Moroccan Traffic (30 page)

I knew what the policeman was going to say, and I had to let him say it. I saw the effect of every word on Reed’s face, and then its reflection on Rita’s. At the end, he translated clearly for her. The officer had finished with some delicacy. ‘My commiserations, mademoiselle. One can hold out small hope, except for confirmation when daylight allows. One may say only that such things are quick.’

In the pause that followed, Rita was silent. Her eyes were rimmed with red like a drunkard’s, but they were dry. Queerly, before we arrived, she had filled in the time decorating her face like teenagers once did. It was all patterned in tiger stripes and little whorls, and her red hair was done in elaborate spikes. Reed looked at her once, and then began, admirably, to say the right things, walking to the gate with the officer; seeing him off with excessive formality. I held Rita’s arm and said, ‘No.’

She looked from me to Lady Kingsley, but didn’t move. The police car reversed, turned and drove off. Reed came back. I said, ‘That’s the story Oliver told us to spread. He isn’t missing.’

Rita lifted her arm out of mine. Reed, his hands at his sides, stood beside her, looking at us.

‘He’s alive,’ said Charity Kingsley. ‘Oliver found him. He was in the explosion. We haven’t seen him, but we heard him speak. He doesn’t want it known that he survived.’

‘Thrawn,’ said Rita. I didn’t know what she meant.

Rolly Reed put a finger on her shoulder, which came no further up than his elbow. He said, ‘So you don’t know quite how he is. What is Oliver doing?’

‘Waiting, I think,’ said Lady Kingsley. ‘When the coast is clear, he’ll bring him here. Should you warn a doctor?’

Reed said, ‘We have one, for the crew. Oliver knows how to reach him. I think we ought to go in.’

It was good advice. In spite of the heat, I had begun to shiver again. When I turned to go up the steps I found two other people standing there. One was the middle-aged steward called Lenny, whom I’d last seen on
Dolly
at Essaouira. Beside him, even more unexpectedly, was the narrow, mangetout face of Mo Morgan. Morgan said, ‘Wendy? You’d like to go up to your mother?’

It embarrassed them, that they’d forgotten my mother. Rita suddenly began to bustle about; taking Lady Kingsley indoors to be tended; giving orders. We all moved up the steps after her. Morgan touched my blanket. ‘Maybe you should get looked after first. You’ll give your mother a fair old fright when she sees you.’

‘She gave me one,’ I said. She was resting, he said, in a bedroom. He took me there, and then went away. I should have asked him how he came to be there, and the man from the yacht. I should have asked about Mr. Reed, but I didn’t. I opened the door of my mother’s room, and she was sitting facing me, bulbous, bow-fronted, draped in some vast spread of cloth from the Wardrobe Department which was already out the price of one wrecked cocktail dress for the Oppenheim party.

She wasn’t smoking. She looked me up and down with screwed eyes just the same. Her fierce hair was rammed full of hairgrips and her eyes were stamped with brown beer rings, and her nose was obscene. On her brow was a swollen bruise the size of a penny.

Only a short time ago, I had lain in a ditch and thought I had lost her. No more harangues. No more arguments. No more mortification.

I said, ‘What the hell were you doing? With Pymm? At that gate? You deserved to be blown up. You did. You did.’

She said, ‘Oh, Christ God,’ and stared at the floor as if someone had thrown up all over it. Her hands were more or less on her knees. As I looked, she rocked herself once, and then stopped.

I was crying with anger and bafflement. I have never understood her.

I understood her.

I said, ‘No,’ and got down on my knees by her chair. I said, ‘I think it’s all right. Not for the waiter. But Johnson was further away.’

She looked at me. I said, ‘Oliver is bringing him here. No one knows it’s all right except us. If it is. It is, I think.’ I put up my hand and touched the swelling. It was shiny and hard. I said, ‘You should have sent for the bloody course first. How to nick murderers.’ Then I burst out crying into her lap, and she hugged me as far as her arms would go round, until she needed to get a hand free for her Gauloises. We didn’t actually get talking even then, but I sat on the floor, hiccoughing occasionally, while she trembled smoke from the side of her mouth and patted me with a hand like a small boxing mitt. It was sort of comforting.

We went downstairs ten minutes later, because Rita tapped to ask if we’d like a wee cup of tea, and my mother, flinging open the door, prodded her shoulder and said Rita was to leave all the food and tea-making to her, and go off and do what needed doing. Wendy would help, she announced, once she’d got all the muck off.

They had known each other for about five minutes. Up to that night, my mother had regarded Miss Marguerite Geddes, Managing Director and business illiterate as a personal threat to the stability of the yen. On the other hand, up to that moment, she thought she had caused the death of Rita’s friend Johnson. When I washed and went down, in an expendable top and pants from the Wardrobe, my mother was away in the kitchen and Rita and Lenny were making up beds, while Roland Reed was answering the telephone, which rang all the time.

Since the police knew we were here, everyone did. Everyone knew that the wife and secretary of Sir Robert Kingsley of Kingsley Conglomerates had escaped serious injury as a result of an explosion in the Medina of Marrakesh. And that, tragically, the gifted English Academician Johnson Johnson was one of those known to be missing. To everyone, Reed said the same thing.
Apprehension shared by all Mr. Johnson’s colleagues and friends. Gallantry of the two ladies, who wished to stay as long as some hope might remain.

The London news agencies had been in touch. The Mamounia phoned to communicate its genuine concern. A secretary rang from the Palace, expressing deep shock, and asking to be kept informed. The bell in the gate began to ring, and a heavy from the film crew was found, to stand inside and send off reporters. Jimmy Auld phoned, and Mo Morgan objected, at last, when Reed put down the phone without changing his story.

He said, ‘If the man’s alive, why can’t you say so to his friends? Look at the distress you’ll be causing. It’ll be all over the papers tomorrow. And what if he requires burn treatment or surgery?’

‘If he does, he’ll get whatever he needs,’ Roland Reed said. ‘I don’t know why he’s asked for this any more than you do, but you may be sure that he has. Oliver wouldn’t stage this alone. We all have to be patient.’

You could tell, now, that Rita’s financial director was not a young man, despite all his elegance; and on the side of his face, his skin showed blue and red like my mother’s. He had been working the film van transmitter when he had been surprised and attacked. There had been a brief, highly skilled attempt to enter the house, foiled by the sophistication of the Ritas’ defences. Morgan, joining them on a hunch, had not even been needed. They didn’t know whose hirelings had been used. Only Sullivan, insolent and secure, had identified himself over the radio to me and to Lady Kingsley and to Johnson. He had no fear of reprisals. He had only to wait, and others would shoulder the blame.

The phone rang, and was answered, as I realised it had to be, in case the call was from Oliver. My mother came in with a tray bearing strong tea and plates of sweet things she had mixed and taken out of the oven and defied us to refuse. Rita returned, and so did Charity Kingsley, her face raw, her bandaged arm and shoulders invisible inside a man’s tailored dressing-gown. My mother brought her a cup and a table and two cushions to keep her back off the chair, and then returned to wedge herself beside my former employer’s rich country wife and embark on a merciless inquisition about horses.

My mother knew nothing about horses. There wasn’t a course, although she might want to create one. Three Sure-Fire Ways To Get A Horse Killed. How to Strategically Analyse Your Opportunity Environment and Learn to Split More Than Infinitives. I saw Lady Kingsley relax, and answer, and deliver a smile that seemed surprisingly genuine. In the middle Roland Reed, who had gone to take some further calls returned to say, ‘Lady Kingsley? That’s Sir Robert on the line. He wants to speak to you.’

They looked at one another. Reed didn’t repeat what he had said to Mo Morgan, but his expression said it all for him. Johnson is missing. Not dead. Not alive. But missing. His expression came as near to an appeal as I’d seen it.

And Lady Kingsley said, ‘Perhaps you would like to tell him about Johnson yourself. Then I should like to have a word.’

They both spoke on the phone to Sir Robert. Rolly Reed’s talk was brief. By the time Lady Kingsley returned to the parlour we had all finished tea, and my mother had got a pack of cards from somewhere and Mo Morgan and she were playing gin rummy for matches, as she’d left her purse and his toe in the café. Everyone candidly looked up as Sir Robert’s wife walked back in and sat down. She looked rather hot. It was Rita who said, ‘Is he keen for you to go on back to the Mamounia?’

And Lady Kingsley said, ‘We discussed it. But he would prefer, really, that I got a flight and went home.’

‘Is he going home?’ Morgan said, snapping cards at my mother. He had just won a game from her, which meant he was cheating. He didn’t look like a man who would bother with ballcocks, or even a man who would give a damn for Daniel Oppenheim’s marriage. He was, I remembered painfully, my latest employer.

Lady Kingsley said, ‘London? Robert’s not going there, or not yet. He has a meeting tomorrow, he says, longish journey. He had planned to leave after the portrait, but now he thinks he may set off first thing.’

‘Where?’ said Roland Reed.

She didn’t seem to notice the brusqueness. ‘South of Marrakesh, he didn’t say where. The vintage cars are going to cross the High Atlas tomorrow, and he could ride along with them, he says.’

Everyone in the room became silent. Then, ‘Really?’ Mo Morgan said. ‘With Gerry and Sullivan? Who’s he going to meet?’

‘He didn’t say,’ said Lady Kingsley. ‘But I suppose, whoever it is, they must be quite important.’

It was then that we heard the sound of a car carefully entering the yard, and of someone getting out and locking the gates, and of quick, furtive footsteps returning. And Rita rose, and Lenny, and Reed, and when they walked to the door no one stopped them; for, in whatever condition, the last of our circle had come.

There followed an interval I didn’t enjoy. My mother put down the cards, and Morgan got up. So did I. Lady Kingsley stayed where she was, her eyes on the door. The window was darkened, but beyond it I could hear Oliver’s voice, and then Rita’s, suddenly halted. Through the silence that followed you could hear a dog barking, and Arab music from a distant radio, and a girl and a man, or maybe several men, laughing somewhere together. Then the same cautious footsteps resumed their advance, and were joined by others, presumably belonging to Reed and Lenny. The escort party transferred itself indoors and could be heard heavily climbing the staircase. Then the door opened.

Large and well-developed and dirty, Oliver Thornton stood on the threshold and gazed in turn at Lady Kingsley, and my mother, and me, and gave us each a flicker of recognition and sympathy. To Mo Morgan he said, ‘I have something really important to ask you. Laugh quietly.’ And he moved to one side.

Behind him, leaning on the doorpost, his hands in his pockets, was Johnson. He had no spectacles on, and the shirt and trousers he was wearing weren’t his. Inside them, from his hair to his shoes, he was green.

My mother’s chins descended a rung. Lady Kingsley’s lips parted. Mo Morgan’s pigtailed head raised itself, and his teaspoon mouth turned up and his Adam’s apple blipped so that he coughed. He sat down. His eyes were full of water. ‘The dye yard?’ he said. ‘The pigeon pellets? The turkey droppings? The camel pats and tubs and tubs and tubs of nice, wet, coloured liquid? Oh, you superior bastard, what have you done?’

‘
Le Maroc en Fête
,’ said Johnson, surveying himself in a profoundly leisurely way. ‘
La Blague du Jour. Service Après Vente Assuré,
plus
La Taxe Sur La Valeur Ajoutée.’

‘Today’s joke, all right,’ said Roland Reed, appearing behind, and taking an arm of the apparition. ‘There was a dye-yard at the back of the fence. He dived in and escaped most of the blast. Come on, Jay. No one can understand you. He always talks French when he’s pissed.’

There were two vacant chairs beside Morgan. The accountant pushed Johnson carefully into the middle one, and sat down beside him. Lenny hovered. Lady Kingsley perched herself again by the bulk of my mother. Rita, failing to seize Oliver’s attention, blew her nose, buffeted it, and went and sat with a thud beside Rolly. She said, ‘OK, but
why
is he pissed?’

‘Half,’ said Oliver. ‘Only half. Wants to talk to us.’

‘If I get a chance,’ Johnson said. He had given up French.

‘We went to the doc on the way. He says it’s all right. The green’ll fade.’

‘Hooker’s Green,’
said Mo Morgan ecstatically. ‘Green Peace. Green Fingers. Green Giant. The Pillock of Hercules. What is there to talk about? We’ve been knifed, hammered, shot at, and told to tell lies to our buddies. Nothing we need to know, is there?’ He had been angry all evening, and now he was furious. He added, ‘What’s the French for Hooker’s Green? You don’t even know that, you bastard.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Johnson said drowsily, and treated him to a short, clear translation. Charity honked, but Morgan’s odd face had pain in it.

‘If you ask me,’ said my mother’s loud, firm, foreign voice, ‘Mr. Johnson’s quite right. Time for a TAM. Team Action Management, Wendy. Action plans, budget, long-range corporate plans, strategy, purpose and objectives. Nine coffees. Right?’

Johnson’s eyes were half-shut. ‘Eight coffees and a very large whisky,’ he said. ‘Doris, I love you more than Morgan does. Charity, you’ll have to forgive us.’