It was a few minutes after noon, and several last-minute passengers for the boat to Palermo shuffled across the quay and boarded. A thick miasma hung in the windless air over the minarets and domed mosques of the surprisingly oriental Libyan capital. Within the city, the noon traffic was heavy. Although much of the population slept during the hottest part of the day, business still had to continue; the country, despite its protestations to the contrary, had been irrevocably influenced by the West. Among the final passengers was a tall, well-built Frenchman, with thick black hair, wide, dark eyes, and a handsome face that would have been more at home on the rocky beaches of Cap d’Antibes than here in this forsaken place of dust and poverty. He was dressed plainly in a short-sleeved safari suit and soft desert boots. He carried two pieces of soft leather luggage. At the head of the gangway, he was greeted by the ship’s purser and deck officer, and a steward was assigned to show him to his first-class cabin for the thirty-hour trip.
