Shadow of the Rock (Spike Sanguinetti) (19 page)

‘What’s going on?’ Spike said.

‘
Le Jour Sacré
,’ the taxi driver replied. ‘When the Gates of Heaven are open to all.’

‘Is there another way through?’

White minivans were parked on the pavements, either having disgorged their passengers or abandoned their journeys altogether. Blankets patchworked the road, women in headscarves selling branches of foliage, slowing progress further as the customers haggled and paid. From behind the walls came the distant sound of chanting.

‘Marshan Cemetery,’ the taxi driver said. ‘Oldest for all Tangiers.’

‘I’ll walk then,’ Spike said. The taxi driver counted his notes, tonguing the gap between his teeth more quickly.

Once through the gate, the cemetery sloped ahead, an uneven rectangle the size of two football pitches, ended by clifftops and the sea beyond. The gravestones were intersected by pathways, the widest running down the centre, lined by beggars, wailing as they held out warty, palsied palms in supplication.

The crowd swept Spike on. The chanting and incense grew heady, intermingled with saline gusts from the sea. Spike turned onto a smaller path: the graves were like concrete bathtubs sunk into the ground, headstones where the taps might have been. Some sprouted with grass, mulched by sprays of decaying flowers.

Spike watched a man and woman approach, escorted by a beggar with a hoe who set to work scraping away the weeds. The woman carried a water bottle; she sluiced it over the headstone, cleaning off the dirt, worrying at the engraving with her fingernails. Her husband beckoned to a holy man, who came over and planted joss sticks in the soil, reciting from the Koran as the woman pressed her face into her husband’s chest.

Spike walked to the cliff face, sitting down on a bare patch of dirt. White horses reared in the Straits: the Gut, twisting away with its secret currents. Sickle-shaped swifts screamed above, preparing to migrate south. The murmur of the crowd started blending with the chanting, as though the mourners were singing their own requiem.

Spike took out his phone and texted Galliano: ‘Extradition dropped. Taking night boat home.’ Then he stood and went to a side exit.

Chapter 43

‘
Ouai?
’

‘It’s Spike.’

The door opened. Jean-Baptiste’s chest was bare above a pair of baggy Aladdin trousers, his brown nipples like tired eyes above the round prurient mouth of his navel. Spike followed him in, bag over shoulder. The air reeked sweetly.

‘Where you go last night?’ Jean-Baptiste said as he picked up a remote control and sat down on the bed.

‘Business.’

‘Your friend?’

Spike nodded as the sound of the TV monitors muted. On-screen, an actor with a widow’s peak was pinned against a wall, knife point stretching to a nostril.

‘I’m going home,’ Spike said.

Jean-Baptiste picked up a rubber band and fastened his dreadlocks into a ponytail.

‘Can I buy you a drink at the port?’

‘Have to finish this movie, uh?’

Spike laid a hotel envelope on the mattress.

‘No money . . .’

‘Good,’ Spike said, ‘because there isn’t any. I’ve got a friend in Gibraltar called Sebastian Alvarez. He runs cigarettes over the border to Spain. If you can make it into Gib, he’ll get you across in his fishing boat. Phone number’s in the envelope.’

Jean-Baptiste prodded the envelope with a finger.

‘There’s a Gibraltarian on the dock who can arrange passage. He takes euros.’

‘My
Chingongo
,’ Jean-Baptiste said, smiling. ‘Maybe I do come for –’

‘Be seeing you, Jean-Baptiste.’

Downstairs, Spike settled up. ‘Money is like a rose,’ the receptionist said as he handed Spike his receipt. ‘Smell it and pass it onto the next person.’

‘Did the policeman come back?’

‘Not yet.’

Spike reached over the counter. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’

‘Life without friends is like couscous without salt.’

‘What
is
that you’re reading?’

‘Mysteries are the –’

‘OK, OK.’

Down by the quayside, Spike purchased a half-bottle of whisky and waited at a café, plugged into his iPod. The lights of the catamaran began to approach, passengers already out on deck. He looked down at his ticket. Gibraltar,
Jebel Tariq
. . . The screen of his mobile illuminated and he swatted out his earphones. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s me.’ The voice was husky and low.

‘Zahra?’

‘I found his address.’

‘Whose?’

‘Abdallah al-Manajah’s.’

‘In Tangiers?’

‘Terrasse des Paresseux. Half an hour.’

Out in the Straits, the catamaran slotted into the port like the last missing piece of a jigsaw.

Chapter 44

Zahra was waiting in the shadows on the Terrasse des Paresseux. Her headscarf was tied beneath her chin to reveal a large mobile mouth with dark, cushion lips. She wore a white dress over her kaftan, fastened with a sash. Her smile vanished as quickly as it had arrived. ‘You smell like cheap perfume.’

‘Whisky.’

‘Yesterday
kif
, today whisky?’ She strode away along the line of cannons into the Place de France. The cafés were closing, a seller of individual cigarettes padlocking his wooden cart for the night.

Spike adjusted his overnight bag on his shoulder and caught her up. ‘I didn’t think you would call.’

‘Esperanza wanted to see Abdallah al-Manajah,’ Zahra said. ‘Maybe he will know something about my father.’

The sky was a dark, denim blue, the moon still too thin to shed light. They crossed over the rue de Belgique. The smaller residential streets had potholes in the macadam and beaten-up cars on the pavements, the apartment blocks seeming to date from an earlier, more optimistic period, acanthus scrolls crumbling above doorways like in old-world Paris.

‘How did you find the address?’ Spike said.

‘I asked a friend.’

‘The man with the red rucksack?’

‘Who?’

‘From the Café des Étoiles?’

Zahra stopped. ‘You are spying on me now, Somerset?’

‘It’s Spike.’

‘Why “Spike”?’

‘Because it’s better than Somerset.’

‘Is Somerset a family name?’

‘My mother was a fan of the English short story.’

A white, Velcro-strapped trainer emerged from Zahra’s dark robes as she picked her way across the rubble. ‘It’s 13C, rue des Rosiers.’

The bell pushes were unmarked. Zahra pressed the third one down. Nothing happened so she tried the same on the next column.

A light flashed on; someone was coming out. Spike and Zahra drew back like caryatids on either side of the entrance as it opened to an old woman in black. As soon as the woman stepped into the road, Spike moved forward and caught the door. She turned and stared; Spike stared back and she shuffled away into the darkness.

‘After you,’ Spike said as Zahra came forward, ducking elegantly beneath his arm like an Elizabethan dancer. Inside, envelopes marked with dirty footprints littered the doormat. The ground-floor flat was 13A; they climbed the drab stairwell to 13C.

The doorbell was silent so Zahra knocked instead. ‘Why don’t you try his phone?’ she said, turning to Spike.

‘He never answers.’

Zahra stared at him until he took out Esperanza’s mobile. From inside they heard a long, distant ringtone. She cast him a querulous glance then rapped again. As she turned to leave, he dropped to his knees and slotted an arm through the letter box.

‘What are you
doing
?’ she hissed.

‘Just watch the stairs.’

He contorted his arm upwards. Blood poured into his head as he strained his fingertips towards cold metal. With one last surge he got hold of the latch and yanked it down. The door shifted, tugging at his shoulder blade. He released the latch and removed his hand.

‘You’re very flexible.’

‘I think it runs in the family.’

The door fell an inch open, releasing a dank putrid aroma. Spike put his shoulder to the frame. Something was blocking it. ‘Hello?’ he called through the gap. ‘Can you try in Arabic?’ he said to Zahra.

‘You think that makes a difference?’

‘Could do.’

‘
Salaam?
’ she said. ‘
Billatí?
’ She withdrew, wrinkling her nose in disgust. Spike barged the door again. It moved a foot this time, allowing him to edge crabwise inside, arm extended for the switch. She followed him in, momentarily throwing them into darkness as she blocked the gleam from outside. Sweeping his hand up and down, he found metal again and the lights crackled on.

The flat was open-plan with a high-beamed ceiling and a mezzanine level accessed by a fixed wooden ladder. A halo of bulbs shone above a motionless fan; there seemed to be a problem with the circuit as they kept flickering on and off.

‘
Ya Allah
,’ Zahra said.

At first Spike assumed the flat had been ransacked. It looked as though the contents of a skip had been emptied out. The door had been blocked by an armchair, one of three crammed next to each other, springs jabbing one to the other. A racing-green picnic table was heaped with string-bound Arabic newspapers, a tangle of anglepoise lamps beneath.

Zahra shoved the door closed. On top of a stack of microwaves sat a gramophone, vinyl records in a crate alongside. She drew one out, nose still wrinkling: the sleeve showed a Moroccan in a handlebar moustache and seventies string vest. She reached into the gramophone cylinder, emerging with a tangle of round spectacles, most missing a lens. ‘Doesn’t he throw anything away?’

Spike glanced to his left. Along the far edge of the flat ran a kitchenette, its floor space covered in empty jars and cans, a knife block on the work surface over-jammed with blades. The aroma of rotting food seemed to issue from there. The lights went out again; Spike heard a clatter as Zahra grabbed his shoulder. ‘What was that?’

The lights blinked on to reveal a tabby cat slinking through the detritus. It turned to Spike and Zahra, stripy tail swishing, before hopping onto the arm of a sofa.

Spike squeezed between the furniture towards the only clear space, a nook beneath the mezzanine where a free-standing plasma TV rose like an altar before a canvas director’s chair.

‘Look,’ Zahra said. He turned and saw her spinning a blue plastic globe. The cat reappeared, perching on a heap of stepladders. It rubbed the side of its head against the metal, clear liquid drizzling from its mouth. Then it sprang down to the floor beneath the mezzanine. ‘Maybe no one lives here,’ Zahra said, ‘and people just use it to dump –’

The bulbs fizzled out. In the silence, Spike heard pulsing purrs. When the light returned he saw the pink rose petal of the cat’s tongue rasping up and down the bare floorboards. It slunk away, licking its lips.

Spike looked up at the mezzanine ceiling. A small, dark circle stained the wood. A bead of moisture stretched to a point, then dripped down into Spike’s face. He clawed a hand to his eye.

‘What?’ Zahra called.

Redness smeared his palm. The lights crackled out again. ‘Stay there.’

‘What?’

Spike felt for the TV, then knocked into it, sending the tabby scurrying for cover.

‘
What?
’ Zahra said again.