The Final Bet

by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

  “Is he the one who told you to leak the contents of the will to Naeema?” continued the lawyer.

  Without hesitation, she nodded.

  The judge sat back in his chair staring at Jacques.

  “When did you tell Monsieur Beaumarché the contents of the will?” asked the lawyer quickly, trying to take advantage of her breakdown.

  She continued crying. She didn’t have any tissues with her so she wiped her tears on the sleeve of her jalbab.

  “How did you meet this man?” asked the judge, taking the reins and pointing at Jacques.

  “On the street, randomly,” she replied, as if she wanted to end this ordeal as quickly as possible. “He told me I was beautiful and that it was love at first sight. I soon fell head over heels for him. After a couple of days, our relationship took off and he promised he’d marry me, saying he’d take me to France with him and give me a job in his company. He soon started to ask about my work and about the kind of clients the office works with. He then asked me who our foreign clients were and I mentioned Sofia to him.”

  “Didn’t you know she was his mother?” asked the judge.

  “No, your honor. He was surprised. He told me Sofia was his mother and then told me about her personality and about her marriage to a man more than forty years younger than her. He said this man is Othman and that he has a lover whose name is Naeema.”

  “When did he ask you to look at the will?” asked the judge.

  “A few weeks after we started dating. He was stunned when he found out his mother left everything to her husband. He cried between my arms and said what hurt him wasn’t being excluded from the inheritance but that a cheating husband would enjoy his mother’s fortune. I told him to tell his mother about her husband’s infidelity but he refused.”

  “Why?” asked the lawyer.

  “He said he didn’t want to cause her pain, especially since she’d just found out she had breast cancer.”

  Both the lawyer and the judge looked over at Jacques, who bowed his head in grief. Selwa continued rubbing her fingers. The judge told her to continue.

  “He told me his mother, after her last visit to France, had a complete medical examination. The doctors discovered the beginning stages of breast cancer but she hid the news from everyone. He found out about it by chance when he saw her medical file sitting out and flipped through it.”

  “That’s why he hurried up and carried out his plan,” said the lawyer enthusiastically.

  The judge gave him a cold look and then asked Selwa to go on.

  “He told me to sign up at Yasmina Club,” she said, rubbing her fingers again. “And to get close to Naeema and become friends with her.”

  “Is he the one who told you to reveal the contents of the will to her?”

  She nodded.

  “Did he say why?”

  “I didn’t ask. I was blindly in love with him and did what he told me to without asking questions.”

  She broke out crying.

  “It’s clear now, your honor,” said the lawyer, taking advantage of the opportunity, “that the victim found out she had cancer during her last visit to France and immediately after her return, she set her will. It’s also clear that her son was spying on her and what we heard now from this woman shows what Monsieur Beaumarché had in mind to make sure Othman didn’t inherit his mother’s estate.”

  “I excuse myself from any comment on these absurdities,” said Jacques as calmly as he could with a bitter smile. “Yes, it’s true I had a relationship with this girl and it’s true I loved her and was intending to marry her. I pushed her to look over my mother’s will since I was greatly pained by Othman’s infidelity. I found out about his cheating by accident and it caused me great pain that my mother would leave her fortune to a man stabbing her in the back. As Selwa said, I didn’t want to tell my mother about her husband’s betrayal because I didn’t want to see her miserable and alone. I also didn’t want to be the cause of that pain. I never told Selwa to tell Naeema about the will. I know now there’s a conspiracy against me.”

  Fatigue appeared in the judge’s eyes. He took down some notes in the register in front of him.

  “Your honor,” said the lawyer, “I have proof this man wasn’t in Paris at the time of the murder, as he claims. He was here in Casablanca.”

  Jacques shuddered in his chair and his face turned pale. His fingers trembled and he quickly hid his hands in his pockets. A smile of victory appeared on the lawyer’s lips. As for Selwa, she still seemed confused.

  “I visited Monsieur Michel Bernard,” added the lawyer confidently, “the advisor at French Cultural Center who was a dear friend of the victim and also of Monsieur Beaumarché. As you know, your honor, the police report does not indicate in any way who told Jacques about his mother’s murder and the reason is clear. The judicial police believed my client was the killer. When Othman visited me before turning himself in, I asked about this point and he told me Bernard was the one who informed Jacques in Paris. This morning, I visited Monsieur Bernard and he told me he tried to contact Jacques immediately after he heard the horrible news but no one responded to his call. As Bernard said, it was very late. He therefore sent an email to Jacques and the next morning, Jacques called and said he’ll take the next flight to Morocco. And here you see, your honor, Monsieur Beaumarché only responded after he got the email, not before. When Bernard told me he met Jacques at the airport immediately after his arrival from Paris, I almost gave up on this theory. But I asked Bernard if he actually saw Jacques walk through customs. And here I was surprised by what he said. Jacques didn’t tell Bernard when he was leaving Paris. Instead, he called him after he arrived at Mohammed V Airport, and Bernard found him outside, in front of the main entrance. Since this point was so important to my case, I went to the airport just to make sure. I talked with the chief of security and gave him Monsieur Beaumarché’s name and passport number, which I took from the deskman at the hotel. I asked the chief of security for the list of travelers coming from Europe on the day Jacques claims he arrived in Morocco.”

  Hulumi took a folded up sheet of paper out of his pocket and handed it to the judge.

  “Here’s the list. You can see for yourself Monsieur Beaumarché’s name isn’t there. The reason is that he wasn’t in Paris at the time of the crime. He was here in Casablanca.”

  Jacques got up as if he was about to flee. In no time, though, he collapsed back into the chair and buried his face between his hands.

  Selwa fidgeted in her chair as she stared at Hulumi in surprise. A thick silence hung over the room. Jacques finally lifted his head and stared at the lawyer with a strange look of surprise mixed with hatred. His jaw jutted forward and a look of defeat and resignation appeared in his eyes. His frazzled appearance clashed with the natural politeness that was obvious from how he spoke.

  “Othman’s innocent,” he said clearly without the least hesitation. “And this girl wasn’t involved,” he said, pointing at Selwa. “She didn’t know anything about it. No, I didn’t go back to France when I visited my mother the last time. I acted like I went through customs at the airport but I gave my spot to a pregnant woman and snuck out. My mother, Othman, and Michel thought they saw me off and that I took my plane. I knew for a long time about Othman’s relationship with Naeema. I won’t hide from you how much it pained me and how much it made me hate my mother’s behavior even more. It was humiliating that she acted like a child and married two men much younger than her. But the will was the breaking point. It’s unjust that my mother cuts me out and leaves her entire estate to a man stabbing her in the back. That fortune is mine. It has to be mine. It’s my right.”

  He swallowed with difficulty.

  “That night,” he went on, “I snuck into the restaurant’s kitchen after everyone left since I had a copy of the keys, but I was surprised when Othman came back. If he’d come into the kitchen, he’d have found me hiding there behind the door with the knife in my hand. I imitated a cat’s meow a
nd all of a sudden he turned around and walked out. Of course, I knew he met his girlfriend every night when he took the dog out for a walk. I waited until he went to see her and opened the door of the villa with my key. . . .”

  He wasn’t able to continue.

  “You stabbed your mother with the knife you took from the restaurant’s kitchen,” said the judge.

  He bent his head.

  “It was bad luck for my client that he pulled the knife out of the victim’s stomach,” added the lawyer. “He left his fingerprints on it. How naive!”

  “I’m the one who’s naive,” said Jacques with a faded smile. “I carried out what he’d dreamed of and gave him a life of security with his girlfriend.”

  13

  In order to celebrate with his guests, Othman took the unusual step of turning off the outside neon sign that read “Sofia’s Restaurant.”

  At the dinner table there was Detective Alwaar, Inspector Boukrisha, the lawyer Ahmed Hulumi, and his colleague Tharya Bouchama. Othman refused to join them until he finished counting up the receipts. He was sitting relaxed on his stiff chair behind the glass counter. All of a sudden he felt a light touch on the nape of his neck. For a second, he thought it was Sofia. He turned around impatiently and saw a magnificently beautiful woman whose stomach was round as a balloon. She had on a fantastic dress. Her hair was charmingly straightened as if she had just come from the hairdresser.

  “Naeema,” he said with a smile of joy on his lips.

  He took her by the hand and massaged her stomach tenderly. He looked up at the picture of Sofia hanging on the wall inside a golden frame and let out a sigh. His eyes flashed with gratitude.

  Around the table, the conversation was raging between Hulumi and Alwaar.

  “What’ll be left of the judicial police,” said Alwaar, “if you and your lawyer friends stick your noses in our work?”

  “Imagine,” said the lawyer, “what would’ve happened if Othman didn’t visit me before turning himself in to you, if I didn’t tail Selwa and discover her relationship with Jacques. Don’t forget that’s what changed the course of the case and I discovered it before the police report was written, before Othman was turned over to the DA. It’s a matter of lawyers in this country being there with the judicial police to defend their client. How many innocent people are abandoned behind bars because of shoddy police work? Without any doubt, Othman would’ve been one of them.”

  Alwaar lit a cigarette.

  “I bet a lot of money using all the numbers that showed up in this case,” he said with his well-known sluggishness, “and I lost. If you want, monsieur lawyer of the future, you and I could make a bet. I gave you all the police reports for the articles you published in the press. There’s something in my report that proves Othman’s innocent. If you hadn’t put together the pieces of the case, I’d have come up with the same result. What is it?”

  “Everything in your report,” said the lawyer, “was against Othman.”

  “Are we betting?” asked Alwaar sharply. “Five hundred dirhams and I’ll solve the puzzle for you.”

  “Don’t let the police steal your victory,” said Tharya to Hulumi.

  “I say your report didn’t have anything supporting my client,” said the lawyer, perplexed.

  “If this is your final word,” said Alwaar, “then you lost the bet.”

  Alwaar called Othman over and made room next to him. He put his hand gently on Othman’s shoulder as he sat down.

  “I want to ask you a question,” he said, clearing his voice of any kind of sluggishness. “And you’ve got to give me a straight answer. When you got back after the crime took place, you found a picture next to the bed where your wife was murdered. It was a picture of her with her son, Jacques.”

  Alwaar turned toward the lawyer.

  “And this is in my report, right?” he added.

  The lawyer nodded in agreement.

  “Tell us, Othman, about the way this picture fell on the ground,” said Alwaar.

  A light fear appeared in Othman’s eyes. He found it hard to return to the details of that awful night.

  “Sofia was dying,” he said finally, swallowing with difficulty. “She tried to speak but she couldn’t. She turned to the picture and tried to pull it to her but she knocked it off the table.”

  “Sofia wasn’t trying to pull the picture toward her,” said Alwaar with determination, staring at Hulumi. “She was pointing to her son as the killer.”

  Hulumi let out a ringing laugh.

  “You wouldn’t have noticed that, Alwaar, if Othman was convicted,” said Hulumi. “You’re interested in it only because he was proven innocent. Sorry, you lost the bet!”

  Translator’s Afterword

  The prehistory of the Moroccan Arabic police novel lies in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of grave human rights violations known as the Years of Lead. During this time, the Moroccan police and security forces arrested and tortured thousands of dissidents, many of whom are still missing and presumed dead. Synonymous with cruelty, capriciousness, and corruption, the police of 1970s and 1980s Morocco were widely feared and hated. Even uttering the word ‘police’ in public during the Years of Lead was considered taboo. It should therefore come as no surprise that the police almost never appeared in Moroccan works of fiction during those decades. Writing about or depicting the police at the time would have been a dangerous act with likely dire consequences.

  All of this changed during the 1990s. A dormant economy, coupled with international pressure to improve the country’s record on human rights and freedom of speech, compelled the palace to institute democratic reforms and launch a period of widespread liberalization. These initiatives also created a new atmosphere of relaxed restrictions on social life and public expression, leading more and more Moroccan newspapers to report on taboo subjects, including, most prominently, crime and police activities.

  This growing liberalization produced new forms of fiction in Morocco as well. In the mid- to late 1990s, genres such as illegal immigration and prison literature began to appear. While several prison novels had been published in the 1970s and 1980s and immediately confiscated, the late 1990s witnessed the first readily available and widely read accounts of the brutality Moroccans faced during the Years of Lead. The mass publication of books and newspaper articles openly depicting past human rights abuses soon led to widespread optimism about the possibility of substantial reforms in police procedure and respect for the rights of the individual. These hopes were further fueled by the feverish optimism that accompanied the arrival of the new king, Mohammed VI, in 1999.

  It was during the heady times of mid-1990s Morocco that the first modern Arabic police novel was born. This new form of writing directly engages hard-hitting issues such as crime, human rights, and state authority, providing a powerful medium for social critique. In The Final Bet, originally published in 2001, Abdelilah Hamdouchi continues this literary experiment by engaging the themes of police reform and legal rights through the fictional story of Othman, a young Moroccan accused of murdering his much older wife. Because all the case evidence seemingly points to Othman, the brutal and outmoded cops in the novel make no effort to investigate other leads in the case. As such, the novel is a powerful condemnation of a police force incapable of adapting to the new age of respect for civil and legal rights ushered in by the end of the Years of Lead.

  Moreover, the novel strongly criticizes how an individual arrested in Morocco cannot have a lawyer present during initial police questioning. In a 2001 interview with the Moroccan daily al-Sabah, Hamdouchi claims: “We know that at this delicate stage, when there’s a specific crime, the fate of the accused—who is naked without defense—is decided. Because of possible disregards of the law, aberrations, or just plain ignorance, the police can easily ensnare someone in a crime they’re innocent of.” Left to the shoddy detective work of today’s Moroccan police, the novel suggests, Othman would have been convicted for a crime he did not commit.

>   A key innovation in The Final Bet is the appearance of a lawyer who conducts an investigation on behalf of his client. For Abdelilah Hamdouchi, the image of the lawyer in the novel is not simply a condemnation of the police. It also serves as a model for reform of the Moroccan legal system as it concerns the rights of the individual. In the same interview, Hamdouchi explains: “Maybe by chance the appearance of The Final Bet will create what is at the moment a hypothetical character—that of the lawyer who has the right to be present with the police at the same time things really happen in a case. If lawyers in Morocco can be there from the beginning of the arrest, we might be able to avoid many of the pitfalls the police fall into.” Even though all the case evidence points to Othman, the novel makes it clear that it must be the police—and not the hypothetical lawyer—who uncover the truth. In the al-Sabah interview, Hamdouchi explains the title of the novel as follows: “I mean by ‘The Final Bet’ the bet that Morocco now faces—a bet on democracy, human rights, and establishing a state of law.” Democracy, however, cannot be measured by words or freedom of expression. As Hamdouchi told me in a Rabat café: “The true test of democracy is in the police stations and not in the dome of parliament.”

  As a writer of police novels, Hamdouchi has dared to do what was not possible before: to enter the police station in order to show not only its inner workings in a realistic and critical way, but also to demonstrate the pressing need to reform the legal rights of the individual at the initial stage of a criminal investigation. Without his lawyer, Othman would have become the victim of a brutal, violent, and incompetent police force that shows little interest in adapting to the demands of the new Morocco. Without a full reform of the police, the novel suggests, there must at least be reform in the legal system that prohibits a lawyer from being present during the first forty-eight to seventy-two hours of a suspect’s arrest. For Hamdouchi—and his lawyer in the novel— if the rights of the individual are not respected at the police station, all talk of democracy in Morocco is meaningless.