of overhead lights, until he reached the highest little oblong compartment, which had a picture of a fire extinguisher on it. Using a skeleton key, he unlocked the door, which fell open to reveal what looked like a pile of bowling pins lying stacked on their sides. Walther took two of them down and slammed the door shut. He jumped down with a look of triumph on his face. “We put out the fire, ja?”

Willi pulled out a crate marked as containing delicate glass. Tim wondered what it really contained. He was getting the idea that these two characters weren’t what they seemed to be. Walther unwrapped the checked towels from the restaurant. “Plenty here for the three of us, if you are hungry.” The bowling pins turned out to be bottles of some exotic Central African beer, wrapped in men’s undergarments. Walther threw the long johns in a pile behind the pilot seats up front. “We Germans cannot breathe without our beer. These local barbarians drink nothing but coffee and tea, and they smoke hashish until their eyeballs explode, but they are very saintly about not touching the holy brew.”

The corks popped in quick succession, and the oily smelling interior became rife with food and beer smells. Tim closed his eyes with delight. “I’m suddenly developing an appetite.”

Willi continued their brief biography. “We saw that the Italians could not hold North Africa, and Rommel did not have enough supplies. Hitler kept pushing him to do the impossible in the wrong places with the wrong equipment, which is why Germany is losing the war, so we took our little Tante Ju here and headed south instead of north. We had four paratroopers and a supply of documents on board. With half a million men and much equipment being captured or fleeing, who was going to miss us? We let the paratroopers out in Morocco, because they had dreams of defecting to the Spaniards. We dumped the documents out in mid-air over the Atlas-Chouf mountains, where nobody will ever read them. And then we headed south to start our little business.”

“That’s right,” Walther added enthusiastically after a big swallow of beer and wiping foam from his mouth with a hairy forearm. “Now we need only a little more funding and we buy a second plane. Then we are in business.”

“After the war, we go back to Germany and start a Konkurrenz with Lufthansa if they still exist, ja?”

Tim was just about to ask what kind of business they hoped to conduct, when there came a loud and frantic banging at the door.

“Schnell!” Walther said, pushing the bottles across to his cousin, who swooped around and hid them under the pile of underwear behind the seats. “Quick! If the Arabs see alcohol they will go berserk. It’s their religion to hate this holy liquid.”

The banging on the side door continued until Willi slid it open. “Ja, Mensch. What is your problem tonight, my friends?”

A squad of Zenago Berber gendarmes in flowing white garments stood outside brandishing swords and muskets. Several wore Spanish Legion-style garrison caps with a tassel hanging from a front fold of the hat. Two military policemen in French Foreign Legion uniform (Vichy) accompanied them, brandishing German Schmeisser rifles. An officer in regular French (Vichy) army uniform led the group. The officer, a first lieutenant, looked crisp and European, his skin noticeably pale compared with the other men’s. “Bonjour, Monsieurs,” he said. “We are looking for a criminal who escaped from custody of Monsieur Nasr Tandileh a few hours ago. He is armed and dangerous. May I see your papers please?”

Walther grumbled. “Of course, Mon Colonel.” He patted himself on the pockets and exchanged glances with his cousin. “Willi, wo sind denn die Papiere?” Where are the papers then, Willi?

“I have them put away for the flight,” Willi said. “Hold on, I’ll get them.”

The lieutenant looked at Tim and saluted, palm out, fingertips smartly touching the short black bill of his kepi. “Monsieur, you have your papers?”

“Monsieur Malone is with us,” Walther said gruffly, handing three passports and three sets of oilcloth-covered documents down to the lieutenant, who stood snappily examining them.

“Who are you, Monsieur Malone?” the lieutenant said without looking up from the documents.

Willi whispered to Tim from behind: “Don’t let him rattle you. He just wants to go back to his whores and his cognac.”

The lieutenant looked up. “Monsieur Malone?” He waved the passport. “This is not in order.”

Tim felt his stomach sinking.

Walther sat on the edge of the door with his feet swinging down. He beckoned for the lieutenant to come closer, which the lieutenant did. Walther spoke softly in German with the lieutenant, while secretly passing across a small wad of Reichmarks. The lieutenant nodded, glancing up at Tim. The transaction was concluded shortly, and the lieutenant said: “Monsieur Malone, kindly get that passport updated before returning to this French colonial territory, oui?”

“Oui,” Tim said with hollow forcefulness. “I sure will, Sir, and thank you very much.”

“Allons,” the lieutenant said to his squad. “Let’s go look for our felon.”

As they drove off in a small rattletrap truck, Tim drew a deep shuddering gasp of relief. He wiped sweat from his forehead and asked Walther: “What were you telling him, in German yet?”

Walther nodded with a wicked grin. “It’s ironic, yes? We are German deserters who should be working for the Fuehrer but we aren’t. He is a Frenchman but he is an Alsatian, of German descent. Did you see his name tag? Rittermann. He’s more German than we are. Yet he is at heart a loyal Frenchman who wants to puke at having to work for the Vichy regime, and he cannot wait for the Tapetenhänger to lose the war.”

“The what?”

“The wallpaper hanger. Hitler. The greasy little vagrant from Austria who isn’t even German.”

“To hell with it,” Willi said, “where is my beer?”

“The important things,” Walther said as he slammed the door shut.

They sat at their meal again and toasted each other with foaming glasses while they ate their couscous. “To a speedy victory for Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt,” Willi said.

“No politics,” Willi said, as if afraid his cousin might say too much. Walther ignored Willi and asked Tim: “What do you think of Stalin in the U.S.A.?” He pronounced Stalin with a 'sht' as in Gestapo.

Tim thought for a second. “Officially we are allies. Then again, we’ve feared the Red Scare for a long time, or at least the wealthy people are, so maybe we’ll be at each other’s throats with Uncle Joe after the war.”

“I believe so,” Walther said, “and Uncle Joe will send his Cossacks to eat the German people alive, mark my words. This Hitler son of a bitch had to go wake up the Russian bear. Damn that fool!”

“I do agree with you there,” Willi said. “Now we’ve got to get some sleep. Where is Malone, do you suppose?”

“Good question.”

“Yes,” Tim said, “thanks for saving my skin. So who is this Malone?”

Walther belched happily and pointed his beer glass. “Robert Malone, my friend, is an American spy. Don’t tell him I told you so, but we know.”

Willi added: “We run the local freight lines and we see a lot. Malone is definitely working for the Allies. We salute him. We help him.”

“That’s right,” Walther said. “Malone comes and goes on missions very secret that we do not ask about. He likes us. Well, maybe he likes our beer, which we bring from Leopoldville and Lomé. You know, the Belgian beer is good—nothing like good German brew made by people who know how.”

Tim saw a map lying nearby and pulled it close. It was a compact navigational map in a plastic sheath, with faint black china-marker lines on it from previous flights. Lomé was the capital of formerly German-owned (now British) Togoland, and Leopoldville capital of the Belgian Congo.

“Very conveniently,” Willi said, “we have Malone’s papers. He had to run an errand on the other side of town and did not want to be caught with the wrong papers. I believe he is checking on movements of the Vichy Legionnaire regiments in this area, what’s left of them after they were misused in Finland and Tunisia and God knows where else.”

“The Balkans,” Walther said authoritatively.

“Yes.” Willi glanced at his watch. “About four hours to daylight and we must take off. Where can he be?”

Walther scratched his cheek. “I do want to get my sleep. I’ll pilot the first leg. You want to go look for Malone?”

“Yes,” Willi said. “If we leave him here he will be mad at us. We need his business.” Willi strapped on a holster with a Wehrmacht Luger. “You want to come with me, Tim?”

Tim did not want to leave the safety of the plane.

“I’ll drive,” Willi said. “You have Malone’s papers and the lieutenant is the gendarme in charge tonight. You have absolutely nothing to worry about.” He offered Walther’s Luger. “Please.”

“Okay,” Tim said, strapping the heavy gun on. “You do all the talking if monsieur le general stops us.”

Walther laughed. “I promoted him to colonel. You make him a general. He should be Charlie Chaplin. Very funny.” Both Germans laughed.

Willi came back after a short excursion to the restaurant. He was driving an antique blue Peugeot delivery truck, the kind with a corrugated steel cover over the bed. “Get in,” he told Tim.

The truck rode high on its rear springs, looking oddly insectlike. The front smelled of spilled gasoline and balled up oily rags on the floor. The floor mats were gone, and in one place Tim got a hypnotic view of a palm-sized hole under which the roadway kept spinning past.

“Keep your feet away from there. It’s rusted through,” Willi said. “These French. Why can’t they be like the Germans and fix things? I’ll never fly on a French airline. I’d be afraid to fall through with my seat.” Willi laughed.

“How long of a flight do we have?” Tim asked as they flew over dark roads among shadowy houses from which occasional small patches of lantern light flickered, or an open hearth gone into embers for the night.

They passed three or four broken columns clustered together. “French?” Tim asked.

“Roman,” Willi said. “Two thousand years old. They used to send expeditions into the interior from here to hunt exotic animals for the Coliseum.”

“I had a run-in with some lions on the coast.”

“Ah yes, the old Barbary lions. Thought to be extinct, but a few have come back with all the confusion of war. They aren’t pure breeds, but mixed with various other subtypes.”

“You are a hunter?”

“I was a Classics student,” Willi said simply. “I had aims of going into the pulpit as a Lutheran pastor, but the war changed everything for us.” He trailed off, grinding gears loudly on a hill as he downshifted before descending into an outlying village.

The desert was bright with moonlight as far as Tim could see. What a beautiful country, he thought. The beer was going through his system, and he had to relieve himself. Soon, Willi pulled up with a screech of brakes at an isolated farmhouse made of wedges of same-size stone neatly fitted together under a roof of corrugated tin scrounged from some old French mine in the area, probably.

Tim found a stand of small palm trees and let the beer flow back out of him while Willi went around the dark house knocking on doors and windows. “Malone!” he called out. “Malone!”

Tim finished and sauntered over. Willi had a strange look on his face. “You hear something?”

Tim listened intently. He heard a distant buzzing sound. “Airplane?” He rumpled his nose as a dreadful smell reached him on the alkaline desert air.

“I think not,” Willi said, holding his nose with one hand. In the other hand he held the Luger, aimed ahead, as he kicked the door open.

“My God,” Tim said, as the stench wafted out.

Willi flicked on a single overhead bulb, using a large white ceramic switch beside the inside of the door.

On the floor, subject to the buzzing of a thousand flies, was a bloated green corpse with a large knife sticking in his back. Nearby lay the smaller, thinner corpse of a dark-haired young woman who must have been very attractive before the green bloat set in. She might have been European and Arab or some similar exotic cross.

“Malone?” Tim mumbled holding his nose.

Willi nodded. “I recognize the ring on his finger. Whoever did it wasn’t robbing him. It was a bit more thoughtful of a crime. And the woman. They were up here to buy drugs. Christus, now what?”

“Let’s run,” Tim offered helpfully.

“Not that simple,” Willi said. “Not sure what happened here, but we can’t have our Alsatian police hound find this. Not when we had you playing Malone on our plane and now Malone is dead.” Willi scratched his head. “Can’t carry him in the car, or we’ll get a mess all over Osman’s boot and he does need to carry food out to the workmen on the roads when the French are paying men to work. What to do?”

“Maybe Malone smokes in bed,” Tim said.

Willi looked confused for a second, then brightened. “Say, that’s good. How do we get him to walk over there?”

“Good question,” Tim said. The bloated greenish-black mass would surely fall apart in ripe chunks if they tried to help Malone 'walk' to the bed by picking him up. “Maybe he is drunk. He is wrapped in a sheet.”

“Good,” Willi said, “I like it.” He started ransacking cupboards. “This is Malone’s little local hideaway. I know from flying with him that he liked to drink, nice American style whiskey from South Africa, which we fly up here sometimes to the local Mahdi for his intimate male get-togethers.” Bottles, cups, plates, forks, spoons, all clattered down onto the kitchen counters. “While I am doing this,” Willi said, “Pick out what you want from his clothing. The two of you are about the same size and build.”

Feeling macabre, Tim poked through dressers and closets. He found the man’s suitcase and put on an ensemble—khakis, boots, baseball cap, everything a well-dressed American. He took the suitcase with suit, shirts, ties, socks, dress shoes.

“Aha!” Willi said. “Look at this, how subtle!” Behind the spice rack was a false door and there, lined up like soldiers were bottles of Johnny Walker Black. “American stuff. Good quality. Shame to waste it, but we can get more where that came from.” He tossed a pair of bottles through the air, and Tim caught them expertly. In a few moments, Tim and Willi had uncorked four bottles.

First, holding his nose, Willi leaned over the body and pulled the knife from its back. He went to the back door and threw the knife as far as he could into a mass of brush and thorns where nobody would ever find it. He came back, clapping his hands clean of dust. “It will look as if he and his girlfriend died smoking in bed while dead drunk.”

They got a sheet from the bedroom, laid it beside the corpse, and used rolled-up towels as a pushbar to roll the corpse over onto the sheets. The flies buzzed more loudly, and a new stench rose as foul smelling liquids burst through the blackened, greenish skin and soiled Malone's clothes. It was quick work: roll him up, carry him to the bed, unroll him dumping him onto the bed, soak the bed with scotch, and leave a mass of lighted cigarettes lying around.

The unknown woman went the same way, though it was easier because she was much smaller and lighter. The interior of the place had a lot of wood in it, not to mention bone-dry furniture and lots of stacked newspapers and other combustibles. The bed caught with a loud woosh! before Tim and Willi were out of the living room.

As Tim and Willi raced to the car, Tim became aware of a shadowy presence. It was a spooky feeling for a moment, and his hackles stood on end though he had no idea why. Willi threw him the car keys, and both men got into the car. Tim pulled his door shut and turned the key in the ignition.

As Willi’s door slammed, there was a popping noise. Willi twitched in his seat. Tim looked over, puzzled, as several more popping noises rang out. Willi was arched over backwards with his eyes glazing over and blood running from one temple. Someone was shooting at them! Tim cranked the engine, wishing it would turn over. Glass shattered around him. Another shot. Two men, shadowy figures, stood by the house. Tim got the engine going, fishtailed the car, and raced away down the road leaving a cloud of dust. Through the dust, he could see that by now the house was a blazing dot of yellow-blue light miles behind them. Tim reached over to check for a pulse, but there was none. The body began to grow cold before Tim drove into the mud-walled outskirts of Atar.

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