“One dumb flatfoot from New York could make this city run like a clock,” he said. “I tell you, these gooks can’t handle anything but camels. But goddammit, how come they drift along like they got a bundle of dough and a three-day pass in their pockets. You know what I mean?”
Beecher smiled; by now he understood the sergeant’s violent attacks on anything he couldn’t compare unflatteringly to America; it was a defensive and puzzled reflex, he guessed, the sore trial of a man who had been taught to equate love of his own country with suspicion and contempt for all others. The sergeant appreciated the splendors of the market at Marrakech well enough to want to show it off to them; but his appreciation made him feel guilty.
“Maybe they’ve got their points,” Beecher said.
“Yeah, right on the tops of their heads,” the sergeant said, and scratched his jaw.
They exchanged hasty good-bys. The soldiers still had a twenty-mile drive ahead of them to their base at Nouasseur. O’Doul made a face when Beecher tried to thank him. “Forget it, Mac.”
For tonight, Beecher decided the Mansour would do as well as any place else. Perhaps even better. It was formidably busy and elegant; hardly the sort of hotel the police would expect a wanted murderer to choose for a hide-out. He was mildly surprised at the devious twist of his thoughts.
A misting rain had begun to fall, and the sidewalks gleamed with yellow light falling in cones from the street lamps.
“Let’s go,” Beecher said, and took Ilse’s arm. “Now listen.”
It wasn’t necessary to repeat the maneuver they had used in Agadir. Ilse joined a line at the reservations desk, and Beecher walked casually to the elevators. When she appeared a few moments later, with a bellboy carrying her suitcase, Beecher drifted close to her. Without looking at him, she whispered her room number, then moved with the crowd into the elevator. Beecher lit a cigarette and threw the match into a sand-filled urn. He waited a few minutes, then took an elevator to the fifth floor.
The room was quietly luxurious, with gold-and-ivory furniture gleaming in the light from slim white lamps. Everything seemed to shimmer in a gentle radiance; the beige carpeting, the creamy white panels of chests and closets, the rose and lavender drapes which hung from ceiling to floor in narrow fluted folds.
Ilse was showering. They had spoken very little during the day, and he knew that she was tense and irritable. She felt sorry for herself and expected him to feel sorry for her too; without his sympathy, she was turning to her memories for comfort. And they wouldn’t help much, he guessed. They would only add to her gloom.
Beecher had thought of one possible way to get from Tangier to Spain — to cross the Mediterranean without going through Customs. But he wondered if getting to Spain would do any good? Their stories were preposterous. And they had nothing to back them up with. The whole scheme, for that matter, had been preposterous from start to finish. How in God’s name could Don Willie have hoped it would work? Was he that big a fool? No, Beecher thought, he was foolish, but he was no fool. Start with that. He was vain, sensitive, comically emotional, but he was no fool. Start there.
Beecher sat up and rubbed his temples wearily. Thinking was almost too great an effort, but he made himself concentrate on all the bits and pieces of Don Willie’s plans. First of all, Don Willie had decided to steal an airplane. That meant he needed a pilot. Enter the Frenchman. And a navigator. Enter Lynch. So far so good. Now cross out the flyer. Exit the Frenchman. That left a blank in the production. And he’d been chosen to fill it. To entice him, they needed bait. Enter Laura.
But why, he wondered now, had Don Willie taken such a devious and slippery detour? Why hadn’t Don Willie gone straight to him in the first place? In some ways, this would have been the consistent thing for him to do. For it had always pleased him to pretend that bluntness was a virtue, when directness or rudeness suited his needs. Beecher could imagine Don Willie joining him at a table in the Bar Central, or driving up to his villa, and then puffing out his pink cheeks and saying: “Mike, we don’t get along sometimes in the past, no? But now this is business, and we forget those little things. I have a job for you in Rabat.” And so forth, and so on. Instead he had sent Lynch to invite him to a fiesta at the Black Dove. This seemed to Beecher, thinking about it now, a clumsy maneuver. And Lynch’s failure to produce him shouldn’t have surprised Don Willie. But he had plodded on to phase two: Laura. She had been forty miles away, sunning herself in Estepona. Why? Why wasn’t she in Mirimar with Lynch? Had they known the Frenchman was going to turn up drunk?
Beecher shook his head in confusion. He seemed to be getting nowhere at all. The most comfortable solution, after all, was to conclude that Don Willie had been a fool.
At any rate, they had sent for Laura. And she had arrived with honeyed flypaper to catch, not a fly, but a flyer. Well, it made sense in some ways, he thought. But it didn’t in others. And Laura and Lynch had planned to disappear into Africa when the job was done, to swank it up with the blacks. Had Don Willie thought that one out very carefully? Could he be sure they wouldn’t get tired of it? And want to get out? Or be seen and recognized some day as the “lost” passengers from the missing C-47?
He was relieved when Ilse came out of the bathroom. His head was aching. Don Willie was a fool, and that was that; in panic, he had mislaid his brains. This was typical, too, of course. Don Willie’s sort always won battles, never wars. Beecher remembered captured German pilots he had talked with in England. They were courteous and intelligent, and had beautiful military manners. But something was wrong with them. It was as if they were looking at everything except Germany through the wrong end of a telescope. People became tiny in their eyes. And a thousand Flying Fortresses passing over to bomb their fatherland were no bigger than a flock of starlings.
Ilse sat on the edge of the bed. Beecher said, “I want you to get the hotel operator and ask her for a line to Spain. To Mirimar. I want to talk to Donald O’Brien at the Irishman’s Pub.”
Ilse stood and picked up the telephone. After repeating Beecher’s instructions, she listened a moment, then glanced at him. “It will be half an hour, at least,” she said.
“That’s all right.” Beecher picked up his cigarettes, but found that the pack was empty. He poked a finger around inside it, idly and pointlessly, then crumpled the pack and tossed it into the wastebasket.
Ilse sat on the edge of the bed again, but stood almost immediately and began pacing restlessly, looking about the room as if she were seeing it for the first time. “It is very nice, isn’t it?” She frowned faintly. “It is like the Frankfurter Hof. So rich and elegant. It’s in Frankfurt, the Frankfurter Hof.”
“I wish you’d let me guess.” He smiled quickly.
“Much of it was bombed down in the war, Don Willie told me. It was smashed to pieces. But in three or four years they put it up as good as new. Finer, even. Then, so soon after the bombings, you could get eggs and milk and fresh beef there, while everywhere else people were going hungry. Even in England, Don Willie said, there wasn’t enough food. But in the Frankfurter Hof the waiters were wearing full-dress suits.” She smiled. “It was just like before the war, he said, with the orchestra and great tables heaped with cold meats and fruits and wine.”
“When were you there?” Beecher asked her.
“Oh, much after that. When the trouble in Germany was finished. Then everything was all right. The shops and restaurants were crowded. No one even remembered the bombings, it seemed. The Germans had worked hard to make everything nice again. They can work very hard, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Beecher said. He wanted a cigarette badly. “Don Willie traveled a lot, didn’t he?”