Hammond Innes - The Strange Land

The drinks came and Kostos raised his glass. ‘Salud!’ He was looking at me with a sly grin. Then he set his glass down and leaned towards me across the table. ‘Lat’am. You do something for me, will you — for the sake of old times. You tell me where Wade is.’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, amused that it was the exact truth.

‘Now don’t be silly, please.’ The smile had gone from his mouth. The lips were compressed into a hard line. His small, dark eyes had hardened, too. ‘I am going to have those papers. He is somewhere here in the Zone. If I do not get them, he never get out. Why do you smile? Do you think I don’t tell you the truth? Maybe you think to help him slip across the frontier with some Berber caravan. Well, you try. That’s all. You try an’ get him out like that. You see’ — he jabbed a tobacco-stained forefinger at me — ‘it is not only me he have to reckon with. It is Ali, also. The word has gone out to the souks.’ He tapped the side of his nose and smiled. ‘He don’t get out of Tangier till Ali has those papers.’

I was almost tempted to tell him how the man he thought was Wade had got out of the Zone. I would like to have seen his face. But it was too dangerous. Instead, I said, ‘He hasn’t got the papers you want.’

‘Then what is your interest in him?’ He said it with something near to a sneer. ‘Now come, Lat’am. Let us not waste time. I know he has the papers.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked again.

‘How? Because he come alone.’ He leaned forward across the table. ‘Down on the beach las’ night you are asking about this man Kavan. Well, Kavan is not on the boat. He do not come. Wade is alone an’ he has the papers. He must have.’

‘Why? What’s Kavan got to do with it?’

He stared at me and then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Come, my friend. We are getting nowhere.’ His voice hardened. ‘We talk business now, eh? ‘Ow much you want?’

I suppose I should have told him then and there what Kavan had told me — that Wade never had the papers. I should have tried to convince him. But I couldn’t tell him that Wade was dead, lost overboard during the voyage, and I hesitated. The trouble was that I was consumed with curiosity about this place Kasbah Foum. Curiosity is something you suck up out of the atmosphere of Tangier. ‘It might help,’ I said, ‘if I knew something about Kasbah Foum.’

‘Ah, I understand. You wish to know what these papers are worth to us, eh?’ Kostos chuckled. ‘All right, Lat’am. I tell you. To me they are worth nothing. Nothing at all. It is to Ali only that they are important.’ He turned to the Berber and spoke quickly in French, explaining what had been said.

Ali nodded. ‘Kasbah Foum is part of the land that will come to me when my father, Allah preserve him, is dead,’ he said, speaking directly to me. ‘It is our own land, you understand, not collective land belonging to the tribe. But when the French come into the south of Morocco, what they call the Pacification’ — there was the suggestion of a sneer in the way he said it — ‘my father is forced to surrender Kasbah Foum to them. A Capitaine Marcel Duprez demand it of him as a personal gift. Now Duprez is dead and my people need that land because the trees are dying of some pest in the palmerie of Foum-Skhira. The date crop has failed and there is little food. But at Kasbah Foum there is water. New trees could be planted and the land tilled.’

‘The place is of no real value,’ Kostos cut in quickly.

‘C’est ca.’ Ali nodded. ‘It is about a thousand hectares of land, mostly mountain, and there is a kasbah, an old mud fort, at the entrance to a gorge. It is of no value, except to my father’s people.’

I looked across at Kostos. I didn’t believe him. Why should he trouble himself about this if there was nothing more to it than a matter of planting a few date palms? ‘Suppose you tell me the truth,’ I said, reverting to English.

‘You think we lie to you?’ His eyes had narrowed.

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I was thinking I ought to convince him I knew nothing about the papers and leave it at that. But I was back in the mood of Tangier and I was thinking of that entry at the end of Wade’s log. ‘Does the name Ed White mean anything to you?’ I asked him.

The Greek’s eyes were suddenly hard and angry. ‘So you know all about it, eh? You sit there laughing at us — ‘ His hand gripped my arm across the table. ‘All right, Lat’am. We talk business now. ‘Ow much?’

I pulled my arm away. To gain time I turned to Ali and complimented him on his French. The Berber smiled so that his teeth showed through his rather thick lips. ‘I was educated in Paris.’ He said it with pride.

‘And now you are a nationalist.’

His eyes lit up. ‘I have dedicated myself before Allah to the task of driving the French out of my country.’ He started on a tirade against the Protecting Power, but Kostos cut him short.

‘This doesn’t get us nowhere.’ He leaned towards me across the table. ‘Listen, Lat’am. You an’ I, we understand each other, eh? You get Wade to hand over those papers an’ there is a hundred thousand francs for you. Understand? A hundred pounds sterling, if you like. That’s what I bring you ‘ere to tell you.’

‘It’s no good,’ I said. ‘He’s out of the Zone now.’

‘That is a lie. He cannot be out of the Zone.’ He finished his drink and nodded to Ali. The two of them got to their feet and Kostos came round to my side of the table, leaning over me, his hand resting on my shoulders. ‘Tell him I expect him at my office by midday tomorrow. If he comes before midday, I see you get the money. Okay? And don’t get some foolish ideas, Lat’am. He is in a fix, and there is nobody will lift a little finger to help him get out of ‘ere — not Arab, Berber or Jew. You tell him that.’ He tapped the side of his nose and smiled. It wasn’t a friendly smile.

They left then and I watched them drive past. Kostos was staring at me, hard-faced and angry. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the whirl of traffic in the Place de France, and I sat there, smoking a cigarette, whilst dust descended on Tangier and the lights came on in the shops. Finally I picked up my suitcase and went across to the British Post Office and phoned the one man I could trust to do something for me and not talk about it, a retired Indian Civil Servant who had been a friend of my father’s. But he was out and his servant didn’t expect him back till late. It didn’t really matter. I could write to him about Karen Kavan from Enfida.

I went to a French restaurant and had some food and after that I walked down to the station and joined the queue waiting in the booking hall to go through the passport check. I wondered whether Kostos would have somebody follow me on the train and I looked about for the Arab who had kept watch outside the hotel. But I couldn’t see him. I wasn’t really surprised, for Kostos was essentially a Tangerois.

The minutes ticked slowly by on the station clock and the queue moved forward only a pace at a time. As always, it was a strangely mixed crowd — tourists and Spaniards and native tribesmen all jam-packed together. There were several Americans in gaily-coloured shirts and lumber-jackets — construction men from the big new Moroccan air bases. There were two Jews with grey beards and little black skull caps on their heads. And close beside me was a Berber chieftain with fierce, swarthy features and a black beard. The curved sheath of his knife was beautifully worked in silver.

The queue shuffled forward and one of the Americans said, ‘Jesus, these Goddamned Spaniards! The way they behave, you’d think we were on Ellis Island.’ He had a hard, braying laugh. Beyond his wide-brimmed hat, I could see the face of one of the passport officials framed in the oval of the hatch. And then a hand plucked at my arm and I turned, startled, thinking it was Kostos or perhaps the police to say that Kavan had been stopped at Casa.