Nim was still cloistered, so to speak, and returning none of my urgent phone messages. But on Saturday morning, as I was wrestling with the movers who were doing their damnedest to gift-wrap my garbage, Boswell had appeared at my apartment door with a box in his hands from “the charming gentleman who was here the other evening.”
The box was full of books, with a note attached that read “Pray for guidance, and wash behind your ears.” It was signed “the Sisters of Mercy.” I’d stuffed the whole pile into my shoulder travel bag and forgotten them. How was I to know that those books, ticking away in my satchel like a time bomb, would have so great an impact upon the events that were soon to follow? But Nim knew. Perhaps he’d always known. Even before he’d placed his hands on my shoulders and said, “J’adoube.”
Included in the eclectic mix of musty old paperbacks was The Legend of Charlemagne, as well as books on chess, magic squares, and mathematical pursuits of every possible flavor and variety. There was also a boring book on stock market projection called The Fibonacci Numbers, written by, of all people, Dr. Ladislaus Nim.
It’s hard to claim that I became an expert on chess in the six-hour plane trip from New York to Paris, but I did learn a lot about the Montglane Service and the role it had played in the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire. Though never mentioned by name, this chess service was involved in the deaths of no fewer than half a dozen kings, princes, and assorted courtiers, all smashed over the head with the pieces “of massy gold.” Wars were started over some of these homicides, and upon Charlemagne’s death, his own sons had torn the Frankish Empire to shreds in a battle for possession of the mysterious chess service. Nim had printed a note in the margin there: “Chess—the most dangerous game.”
I had learned a little about chess on my own in the prior week, even before reading the chess books he’d included: enough to know the difference between tactics and strategy. Tactics were short-term moves to position yourself. But strategy was how you won the game. This information was to come in quite handy by the time I reached Paris.
The partnership of Fulbright Cone had lost none of its patina of time-tested treachery and corruption with my crossing the Atlantic. The language of the game they were playing might have changed, but the moves were still the same. From the moment I arrived at the Paris office, they’d announced the whole deal might be off. They had failed, it seemed, to get a signed contract from the boys at OPEC.
Apparently they’d been kept waiting for days at various ministries in Algiers, jetting back and forth from Paris at great expense and coming up empty-handed with every trip.
Now the senior partner, Jean Philippe Petard, planned to get involved. Cautioning me to do nothing at all until he arrived in Algiers at the week’s end, Petard assured me that the French partnership would surely find something for me to do once the dust had settled. His tone implied some light typing, floors and windows, and perhaps a few toilets to clean might be in order. But I had other plans.
The French partnership might not have a signed contract with the client, but I had a plane ticket to Algiers and a week to spend down there with no immediate supervision.
As I walked out of the Paris office of Fulbright Cone and hailed a cab back to Orly, I decided that Nim had been right about sharpening up my killer instincts. I’d been using tactics for close maneuvers too long, and I couldn’t see the board for the pieces. Could it be time to remove those pieces that were cluttering up the view?
I’d been standing in the Immigrations line at Dar-el-Beida for nearly half an hour before my turn came. We were crawling like ants through the narrow lanes with their metal guardrails before reaching the gates to passport control.
At last I was facing the glass booth. The passport officer was perusing my Algerian visa, with its official little red-and-white sticker and the big sprawling signature nearly covering the blue page. He looked at it for quite a while before glancing up at me with what seemed a strange expression.
“You are traveling alone,” he said in French. It was not a question. “You have a visa for affaires, madame. For whom will you be working?” (Affaires meant “business.” How like the French to kill two birds with one stone.)
“I’ll be working for OPEC,” I started to explain in my poor French. But before I could continue, he stamped “Dar-el-Beida” all over my visa in haste. He motioned with a nod of his head to a porter who’d been lolling against a nearby wall. The porter came over as the Immigrations officer flipped quickly through the rest of my visa and slid the Customs declaration through the slot to me.
“OPEC,” said the officer. “Very well, madame. Just write on this form any gold or money you are carrying.…”
As I was completing the form, I noticed he mumbled something to the porter, jerking his head toward me. The porter glanced at me, nodded, and turned away.
“And your place of residence during your stay?” asked the officer as I slid my completed declaration back under the glass partition.
“The Hotel El Riadh,” I replied. The porter had walked to the back of the Immigrations aisles and, glancing once at me over his shoulder, was now knocking on the smoked-glass door of the solitary office that stood against the back wall. The door opened, and a burly man came out. They were both looking at me now; it was not my imagination. And the burly guy had a gun on his hip.
“Your papers are in order, madame,” the Immigrations officer was telling me calmly. “You may proceed now to Customs.”
I mumbled my thanks, picked up my papers, and passed through the narrow aisle toward a sign that read “Douanier.” From afar, I saw my luggage stacked on a stopped conveyor belt. But just as I headed toward the place, the porter who’d been eyeing me came strolling over.
“Pardon, madame,” he said in a soft, polite voice that no one else could hear. “Would you come with me?” He motioned to the smoked-glass door of the office. The burly man was still standing at the door, fondling the gun at his hip. My stomach slid up into my throat.
“Certainly not!” I told him loudly and in English. I turned back to my luggage and tried to ignore him.
“I’m afraid I must insist,” the porter said, placing a firm hand on my arm. I tried to remind myself that in business circles I was known for nerves of stainless steel. But I could feel the panic rising.
“I don’t understand the problem,” I said, this time in French, as I removed his hand from my arm.
“Pas de problème,” he said quietly, never taking his eyes from mine. “The chef du sécurité would like to ask you a few questions, that is all. This procedure will take merely a moment. Your baggages will be perfectly safe. I myself shall attend them.”
It wasn’t my baggage I was worried about. I was reluctant to leave the brightly lighted floor of the Douanier to enter an unmarked office guarded by a man with a gun. But I seemed to have little choice. He escorted me to the office, where the gunman stepped aside to let me enter.
It was a tiny room, barely large enough to hold the metal desk and two chairs that were set up facing it. The man behind the desk rose to greet me as I entered.
He was about thirty years old, well muscled, tanned, and handsome. He moved around the desk like a cat, muscles rippling against the lean lines of his impeccably tailored charcoal business suit. With his thick black hair swept back from the forehead, olive skin, chiseled nose, and full mouth, he might have passed for an Italian gigolo or a French film star.
“That will be all, Achmet,” he said in a silky voice to the armed thug still holding the door behind me. Achmet withdrew, shutting the door softly after himself.
“Mademoiselle Velis, I believe,” said my host, motioning me to take a seat opposite his desk. “I’ve been expecting you.”
“I beg your pardon?” I remained standing and looked him in the eye.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be mysterious.” He smiled. “My office reviews all visas about to be issued. We don’t have many women applying for a business visa; in fact, you may be the
first. I must confess, I was curious to meet such a woman.”
“Well, now that you’ve satisfied your curiosity,” I said, turning back toward the door.
“My dear mademoiselle,” he said, anticipating my thought of escape, “please do have a seat. I’m really not an ogre, I won’t eat you. I am the head of security here. People call me Sharrif.” He flashed his white teeth in a dazzling smile as I turned back and reluctantly took the thrice-proffered chair opposite him. “May I mention that I find your safari outfit most becoming? Not only chic, but appropriate for a country with two thousand miles of desert. Do you plan to visit the Sahara during your stay, mademoiselle?” he added casually, as he took his own seat behind the desk.
“I’ll go wherever my client sends me,” I told him.
“Ah, yes, your client,” the slick one rambled on. “Dr. Kader: Emile Kamel Kader, the petroleum minister. An old friend. You must give him my warmest regards. It was he who sponsored your visa, as I recall. May I see your passport, please?” His hand was already out for it, and I caught a flash of gold cuff link that he must have seized at Customs. Not many airport officials make that kind of dough.
“This is merely a formality. We select people at random from each flight for a more thorough search than that conducted at Customs. It might not happen to you again in twenty trips or a hundred.…”
“In my country,” I told him, “people are only hauled into private offices at airports if they’re suspected of smuggling something.” I was pushing my luck, and I knew it. But I was not deceived by the glitz of his chameleonlike story, his gold cuff links, or his movie-star teeth. I was the only person to be called in and searched from my entire airplane. And I’d seen the faces of the airport officials as they whispered about me from afar. It was me they were after all right. And not only because they were curious about my being a woman on business in a Moslem country.
“Ah,” he said, “you fear I believe you to be a smuggler? Unhappily for me, it is the state law that only women officials may search a lady traveler for contraband! No, it is only your passport I wish to see—at least for now.”
He pored over it with great interest. “I’d never have guessed your age. You look to be no more than eighteen, yet I see from your passport you’ve just had a birthday. Twenty-four, in fact. But how very interesting—did you know that your birthday, April fourth, is an Islamic holy day?”
At that moment, the words of the fortune-teller suddenly leapt to mind. When she’d told me not to mention my birthday, I’d forgotten about things like passports and driver’s licenses.
“I hope I haven’t alarmed you,” he added, looking at me strangely.
“Not at all,” I replied casually. “Now if you’re finished …”
“Perhaps you’d be interested to know more,” he went on, smooth as a cat, as he reached forward and pulled my handbag across the table. No doubt just another “formality,” but I was becoming extremely uncomfortable. You are in danger, said a voice deep inside me. Trust no one, look always over your shoulder, for it is written: On the fourth day of the fourth month—then will come the Eight.
“April fourth,” Sharrif was saying to himself as he removed tubes of lipstick, a comb, and a brush from my shoulder bag and placed them carefully on his desk like the labeled evidence for a murder trial. “In al-Islam, we call this ‘the Day of Healing.’ We have two ways of counting time: the Islamic year, which is a lunar year, and the solar year, which begins on March twenty-first of the Western calendar. There are many traditions for each.
“When the solar year begins,” he went on, dragging notebooks, pens, and pencils out of my bag and classifying them in rows, “Muhammad has told us we must recite from the Qu’ran ten times each day for the first week. The second week, we must rise each day, blow our breath upon a bowl of water, and drink from that same bowl, for seven days. Then—on the eighth day—” Sharrif looked up at me suddenly, as if he expected to catch me picking my nose. He smiled casually, and so, I hoped, did I.
“That is, the eighth day of the second week of this magical month, when all Muhammad’s rituals have been fulfilled, whatever the person’s ills, he will assuredly be healed. This would be April fourth. Persons born upon this day are believed to have great powers to heal others—almost as if … But of course, as a Westerner, you can scarcely be interested in such superstitions.”
Was it only my imagination that he was watching me as a cat does a mouse? I was adjusting my facial expression when he let out a little cry that made me jump.
“Ah!” he said, and with a flick of the wrist tossed something across the table so that it came to rest just in front of me. “I see that you are interested in chess!”
It was Lily’s little pegboard chess set that had remained forgotten in a corner of my shoulder bag. And Sharrif was pulling out all the books and piling them in a stack on the desk as he carefully read the titles.
“Chess—mathematical games—Ah. The Fibonacci Numbers!” he cried, wearing that smile that made me think he had something on me. He was tapping the boring book that Nim had written. “So you’re interested in mathematics?” he said, looking at me intently.
“Not really,” I said, on my feet and trying to stuff my belongings back into my shoulder bag as Sharrif handed me my possessions one by one. It was hard to imagine how one skinny girl could carry so much useless crap halfway around the world. But there it was.
“What exactly do you know about the Fibonacci numbers?” he asked as I continued loading my bag.
“They’re used for stock market projection,” I muttered. “The Eliott Wave theorists project bull and bear markets with them—a theory developed by a guy named R. N. Eliott in the thirties—”
“Then you’re not acquainted with the author?” interrupted Sharrif. I felt my skin go slightly green as I glanced up, my hand frozen over the book.
“Leonardo Fibonacci, I mean,” Sharrif added, looking at me seriously. “An Italian born in Pisa in the twelfth century, but educated here—in Algiers. He was a brilliant scholar of the mathematics of the famous Moor al-Kwarizmi, after whom the algorithm is named. Fibonacci introduced Arabic numerals into Europe, which replaced the old Roman numbers.…”
Damn. I should have known that Nim wouldn’t give me a book just for idle reading, even if he wrote it himself. Now I wished I’d really known what was in it before Sharrif’s little inquisition began. A light bulb was going off in my head, but I couldn’t read the Morse code it was flashing.
Hadn’t Nim pressed me to learn about magic squares? Hadn’t Solarin developed a formula for the Knight’s Tour? Weren’t the fortune-teller’s prophecies riddled with numbers? So why was I such a lunkhead that I couldn’t put two and two together?
It was a Moor, I recalled, who’d given the Montglane Service to Charlemagne in the first place. I was no genius at math, but I’d worked around computers long enough to learn that the Moors had introduced nearly every important mathematical discovery into Europe, ever since they’d first hit Seville in the eighth century. The quest for this fabled chess set obviously had something to do with math—but what? Sharrif had told me more than I’d told him, but I couldn’t piece it together. Prying the last book loose from his fingers, I deposited it in my leather pouch.
“As you’re going to be in Algeria for a year,” he said, “perhaps we could have a game of chess sometime. I myself was once a contender for the Persian junior title.…”
“Here’s a Western expression you might enjoy learning,” I told him over my shoulder as I headed for the door. “Don’t call us—we’ll call you.”
I opened the door. Achmet the thug glanced at me in surprise, then at Sharrif, who was only just rising from the chair behind his desk. I slammed the door behind me, and the glass shuddered. I didn’t look back.
I made my way swiftly to Customs. Opening my bags for the Douanier, I could see from his indifference, and the slight disarray of the contents, that he’d seen them before. He shut them up and marked
them with chalk.
The rest of the airport was nearly deserted by now, but luckily the currency exchange was still open. After changing some money, I flagged down a porter and went outside for a cab. The heaviness of the balmy air struck me again. The dark scent of jasmine pervaded everything.
“The Hotel El Riadh,” I told the driver as I hopped in, and we sped off along the amber-lighted boulevard leading toward Algiers.
The driver’s face, old and gnarled as a redwood burl, peered at me inquisitively from the rearview mirror. “Has madame been before in Algiers?” he asked. “If not, may I give her a brief tour of the city for a price of one hundred dinars? This would include the journey to El Riadh, of course.”
El Riadh was over thirty kilometers the other side of Algiers, and a hundred dinars was only twenty-five dollars, so I agreed. It could cost more than that to get to Kennedy Airport from midtown Manhattan at rush hour.
We were passing along the main boulevard. A stately row of fat date palms ranged on one side. High arched colonial colonnades fronted the buildings on the other, facing the port of Algiers. You could smell the dank, salty flavor of the sea.
At the center of the port, across from the stately Hotel Aletti, we branched off onto a steep, sweeping boulevard that ascended the hill. As the street rose, the buildings seemed to become larger and to close in about us at the same time. Imposing, whitewashed colonial structures from before the war, looming in the darkness like ghosts that whispered together high above our heads. They were so close they folded out the starry night from view.
The air was completely dark now and silent. A few sparse streetlights cast the shadows of twisted trees against the stark white walls as the road grew ever narrower and steeper, winding its way into the very heart of Al-Djezair. The Isle.