Magic Terror Read Online Free PDF Page A

York.” This was technically true. In an average year, N spent more time in his Upper East Side apartment than he did in his lodge in Gstaad. During the past two years, which had not been average, he had lived primarily in hotel rooms in San Salvador, Managua, Houston, Prague, Bonn, Tel Aviv, and Singapore.
    “But you have spent perhaps a week in Paris?”
    “I was there a couple of days,” N said.
    Behind him, one of the men said, “Paris is under Japanese occupation. I hear they serve raw fish instead of
cervelas
at the Brasserie Lipp.”
    They came out into the lobby. N and the innkeeper went to the counter, and the two other men pretended to be interested in the tourist brochures.
    “How many nights do you spend with us? Two, was it, or three?”
    “Probably two,” said N, knowing that these details had already been arranged.
    “Will you join us for dinner tonight?”
    “I am sorry to say that I cannot.”
    Momentary displeasure surfaced in the innkeeper’s face. He waved toward his dining room and declared, “Join us tomorrow for our roasted mutton, but you must reserve at least an hour in advance. Do you expect to be out in the evenings?”
    “I do.”
    “We lock the doors at eleven. There is a bell, but as I have no desire to leave my bed to answer it, I prefer you to use the keypad at the entrance. Punch twenty-three forty-five to open the door. Easy, right? Twenty-three forty-five. Then go behind the counter and pick up your key. On going out again the next day, leave it on the counter, and it will be replaced on the rack. What brings you to the Basque country, Mr. Cash?”
    “A combination of business and pleasure.”
    “Your business is . . . ?”
    “I write travel articles,” N said. “This is a beautiful part of the world.”
    “You have been to the Basque country before?”
    N blinked, nudged by a memory that refused to surface. “I’m not sure. In my kind of work, you visit too many places. I might have been here a long time ago.”
    “We opened in 1961, but we’ve expanded since then.” He slapped the key and its metal plate down on the counter.
     
    N put his cases on the bed, opened the shutters, and leaned out of the window, as if looking for the memory that had escaped him. The road sloped past the auberge and continued uphill through the tiny center of the village. On the covered terrace of the cement-block building directly opposite, a woman in a sweater sat behind a cash register at a display case filled with what a sign called “regional delicacies.” Beyond, green fields stretched out toward the wooded mountains. At almost exactly the point where someone would stop entering Montory and start leaving it, the red enclosure of the telephone booth he had been told to use stood against a gray stone wall.
    The innkeeper’s friends staggered into the parking lot and left in a mud-spattered old Renault. A delivery truck with the word
Comet
stenciled on a side panel pulled in and came to a halt in front of the old stable doors. A man in a blue work suit climbed out, opened the back of the truck, pulled down a burlap sack from a neat pile, and set it down inside the kitchen. A blond woman in her fifties wearing a white apron emerged from the interior and tugged out the next sack. She wobbled backward beneath its weight, recovered, and carried it inside. The girl in the blue dress sauntered into view and leaned against the doorway a foot or two from where the delivery man was heaving his second sack onto the first. Brown dust puffed out from between the sacks. As the man straightened up, he gave her a look of straightforward appraisal. The dress was stretched tight across her breasts and hips, and her face had a coarse, vibrant prettiness entirely at odds with the bored contempt of her expression. She responded to his greeting with a few grudging words. The woman in the apron came out again and pointed to the sacks on the floor. The girl shrugged. The delivery man executed a