The Blue Hour (17 page)

As I walked onto the terrace of the café, Fouad looked at me as if Typhoid Mary had just come a-calling. It was clear I was the last person he wanted to see but, with a grimace of resignation, he motioned for me to take a table in the far corner. Then he disappeared inside for several minutes, returning with a plastic shopping bag in one hand. Mint tea arrived. Fouad poured us two glasses. We sat there in silence for several moments. It was clear he was expecting me to initiate the conversation . . . or, more to the point, the questioning.

“Do you know where my husband is?”

“Perhaps.”

Fouad was not going to be immediately forthcoming. I chose my next words with care.

“I am concerned—not just about the fact that my husband has gone missing, but also that he injured himself.”

“He told me you did that to him.”

“He what?” I yelled. Immediately all eyes in the café were on us. This displeased Fouad even more. He raised his finger to his lips.

“You do not want to draw attention to yourself,” he whispered.

“I did not hurt my husband.”

“That is your story.”

“That,
monsieur
, is the truth. My husband is in a very unstable state, and one of the maids at the hotel saw him slam his head against the wall—”

“Which you made him do.”

Oh, God, I was lost now.

“I did not force him to hurt himself.”

“He said you rejected him.”

“I caught him out in a lie. A terrible lie.”

“Then you left him a note, telling him to kill himself. Which is what he tried to do.”

“I was angry,” I said. “Desperately angry.”

“He took you at your word. And now . . . why should I help you?”

“Because he needs my help. Because he is fragile and in a bad place.”

Fouad looked away.

“I am begging you . . . just tell me where he is.”

Another shrug.

I reached into the backpack and pulled out Paul's journal. I opened it and showed him the photograph of the young woman named Samira.

“Do you know her?” I asked.

Silence.

“Do you know if he was heading to Casablanca to see her?”

Silence.

“You have to help me, Fouad.”

“No I do not.”

“I will give you one hundred dirhams if you tell me.”

“Five hundred.”

“Two-fifty,” I said.

“Three hundred.”

I nodded assent. He motioned for me to hand over the money. I did as demanded. He counted the small pile of dirhams, then said, “Yes, Monsieur Paul had gone to see this woman.”

“Did he explain why he was seeing her, why he had her photograph in his journal?”

“You have to ask him that.”

“But how am I going to ask him that?”

“Go to Casablanca.”

“He met her at the university where he teaches,” I heard myself saying, articulating a scenario that had become clearer to me in the hour since I'd made the discovery of her photograph. She was one of his students, and he'd become intoxicated with her during the course of their affair over the past year. When she said she was going back to Morocco for the summer, he felt the compulsion to follow her across the Atlantic to North Africa. But as he couldn't disappear without me, he convinced me to join him. However, he was always looking for that decisive moment when he could run off into her arms. Did he use the head-butting incident to give him an excuse to vanish—and to land me with the guilt of believing I had tipped him over the edge? Did the discovery that I had found him out make him play the self-destructive card, then push him to realize that the only future now open to him was with her in Casablanca?

“Tell me, please,” I said, “did he meet her back in Buffalo?”

Another of his infuriating shrugs. Then: “Ask him yourself.”

I held open a page of his notebook and pointed to the place where he'd marked down her residence.

“Here's her address. Can you get me there?”

“What would the police think?”

“I can make it worth your while.”

“If I take you to Casablanca there will be questions, many questions from the inspector. He might even consider closing my café down. So . . .”

“Then find somebody else to drive me.”

“Ten thousand dirhams.”

Over one thousand two hundred dollars.

“That's absurd,” I said.

“That's the price. You don't like the price, take the bus. There is one that leaves at midnight. Of course, the police always have men stationed there to see who is coming or going out of town. We are a police state, Morocco. A very polite police state. But everyone is, in some way, under surveillance.”

“So how did Paul get away undetected?”

“He had help.”

“Now I am asking for your help.”

“I have given you a price.”

“All I can give you is four thousand dirhams cash.”

“You wait here,” he said, and disappeared into the interior of the café. I glanced over in the direction of Mohammed. He gave me a shy wave. I waved back, wondering simultaneously if Fouad was going to return with the police, telling them how I had snuck out of the hotel and was trying to bribe him to get me out of town.

But after a minute or so, Fouad returned alone.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Four thousand dirhams one-way to Casablanca. You pay me in advance.”

“When do we leave?”

“Now.”

THE CAR WAS
an ancient Peugeot with bad suspension and a tendency to emit an automotive burp every few minutes. We'd be driving along at fifty miles an hour, and out of nowhere would come a loud glottal belch from the engine that was evidently on the verge of cardiac arrest. These eruptive internal combustion noises didn't seem to faze the driver, a man named Simo: wiry, edgy, around fifty, with a pronounced hack cough courtesy of a ferocious cigarette habit. In the four hours it took us to reach Casablanca, he always had a cigarette on the go. When one was burned almost down to the filter, he reached for the packet on the seat next to him and lit a fresh one off the remnants of the one that was about to expire.

Simo insisted that I sit in the backseat, where I had both windows wide open to rid the car of his incessant cloud of smoke, and to provide some ventilation on a torpid night when the humidity and the actual mercury level made the air seem as glutinous as maple syrup. Simo also made it very clear that, outside of driving me, he wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. When I asked him if he knew the address that Fouad had given him, he nodded. When I asked him if he thought we might encounter police checkpoints on route, he shrugged.

Fouad had warned me while we were still in the café that Simo was the wrong side of taciturn. Before we got up to leave and meet him, I went over to where Mohammed was sitting. I told him that I needed to head off somewhere, and asked him to not say a word about this to anyone.

“But Mira might be concerned if you don't come back.”

“You can tell Mira I had to go find my husband. She won't tell anybody. She assured me of that. Please assure me that you will keep this secret.”

I pressed two 100-dirham notes into his hand. His eyes grew wide.

“
Shokran, shokran
,” he said.

“That money is for you, not your father. Do you think he'll wonder where I've gone to?”

“I will give him the fifty dirhams you gave me. That will keep him quiet.”

“I wish you well, Mohammed.”

“Bless you,
madame
.”

Then I hurried back to the café. Fouad escorted me through the kitchen—a small, cramped, hellishly steamy place where two men in stained, sodden white T-shirts were frying falafel and scooping hummus on plates. They glanced up at me. Fouad favored them with a scowl. Their eyes returned to the task at hand.

Within a moment we were in the back alley, in which had been squeezed the ancient Peugeot, with a man standing in the shadow, smoking a cigarette. Fouad introduced us and explained that Simo would be driving me to Casablanca. He asked me for the address. I opened Paul's notebook and showed him the spot where the address of Samira's apartment was marked down. He, in turn, took out a small crumpled notebook from his back pocket, pulled a pencil out from behind his ear, licked the lead, and wrote, in Arabic, the address. Handing it to Simo he barked several instructions to him, then motioned with his hand for him to get lost for a few moments. Simo walked deeper into the shadows of the alley.

“I didn't want him to see you handing over the money,” Fouad explained. “I will pay him later. I chose him because, although he doesn't say much, he's not the sort who will try to hit you up for money. He knows that he'll have to answer to me should anything go wrong, or if he tries anything—which he won't.”

I reached into my pocket and counted out four thousand dirhams. My crazed hope was that, on arrival in Casablanca, I would find Paul at the apartment of his mistress, verify that he was all right, give him the chance to get on that midday flight with me to New York, and, at worst, have the door slammed in my face, ending a marriage that was, in my mind, already finished.

Fouad counted his way through the money. When he was satisfied that he had the complete amount, he called the driver over and spoke to him in a low, firm voice, showing him the address, gesticulating toward me several times, then making a point of writing out a series of numbers on another scrap of paper, tearing it along its perforated edge, and handing it to me.

“If there is any problem, you phone me on this number,” Fouad said. “But there should be no problem whatsoever. Simo . . . he is okay.”

Then he handed me a plastic bag. “Your husband left this behind when he showed up late this afternoon. I'm not saying he wanted you to have it, but I'd rather that you keep it safe for him.”

“You still won't tell me where your other driver dropped him?”

“I cannot . . . because I gave him my word I would not.”

“Can you at least tell me if I am right to be going to this address?”

Fouad considered his response for a moment, then answered, “Inshallah.”

Allah willing.

Five minutes out of Essaouira I discovered that the reading light in the back of the car was not working. When I asked Simo if there was a problem with the light he just shrugged. I asked if he could pull over and get it fixed—as I was completely in the dark and very much wanted to see what was in the shopping bag that Fouad had given me. I also wanted to use the four or so hours on the road to read through Paul's journal—though the prospect of delving into the inner sanctum of his mind made me uneasy. Maybe the blown light was a hint that I'd best not pry into his private world. But the very fact that I was in this broken-down car, fleeing our hotel in search of this lost man . . .

“
J'ai besoin de lire, monsieur
,
” I told Simo when he reported that he could do nothing about the busted light. In response, he reached into his pocket and tossed a disposable lighter into the backseat.

“
Ce n'est pas suffisant. Vous n'avez pas une lampe-torche?
”

He shook his head and accelerated the engine, causing the first of many belches to exude from the exhaust pipe. I sank back into the vinyl seat, aware of springs sticking up through the upholstery. I had to shift around until I could find a spot that didn't feel like acupuncture. Then I reached into the plastic bag. I felt something close to massive relief when I pulled out one of his large sketchbooks. Flicking on the lighter—its flame meager—I opened its hard black cover and felt myself tearing up when I found page after page of his Essaouira line drawings. Whatever agony or fury or self-destructive rage made him rip up several of his notebooks back in our room, some sliver of self-preservation clearly kicked in, for this book contained his best work by far. Over fifty drawings, so innovative and daring in his use of line, in his mingling of the abstract and the representational, in the heat-and-dust authenticity he brought to the souk, yet all underscored by Paul's absolute need to draw these market scenes in an original way. At one point I had to shut the album and put down the lighter and sit silently in the dark, absorbing the sense of loss that was careening through me like a fast-acting toxin. I looked out at the scrubby dusty landscape we were traversing, the beclouded sky that blocked all celestial light. The sheer immense stress of the past few hours, the fear and anguish of what I would find in Casablanca . . . all of it suddenly sideswiped me. I found myself overcome by the realization that the entire terrain of my life had changed.

I began to cry. Weeping in the dark of this shabby car, being watched in the rearview mirror by a silent man uncomfortable with this show of emotion. He lit another cigarette. When I stopped crying he reached into a bag on the front seat and handed me several cubes of baklava wrapped in paper.