Tangier (39 page)

Still he was wary, and one time badly scared. Shortly after the beginning of the affair Foster burst into his office clutching a copy of the
Dépêche de Tanger
. He plunked the paper down in the middle of the desk, then stabbed at Robin Scott's gossip column with his thumb. "Get a load of this," he said, pointing to a passage underlined.

Lake read it slowly, then looked up, expecting Foster to punch him in the teeth.

But Foster was laughing. "Get it?" he asked. "Uganda! A major power! Jesus—what a joke!"

"Uganda?" Lake searched his face. He couldn't follow Foster's drift.

"It's Fufu, Dan. Hell—I thought you knew. He's got mistresses all over town."

Lake was incredulous. Was Foster really such a fool? There it was in black and white, a clear reference to Jackie and himself. "A senior representative of a major power," Scott had written, "making whoopee in a big black car." Could anything be more incriminating than that? He wondered if Foster was playing dumb. But that night Jackie reassured him. "He doesn't know shit from shinola," she said, handing him a kif cigarette.

She'd been trying for a month to turn him on to pot, but he'd been resisting as best he could. "It's groovy," she told him, "prolongs orgasms, stuff like that." She showed him how to inhale the smoke, then hold it in his lungs.

He didn't like it. It made him dizzy. He much preferred to drink. "Come on, Dan—don't be a stiff. You've got to smoke the local grass to understand a place." He told her he didn't give a damn about understanding Tangier, but when she convinced him finally to share a joint, he felt like a buoy floating loose at sea.

In the early days he'd picked her up on street corners, then driven her out to the lovers' lane at Rimilat. But after they read about themselves in Robin's column, they began meeting in his office late at night. They'd screw like crazy there, while Janet slept in the adjoining residence, and Foster, dozing in his flat, assumed Jackie was out for an evening jog. After a while, however, these quick, impassioned meetings were insufficient to their needs. They longed for more subtle, extended sessions, free of fear that their spouses might intrude.

It had been easy persuading Janet to take the boys to Minnesota. Getting rid of Foster had been something else. Lake devised the political reporting project to get him out of the building. Then he met with Jackie in the empty residence and made love to her for hours at a time. Foster, however, was energetic, and began to turn up at odd moments with hysterical reports. He claimed conditions in Tangier were not so placid as they seemed. He said the city was ready to erupt.

"Nonsense," Lake told him, evading Foster's eyes, his own hand in his pocket nursing his sore cock beneath the desk. "Where do you get this stuff, for Christ's sake? The town's prosperous. The lousy tourist season's at its height."

"Well—I've been sniffing around, Dan, just like you said. I've been getting the Moroccan point of view."

"And?"

"And they're pissed, Dan. There's too much corruption. And the government's started up a draft. Seems the King's Saharan initiatives chewed up his army. He needs new recruits, so they're drafting them like crazy—one man from each family, they say, to fight dissident tribesmen in the south. There's a lot of tension now. The people don't like it, especially in Dradeb. A lot of anger in the city now. The lid's about to blow."

"Jesus, Foster, how many times have I got to tell you? In the foreign service we don't use words like 'pissed.' "

"Sorry."

"You've got to be specific. Impressions aren't enough."

"I've got specifics. Like this business about the soup."

"What business? What soup?" Lake shook his head, annoyed.

"This Ramadan thing," Foster explained. "It's really got Dradeb riled. See—there's this tradition. On the first night of Ramadan the King gives soup to the poor. Harira soup, to break the fast—it's supposed to be rich, full of vegetables and meat Anyway, this year the King paid for it, but as the money trickled down all the middlemen took their cut. By the time the soup got to Dradeb it was nothing but this thin brown goo."

"So, what did they expect? Everyone knows there's graft."

Foster shook his head. "They're agitators down there, Dan. Like this surgeon guy, Achar. He went around with the soup truck making speeches. Ladled the stuff onto the ground. Said it symbolized the country's rot."

"Yeah? What else did he say?"

"A lot of stuff against the regime. Very antiforeigner too. Like it was all a plot or something, and the people didn't have to take it anymore."

"Hmmm," said Lake, taking all this in. "Maybe you're on to something after all. Write it up and we'll report it to Rabat. Put it in decent English if you can."

It was Jackie, finally, who came up with the idea of sending Foster out of town.

"Just get rid of him," she said. "Get the jerk out of our hair."

The idea of traveling alone across northern Morocco, making contacts and reporting on the political scene, should have intrigued Foster, if only because of the adventure involved. But for all his jogging he turned out to be soft. He balked at the idea, claimed he was needed in Tangier, to handle visas and visit arrested Americans in jail.

"He's really a schnook," Jackie said after Lake had ordered him to go. "I'd like to divorce him, but then I wouldn't know what to do. Join the Women's Army Corps, I suppose, or maybe take a masters in phys. ed." Lake felt touched by her limited ambitions. Something about the contrast between her naiveté and her expertise in bed struck him as entrancing and profound.

With Foster finally out of the way, he was free to zero in on Z.

At the beginning he had no idea why he was cultivating the man. He'd been fascinated, of course, by his file—Zvegintzov's past as a Soviet agent and the warning that "personal contact by consular officials" was specifically "not advised." There'd been something contrary, he realized, about his pursuit of Z, something deliberately disobedient that drove him on. Assigning Foster to watch the shop, then going there nearly every day, inviting the Russian to dinner at the Consulate, spying on him through his window late at night—it was as if all of that was a way to thumb his nose at the Department, which had exiled him so unfairly to Tangier.

Yes, he'd been fascinated by the idea of becoming friends with a Russian agent, ignoring instructions, doing what he pleased. It was a way to assert his independence, but still, he felt, there was something more. A link—that was it; the link he felt with Z. Two men used up, two old cold warriors stationed in the backwater of Tangier. There was much in common, he thought, though they were employed by opposing powers. Two men mired in boredom, thrown on the ash heap by superiors indifferent to their fates.

The trouble was that despite a veneer of intimacy, the Russian never really opened up. His fleshy face remained noncommittal. He sidestepped Lake's overtures and kept himself aloof.

But then one day it came to Lake—the real reason behind it all, an explanation of what he was doing, a justification for his pursuit. He'd seen it in a moment, a revelation that struck him like a bullet and exploded a whole new level of ideas. It was very simple really, a mission he'd been destined to fulfill. The reason he'd been pursuing Z was to cause the Russian to
defect
.

Once he realized that, everything started making sense. He became flooded with fantasies of such intensity that even his interest in Jackie began to wane. He knew it would not be easy to cause defection. Russian agents were known for their fanaticism, their resistance to reason and the soft life styles of the West. But still he imagined himself engaging Z in a debate. They would wrestle together over the salvation of his soul.

Z would waver at first, then pull back. The struggle would teeter this way, totter that. But Lake would prepare himself well, laying the groundwork for a solid friendship while dropping increasingly unsettling hints and boning up on crucial Marxist texts. In the end he would send Z off to Washington, where for months the Russian would spill his guts.

He'd have much to tell of the intrigues in Indochina, and vital information on the North African spy nets. With luck he might even be converted into a double agent, then used to feed back false information to the Soviets. Or he might opt for a new identity in some Midwestern state, where he could begin his life again, perhaps open up another shop.

Lake knew it was a grandiose idea, and also treacherous with risk. He'd be putting his entire career on the line—if he failed he'd be fired for sure. But still, it seemed to him, he had very little choice. Better to end in glory or defeat than to die slowly of boredom and despair.

The day after he got the idea he began to intensify his assault, extending his visits to the shop, stopping in at odd hours when no one else was there, buying paperback espionage novels on Peter's recommendation, reading them and then returning to discuss the intricacies of their plots.

"Now, Peter," he'd ask, "if you'd been the spy here, would you have done the thing this way?" The two of them would then talk it out, their conversation laced with friendly tension and double entendres. Z would dance about behind his counter, hopping from foot to foot. His eyes would dart back and forth behind his spectacles. He'd cough and sputter and try to change the topic to something else.

"Now, Peter," Lake had said another time, apropos of nothing at all, "if
I
were a spy and wanted to set up a network in Tangier, first thing
I'd
do would be to get hold of a little shop like this. Place is a natural, a crossroads, great situation for a drop. I could keep an eye on everything, position myself in the center of the web. Like a spider, Peter, spinning wider concentric circles all the time."

Z had stiffened at that, but then Lake had smiled, and the Russian had relaxed. Lake wanted him to wonder whether he was merely being teased or whether he was being snared in a complicated plot.

One day he came in and spoke blandly about the weather. Then, as soon as Peter let down his guard, he threw him a tricky curve. "When I read about these deep-cover agents," he'd said, "I feel sorry for them, their loneliness, their difficult, dangerous lives. How tempting it must be for them to turn themselves in, to 'come in from the cold' as the expression goes—"

Peter, Lake thought, had betrayed himself, grasping one hand in the other, blinking involuntarily, turning to straighten merchandise on the shelves. Lake felt he'd touched a nerve and resolved to keep the pressure up. When, finally, he offered the alternative of defection, Z would be grateful and relieved.

The trouble was he didn't get much feedback, nothing but these occasional signs of strain. The Russian would stare at him attentively, or glance up with a grin, but he never countered with a quip of his own and sidestepped when Lake became direct. It was impossible to know what the man was really thinking. Lake felt he was working blind. The more unsubtle he became, the more Z backed away. Often when he left the shop, he felt the pieces weren't falling into place.

It was getting to be time, he knew, to make his move, time to stop pussyfooting around. The previous Friday, when he'd dropped in at La Colombe, he'd asked Peter to meet him at the Consulate Sunday afternoon. "Come on over after you close," he'd said, "after the church crowd's passed on through. I'll show you around the building. Then we'll have ourselves a little talk."

Now it was Sunday, nearly four o'clock. Peter, he guessed, would just be closing up La Colombe. He took the elevator down to the Consulate's lobby floor. He wanted to be there waiting when he arrived.

The glass that faced the street was one-way, mirrored, put in at great expense. The object was to cause confusion in case there was a terrorist attack. Lake paced the lobby, pausing every so often to straighten a stack of "customs hints" brochures. On the wall by his order was posted an enormous sign listing the Americans languishing in Malabata prison on account of drug arrests.

Lake loved this building, so antiseptic, so clean, an air-conditioned American oasis, his fortress against Tangier. Here the corridors were straight, the elevators were silent, the city was hermetically sealed off. Everything was new, made of glass and steel, so unlike the teeming streets outside.

A few minutes later he saw Z pull up, then watched, unseen, as the Russian locked his car. Peter mounted the Consulate steps, struggled with the locked front door. He paused, pulled out a handkerchief, and applied it to his dripping face.

Christ—if he's afraid to ring the bell, then I've really got him by the balls.

Peter did ring finally, and Lake waited a full minute before he opened up. He just stood there, ten feet away, face to face with Z, feeling powerful because he was invisible, carefully inspecting the Russian's face. Z was stubborn, all right, crafty, but he looked vulnerable outside his shop. Lake enjoyed the idea of watching coolly from the lobby while the Russian perspired in the sun.

"Peter." He opened the door. Z edged his way inside. "No one here," said Lake, "just the two of us. Come in—I'll show you around."

He led Z through the building, down corridors, into offices, even into the garage. Finally he brought him upstairs to the Consul General's suite, then seated himself behind his desk, before his ensign and the American flag.

"You're the first Russian to get the grand tour, Peter. VIP treatment—nothing less."