The Care of Time (8 page)

I looked at Chihani and held up the raincoat. ‘What’s this for?’

She seemed pleased that I had asked. ‘Who knows how long you may be away from your room, Mr Halliday? Someone might ask for you. Pacioli perhaps. So, your bags have been unpacked for you and your suits hung in a closet.
Your toothbrush is damp. One of the beds looks as if you may have tried to sleep. Your room key is there in your coat pocket. Perhaps you went for a walk. You see, I try to plan for all eventualities.’

The delayed shock was turning now into anger. ‘I’ll bet there’s one eventuality you didn’t plan for,’ I said.

‘What is that?’

‘Really having to use thiopental on me. You weren’t prepared to do that.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘You were all set to swab my arm with spirit, and yet you hadn’t loaded the syringe. You hadn’t even taken it out of the pack. You were bluffing.’

She looked pleased. ‘Very good. Hindsight is beginning to work. And why didn’t you call the bluff? Let me tell you. Isopropyl alcohol has a very distinctive smell which you associate with injections. So, you smelled, you believed and you were frightened, as I intended you to be. Why? Because I didn’t want to make you unconscious unless it was absolutely necessary. It would have been inconvenient. Something could have gone wrong. Supposing you had swallowed your tongue while we had you in the linen basket. Such a happening would be dangerous.’

‘Very. You might have had a corpse on your hands. Better to bluff. That way you get a live-and-kicking, free-breathing writer to take to your leader. I hope he won’t mind when I tell him, very politely of course, to get stuffed.’

She shrugged. ‘Naturally, you are upset at the moment.’

‘Upset, yes, and even more, surprised.’

‘Surprised? You are an experienced person. What could there be to surprise you?’

‘Odd as it may seem to you, Miss Chihani, I am not used to being assaulted on arrival in a strange hotel by thugs masquerading as bellhops. What’s more, the only reason I’ve come here is to assist Dr Luccio in the writing of a book to counter terrorism. When I find that he has a terrorist gang of his own working for him I think I’m entitled to be surprised.’

That drew a light laugh. ‘Have you been terrorized, Mr Halliday? How terrible! But is it true? I would myself say only that what you call your dignity has been a little injured. Yes, that’s it, eh? You will calm down.’

‘You think so? Where are we going?’

‘To meet Dr Luccio in a safe house.’

‘Safe house is a jargon term used by intelligence services. Does Luccio belong to one?’

‘Safe houses are used by all organizations and groups engaged in covert and clandestine operations, and especially by organizations with a particular need to defend themselves against enemy penetration.’ She sounded as if she was quoting from an instruction manual.

‘In Dr Luccio’s case, which enemy would that be? The anti-terrorism people, the kidnapping specialists or the bunco squad?’

She fielded the insult with another shrug. ‘Oh, we have nothing to fear from the police. Our enemy is far more dangerous.’

‘Who is this enemy, then? The PLO, the Red Brigades, the PFLP? Who?’

‘If you need to know about them, Dr Luccio will tell you.’ She gave a sharp order in their private language and the driver switched off the roof-light.

Obviously she was also trying to switch me off. I stayed on. ‘Was this enemy the reason why I couldn’t leave the hotel by walking out through the front doorway? Would he, or they, have tried to stop me?’

‘They know you are here and they know why. They would certainly have followed you, whether I was there or not. The safe house would have been compromised. By acting immediately, the moment you arrived, we gave them no time to complete full and effective surveillance. In all covert or clandestine work every opportunity to forestall and confuse the opposition is always to be taken.’ Another quotation.

‘Is writing a book in Italy clandestine work?’

‘The writing of Dr Luccio’s book will be done under
conditions of the most strict security, Mr Halliday. Didn’t Pacioli make that clear to you?’

‘He explained that you, Miss Chihani, acting as an intermediary, would be issuing orders on the subject of security, yes. I didn’t say that I would obey them. And you still haven’t given me the shadow of a reason why you had to attack me physically. If you needed my co-operation why didn’t you just say so and ask for it?’

‘It would have been necessary to explain.’

‘Isn’t that what intermediaries are supposed to do? Communicate and explain? If you’d asked me nicely I’d have gone down with you in the service elevator. Why
didn’t
you ask? Because you like using muscle? Because you enjoy it?’

‘You’re answering your own questions, Mr Halliday,’ she replied calmly. ‘If I had asked you would have argued, objected and demanded explanations. You would have done, in fact, just what you are doing now. Then, I had no time to spare for your games. Now, it doesn’t matter what you do or say. The operation is going according to plan.’

‘
Your
plan?’

‘Yes, but I am only carrying out Dr Luccio’s orders. The orders are to take you to the safe house without compromising its security. Later, after Dr Luccio has talked with you, learned how you respond to operational stresses and made his own assessment of your reliability, more convenient security routines may be established.’

We were in heavy stop-and-go traffic. The minibus jolted forward again jarring my shoulder painfully.

I said: ‘Supposing I decide that I’ve already had more than enough operational stress for today, and that unless I’m taken back to my hotel immediately I shall consider my contract to help Dr Luccio write a book null and void? What do your orders say about that, Miss Chihani?’

She had just put a cigarette in her mouth and had a lighter raised. So that I could have the full benefit of her thinking and feelings about me, she removed the cigarette and lowered the lighter before answering. ‘I would say several things, Mr
Halliday. First, that you have already been paid a lot of money without having yet done a thing for it. Second, that Dr Luccio wishes to see you this evening and may not be disappointed. Third, that you are an experienced person and must know that it is no use blustering. You will, of course, accept the situation.’

It was, I noted, the second time that she had called me an experienced person. I thought for a moment of asking what she had meant, but she was by then puffing away at her cigarette and clearly determined to say no more.

One thing I do know from experience is that estimates of the passage of time and of distance travelled made while sitting in darkness are usually inaccurate. So, under that particular set of circumstances, my guess that in the next hour and a quarter we covered almost seventy miles was a good one. It was my sense of direction that went haywire. After about twenty minutes in heavy traffic we began to go faster and then, following a brief stop and the sound of a voice from outside, very fast. I assumed, correctly, that we had gone through a toll-gate on an autostrada and stopped to pay. Confusion began when, after thirty minutes or so at high speed, the same thing happened again. We came to another toll-gate. There was no mistaking it. As our driver approached he slowed and wound the window beside him all the way down. I knew because of the changes in the background sounds and because I could feel the cooler air coming in. A second or two after we had stopped completely another voice spoke up from outside. It was a second toll collector telling us how much
he
wanted for that little stretch of road. What sort of an autostrada was it where you had to pay to get on and then pay all over again to get off? Had we managed to do a U-turn somewhere along the way?
Another
of Chihani’s security precautions? Could it have been done without my noticing it?

From then on I was lost. I had been sure at first that we were heading north, then maybe a trifle west of north. Now I began thinking east. Monza maybe? The Bergamo area? Or
were we about to double back to central Milan and one of those permanent luxury hotel suites that Zander maintained to house himself and his three briefcases on their journeys around the world?

We went through a small town and then turned slowly on to what felt like one of those corduroy roads that army engineers used to build for transport needing firm going across mud. Only this one seemed to have been made of utility poles instead of four-inch logs. Our speed dropped to a crawl. The minibus’s suspension thumped protestingly. Then we were on smooth pavement again and starting to make good time through a series of left and right bends that had me holding on to my seat to keep from lurching against Chihani. She had a grab rail to hold on to. After ten minutes of this we stopped again, at some traffic lights in a village I thought. When they turned green and our driver started up through the gears again Chihani reached into a TWA flight bag that she had pulled from under the seat and produced a hand-size CB radio. She extended the antenna, glanced at her watch and then began calling.

She said ‘ ’allo, ’allo,’ twice before an answer came. It sounded like ‘Qui batula’ and the voice was a woman’s. Chihani replied with a couple of short sentences that meant absolutely nothing to me, repeated them both very distinctly and then switched off. I assumed that she had been making a progress report.

Minutes later we entered yet another small town. There was more stop-and-go work and I waited for another run-up through the gears. Instead, we turned left on to cobbles and began to climb a steepish hill. After only a few yards, it seemed, we bore left, made a sharp right and slowed. The minibus lurched up over something that felt like a kerb and came to a standstill. Chihani stood up and pushed past me.

‘We have arrived,’ she said, ‘but I think you had better let me guide you out, Mr Halliday. A little caution is necessary.’ She took a heavy flashlight from a bracket by the door.

Because of the darkness inside I could at once see well in
the semi-darkness outside, but she had been right about the need for caution. We were in a small flagged courtyard at the foot of a semicircle of stone steps leading up to an entrance. Overhead there was a lantern, but the low-wattage bulb in it did not shed nearly enough light to show up the uneven surface of the flagstones and a large break in one of the steps.

Chihani went ahead guiding me with the flashlight. ‘Follow me, please.’

‘What is this place?’

‘It used to be a hotel.’

Inside, I could see that for myself. It had been one of those old, shabby, small hotels of the kind favoured, before the coming of the motel, by travelling salesmen on per diem expense accounts, and it still looked like one. Behind what had been the reception desk, and beneath an array of empty mail boxes with brass key-hooks numbered from one to twenty-two, sat a fat girl with long black hair and blue-tinted glasses. The foyer smelt strongly of old soap and carpet dust with just a hint of some carbolic-based disinfectant. The radio in a nearby room was tuned to a pop-music station. The fat girl looked up from the book she was reading as we entered and then, when Chihani snapped her fingers at her, pressed a switch on the wall beside her.

Opposite the desk there was a stairway. As she led the way over to it, Chihani glanced back at me. ‘Here also one must be careful,’ she said. ‘One could easily fall.’

One could indeed. In that kind of hotel almost everything except the outside walls had been modified over the years by owners trying, usually without success, to keep pace with changing standards of comfort and convenience. The quest for space in which to install more bathrooms and utility ducts has always been hard on stairwells. This one seemed to have been remodelled for the use of mountain goats. The staircase in it was spiral, and constructed with risers too high for the narrow treads. The carpeting was threadbare and slippery. You went up clinging to a strip-metal balustrade as you felt for toe-holds and tried to disregard the sharp cracking noises
that accompanied every move you made. You reached the top with a relief tempered by the knowledge that it would be worse going down. It was no surprise in such a place to find that, a yard or two away, the passage zigzagged and that, right in the middle of the zigzag, a door had been set. The room number on it was 17.

Chihani tapped on it lightly with the buckle of her shoulder bag.

When I had asked my news-agency friend for a physical description of Zander he had replied that he couldn’t really help me much there. Sure, they had pictures; but only some that had been taken in Algiers at the time of the independence celebrations in ’sixty-two. Zander had been identified as one of the smiling faces in a group of politicos posed against Air France boarding steps by the door of a DC3 on the tarmac of Maison Blanche airport. How, or by whom, he had been identified God alone knew. The pictures were of poor quality and, in black-and-white anyway, most smiling faces tended to look very much alike. More useful maybe, after all this time, would be a verbal description. One of the stories about the Zander-Brochet operation had described him as having a head like an Easter Island stone figure.

If all you were talking about was a shape, the man who now opened the door of room number 17 did have that kind of head. The tanned face was long and narrow with a jutting chin and thin lips. There was, though, nothing remote or severe or forbidding about his appearance, nothing, that is, at first sight. He was short, broad-shouldered and dressed in nothing but a blue terrycloth robe and a pair of sandals. He had a good head of hair, thick and white, and a triangle of grey fluff on his chest. The line of a mouth that could so easily have conveyed warnings was here permanently set in a wry little simper that only vanished when the lips were needed to make vowel sounds. It took me several minutes to realize that the mask told you nothing of what was going on behind it
and that you had to learn to read a pair of pale, grey-green eyes.

They were smiling along with the mouth as he greeted me. ‘Welcome, Mr Halliday, welcome.’