'It is possible. One must break into the bank, and wait for the time lock. If the lock has been set so that the safe will not open for sixty hours, then one must wait for sixty hours. If bank employees arrive, one must kidnap them, keep them prisoner. There is no other way. A safe with a time lock has to wait for the time set.'
'I doubt if we can do that,' Craig said. 'The Tangier bank is too crowded.'
'We will not have to,' said Istvan. 'There is another way. You see,' he said, and his manner became more than ever that of the expert lecturer to first-year students, 'the trouble with time locks is that they're too good. They even have the clock inside the safe now, where people like me can't get at it. But suppose something goes wrong, then the bank has a problem. If the time lock developed a fault you couldn't get in, not without boring holes in the safe. And that could take days. So they put a secret way in—almost always. There's one in the bank in Tangier. There's one here.'
'Where?' asked Boris.
'Through the safe upstairs,' said Istvan. 'First you have to get through a grille with a key lock— then there's the safe itself. That has a combination lock. Come up and I'll show you.'
To open two sets of locks and work out two combinations took time, but there was no possibility of denying Istvan's certainty. They entered one safe at last. From there they could attack the other, now beneath them. This problem too he solved with massive certainty. As he prepared to open the trapdoor Boris said: 'An hour to get in, an hour to open the safe. That's pretty good.'
'It's brilliant,' said Craig, and Istvan smiled. 'And it'll take even less time to do the bank. The way-in's already been done. All we've got to do is the safe.'
Boris lowered himself down into the time-lock safe, then a beam of light flicked at him, and he swore again in Hungarian.
Inside the safe sat Loomis, torch in hand, a flask of coffee by his side.
He beamed at Istvan.
'You're good, cock, d'you know that?' he said. 'In fact you're better than good, you're bloody marvelous.' He paused. 'I knew you would be— or I wouldn't be here.'
He beamed at Istvan once more. 'You know a chap called Chelichev?'
'I do indeed,' said Istvan, and Boris stiffened.
'I'll be writing to him soon. Tell him just how good you are.'
15
They flew to Tangier in a Comet 4B, and Boris took advantage of the quaint local custom that allowed him to drink cheap liquor because he was on a plane. It didn't seem to affect him. Istvan tried it too, and it made him drunk, or at least talkative. Craig settled down to listen. So long as Istvan talked of the jobs he had done he was fascinating, and Craig, an expert himself, found no difficulty in tuning in to that part of his mind. The overwhelming need to solve the apparently insoluble was one he knew all about. It delighted him, and he was happy to hear it, and even as he grappled with the details of picklocks and tumblers found himself remembering his own pleasure at finding out how to defeat two men, two good men, who jump you simultaneously from opposite sides. But then Istvan began to talk of women, and Craig became first bored, then restless. It would be easy to shut him up, but Loomis had told him to be nice to him, so he went on listening. It was Boris who interrupted.
'You think too much of women,' he said.
'But consider,' said Istvan. 'I am supposed to be an American.'
Boris laughed. 'That is a point, but even so, you mean it, Istvan.'
'I was a very long time in Siberia,' the Hungarian said.
'And were there no women there?'
'Not in the sense that I mean,' Istvan said. 'In that sense there were none at all.'
Craig said: 'Boris is right. Women get in the way —slow things up.'
The Hungarian's eyes were both shrewd and pitying as they looked at him.
'That is the British way,' he said. 'It works, I suppose.'
'It works very well,' said Boris. It was his official voice; Istvan was silent.
'Our controller is a woman,' he said. 'She is quite young and very beautiful. It would be foolish of you to desire her, Istvan.'
Istvan said at once: 'Extremely foolish.'
There was a pause: they both seemed to be waiting for Craig to speak.
At last he said: 'I should have been told this earlier.'
Boris said: 'Don't worry. She is extremely good. Like a man is good. She thinks like a man, works like a man. Only the body belongs to a woman. That is very useful. And very dangerous.'
'Will she meet us at the airport?' Craig asked.
'No, no,' said Boris. 'That will all be arranged in time.' He pressed the bell above him. 'I think we should all drink cheap brandy and stop talking about women. . .'
* * *
So much about Tangier had changed, Craig thought. There was a modern airport now, and the road linking it to the city was fast and new. Now, too, the taxis were numerous, and the driver didn't try to sell you a woman as soon as you opened the door. The town looked cleaner, and more cared for: the lights in the street came on first time. The brothels had gone, and the shops where you could buy anything, from a fountain pen to an automobile, below duty-free price, below cost price sometimes, so that you came out wondering if the ring or the watch or the radio you had bought was counterfeit, or merely stolen . . . But the sea was still there, the confluence of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and the incredible view of it from the headland: the water in solid bars of blue and green, and behind it, softened by distance, the rocky masses of Gibraltar and the mainland of Spain. Craig thought briefly of George Allen, and Dovzhenko, who preferred to be known as Jean-Luc Calvet. Spain was a country he liked, and he'd been there often enough in the old days, but here in Tangier he was at home. He had no house any more, and no doubt tourists now used the little bar that had once belonged to the smugglers, but he felt still as if he had roots here, the stability of language and customs perfectly learned and understood. Many of the people he had known would be gone by now—particularly the Spaniards. When Spain had abandoned Spanish Morocco a lot of them had slipped back home across the water, but a lot of them would be left. And Arabs and Jews, and the Christians who were often so enchantingly vague about their nationality. If they saw him they would recognize him, but it didn't matter. The police couldn't touch him, didn't want to. After all, the arms he'd sold had all gone to the Algerians or the Moroccans themselves. Never to the French. That made him more of a local hero than a criminal. Nobody would mind if he brought over a couple of respectable business friends to look at the sights, though a few people might be disappointed to find that he was now respectable too.
The three of them dined in their hotel, a new one just off the Boulevard Pasteur, with a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms, and an open patio that looked straight up at stars that seemed almost gentle in the black and tender sky. They ate well, and without preoccupation, and Craig sensed that the woman—their controller—was not in the hotel. Then they walked back to the Boulevard Pasteur, and sat outside a cafe, to watch the aimless meandering of a Mediterranean crowd that knows how to enjoy the cool of the evening by doing nothing but relaxing and gossiping at cafe tables.
That night, as every night in summer, the crowd was mostly foreigners, tourists with money who would stray inevitably into souvenir shops, cafes, and cabarets. But now and then there passed a man in a djibbah, or a veiled woman, shrouded from the bridge of her nose to her toes, walking behind her lord. And sometimes, Craig remembered, those toes were covered by shoes imported from Paris, and the scent on their bodies came from Cardin . . . He watched a donkey go by. An old countryman rode on it. Behind him walked his wife, bent double under a load of firewood. Between them they halted a line of American cars, and the police-
man on duty let them. After all, they were citizens too.
Boris said: 'There is a great deal of inefficiency here.' Craig agreed. 'And a smell, also. Have you noticed it?'
'Drains?' Craig asked.
'No,' said Boris. 'It is a strange smell—thin and bitter. A lot of the people here seem to carry it about on their clothes.'
Istvan giggled.
'That's kef,' said Craig. 'A kind of marijuana. A lot of people use it here instead of alcohol. Alcohol's not approved of in a Muslim country.'
