Tangier (47 page)

"Well," said Hamid, "when you're settled in Montreal I hope you'll think kindly of the place."

"I'll try, Hamid. But I don't guarantee I will."

Hamid laughed. "It's funny, isn't it—nearly every foreigner who's ever moved here has become disillusioned in the end. The strong ones find the will to leave. The others stay and rot. I like to think that you'd have left sooner or later on your own—that it wasn't just Hervé 's murder that showed you that you must, but a sense of waste and self-disgust."

"You've always been after me to leave, Hamid. I think you used to suggest it because you liked to see me get annoyed. Anyway, you were right. Now tell me—you're an observant man. Have I changed very much these past ten years?"

"Oh, yes. You were a beautiful hippie when you came. Mad, of course, but interesting, and so extreme."

"And now?"

"Now you're a gossip."

"A bitch you mean."

"All right—a bitch. You started out here as a person, but after a while you became a 'Tangier character.' Our stock and trade. We have so many 'characters,' many more than a little town like ours is able to support. Now I wonder about Montreal. Whether you'll fit in there. Whether you'll really change."

"I think so. It's a big, sophisticated city."

"Very expensive, I imagine, too. Actually, I was wondering whether you'll be able to do without some of your exquisite pleasures. You know what I mean—your peculiar tastes."

"My homosexuality? Of course not. I am and always shall be gay. You hate that, don't you?"

Hamid shook his head. "If you think I do, you're wrong. But what I don't like, aside from the issue of children, is the preying stance you people take. Rather than sticking together and sleeping with each other, you insist on taking advantage of Moroccans who are ignorant and poor. It's racism, really—exploitation. Our boys are booty to be plundered, animals to be penetrated and used. Have you any idea what this does to us? It's far worse than going into a poor country and exploiting cheap labor, resources—phosphates or oil. We're talking about human beings, after all, people like my own brother, one of the very few who's had the good fortune to escape the business more or less intact. Still he's been affected. I see it in him all the time. By the way, I caught him with Hervé
 
one night in the rug room of his shop, stumbled in on them by accident a month or so ago."

Robin, silent, was staring straight ahead. When he finally spoke he did not use his usual bantering style. "To think that all these years I thought it was just a matter of your personal distaste. Well, Hamid, on our last day together I discover a side to you I didn't know before. Too bad in a way, but I agree with everything you've said. My escapades here have been exploitative, and endlessly complicated by sex—something I've never understood or learned how to control. I have to ask myself, you see, why I didn't take better care of Hervé . I was his friend, but I sent him to a hustler, one I knew was dangerous besides."

"Oh, stop it, Robin."

"No. It's very important, because it ties in with what you said. Pie was the reluctant chicken, and Hervé
 
the incompetent hawk. I've learned a lesson from this, I think. In Montreal, I assure you, I'm going to become a different man. No youngsters, first of all, though that much is obvious, I suppose. No—it's really much more important than that. It's a question of people and who they are. I'll be gay, of course, but when I look for lovers I'll choose them from among my equals, my friends."

Hamid drove on, and after an hour the Mediterranean came into sight. Then they started to descend, by groves of eucalyptus, toward towns with Spanish facades. Down at sea level they passed tourist villages built up along the coast. Hamid finally stopped the car a few feet from the frontier.

"Well," he said, "I'm going to miss you."

Robin nodded. "I shall miss you too. Tell me, Hamid, about yourself. What will your future be?"

"I'm changing too, Robin—just like you."

"Good. Good. A strange ten years it's been. Thanks again for the loan. I'll pay you back when I get a job."

"I'm not worried. I wish you luck."

"Thank you, Hamid. Good luck yourself."

They shook hands, then Robin left the car. Hamid watched as he approached the frontier, set down his bags on the customs rack, had them chalked by the inspector, then moved on to passport control. He emerged a few minutes later. A guard raised the jackknife barricade. Robin stepped out of Morocco, turned, and gave a final wave. Hamid waved back, and when Robin's red mop had finally disappeared into Spain, he turned the car around and drove back to Tangier.

A
few days later when the
Dêpèche
came out, Hamid bought a copy and opened it on the street. He turned to "About Tangier by Robin Scott" and was surprised by what he found. Most of the space was blank where the column normally appeared. There were only a few lines printed near the top: "Robin Scott announces his permanent departure from Tangier and bids farewell to all his friends."

Indeed, Hamid decided, it was the best column Robin ever wrote.

O
n the first of September the weather in Tangier changed. The haze, which had hung above the city for a month, lifted in a single day, and after that the sky was clear and blue. The yachts sailed out of Tangier harbor, and the summer residents dispersed. The hotels emptied, the tourist buses disappeared, and the restaurants along the beach began to close.

Ramadan was finally finished too—a blessing, thought Hamid. No more frantic nights of eating; no more torturous days of thirst. The heat was gone, and so was tension. He smoked cigarettes, sipped mint tea. There were even times when he smiled at Aziz across an empty desk.

Kalinka still glided about in her Vietnamese dresses, slim, enigmatic, sublime, but it seemed to Hamid that her work in Dradeb had brought a new beauty to her eyes. Often in September when the nights were cool they would lie together, wrapped in each other's arms, on the rough Berber rug on the floor of their salon. They'd lie beneath a Riffian wool blanket he'd bought for her in the souk at Sidi Kacem, bound together chest against chest so tight he could feel the beating of her heart. He was moved by her tiny throb, and the pale, tawny quality of her skin. How big he felt then, a large, dark man. When she looked up at him, showed her smile, he was rent by stabs of love.

They were lying like this late one night near the end of the month, holding on to each other, feeling each other's warmth, while the wind blew furiously outside, rattling the windows of their flat.

"I left the laundry out," she said after a while. "I can hear it flapping there, out on the terrace. Poor sheets. Poor towels."

"I'll bring it in," he said, kissing her and standing up. She felt the same sorrow for everything that was damaged or abused, could not bear suffering in anything, whether a lame dog, a broken man, or a petal torn out of a flower.

He hesitated a moment at the glass terrace doors, turned back to look at her, a small figure on the enormous rug. "Back in a minute," he whispered, then unlatched the doors. The wind was blowing so hard he had to push at them with extra force.

Outside the laundry was alive, dancing crazily in the cold night air. He fought with it for a while, tried to undo the clothespins she'd attached, finally managed to gather it into a great bunch in his arms, then stared out at the Mountain, where yellow lamps blinked on and off, covered and uncovered by wind-lashed trees. The sky was clear, black, sparkling with stars. Then he saw the fire.

For a few moments he was fascinated by it—flames leaping in the wind, far across the valley of Dradeb. It made a brilliant spectacle in the night, swirling pillars of sparks shooting toward the sky. He watched, impressed by its fury, wondering where it was. Then he knew, it came to him in an instant, and he felt helpless standing on his terrace a mile away, his arms loaded with sheets and pillowslips and towels, while the wind blew the faint aroma of burning wood across his face.

"Mosad," he whispered to himself. "Mosad."

A second later he was back inside, wrestling with the terrace doors. "Must go, Kalinka," he said, dumping the laundry on the rug. He started toward the closet to find his leather jacket and his gun.

"What is it? What's the matter, Hamid?"

"Call Aziz," he said. "Tell him to meet me on the Mountain. Tell him the man from Israel has come. And don't wait up for me, Kalinka. I won't be home till late."

Then everything was too slow for him—the elevator which took too long to reach his floor, and even longer, with its slowly grinding gears, to take him to the street. Running out of the lobby into Ramon y Cahal, he was met by a blast of wind. The palms were thrashing, and the neighborhood dogs were making a cacophony in the night.

For a moment, when his car refused to start, he pounded at the steering wheel, enraged. How long had it been since the fire had been set? How long, in this wind, before it devoured the Freys' great house?

The engine caught finally and he was on his way, down Avenue Hassan II, looping around the Italian cathedral, then swerving into the road that led to the Mountain through Dradeb. He made good time until he reached the intersection at Rue de Persil, where he found himself trapped behind a long line of honking cars. A bus was stalled ahead. He wished he had a police jeep with a siren.

He pulled onto the sidewalk, left his car, then ran toward the bus through air thick with pungent fumes. He was about to shout at the driver, order him to pull aside or clear the way, when he saw there was a barricade in the street, a huge pile of vegetable carts, benches, tables, and chairs from a neighboring café
 
and, beyond that, a mob of youths rushing toward the fire. He heard sirens then, far away—fire trucks, he realized, trapped behind. The bottleneck was impossible, the road was too narrow, and someone had slashed the tires of the bus. He thought about trying to dismantle the barricade, but knew it would take too much time. The firemen would have to deal with that; he would continue to the Freys' on foot.

There seemed to be a lot of people ahead. He could hear laughter and cries, the sounds of a country carnival. He climbed onto the obstruction, picked his way across its top, then jumped down just as a swarm of young people emerged from an alley of the slum. They carried him along with them until he stumbled in front of a miller's shop. They ran on in a surge toward the Jew's River bridge to view the fire on the cliffs.

He picked himself up and ran on, determined to break through the mob, cross the bridge, get onto the Mountain and up to the burning house. But the farther he ran, the thicker he found the crowd, a barrier of humanity with a choking density of its own. It seemed as though everyone in Dradeb had poured into the street. The throng was impenetrable. People's eyes were wild. There was fury in them too, he felt—violent passions about to be released. He yelled that he was a police inspector, but could barely hear his voice. The sound of it died in the yells of the people around, their delighted whoops and cries.

It would be impossible, he realized, to fight his way through. He shouldered his way to the curb, then up some steps against more people surging down. Finally he found an empty alley, darted in, then paused a moment to catch his breath.

He knew Dradeb, had spent his childhood in the slum, had known all its alleys, its intricate passageways, years before. But the place had changed. Its shacks had been rebuilt and repositioned many times. Still, he knew, there had to be a route to the ravine, a path he could follow through the labyrinth of tin and cardboard buildings that would take him to a point above the bridge from which he could descend to the river, then cross to the Mountain through the muck.

He dashed up the passage, moving as quickly as he could, sniffing his way, moving by instinct, prowling the maze like a hungry cat. He rushed down little alleys barely wide enough to accommodate his girth, charged up paths, through archways, reached a tiny square containing a water trough and a public well. Then he ran directly through a house whose walls were made of blankets, across a graveyard long since encroached upon by shanties, through heaps of garbage, across an open sewer behind an outhouse, emerging finally far higher than he'd planned, on an outcropping above the chasm not more than a hundred yards from the sea. Some women were standing there, one with an infant in her arms. They were all gazing across the gorge, mesmerized by the fire, spirals of sparks, gushing from the Freys' crenellated roof, swirled until they died against the sky. The walls of the palace were silhouetted by flames. Hamid could see fire through the windows, leaping, flaring, devouring the precious collections inside. The house was finished—in a few minutes it would be completely burned. He stared at it, remembering that a month before, when he was short of summer help, he'd approved Aziz's suggestion that they remove the men they'd posted to watch it from the road.

Impossible now, he knew, to get across. The chasm was too steep, he was too far from the bridge, and in any event there was no way he could cross the river without becoming trapped in a treacherous marsh. Even if his quarry were still there, an unlikely event, he was too late, too far away—the crime had been committed, the arsonist had struck. Somehow, eventually, the firemen and police would get through. Then he could organize a manhunt, pound his desk, order the frontiers sealed. But for all of that, he knew, he would obtain no result. Watching the house burn, he felt sorrowfully that he'd failed.