Tangier (4 page)

"She says you meet all the time, everywhere in the city. She says she's been lying to me, that when she goes out it is never to the places she has said. She says she follows you, and that when you come into my shop you pretend to listen to me but use your eyes to speak with her."

Zvegintzov stepped into the doorway. A bit of light from the street cut a triangle across his face. There was anger in his face. Down the hall someone yelled "Quiet!" in Spanish. Hamid took another step back.

"I don't understand why you've come here in the middle of the night."

"How can you say a thing like that? My wife tells me she's leaving. Of course I've come to you. What difference the time of night? I have come for an explanation. I'm the husband. I have certain rights."

Hamid stared.

"For a long time I have helped you, Hamid—invited you into my place of business, told you things that have helped you with your work. You could not force me to do this. There is no pressure you could bring against me. I talked to you of my own free will. Now I learn that you will take away my wife. I confront you and you deny it. Is Kalinka a liar then? Tell me, tell me to my face."

He stood blocking the door, defiant, enraged. Finally Hamid answered him, but not without exerting an enormous effort to meet his eyes.

"Yes, I love her. But I never knew she loved me until you told me so tonight."

"Ah—then it's true." His voice was filled with resignation, all the anger drained away. He brushed past Hamid, walked to the center of the room. "I'm a fool," he said. "A fool. You're an inspector of police and I'm a fool."

From a sleeve of his coat he drew a short, stiff riding crop. Then he dropped it on the floor. "I brought this so I could slash your face. She does this to me, you see. Drives me mad, makes me miserable, makes me act the fool."

He stood for a time, his head bowed. Hamid watched him, unable to tear away his eyes. Zvegintzov began to gasp and then to weep—strange sounds, whimpers of agony stifled finally by his heavy Russian cough.

"Forgive me for coming. I can't control myself. I am helpless. You see that."

He wept some more, then left. Hamid watched him from the window, watched him move slowly down the street. The wind was blowing hard, the street lights flickered. Then a hailstorm began. Pellets the size of marbles were falling upon Tangier.

He and Peter did not speak again. The next day he sent Farid to fetch Kalinka and bring her to Farid's bazaar. In the back room she told him she was in love with him, and that if he wouldn't take her to live with him she would leave the town.

"For years I saw you," she said. "Sometimes I waited the whole day thinking of nothing but that soon, perhaps within the hour, you would come to see Peter in our shop. I wanted to see your eyes, hear your voice. I trembled when I saw you watching me on the street."

He asked her about Peter, and she swore to him then that she was not his wife, had never been, either in law or in deed. He was amazed, and his policeman's temperament, his skepticism, all his control ebbed away. He felt helpless in the face of her passion, her strange inflections, her enigmatic eyes. He took her hand. They kissed and moaned. She lay her fingers upon the high bones of his cheeks.

Later he went to see his mother in Dradeb. She was ironing when he came into the house.

"Ah, Hamid, you have always been in love with foreigners. Ever since you were a boy. Now the foreigners will dislike you. It's bad for a Moroccan to steal a Nasrani's wife."

"No, mother," he said. "I'm an inspector of police. Now it doesn't matter what the foreigners think. It only matters what I think of them."

She nodded, but she didn't understand. To her Tangier would always be a city which the infidels controlled. Later, when he brought Kalinka, his mother looked into her eyes.

"This woman smokes hashish."

"I know. I know."

It had bothered him at first, but he came to realize that the smoke was a part of her, part of the aura of dreaminess and mystery that he loved.

"Perhaps," his mother said, "she will cause you pain."

She hadn't yet. She served him, cooked for him. She polished his moccasins and arranged them on the floor in pairs. Farid finally found the horn and gave it to them as a gift. They kept it standing straight on the floor beside their bed. It was as tall as Kalinka, and its end, shaped like a bell, reminded him of her name.

At the S
û
ret
é
they said she was the best thing ever to happen to him. Once he overheard Aziz speaking to a colleague in the police canteen. "Of course Hamid understands the foreigners," he said. "He lives with a Chinese woman now, has learned all their secrets from her."

A Chinese woman—she was not that, but he understood why they thought she was. Just as all foreigners were infidels, and all infidels were Christians, so all Orientals were Chinese to them.

The wind. The wind. It blew so often in Tangier. When he thought back over that time he remembered the wind and the tears that flowed from Peter Zvegintzov's eyes. It pleased him that he lived with a woman who could inspire great love and break mens' hearts. To love a woman—yes, that he understood. A woman could charm a man, cast a spell upon him, drive him mad. He was himself, he knew, bound to Kalinka by invisible bonds of passion that only she could break.

Who was she?
Why had Peter lied and said she was his wife?

The wind, blowing hard outside, steady, raw, drove him finally into sleep. His last thought before falling off was of Peter's misery and the way Kalinka haunted him, lived on in his heart even after her betrayal.

I
t was three o'clock in the morning, and still Lake couldn't sleep. The wind was bothering him, ripping at the palms in the Consulate garden. He stared up at the ceiling and thought of faucets that leaked, appliances in the basement that didn't work. He couldn't bear a smudge on a window or a puddle of grease beneath a car.

He stole out of bed, went to the bathroom, snapped on the light, splashed water on his face. Then, as he stared into the mirror, he practiced a stiff salute. His curly hair was dull, not glossy as he liked, and there was a bald spot toward the back. There was a terrible ticking too—something like a bomb that threatened to blow up inside his brain.

He turned on the shower, adjusted the faucets until the water ran hot. Then he stood under it, trembling in the heat. It had been the same in Guatemala during the visit of the Secretary of State. He had almost had a nervous breakdown then, terrible chills in the tropic nights, insomnia, strange urges to fix things, clean things up. He'd felt caged in, restless, smoked too many cigarettes, and had been frightened by his inability to sleep. Was it happening to him again, all those strange symptoms that had come together and then nearly brought him to the brink? This time would he succumb? Would Tangier drive him mad?

He dressed and wandered into the stainless steel kitchen, opened the refrigerator, found a package of bacon, threw some strips into a frying pan, and began to scramble eggs. When he was finished he turned on the blower to remove the fumes, then set to work washing the utensils. Everything had to be cleaned and arranged as it was before. When the servants came they mustn't find a trace.

He went back to the bathroom, brushed his teeth and shaved, then rinsed out the sink and applied an acrid spray to purify his breath. He checked himself in the mirror again, noticed crow's-feet around his eyes. His jawline was becoming flabby. His muttonchop sideburns were turning gray.

He looked in at Janet—she was curled toward the wall. He envied the calm rhythms of her breathing, so unlike his own harsh gasps. In a shelf by their bed was his collection of self-help books, paperbacks worn out by use. He checked his sons, paused for a moment in the doorways of their rooms. Steven slept peacefully amidst his games. Joe slept quietly too, and Lake was moved by the disarray: various sneakers, unmatched, spread in odd corners of the room; a limp tracksuit on the floor.

He let himself out the back door, braced before the wind. It swept him across the garden, between the yuccas and palms. Looking back toward the residence, he was struck by its enormous size. The moon was only half full, and that annoyed him—he couldn't abide uncompleted things, unanswered mail, unpolished shoes.

He turned a key in the back door of the Consulate, entered, then locked himself inside. Suddenly the wind was cut off by the thick sliding glass. For the first time that evening he felt relief. Here in the empty building he could be alone, sealed off from the wind, safe from his demons. Even the smell here made him feel good: the floors were cleaned in the early evening, and the odor of the cleansers still perfumed the air.

He took the elevator to the top floor, unlocked his office, sat back in his swivel chair, safe between his consular ensign and the American flag.

I am
, he thought,
the Consul General of the United States
.

He loved the title. After tours in Guatemala, Beirut, Vientiane, he had come to Tangier excited by the prospect of two years of well-earned peace. For a decade he'd served in countries racked by street riots and guerrilla wars. Now at last he'd be able to rest, restore his balance, contemplate the dangerous world that lay beyond détente.

He'd been wrong. The post was a nightmare, and now the tedium stole his sleep. Too many lost passports to be replaced; too many hippies arrested on drug charges who had to be visited at the Tangier jail. He loathed his ceremonial duties, the endless, boring banquets with Moroccan functionaries and the irate tourists who wandered in, complaining because their reservations hadn't been honored at the hotels. His vice-consul disgusted him, and he felt no love for his Moroccan staff. The only friend he'd found was Willard Manchester, who'd once held the Coca-Cola franchise in southern Spain. But even Willard, full of advice on ways to cope, could not sustain him here. Thinking things over, pondering them for months, Lake had come to the conclusion that the Department had found him out. How had it happened? For years he'd gone to pains to conceal his disorders, used drugs to control his depressions, stayed clear of psychiatrists, bluffed his way through physical exams. Now they'd put him out to pasture, assigned him to Tangier. The town, so pleasant, so relaxed, had become for him a maelstrom where his demons gnawed without pity and his soul withered beneath the glittering sun.

It was so unfair. He loved the Department, loved to face foreign officials and say: "Speaking on behalf of the United States. . . ." What had happened? Were his symptoms really so bizarre? He didn't take off his clothes in public or sit in cafés speaking to the air. He was not one to teach a parrot dirty words or chase servant girls down scullery stairs. What was it then? Something not quite right, something that spooked people, an aura of failure that surrounded him like a cloud. Yes, that was it; he knew, could feel it in himself. There was madness at work inside, and that made him afraid.

By the light of half a moon he could see the wind tearing at the trees. In the distance the Mountain was dark, except for the yellow lamps that lit the road.

Thank God for the files. They'd saved his life. Dating back to the time when the Consulate had been a full legation, they told tales of gun running, the recovery of stolen bullion, the sorts of intrigues that had given Tangier its fabled name. It was as if the city he read about was not the same as the place he lived, a dark night city of killers and spies, espionage, blackmail, double agents, dirty tricks. Now, at night, when he couldn't sleep, he'd leave his bed, shave and bathe, then steal across the garden to his office to immerse himself till dawn in tales of deceit.

There was much in these stories to entertain him—they were better than thrillers, though not so neat. And, slowly, they began to alter his perception of Tangier. Now this city of crumbling facades, so sleazy in its decline, became the backdrop for exotic dramas once played out on its shabby streets. He loved the tale of the defecting East German scientist, and the one about the Vichy agent whose body had been dumped in the Forêt Diplomatique. Then unexpectedly (by chance or fate?) he stumbled on the file on Z.

He'd almost missed it. He'd been prowling through a disordered drawer of gossip. He remembered a thin folder on Camilla Weltonwhist containing photos (clipped from an old issue of Country Life) of her recently sold Bermuda estate, and a fascinating report from Jakarta in which an informant ("usually reliable," it said) fingered Jimmy Sohario as a heroin racketeer, and his chain of laundries as a front. But Z's file was different, a special case. Over the next few weeks Lake would read and reread it, but he would never forget the exhilaration that seized him that first night.

ZVEGINTZOV, PETER PETROVITCH

This long-time resident of Tangier is believed to be a low-grade Soviet agent who has operated in northern Morocco for nearly twenty years. He emerged from deep cover in the early 1960s, at the time of the French Saharan nuclear tests. He was observed in contact with Col. Igor Prozov, coordinator of KGB activities in the Maghreb. Subject is now believed inactive. Personal contact by consular officials not advised.

Z was born in Hanoi in early 1920s. Parents were White Russian. Education not known. Believed recruited by Soviets near end of World War II.