TWO DAYS LATER, I WAS AT AN AIR BASE OUTSIDE OF LONDON, waiting to catch a flight to Gibraltar. From there I would hop across the Straits to Tangier, where I would meet with the head OSS man in the region. After that, I assumed I’d be off to Casablanca to take a look at a river in the desert.
Martha came to the air base to see me off. We were standing on the tarmac, beside my plane.
“Good-bye, darling,” she said. There weren’t any tears in her eyes, but her voice sounded strained. “I’ll be leaving soon, too,” she said. “I just got a call from a friend in the air corps. He’s managed to get me a space on an army plane heading home.”
“Is he in love with you, too?” I said. And I said it with a smile, so that she would take it as a compliment, which is how I meant it.
“Thank you for saying ‘too.’ I’ll ask him and let you know. You will look after yourself, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a silly thing to say, isn’t it.”
“Maybe. But it’s expected in scenes like this. And it’s my turn to say the same thing to you.”
“I will. Take care of myself, I mean. You know me. And assuming we don’t get shot down, my biggest challenges, once I get home, will be boredom laced with domestic tension, at least until I can wangle another assignment. I’m stopping off in New York and maybe if I sit on someone’s lap at Collier’s, they’ll think of something else for me. I’ll write to you. Will you write to me?”
“Of course.”
She had a private, personal post office box in Havana. I had sent letters there in the past. She sent her letters to me via the Fleet Post Office, and they eventually got to the ship. But for the next month or so, my address would be the US Consulate in Casablanca.
“I’m very much in love with you, you know,” she said. “If anything, the week we’ve just had has made it worse.”
“For me, too. And you know, of course, that I feel the same way.”
“You’re in love with me, too.”
“Desperately,” I said, smiling, to balance the melodrama.
“‘Desperately’ is good,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“If I ever write this scene, I may use it.”
“And when I read it, I’ll remember.”
“You’d better.”
Then she smiled slightly and kissed me and turned around quickly and hurried to the cab that was waiting. And that was the end of it. Aside from the little jokes, it was a pretty typical wartime farewell scene. That was all right. There’s not much room for originality in situations like this, so there’s no need to wish for it.
Would I ever see her again? How the hell did I know. We had made no promises, other than to write and try not to get ourselves killed. But I hoped I would—see her again, I mean. Was I really in love with her? Yes, I was, although I’m not sure “desperately” was the best way to describe it. And I believed she meant what she said to me. We both knew ours was a far-above-average love affair. In peacetime, it might’ve had a chance of lasting for a while. But this was wartime, and things had a way of happening.
The plane was a Lancaster bomber that made a regular run to The Rock. We took off and swung well out into the Atlantic, beyond the range of Luftwaffe fighters, before turning and making a dash to the east and setting down nicely in Gibraltar.
The Brits welcomed me and gave me a room in the Royal Navy bachelor officers’ quarters. I only had that evening to look around. But I didn’t feel much like sightseeing. Most of the actual Rock was off limits, anyway, and I had no interest in seeing the Barbary apes. I agreed with Mark Twain when he said the Almighty must have designed humans because He was disappointed with the monkey. I knew some excellent specimens of humanity, but not all that many, and most of the rest of the species didn’t impress me much. And I’m pretty sure they would return the compliment. So I certainly wasn’t interested in looking at failed prototypes.
On the flight down to Gibraltar, I couldn’t help thinking about Amanda Billingsgate and wondering if I’d run into her in Morocco. Casablanca was a pretty big town, but the foreign community tended to hang around the same places. At least, that’s what Bunny had told me. Chances are, I would see her, unless for some reason she didn’t want to be seen. That was a possibility. If she was up to some nefarious espionage business, she might not want to be seen by anyone from her past. But I hoped I would—see her again, I mean. Amanda and I had what’s known as a history. And it was the good kind. She always reminded me somehow of butterscotch. It was mostly her coloring, and I wondered if she’d changed that. If she was involved in the spy business, it would have been the sensible thing to do. But it would be too bad.
I have to confess—I also wondered about having those pleasant thoughts and memories about Amanda. After all, it wasn’t too many hours before that I’d said good-bye to Martha and also said some pretty serious things to her, and heard the same things from her. And that made me think that maybe Mark Twain had got the order of creation backwards, at least in some cases. But I dismissed that idea, as well as any budding feelings of guilt. You can’t help what you think. That’s why it’s generally best not to do it, when complicated matters of the heart are concerned. Other times, of course, it’s useful. Even necessary.
Besides, Bunny was the one who brought her up. Amanda, I mean. If he hadn’t, she would have remained a name from recent history. If she had returned to my thoughts, it wasn’t my fault. A rationalization? Maybe. But I could live with it. I did wonder if he had mentioned her just to sweeten the deal he was offering me. God knows there was very little sweetness about the rest of it. I had raised my hand and said yes, but at the moment I had a mild case of volunteer’s remorse. That’s normal, of course, but knowing that doesn’t make it go away.
The next morning I hopped a ride with a Royal Navy patrol boat, and we headed across the Strait for Spanish Morocco and the city of Tangier. Morocco was theoretically ruled by a Muslim king, but in fact it was divided into two protectorates, which was the fig-leaf term for colonies. The northern portion along the coast was run by the Spanish, while the southern portion, which was far larger, belonged to France. Tangier was supposed to be an open city under the international agreements that set up this whole arrangement, but a couple of years ago, after winning his civil war, Franco decided to absorb the city, and so he was now running things in Tangier. The international community didn’t say much about it, as far as I knew. All those diplomats sitting around long tables were used to making elaborate treaties that other diplomats and their bosses would ignore when it suited them. It was how things worked.
The boat ride was pleasant and the patrol craft was sleek and fast, and in a couple of hours I was in the capital of wartime espionage. Or at least, one of them.
There was a US sailor and a jeep waiting for me when I arrived in the very busy port. He came up and saluted smartly and said he’d come from the Consulate to pick me up and take me to Lieutenant Colonel William Eddy, who was the naval attaché in Tangier, and my contact in the OSS.
“What’s your name, sailor?” I asked my driver, when we had settled my luggage and climbed into the open-air jeep.
“Davis, sir.”
“How do you like being posted here?”
“Well, sir, it’s one of the best places in the world, if you want a dose of the clap.”
“Good to know.”
It didn’t take long to realize that Tangier was city that would depress all but the most optimistic missionary with the hopelessness of his task—assuming his task involved conversion and reformation and rejection of any and all sins, deadly and otherwise. In fact, missionary optimism alone wouldn’t suffice. Blind innocence and a healthy dose of saintliness might make someone believe in the essential goodness of mankind, or even in the possibility of improvement. Anyone else would see clearly that the human race was a mess, and that Tangier had collected the sour cream of the crop.
Not that it wasn’t interesting to me. Actually, I was expecting something along these lines, and I was not disappointed. First, there was the port itself, crammed with shipping from all over the world and loaded with cargo, some of it legitimate, some of it headed for illegal harbors. And, like any international port, the docks and adjacent streets were no places for your grandmother. But if you wanted a grandmother, there’d be a pimp who’d get you one and guarantee she was a virgin and had a clean certificate of health. She’d meet you near the end of the next alley and you shouldn’t mind the merchant sailors you had to step over to get to her.
That was just for starters.
Away from the port and in the city, there were a couple of thousand desperate refugees from all across Europe, most of whom would do anything to find a way out of there, so that they could get to somewhere leading to anywhere else, as long as it was free from Franco’s police, Nazis, and the local Gestapo thugs.
The refugees were milling around, desperately harried by local con artists who would sell them whatever they needed in terms of paperwork. Paperwork was easy to forge, and there was a willing market just waiting to be cheated. In the mix with these frightened Europeans were a few thousand Spanish communists and escapees from the Civil War. They hated Franco and his goons and were of course making plans and plots to get their revenge. The native Berber population, along with smatterings of other North African tribes, were the teeming majority, but they were also the indigenous underclass typical in any European colony. Their allegiance to their European masters was wavering, or, rather, nonexistent. They didn’t care who won the war, because they only wanted their independence, and anyone who lied to them convincingly about helping them get it had a receptive audience. They disliked being shoved around by Franco’s police and didn’t like being thought of as virtually subhuman. It didn’t seem unreasonable to me, but their European bosses didn’t think they were ready to look after themselves, and told them so.
So, if you take all these incompatible peoples and cram them in a city of narrow streets and alleys that wind around dark and dirty neighborhoods with sinister-looking men and sinister-looking women all dressed in sinister-looking clothes tending sinister-looking urchins throwing stones at sinister dogs, all of them with that “lean and hungry look,” and you set all these characters lurking in the dirty, littered stinking neighborhoods, you would have the essence, and I do mean essence, in the Chanel sense of the word, of Tangier.
True, the main part of the city was almost recognizable as a civilized place, with hotels and government buildings here and there and more bars and nightclubs than you could count in an evening’s wanderings. The minarets where they called the faithful every few hours gave the place an Arabian nights atmosphere. But on balance the city was a steaming pile of depressing humanity that made you wonder about a lot of things, metaphysical and otherwise.
There is the kind of person who revels in all of this and thinks it’s colorful, which it is, and also thinks its diversity is enchanting. I didn’t fall in that particular camp. What was it Martha had said? Mankind cannot stand too much reality? Well, here it was staring me in the face. I could stand it. But as I surveyed the scene, I thought fondly of the swimming pool around the Garden of Allah Hotel—the Hollywood pleasure dome and fraternity house where I used to live—and of the starlets who came there in the fragrant evenings to swim naked, while the various degenerate writers and actors sipped gin and tonics and enjoyed the spectacle and hoped that Kismet would deliver one or more of these houris to their room. I much preferred those ersatz Arabian nights to this real thing. Too bad. Hollywood was a long way away. I had joked to Bunny that it didn’t really exist, and from the perspective of faraway Tangier, it was easy to believe that.
We drove through the narrow, littered streets, and in one alley a gang of kids, all about eight years old on average, gathered and followed along behind us, shouting something. Davis reached in his pocket and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes and tossed them over his shoulder. The pack of kids fell on the cigarettes like sharks on a dead whale. “They start smoking early here,” he said. “Luckies are their favorite. ‘LSMFT—Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.’”
I thought the advertising agency that had dreamed up that slogan would be proud to know it was being quoted in faraway Tangier.
Then we pulled out on the wide boulevards of the main city. We weren’t headed for the official US offices, though.
“Colonel Eddy wants to meet you at his villa outside of town, sir,” said Davis. “That’s about the only place you can be fairly sure of having a private conversation. He also has rooms at the El Minzah Hotel in town, but those rooms are bugged, and every maid and waiter is being paid by somebody, maybe by more than one somebody, to report whatever they hear and collect any scrap of paper they can lift from the wastebaskets. The Consulate and all our offices are bugged. Even the head. Phones, too. It’s a good way to pass along phony information to the Krauts and Eyeties and the matadors.”
It took about half an hour to get to Eddy’s villa in the country. When we left the city and went out into the countryside, it looked a lot like Southern California. The weather was sunny, not surprisingly, and the dry desert air also reminded me of California. It was a welcome change after my last year, stationed in Key West and Havana, where the air was half liquid most of the time. And shepherding slow convoys across the Atlantic was an exercise in weeks of nothing but the damp and mold. So it was good to feel dry all over, even if you paid for it by being in North Africa.
The villa was on a small hill, and you could see the Atlantic in the distance. On a very clear day you could make out the tip of the Rock of Gibraltar across the Strait. The house was large and white, of course, and there was a small garden and patio on the side. Orange trees and cactus were mixed with the flowers.
“Where’s all the sand, Davis? I thought we were supposed to be in the desert.”
“Go a little ways east, Lieutenant. Climb over those Atlas Mountains there and look toward Egypt; you’ll have all the sand you want for as far as you can see. That’s the Sahara, and thank God it’s on the other side of the mountains.”
“Well, the colonel’s villa is in a pretty spot,” I said, as we pulled into the well-maintained gravel driveway.
“Being a colonel’s a good thing.”
“How about being a seaman, first class?”
“Less good, but still better than being any of these beggars in this godforsaken part of the world.”
Frankly, it didn’t seem that godforsaken, now that we were out of the teeming city.
Colonel Eddy had seen us driving up and was on the patio when we arrived. I could see that he walked with a pretty severe limp and used a cane.
I got out of the jeep and waved. Neither one of us was wearing a uniform so there was no saluting required.
“I’ll wait for you, sir,” said Davis. “I imagine you’ll be going to the hotel, when you’re finished with the colonel.”
“The hotel that’s bugged?”
“They all are, sir, but you’ll be going to the El Minzah. It’s the best in the city. Highest-quality bugs.”
“It’s good to be a naval attaché.”
“That’s the truth, sir.”
I walked over to the patio and introduced myself to Colonel Eddy.
“Good to meet you,” he said with a friendly smile. “Welcome aboard.” He turned to Davis. “Has the drip cleared up, Davis?”
“Almost, sir.”
“Good. Let that be a lesson to you.”
“I’ve learned it, sir.”
“Go around to the kitchen and get a beer. Mr. Fitzhugh and I will need about an hour, then you can take him back to town.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Eddy laughed and said to me, “The only thing Davis has learned is not to go back to that same house. Let’s sit on the patio and have a drink. Gin and tonic suit you?”
“Yes, sir.”
We sat down at a table under an orange tree and a navy steward took the drinks order.
Eddy looked like a movie extra, but not the handsome kind—more like the kind who plays the camp cook on a cattle drive or a rugged sergeant major in the cavalry. Everything about him seemed to be thickset, including his face. But there was no fat on him. There was a trace of bulldog, too, as though he were a distant, younger cousin of Churchill.
“The only people working here are sailors and marines,” he said. “No locals or Europeans. Frankly, you can’t trust anyone you’re not absolutely sure of. That’s the first lesson to learn about this part of the world. That sounds like something out of The Boys’ Book of Adventure, but it’s the unvarnished truth.”
“Davis was telling me that all the offices are bugged.”
“It’s true. And we’re followed wherever we go. I know for a fact that there are at least fifty-five Gestapo agents in the city, alone. Those are the ones we know about and have pictures of. Who knows how many more there are? The only business we conduct at our offices is meaningless busywork or counterintelligence stuff—passing phony information through the thin walls or over the telephone. We do the important business out here. Maybe you noticed the marine sentries arranged around? Nobody gets in here.”
“I saw a few.”
“You didn’t see them all. Do you carry a handgun?”
“No, sir. Should I?”
“Never hurts. You can draw one from the Consulate. You’ll have to sign for it and turn it in when you leave. You know how that works.”
“Yes, sir.” I wouldn’t need to draw one. I had my .38 in my luggage.
“What do you think of the country so far?”
“Interesting.”
“Ha! That’s what people say about modern art. Well, if you stay here long enough you may get to the point where you appreciate it. You know what the English say about India—‘You hate it for the first six months you’re there and love it for the rest of your life.’ It’s the same here. For some.”
“I figure to be out of here before six months, Colonel.”
“One way or the other, eh? I understand. The country takes some getting used to, but I like it, and I like the people very much. Of course, I was born in the Middle East. My folks were missionaries. So I grew up speaking Arabic alongside English. Arabic’s an interesting language. Very difficult, but not if you take to it as a kid. Lots of different dialects, of course, but they all can understand each other pretty well. And the calligraphy is exquisite. How’s your French?”
“I can order a beer.”
“Well, that should be good enough. Most people you’ll need to deal with can get by in English. I figure they thought of that when they gave you this job. So, speaking of that—what have they told about your mission?”
“Well, sir, not really all that much. They want to know if the Sebou River north of Casablanca is navigable. They’re pretty much leaving it up to me to figure it out.”
“That’s because you’ve been lent to the OSS. That’s how we do business. Figuring it out as we go along. Leaves lots of room for initiative and screwups. Even a touch of farce now and then. How’s our friend Bunny Finch-Hayden?”
“Very well. He sends his regards.”
“Good fellow. I met him when I was in London this last trip. You’d think only the English would saddle a kid with that nickname, but Edmund Wilson is called that, too. Know of him?”
“Only by reputation.”
“Bit of a stuffed shirt, despite being a Princeton man.” Our drinks arrived. “Well, cheers—and here’s to the success of your mission.”
Bunny had briefed me about Colonel Eddy. He was an altogether remarkable man. Born in Lebanon to Presbyterian missionaries, he was sent back to the United States for his education. After graduating from Princeton in 1917, he joined the marines and was wounded in France. Shortly afterwards he was caught in the Spanish flu epidemic that caused some severe infections that required surgery, damaging his hip joint so badly that he walked with a limp from then on.
When the war was over he went back to Princeton and got his PhD in English, taught at Dartmouth College for a while, and then became president of Hobart College. When the current war broke out, he rejoined the marines and then found his way into the fledging OSS, which resulted in his assignment as naval attaché in Morocco. He spoke a couple of other languages, in addition to Arabic, and had written his doctoral dissertation on satire in Gul-liver’s Travels. So he had a healthy taste for irony and humor of all varieties, mixed with a missionary son’s sense of duty and a marine’s sense of honor and devotion to one’s country. He had a loving wife and family back home. He was friendly, even gregarious, and could get along with almost anyone, but he did not suffer fools at all. He was exactly the way you’d design a warrior-diplomat-spy, if you knew what you were doing.
“What were you doing before you got lassoed into this business?”
“I was the executive officer on the PC-475,” I said. “We were escorting a convoy to England and got hit pretty hard by a bomb from a Heinkel 111. The ship’s scheduled for repairs at the Clyde River shipyard, and it’ll take a while to put her back together. So Bunny thought I might like a temporary assignment.”
“What did you do before the war?”
“I was a private investigator in Los Angeles. That’s how I got to know Bunny.”
“Yes, he told me he taught at UCLA.”
I was glad he didn’t smile or make a joke about trench coats, when I told him about being a PI. A lot of people seemed to think it was funny, somehow. He didn’t. I guess it was no more unusual for a former private dick to be in this spy business than a former college professor. As I was to learn, the unusual was common in the OSS.
“How much do you know about Operation Torch?” he said.
“Not much, sir. What little I know about anything is pretty much confined to questions about the Sebou River. Planners want to know if a supply vessel could get upstream as far as the airport. Twelve miles or thereabouts. Why they want to know it is pretty clear, but I don’t know much more than that. Not much about the bigger picture.”
“Better that way, I think. That way, if you’re captured and questioned, you won’t be able to tell them anything they don’t already suspect.” He smiled. It was not exactly a grin, but close. “The truth is, if they did capture and interrogate you, they’d probably think you were a plant put there to lead them astray. You’re a new face, and they’ll be suspicious. That’s how devious things have become these days in this part of the war. We all start with the premise that nothing is real. Certainly nothing is what it seems to be.”
I must have smiled, too.
“You think I’m joking? Well, maybe a little. But when I tell you we have a man picking up Moroccan mule turds for analysis by our weapons boys in London, you’ll change your mind—at least about how devious things are. There aren’t many good roads in this part of the world, and those few are scattered with mule droppings, so our folks are making small land mines in that shape and color. Big enough to blow up a tire or maybe a tank tread. That’s in case the Germans or their buddies decide to come west to attack Morocco.”
“English mule turds wouldn’t do?”
“Surprisingly not. Different feed results in different color and consistency, you see. Personally, I doubt whether your average German truck driver would know the difference. But our mad scientists are fussy about details.”
“What happens if the Germans don’t come?”
“Well, then you wouldn’t want a job as a road sweeper. And there’ll be a few bad days for stray dogs. But the whole point is, not even a humble pile of shit is a humble pile of shit. We and the enemy are thinking creatively, so the idea of planting someone with false information is standard operating procedure. We do it all the time. We have to figure they do too. Now that I think of it, the fact that you’re a former private eye may have suggested to Bunny that you were just the right man for this job. Maybe he figured you could tell the phonies from the real guys.”
“Well, sir, I have worked the last half-dozen years in Hollywood. I guess if I’m an expert in anything, it’s phonies. So I hope Bunny’s right.”
“Me, too. But if you think the exploding mule turds is a one-off Marx Brothers’ idea, there’s a scheme in the works to dress up a dead body in an officer’s uniform with a set of phony plans and dump him off the shores of Spain, figuring sooner or later he’ll drift ashore, the Spanish cops will find him, and the phony plans will eventually get to Adolf. It’s not my project, but I’ve heard about it. So these things do go on. Even so, I would not want you to get arrested.”
“Me, either. But I assume we have diplomatic immunity. Doesn’t that provide some cover?”
“Up to a point. Which is another way of saying, not exactly. Our diplomatic status with the Spanish—and more importantly, with the Vichy French—has been very useful to our intelligence business. It means that we can send and receive things by diplomatic pouch, which allows for a degree of secrecy in our communication. And we can move around pretty freely through both parts of Morocco and Algeria, for that matter. The president and the State Department took a great deal of flak for recognizing Vichy after the surrender. And you can understand why. But the arrangement has been very helpful to us, so it was another pretty good deal with the Devil—which more or less describes what we do here, daily. On the other hand, we’ve had a hell of a time setting up a series of secret radio stations, so that we can transmit and receive when the mule shit hits the road. They are technically illegal, even for us attachés. So we have far from a free hand. I suppose you’ve been briefed on all this political stuff.”
“Up to a point.”
“Ha! Very good. Speaking of ‘up to a point,’ are you familiar with Evelyn Waugh? No? Very funny writer. His novel Scoop uses that line, which is where I got it. This English press lord, sort of a Beaverbrook character, bosses everyone around and people are afraid to say no to him, so when he asks a tough question they respond with ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper,’ when the answer is really no.”
“I’ll look it up. I do read a lot. When there’s time.”
“You should. Anyway, you have to keep in mind that you are dealing with the Nazis and their stooges—Italian, Spanish, and Vichy French—plus their natives. They don’t play by civilized rules. And so, we don’t either. They won’t necessarily arrest you and put you in jail, but you might end up in a lonely spot in the desert, if they find you doing something they don’t like. I don’t say this to be melodramatic, once again. But just so that you’ll know the situation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How do you plan to go about figuring out the river?”
“Aside from going and taking a look, I was hoping for a suggestion or two.”
“You’re familiar with Samuel Johnson?”
“Yes, but mostly through Bunny.”
“Yes, that figures. Well, Johnson said there are two kinds of knowledge—knowledge of the thing itself, and knowledge of where to find out about it. In this case, the second way is the more efficient, seems to me. There’s no sense trying to learn every twist and turn and channel, when there’s probably someone who already knows it. It’ll just be a matter of finding him and persuading him to give you the information.”
“That occurred to me as well, sir. There’s the added problem that the Sebou is a tidal river, so it will be different at different stages of the tide. It may be navigable only part of the time. Which means local knowledge is a lot more useful than my personal observations.”
“Yes. Heraclitus said you can never step into the same river twice. He must have been thinking of a river like the Sebou.”
“Yes, sir. He often came to Morocco for the waters.”
“Really?”
“Up to a point, Colonel.”
“Ah. Good. You can tell a lie with a straight face.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Well, when you get to Casablanca, you will contact our man there. Tell him what you’re thinking about. He’ll know the basics of the assignment and may have some suggestions for you. He’s an anthropologist and a Harvard professor. I don’t hold that against him. But I warn you, he has a lively imagination. He enjoys this business—maybe more than he should. Likes to run around the desert in native costume. He’s the one who dreamed up the exploding mule shit. So I wouldn’t accept a cigar from him, if I were you. At least, if you do, don’t light it.”
“I don’t smoke, sir.”
“Very wise. We’ll fix you up with a car and a driver and all the necessary papers. There’s a pretty good road between here and there, which is convenient in one sense and not so good in another, because it makes it easy for the Vichy to watch it and to set up checkpoints wherever they want. There’s one at the border between the Spanish and the French sections, of course, but others are ad hoc. Could spring up anywhere once you’re in the French zone. But going down you shouldn’t have any trouble.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He looked at me for a moment, obviously making an assessment. He seemed satisfied.
“I hear you did well against the Krauts in the Gulf of Mexico.”
“We got a German freighter and the crew of a U-boat.”
“Nice work. I just got back from a meeting with the brass who are going to run the Moroccan side of Torch. George Patton’s in command. When I came limping into the meeting he said, ‘Well, he looks like he’s been shot at enough.’ To him that was a compliment. I told him I agreed with the ‘enough’ part, which brought a laugh. I’d never met him before, but he impressed me as someone who knows what he’s doing. It’s funny how you get these quick impressions. And my quick impression is that you’ll do fine in this job.”
“I appreciate that, Colonel.”
“All you need is a code name. An ideas? Preferences?”
“No, sir. Not offhand.”
“I know. You come from Hollywood. How about Beau Geste?”
“Okay by me, sir. Of course, he dies in the end.”
“Yes, but he gets the job done. Besides, life doesn’t have to imitate art, does it?”
“No, sir. In fact, in my experience, it almost never does.”
“Good. Beau Geste it is. How about another drink?”
“That’d be good.”
My mouth was a little dry—probably from the desert air.