"Mosad," he whispered to himself. "Mosad."
A second later he was back inside, wrestling with the terrace doors. "Must go, Kalinka," he said, dumping the laundry on the rug. He started toward the closet to find his leather jacket and his gun.
"What is it? What's the matter, Hamid?"
"Call Aziz," he said. "Tell him to meet me on the Mountain. Tell him the man from Israel has come. And don't wait up for me, Kalinka. I won't be home till late."
Then everything was too slow for him-the elevator which took too long to reach his floor, and even longer, with its slowly grinding gears, to take him to the street. Running out of the lobby into Ramon y Cahal, he was met by a blast of wind. The palms were thrashing, and the neighborhood dogs were making a cacophony in the night.
For a moment, when his car refused to start, he pounded at the steering wheel, enraged. How long had it been since the fire had been set? How long, in this wind, before it devoured the Freys' great house?
The engine caught finally and he was on his way, down Avenue Hassan II, looping around the Italian cathedral, then swerving into the road that led to the Mountain through Dradeb. He made good time until he reached the intersection at Rue de Persil, where he found himself trapped behind a long line of honking cars. A bus was stalled ahead. He wished he had a police jeep with a siren.
He pulled onto the sidewalk, left his car, then ran toward the bus through air thick with pungent fumes. He was about to shout at the driver, order him to pull aside or clear the way, when he saw there was a barricade in the street, a huge pile of vegetable carts, benches, tables, and chairs from a neighboring cafe and, beyond that, a mob of youths rushing toward the fire. He heard sirens then, far away-fire trucks, he realized, trapped behind. The bottleneck was impossible, the road was too narrow, and someone had slashed the tires of the bus. He thought about trying to dismantle the barricade, but knew it would take too much time. The firemen would have to deal with that; he would continue to the Freys' on foot.
There seemed to be a lot of people ahead. He could hear laughter and cries, the sounds of a country carnival. He climbed onto the obstruction, picked his way across its top, then jumped down just as a swarm of young people emerged from an alley of the slum. They carried him along with them until he stumbled in front of a miller's shop. They ran on in a surge toward the Jew's River bridge to view the fire on the cliffs.
He picked himself up and ran on, determined to break through the mob, cross the bridge, get onto the Mountain and up to the burning house. But the farther he ran, the thicker he found the crowd, a barrier of humanity with a choking density of its own. It seemed as though everyone in Dradeb had poured into the street. The throng was impenetrable. People's eyes were wild. There was fury in them too, he felt-violent passions about to be released. He yelled that he was a police inspector, but could barely hear his voice. The sound of it died in the yells of the people around, their delighted whoops and cries.
It would be impossible, he realized, to fight his way through. He shouldered his way to the curb, then up some steps against more people surging down. Finally he found an empty alley, darted in, then paused a moment to catch his breath.
He knew Dradeb, had spent his childhood in the slum, had known all its alleys, its intricate passageways, years before. But the place had changed. Its shacks had been rebuilt and repositioned many times. Still, he knew, there had to be a route to the ravine, a path he could follow through the labyrinth of tin and cardboard buildings that would take him to a point above the bridge from which he could descend to the river, then cross to the Mountain through the muck.
He dashed up the passage, moving as quickly as he could, sniffing his way, moving by instinct, prowling the maze like a hungry cat. He rushed down little alleys barely wide enough to accommodate his girth, charged up paths, through archways, reached a tiny square containing a water trough and a public well. Then he ran directly through a house whose walls were made of blankets, across a graveyard long since encroached upon by shanties, through heaps of garbage, across an open sewer behind an outhouse, emerging finally far higher than he'd planned, on an outcropping above the chasm not more than a hundred yards from the sea. Some women were standing there, one with an infant in her arms. They were all gazing across the gorge, mesmerized by the fire, spirals of sparks, gushing from the Freys' crenellated roof, swirled until they died against the sky. The walls of the palace were silhouetted by flames. Hamid could see fire through the windows, leaping, flaring, devouring the precious collections inside. The house was finished-in a few minutes it would be completely burned. He stared at it, remembering that a month before, when he was short of summer help, he'd approved Aziz's suggestion that they remove the men they'd posted to watch it from the road.
Impossible now, he knew, to get across. The chasm was too steep, he was too far from the bridge, and in any event there was no way he could cross the river without becoming trapped in a treacherous marsh. Even if his quarry were still there, an unlikely event, he was too late, too far away-the crime had been committed, the arsonist had struck. Somehow, eventually, the firemen and police would get through. Then he could organize a manhunt, pound his desk, order the frontiers sealed. But for all of that, he knew, he would obtain no result. Watching the house burn, he felt sorrowfully that he'd failed.
Suddenly one of the women shrieked. When he turned to her she pointed down to the left, at the little cluster of shops at the base of the Mountain and the mob massed on the bridge. There was pandemonium down there, shouts and cries, people running back and forth, waving torches, crazed. There were other fires too, and he could see figures in the night running up the Mountain, wielding torches and swinging chains. He heard sirens closer than before. Something was happening. He could feel the savage anger of the mob. It had been galvanized by the spectacle of the fire. It was as if all of Dradeb was tensed, coiled to attack.
He began to rush down toward them, tripping, stumbling, then picking himself up and charging on, over piles of rusty cans and broken glass, through mounds of trash so high he sank into them to his knees. The smell of the fire merged now with the foul aroma of outhouse filth. The clamor grew louder; the sirens wailed as he struggled on, picking his way, oblivious to the possibility that he might fall from the narrow ridge between the back walls of shanties and the deep Jew's River gorge.
'Ihe earth here was not firm. The cliffs were eroded. There were always mudslides when it rained. Several times he felt the land give way, but still he stumbled on, grasping the fence along the ridge built to keep rats from entering the slum. As he approached the bottom he was better able to decipher the cries, a chorus of angry male voices yelling "Burn!" and the mob, lashed to fury by this chant, roaring back its approval in savage animal response.
He was blocked forty feet above them by a cement barrier that diverted flash-flood water from the bridge. Below he saw them in extreme disorder, a vicious, thrashing mass. Someone was being trampled. Someone else was being kicked. Then he saw flames leap up from behind La Colombe as young men bailed gasoline against its walls. In seconds the fire grew-they were burning Peter out. The flames leaped, engulfed the shop; then, a moment later, he saw Peter in silhouette, clutching at the security grill, desperately trying to escape.
The mob was mad, deranged. Were they going to stand there while Peter burned alive? Already the young people who'd set the fire were streaming up the Mountain with their cans of gasoline. Hamid drew his gun, raised it, fired it into the air three times. People stopped, gazed up at him, a menacing figure on the ledge, as he motioned frantically and yelled to them to let the Russian out. But the wind and the shouts below drowned his words. In desperation he raised his revolver again, this time to shoot at them. He held the gun straight out, gripped in both his hands, prepared to fire, massacre, do anything he could to bring them to their senses and make them stop. But Peter fell back just then, disappeared into his flame-filled shop. There was silence as the crowd watched him burn, then turned back to Hamid with fearful eyes.