Lon Charles looked down at him and then out of the rest of the mercenaries who were regarding him without expression. He said, “I seen this savate type of fighting before. But you got to remember it was us Americans who invented stomping. If you want to see what fighting with the feet can come to, I’ll give you a lesson in stomping some time. A man gets stomped once and maybe he gets by; maybe even twice. But no man ever gets stomped three times and goes around normal. His kidneys and his gall and his balls and the rest of his guts and his ribs is all busted up.”
He turned and headed back for his chair.
Meg, her face white, began to rise to hurry to the fallen man, but Bryan put a restraining hand on her. “Easy,” he said.
Sean took a breathful and said, “That’s the last fighting between ourselves we’re going to have until this assignment is successfully terminated. Anyone who disobeys this order will be turned out of the group.” He looked at them emptily and added, “I suppose you all realize what it means to be turned out alone into the Sahara without transportation and only the amount of food and water you can carry on your back.”
He turned and looked at the Levantine, who had remained expressionless of face and silent, thus far.
Sean said, “And this is Mr. Saul Saidi, the representative of the government which has employed us. He will speak to you and answer any questions pertaining to our pay, or whatever.”
Sean sat down and Saidi took his feet. He said, “Your gold can be deposited to the bank of your choice in Victoria, Hong Kong. Most of the largest of world banks have branches there. I recommend, in particular, First National City Bank of New York, Barclay’s of London, or the Suisse Bank of Geneva.”
IX
SERGE SVERDLOV
Colonel Serge Sverdlov was retracing almost identically the route a colleague and close friend—if it is possible to have a close friend in the colonel’s trade—had taken only short months before.
His complexion, all over his body, was that of a light skinned negro and the cosmetic surgeons in Moscow had also made a few tucks about his lips to give him a heavier mouth. To his disgust, they had also circumcised him, since his cover indicated him to be a Moslem. His darkened skin was reversible, but hardly the circumcision.
He bore a Libyan passport and had flown in to Gibraltar on an Arab Union roco-jet. He had no difficulty whatsoever in passing through immigration and customs and took a taxi the short distance into town. He inquired in a store owned by supposed fellow Arabs, though it turned out they were from Tunisia, rather than Libya, and was told that the Mons Capa ferry to Tangier wouldn’t leave for an hour. He left his two bags at the store and spent the time wandering up and down Main Street which he found to be aptly named, since it was the only main street in town. It was a tourist way par excellence; save for a couple of bars and two or three hotels, all was devoted to tax-free shops, largely in the hands of Indians. With the exception of cameras and other optical and electronic equipment from Germany and especially Japan, the products offered were of second or third rate quality, obviously aimed at sailors and tourists.
He went up a side street, found a bar, and went in to find they stocked only British brews. He had long since arrived at the conclusion that British bitter was the worst beer in the world, but he had no time to spend seeking out another bar. He ordered and drank a pint of bitter.
The ferry running to Tangier took approximately two hours and he spent the time on deck, watching the rock of Gibraltar drop behind. The straits of Hercules were moderately choppy and Tangier, once the Tingis of the Phoenicians and hence one of the oldest continually occupied cities in the world, was at the far end of them, across from Trafalgar where Admiral Nelson triumphed… and died. The city was built on the end of a peninsula with a crescent bay before it and a perfect beach that must have stretched for at least three miles. It was an impressive setting. The town ran up the mountainside and, from a distance, with its mosques, its aged palaces, its white, pink and blue typically Moslem houses, presented an appearance suitable for a time traveler. Tangier must have looked thus when the Moorish hordes swept across the straits to bring the blessings of Allah to Spain.
When he landed, he made the same mistake as had his earlier arriving colleague. He assumed that Arabic would be the prevailing language. It wasn’t. Rif, a Berber tongue, was that largely spoken. Serge Sverdlov resorted to French, both at customs, where again he had no difficulties, and in ordering a Chico mini-hovercab. Peculiar to Tangier, it was the smallest cab he had ever been in with room hardly for himself and his bags.
He directed the driver to the El Minza hotel, which was immediately off the Plaza de France, the main square of the European section, and on Pasteur Boulevard, once, he had read, a financial center rivaling those of Switzerland and New York, when the International Zone had prevailed and Tangier had been a free city.
At the door, there were two natives, jet-black as bantus, rather than Rifs or other Moroccans. They were dressed in red jackets, yellow barbusha slippers, voluminous yellow pants and on their heads wore the red fez of Northern Africa. He had changed money in Gibraltar and hence had the dirhams to pay the cab and later to tip the boys, who took his bags and hustled him to the reservation desk. He had cabled ahead for a room.
It was necessary to leave his passport overnight for the routine of police redtape. He didn’t bother to check out the room but sent the boys up with his luggage and immediately left for his contact.
Had he known, he was duplicating the movements of his colleague almost exactly. But then, they had both received their instructions from the same source.
He strolled, as any tourist might stroll, up the Boulevard Pasteur and turned right at the king-size sidewalk cafe there, across from the imposing French Embassy, and began descending the Rue de Liberté toward the medina, the native section of town. And now those in European dress thinned out and their place was taken by swarms of costumed Rifs, Arabs, blacks, and even an occasional Blue Man up from the desert. The name, he had heard, came from the fact that their cotton robes were dyed in an inadequate indigo that came off on their skins, giving them the eerie blue look.
At least half of the men wore the brown, camel hair burnoose, that universal garment with its hood, which tripled as coat, rain coat and blanket. The women wore either the white tent-like haik and veil, or the more attractive tailored jellabah of the upper classes.
The section he had just come from could have been part of the French Riviera, but now he was descending into the world of Medieval Islam, into the Baghdad of Harun-al-Rashid.
He passed through the teeming Grand Zocco street market, with its hundreds of stands, and multi-hundred merchants squatted down on the ground before rugs upon which sat their products, ranging from fruits and vegetables, through herbs and magic potions, to openly displayed kif—marijuana, as it is called in the Americas—and the Cantharides beetles, commonly known in the West as Spanish fly and utilized in North Africa as an ingredient of El Mojoun, along with kif, in the making of hashish fudge.
Across from the market he passed through the ancient, horse-shoe shaped gates of the old city and took the Rue Singhalese, which was the only street in the medina wide enough to allow even a small car. He descended this as far as the Zocco Chico, once considered the most notorious square in the world.
He was playing the stranger, the tourist, and from time to time stopped to look into windows. As in Gibraltar, most of the shops seemed Indian-owned. At last, he peered into one, as though in indecision. The window featured ebony figurines from the interior, carved ivory from the Orient, Japanese cameras, chessmen of water jade, odds and ends of supposed art objects from all over the world.