Checkpoint Charlie Read Free Page B

Ross. He stumbled groggily when we went along to the shabby export office that housed the front organization for Arbuckle’s soporific East Africa station.
    A fresh breeze came off the harbor. I’ve always liked Dar; it’s a beautiful port, ringed by palm-shaded beaches and colorful villas on the slopes. Some of the older buildings bespeak a dusty poverty but the city is more modern and energetic than anything you’d expect to find near the equator on the shore of the Indian Ocean. There are jams of hooting traffic on the main boulevards. Businessmen in various shadings: Europeans, turbaned Arabs, madrassed Asians, black Africans in tribal costumes. Now and then a four-by-four lorry growls by carrying a squad of soldiers but the place hasn’t got that air of police-state tension that makes the hairs crawl on the back of my neck in countries like Paraguay and East Germany. It occurred to me as we reached Arbuckle’s office that we hadn’t been accosted by a single beggar.
    It was crowded in among cubbyhole curio shops selling African carvings and cloth. Arbuckle was a tall man, thin and bald and nervous; inescapably he was known in the Company as Fatty. He had one item to add to the information we’d arrived with: Lapautre was still in Dar.
    â€œShe’s in room four eleven at the Kilimanjaro but she takes most of her dinners in the dining room at the New Africa. They’ve got better beef.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œYeah, you would. Watch out you don’t bump into her there. She must have seen your face in dossiers.”
    â€œWe’ve met a couple of times. But I doubt she’d know Ross by sight.”
    Ross was grinding knuckles into his eye sockets. “Sometimes it pays to be unimportant.”
    â€œHang onto that thought,” I told him. When we left the office I added, “You’d better go back to the room and take the cure for that jet lag.”
    â€œWhat about you?”
    â€œChores and snooping. And dinner, of course. I’ll see you at breakfast. Seven o’clock.”
    â€œYou going to tell me what the program is?”
    â€œI see no point discussing anything at all with you until you’ve had a night’s sleep.”
    â€œDon’t you ever sleep?”
    â€œWhen I’ve got nothing better to do.”
    I watched him slouch away under the palms. Then I went about my business.
    *   *   *
    T HE BREAKFAST layout was a nice array of fruits, juices, breads, cold cuts. I had heaped a plate full and begun to consume it when Ross came puffy-eyed down to the second-floor dining room and picked his way through the mangoes and sliced ham. He eats like a bird.
    The room wasn’t crowded; a sprinkling of businessmen and a few Americans in safari costumes that appeared to have been tailored in Hollywood. I said mildly to Ross when he sat down, “I picked the table at random,” by which I meant that it probably wasn’t bugged. I tasted the coffee and made a face; you’d think they could make it better — after all they grow the stuff there. I put the cup down. “All right. We’ve got to play her cagey and careful. If anything blows loose there won’t be any cavalry to rescue us.”
    â€œUs?”
    â€œDid you think you were here just to feed me straight lines, Ross?”
    â€œWell, I kind of figured I was mainly here to hold your coat. On-the-job training, you know.”
    â€œIt’s a two-man job. Actually it’s a six-man job but the two of us have got to carry it.”
    â€œWonderful. Should I start practicing my quick draw?”
    â€œIf you’d stop asking droll questions we’d get along a little faster.”
    â€œAll right. Proceed, my general.”
    â€œFirst the backgrounding. We’re jumping to a number of conclusions based on flimsy evidence but it can’t be helped.” I enumerated them on my fingers. “We assume, one, that