Flashback (22 page)

“Thank God,” Brian echoed.

“Here.” I withdrew the tattered ferry ticket and handed it to him. “My sole worldly possession.”

He took the scrap of paper and examined it carefully.

“There's something on the back,” I told him. “I always thought it was a code of some sort.”

I watched him flip the ticket over and mouth the characters silently to himself.

“Or maybe a combination,” I hazarded.

“It's not a combination,” he said. He handed the paper back to me, started the Rover's engine, and pulled out onto the street.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Brian turned onto the Avenue Mohammed V, heading in the direction of the Ville Nouvelle. “We need to find a Koran.”

*   *   *

We parked on a side street behind the post office and walked the few short blocks to the All Join Hands offices. It was early afternoon and the building was still open, but the offices were nearly empty. Charlie Phillips and a pretty but overly thin young black woman with an upper-class British accent were playing darts in the common area while a scrawny American kid with bad acne played a video game at one of the many computers.

It was a strange threesome, each of them a misfit, each so obviously wounded in his or her own way, at large in the world, trying to find some comfort in exile. For why else would you leave? What else but belonging would you be looking to find in a place so far from home?

Charlie glanced back when he heard us come in. For a split second he looked less than happy to see us; then he tipped his mouth up into a wide grin.

“Bri,” he said jovially.

Brian stepped forward, and I followed. “Hey, man,” he said. “You mind if we make use of your library?”

Charlie smiled uncomfortably. Something was wrong, I thought, though it could have been just that we'd busted in on his hustle. “Sure,” he said.

Brian started for some bookshelves on the far side of the room. “Don't let us keep you from your game.”

Charlie looked over at the woman. “She's beating me anyway.” He chuckled nervously. “You know Fiona, don't you?”

“Hey, Fiona.” Brian acknowledged the woman, then turned to the stacks, his finger running across the rows of worn spines. He pulled a leather-bound volume from the shelf and took a seat at one of the desks, motioning for me to join him.

Brian opened the Koran to the back cover and began paging backward. “The ticket,” he said, stopping about a third of the way through the text, setting the book flat on the desk.

I pulled the ferry ticket from my pocket and handed it to him.

He laid the paper on the page.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Mary,” he said. “The letters are from the first line of the sura called Mary. Only here you have them written backward.”

“What do they mean?”

Brian shrugged. “No one's quite sure. Some people think they're the initials of the original scribe. Another camp believes they have some mystical significance.”

He ran his finger down the page. “Verse twenty-one,” he said, reading the text out in Arabic.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“It's the angel, talking to Mary about the Immaculate Conception. She wants to know how she can have a child when she's a virgin. The angel tells her these kinds of things are easy for God.
The Lord saith: It is easy for Me.
”

Easy, I thought, it is easy for me. Where had I heard that before? “Abdesselom,” I said, remembering the Koran I'd found in my room there.

“What?”

“At the Hotel Continental. It was the first thing he said to me when I went to check in.
It is easy for me
. I thought he knew me. I could have sworn he knew me.”

NINETEEN

We left the city and headed north, retracing the route I'd taken down from Tangier, through the green heart of the country, the emerald patchwork of barley and new hay. After the austere Atlas, the landscape seemed extravagant, overrun with row upon opulent row of crops. Women in bright robes, colorful as songbirds, dotted the fields and dirt roads. Discarded Tide laundry soap packages littered the riverbanks where the day's linens had been scrubbed, the familiar fluorescent orange-and-blue packaging scattered like petals from some strange fruiting tree.

The sun was beginning to set when we crossed the blue curve of the Oued Oum er-Rbia. Shadows stretched themselves across the stubbled plateau. Women and men headed in from the fields for a bowl of
harira
and a cigarette, that first glass of water to break the fast. As we drove toward the sea, the sky slowly darkened, the few high clouds stained pink to violet, the blue vault above us sliding from deep indigo toward star-speckled black.

We drove in shifts through the darkness, hugging the coast through Casablanca, Rabat, and the fortified towns along the Atlantic. It was close to two in the morning when we reached Tangier, and except for a few straggling tourists and a Senegalese whore or two, the city was a dark ghost town. Brian drove us in through the Ville Nouvelle to the southeast ramparts of the medina.

The Rover was too big to squeeze in through the old plaster gate on the Avenue d'Espagne, so we parked it on the Rue du Portugal and climbed the last three hundred meters up the steep cobbled street toward the Continental. I took my pack with me, hooking the Beretta in the back waistband of my pants. The gun sat snug against my skin, a spare clip bulging from my back pocket.

We will make of him a revelation for mankind and a mercy from Us.
I repeated the second half of the twenty-first verse of the sura Mary as I followed Brian up past the Great Mosque, past Joshi's apartment building, toward the hulk of the old hotel.
And it is a thing ordained.

Mercy, I thought, and then I heard the sisters, all dead without mercy.
Kyrie eleison,
Lord, have mercy on us. And the Gloria:
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filus Patris: qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis
. I took a deep breath and let the rich stink of the bay fill my nostrils. Didn't we all die without mercy?

A pair of rats scrambled across the alleyway in front of us and slipped into a storm drain.
They're coming,
Pat had said, his lids closing, his eyes scanning some unknowable dream, some paradise of his own making. An Eden of memory, I had thought, the synapses firing back toward childhood, a slow dance in a grade-school gym, paper streamers and a girl's cheap perfume, or a boat ride across a green lake, an island capped with pine trees, his skis skimming the water, dipping back and forth across the wake.

Isn't this what we all wanted, the succor of our memories, the wave upon which we could ride and ride? Not heaven, but a return, a backyard full of fireflies, the cool prickle of mowed grass on the soles of our feet, that time-softened place with which we all long to be reconciled.

And yet, I realized for the first time, this was not what Pat had meant. There had been someone coming.
There's a place,
he'd said in my dream.
I can call for help
. He had called, and they had come, but they had not saved him. Someone with wings, I thought, not wings but the sound of wings, rotors thrashing the air. Pat had called for help, and it meant something, only I couldn't say what.

Brian turned in to the Continental's rambling courtyard, and I hesitated a moment beneath the gate, trying to discern dream from memory, wishful fiction from fact. It's not about guarantees, Heloise had said once when I'd questioned the idea of omnipotence; it's about surrender. But to what? I wondered, watching Brian's dark form. Was I a traitor? A killer? Someone's mother? Someone's daughter? The girl of someone's dreams? Or was I all these things, like Heloise's cruel God, the baby in the crèche, the man on the cross?

Brian turned back to me, and I willed myself to follow. There was a light fog coming off the bay, softening the patio lights, and the old hotel glowed like a dew-brushed rose. We climbed the wide stone steps to the veranda, pushed open the double doors, and stepped inside.

As late as it was, the lobby was deserted, the front desk unmanned. A handwritten sign on the counter indicated an electric doorbell and advised us to “please ring for service.” Brian pressed the button, and we heard the muted chime somewhere far off, in the depths of the old building.

It seemed like a good ten minutes passed before our call was answered. We stood there, our silence accompanied by the tick of the old grandfather clock, by the shuffling of our own feet on the lobby's tiles. Then, miraculously, the door behind the desk rattled and shook, and Abdesselom appeared. His eyes behind his wire spectacles were half asleep, his shoulders slightly hunched in his gray wool cardigan. He came forward and stopped just on the other side of the counter from us.

“We will make of him a revelation for mankind and a mercy from Us,”
I said.

Abdesselom blinked at me. For a second I thought I was wrong, that we'd made the trip for nothing; then the old man nodded, slowly, carefully.
“It is a thing ordained,”
he answered.

“You have something of mine,” I told him, more question than statement.

“Yes,” he said, glancing from me to Brian and back again. “Who is he?”

I moved toward Brian. “A friend.”

He seemed less than reassured by my statement. “Wait for me in the alcove,” he said, craning his neck to indicate the short hallway that ran back from the lobby stairs. Then he turned and slipped through the same door he'd emerged from, closing it silently behind him.

Brian and I made our way down the corridor toward the little sitting alcove. The room was gaudily Moroccan, ringed with richly upholstered banquettes and dotted here and there with handworked leather ottomans. The walls were orange, inset with faux windows latticed with bright blue five-pointed stars. The archway that served as a door was plaster, intricately carved, and above the plaster the wall had been carefully pieced with a blue-and-white zillij mosaic. Wool kilims in bright patterns covered the floor.

I took a seat on one of the banquettes. “Do you trust him?” I asked.

Brian stood near the door. “We don't have much choice, do we?”

The lobby door opened and Brian tensed visibly, but it was only some late partiers. There was drunken laughter, male and female, then the sound of feet starting up the stairs.

I leaned back into the silk pillows that lined the banquette. I felt like a bride before a wedding, or like Judas in those last seconds before the kiss, trapped in that long bewildered moment before the great shift toward one's promised self, that moment when there's still time to act, but when action seems impossible.

He would know, I thought, that old man in the gray cardigan, a package, a person, even a child. There was so much I wanted to ask him, about Hannah Boyle, about why I'd come to Morocco.

The revelers dispersed to their rooms, and the hotel fell silent once again. Down the hall, I heard Abdesselom emerge from his doorway and the sound of his slippers on the terra-cotta floor. He appeared in the archway, his face more relaxed than it had been.

“My dear,” he said. He smiled and came toward me. “I had heard you were dead.”

I shook my head. “No,” I told him, “not dead.”

“I thought it was you before. Only it had been so long. You've changed. Of course I should have known. After the last time you disappeared.”

“The last time?”

“Yes, my dear. Five years and not a word. We thought you were dead then as well. But I thought we had agreed you were going to send someone else this time.”

“Who?”

The old man shook his head. “I don't know. You only said you would send someone, someone who would know our signal.”

Reaching into the pocket of his sweater, Abdesselom pulled out an object about the same size and shape as a fat fountain pen. “Here,” he said.

I put my hand out and took the offering. I could see now that it was some kind of portable memory. Where the tip of the pen would have been was a circle of metal and a cluster of tiny pins for fitting into a computer's USB port.

“What is it?” I asked. “What's on here?”

Abdesselom shook his head. “I don't know,” he said. “It was my place only to keep it.”

“Thank you,” I said, trying to decide where to begin, what to ask first. There were so many questions.

Abdesselom opened his mouth to say something, but he never got the chance. Over the hotel manager's shoulder I saw Brian raise his arm. In his hand was a gun, a dark and solid piece of metal. He lifted it, bringing the full force of his fist and the stock down across the back of the old man's neck. For just an instant a look of surprise crossed Abdesselom's face; then he slumped forward onto his knees like a man begging for something. I watched him fall, his glasses knocked off by the blow, his rag-doll head careening forward with the rest of his body. He hit the floor with a thud and lay there, motionless.

I spun backward, reaching for my Beretta, but I was too late. When I turned my head, the first thing I saw was Brian's gun, the barrel of the Browning staring down at me like a vacant eye.

“Give me the pen drive,” he said.

It took me a moment to understand what he meant, that he was going to kill me, that he had known for some time that this was how things would end. I thought back to Ourzazate, how he'd stepped toward me, then drawn back, how I'd expected him to kiss me and he hadn't. He'd known then, I was sure of it. He was going to kill me, and in the end I didn't believe in mercy or grace.

“Give me the pen drive,” he repeated.

I turned my face up to his and opened my eyes wide. “Patrick Haverman was alive when I left him,” I said, the truth of what had happened snapping into place as I spoke. “He was the one who called for help. Think about it; who would he have called?”