Mac wingate 1, p.11
Mac Wingate 1, page 11
It was 8:55, according to Mac Wingate’s big Rolex, when Ben-jussif finally slowed and came to a stop. Wingate came up beside him and the boy pointed to a house standing by itself in a small open yard. “Numero Seize, Johnny,” he whispered. “Rue el Ghaza.”
Wingate expected the boy to wait for him there in the shadow of the side street. Instead, he broke into a rapid run, led the way across the Rue el Ghaza and around the back of the house. He had a key to the back door that somehow Timmermann must have arranged, and in a moment the pair of them were inside.
The stairs were to the left of the door and Wingate led the way with the flashlight beam on. The place smelled of furniture cream and Lysol—a strange mixture of wealth and public institution. They reached the second floor and turned around the carpeted landing for the final flight of steps.
Something about this particular situation worried Wingate. Finally he put his finger on it—it was the emptiness. As he passed the rooms on each floor, there was no sign of life behind any of the doors. No lights shone under them. There was no indication that anyone occupied them. The only sound was an odd drumming silence, as if some distant sound—a passing train, the beating of the waves against the shore—was being resonated throughout the place. The higher Wingate and Ben-jussif climbed, the louder the resonance became.
There were three doors opening off the top landing. He picked one at random and turned the knob. The door was open. Wingate took out the Browning and went inside. He moved quickly, at first with the flashlight beam off, crouching low and keeping to the wall on his left. He glanced back momentarily to warn Ben-jussif to keep low, but he could make out the boy’s shape already hugging the floor. Wingate felt a sudden sense of warmth toward the kid. If they got out of this safely, Wingate would find some way of showing his gratitude.
Wingate snapped on the flashlight. The place was a bedroom. The blackout shades were drawn at the windows. The bed had been slept in, but whoever had been occupying it had got up pretty quickly. The covers had been tossed right off it and lay in a heap on the floor, wedged between the bed and the wall. There was a side table with a couple of magazines in French and a little clock. The clock was still ticking. It showed 9:25. The drawer of the table had been pulled out and lay upside down on the floor.
Wingate checked the closet. Someone had already been through it. Some of the expensive suits had been pulled off their hangers and not been re-hung. They lay in a heap on the closet floor. Apart from the clothing and three pairs of French-made shoes, there was nothing to explain the disarray. If Moreau had left that mess, then he had certainly been in a hurry.
The center door led into the living room. The minute he got inside he could tell that Moreau wasn’t behind the mess. No one did that kind of thing to his own property. Wingate checked the blackout shades in the flashlight beam, then switched on the main room lights. The place was a shambles. The furniture was irreplaceable Louis Quinze by the look of it. Hardly a piece remained undamaged. The desk had been literally ripped apart, with the pigeonhole file organizers smashed and the drawers pulled to pieces. The silk upholstery of the chairs had been slashed and the stuffing pulled out of them and scattered all over the carpet. Even the carpet had been pulled back to expose the bare boards of the floor. Some goon had certainly been determined to find something. Had he found it? If so, what was so important to justify this chaos?
Where the hell was Moreau? Even by that little clock in the bedroom, the guy was almost half an hour late. Or maybe he’d been here when the intruder called and had been abducted. Perhaps there was a simpler explanation—the Vichy sympathizers who had been after him had finally reached him. Maybe Moreau was in some lockup where no one would ever find him. Worse, maybe he’d been tossed into the harbor with a couple of hundred pounds of scrap iron roped to his ankles. It wasn’t Moreau himself who concerned Wingate. But Moreau was the only lead he had. Without Moreau he had no choice but to go back to Patton and admit failure. The meeting that Patton was counting on preventing would take place after all! The whole course of the war could be altered. Wingate sagged under the weight of his responsibility.
Ben-jussif was calling quietly from the landing outside the open door, “Johnny, Johnny.” The call was insistent, but there was no panic in it and no particular urgency.
Wingate went to the kid. He was standing just inside the third door. He had put the light on and was waving Wingate toward him, all the while keeping his eyes on something in the room itself.
Wingate took a couple of quick strides across the landing and stood immediately behind Ben-jussif. He was in the bathroom. To his right was the toilet and the washbasin. Ahead of him was the tub. The shower curtain that had enclosed the tub had been ripped off the rings that suspended it from the rail. On top of it, half across the floor and half over the edge of the tub, lay Moreau’s body. The throat had been slashed so deeply that the head was almost severed from the body.
Wingate’s first reaction was to pull Ben-jussif out of the place and sit him down on the landing outside. The idea that a young boy should have witnessed a sight as grotesque as this was horrific to Wingate. Yet the kid himself seemed unmoved by it. He gave the impression that it was the kind of thing a North African boy could expect to come across almost every day of his life.
Back in the bathroom with the door closed, Wingate checked the body. He calculated from the way the blood in the bath was already half congealed, that Moreau had been killed an hour or so before. His eyes were wide open and there was an expression of absolute horror on his face. To judge from his appearance, he had seen his attacker face to face and known only too well what was about to happen.
Wingate went through Moreau’s pockets. It left him with a sick feeling in the guts, but he wanted some clue that would help him. Moreau had talked about a “contact” whom he expected to give him information on the meeting. Maybe there was some letter, some business card on Moreau’s body that would help Wingate carry on where Moreau had been stopped.
There was nothing. An identity card from the local Prefecture in Casablanca, a little pocket diary in which nothing had been entered except such personal details as Moreau’s size in hats and shoes. There was a small blue card in an inner pocket his of wallet that identified him as a member of de Gaulle’s Fighting French forces—a fact that was well enough known in Casablanca.
Wingate left the bathroom. “Come on, buddy,” he said to Ben-jussif, turning the boy toward the stairs. He was trying to put the whole thing into perspective. He remembered the chaos he had found on the boat in the harbor. He remembered the way Moreau had been trussed up in the closet. He remembered the Japanese heavyweight whom he had surprised rifling Moreau’s cabin. Maybe he had come after Moreau again. Maybe this time he had found what he was looking for. In that case there would be no point in leaving Moreau alive. A man with the strength of the Jap could cut through a stovepipe with one slash of a knife. A human throat would be no problem to him.
Ben-jussif ran down the stairs, a couple of steps ahead of Wingate. Wingate had sorted out his options and made his decision. He could start again from scratch. He could go after the Jap. Or he could take up the offer Selima had made—and in the process he could grab the explosives and blasting caps that he needed.
When they reached the back door of the building and began to race across the open yard, Wingate whispered sharply to Ben-jussif, “The El Khalil! I need to go back there!”
The massive Berber still stood by the steps leading up from the street, but he made no attempt to stop Wingate and the boy from entering. Selima was in the room, sitting on the sofa surrounded by cushions as if she had been waiting for Wingate to return. The blackout shades had been put over the windows and the yellow light from the kerosene lantern filled the room.
Jacobi got up from one of the bunks by the window and came over to Wingate right away. As far as Wingate could see, the passage of time had only made the little bastard more obsequious. “We’re—terribly sorry, Mr. Legrand,” Jacobi said, quietly. His voice had the texture of syrup. “Selima was dreadfully shocked. She hoped to spare you the experience.” He shrugged. “I see we were too late.”
“What’re you talking about?” Wingate snapped. Circumstances had put him in Jacobi’s hands and Wingate didn’t like that. There was something about Jacobi that he couldn’t stand—something corrupt and rotten behind this fawning act the guy put on. He was the last person in Casablanca that Wingate would have trusted—yet that was exactly what he was being forced to do now.
“About poor Jacques Moreau, Mr. Legrand,” Jacobi said, a touch of surprise in his voice. “Selima was the first to find him. If I hadn’t been right behind her, she would have collapsed. I’ve never seen so much blood ...!”
Wingate looked at Jacobi, wondering how to respond. Selima was sitting upright among the cushions nodding slowly toward Wingate. There was no point in trying to deny anything. They both knew where he’d been. They knew about Moreau’s death and they knew that Wingate knew. Where did he go from here?
Wingate sat down on the sofa and leaned forward toward Jacobi, his hands resting on his knees. “What the hell were you doing there?” he snapped, deciding that it was better to attack than try to explain himself.
Jacobi shrugged. “We might ask you the same question, Mr. Legrand,” he said. “We offered you the hospitality of Selima’s apartment and you simply walked out on it. Myself—frankly, I was upset. Is that any way to repay our hospitality?”
Wingate had walked out and there was no denying it. If Moreau had been alive when Wingate had got to the apartment on the Rue el Ghaza, Wingate wouldn’t be back here now. Jacobi and Selima and this odd El Khalil setup would never have seen him again. As it was, he needed these two because they could lead him to the explosives that he had to have.
“You’re right,” Wingate admitted at last. “I’ve been a pretty lousy guest. But I’m back now. I’ll go along with this scheme of yours. If you want some of your people trained to handle explosives, I’ll do what I can.” Off the top of his head he couldn’t think of any other way of finding where they kept the stuff. Once he got his hands on it, he’d have to figure a way of getting enough of it back into Casa without them stopping him.
Jacobi smiled and said, “Thank you, Mr. Legrand. Perhaps ...”
Selima interrupted him by clapping her hands twice very sharply. Jacobi stopped talking at once and turned to her. Wingate looked at her too, wondering. Was she the one who directed operations? Maybe Jacobi was little more than an interpreter for her.
Jacobi went to the second of the two brass tables in the room and picked up a pad of paper and a pencil. She took them from him and scribbled for a moment. Finally she handed the pad to Wingate.
“Why you go to Moreau?” Wingate read.
He looked at her but he didn’t say anything. He couldn’t tell her the truth, yet there was too much intelligence showing in her eyes for him to risk lying to her.
She took the pad back and scribbled again.
“Explosives?” the message read.
What the hell was the point of trying to keep anything secret in Casablanca? It was on the streets the minute it had been hatched. He still didn’t say anything.
She scribbled: “Moreau’s contact me. Selima.”
Wingate didn’t know if he’d understood the message. Was she trying to tell him that Moreau had contacted her before he’d been killed, or did she mean that she was the contact Moreau had been waiting for? At least that would explain how it was that she and Jacobi had found Moreau’s body. How far was it safe to lay his cards on the table?
“You knew Moreau?” he asked, speaking precisely so that she could understand him. He had concluded from her writing that her command of English wasn’t all that strong.
She nodded and tapped the message on the pad with an insistent finger. Finally she turned to Jacobi to explain to Wingate and Jacobi said, “Yes. She knew Moreau. Monsieur Moreau was a liberal, Mr. Legrand. He was sympathetic to the Berber cause. He had promised to use his influence with you to persuade you to help us. He intended talking to you tonight. That’s why he asked Selima to be present—that and the fact that she had news for him. But alas—”
Wingate was just going to have to go with it. “You were the people he was going to get explosives from—is that right?”
Selima nodded.
“And you can still supply them—if I cooperate?”
Again Selima nodded.
“And what was the news you had for Moreau?” asked Wingate.
Selima took the pad and scribbled. Wingate read aloud, “Meeting—Anfa Hotel. Delegations—three villas on grounds. Date—January 14.”
Wingate considered the message. He needed to make sure he had understood it. He said slowly to Selima, “Let me get this straight. The delegations are going to be staying in three villas on the grounds of a hotel at Anfa. That’s a suburb outside of Casablanca, right?”
Selima nodded.
“And the meeting itself will take place in the hotel?”
Again Selima nodded.
Jacobi added, “We are not just talking about any hotel, Mr. Legrand. The name of this place is the Anfa Hotel. It’s very well known.”
“Not in Sawyer County,” said Mac Wingate, dryly.
“Please?” Jacobi asked.
“Forget it,” said Wingate. “It’s a private joke. Just trying to ease the tension.” He felt the tension acutely. All at once the whole picture was clear to him. He was going to get the explosives he needed, he knew the location and he knew the time. He asked, “How long will it take you to get the stuff into town?”
“We have the camels standing by for you, Mr. Legrand,” said Jacobi. “We can be there and back in a day—unless you fall off.” He gave a little smile, as if getting his own back for Wingate’s “private joke.”
“What are you talking about?” Wingate asked. “You don’t expect me to get on the back of one of those damn things, do you?”
“There’s no other way, Mr. Legrand,” said Jacobi. “No trains, no aircraft. If we took a truck we should either be stopped or machine-gunned, if we travel as Berbers, keep to the old trade routes from the south, there is a very good chance we shall be safe.”
“Look,” said Wingate, trying to explain his side of the problem. “You knew Moreau. You knew what he was into. I need all the time I can get to check this Anfa Hotel and the villas. Have you any idea what kind of security I’m going to have to get through?”
Selima was shaking her head, indicating that there was a more fundamental problem that he had forgotten.
Jacobi explained. “We know nothing about explosives, Mr. Legrand,” he said. “Suppose we brought you the wrong things? You will have to accompany us. You will have to see what we can offer you. You will have to pick out the right materials yourself.”
“For Christ’s sake ...!” Wingate snapped.
Jacobi gave a little shrug and smiled. Selima continued to shake her head slowly from side to side. In the end, Wingate gave up. They were right. If they didn’t know anything about explosives, God knew what kind of a screw-up they could make by themselves.
It was a bone-cracking ride for Wingate, every inch of the way. They picked up the meharis, the fast dromedaries used by the Moroccan Camel Corps, just south of the new medina. In twenty minutes they had left the last of the mud houses of the outer city and hit the old caravan route southeast toward Oued-Zem.
Wingate was wearing the long, loose cloak of the typical cameleer, together with the full-cut baggy pants. His feet were in open-toed sandals. Round his head Selima had wound a long band of faded khaki cotton cloth to form a headdress, leaving the end loose so that it could be drawn across the face like a mask and tucked into the general winding. He wore the Berber garments over his European pants and jacket because of the cold of the desert night. In the waistband of his pants he still had the Browning, but on top of his cloak he carried an old leather bandolier diagonally across his chest and a French 1892 model rifle slung across his back.
The massive Berber led the way, a great black hulk against the deep velvet blue of the night sky. Wingate followed, then behind him Selima and Jacobi. Above the little caravan, the sky was studded with brilliant stars.
They rode southeast for three hours. The stars in the sky shifted their positions. The ghost of a moon appeared, covered a low arc and finally faded. As the pale violet of dawn outlined the first range of the Atlas Mountains to the east, they were skirting a small town on their right. No one challenged them and the big Berber never altered direction or changed the stride of his camel.
The coastal plain finally came to an end and they began to climb into the foothills. It was light enough now for Wingate to make out the more obvious features. The ground was rocky with only a thin covering of sand. The sand shifted all the time in the light wind coming from the west. It made a shuffling sound as it moved across the rock surface, and from time to time a sharper gust of wind would lift it and drive it into Wingate’s face. He could see the purpose of the cheche that Selima had wound around his head. The veil across his face kept the sand out of his mouth and nose. He was hoping too that the robe he was wearing would keep it out of the mechanism of the Browning. The next few hours would tell whether he was going to have to use that weapon.
They climbed steadily for more than half an hour, then finally the Berber reined in his camel. He turned in the high wooden saddle and called back in Arabic to Jacobi. Jacobi came up alongside him and the pair of them gazed ahead.
