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Page 50.

The doors were locked from outside. Tim softly broke a window. He threw an old blanket over the sill to climb out. He was outside, in the yard! The night air blew dry his sweat, and bathed him in the freshness of freedom. This was worth it. It was worth dying a free man.

He clambered through a bush, over a wooden fence, and stood in a dirt alley among looming houses whose windows threw light out upon the darkness. He heard radios playing Arabic music, the lilting wail of a woman singer praising God, or lamenting a lost love, or commenting on the eternity of the desert, or on the brevity of life and love. He walked toward the airport, as he had HD’d it in the darkness of his captivity. He was surprised at the smell of flowers in the air. Maybe the town must have grown up around an oasis. There were no streetlights, but here and there a corner lantern in a glass case threw light on the next turn or the next alley. Occasionally he passed other night pedestrians—an old man with a donkey, or a young boy hurrying along with a package. Someone would greet him, and he’d mumble back salaam aleikum, “be well, go with God.” A hooded shape stepped in his path, a woman veiled from head to toe, who muttered seductively. He smelled her cloying cinnamon and hookah breath. He brushed past her saying his greeting, adding shukran, “thanks,” and he heard two or three young prostitutes giggling behind him.

The airport was a long dirt strip with several buildings along the side. A windsock fluttered in the chill night wind from the desert, above what looked like a small warehouse and was probably a hangar. Next to that blazed every light on earth inside an office building that carried the French and Mauritanian flags (a tricolor, and beside that a green banner with a yellow star above an upturned yellow crescent). Inside at a desk he spied several dark-haired men in military looking uniforms, hunched over forms and engaged in conversation. He hurried past them, looking toward another building that had a sign, “New-York City Bistro.” Loud music and laughter emanated from there, and he thought he heard a man’s coarse voice bellow something in English.

Tim waited in the shadows with his hood up. Being dark-haired and unshaven, he looked a bit like a Moorish northerner of Caucasian stock. Many of the guest laborers were Fulani or Wolof, brown-skinned Senegalese, with occasional bluish-black-skinned tropical Africans from further south and inland. The French West African territory of Mauritania had been administered from Saint-Louis in Senegal since 1920.

Tim craned his neck, looking past the half-open blue wooden door, and into the interior of the establishment. Smoke from hookah pipes floated out, as did smells of strong, sweet black coffee and an occasional sour whiff of strong French cigarette smoke.

How long could he stand here like this before being challenged, discovered, thrown in jail, perhaps shot? It was all or nothing. He started walking. He kept his hands in his pockets and his hood up to keep his features in shadows.

He crossed the threshold onto the bistro’s wooden floor. He smelled cooked lamb, cabbage, a dozen other pungent vegetables. It was a rich, gamy smell with a strong undertone of wood fired grilling, but he had no appetite.

A pair of men in gray clothing whose shoulder patches had been carefully razored off, and wearing gray visored caps, were just leaving with bundles of food under their arms. The bundles were wrapped in blue and white-checkered towels. Each man also carried a wooden container of drinking material (tea, probably, Tim surmised).

“Fellas, you’ve gotta help me,” he said, confronting them in the narrow hallway.

“Was sagt er?” said the one to the other. “What’d he say?”

Krauts, Tim thought, just my luck.

The other, the older and stockier with the redder face, shrugged. “Engländer, wahrscheinlich.” “Probably an Englishman.”

The younger man, who was the blonder of the two, said: “You speak English?”

“Yes, I’m an American. U.S. Navy. I surrender. Please take me with you.”

They laughed. “We are noncombatants, Check,” one said in good though thickly accented U.S. idiom. It took Tim a moment to realize he was saying ‘Jack,’ pronouncing it sounded like ‘Check’.”

“Make that Tim.” He began to see some hope.

One of the Arabs in the place shouted a question, probably asking if some Rif baggage were bothering them.

“Schon gut—alles klar,” the younger man said with a wave. “No problem—take it easy.”

“Keine Sorge, alter Chef,” the older man told the Berber. “Not to worry, old boss.”

“You didn’t kill or rob anyone, did you?” the younger man asked.

“I was shipwrecked and sold into slavery.”

The old man laughed. “Anywhere else, I’d say Du spinnst Märchen, you tell fairy tales, but not here.”

They took him between them, protectively, one at each elbow, and guided him along toward the landing strip. The older man introduced himself as Walther Märzig, co-owner of a one-plane airline called Guterspedition—Westafrika Sternlinie (Cargo Express—West African Star Line). Big name for a one-plane show, Tim thought. The younger man, by maybe ten years, was his paternal cousin, Willi Märzig. They were originally from Kiel, but Rommel had brought them to Africa. Now Rommel had gone one way, and they had gone another, taking with them one of his cargo planes.

“You want to go to Morocco?” Walther asked Tim.

“Why Morocco?”

“There is a colony of American expatriates there. We met some of them last year, including the writer Paul Bowles and his wife Jane, a playwright. They come and go like the rest of your countrymen.”

“Strange birds, many of them,” Willi said.

“Artists,” Walther said. “Bohemians. And she is a Jew.”

“Very dangerous for them,” Walther agreed. “You want to travel north on our next trip?”

“Very dangerous for me,” Tim said. “No, I’d rather head deeper into Africa.”

“Then the Congo,” Walther said. “The Germans occupy Belgium, and so they think they own the Congo, but everyone is there now. Americans, Belgians, British…”

Willi added: “And the Soviets too. It’s a fight between allies.

From his technical reading, Tim had an inkling that it had something to do with the rich radium mines in that Belgian possession. He’d read about a terrible energy bomb, made from radium, that could win the war and change history.

“Come,” Willi said.

“We’ll get you out of here,” Walther added.