Assignment Madeleine Page 8

  “Are you Monsieur Durell?”

  “I am.”

  “Then I have come for you, m’sieu.”

  “To kill me? Why?”

  “Not to kill you. I have orders to take you to a conference.”

  “With whom?”

  The man’s eyes were pale crescents sliding toward Madeleine as she sat on the bed. The girl was rubbing her throat and mouth with one hand. She held the sheet around her body with the other. “It would be best if we discussed this privately. An old friend of yours has learned of your arrival in Marbruk. He is anxious to talk to you.”

  “News travels fast in Marbruk.”

  “Events match the pace of the news, like two running camels.” The man’s voice was sardonic. “You do not need the gun, m'sieu.”

  “But you came prepared for violence.”

  “Only because it is necessary that you agree to come on our terms. You must come with me blindfolded and give your word you will not attempt to discover where I take you.”

  “I have nothing to discuss. Suppose I say no?”

  “It will be to your advantage. It concerns your prisoner.”

  Madeleine's whisper was harsh. “Charley?”

  Durell looked at her. Her face was dim and lovely, but it was also traced with uninhibited savagery in the dim light. “Go back to your room, Madeleine,” he said quietly. “It would be best.”

  “She was in here waiting for you," said the Arab.

  “This harlot, this traitor.”

  “Go on, Madeleine,” Durell said.

  The girl slid off the bed and stood up. Her body looked soft and rounded as she walked past him into the other room. Durell scooped up her skirt and blouse and tossed them through the doorway after her, then closed the door and turned the key in the lock. “Stay here,” he told the Arab.

  He Went into the corridor. The French soldier was stirring on the tiled floor beyond the threshold. His eyes held a dazed, wild look. Durell went to Madeleine’s corridor door and locked that and pocketed the key.

  The Arab stepped into the hallway across the guard’s body.

  Durell said, “Who wishes to speak to me?”

  “It is the Hadji, my commander. El-Abri.”

  “Does he remember me?”

  “He remembers you with friendship, m’sieu.”

  “How can I be sure you’re telling the truth?”

  “He said to remind you of a favorite quotation of his, which he is sure you will remember. It is this: In this life, one must either be the anvil or the hammer. The strong man tries to be the hammer.”

  "I'll go,” Durell said.

  Chapter Ten

  THEY LEFT the hotel by a back door. The lobby was empty and there was no sign of Felix. The Arab led the way for a few hundred yards, through one alley and then another, each redolent with smells. The moon provided the only light. Durell kept his gun in hand until they came to a small, battered Renault 4-C, a Quatre Chevaux model, parked in a courtyard. Tramping feet came to them from the opening of a crooked street nearby, and they stood in silent darkness until a U.T. patrol passed. The Arab took out a long scarf while he listened.

  “The territorial units fight terror with terror. It is like a darkness on the land. You agree to be blindfolded?"

  “How far must we go?”

  “It will take no more than fifteen minutes, if we are not stopped by patrols.”

  “The Hadji is reckless to make his headquarters so close to the French.”

  “One can hide in the nest of the adder better than on the open rock. You may keep your gun, m’sieu. You have el-Abri’s word that you will be returned safely in one hour.”

  The trip was no longer than the Arab said it would he. Durell tried to mark the twists and turns of the Renault’s course, listening to the changing sound of the tires as they rumbled over stone, asphalt, and finally a gravelly roadway. Once they stopped abruptly, and he heard a truck lumber along not far away, and he assumed it was another U.T. patrol. He heard French voices, and then the truck went on; after a moment the Renault proceeded again, turning left, then bumping over a wooden bridge, to judge by the hollow rumbling under the wheels. Then they stopped abruptly.

  "We are here, m’sieu. You may remove the blindfold."

  For a moment Durell felt a confusion of time, as if the fifteen years since his last assignment in the OSS had never been. For two months he had worked in the desert with el-Abri, who then had not yet made his pilgrimage to Mecca to earn his title of Hadji. They had been operating a radio unit then, exploring the sentiment of Arab and French settler alike, preparing for the North African invasion. He had lived in the desert as just another Berber with el-Abri, had risked capture by a Nazi counterintelligence unit, had avoided Rommel in a long swing through the deserts of Tunisia. They were both younger and wilder in those days, Durell remembered. And the postwar years had seen too many changes in this country to expect things to have remained as they had been.

  When he stepped from the Renault, he saw the huddle of a douar, a native village of about eight mechtas, the mud-walled Arab houses. There were a few straggling date palms and the high, windy pressure of the mountain slopes to the north. He looked back and saw that the road they had followed twisted along the edge of a rock wadi. An armed guard in ragged khaki lowered his rifle and nodded to the Arab and Durell.

  “The Hadji is waiting. Is the American armed?”

  “Yes,” Durell said.

  “Ah, you speak our tongue.” The guard moved closer.

  “One does not know how the years will change a man, the Hadji says. He remembers you as a man of courage and honor. But a long time has passed since he saw you last.”

  “The knife cuts both ways, Durell said. I keep my gut“

  As you say."

  Durell stepped into the largest of the mechtas. El-Abri got up from a chair behind a wooden table, where maps had been spread in apparent disarray. Durell remembered him at once. He was gray now, where he had been dark and wild and unkempt. And there was a veneer of culture over the tall Berber that hadn’t been there fifteen years ago.

  “Durell.” His hand was hard and lean. "It is good to see you again.”

  “And good to see you, too,” Durell said.

  El-Abri smiled. “We could have enjoyed our reunion under happier circumstances, I fear. For me, it would be better if I were no longer a renegade guerrilla chief, hiding in my own land. For you and your people, the world has turned upside down, has it not? You Americans no longer walk the world in pride and arrogance.

  “Humility can have a cleansing effect,” Durell said.

  “Would you like a drink? For myself, of course—”

  “No, thank you. You asked to see me, Hadji, but not in friendship. Only in a state of truce.

  “We have no quarrel, you and I. Please sit down. Forgive me if you think I greet you with a taunt and a jeering phrase. But what I said is true, is it not? Between East and West, the balance has tipped against you. You no longer have the comfort of complacency. The world walks on the edge of a knife.”

  “We can use that knife to pare some of our fat, Durell said. “We respect our rivals now, and that is good.”

  He sat down. “Your war with the French is not my war, and I am not permitted to take part in it or even to venture an opinion on it. If I am ere under terms of truce, then I must warn you not to tell me anything I should not know. I may be considered a neutral, yet most of my associations are with the French. Do you understand?”

  El-Abri smiled. “You are here as a friend, then, unless you choose otherwise.”

  “Agreed.”

  “You look well.”

  “And you, too.”

  “Much time has passed since our old victory, Durell.”

  “The war is not yet over,” Durell said.

  There was a single, smoky kerosene lantern in the one-room hut, and the Berber chieftain turned it up slightly so that its yellow light flared out in the bare room. His teeth gleamed wh
itely as he smiled. His face was the face of the desert, lean and dry, scarred under a thin gray beard. He wore a khaki uniform, the trousers stuffed into American paratrooper’s boots. El-Abri was armed with a German Schmeiser and a long, wicked-looking knife in a leather scabbard. His pale brown eyes were brooding and intelligent.

  “Did you know I spent four years in Paris after the liberation?” the Berber asked abruptly. “I learned the ways of the French and then I went to Mecca and then I attended the Arabic University of Zitouna, in Tunis. By that time the resistance movement was in full swing and I joined it. Your war has not ended, and indeed, is going badly for you, Durell. My war is the same. But today we fight, if not on opposite sides, at least in different directions.”

  “I wish it were otherwise,” Durell said.

  “But you and I are not enemies, and never will be.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  El-Abri sighed. “Yet the fighting will go on. The relationship between Arab and Frenchman must not he that of horse and rider.”

  “You don’t hate the French, then,” Durell said.

  “No. I hate the extremists of both parties, if you must know. The French territorials, the settlers, the proprietors call us gooks and want to continue the attitude of treating us as inferior people, using terror and violence to prolong the war between us, just as much as the rebel factions have now become intransigent and refuse to treat or negotiate.”

  “You didn’t send for me, though, to give me a political lecture,” Durell said.

  “You wonder why I sent for you. The French would like to know about this douar. I should tell you, first, that tonight’s raid on Marbruk was not my operation. It was the extremist faction.”

  “You don’t work together?”

  Something flickered in the Kabyle’s tawny eyes. “No. It has not been so for some time. This is my territory and my people live here, and I have been in command since the fighting began. But recently the extremists came in and demanded jurisdiction. Until then, I managed to keep things peaceful. There was no terror, no murders.” El-Abri’s eyes darkened. “Unlike the extremists, I refuse to kill Arabs who remain loyal to the French. We owe much to France and will owe more before our legitimate aims are achieved. And long afterward, as well.”

  “You do not speak like a man of violence,” Durell said.

  “I have had enough of it.”

  “But you bear arms and command troops.”

  “A great many harkas, or units. Yes. I only wish what will be best for my people and Algeria. One moves with the winds of the desert. Or one dies. I shall be truthful with you, Durell. As an old comrade, you will understand. I know why you are here. I knew you were coming before you left Paris. Our intelligence is very, very good. I knew your friend, Orrin Boston. He was my friend, too. We talked often about you. I have said prayers for him since his death.”

  “Was Orrie negotiating with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “For a truce?” Durell asked tentatively.

  El-Abri smiled thinly. It was like a movement in granite. “You are an astute man. I trusted Orrin Boston. Yes, I was negotiating for a truce with the French. After the extremists came in, I searched my conscience for the right and wrong of this war. The extremists use violence, murder, looting. They think they can win the rebellion this way and hope for stability afterward. I believe otherwise. I believe in negotiation to achieve Algerian aims. For this reason—and because your enemies, too, seek to blow up the sands of the Sahara to obscure their own aims against you—I was prepared to surrender with my two thousand men to the French.”

  Durell sat back in die hard wooden chair. Nothing changed in his face, but he knew the importance of el-Abri’s announcement. Few of the rebels had dared to surrender, in view of the extremist ten-or behind them. If a truce here could be achieved, a chain reaction might result that could bring reason and eventual peace in a reasonable time. He understood now what Orrin Boston was trying to do. Peace anywhere in the world” was worth any effort, and desirable for the West.

  ‘What stopped your plans to surrender, then?” Durell asked. “You haven’t laid down your arms, Hadji.”

  The Berber said flatly, “Because I was betrayed.”

  “Not by Orrin Boston,” Durell said.

  “No, no. By his assistant, that man L’Heureux. The man you claim as your prisoner.” The Kabyle’s eyes were like hard topaz as he leaned forward into the light of the kerosene lamp. “Listen and understand, Durell. You think it will perhaps be a small thing if I surrender with my small force of men. Maybe so. A small event in a large and troubled world. But who knows which straw, Durell, will tip the scales for or against the Western world?”

  Durell nodded. “Hadji, you know me of old. If I fight for anything, it is to see men live in peace, through reason, not locked in a struggle to kill each other.”

  “Yes, you were always i e that,” el-Abri mused.

  “Well, I was prepared to surrender, granted amnesty.

  It was all arranged by Orrin Boston, and Captain DeGrasse knew my intentions. But I was betrayed, as I said. As I took my men down out of the mountains, I marched them unwittingly into an ambush. The ambush was not made by the French. It was sprung by my so-called brothers of the extremists. Someone informed them of my readiness to negotiate, and because of their fanaticism and zeal, they set a trap for me. It was a massacre, my friend. Many of my men fell.”

  “But you escaped,” Durell said quietly.

  “Yes. And we took one of the extremists a prisoner. We made him talk It was not easy. Nothing is easy in the desert. The prisoner was a lieutenant, and I had to torture him before his tongue loosened. He told me that your agent, Charles L’Heureux, working for Orrin Boston, tipped his commanders that I was coming out of the mountains to negotiate a surrender. So they waited for me and tried to wipe us out. They failed. And now I know that L'Heureux killed your friend and mine, Orrin Boston, when Boston learned of L’Heureux’ part in the affair. The blood of many of my men are on this man’s hands. And he is the man you have come to take

  back with you as a prisoner.”

  Durell nodded. From outside the hut came the measured tread of a guards boots on the rocky shale at the edge of the wadi. The wind had changed. The chill of a desert night was in the air.

  “What are your plans now, Hadji?” he asked.

  “I still wish to surrender. I believe my way is right.”

  “And what about your men?”

  “They will follow me. They are lonely for their women and their own mechtas. We have discussed it democratically. They will go where I lead them.”

  “I can arrange it for you,” Durell said. “Perhaps I can finish Orrin Boston’s work.”

  “That would be fitting,” el-Abri said. “But there is a condition.” The Kabyle’s thin face was harsh. “The condition is L’Heureux. You must give him to me. And then I will surrender to DeGrasse.”

  “No,” Durell said.

  “It is a small thing. Perhaps you do not yet understand. He caused many good men to die because of his greed and treachery. And he killed Orrin Boston.”

  “What would you do with him?”

  “I intend to kill him.”

  "I'm sorry,” Durell said. “You can't have L’Heureux.”

  The guerrilla commander stood up and walked to the door of the hut and looked out at the desert night. His voice had tightened. “Would you defend such a man, Durell?”

  “I don’t defend him. And I don’t judge him. My orders are to take him back to Paris.”

  “You have no desire for revenge?”

  “My personal feelings cannot enter into it,” Durell said.

  El-Abri looked at him curiously. “I ask you once more for this murderer, this assassin. I want this man who killed our mutual friend, who would have seen me killed along with my men, for personal gain. Two hours after he is in my hands, I promise to surrender. There will be an end to the fighting here. A small thing, perhaps, as I said
before. I do not delude myself about my importance. But it is a straw, is it not?”

  “You can surrender, anyway,” Durell said. “Charles L’Heureux is of no importance in this matter.”

  “He is important to me. It is a matter of honor.”

  “I can’t let you have him,” Durell said.

  The Kabyle turned away from the door of the mechta. His face had hardened. He looked as cruel as the barren land that had given him birth. “Durell, we are old friends. We fought together. You remember how it was, when we were young?”

  Durell smiled. “I don't feel that old now.”

  “Still, it was many years ago. One grows old quickly in this land. And the world has changed. Your country can no longer walk in pride and solitary arrogance. You need friends. I do not like to speak to you in this fashion,. Give me Charles L’Heureux.”

  "No."

  “I cannot understand you.”

  Durell said, “I have my orders. Call it duty. I have to do my job.”

  “It is only that? A sense of duty?”

  “Would you call that a small thing, Hadji?” Durell asked. “I don’t enjoy having to protect this man. I didn’t ask to save his life. But he must live to be tried justly and honestly, and then ta.ke his punishment. I’m taking

  him back to Paris with me.”

  “You were always a stubborn man,” the Hadji said softly. He looked at Durell with sadness behind his bold, tawny gaze. “It could be a stupidity. But I have one more thing to offer.”

  “The money.” Durell asked.

  The Kabyle was surprised. He flied to hide it, but for just one moment the stony mask of his face gave way. He reached down on the floor and picked up a thermos bottle and poured two cups of coffee into small tin mugs. “What do you know about it?” el-Abri asked.

  “I know that a quarter-of-a-million American dollars is floating around here somewhere. Do you have it, Hadji?”

  “No."

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tell me about it,” Durell said.

  “The money was taken from your courier in a criminal plot,” el-Abri said. “It had nothing to do with politics at the time. Then L’Heureux got into it through his associations with criminal gangs in this area and in the Mediterranean. Smugglers and the like. Scum and offal. The original thieves were killed. And the people for whom L’Heureux used to work got into it.”