Free Cloak of Darkness by Helen MacInnes Page B

manners as host. “Do you need Alexandre and his taxi to drive you out to that godforsaken place?”
    “Yes.” Claudel glanced at his watch, saw it was ten minutes to nine. The day was half over for most people. By eleven, the streets were emptying; by noon, people were behind closed shutters or lying in the shade of a wall. In the early evening, after the long hot afternoon, life came back to the town. “Ask Alexandre to be here around ten o’clock.” Claudel was on his feet. “I’ll take my usual stroll to the market, stretch my legs, and buy a newspaper.” It was his daily routine, like Alexandre’s taxi, and it aroused no comment.
    ***
    The Café-Restaurant de l’Univers stood at the corner of a broad street, once intended as a boulevard with two rows of trees down its middle. From here branched off some lesser streets, crossing other narrow streets at right angles, all part of neat French planning. After that, things went slightly haywire, but to reach the open marketplace was easy. One walked down a straight street, fairly straight at least, between two continuous rows of houses, mostly white, a few walls painted blue, all a little faded or discoloured. Some had brief colonnades, little stretches of curved arches; most were plain-faced, unadorned, rising three stories above the street level, where a few shops had intruded; high-ceilinged stories, to judge by the tail windows, seemingly without glass, whose massive shutters were opened for the morning air.
    The road was unpaved but many people walked there, for traffic was light—some neat cars, three small green taxis—and the sidewalks were uneven and raised by knee-high curbs. As if, thought Claudel, the planners of this street had feared torrential monsoon floods. Or, more likely, they had raised the sidewalks high to let people step out of their carriages without a jolt or a jump. What, he wondered, had this quarter been like fifty, thirty, even twenty years ago? Blue and white walls would have looked freshly painted, the shutters would have hung straight—not half off their hinges, comically tilted. Few chips and gashes on the arches, less peeling plaster, no large puddles at the side of the earth-packed road left from this morning’s hosing of broken sidewalks. Bless the underground stream that gave the town its water, and pray that it flows forever and ever. Or did Nature’s bounty change as men’s did? Grow old and weary and tired of giving?
    It was a sad thought out of keeping with the people he passed. Intent on their own lives, on the immediate present, such as the morning’s marketing, the cost of buying, the price of selling, the earnest gossip with friends, they brought colour and movement to the street. The variety of faces, of languages, of dress, always fascinated Claudel; and, above all, the women. They were young—and where were the older ones? So few to be seen—young and beautiful, very tall, very thin, their faces unveiled but their bodies enveloped by layers of floating muslin in bright flower patterns. Wide skirts fluttered to the ground and hid their ankles. Knee-length tunics, loose and thin, moved with each step. Vivid scarves covered their heads and then wound loosely around necks and shoulders in billowing folds. Their faces were extraordinary: smooth skin, deeply black, tightly drawn over fine-boned faces; profiles that were sculptured to perfection. But the eyes, briefly looking at him, then ignoring, were the hardest eyes he had ever seen, carved out of obsidian. Don’t even glance at me, my proud beauties: you’d scare the hell out of me.
    Strangely, the tall, thin, black-skinned men, with the same fine features as their women (but they never walked together; it was men with men, women either alone or with another woman), had eyes that seemed more human: clever-quick, deep-set, not friendly, but not inimical, either. Some of the younger ones were dressed like Claudel, in trousers and short-sleeved shirts; the rest