Lulu in Marrakech (4 page)

6

Michael Barclay did not think of himself as a spy. Nor would he even say he belonged to the secret service or the security service—though he’d agree security was at the root of much of his work. If pressed, he might nod towards the word “Intelligence.” He liked the word. It meant knowing a lot.

—Ian Rankin,
Witch Hunt

W
e sat for a moment near the decorative pool and were brought some tea. When Tom and Amelie had gone, Ian said he would take me to my room, his reference to “my” removing one ambiguity, for though we were lovers, I hadn’t been sure what my new status would be or how connubially we would be living.

My room was as austere as a nun’s cell, with high, whitewashed walls and a wooden ceiling. The ceiling was domed, with an open lantern that let in light, and a filigreed lamp, shaped like the inverted dome of a mosque, hanging in the center. A large bed festooned with netting was almost the only furniture—the netting a bad sign, I feared, thinking of mosquitoes and scorpions; there was a little closet and a table to use as a desk. A small bookcase was set into the wall, with a few English paperbacks on its shelves and a picture over it of a genie on a carpet floating above a pond. Heavy wooden shutters would close out the light.

This room led to a cavernous bathroom lined with marble and rustic tile, slightly musty, with a shower of stucco and a toilet with a chilly-looking marble seat set into a box. Ian’s razor, shaving soap, and a bottle of vetiver eau de toilette were laid out on the marble sink. Ian’s room adjoined on the other side. As we stood in the bathroom, he kissed me properly and said he was glad I had come. Then he left me to unpack and told me lunch was at two. It was a little abrupt, but I had seen that he was, here, a host responsible for more people than just me. Still, this casualness was slightly disappointing; I’d imagined a more rapturous welcome. But it was hardly important yet.

I unpacked my bathing suit, tennis clothes, paddock boots—for Ian had mentioned pack trips in the mountains—some low-cut dresses for dinner, covered-up dark dresses for public excursions, underwear. I arrayed my objects—my laptop; my ordinary‐ looking clock radio, so chockablock with useful capabilities; my clever James Bondish fountain pen; and bottle of secret ink. There were the versatile utensils in my writing portfolio—little sticks of wax made up like pencils, a supply of cellophane, my camera with its several lenses; all could be turned over by a maid without seeming to be what they were.

I plugged in my computer. I was working “bare”—if I got caught at something, my colleagues would deny knowing anything about me. No official status, no gun; I didn’t need a gun. I have to admit I’m drawn to guns and have been since learning to shoot at the Stanford University summer camp I went to as a child. My parents were upset because we came home with National Rifle Association certificates at the end. They considered the NRA an institution of the devil. Here a gun would have to be hidden with particular care, so I wouldn’t ask for one.

In time, if necessary, someone could bring me a “firearm” (as Taft called them), but this was not considered a dangerous or “wet” mission unless I somehow stumbled into narcotics or nukes. We don’t usually concern ourselves with drugs, though.

S
ome of my equipment filled me with a special sense of unreality. Why would I, “Lulu,” an untroubled Californian tourist, have a microdot reader? Why were the names of people I could just call on the phone encrypted? I knew why, of course. There were particularly ruthless elements in North Africa, there were corpses in doorways, throats slit, ears removed, whose errors might only have been letting it be known they had talked to one of my colleagues or had done a little business with them. I knew all this but never could help an innate feeling that the frankness I have always been criticized for was the better course. Secrecy was against the grain, but I also have heard that to go against the grain is to grow.

I couldn’t resist checking my e‐mail, in part to see how good the reception was and whether I’d need to dial up, but there seemed to be a strong signal. I’ve mentioned that I reported to this especially irritating man named Taft, who seemed to know nothing about the Balkans, and now nothing about North Africa. In part, I was to communicate with him by e‐mail, in a transparent way. He was called Sheila (“Dear Sheila”) with a simple AOL address and a fairly impenetrable set of code words by which I could alert him to look for an encrypted message online and vice versa.

He had already told me that in Marrakech I would meet another agent; that agent in turn would know our people in Casablanca and Rabat. That agent, I was told, would find me. Now, Sheila wrote, “Watch your purse in the souk. Is it called the Casbah? I know several people who were pickpocketed.” That is to say, watch your back, there is danger, there is something afoot. With my heart excited by Ian, the message from Sheila acted on me like the chilling admonitions of my mother, recalling me to duty and common sense.

7

Emilia: How if fair and foolish?

Iago: She never yet was foolish that was fair.

—William Shakespeare,
Othello,
act 2, scene 1

A
t two I went down to lunch, disappointed that there were other people staying, but was quickly brought out of that mood by the prospective comedy of house parties, with their tiptoeing, significant looks, and creaky doors. Maybe it was propitious that there were others here; maybe in the long run, love would thrive on stolen moments, and maybe the other people would help me find my way into Moroccan intrigue. Though I didn’t quite see how. The other guests were a gangly British laureate poet named Crumley, a man in his fifties; his younger, pregnant wife, Posy, a sturdy girl with the English ankles, or maybe incipient swelling problems related to the pregnancy; another English woman named Nancy Rutgers, a soignée blonde in her late thirties or early forties who worked at Sotheby’s in London, expert on clocks and carpets; and her boyfriend, an American bookseller or antique dealer—one or the other—David someone.

“They’re only staying a few days,” Ian whispered, nodding toward Nancy and David, brushing the top of my head with his lips as he bent over me. Aloud, he said, “You’ve come on a Wednesday, Lulu, so you get the full shock of Marrakech life this very night—tonight’s my turn to host the Shakespeare club. You’ll have to take a part.” He explained that members of the English ‐ language community read Shakespeare plays aloud on the first Wednesday of every month, an inviolable date.

“I see her as Emilia, definitely,” cried Robin Crumley, the poet, with a gallant gesture toward me that seemed to irritate his wife.

Lunch was a somewhat stringy chicken
au poivrons rouges
—I supposed there was a Moroccan name for this dish—served by the man who had answered the door, Rashid. Throughout the meal, I felt Ian’s eyes on me, and when I met his gaze he gave a little smile, as if to affirm that we were a couple and that he was glad I had come. This made me unexpectedly happy; I was finding my whole reaction to Ian stronger than I’d imagined it would be, and I longed for the sex scene to follow.

It was a long lunch, with lots of a Moroccan rosé, and I was grateful when we rose from the table to take a turn around the gardens outside. Ian was extremely proud of them. “I was influenced by the Persian
chahar bagh,
a private and restful garden space, as you can see, but fruitful too,” Ian had been saying. “The pools in the center and the
jub
—that ditch—running around the edge, are actually for irrigation, but strongly decorative, I like to think. Those are flowering cherries; they’ll be beautiful in the spring, but these are lemons and limes.…” This new botanical Ian surprised me very much.

It seemed no time until the Shakespeare club began to arrive. Some of the members I had met already—Tom Drill came in with his partner, who proved to be a younger, attractive black guy named Strand Carter, with their little skinned-knee girl, Amelie, and the bony, imposing Cotters, Sir Neil and Marina, who were dressed as they might have dressed in England, in tweed and leather. They didn’t have their new employee Suma with them.

“We have an apartment in London,” Sir Neil found an occasion to tell me at once, in a confidential tone. “But as we spend a lot of time here, we sometimes let our London place on very reasonable terms— you must tell me if you ever want a stay in London.” I was somewhat nonplussed to have this either invitation or commercial proposition put to me in Ian’s house, as if I were a paying guest here whose whims might soon require her to rent a place somewhere else. I thanked him but said I didn’t expect to get to London.

I did have a chance to speak to Lady Cotter—Marina—about Suma. “Yes! We’re so pleased! She seems a charming girl,” she said.

“How is it you are in touch with SOS Femmes?” I asked.

“Actually, I’d never heard of them,” she said. “A friend in Paris knew how desperately I was looking for an au pair. It’s a godsend. Of course, I didn’t realize she’d only speak French.”

“Does she speak Arabic?”

“Yes, I suppose it will be good for the children to learn both, since they have to live here. My daughter-in-law…” She told me something of the story, the tragic death of her daughter-in-law in the mountains of Nepal, leaving these young grandchildren. The daughter-in-law suddenly couldn’t breathe, in her tent, lost consciousness and died before anyone could do anything, and was cremated on the spot. That sounded odd. I suppose it is what they’d been told.

“Didn’t they try to take her down to a lower altitude?” I asked.

“Well, yes, I imagine so,” Marina said, but looked dismayed, as if thinking they might not have. I suppose some people are more fatalistic about death than Americans are.

“Suma seems a nice girl. I don’t think she’d done anything very shocking, dated a boy and went on his motorbike or something. She wears the head scarf. The brother tried to kill her. We forget how primitive some of these people are, even if they do live in Paris.”

“I’ll come visit her one day, if I may,” I proposed, and Marina assured me she welcomed the idea.

“I’m sure you speak more French than we do. We learned it at school of course, and to speak to vendors and such, but not for proper conversation; how it fades over the years.”

A former American ambassador to Tunisia came in—I wondered if he’d turn out to be my contact. One or two of the guests were Moroccans, whose unfamiliar names I didn’t retain. I had worked on learning common Muslim names but found them elusive except for the main Koranic ones—Mohammed, Ali, and so on.

The most unexpected arrival was the same Saudi woman I had seen on the plane and again with her husband at the airport, only now we were introduced: Gazi and Khaled bin Sultan Al‐Sayad. As they came in, she was still wearing a black veil—the abaya—though not over her face, but she whisked it off and was wearing a beige pantsuit underneath, with lots of gold chains that emphasized her dramatic sort of harem-slave beauty, like a concubine out of the
Arabian Nights,
maybe Scheherazade herself, and seemed to symbolize the enslavement implied by the veil. Her husband, Khaled, who had worn white robes and a red-and-white head cloth at the airport, now was wearing a Western‐style suit and was a good-enough‐ looking man of maybe thirty, though with a remarkable nose that grew like a falcon’s beak between his dark eyes. How I admired the way Ian had mastered their long string of names, laced with “bins” and “bints” like a refrain! They lived next door—that is, in the next nearest villa estate—and were apparently well-known to everyone else here and deeply admiring of Shakespeare.

“Of course. I went to Brown University,” said Gazi to me. “And Khaled went to Yale. Not that we’re pro-American particularly, it was just the only game in town educationally, though many Saudis go to the Oxbridge colleges instead. And who else but Americans can control Israel?” She made these somewhat disconnected observations with a provocative smile that seemed to invite some response or comment, but I had no idea what to say. I wasn’t even sure she realized I was American.

“I know you must think it’s odd for me to have a man’s name,” she said. “Gazi—it’s more or less a family joke. My real name is Ghaniyah. We go to London and Stratford every winter to see the performances,” she continued. It seemed to me that Shakespeare was as good a foundation for international understanding as any other—better, really—and I was glad to hear that educated Arabs admired him. Do we know as much about their great poets? I knew the names of two Persian poets, Hafiz and Saadi, and Omar Khayyám, but that was about it.

Waiting to begin, the party spoke in several languages—English, French, and what I took to be Arabic, lending an air of baroque multicultural sophistication I found thrilling. We sat in a ring of chairs, I next to Gazi, so I dared to ask when and how it was that she wore the veil, even here in Marrakech, where most women didn’t appear to.

“Always worn at home in Riyadh, naturally, but here only sometimes—when I’m out with Khaled, who prefers it on the street.

He’s not a benighted jerk, not at all,” she said in her perfect but slightly odd English . “He went to Yale, after all. But it reduces the chance that someone from Riyadh might see me. There’s a certain amount of resentment there of people who have homes elsewhere or send their kids away to school. They all would if they could.” I assumed that Khaled must be rich, like all Saudis, but I didn’t know enough about that to ask even an oblique question about his business or profession. I admit that I also thought, What good is it to be beautiful if you have to live in Saudi Arabia?

The guests, now fifteen in number, sat in the ring of chairs in the courtyard by the pool and studied their parts for a few minutes while a maid lit the hundreds of candle lamps that ringed the swimming pool. Ian’s servant, Rashid, passed drinks—orange juice, whiskey sodas, and white wine. The evening cool was beginning, but the air was somehow dusty. There were no mosquitoes. In the distance, from somewhere, it was just possible to hear the sonorous drone of the evening call to prayer.