The Drifters (111 page)

‘Seventeen, beautiful, fair-skinned, dark-haired English girl. Daughter of an important family. Using heroin daily. Checked into the Splendide two nights ago. Left this morning. We’ve got to find her.’

He hurried us back to the Bordeaux, but as we crossed the Djemaá, he stopped in anger and looked to the far side of the square, where Jemail lounged against a kiosk, watching our progress. As we approached, he met us with a new proposal: ‘You fly to Casablanca, right? How about I get you the very best taxicab to the airport?’ I shook my head no, and he countered, ‘Then how about a limousine? Drive you non-stop right to Hotel Miramar, Casablanca?’ Again I said no, and he replied, ‘Hope you find her.’ Then nonchalantly he waved goodbye and moved to the part of the Djemaá at which tourists were beginning to unload.

Police Inspector Ahmed was a large-boned, dark-complexioned officer who had served on the local force when Tangier was a free city belonging to no nation. It was then the roughest spot in the world, cynically governed by a commission of foreign consuls; it had been easier to arrange a murder in Tangier than to fix a traffic ticket in Chicago. Dope, forgery, blackmail, forced prostitution and the printing of false passports had been openly acknowledged specialties, and Inspector Ahmed had done what he could to keep the corruption within bounds.

Now Tangier was part of Morocco, and his job was easier, but not much. ‘In the old days,’ he said as we sat in his office, ‘she’d probably be smuggled over the border
into some well-run whorehouse. Today that sort of thing doesn’t happen. Here’s what we’ve found out. She hasn’t left Tangier by plane and was not seen on the ferry to Algeciras, or to Málaga. She’s got to be here somewhere. So don’t worry.’ He was not a bland man, assuring us that everything would be all right, but he did convince us that if Monica could be found, he would find her.

The first day he accomplished nothing, and most of the effective searching was done by Big Loomis, who had a remarkable knowledge of Tangier and a host of friends. From one bar to the next we plodded, interrogating any habitués who had seen the English girl, and we established that she had spent her first night in the city touring the smaller bars with a man who had not driven her to Tangier. Apparently she had picked him up in this city, but none who had seen him recognized him.

We scoured the Zoco Grande, finding no trace of her, and passed down the narrow passageways to Zoco Chico, a small square surrounded by bars which served as headquarters for the hippies of Tangier. We asked young people of all nationalities and in all costumes if they had seen Monica, and two Swedish girls who looked as if they hadn’t bathed for months said they’d seen her at a miserable flophouse called the Lion of Morocco. For fifty cents they took us down a series of filthy alleys to a ramshackle building. Its upstairs windows overlooked the harbor, and as we stood staring down at the scene which had excited so many travelers in past ages, an asthmatic Arab climbed the stairs to greet us. ‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘I had the English lady as a guest. One night. Yes, she was with several young Moroccan gentlemen and they left after only one day.’

That was all. We hurried back to police headquarters to inform Inspector Ahmed, but it was he who had news for us. ‘We’ve found her,’ he said, ‘but I must warn you that she’s in dreadful shape.’

‘What happened?’ Cato asked.

‘Nothing unusual. Malnutrition, dope. She’s in our hospital.’

He led us to the edge of town, where, on a cliff overlooking the incomparable bay of Tangier, a group of Catholic sisters still remained to run a hospital for a country which had more or less kicked out their church. The mother superior who met us was as gracious as nuns
always seem to be when dealing with men of other religions, but she was not optimistic about Monica.

‘This girl is gravely ill,’ she warned us as we approached the ward. ‘Only one of you had better enter.’

We looked at each other and by common agreement chose Cato to see her, but before he could enter, Inspector Ahmed produced a British passport: ‘This is the girl, I assume.’ Cato took it, opened its cover, and gave a deep sigh when he saw Monica’s slim patrician face smiling back at him.

‘It’s her,’ he said, and the nun led him into the room, but within a few seconds he was back, his face contorted: ‘It’s not Monica!’

Ahmed and I brushed past the mother superior and hurried into the room, where there on a bed lay a blond girl of about twenty who looked not at all like Monica. We guessed she was a Swede, but it was apparent from her appalling condition that we were not going to be able to question her. In fact, from my brief glimpse of her slack-jawed face I wondered if she would live much longer.

We piled into Ahmed’s car and drove hurriedly back to the Lion of Morocco, where the asthmatic innkeeper told us that there had been several Swedish girls staying with him over the past week, but he knew nothing of them. One of them could have stolen the English girl’s passport, but that was unlikely, because he ran a clean establishment, as the police would verify.

Cato suggested doubling back to the Zoco Chico to see if we could spot the two Swedish girls who had first told us Monica had stayed at the Lion of Morocco, and we found them there, lounging in the sun outside one of the bars. ‘Are any of your gang missing?’ Ahmed asked professionally, and in a slap-happy way the two girls began to cast up their friends, but they had apparently been eating hash and could not focus on anything, so Ahmed pushed them into his car and drove them to the hospital, but when we got there, the mother superior told us, ‘She’s dead.’

Ahmed dismissed this information as irrelevant and took us all into the morgue, where the young girl we had seen less than an hour ago lay stiffly under a sheet that left her face exposed: emaciated, debauched, dead. The girls required only a brief glimpse: ‘It’s Birgit.’

‘Birgit who?’

‘From Uppsala.’

‘But what’s her name?’

‘Birgit from Uppsala.’

Inspector Ahmed jerked the sheet away, inspected the veins in her arms, rubbed the abused scar tissue, looked at us impassively, and replaced the sheet. ‘Heroin,’ he said.

On our ride back to the center of town I saw that Cato was trembling, and I turned as though to comfort him, but he kept his eyes averted and shrank away from me. When we reached our hotel room he fell into a chair and held his head between his hands, staring at the floor and mumbling, ‘Oh God, let us find her … quick.’

‘Any ideas, Loomis?’ I asked.

‘One. At the Zoco Chico, I know a waiter in one of the bars. He works only at night and he’s the most corrupt human being in North Africa. Let’s get a little sleep now, because he’s our last chance.’

It was ten o’clock that night when we trailed down the hill to the Zoco Chico, to find it brightly lit and filled with tourists. It could have been a square in ancient Baghdad, or modern Damascus, or Cairo of a hundred years ago, except that this year it was crowded with drifters from all parts of the world, most of them young students who had vaguely wanted to see Marrakech but who would never get beyond Tangier. They were not an attractive lot, for most of them were sodden-eyed, unkempt, and shuffling of gait, as if they were hopeless men in their sixties instead of hopeful people in their teens.

Big Loomis headed directly to the principal bar, went to the inside office, and shortly returned with a waiter of indefinite age; he was probably no more than thirty-five but looked to be in his seventies, for he was totally debauched, and I was astonished that he could still hold a job. When he spoke, however, he was alert and persuasive: ‘Gentlemen, you come to me highly recommended. My friend Big Loomis can be trusted and I have good news for his associates.’ He dropped his voice, sidled up to us, and through black teeth whispered, ‘The flowers were never sweeter in Lebanon.’

‘What?’ Cato asked.

‘From Lebanon, riches beyond compare,’ he said with a sly wink.

‘What?’ Cato asked again.

‘Marijuana!’ he snapped. ‘Damned good marijuana from Beirut.’

‘Kasim,’ Big Loomis said, placing his arm about the waiter’s shoulders, ‘what we’re interested in tonight is what happened to the English girl, Monica Braham.’ Kasim showed no sign of recognition, but Loomis continued, ‘She’s a most important young lady. Seventeen. Daughter of Sir Charles Braham, London.’

‘And Vwarda,’ Kasim said, not changing his expression.

‘The same,’ Loomis said. ‘And we’re phoning Sir Charles tonight. He’ll be deeply concerned about the whereabouts of his daughter.’

‘He’ll pay for helpful information?’ Kasim asked.

‘I will pay,’ I interrupted.

Kasim, relieved to find that an American with funds was accepting responsibility, said, ‘I know nothing of this girl. English girls? Look for yourself. There are hundreds. But I’ll ask.’

‘That’s all we could hope for,’ Loomis said reassuringly.

We sat down at a sidewalk table, and with Kasim standing over us as if he were only a waiter, we told him all we knew, giving him the names of the two places where Monica had slept and the name of the dead Swedish girl who had been using her passport. With this information, Kasim disappeared.

As we waited for his return, Big Loomis tried his best to divert us by saying he could calculate within a few months how long each passing foreigner had been in Tangier. Germans with quick step and keen searching eyes had come in this week. Englishmen with dragging feet and glazed expressions had been here upwards of a month. Americans shuffling along, looking furtively this way and that, uncombed and unwashed, had been here for half a year. And a few nondescript types from almost anywhere—California, Sweden, Sydney, Vancouver—were habitués who would never leave as long as they could collect money from some relative. A goodly number of this latter group, Loomis said, were remittance men from England or France, and some of them recognized the big Negro, who was himself technically a remittance man, and these sat down to inform us that things in Tangier were not so good as they had been four years ago.

When they heard why we were there, they expressed no interest at all in the disappearance of an English girl; it
happened all the time and they had found it wisest to keep clear of such messes, because if you didn’t, the damned girl was certain to wind up in your flat, with her parents accusing you of having seduced her. Cato, furious at such indifference, said, ‘Don’t be so goddamn casual,’ and the Englishman said, ‘She’s your girl?’ and when Cato nodded, he said, ‘Unquestionably she’s shacked up with someone else, and what can you do about it?’ Cato said, ‘You son-of-a-bitch, she may be dying,’ and the Englishman said, ‘Aren’t we all, really?’ Cato wanted to clout him, but Big Loomis said, ‘Cool it. We may be here for days.’ As if to support this conclusion, Kasim returned about two in the morning with sorrowful news: ‘No one knows where she is.’

Our phone call to Sir Charles Braham in Sussex proved abortive. He was not at home … had gone off to some kind of agricultural meeting; and as I waited while the telephone girl tried unsuccessfully to track him down, I reflected that during each crisis in his daughter’s life he had been absent. We could expect no help from him.

We spent the next day running down futile leads and at night we again went to the Zoco Chico, but Kasim was not on duty. Loomis asked where he was, and the proprietor said, hopelessly, ‘With Kasim, who knows?’ Fortunately we waited, for after midnight the clever fellow appeared with a big smile on his face. ‘I have found her! The police could do nothing, but I have found her.’

We leaned forward, and he said, ‘It’s been most expensive. I had to send a boy to Chechaouèn.’ At the mention of this ancient hill town, Big Loomis whistled, for it was a considerable distance southeast of Tangier, and that an English girl would go there was inexplicable.

Cato spoke first. ‘Can we drive there?’

‘I think you should,’ Kasim said.

‘What do you mean?’

Kasim looked at Cato, then at me. ‘Maybe it’s better I speak with this gentleman,’ he suggested, leading me to the rear of the café. ‘The news is not pleasant,’ he whispered. ‘Two boys from here made her acquaintance … rented her out to seven of their friends … one after the other. Then they took her to a country place in
Chechaouèn. She became very sick, so they ran away.’ He paused, then added a scrap of information which he knew summarized the case but which was too strong to share with Cato. ‘My boy told me over the phone, “They screwed her eight or nine times a day but wouldn’t give her anything to eat.” ’

When we reported her whereabouts to Inspector Ahmed, he commandeered an official limousine, loaded the three of us in, and sped eastward toward Tétouan, the city which Spain had renamed grandiloquently Tetuán-de-las-Victorias in commemoration of some minor skirmish. It was dawn when we got there and turned south along a winding road that carried us high into the foothills of the Atlas. The day was well begun by the time we reached Chechaouèn, a very old caravan stop nestled within a rim of hills. We drove to a spot near the square and were met by local police, who set out to find Kasim’s boy. He was located at a booth in the square, and as we crossed this irregular-shaped market we could have been in any Biblical city two thousand years ago. Even the costumes of the Arabs who were opening their stalls were unchanged, their habits untouched by the modern world, for this was a city with very old religious interests, and modernism was not welcome.

Our guide was a boy of fifteen, trained by Kasim in the intrigue of Tangier, and knowledgeable in those vices which could be turned to profit. As he led us past the market and into an ancient quarter of the town, one that for centuries had been forbidden to infidels, he selected me as the probable leader of the group and confided, ‘Your daughter is very sick. Maybe we should get a doctor.’

I started to say that I was not her father, but decided not to complicate things. ‘Fetch a doctor, if one is available,’ I said, and he took us on a short detour to the home of a young medic who had been trained in Casablanca and was now posted to Chechaouèn for public service. He spoke excellent French and asked which of us was ill. When the boy explained that my daughter had fallen upon bad days, he nodded gravely and told me, ‘We saw a good deal of this in Casablanca. Swedish girls mostly.’