Algiers is the only city I know where the main post office looks like a mosque and the chief mosque looks like a post office. Not that I spent much time in the mosque but I thought I had made a major error when I entered the post office for the first time to collect letters from poste restante. I gazed in wonder at that vast hushed hall with its fretted screens and arabesques and came to the conclusion that it was an Eastern attempt to emulate the reverential and cathedral-like atmosphere affected by the major British banks. I got to know the post office quite well.
Getting to know the whereabouts of Paul Billson was not as easy. Although my French was good, my Arabic was non-existent, which made it no easier to fight my way through the Byzantine complexities of Algerian bureaucracy, an amorphous structure obeying Parkinson’s Law to the
n
th degree.
The track of my wanderings over Algiers, if recorded on a map, would have resembled the meanderings of a demented spider. At the twentieth office where my passport was given the routine fifteen-minute inspection by a suspicion-haunted official for the twentieth time my patience was nearly at snapping point. The trouble was that I was not on my own ground and the Algerians worked to different rules.
My hotel was in Hamma, in the centre of town near the National Museum, and when I returned, early one evening, I was dispirited. After a week in Algiers I had got nowhere, and if I couldn’t track Billson in a city what hope would I have in the desert? It seemed that my cutting edge had blunted from lack of practice.
As I walked across the foyer to collect my room key I was accosted by a tall Arab wearing the ubiquitous
djellaba.
‘M’sieur Stafford?’
‘Yes, I’m Stafford.’
Wordlessly he handed me an envelope inscribed with my surname and nothing else. I looked at him curiously as I opened it and he returned my gaze with unblinking brown eyes. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, unheaded and with but two typewritten lines:
I believe you are looking for Paul Billson.
Why don’t you come to see me?
There was a signature underneath but it was an indecipherable scrawl.
I glanced at the Arab. ‘Who sent this?’
He answered with a gesture towards the hotel entrance. ‘This way.’
I pondered for a moment and nodded, then followed him from the hotel where he opened the rear door of a big Mercedes. I sat down and he slammed the door smartly and got behind the wheel. As he started the engine I said, ‘Where are we going?’
‘Bouzarea.’ After that he concentrated on his driving and refused to answer questions. I gave up, leaned back in cushioned luxury, and watched Algiers flow by.
The road to Bouzarea climbed steeply out of the city and I twisted to look through the back window and saw Algiers spread below with the Mediterranean beyond, darkening
towards the east as the sun set. Already strings of lights were appearing in the streets.
I turned back as the car swung around a corner and pulled up against a long wall, blank except for a small door. The Arab got out and opened the car door and indicated the door in the wall which was already swinging open. I walked through into a large walled garden which appeared to be slightly smaller than Windsor Great Park, but not much. In the middle distance was a low-slung, flat-roofed house which rambled inconsequently over the better part of an acre. The place stank of money.
The door behind closed with the snap of a lock and I turned to confront another Arab, an old man with a seamed, walnut face. I didn’t understand what he said but the beckoning gesture was unmistakable, so I followed him towards the house.
He led me through the house and into an inner courtyard, upon which he vanished like a puff of smoke into some hidden recess. A woman lay upon a chaise-longue. ‘Stafford?’
‘Yes—Max Stafford.’
She was oldish, about sixty plus, I guessed, and was dressed in a style which might have been thought old-fashioned. Her hair was white and she could have been anyone’s old mother but for two things. The first was her face, which was tanned to the colour of brown shoe leather. There was a network of deep wrinkles about her eyes which betokened too much sun, and those eyes were a startling blue. The blue eyes and the white hair set against that face made a spectacular combination. The second thing was that she was smoking the biggest Havana cigar I’ve ever seen.
‘What’s your poison? Scotch? Rye? Gin? You name it.’ Her voice was definitely North American.
I smiled slowly. ‘I never take drinks from strangers.’
She laughed. ‘I’m Hesther Raulier. Sit down, Max Stafford, but before you do, pour yourself a drink. Save me getting up.’
There was an array of bottles on a portable bar so I went and poured myself a scotch and added water from a silver jug. As I sat in the wicker chair she said, ‘What are you doing in Algiers?’
She spoke English but when she said ‘Algiers’ it came out as
‘el Djeza’ir’.
Then she was speaking Arabic. I said, ‘Looking for Paul Billson.’
‘Why?’
I sipped the scotch. ‘What business is it of yours?’
She offered me a gamine grin. ‘I’ll tell you if you tell me.’
I looked up at the sky. ‘Is it always as pleasant here in winter?’
She laid down her cigar carefully in a big ashtray. ‘So okay, Stafford; you’re a hard trader. But just tell me one thing. Are you here to hurt Paul?’
‘Why should I want to hurt him?’
‘For Christ’s sake!’ she said irritably. ‘Must you always answer a question with a question?’
‘Yes, I must,’ I said sharply. ‘Until you declare your interest.’
‘So, all right; let’s quit fencing.’ She swung her legs off the chaise-longue and stood up. Her build was stocky and she was a muscular old bird. ‘I was a friend of Paul’s father.’
That sounded promising, so I gave measure for measure. ‘His sister is worried about him.’
Her voice was sharp. ‘His sister? I didn’t know Peter Billson had a daughter.’
‘He didn’t. His widow remarried during the war to a Norwegian who was killed. Alix Aarvik is Paul’s half-sister.’
Hesther Raulier seemed lost in thought. After a while she said, ‘Poor Helen; she sure had a tough time.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘I knew them both.’ She went over to the bar and poured a hefty slug of neat rye whisky. She downed the lot in one swallow and shuddered a little. ‘Paul told me Helen had died but he said nothing about a sister.’
‘He wouldn’t.’
She swung around. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘He treated her pretty badly. People don’t talk about those to whom they’ve been unkind. I’ll tell you this much—Paul wasn’t much help to his mother in her last years.’ I picked up my glass again. ‘Why should you think I’d hurt Paul?’
She gave me a level stare. ‘I’ll have to know a lot more about you before I tell you that, Max Stafford.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘And I’ll need to know a lot more about you.’
She smiled faintly. ‘Seems we’re going to have us a real gabfest. You’d better stay to dinner.’
‘Thanks. But tell me something. Where is Paul now?’
‘Come with me,’ she said, and led me into the garden where she pointed to the south at a low range of hills just visible in the twilight. ‘See those? Those are the foothills of the Atlas. Paul Billson is way to hell and gone the other side.’
By the time we went in to dinner our stiff-legged attitude had relaxed. I was curious about this elderly, profane woman who used an antique American slang; any moment I expected her to come out with ‘twenty-three, skidoo’. I gave her a carefully edited account and ended up, ‘That’s it; that’s why I’m here.’
She was drinking whisky as though she ran her own distillery at the bottom of the garden but not one white hair had twitched. ‘A likely story,’ she said sardonically. ‘A big important man like you drops everything and comes to Algiers looking for Paul. Are you sweet on Alix Aarvik?’
‘I hardly know her. Besides, she’s too young for me.’
‘No girl is too young for any man—
I know.
You’ll have to do better than that, Max.’
‘It was a chain of circumstances,’ I said tiredly. ‘For one thing I’m divorcing my wife and I wanted to get out of it for a while.’
‘Divorcing your wife,’ she repeated. ‘Because of Alix Aarvik?’
‘Because the man in her bed wasn’t me,’ I snapped.
‘I
believe
you,’ she said soothingly. ‘Okay, what’s your percentage? What do you get out of it?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
A cold blue eye bored into me. ‘Look, buster; don’t give me any of that Limey blandness. You tell me what I want to know or you get nothing.’
I sighed. ‘Maybe I don’t like being beaten up,’ I said, and told her the rest of it.
She was silent for a moment, then said, ‘That’s a hell of a concoction—but I believe it. It’s too crazy to be a spur-of-the-moment story.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ I said feelingly. ‘Now it’s my turn. How do you happen to live in Algiers—for starters.’
She looked surprised. ‘Hell, I was born here.’ It seemed that her father was of French-Arab mixture and her mother was Canadian; how that unlikely match came about she didn’t say. Her mother must have been a strong-minded woman because Hesther was sent to school in Canada instead of going to France like most of the children of the wealthy French colonists.
‘But I haven’t been back in years,’ she said. That would account for her outdated slang.
She had met Peter Billson in Canada. ‘He was older than I was, of course,’ she said. ‘Let’s see; it must have been 1933, so I’d be seventeen.’
And Billson was thirty. Hesther was on vacation, visiting the home of a schoolfriend, when Billson came into her life. She was the guest of McKenzie, a wealthy Canadian who was interested in the development of air travel, particularly in the more remote parts of Canada. Billson had begun to make a name for himself, so McKenzie had invited him for a long weekend to pick his brains.
Hesther said, ‘It was like meeting God—you know what kids are. These days they go nuts over long-haired singers but in those days the fliers were top of the heap.’
‘What sort of a man was he?’
‘He was a man,’ she said simply. She stared blindly back into the past. ‘Of course he had his faults—who hasn’t?—but they were the faults of his profession. Peter Billson was a good pilot, a brave man ambitious for fame, an exhibitionist—all the early fliers were like that, all touting for the adulation of the idiotic public.’
‘How well did you get to know him?’
She gave me a sideways look. ‘About as well as a woman can get to know a man. 1933 was the year I lost my virginity.’
It was hard to imagine this tough, leathery woman as a seventeen-year-old in the toils of love. ‘Was that before Billson married?’
Hesther shook her head. ‘I felt like hell when I had to talk to Helen over the coffee cups. I was sure I had guilt printed right across my forehead.’
‘How long did you know him?’
‘Until he died. I was supposed to come back here in 1934 but I managed to stretch out another year—because of Peter. He used to see me every time he was in Toronto. Then in 1935 I had to come back because my mother threatened to cut off the funds. The next time I saw Peter was when he landed here during the London to Cape Town Air Race of ’36. I saw him take off from here and I never saw him
again.’ There was a bleakness in her voice when she added, ‘I never married, you know.’
There wasn’t much to say to that. After a few moments I broke the uncomfortable silence. ‘I hope you won’t mind telling me a bit more about that. Did you know his flight plan, for instance?’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said a little wearily. ‘But I don’t know much. I was a girl of twenty, remember—and no technician. He had that beefed-up Northrop which was a freight carrier. Jock Anderson had installed extra gas tanks in the cargo space and the plan was to fly south from Algiers to Kano in Nigeria. The desert crossing was going to be the most difficult leg, so Jock came here with a team to give the plane a thorough check before Peter took off.’
‘Jock Anderson—who was he?’
‘The flight mechanic. Peter and Jock had been together a long time. Peter flew the planes and pushed them hard, and Jock kept the pieces together when they threatened to bust apart. They made a good team. Jock was a good engineer.’
‘What happened to him afterwards?’
‘When Peter disappeared he broke up. I’ve never seen a man get drunk so fast. He went on a three-day splurge, then he sobered-up and left Algiers. I haven’t seen him since.’
I pondered on that but it led nowhere. ‘What do you think of Paul Billson?’
‘I think he’s a nut,’ she said. ‘Hysterical and crazy. Totally unlike his father in every way.’
‘How did you get to know him?’
‘Same way as I got to know you. I have ears all over this city and when I heard of a man looking into Peter Billson I was curious so I sent for him.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Where is he?’
‘Gone looking for his Daddy. By now he’ll be in Tammanrasset.’
‘Where’s that?’
Hesther gave me a crooked smile. ‘You go south
into
the desert until you’re going
out
of the desert. That’s Tammanrasset, in the Ahaggar about two thousand kilometres south of here. Plumb in the middle of the Sahara.’
I whistled. ‘Why there?’
‘If you’re looking for something in the Ahaggar, Tam is a good place to start.’
‘What’s the Ahaggar like?’
Hesther looked at me for a moment before she said, ‘Mountainous and dry.’
‘How big?’
‘Christ, I don’t know—I haven’t measured it lately. Wait a minute.’ She went away and returned with a book. ‘The
Annexe du Hoggar
—that’s the administrative area—is 380,000 square kilometres.’ She looked up. ‘I don’t know what that is in square miles; you’ll have to figure that yourself.’
I did, and it came to nearly 150,000 square miles—three times the area of the United Kingdom. ‘Paul Billson
is
crazy,’ I said. ‘What’s the population?’
Hesther consulted the book again. ‘About twelve thousand.’