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Page 48.

Tim hardly ever got to see his owner. He was kept in a big, dark room in chains. It was not as unpleasant as the truck ride, except for the pain where his ankle was chafed by the cold iron.

He woke up in Néma, chained to a wall. At least, the goat collar was gone. His hands were manacled. A skinny Arab with a French accent and graying hair came to see him. “I am the school teacher Selim Bey of Néma, Mauritanian city. I speak English. What is your name, Sir?”

“Timothy Nordhall, Lieutenant Junior Grade, U.S. Navy, serial number...”

“Very pretty. British?”

“American.”

“Yes, very pretty, thank you.” The schoolteacher sat on a wooden chair at a scratched dark oak table with a glass top and smoked a cigarette. His features half-stayed in amber shadows. He had pale, delicate hands and a bit of a nervous tic. He had big dark puffy eyes and a paunch. Evidently he lived fairly well, but had a lot of stress. “Mr. Omar Nasr Tandileh has paid to have you here. He is wealthy man who owns much property in Néma. We are deep in the desert and there is no place to run. You will stay here until your embassy calls.”

“Calls or comes?” Tim said. He sat in a corner, leaning against the coolness of a whitewashed mud wall. The floor was hard packed dirt, but had some frayed old oriental rugs thrown haphazardly over it. Tim pulled together a kind of soft seat for himself. The chain on his ankle was attached to a wrought iron grating inset over a small fireplace. It was mortared firmly in place. A little probing told him it would not come loose. No matter—where could he go, in the middle of the desert near the Mali border not too far from Timbuktu? The idea of escape was laughable.

“Calls, comes, they will negotiate. Very pretty. You will stay here quietly and if you have any concerns you call for teacher Selim Bey, you understand?”

“I understand, Mr. Selim Bey. Thank you.”

Selim Bey had a way of mugging his cigarette, getting half of it wet while it hung with a long ash under his nose. Tim, who rarely smoked, didn’t understand how the man could tolerate the smoke drifting through his eyes. Selim Bey rose and hitched his white pants up. He tucked his shirt in and came close, bending down to run a speculative and feminine pair of fingers up Tim’s spine. “Very pretty. You lucky, Mr. Nasr Tandileh does not like sleep with men. If you stay quiet, Mr. Tim, it will be easy. If you make trouble, Mr. Nasr Tandileh will cut your foot off, then your tongue. You won’t run far.” He made a horrified face and pointed his index fingers at his own eyes. “Or he take your eyes out. Be careful. Very pretty.” Selim Bey tilted his head to one side, with big eyes and a protruding tongue. He ran his fingers up and down Tim’s back, grunting, while holding his other hand over his own thigh. Tim recoiled, throwing himself against the wall and raising his manacled hands to ward off the dirty old man.

Bey looked at his fingers as if to inspect their tips for possible damage. Shivers ran up and down Tim’s spine. Still with that cigarette dangling like a physical appendage, Selim Bey reached behind the desk for a walking stick Tim had not noticed before. He gave the desk a sharp whack, and Tim shrank back at the clear threat, the ominous sense of beatings and other abuse to come if he did not cooperate.

Bey walked to the door. “You be smart, Mr. Tim. Very still, wait until negotiations complete. Nothing happen if you stay smart.” With that, he saw himself out. The door clapped shut, and a latch descended with a slam. Tim imagined that Bey was being cut in on whatever Tandileh hoped to get from the Embassy for his investment. Everything had its price.

Tim tried mentally to push away the aura of slime the man had left in the room. He reached for the tin dog bowl nearby and splashed water on his dirty, stubbled face. Warm droplets like thick blood dribbled off his chin and down his chest, into the hairs under the ragged tunic they’d given him to wear.

It was quiet in this empty room with its torn little carpets. Tim felt sick and exhausted. He rested against the wall until he slumped down and started to go to sleep on his rugs, like a dog. He heard layers of noise outside the quiet nucleus of this gloomy hall. Just beyond the confines, he heard the clatter of pots and dishes in a kitchen, and the laughter and conversation of women. Beyond that, he heard the noise of the city, the braying of camels and other animals—no dogs, for those were considered unclean—but he heard a cat meowing someplace. Those animals all had more freedom than he did, but then again he reflected, he was alive and all the men he’d served with were dead, gone painfully to a watery grave. He listened to the haunting song of the muezzin pouring like a dark and baleful river of words through the air every few hours—”God is great. There is no God but God. Mohammed is the Messenger of God. Come to prayer and be saved.”

Tim dozed as much as he could, but five times a day he awoke to the nightmarish sound of that call droning away. He began to tell apart the voices of the men who made that call to prayer from the highest minaret in the city. One was a higher, brighter voice, like that of a man happy with his work; the other, a dour and gloomy voice like that of a man wanting the world to suffer under the same penances and reproaches that crushed his own heart.

Tim grew tired of waiting in his prison, and started to plot an escape. He was still shackled and chained to the wall, and his ankles had developed weeping wounds that caused him considerable pain. His legs kept growing numb, and he kept having to shift painfully around to keep them exercised. This dance of the hours coincided with the passage of shadows across the white walls like the shadows on a sundial, and kept him hypnotized.

In all of this time, he only met his owner once. Mr. Nasr Tandileh was a brown-skinned man of Egyptian origin. So said Madame Noualah, a dumpy middle-aged wife of his who came in twice a day to rub fats and oils into Tim’s wounds. She spoke a little bit of English. Apparently, Selim Bey gave English lessons to Nasr Tandileh’s four wives. Tandileh came in one day, wearing a khaki and brown uniform of his own design, which was a cross between that of the French Foreign Legion (Vichy) and the Spanish Foreign Legion. He wore a French-style officer’s kepi, dark blue, with gold braid and red top. He wore a cape, evidently borrowed from the Spaniards not far up the line in Morocco’s western Sahara district. And, on his arm, was an armband with a French tricolor but in the middle of that was a small red diamond with a white circle inscribed, and, within that, a black swastika. He wore highly polished brown boots, yellow puttees, jodhpur riding trousers, and a dark green-brown wool British battle jacket associated with Eisenhower.

Evidently weighing his loyalties, Mr. Nasr Tandileh no doubt understood the British and Americans were wresting Africa back from the fascists, but there was always the danger of Adolf and Benito’s return. Besides, western Africa was largely a French operation, since the French were situated just across the Med. The French had staked their claim in North Africa around 1830, after the end of their Napoleonic follies, and Louis Philippe had created the FFL to do the heavy lifting in the invasion of Tunisia and Algeria. In the 1920s, Spain had followed with its own FL and, between the two nations, they’d broken the back of Barbary’s Rif warlords.

Two swarthy thugs accompanied Nasr Tandileh during his inspection of his prisoner, while Tim lay moaning on the floor from an ankle infection he was developing from the shackles. Turning up his nose, Nasr Tandileh left the room after just five minutes with his bodyguards. Tim heard a powerful engine start up in a garage just on the other side of the wall. This got Tim using his hearing, like a kind of Huff Duff, to divine the layout of the sprawling house with its harem, and the world beyond.