Tangier Page 9

  If only he were Lord Barclay—that would indicate his station to all concerned. He considered listing himself that way in the next edition of the Tangier telephone book, but knew someone would tip off the London papers, and then everyone would make a stink. He shrugged. Titles were amusing. As far as Tangier went he might as well be a duke. He had, he thought, as much right as anyone else: Lord Pitt was only a life peer, and Françoise called herself "Countess" though the French monarchy had been dead a hundred years. Anyway, lord or not, he could still make the others jump. He would stop Vanessa Bolton and Percy Bainbridge from going to Françoise de Lauzon's.

  Vanessa turned out to be difficult, refused to alter her plans. He was annoyed, put a little X beside her name—it would be a long time before he'd ask her again.

  "What's kept you?" he demanded when he called up Percy and had to wait for him to be summoned to the phone.

  "Matter of fact, Peter, I was in the garage finishing up the prototype of my new papoose."

  "Papoose! What will you think of next? Never mind—don't tell me now; we can discuss it at dinner Tuesday night."

  A pause then while Percy considered his dilemma: How was he going to extricate himself from his acceptance to dine with Françoise? Peter waited, delighted by the situation—the old inventor was too cowardly to refuse an English peer. Percy's inventiveness, of course, was nothing but a joke. The Australian had written a little book about his discoveries—ways to make soybeans taste like turkey, and lampshades out of old gloves. Poor Percy—he persisted, though his magnetic broom for ironmongers had failed to catch on, and after ten years of development his grapefruit juicer still ran too hot.

  "Tuesday would be perfect, Peter. Just had to check my book."

  A lie, of course, but touching in a way. Peter, relishing his power, decided to make Percy crawl. "You know, Percy, I've been thinking about you, and I've decided there's something in the house you simply have to change. That ghastly watercolor, the one hanging in the hall—it's time to stash it in the attic for good."

  "Hmmm. Do you really think so? I never actually thought of that."

  "Well do, dear, do. It'll give the hall a cleaner look. Do it this afternoon—you'll see instantly that I'm right."

  Percy promised to give it thought, and Peter smiled as he rang off. The watercolor was one of Percy's best things—Peter would be pleased to own it himself. But it was always necessary to make these little tests, check around and see who still obeyed. If Percy did take the picture down, then that meant things hadn't changed: he was still pasha of the Mountain and the peasants still ran to kiss his feet.

  "Oh, dear," he said suddenly, looking up at himself in a gilded mirror. "Peter Barclay: you are a nasty pouf!"

  The phone rang just as he was staring at himself. It was Vicar Wick, calling about the note.

  "I've spoken to Consul General Whittle," he said in his nervous voice. "As the police here refuse to help, we're going to send the note up to Scotland Yard. Not for fingerprints, mind you—they're probably all smudged out. Handwriting analysis—that's the thing. We'll catch the culprit yet."

  "Yes," said Peter, somewhat dazzled by the thought. "Sounds perfectly reasonable to me."

  "We've thought of everything, Whittle and I, and we've come up with a jolly good plan. At the Consulate they've got a file of old Christmas notes and B&Bs. We'll send the whole batch up to London too, so that hopefully they'll match some writings up."

  "Good thinking, Vicar, I must say."

  "Thank you. I thought so myself. Also, with your permission I want to bring in Colonel Brown. He's an avid reader of detective novels and would make an excellent sleuth. Plan is for him to give a series of luncheons, invite all the suspects, and try to smoke them out. Watch the eyelashes and all that. I think it's worth a try. Meanwhile next Sunday I shall preach a sermon that'll get our man where he hurts. Just look around church for a pair of burning ears—we may trap him right there."

  It all sounded excellent, the Vicar's three-pronged plan, and set Peter to pondering the punishment he'd exact. Ostracism was one possibility. Let everyone know the anonymous author's name, then put him in Coventry until he was driven from Tangier. But the more he thought about it, the more he preferred the opposite course: seduce the villain by sweetness, treat him like his closest friend, and then, when he'd done that, confide how much the note had hurt. He'd offer his fair cheek to those sickening underbred lips, and then, he thought, we shall truly see just what the word "two-faced" means.

  He laughed at the thought, then dismissed it from his mind. While the Vicar, the Colonel, and Scotland Yard worked to break the case, he'd forget about the note and have some fun. If his days as pasha were numbered, he'd do well to enjoy his power now. Eventually, some way, he'd find his enemy out and crush him like a fly.

  He wandered into his garden, along its many paths, stroking his day lilies as he walked. The garden was nearly as he wanted it, after a quarter century of work, but still there were problems with the view. There was something wrong there that disturbed him more and more. And as much as he tried, he didn't know how to set it right.

  It was Dradeb that bothered him—that damnable, horrid slum. It lay between the Mountain and the city and ruined the whole effect. It wasn't that Dradeb looked so terrible from the Mountain—from high up it appeared as a white cubistic maze. It was just knowing that it was there, knowing what it was and how it reeked, that spoiled his paradise.

  But what to do? It would be splendid if he could just wave a wand and make it all go away. Or if, by some magic in the night, it could become transformed into a valley full of Moroccan shepherds playing flutes. That would be marvelous, and then the filthy Jew's River could become a babbling stream. Or else, he thought, curling his lip, those damn people down there could be taught to devour their young.

  But then, suddenly, there came to him a solution, and he wanted to kick himself for not having thought of it before. All he needed were a few fast-growing eucalyptus. Then, in a couple of years, he could screen the Dradeb out.

  He became excited and entered the garden again. He walked to the edge of his property, then sadly shook his head. There wasn't enough room, and his shrubs would be ruined by the eucalyptus' invasive roots. But the property just below his, vacant Moroccan-owned land, would make a perfect place for such a grove. He could plant down there and, when the trees reached the proper height, pollard their tops and create a verdant wall.

  The problem was to get hold of that land. He couldn't afford to buy it himself. Perhaps Camilla would help—she had old Weltonwhist's fortune and could certainly spare some pounds. Yes—she might do it; it would be a good investment for her too. She'd probably jump at the chance if he handled her right. Yes, that was it, he'd get Camilla to buy the land, then plant the trees and abolish the excrescence from his sight.

  He began to dream of how he'd make the Mountain reach Tangier, of the view he'd have: foliage, the city, and the sea.

  Kalinka

  Whenever Hamid thought about it, he was amazed by how little he knew about Kalinka. It was his habit to plumb a person's depths—he did this every day in his office, interrogating suspects, probing informants, seeking a conception of their characters beyond the information they had to give. But with Kalinka it was different. He hadn't pressed her, and as a result she'd remained mysterious, the mysterious woman who'd floated into his life.

  He wondered whether he feared the ruin of an illusion if he came to understand her well. But he did know her, knew every curve, every crevice in her body, knew the texture of her hair, so long and black and thick, the way morning light could gleam off her ivory skin. And her eyes, large and dark, surrounded by disks of glittering hazel—he knew the wide-open softness of them when she awoke, and the rimless Oriental lids that covered them while she slept. Yes, he knew her, but underneath there was something he did not know. Her history. Her past.

  He was thinking about this as he sat in his car parked across the street from Peter Zvegintzov
's shop, waiting for the customers to leave so he could go inside and confront the Russian with the fact Kalinka had revealed the night before.

  They'd just finished dinner, were sipping tea in silence, when suddenly she'd turned to him and spoke.

  "He followed me."

  "What? Who followed you, Kalinka?"

  "Peter," she said. "At a distance. Discreetly. Perhaps fifty yards behind."

  "When? When was this?" She'd told him before that she thought Peter followed her, but always when he'd asked her if she was sure, she'd stared down at the floor.

  "After the play," she said, "the British play. Remember—you left early with Aziz. Later, when it was over, I walked back here. And he followed me the entire way."

  "What?" Suddenly his heart stood still.

  "Yes. I'm sure of it. When I was safe up here I went out on the terrace and looked down. There he was, standing on the street. He saw me. Our eyes met. Then I stepped back inside."

  "I'll close him up, Kalinka. I'll drive him out. I'll expel him from Tangier."

  "Oh, no! He's harmless. Please, Hamid. It doesn't mean anything. You mustn't hurt him. Please."

  "But it's not right. He can't follow you—"

  "He loves me, Hamid. There's no crime—I don't see any crime in that."

  No crime. Why couldn't she understand, why couldn't she see that it was intolerable for him that the man people thought was her husband now openly followed her on the street?

  Love! he thought—he has no right to love her anymore. But then he stopped himself, contained his fury. He would not burden her. He would settle this himself.

  So now he was waiting outside the shop for the second time in ten days—the second time in all the months since he and Kalinka had fallen in love and he had brought her here and waited for her to fetch her clothes—and he wondered: What can I say to him except to warn him that he must never follow her again? What can I say beyond that, since I know nothing of what went on between them all those years?

  For months now, he realized, he'd been resisting his policeman's instincts. The memory of the previous winter, the intense, unspoken way they'd fallen in love, the way they'd discovered their love for one another amidst the chaos of Tangier—he'd treasured that time so much he'd been afraid to tarnish it by exploring what had gone on with her before. And then, after she'd moved in, he didn't want to disrupt the quiet of their lives, the special calm with which she surrounded him, the vagueness which was as much a part of her as the aroma of hashish that forever filled their fiat. Better, he'd thought, not to disturb this calm. Kalinka is my refuge. In her stillness I have an oasis in Tangier.

  But there was more than this stillness that he savored and feared to disrupt. There was her passion too, which burst out unpredictably, causing her to grasp him, crush her body against his. And, too, there were those times when they loved each other subtly, when she seemed to be still and yet moved, caressing him, drawing him in, extending their lovemaking for hours until he became lost in her body, her embrace. At those times she drew him into a world which he explored in an intoxicated state, a dazed sensuality in which he reveled, her strange world of subtlety and dreams.

  And yet, more and more often lately, he'd asked himself how long this magic of theirs could last. It worried him, for he could see no end to her dreaminess, could find no fixed points by which he could relate her to Tangier. And he knew too that the disconnection between their love and his public life must, somehow, be resolved.

  He'd begun to ask her questions, but the more he asked, sensitive to her resistance, her unwillingness to talk and to reveal, the more he found himself disturbed by her refusal to respond with facts. She would turn away, busy herself with sketching or cooking or housework, rearrange flowers in a bowl, water the plants she was growing on the balcony, fold laundry, or else take his hand, bring it to her lips, stare back at him with her large, glazed eyes, smiling as if to tell him that she did not want to doubt his love, and then shake her head and dismiss his query from her mind.

  What could he do in the face of that? He was not a man accustomed to being evaded. Could there be something terrible hidden behind her smile, something criminal, some awful crime? He knew so little about her, had such a sketchy notion of her life. He knew only that she'd been born in Hanoi and orphaned at a young age, and that Peter Zvegintzov had adopted her, taken her to Poland to escape some cataclysm of Asian politics, and then finally to Tangier where he'd imposed the pretense that she act as if she were his wife.

  She was adamant on one point: that she and Peter had never been married; that Peter had never touched her as a man might touch a wife. And yet, despite her assurances, the thought of Zvegintzov living with her so many years, in some strange relationship he could neither define nor understand, preyed upon Hamid. The thought of this obsequious man, this second-rate tattered little man with his vague past and his frayed cuffs and his formless, odorous suits, whose face announced to the world that he was ready to be trampled upon and used, that this awful man had invented the pretense that he'd been a husband to Kalinka, had slept with her—he could hardly bear the thought. It was almost worse than if Peter's claim had been true, for there was no logic to it and something disgusting, something awful, that made his stomach turn. Now all his work at the Sûreté, his confrontations with smugglers and drunkards and men who'd come to Tangier to misbehave—all of that seemed meaningless in the face of the mystery of Peter and Kalinka and their past.

  He thought about it all the time now, tried to recall details, hints from Kalinka, little things Zvegintzov might once have said. He realized, thinking back, that he'd never actually heard Peter say that Kalinka was his wife, not in all the years he had frequented the shop, seen Kalinka there, hardly noticed her, thought of her as a fixture or a pet. Yet everyone in Tangier knew that they were married—it was something that had always been assumed. And then there had come that strange night the previous January when the hailstones had rained down upon a cold and damp Tangier, that night when Zvegintzov had come to his flat on Rue Dante with a riding crop hidden in his sleeve and said: "My wife tells me she's leaving. I am the husband. I have certain rights." It was only then, that one time, that Hamid had actually heard Zvegintzov make the claim. And the next day, when Hamid met her at Farid's shop, when they'd kissed and touched and held each other for the first time—that day she'd looked steadily into his eyes, told him that she loved him, and swore to him she had never been married to Zvegintzov, had never been his wife.

  He'd accepted that—another mystery, he'd thought—and yet he knew now he would never have accepted such a statement from any person he suspected of a crime. He would have probed the claim, asked questions, cross-examined, insisted on dates and facts. But after she moved in with him it didn't seem to matter—though, if he were to marry her, it would matter very much.

  But now he wondered, waiting outside Zvegintzov's shop, trying to formulate what he would say to him, the cold words which must not reveal the heat of his fury, the warning which would leave no doubt in Peter's mind that he must never follow her again. Yes, now he wondered: Who was she? What mystery lay behind her smile? What strange childhood had she had? Why had Zvegintzov brought her to Tangier?

  Her passport told him so little, her old Polish passport, listing the name of her mother, someone called Pham Thi Nha, her father "unknown," and the fact that she'd been born in Hanoi in November 1943. Were there other documents? Adoption papers? Certificates from schools? When he'd asked her she'd shaken her head, perhaps to say she didn't know, or that Peter had them and would never give them up.

  Now he would have to find out, no matter how great the risk. If she could not give information like other people, if she was able to communicate with him only by signs and gestures and nods and looks, then he would have to learn to decode these signals too. He thought about her then, the way she watered a plant and fried a fish, the way she undressed, cast aside her clothes, the way she smiled, turned when he called her, kissed him, or
lay slightly curled on their bed waiting for him to come home with the late afternoon light, the intense blue light of a Tangier afternoon cutting through the blinds on their bedroom window, striping her body with diagonals, and her hashish pipe set on the bedside table, perfectly angled as if for a photograph in a book about the mysteries of the East—just the thought of her like that stabbed at him with love.

  Yes, he loved her, adored her, could not imagine life without her now, and yet he could not help himself, could not hold himself back any longer, even at the risk of destroying this spell of hers, this sense of refuge by which she held him in such thrall.

  He looked back into La Colombe. There still were customers inside and he could see Peter too, in silhouette, making those too hasty movements by which he brought requested merchandise to the counter, or used the long stick with the pincers at its end to extract large boxes from the shelves above his reach, and he thought: I can't go in there now and threaten him, tell him not to follow Kalinha on the street. I'll become too angry, ask too many questions, appear too jealous, and lose my dignity as an inspector of police.

  He shook his head then and started up his car. He would not go in, and he was amazed at himself for that—that he, Hamid Ouazzani, a chief of section at the Tangier Sûreté, so cool in his dealings with foreigners, so dignified, such a smooth practitioner of an inspector's manner, that he could not now find the words or the poise to deal with a man who, he knew, could only gape at him in fear.

  Driving back toward his apartment through the main street of Dradeb, he thought of the words of Mohammed Achar when he'd come to him with his worries the afternoon before.