the cold fish. I hadn’t known Charlie had thought of me in that way. We had always been personal friends as well as getting on well with each other in the business. To get a flash of illumination on oneself through the eyes of another can sometimes come as a shock.
I slept and woke again after having bad dreams of vaguely impending doom. I lay with open eyes for a long time and then, finding sleep impossible, I turned on the bedside light and lit a cigarette.
I prided myself on thinking and acting logically, but where in hell was the logic of goose-chasing to Algiers? The sexual bounce, maybe, from Gloria to Alix Aarvik? The desire to be the parfit, gentil knight on a white charger going on a quest to impress the maiden? I rejected that. Alix Aarvik was a nice enough girl but there was certainly no sexual attraction. Maybe Max Stafford was a cold fish, after all.
What, then?
Maybe it was because I thought I was being manipulated. I thought of Andrew McGovern. He had tried to send Alix to Canada. Why? In the event he didn’t send her. Why? Was it because I had been a bit too quick and caught her and talked to her the day before she was supposed to leave? If the damage had been done there would be no reason to send her away. I had been beaten up immediately after I had seen her. If McGovern had been responsible for that I’d have to think up some new and novel punishment for him.
Was McGovern deliberately putting pressure on me through Brinton? Brinton, on the day of the board meeting, had said he was under pressure from McGovern. What sort of a hold could McGovern have over a shark like Brinton? And if McGovern was doing the squeezing, why was he doing it?
Then there was Paul Billson. Before he entered my life I had been moderately happy, but from the moment Hoyland rang me up to have his hand held there had been nothing but trouble. Everything seemed to revolve around Paul, a man obsessed.
Logic! If everything revolved around Paul Billson, maybe he was the person to talk to. Maybe going to Algiers wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.
I put out the light and slept.
Three days later I flew to Algiers.
Algiers is the only city I know where the main post office looks like a mosque and the chief mosque looks like a post office. Not that I spent much time in the mosque but I thought I had made a major error when I entered the post office for the first time to collect letters from poste restante. I gazed in wonder at that vast hushed hall with its fretted screens and arabesques and came to the conclusion that it was an Eastern attempt to emulate the reverential and cathedral-like atmosphere affected by the major British banks. I got to know the post office quite well.
Getting to know the whereabouts of Paul Billson was not as easy. Although my French was good, my Arabic was non-existent, which made it no easier to fight my way through the Byzantine complexities of Algerian bureaucracy, an amorphous structure obeying Parkinson’s Law to the nth degree.
The track of my wanderings over Algiers, if recorded on a map, would have resembled the meanderings of a demented spider. At the twentieth office where my passport was given the routine fifteen-minute inspection by a suspicion-haunted official for the twentieth time my patience was nearly at snapping point. The trouble was that I was not on my own ground and the Algerians worked to different rules.
My hotel was in Hamma, in the centre of town near the National Museum, and when I returned, early one evening, I was dispirited. After a week in Algiers I had got nowhere, and if I couldn’t track Billson in a city what hope would I have in the desert? It seemed that my cutting edge had blunted from lack of practice.
As I walked across the foyer to collect my room key I was accosted by a tall Arab wearing the ubiquitous djellaba. ‘M’sieur Stafford?’
‘Yes, I’m Stafford.’
Wordlessly he handed me an envelope inscribed with my surname and nothing else. I looked at him curiously as I opened it and he returned my gaze with unblinking brown eyes. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, unheaded and with but two typewritten lines:
I believe you are looking for Paul Billson.
Why don’t you come to see me?
There was a signature underneath but it was an indecipherable scrawl.
I glanced at the Arab. ‘Who sent this?’
He answered with a gesture towards the hotel entrance. ‘This way.’
I pondered for a moment and nodded, then followed him from the hotel where he opened the rear door of a big Mercedes. I sat down and he slammed the door smartly and got behind the wheel. As he started the engine I said, ‘Where are we going?’
‘Bouzarea.’ After that he concentrated on his driving and refused to answer questions. I gave up, leaned back in cushioned luxury, and watched Algiers flow by.
The road to Bouzarea climbed steeply out of the city and I twisted to look through the back window and saw Algiers spread below with the Mediterranean beyond, darkening towards the east as the sun set. Already strings of lights were appearing in the streets.
I turned back as the car swung around a corner and pulled up against a long wall, blank except for a small door. The Arab got out and opened the car door and indicated the door in the wall which was already swinging open. I walked through into a large walled garden which appeared to be slightly smaller than Windsor Great Park, but not much. In the middle distance was a low-slung, flat-roofed house which rambled inconsequently over the better part of an acre. The place stank of money.
The door behind closed with the snap of a lock and I turned to confront another Arab, an old man with a seamed, walnut face. I didn’t understand what he said but the beckoning gesture was unmistakable, so I followed him towards the house.
He led me through the house and into an inner courtyard, upon which he vanished like a puff of smoke into some hidden recess. A woman lay upon a chaise-longue. ‘Stafford?’
‘Yes—Max Stafford.’
She was oldish, about sixty plus, I guessed, and was dressed in a style which might have been thought old-fashioned. Her hair was white and she could have been anyone’s old mother but for two things. The first was her face, which was tanned to the colour of brown shoe leather. There was a network of deep wrinkles about her eyes which betokened too much sun, and those eyes were a startling blue. The blue eyes and the white hair set against that face made a spectacular combination. The second thing was that she was smoking the biggest Havana cigar I’ve ever seen.
‘What’s your poison? Scotch? Rye? Gin? You name it.’ Her voice was definitely North American.
I smiled slowly. ‘I never take drinks from strangers.’
She laughed. ‘I’m Hesther Raulier. Sit down, Max Stafford, but before you do, pour yourself a drink. Save me getting up.’
There was an array of bottles on a portable bar so I went and poured myself a scotch and added water from a silver jug. As I sat in the wicker chair she said, ‘What are you doing in Algiers?’
She spoke English but when she said ‘Algiers’ it came out as ‘el Djeza’ir’. Then she was speaking Arabic.
