The Man Between. Чарльз Камминг
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time.
‘Chaos back there,’ he said. ‘Thanks for helping me out.’
‘No problem.’ The driver popped the boot. ‘Where you headed, man? I drop you off.’
Carradine was staying at a Sofitel in the centre of town. It transpired that Ramón was staying in a hotel less than five hundred metres away.
‘No way! I’m at the Sheraton! Literally like no distance from where you are.’ A part of Carradine died inside. ‘We can meet up later, go for a drink. You know any good places?’
‘Somebody recommended Blaine’s to me.’
The words were out of his mouth before Carradine had time to realise what he had said. He was due to meet Yassine at Blaine’s the following evening. What if Ramón showed up during their dinner?
‘Blaine’s? I know it! Full of chicks, man. You’re gonna love it.’
He could feel his carefully arranged schedule being quickly and efficiently unpicked by the Spaniard’s suffocating camaraderie. He didn’t want to be put into a position where he had to work his cover, lying to Ramón about phantom meetings with phantom friends just to avoid seeing him. Why the hell hadn’t he taken a separate taxi?
‘Sofitel,’ Ramón told the driver, speaking in accentless French. ‘Près du port. Et après le Sheraton, s’il vous plaît.’
Somewhere between the aircraft and the Mercedes the Spaniard had developed a case of volcanic body odour. The car was quickly filled with the smell of his stale sweat. It was hot in the back seat, with no air conditioning, and Carradine sat with both windows down, listening to the driver muttering to himself in Arabic as they settled into a queue of traffic. Ramón offered Carradine a cigarette, which he gladly accepted, taking the smoke deep into his lungs as he gazed out onto lines of parked cars and half-finished breezeblock apartments, wondering how long it would take to get into town.
‘I never asked,’ he said. ‘What do you do for a living?’
Ramón appeared to hesitate before turning around to answer. His eyes were cold and pitiless. Carradine was reminded of the sudden change in his expression when the flight attendant had walked into the galley. It was like looking at an actor who had momentarily dropped out of character.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘I’m just a businessman. Came out here to do a friend a favour.’
‘I thought you said you were here for the rest and recreation?’
‘That too.’ Ramón touched his mouth in a way that made Carradine suspect him of lying. ‘R & R everywhere I go. That’s how I like to roll.’
‘What’s the favour?’ he asked.
The Spaniard cut him a look, turned to face the oncoming traffic and said: ‘I don’t like to talk too much about work.’
Another five minutes passed before they spoke again. The taxi had finally emerged from the traffic jam and reached what appeared to be the main highway into Casablanca. Ramón had been talking to the driver in rapid, aggressive French, only some of which Carradine was able to understand. He began to think that the two men were already acquainted and wondered again if Ramón had deliberately waited for him to come out of the airport.
‘You’ve met before?’ he asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘Your driver? You’ve used him before?’
The Spaniard flinched, as if to suggest that Carradine was asking too many questions.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Oh, nothing. It just sounded like this wasn’t the first time you’d met.’
At that moment the driver – who had not yet looked at Carradine nor acknowledged him in any way – turned off the highway onto a dirt track leading into a forest.
‘What’s going on?’ Carradine looked back at the main road. Paranoia had settled on him like the slowly clinging sweat under his shirt. ‘Where are we going?’
‘No idea.’ Ramón sounded disconcertingly relaxed. ‘Probably has to visit his mother or something.’
The Mercedes bumped along the track, heading further and further into the woods.
‘Seriously,’ said Carradine. ‘Where are we going?’
The driver pulled the Mercedes to the side of the track, switched off the engine and stepped out. The heat of the afternoon sun was overwhelming. Carradine opened the door to give himself an option to run if the situation should turn against him. There was a small wooden hut about ten metres from the road, occupied by a woman whose face he could not see. The driver approached the hut, held out a piece of paper and passed it to her. Ramón put a tattooed arm across the seat.
‘You look tense, man. Relax.’
‘I’m fine,’ Carradine told him.
He was anything but fine. The stench of sweat was overwhelming. He was convinced that he had walked into a trap. He looked in the opposite direction, deeper into the woods. He could see only trees and the forest floor. He used the wing mirror on the driver’s side to check if there was anybody on the road behind them, but saw no sign of anyone. Through the woods beyond the hut he could make out a small clearing dotted with plastic toys and a children’s slide. The driver was coming back to the car.
‘Que faisiez-vous?’ Ramón asked him.
‘Parking,’ the driver replied. Carradine smiled and shook his head. His lack of experience had got the better of him. He looked back at the hut. The veiled woman was marking the piece of paper with an ink stamp. She slammed it onto a metal spike.
‘Crazy!’ Ramón produced a delighted grin. ‘In Casablanca they pay their parking tickets in the middle of the fucking woods. Never saw this before, man.’
‘Me neither,’ Carradine replied.
It was another forty-five minutes to the hotel. Carradine sat in the heat of the back seat, smoking another of Ramón’s cigarettes. On the edge of the city the Mercedes became jammed in three-lane traffic that inched along wide colonial boulevards packed with cars and motorbikes. Ramón grew increasingly agitated, berating the driver for taking the wrong route in order to extract more money for the journey. The swings in his mood, from back-slapping bonhomie to cold, aggressive impatience, were as unexpected as they were unsettling. Carradine followed the progress of the journey on his iPhone, trying to orientate himself in the new city, the street names – Boulevard de La Mecque, Avenue Tetouan, Rue des Racines – evoking all the antiquity and mystique of French colonial Africa. Mopeds buzzed past his door as the Mercedes edged from block to block. Men hawking drinks and newspapers approached the car and were shooed away by the driver, who switched on the windscreen wipers to deter them. Several times Carradine saw cars and scooters running red lights or deliberately going the wrong way around roundabouts in order to beat the jam. Stalled in the rivers of traffic he thought of home and cursed the heat, calling his father to tell him that he had arrived. He was busy playing backgammon with a friend and had no time to talk, their brief exchange leaving Carradine with a sense of isolation that he found perversely enjoyable. It was exhilarating to be alone in a strange city, a place about which he knew so little, at the start of a mission for which he had received no training and no detailed preparation. He knew that his father had been posted to Egypt by the Service in the early years of his marriage and thought of the life he must have led as a young spy, running agents in Cairo, taking his mother on romantic trips to Sinai, Luxor and Aswan. Ramón offered him yet another cigarette and he took it, observing that the smog outside was likely to do more damage to his lungs. Ramón went to the trouble of translating the joke for the benefit of the driver who turned in his seat and smiled, acknowledging Carradine for the first time.
‘Vrai!’ he said. ‘C’est vrai!’
That was when Ramón showed him his phone.
‘Jesus