Stabs at Happiness (18 page)

“What do you know about the Koran?” the guy asked, eyes bright and dark, eager to talk. Anthony managed to extricate himself from this, to the fellow's visible disappointment. He wanted to explain Islam.

Anthony went to a seafood restaurant on a steep cobble-stoned street he'd never noticed before, and had grilled swordfish, along with two salads. Both were of couscous. One had chickpeas, green onions, the other currants, shredded carrot and mint. It was a family restaurant, and he seemed to be the only non-Moroccan present. It was jam-packed.

He walked to the medina. Many stalls and souks seemed ready to stay open all night. He bought cigarettes and some matches: local matches were these twisted splinters of wood that usually broke. Really, you needed a lighter if you were going to smoke over here.

More noise, until the muezzin's amplified call to last or first prayer just at dawn. That horrible rooster again. Anthony fell asleep and awoke perspiring and dry-mouthed, still very tired, at noon. He poured himself a glass of Sidi Ali water and drank it down.

Inspector Mohammed Qasir listened to the theory of the ice-pick through the tear-duct, which Anthony delivered with a certain irony, not taking entire responsibility. Qasir's response was: “Yes, maybe such a thing is possible, and it's possible our pathologist may have missed it… but do you think Patrick Murtaugh would have lain still for such a procedure? He was a fit young man, bigger and stronger than the average Moroccan. Any resistance on his part would have left signs. You see that, don't you? He would have had to have been heavily sedated, but there were no drugs in his system. Nothing, not even a low level of alcohol. His skin had no bruises. So you see: violence seems ruled out. He died in his sleep. It was a congenital defect. This could have happened at any time.”

“What about Lauren?”

“Yes, of course that's a more difficult matter. We don't have a body, or any evidence except the fact that she was here and then she was gone. It's all negative. If I can be frank with you… my own best hypothesis, my idea—is that your Lauren's buried in the countryside somewhere, deeply, under some stones. What might have happened before this, whether she partially cooperated by her fate by willingly going for a ride in a car with a stranger whose intentions she did not divine… unless someone comes forward, we may never know. Here in Morocco we occasionally have our deviants, just like anywhere else. Such crimes, unless they are repeated, and there is some evidence, or witnesses, a pattern, all that… such random crimes are almost impossible to solve. And then, M'sieur Murtaugh coming back to the scene, and dying like he did, at a relatively young age, unexpectedly… I admit it makes for a certain symmetry, it's interesting, superficially it is an intrigue. I understand your disquiet.”

“And the postcard?”

“A cruel prank.” Qasir shook his head.

Anthony thanked him and said goodbye. It was all reasonable, everything the inspector said. It was all probably true. There were no other hypotheses available, really. What? Lauren kidnapped and sold into a harem, Patrick murdered by supernatural or occult means? No.

That night, Anthony checked out the sleazy discos he'd avoided when he'd been here before. They were located up in little alleys, and just didn't seem very appealing to him. Garish, purple or crimson walls, outdated insane strobe lighting, some crooked Moroccan's idea of Disco Inferno. Not one of the girls looked pretty to him.

Good Moslems don't drink alcohol. These did, and smoked kif as well, the smell was overpowering, you couldn't help but get slightly high just breathing the atmosphere, the fumes. And if belly-dancers were a possibility in the Islamic world, why not strippers? How far will you go? Anthony gazed, he watched the show, all of the light infected by the reddish, diabolical glow and sordid sepia-violet shadows, the anti-rainbows in the dark. It wasn't likely, he never thought it was, that Lauren would take part in such a performance, but observing it was educational nonetheless. When some anatomical novelty is revealed, some trick that's new to you but old, you know it's old, you really only need to see it once.

Anthony felt in no hurry to leave Tangier. He rented a car and went out in the dry but not unfertile countryside, olive groves and grapevines, chicken and sheep, plaster and stone villages on sides of rocky hills, ancient Roman outposts in ruins; he went to Asilah and Quezzane, and back, keeping his cheap hotel room in Tangier. He took the crowded bus to Tetouan and wandered in the ancient medina, down twisted, crooked streets. Because he was black he was mostly left alone by the notorious hustlers and touts. They assumed he was a Muslim, an African, and so it seemed unlikely he had as much money as other tourists.

He slept from dawn to early afternoon, then took a late afternoon nap. He came close, not entirely unintentionally, to observing Ramadan austerity, keeping the fast but for noontime café au lait.

One day a lizard got into his room and clung to the wall, high up in the corner. It was a fairly big lizard. Anthony recognized it as a sign. He communed with it. It understood all.

After sleeping particularly hard, he woke up on a gray cloudy day, not sure at first where he was. It was a very plain, ordinary room. He could hear music, while he was still halfway asleep, distant music he could not make sense of, he tried to concentrate, he wanted to hear more. The theme of a symphony? Mahler? The early Rolling Stones? Maybe as broadcast through the fuselage of a jet plane taking off.

Anthony had not shaved for a few days. The water that came out of the shower was room temperature up to lukewarm. He put on a light blue t-shirt, “Coca-Cola” spelled in white Arabic script. His glasses, gold-rimmed, matching his expensive watch. He was big enough, he wasn't especially frightened of anyone trying to rip him off.

He walked up a twisting, deserted street, until he came to a house that had been partly burned down. There was nobody around. The wind blew, gentle and warm.

There was so much that was irrational in this world. People were so superstitious, and rightly so, even if the forms of their superstitions might not necessarily correspond at any point to the actual mysteries which they were meant to pay homage to, or affect. In America, the land of magic materialism, there was a tremendous belief in irrational forces affecting the outcome of events – belief in the vagaries of luck.

Luck, and unseen forces, propensities and inclinations of the moment, like watching a basketball game on TV and influencing, through some incantation or ritual gesture, an outcry, whether your team wins, or someone makes a given shot. You went out of yourself in an instant of joy. Or on Wall Street, whether or not some stock performs, the numbers, the name of the entity, from there to a magic attached to some individual, personal luck, the cult of personality or self-made bandit tycoons, the worship of these people for their relationship with money, “hard-work” part of the mythical equation, necessary, yet nowhere near as important as personal luck.

Anthony had seen, many times, how in America you could criticize a politician, or a movie star, a sports hero, but no one wanted to speak objectively about the extremely successful businessman. It was a part of the unspoken, unacknowledged national ideology, the reverence for these men. They could cheat, and steal, and it didn't matter. They knew how to make money. It was said straight out, so and so had “the magic touch.” It amounted to the manipulation of unseen forces, the invocation of what amounted to cultivated luck.

Akin to having God on your side.

Something invisible to connect with the symbolic numbers of wealth, the immaterial, spiritual realm of money, all these zeros and what they represent – an entirely made-up, invented, yet all-powerful world. Which people accept on faith. It's all so far removed from how one imagined it used to be, in prehistoric days, it seemed a long way also from using cattle as units of wealth, like the Swahili, his cousins on the savannah, prey to their own fucked-up ideas and made-up gods, their own swarming invisible world.

Fictions, man. Anthony walked to the same little garage grocery and bought a wrapped-in-brown-paper beer, and considered going back pretty soon to his artificial, abstract world of TV, computers, and securities fraud. It was an aesthetic decision, really, what variety of made-up shit you found acceptable. What was the nature of his own personal luck? Did he feel lucky? Anthony wasn't sure. How unlucky he was remained to be seen. The world was a mysterious fucking place.

That evening, in a much better mood, having maybe taken a certain train of thought as far as he cared to, and come back, Patrick Murtaugh the last thing on his mind, likewise Lauren, in the medina, buying cigarettes, he ran into Sara. She was wearing some kind of a gauzy, layered, cerise and apricot colored outfit, and Anthony didn't recognize her at first.

Nor she him. She was with two handsome young Moroccan men, with mustaches, smiling, and a Dutch or otherwise Scandinavian couple, husband and wife perhaps, both soft-bodied blondes. When Sara did recognize Anthony, after he spoke to her, she acted as if they were good friends, as if they'd conceivably spoken on the phone earlier that day.

“Anthony. Nice to see you.”

“Sara.” Anthony collected himself. “I'd like to talk to you. How long are you here?”

“How long? I live here, Anthony.”

Anthony wanted to grab her by the throat. He didn't like the way she said, “I live here.” She was playing with him. Naturally, all his wildest suspicions returned at once, inchoate but intact.

“Do you want to visit me tomorrow afternoon?” she said, after laughing at some murmured comment by one of the Moroccans.

“Yes. I would like that.”

“Good. Be at the Café de Paris at four o'clock. I will send someone for you. Okay? Does that sound fair?”

He nodded, and she smiled, off with her friends to unknown revels. Anthony considered following them, but the risk of being discovered in such an act seemed large. In any case, the opportunity for such espionage was soon lost.

At 4:00 the next day, having shaved, in a white shirt and muslin pants, Anthony followed a young man named Rachid, on a sunny day, warmer than usual, up past the Hotel Intercontinental, further, to what turned out to be an old apartment building, with an antique elevator, a smell of cinnamon and musk and myrrh. Up to the third floor of five.

Once Rachid had delivered Anthony to Sara, and she answered the door, Rachid excused himself and left.

“Will you have tea with me?” she asked, and Anthony said sure. There were large cushions to sit on, around a low table of ornately carved dark wood.

“Please have some of these sweets,” she said. “They're very good. A friend of mine knows a baker, and he passed these on to me, but there's more than I will ever happen to eat.”

Anthony ate a cookie, with his tea. Black tea. The cookie was indeed quite good. He hadn't tasted one like it before. He was glad it wasn't oversweet, like baklava.

“I've been meaning to ask you,” he said, “did I meet you one time in New York?”

“I don't know,” Sara said. “Do you think you did? It's possible. I've been there.”

She was wearing blue today, her wavy dark hair down, the first time he'd seen her this way. It crossed his mind that she might want to seduce him. She looked more attractive to him the more he saw her, though he still found her accent affected.

“How long have you lived here?”

“Here?” she said, meaning the apartment, “Three years.”

Anthony saw how it was going to be.

“What do you know about Lauren?” he asked, watching her eyes.

Sara took a considerable quaff of tea.

“You mean that nice Jewish girl who disappeared last year?”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “that's who we're talking about. What do you mean, ‘disappeared'? The police assume she's dead.”

“If you think that,” Sara rejoined, “why are you here? Tell me,” she said, with amusement, leaning forward, “do you think she was spirited away to some harem somewhere, and she's become a sex slave? Do you think that's the sort of world we live in, a world in which such things can take place?”

“I don't know.”

“It might have happened,” she said, changing tone. “She didn't seem to me to be so beautiful there'd be an urgent demand, but she wasn't bad. What did your friend think?”

“You mean Patrick. What do you imagine he thought?” Anthony asked, falling into playing her game.

“I'm sure he believed in something like I've just described. Maybe that she was drugged, and taken to a secure place, and then shipped from there to—who knows? Saudi Arabia perhaps. In the realm of this sort of fantasy, anything's possible.”

“And his death?”

“Oh, that must have been magic, some kind of poison, or perhaps simply a spell. That completes the picture, don't you think?”

Anthony didn't answer for a while, and then he looked into Sara's eyes and said, “Sure. I suppose it does.”

She asked if he had ever read
The Sheltering Sky
. He said he had. They had a literary conversation then, of sorts. Sara talked and Anthony listened, although he wasn't interested in the subject that much. Or at least not with her. She said she lived near the writer Paul Bowles. She saw him every day when his driver took him out to get his mail.

He was sure she was an American. She was the girl he had seen, at a party; and for some reason later on someone had gossiped about her to him. Anthony hadn't paid any special attention at the time. People gossiped about everyone in certain strata of Manhattan.

“When are you leaving, going back home?” she finally asked. Sara was bored with him now.

“In a day or two.” He hadn't known this until he said it, but now it seemed true.

“Well, I hope I get to see you again,” she said, and Anthony didn't believe her.