L'Assassin Read online

  Camille walked swiftly to the gate. “I think you had better leave, monsieur.” She opened the gate and held it open. “Now.”

  “I understand, madame. I have children of my own. I would feel as you do if someone said to me about one of my children the things I have just said to you about your son. I apologize for my brutal frankness, madame. However, I assure you that you will thank me someday for what I have to say to Pierre, and he will thank me too. If only I can discover a way to deliver my message to him. But I see that you do not know where he is.”

  Louis had risen. “I understand that it is unlikely, but if you should hear from him, please tell him that I am staying at the Hôtel de Boufa.” He gestured in the direction of the city below. “I mean him no harm. And what I have to tell him could save his life.

  “Thank you for your hospitality and your patience, madame. I am sorry to have upset you. As I said: the Hôtel de Boufa.” Louis reached down and scratched the cat behind the ears. He tipped his hat as he left the gate. He walked to the waiting taxi and got in, tipping his hat once again as he did. He could no longer see Camille Lefort, but he was quite certain that she was watching him.

  VIII

  The number seventeen bus left the Algiers railroad station and followed the Boulevard Hassiba Ben Bouali for a kilometer before turning off. It then wound through narrow, cobbled streets, wheezing and coughing whenever it stopped to take on or discharge passengers. Louis and Samad sat just behind the driver, and Moamar sat three seats back, next to an old woman wrapped entirely in black. She held a wicker basket on her lap, and every once in a while some living thing inside the basket made a rustling sound.

  The bus climbed out of the city, past high-rise apartment buildings and along a string of broad boulevards joined, like a necklace, by a series of traffic circles. The streets were lined with ficus and palm trees, oaks and plane trees, as well as other trees Louis did not recognize. The bus stopped at a market where a jumble of stalls and stands was filled with shoppers. Some passengers got off the bus carrying empty shopping bags, and others got on, their canvas and straw bags bulging with groceries and clothes and even small appliances. The bus proceeded past factories and oil storage plants.

  Soon they left the city behind. Occasional shacks and shanties had been cobbled together of scrap wood and cardboard and corrugated metal. What few trees they passed were sickly and coated with dust. The road straightened, the bus gathered speed, and soon they were crossing a vast desert interrupted only by grotesque stone formations rising out of the sand. Everything was red and orange with purple shadows. The colors were so vivid against the azure sky that the horizon shimmered. Louis tried to imprint the colors in his mind so that he could paint with them later.

  They passed a stretch of olive orchards and then more desert. Every now and then they came upon solitary people riding donkeys or walking. Where could they have come from, Louis wondered. Where could they be going? A man in a dirty and tattered robe pushed a wooden handcart on wobbly wheels. On the cart was a white appliance—a stove or a washing machine—lying on its side and tied down with ropes, as though it might try to get away. The man leaned into the handle of the cart at a steep angle, and still the cart barely moved. Further along, a small barefoot girl pulled a reluctant goat on a rope. She flailed at the goat with a switch from time to time, and it scampered forward, only to stop in its tracks once again.

  The bus windows were open against the building heat, and great clouds of dust swirled through the bus. Louis held a handkerchief over his nose and mouth, but it did little good. He could feel the grit between his teeth and under his eyelids.

  Louis, Samad, and Moamar got off at the Al Harib crossroads, where they faced a rambling building, a store, made of concrete blocks and corrugated tin. Men milled about under the tin porch roof, smoking and talking. There were two bright yellow gasoline pumps out in front of the store, and a handpainted, and highly improbable, sign—GOLF 16KM—pointed along a small dirt track that disappeared into the desert.

  Somebody had laid out a circle of stones between the gasoline pumps and the road and had placed a dilapidated fountain at its center. Cars could not approach the pumps without driving around this imaginary driveway. There was no water in the fountain, nor had there ever been. It sat cracked and ruined and lopsided on the dusty earth. Behind the building, arrayed in a long row, were dozens of cars in various stages of deterioration and demolition, and beyond the cars stood the forbidding peaks of the Atlas Mountains.

  Louis and Samad walked to the building to wait, as Louis had been instructed to do in the letter he had gotten the evening before. Samad had been sitting in the lobby when it arrived, delivered by one of his friends from the café. “Someone dropped it off,” said the friend. “He said it was important.”

  “Why didn’t he deliver it himself?” Samad wondered.

  “Why not indeed?” said his friend.

  The envelope was addressed to Monsieur Louis Morgon, Hôtel de Boufa. “It is from Lefort,” said Louis. “He tells me where to go. Someone will pick me up there by car and take me to him.” He handed the letter to Samad. “It says I am to come alone.”

  Samad read the letter. “That is ridiculous,” said Samad. “I will not let you go alone.” And he actually took hold of Louis’s arm, as though he meant to physically restrain him.

  After some argument, Louis relented. “Perhaps Lefort will think two old men are twice as helpless as one,” he said. Next Moamar insisted that he would go along to protect his father. He would remain apart, and once Louis and Samad were picked up by car, he would follow them as best he could. “Don’t worry,” Moamar said. “It’s a store. I’ll find someone to drive me. Someone will want to earn a little money.”

  Louis stood in the shade, his hat pulled far down over his face. Samad went into the shack and returned with two small bottles of pomegranate juice. The two men sucked the sweet nectar through plastic straws.

  After a while, a battered panel truck swung into the drive, circled the fountain, and slid to a stop in front of where Samad and Louis stood. The driver leaned across the seat and peered at them with a mixture of curiosity and alarm in his eyes. He could not have been much older than thirteen. “Morgon?” he said in a high, scared voice. “Monsieur Morgon?”

  Louis and Samad stepped toward the van. The boy recoiled and waved his hands. “No,” he said. “No, no, no. Only Monsieur Morgon.”

  Samad said that he could not allow his friend, Monsieur Morgon, to come out here alone. “This is a dangerous country for a foreigner, my son. Besides, I am a harmless old man.” He smiled and waved his stick to demonstrate his age. The boy looked this way and that before he motioned the two men into the van. Before Samad had even shut the door, the boy stepped on the gas and they sped away.

  Moamar approached a man leaning against a battered Ford who agreed to take him wherever he wanted to go, for a price. “Follow that van,” said Moamar, and gave the man several bills. The man did not hesitate or question Moamar. It was as though following strangers were a normal thing to do. The man tucked the money into his shirt pocket and Moamar climbed into the car. Rap music was playing softly on the radio. A red, black, and green tassel danced from the rearview mirror as they raced off. “Don’t lose him, but don’t get too close,” said Moamar.

  In the van the boy’s thin legs barely reached the pedals, and the steering wheel was huge in his small hands. But he drove fast and with assurance. Louis held onto the door, and the boy turned and smiled broadly, as though he knew exactly what Louis was thinking. After a short while they turned off the main road and onto a stone track. There seemed to be nothing between them and the mountains, when they swung around a great boulder and dropped steeply over a ledge.

  In front of them was a small house sitting in the center of a grove of fruit trees—oranges, lemons, figs, and a tall, somewhat weary-looking date palm. Beside the house was a small vegetable garden. Some chickens pecked about in the garden and under the trees. An im
provised irrigation system of interconnected black rubber hoses wound around the property.

  The van slid to a stop, and the young boy jumped out and ran toward Pierre Lefort, who stood in the doorway. He put his arm around the boy’s shoulder as the boy explained how Louis had refused to come alone. “I am not surprised,” said Lefort. “He is not an idiot.

  “I cannot help you,” Lefort said, turning toward the men. “You have come a long way for nothing.”

  “On the contrary. I have already learned something,” said Louis.

  “And what is that?” said Lefort.

  “That you are a man who still listens to his mother.”

  Lefort laughed. He turned to the boy and instructed him to go inside.

  “It is true,” said Louis, “that there are things I could learn from you. About the camera you put in my house, for instance. But as to why it is there and who paid you to put it there, I am fairly certain I know more about that than you do.”

  “Well, in that case, my son can take you back to the bus stop,” said Lefort.

  “You know, of course, that someone intends to kill me. That is not news to you, and probably it doesn’t concern you either. Why should it? But here’s the part you haven’t thought of. If you had, you wouldn’t allow yourself to be found so easily. It is this: when they have finished with me, they will kill you too. They’ll shoot you from those rocks.” Louis turned and pointed. Lefort looked where Louis was pointing, as though the assassin might already be there, peering down his sights.

  “Think about it,” said Louis. “First of all, you are a witness to crime in high places in American government. And don’t think that not knowing who hired you will protect you. It won’t. Once they dispose of me, then you become a liability for them. Second, once your neighbors know that you are an agent for the Americans, they will despise you and want you dead. Both of these groups—my killers and your neighbors—are deadly players, and one or the other of them will get you. Why do you think they picked you to do the robbery? Do you think it was because of your great skill in these affairs?”

  “You tell me,” said Lefort, smiling uneasily. He shifted from one foot to the other.

  “They picked you,” said Louis, “because you were just skillful enough to do what they wanted, but you were also known to be lazy and uncurious. You aren’t one to ask questions or to try to look behind the scenes, are you? They knew you’d take their money without being too interested in why you were being paid such a large sum. It was a lot of money, and that was all you really wanted to know.

  “You are indifferent to the identity of your masters. They must have liked that about you too. And finally, and most importantly, you are dispensable. No one will care if you disappear, besides your mother and your son, of course.

  “Frankly, I don’t care either,” Louis said. “My only interest is in how you might be helpful to me. You have knowledge that will help me fight back and perhaps even gain an advantage. I am at their mercy at the moment, but if I knew what you had done in my house, I could at least fight back.

  “I don’t expect you to help me out of any concern for me. You aren’t a good or compassionate man. Am I wrong about that?” Louis paused. “I didn’t think so. And I don’t have any money to pay you with. But if I can disrupt their plans, then that might make it possible for you to save your life. Your son might not end up an orphan. Your mother might not have to grieve for her lost Pierre.”

  Lefort laughed. “Fight back? You are an old man. What do you think you can do against them?”

  “I’ll show you,” said Louis. He turned and pointed to the rocks again. “If you go up there, you will see that we are being watched.” Lefort did not move. “Go ahead,” said Louis. “Overcome your laziness, for once. Then ask yourself: who would be watching me, and why?” Lefort stared into the rocks. “You spent several months in jail, Lefort. You were paid a lot of money for your time. So why are they watching you? Do you think it is out of concern for your well-being? Do they think I will harm you? Or maybe their reasons are less benevolent.”

  Lefort straightened up and dropped his arms to his side. “Go ahead,” said Louis. He looked up the twisting road. There was nothing to be seen. “I did not see them on the way in. But I am sure they are there. And,” Louis added, “don’t let them catch sight of you.”

  Lefort disappeared into the rocks. In five minutes he was back. “So what?” he said. “Two men in a Ford. They could be anyone. Maybe they’re scavengers. Scavengers come out here all the time. How do I know you didn’t bring them?”

  “You don’t,” said Louis. “Unless you bother to think about it.”

  Lefort thought for a moment, looking first at Louis’s face and then back to the rocks. Louis waited before speaking. “I am just guessing, Lefort. But I think you may appear on the surveillance tape that was made in my house. Doing … something. I don’t know what.

  “In fact,” said Louis, “it doesn’t much matter what it is. You know, if you’re on the tape, then it might as well be your death warrant. Signed and sealed. Your being in my house links us together in the eyes of anyone watching the tape, doesn’t it? When they see you there, that makes you my accomplice, deserving of the same fate as awaits me.”

  “Terrorists,” said Lefort after a long silence. “We were supposed to be terrorists.”

  “We? There were others? Who were they?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know them.”

  “How many were there?”

  “There were three of them.”

  “Did you hire them?”

  “No. They found me.”

  “How did you know what to do, what to say?”

  “They had a sort of plan. Like a script. They told me what to say.”

  “Were they caught too? Were they paid?”

  “The robbery came afterwards. I did the robbery, but they were gone by then. So, no, they weren’t caught.” Lefort’s face changed suddenly, as though something had dawned on him.

  “And,” said Louis, “you can be sure they weren’t paid. Do you know why?” Lefort was thinking and didn’t seem to hear. “Well, do you?” said Louis.

  “Because,” said Lefort. He stopped and then started again. “Because they were already on the payroll.”

  “Exactly,” said Louis, as though he were revealing to Lefort what had gone on and not the other way around.

  “We were pretending to plan a terrorist attack,” said Lefort. “At the tennis matches or something like that. But we talked as though the decision hadn’t been made yet …”

  Louis interrupted. “So that a strong preventative response would be required?”

  “A preventative response?” said Lefort.

  Samad had stood silently until now, but suddenly he threw his hands in the air in exasperation. “Don’t you see?” he shouted at Lefort. “Can’t you see? My God! Are you a complete idiot?! You have not only engineered Mr. Morgon’s assassination. You have engineered your own as well. You are recorded on tape as a terrorist. Presumably, someone was acting the part of Mr. Morgon?”

  “That is true,” said Lefort.

  “Well,” said Samad, stepping up close to Lefort so that he was looking hard into his eyes, “did it ever occur to you exactly who you might be dealing with, who might want such a thing done?”

  Samad continued before Lefort could speak. “Government spies do these deadly tricks. Now, Mr. Morgon is, as you know, an American. Or maybe you don’t know. Maybe they didn’t even tell you that much. And, as it turns out, to your great misfortune, he is an important American. Now, this is obviously a well-organized and highly planned operation. It comes from a high level. Even you can see that. Am I correct?”

  Samad spoke as though he were leading a schoolboy through a not terribly difficult math problem. “Now, which American agency do you think might do such a thing? Which agency might want to eliminate one of its own troublesome operatives”—Samad gestured toward Louis—”and want to blame it on the FLN or
al Qaeda or some other terrorist organization? Which one?”

  Before Lefort could pronounce the dreaded initials, Samad placed his hand in front of Lefort’s lips. “Do not even say it,” said Samad. Lefort looked around nervously, as though someone might actually be listening.

  “I did not know,” said Lefort. “They did not tell me anything. How could I know?”

  There was not much more to be said. Lefort was desolate, and neither Louis nor Samad said anything to offer him any comfort. He summoned his son, who drove the two men back to the gas station. Moamar was waiting for them there. The three men took the next bus back to Algiers. “He saw you in the rocks,” said Samad to Moamar. “In the car with the guy that drove you there.”

  “That was a gamble,” said Louis. “I’m glad you were there.”

  “He is convinced that you were spies from the CIA,” said Samad.

  “Your father convinced him,” said Louis. “You were really quite expert, Samad.”

  Samad chuckled and folded his hands across his belly. “You are not the only one with secret talents,” he said.

  “Don’t be so pleased with yourselves,” said Moamar, scowling. “We may not have been CIA spies sitting there in that car, but the plot that you surmised appears to be true. You are marked as a terrorist, and an assassination target. And now it is likely that we are too.”

  IX

  Hakim, the man in the Ford who had driven Moamar, was more than satisfied with the day’s accomplishments. He rehearsed his report as he drove back to Algiers. He did not want to leave anything out. He had followed the three men from the hotel and had photographed them getting on the bus. He had followed the bus out to the Al Harib crossroads, where he had photographed the men getting off the bus, then waiting in the shade and drinking juice. He had noted down the make and license number of the van that had picked up the two older men. He had made himself available to the younger man when he wanted to hire a car and had sat with him while the two older men talked with Lefort.