Moroccan Traffic (37 page)

I had spent more time listening to Oliver’s voice than I had in his company. I knew nothing about him. I wondered what I was going to see, arriving at the low house; stepping over the rushing stream at the door into the throbbing darkness of the chamber inside. Morgan took my elbow and steered me round a vast, recessed grinding stone, turning and shuddering with the force of water beneath it. A cone full of grain hung above it. Beyond was daylight, and a yard full of litter and curious children, and a cow, and the door of a bath-house. Further than that was another door, and a clutter of low-walled rectangles, roofed or latticed or open that constituted the living quarters, the kitchen, the storehouses, the place for the hens.

Oliver lay unconscious in Hassan’s bedroom, on a low mattress covered with rugs. His face was pale under its tan, and covered with bruises, and his limbs were splinted with skis. The young medic explained the splints he had put in, and the jag he had given, and prepared another in case it was needed. Then he left to join his support truck and travel back to where they were supposed to be. Only then did our host, the Berber Hassan appear in the doorway.

He was a tall man, with the full lips and smooth olive face I was beginning to recognise among hillmen. His chin was ringed with grey bristle and he walked with a limp. My mother said, ‘I wish to greet him in Berber.’ Her own bruise was quite lurid, like a caste mark.

‘He would appreciate that,’ said Mo Morgan. ‘But he speaks pretty good English. And French and German, as a matter of fact. Runs a mean hut, and stands no nonsense. What do you think?’

This to Hassan, who bowed to my mother and me, and then entered. He said, ‘The hospital will X-ray him. The lungs are not pierced. The pelvis, I do not know. This is your friend?’ He looked at Johnson.

‘Bontine Graham,’ Johnson introduced himself politely. Morgan looked at him. Johnson continued, ‘Without you, the boy would have died. Has he spoken?’

‘Only one word. He said
Chahid
as we lifted him. A name? The name of the one whose bullets ruined his tyres?’

‘This is known?’ Johnson said. Dropping to the floor, he took Oliver’s wrist and felt for the pulse.

‘To us in this room. When the fire took hold, as Mr. Morgan has reminded me, there was nothing to see. Who is this Chahid?’

‘An enemy,’ Johnson said. He tapped Oliver’s hand and sat back. ‘We think he is not far away. Is there a market?’

‘A local one. You would soon notice a Westerner.’

‘Perhaps,’ Johnson said. ‘It might be worth trying.’

He and Morgan and Hassan stayed by the bed, watching it and talking in low voices, while my mother reacted as was her custom, picking up Oliver’s wet things and folding them into his jacket, and taking charge of his keys and his radio and his papers and his very smashed watch, and taking a quick look at the way the bandages were. She fished out two dry hankies of her own and put them by the syringe, and finally laid a palm like a muffin on his brow.

He didn’t stir. I left the room before she did, and found myself pulled along by children and girls who didn’t speak English or German or French, but wanted to know if I was hungry or thirsty, and show me their sitting-room, which had thick-carpeted window sills, and a recess full of tattered school books covered in flour, and a TV draped in gold cloth also covered with flour, as was the single lightbulb. I was still there when the ambulance began to come down the blue winding road. I found my mother by the fire in the kitchen, hunkered down on the floor beside another old woman in black. She had taken her teeth out as a gesture of courtesy. An oil can hung from the ceiling, and they batted it sloshing between them, making inarticulate conversation and goat cheese. They were both smiling blackly and coughing. Then I told her, and she see-sawed up to her feet, put her teeth back, and came with me to look for the others.

They had begun grinding again when Oliver, still unconscious, was carried out of the house. The woven cone dribbled barley on to the stone and the white flour poured out from the sides. The noise it made was like the chuff of a steam train. The ambulance driver, speaking French, said, ‘I have also to take the two ladies.’

Morgan had gone to fetch Johnson. My mother doesn’t speak French. I said to her, ‘You’ll have to get in. They want you to go with him.’

She glared at me. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘The Implications of Being a Woman. Creating a Trust Climate where Two-Way Communication Thrives. Go and tell Rita what’s going on. Bloody delegation, remember?’

I had heaved her into the van when Hassan appeared and said, in his excellent English, ‘But, mademoiselle, they wish you to go as well.’

‘I thought so!’ cried my mother from the recesses of the ambulance.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m Mr. Morgan’s Executive Secretary. Where is Mr. Morgan?’

He appeared at that moment, looking harassed. He had put on his anorak, and his pigtail was all done up again. He said, ‘I can’t find. . .’

‘Mr. Bontine Graham,’ said Hassan, ‘has gone.’

‘Where?’ Morgan said. ‘The effing bastard. To the market?’

‘He asked about the market,’ said Hassan. ‘He asked about the sources of power. I told him the excess of mud is due to the laying of cables; especially telephone cables.’

‘Telephone cables!’ said Morgan.

‘To the kasbah,’ explained Hassan peacefully. ‘The approach lies through the market; the fortress occupies the rise of the hill just behind. Once a ruin, and now restored at a cost of many millions of dirhams by the new owner. He is an Arab. He is an Arab not of Morocco.’

‘And J – Mr. Graham’s gone there,’ Morgan stated. The ambulance driver had started his engine.

‘He wished to see it. You are to wait for him here. The ladies are to go to his friends at Ouarzazate.’

‘I’m staying,’ I said. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to know about Arabs. I had found the way to Omar Sharif and Peter O’Toole and Ramon Navarro at last, and I was petrified.

My mother said, ‘Wendy?’

Morgan said, ‘Wendy. Get into the damned thing and go. For God’s sake what do you want? Overtime?’

I felt myself flushing. I shouted at him. ‘You needed Oliver. You’ve got to have somebody. Anyway, what are you worried about? You’re the blasted cream of the microprocessor intelligentsia, and no one can touch you.’

He didn’t even answer: he gazed at my mother. My mother said, ‘Wendy, you just got the big picture perspective. You’re a trailblazer. You trail it. I’m proud.’ I still couldn’t tell whether she was serious. Then she lifted her paw, and the driver let in the clutch, and the ambulance drove off to the south with a splash. The last thing I saw was her bruise. She must have had a headache since yesterday.

Morgan said, ‘OK. Come on, Oliver,’ and made for the jeep.

Because no one could touch him, Morgan drove to the Berber market quite openly, and parked the Rover, and joined the crowds with me at his side. His intention, I knew, was to find Pymm and Chahid and keep them out of Johnson’s way. His further intention, I suspected, was to do something quite nasty to Chahid. We didn’t discuss it.

On the face of it, we were reasonably safe. If Pymm and Chahid were about, they had no reason to jump out and slug us. Johnson was dead, Oliver had just had an accident, and my mother, who had failed to go to London, had now been removed from the scene. Morgan said, ‘She’s the one Pymm must be suspicious of, not you. Stick to me, and all you’ll get is hay fever. That must be the road up to the kasbah.’

I could see it, a narrow band of slush rising behind the massed roofs of corrugated iron and canvas that covered the stalls, the mats, the mud of the market. If Johnson was up there, there was no sign of him. On the other hand, he might not have arrived yet.

Entering the market, you could see what a good place it could be to hide in. As Hassan had said, there were very few Europeans, although I did see a pair of fine tailored tracksuits turning over an array of spare parts and spanners. The Bugatti had come for some shopping. The rest were all Arabs and Berbers, with the occasional black face among them. I noticed for the first time how tall and well-grown some of them were: silent figures standing bowed within a tent weighing grain, or presiding over a table of dusty cassettes which perhaps discussed familiar questions (Mid-Career Plateau or Launching Pad?) or perhaps offered no more than the mournful Arab music the owner was playing, broken into by a gabble of French.

Because of the weather, a lot of the stalls were enclosed. We walked between them, peering at beans and coffee, washing- powder and bowls, carpets and baskets and wrought-iron, tinny jewellery and hanks of rough turquoises. It was like the Marrakesh souks in a small way: tribal market and tourist centre in one. Morgan bought pastries and we devoured them as we went. We found a storyteller and a man charming snakes, but not Ellwood Pymm or his agile, numerate and ruthless friend Chahid. We passed a vat of hot fat flanked by doughnuts: some uncooked, some crisp and coloured. I said, ‘I saw a film once. The fire-eater blew into the frying fat, and the hero escaped.’

‘That’s the trouble,’ said Mo Morgan. ‘All the clichés have got used already. Like the chase in the souks.’

‘What?’ I said. A boy with a fibre suitcase offered us a choice of cheap watches.

‘You hadn’t rehearsed it,’ said Morgan, ‘but the crowd had. I’m told they demanded extra pay when it was over. Look, we’ve been this way before. Let’s go back to the cassettes.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Want to buy one?’

‘Maybe,’ Morgan said. ‘How’s your French?’

My French is quite good. Good enough to pick up the chatter you could hear from the stall, mixed up with the wails of the music. The moment we got close, it stopped. We lingered a moment, turning over the cassettes while the well-built Berber at the stall watched us as if we meant to steal them. Mo bought one, and we walked on, the music receding. The voice didn’t restart. I said, ‘He was taking a radio message. It said,
They are here, both of them.
‘

‘They said it in Arabic too,’ Morgan said. ‘There are others. Try not to seem to be looking. We’ll do this, and get back to the middle.’

We had come to the abattoir. On the rough wood benches beside it, choppers thudded and banged and sliced through soft meat and brittle poultry. Sheep heads lay by sad heaps of wool, each chopped off spine sticking up, a pale cylinder in the red welter. A man stood, stuffing sausages. Grey and shining, they whipped in his fingers like eels. He was tall, as the others had been. Tall and muscular.

Their industry was the more remarkable because the number of shoppers had dwindled. The trampled ways between stalls had become easily passable. The noise of laughter and bidding had lessened. Even the bamboo pipe of the snake-charmer was fading. The only customers who had remained in their places were the captive ones in the barbers’ row of mud cubicles, each with its one chair and zinc bowl of water. All the clients were men. They sat wrapped in cloth, submitting to the comb or the razor: to being trimmed, shaved or apparently scalped. Most were elderly. One had a crewcut.

It was Pymm. He turned his pug-nosed, frothing face in that moment, and saw me and Morgan, and reacted with an expression of shock that trembled towards a diligent smile. He got up, the soapy towel still round his neck. The barber in the next cubicle also rose. Approaching us, Pymm opened his mouth. Morgan stepped forward. The barber from the next cubicle began to stroll in our direction. He had an open razor in one hand. At the last moment Pymm turned and saw him. Pymm gasped. The barber said to Ellwood Pymm, ‘You will come with me.’

A hand closed over my mouth. ‘And you will come with me,’ said another man softly behind me. I struggled. Morgan, intent on Pymm, didn’t turn. The man behind me pinioned my arms and, tripping me neatly off-balance, whipped me back out of sight of the others. ‘It’s all right,’ said the same voice reassuringly. ‘Mo’s in no danger. But Pymm is bloody going to involve him, and I’m not sure if you’d be as lucky. Turn round, Wendy.’

The hands fell away. I turned. Over Johnson’s nice lock-knit jersey he now wore a rather natty djellabah, clean but creased from my mother’s knitting bag. We were in a space between empty stalls, and I could hear Pymm’s voice raised in protest. Johnson said, ‘I’ve got some gear for you, too, but do you mind if we see what is happening?’ He spoke as if it were a video show. Holding me, he moved cautiously forwards.

They had got Pymm by then: the barber and at least one other helper. The towel had been twisted tight round his neck, and above it his half-lathered face had become scarlet. He was calling ‘Morgan, Morgan! You know me! Any size cheque that you like! Help me, Morgan!’

Talisman in the microchip world, the name Morgan was unknown to Pymm’s captors. It merely indicated that Pymm had a friend and an ally: someone who equally, therefore, merited lifting. The large man, with no trouble whatever, restrained Ellwood Pymm. It took three others to get hold of Morgan, and all the time he was looking for me. Then, satisfied that I had gone, he abruptly stopped struggling.

‘It is good,’ said the man who had first spoken. ‘And now, we shall go to the kasbah.’

I turned. Inside Johnson’s hood, I caught a single black gleam. Then he said, ‘No, I’m not going to help him. Neither are you. So, are you on? I’m after Chahid, and it might be tricky. You can come, or go back to Hassan.’

I said, ‘Only Chahid? Not Sir Robert and Oppenheim?’

‘Oh, they’re in the kasbah,’ said Johnson. ‘But I don’t need to see them. Morgan will.’

That was why he hadn’t stopped Mo being captured. Johnson wanted him captured, so that he could learn for himself what Oppenheim and Sir Robert were up to. I thought he was mental. I said, ‘According to Hassan, the kasbah’s owned by an Arab. A pan-Arab. Not a Moroccan.’

‘Surprising, isn’t it?’ Johnson remarked. We were retreating silently between empty stalls. ‘You could imagine Ellwood Pymm pimping for anybody, but I didn’t connect Daniel with Arabs. I should have. He’s subtle, although he can’t fathom a mystical idiot like Morgan. And of course, these are not your usual investors. They’ve no links with the al-Baraka or the al-Rajh or the IDB: we checked these all out at the start. Daniel’s Arabs are very quiet fellows, pissing-rich and broad thinkers. The kind who want bangs for their bucks.’