The Torch of Tangier (3 page)

Chapter Five

The first time Lily saw Suzannah was on Cape Spartel, outside the Caves of Hercules. Suzannah was a passenger in one of the taxis that had come from town on a sightseeing excursion to the caves.

It was a windy day, just after noon. Zaid had been sifting soil from the trench through a rocker screen on the apron of the cave, looking for small finds—teeth, bone fragments, pieces of debitage and small tools. That day he wore turquoise pantaloons and a red sash, his head wrapped with a bright yellow turban. A sudden gust came up from the Strait and blew a cloud of dust into Zaid’s face.

He let out a howl and covered his eye.

MacAlistair ran out of the cave. “Don’t rub it,” MacAlistair called and rushed to Zaid. Tariq was ahead of him, already looking into Zaid’s eye. Tariq rolled back the lid and licked the eyeball with his tongue.

“Stop that,” MacAlistair shouted.

Tears from Zaid’s reddened eye cut a track through the dust on his face as they streamed down his cheek. He clapped his handkerchief to his eye again.

“You need a doctor,” MacAlistair said, and scanned the line of taxis parked on the path up to the caves. “Maybe one of the tourists can take you to town.”

MacAlistair started down the path, wheezing slightly. Lily followed. Before he was halfway, he stopped, gasping, and leaned against the cliff face.

“Your asthma again,” Zaid said. “Rest awhile.”

Lily took MacAlistair’s arm. “Asthma” was one of the euphemisms they tacitly agreed on. Sometimes it was “bronchitis,” sometimes “your respiratory problem.”

Zaid shook his head and grimaced. “We’re a walking hospital.”

The cloth clasped to his eye, Zaid started down the path alone and approached a taxi about to pull away. He addressed the French passengers, speaking in his best French, with only a slight North African accent. The woman passenger backed away and started to roll up the window.

Zaid told them he had suffered an accident, needed a ride back to town to see a doctor, and asked if he could share their taxi. He offered to pay.

The woman screamed. The man shook his fist and shouted, “Get away from her, you filthy Arab.
Va t’en
! Come any closer and I’ll club you.”

Zaid turned pale and clenched his fingers. Before he could answer, Suzannah stepped out of one of the parked taxis. A young Spaniard in the back seat tried to pull her back by her skirt.

“You will come with us, Zaid.” Suzannah cooed at Zaid as if he were a bird. “We will carry you to a physician.” The Spaniard shook his head in dismay.

Above them on the slope, the wind caught the pile of dust from the rocker screen and swirled it around. A paroxysm of coughing seized MacAlistair. His shoulders heaved.

Suzannah watched as MacAlistair covered his mouth with a handkerchief, drew it away and stared into it, his body convulsing for breath.

“I will carry you both to the physician,” she said.

Zaid started back up the path. He reached for the trembling MacAlistair with his free hand, his other hand shielding his eye with the cloth.

“Step carefully,” he said.

With Lily on one side of MacAlistair and Zaid on the other, they stumbled from boulder to boulder.

“Look at them,” Suzannah said to the young Spaniard. “It is the blind leading the halt.” The young man in the taxi gave a helpless shrug and sat back. “I must fetch my friends,
querido,
” Suzannah said to the Spaniard. “
Espere aqui
. Stay here.”

Suzannah reached for Zaid’s arm. Two by two—Suzannah with Zaid and Lily with MacAlistair—the four of them made their way down the rocky path to the waiting taxi.

“We will pay,” Lily had heard Zaid say before he climbed into the back seat.

“Indeed you will,” Suzannah had answered.

That evening, amid the arabesques and lilies in the courtyard of the villa, Zaid had hunkered in his chair, his eye covered by an enormous bandage, his head resting on his hand. He had muttered and growled, still rankling with the insult from the French in the taxi.

“I should have killed them. Ignorant peasants. Who do they think they are?”

He touched the bandage gingerly and winced. “I am nobler than all the pashas and governors. I descend from kings and princes, the old Moors of Granada who ruled before it was lost to the Nazarenes.”

MacAlistair laid a sympathetic hand on his arm.

“I am nobler than any Nazarene,” Zaid told him. “Nobler than you, MacAlistair, with your British pretensions.”

“Please, Zaid,” MacAlistair had said. “Don’t upset yourself. We all love you here.”

“I’m only a bit of local color to you.”

“That isn’t fair, Zaid.”

“You love me like you love a performing poodle. I’m your pet, with a jeweled collar, and I dance at the end of a golden chain.”

Embarrassed, Lily had looked away and watched the water play in the blue tiled fountain in the middle of the courtyard garden.

But she never forgot Zaid’s rancor.

Chapter Six

Herr Balloon or his companion seemed to hover outside the hotel entrance whenever Lily and Drury left for the Legation in the morning.

“They’re nobody,” Drury said when Lily looked over at them. “If they mattered, they’d be in Paris.”

Lily and Drury would leave the hotel at nine o’clock and work at the Legation until about four. The Germans looked seedier and seedier each day. “They’re monitoring your room on spec,” Drury said to Lily. “Nobody’s paying them. You can see that. I told you. Nothing to worry about.”

Still, Drury looked back over his shoulder whenever the Germans followed.

When they reached the stairway that led to the Legation and crossed under the arch into the quiet maze of white-walled alleys, the Germans would stay behind, watching from the landing.

Lily and Drury shared a clammy, high-windowed office in the Legation, no bigger than an oversized broom closet, furnished with two desks and a bookcase. A bright Moroccan rug covered the worn glazed tiles.

The first chill of autumn seeped into the dank room.

“Can’t the U.S. government afford a newer building?” Lily asked. “This smells like an old shoe.”

“Have a little respect for history,” Drury said. “This is the oldest American government building in the world.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it.”

“Morocco recognized America in 1776, while the ink was still wet on the Declaration of Independence. First country that recognized us.” An expansive wave of his arm wafted over their tiny office and included the hall outside. “This was once a sultan’s palace, a gift to America from the Kingdom of Morocco.”

***

They worked on the pamphlet every day, cobbling it together from books in the Legation library and from yellowed notes on brittle paper in trunks that Drury kept in storage in MacAlistair’s villa.

Lily wrote about the cultural history of the zone; Drury, about physical characteristics and diseases of the indigenous population. Lily wrote about social organization, residence, and kinship; Drury, about language, resolution of conflict, and political organization.

The work went smoothly, except when Drury leaned over Lily’s shoulder to see what she had written. Then the cramped office, the tight writing on the pages, the damp smell of the place bothered her.

One of those afternoons, when she felt restless and out of sorts, she decided to take a break.

She put down the pen and left the office, left the Legation and started to walk through the crowded streets of the medina, into the bustling fondouk market with its tangy aroma of spices, of apples, of half-rotted vegetables. She pushed her way past shoppers haggling with Berbers hawking produce heaped high on carts, past women squatting next to squares of cloth laid out on the sidewalk and piled with mounds of rice, of thyme, of cumin.

She noticed a Berber watching from the edge of the crowd. He’s from the south, she thought, noting his dark skin, the reddish-brown stain of his teeth, his striped burnoose. He’s from Marrakech, the Red City, where the iron-infused soil tinted the mud brick walls with a roseate glow and seeped into the well water to pit and stain the teeth of children.

She passed him and climbed up, up into the calm above the market, through cobbled lanes and alleys that snaked among the whitewashed walls of houses.

Over subdued street sounds—children’s voices, mothers calling—she heard the shuffle of Berber slippers close behind her.

She looked back. It was the Berber from Marrakech she had seen in the fondouk market.

She paused at a café near a street corner, where men and women seated at outdoor tables nursed glasses of tea, browsed through newspapers, played at backgammon.

She took a table and ordered a mint tea. As she sipped it, she gazed down the street, watching women trudging with net bags stuffed with vegetables, watching strollers hiking up the hill.

When she saw the man with the camel’s hair jacket at the corner, she felt a prick of anxiety. He was talking with the Berber. The man leaned against a wall, his head back, his eyes half closed. He was talking to the Berber but looking at Lily. What bothered Lily most was the man’s eyes, the irises ringed in dark blue, the rest so light they were almost white. They were like ice.

The man stopped talking and ducked into an alley.

Lily paid for the tea and got ready to leave. She started down the hill toward the Legation.

Once more she heard the Berber’s footsteps behind her.

Don’t look back, she told herself, and felt a chill running up her spine.

She could feel him coming closer, felt his presence on the back of her neck.

She started to run and heard his footsteps slap against the cobbles, the sound of them faster and faster, closer and closer.

He caught up with her when they were out of sight of the café.

He grabbed her arm.

His face was blank, his eyes cold. “You will come with me.”

There was no one else in sight.

“Why should I go with you? Who are you?”

His grip tightened.

“I don’t know the city.” Lily tried to pull away. “I can’t give you directions.” She felt his thumb pressing on the inside flesh of her arm. “You’re hurting me.”

“What do you do for Drury?”

“Drury?”

The pressure on her arm increased. A jolt of panic crept into her throat.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He leaned into Lily, started to twist her arm.

Instinctively her knee jerked up and she jammed it into his groin.

He loosened his grip, began to double over.

His knitted cap fell to the ground.

A flurry on the edge of her peripheral vision made her glance to the side. Drury stood at the bottom of the street emerging from an alley, transfixed, waving his arms, his mouth opening and shutting, shouting, starting up the hill.

Her breath came in gasps and a surge of alarm pounded in her ears, fluttered in her eyes. She couldn’t hear Drury.

The Berber reached for her again. She kicked at him, shoved him back with both hands.

He staggered, hit his head on the corner of the building, sank to his knees and collapsed onto the cobbles.

“You all right?” she heard Drury ask from behind her.

“He’ll be all right, won’t he?” Her voice caught. “I just pushed him.” She was staring at the Berber lying motionless on the ground. “He was trying to….”

“I saw.” Drury gave her an appraising look. “Remind me to keep my distance when your adrenaline is up. You have more talents than I suspected.”

Drury bent down and felt the man’s pulse.

“He’s dead?”

“No.” Drury looked up at Lily. “He’ll live.”

Drury felt along the Berber’s head. Flakes of whitewash from the building dropped out of his hair. “He has a concussion.”

“Who is he?” Lily asked.

“I’m not sure.”

Drury patted the man’s body, turned him over and felt under the burnoose. He pulled out a knife and then, a gun.

“A Luger.” Drury rose. “Let’s get out of here before he wakes up with a headache.”

They hurried downhill through silent streets.

“You could have been killed,” Drury said as they plunged back into the tangle of the fondouk market, before they lost themselves in the safety of the crowd and made their way back to the Legation.

***

That evening, Zaid was late for dinner. The three of them, Lily, Drury, and MacAlistair, waited for him, seated at the table in the courtyard of the villa.

“It’s taken care of,” Zaid said as he sat down, and Faridah, the cook brought out a steaming tureen.

None of them spoke until almost the end of the meal.

Lily broke the silence. “That Berber this morning,” she said to Drury. “Why was he asking about you?”

Drury put down his fork. “Was he now?”

“He was talking to a man with steely eyes when I first saw him. The man gave me the creeps.”

Zaid pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair. “Your Berber was a dangerous man.”

“What do you know about him?” she asked.

“His name was Saleem.”

“Was?”

Zaid took a packet of Gauloise from his pocket. “He had an accident.”

A surge of anguish flooded through her. “The concussion?”

“No, nothing like that,” Drury said. “It happened much later in the day.”

“How?”

“You had nothing to do with it.” Zaid busied himself with opening the pack of cigarettes. “He slipped as he was getting into the bath. Drowned in the bathtub.”

“You heard it on the news?”

Zaid shook a cigarette from the packet. He didn’t look up. “Things like that are not reported in the news.” He seemed to be smiling.

“The police, then?”

Lily looked across the table at Zaid. He took a box of matches from his pocket. “They don’t know about it yet.”

“Well then, how do you know?” She felt a sudden, inexplicable anger. “You killed him, didn’t you? In cold blood.” Her voice rose, trembling. “What’s wrong with you? He was a simple Berber, for God’s sake.”

“He was a traitor, was willing to sell out Morocco to Europeans,” Zaid said. “He worked for the Germans, worked for the French. For money.”

“Zaid handles…” MacAlistair began, and looked over at Zaid.

He rolled the cigarette between his fingers and began tapping the end of it against the side of the box.

“Zaid,” Drury said, “has contacts, knows people, knows how to get things done.”

Lily waited for him to say more.

“The Berber worked for Gergo Ferencz,” Drury added. “Ferencz runs German intelligence here in Tangier.”

“You should be grateful to Zaid,” MacAlistair told her. “The man threatened you, tried to kidnap you, could have killed you. Zaid handles problems like that, watches over us.”

Zaid lit the cigarette. “I do what I can,” he said and shrugged.

His tongue flicked at a piece of tobacco stuck on his lip and he rubbed it off with his finger.

“And he does it so well.” MacAlistair beamed at him like a proud father.