Two Crosses (49 page)

“I found your tall friend all right. He says he has the information you want. He’ll bring it to you. You say when, and he’ll be there.”

Jean-Claude nodded approvingly. He stood up and stumbled over to Rosie, a gleam in his eyes. “Very good, my little tramp.” He slapped her hard across the face.

Rosie cried out as she fell across the bed. Jean-Claude leaned down over her, looking worried.

“Are you hurt?” He slurred his words. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, little Rosie.
Au contraire, ma petite pute.
We have every reason to celebrate tonight,
n’est-ce pas
?”

He pressed his body down on top of hers. Rosie closed her eyes, trying to ignore his putrid breath as he fumbled with the buttons on her blouse.

“Every reason to celebrate,” he said again.

Rosie didn’t struggle. She let the drunken Frenchman paw while she thought of money and freedom. Rosie Lecharde was smart.

David didn’t look any different to himself as he shaved in the bathroom of his one-star hotel room in the slums of Marseille. The same long, thin face with deep-set black eyes and thick eyebrows stared back at him. But something felt different to him as the razor slid smoothly through the white foam on his face.

“Hope,” he said suddenly and laughed. Yes, that was it. Today there was hope. Never before had he awakened with the excitement that he had felt during the past week. Ever since the night on the beach. Hope.

He shook his head. It almost sounded, well, fabricated. Shallow. That would be his response to anyone who tried to explain what he was feeling. That had been his response to Gabriella. But he could not deny the deep sense of hope he now carried.

He grinned at the mirror. He wished he could tell Gabriella. He wished he could see the expression on her face when he said, “I’ve done it.”

But he couldn’t return to Montpellier and Castelnau. Not yet.

He rinsed his face and dabbed it with a towel. The sun was peeping in between the slats in the rotting wooden shutters. David pushed them open, welcoming the cold air on his freshly shaven face. He returned to his bed and spread out the briefcase on it. Jean-Louis would be waiting. Tomorrow was the first of March, and exams were only four days away.

He had explained to Jean-Louis where to find last year’s exam in his desk at Mme Pons’s, in case he didn’t have time to write another. That would be the simplest way.

He pictured Gabby waiting for him, coming to class each day. He recalled her last words to him, two and a half weeks ago. “I hope you find her.” He wondered if she remembered his response. Had she understood? Couldn’t she see? He
had
already found the one he was looking for, his Raphaelite angel.

And now, with hope, with some new, naked faith, he longed to run to her and say it. “I love you, wild red-haired angel! Don’t you see? Don’t you understand? Be mine!”

Gabriella deserved a love letter, he mused, running his hand over his now smooth face.
She
needed hope! So far his only response to her had been silence. Thick, tense, smothering silence. The spark had not been fanned to flame. With silence the heat would ebb and die, and ashes, like those of the sweet African lily, would be the only memory of another unwise romance.

But now there was hope! “Dear Gabriella,” he whispered. How could he tell her? Slowly he took up his fountain pen and began to prepare questions for the exam. Suddenly his pen flowed more quickly, and he smiled as an idea burst forth and shimmered with hope. He nodded.
Yes, my angel. You’ll understand this, darling. It will be perfectly clear.

“There must be another woman,” Yvette concluded, as she sipped her coffee in Monique’s kitchen. “He’s gone too often, this M. Hoffmann, to really care for Gabriella. Poor child. You can read it all in her eyes. The love, the hope, the fear that after all there is someone else.”

Monique nodded broadly as she lifted a cup to her lips and sipped the dark coffee. “You can read Gabriella’s face, but M. Hoffmann’s is a dark puzzle. He seems to like her, but off he tramps to another town. I’m surprised Mother Griolet stands for it. He’s supposed to be teaching.”

By the time the coffee cups were empty, Mme Pons and Mme Leclerc were no longer sure that David Hoffmann was worthy of the fair Gabriella.

Monique changed the subject. “Thank heavens February is out of the way. You think the sun is going to warm up at the end of January and then, whoosh, in blows the frost of February.”

Yvette agreed. “And it’s soups, soups, soups. The girls are tired of soups, but what do I say? We start our meals with soup until February leaves us
tranquilles
. It’s very difficult, you know, to feed these American girls. It’s the same each year. One will nibble and another will gorge.”

“I suppose Gabriella still does not eat well?” Monique inquired.

“She picks at the food. She is losing hope, poor child. And not a thing I can say. Poor foolish child.”

Hussein looked no more than ten years old, when in fact he was fourteen. He wished for the fuzz his friends had underneath their noses. He wished for a sudden growth spurt. He wished that the young Arab girls would lift their eyebrows and flirt with him as they did with others.

But at least he had something to do in Algiers. At least Ali paid him a few coins for his eyes. At least no one had turned a gun on him and shot him in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street. That was something to be thankful for indeed.

His mother wrung her hands together and worried when he left the apartment each day. “Don’t you understand, Hussein? They kill anyone. What is a boy to the OAS? Just another empty can to be knocked down. Please, Hussein, be careful.”

It was true. Yesterday he had walked by a café at noon. It was sunny, and people were out, happy to think of spring coming. The patrons sat and smoked and sipped their cognacs and whiskeys. Then a shot came from somewhere around the corner, and Hussein saw a young man groan and fall to the ground, slipping out of his chair like a stuffed dummy. Right there at the table in the café. A newspaper was placed on his face. An ambulance eventually hauled off his body. Later the firemen hosed off the bloodstains. And still the people ate and pretended that nothing had happened. Pretended that their lives were not falling apart.

Thirty or more murders a day. Innocent civilians. Arab and pied-noir. But Hussein had work to do, and it helped him ignore the tight knot in his stomach as he walked through the neighborhood of Bab el-Oued, flashing a picture of a lovely pied-noir woman and a young Arab man with curly hair at shop owners along the street. He had seen the woman one time. Surely, surely, she would step out into the sun someday and lead him to her apartment. The rest would be up to Ali. And Hussein would have more change jingling in his pocket.

Ali smoked and spat, smoked and spat. The February negotiations for cease-fire had failed. But rumor from the top of the FLN was that they wouldn’t fail in March. The mail was no longer delivered in Algiers. The OAS had slaughtered five postmen. Life was shutting down.

Ali thrust his cigarette stub on the floor and crushed it with his shoe.
So we will crush you, slimy French. You think we are afraid of your terrorism. Who, after all, did you learn it from?
He chuckled softly. It was useless for France to try to hold on to Algeria.

The last news from the nutty Jean-Claude had sounded promising. A sleazy little prostitute was keeping Jean-Claude warm and well-informed about M. Hoffmann. That was fine.

His last instructions to Jean-Claude had been very clear:
Don’t eliminate M. Hoffmann. Not until he has led you to the child and the woman and you have the names. Then you may do whatever you please with the whole lot. And do it quickly.

Meanwhile, through the littered back alleys of Bab el-Oued, hiding behind overflowing trash cans, stepping on slimy orange peels, listening in cafés where students congregated, was a small, smart Arab boy. Ali liked to imagine Hussein at work.

“Someday you will be like me, Hussein,” he had told the boy. “You will be powerful if you develop sharp eyes and a quick mind.”

Ali Boudani was not a man to give up hope in his cause. Not for Algeria. Certainly not. Victory was sweet. It hung on the tip of his tongue. And he would not give up hope for revenge.
For revenge
, thought Ali,
is sweeter still
.

30

Rosie Lecharde wore sunglasses for her meeting with David Hoffmann. There was no use in showing him the ugly bruise around her eye. She had a feeling he might somehow care, and she didn’t want David Hoffmann to care. She only wanted him to talk. Five hundred francs Jean-Claude had given her, with five hundred more if she could bring M. Hoffmann to him.

A shaft of sunlight peeked through the billowing clouds. Rosie clicked her heels and wiggled her hips as if it were any other day in the world. She wished that she could go with the smart American. Jean-Claude was beginning to frighten her.

Don’t think of it, Rosie. Don’t even think.

She turned onto the Canebière, the main street in Marseille, busy, loud, full. He had said to meet him where the cours Saint-Louis joined the Canebière, where the whole world sat and watched. The black-skinned sailors and blond-haired cadets, the buxom, white-teethed women from Martinique, the tourists in bold, hot colors waiting for the next trip to the Château d’If.