Tangier

by William Bayer

  When he walked into his brother's store, Farid's assistant was showing a necklace. His customer, a French lady accompanied by a boxer dog, was debating the merits of the piece and the astronomical asking price. Hamid interrupted, asked the assistant for Farid. The bartering continued. The assistant pointed to the stairs. Hamid mounted them quietly—only later he asked himself why. He hadn't intended to surprise his brother, but he didn't want to disturb the negotiations in the shop. He had just stepped into the dim upstairs room, the room where Farid stored and showed his rugs, was looking around, wondering where his brother was, when he heard a groan quickly followed by a gasp. He moved slowly, quietly, toward a mound of rugs piled near the wall. He heard the sound again and, following his policeman's instincts, moved closer so he could look behind.

  He guessed they'd heard his footsteps—the next moment their startled eyes looked into his: Farid and Hervé Beaumont, the olive-skinned body of his brother, the pale one of the European boy, entwined, naked on the floor.

  The bargaining downstairs had become shrill—he could hear the high-pitched cries of the Frenchwoman demanding a concession in the price. Hervé began to giggle, then to rock his body back and forth, but Farid remained still, his face impassive, a look Hamid remembered from their boyhood, as if he expected to be hit.

  A long moment passed between them as they searched each other's eyes. Later Hamid had the impression that they'd tried to peer into each other's brains. But then the mood was broken by a bark—the Frenchwoman's boxer downstairs.

  "I just came by to return the book," he said. He laid it on top of the rugs, turned, and walked away.

  Downstairs Farid's assistant was standing in the doorway talking to another assistant shopkeeper from across the street. "What a bitch," he was saying as Hamid brushed by. "When I met her price she laughed at me, yanked at her dog, and left."

  "Yes," said the other, "they're all like that this year. Pigs' vaginas, tourist trash—"

  A few days after he surprised his brother, Hamid decided to abandon his cleanup of the beach. He also decided that the time had come to confront Zvegintzov without letting him wriggle away.

  He pulled up in front of La Colombe at ten o'clock, long after the shop had closed. This time there'd be no interruptions, customers intruding, or telephone ringing in the back. Pausing in his car, he studied the iron grill pulled down over the store's facade. He remembered sitting out here one afternoon in May wanting to warn Peter about following Kalinka, then hesitating and finally driving off. This time it was different. He knew the questions he must ask. He also knew that Peter was afraid of him, though he had no desire to exploit that fear.

  When, finally, he walked across the street, he heard drumming and music clashing within Dradeb. There were many weddings in the slum that summer night. If he and Kalinka decided to be married, would they celebrate the traditional way?

  He looked in through the grill. The lights were off, and there was no sign of movement in the shop. No bell either, so he shook the grill, then noticed a ribbon of light beneath an inner door. He's in the back room, he thought, that back room where Kalinka spent so many years. He walked around the side of the building to a window where a shade was drawn.

  He rapped on the glass. Nothing. He rapped harder. Still no sign. He was about to call out Peter's name when suddenly the shade snapped up.

  "Peter—"

  "Who's there?" His face was only inches away, but the reflections on the glass must have confused his sight. "It's me, Hamid."

  "What do you want?"

  "Open up."

  "It's late."

  "I want to talk to you. Open up."

  Peter glared out, blinking his eyes. Then he yanked down the shade.

  Hamid walked to the front of the shop. A minute later a fluorescent light sputtered on. Peter opened the inside door and spoke to him through the grill.

  "I'm closed, Hamid. Come around in the morning."

  "No, Peter. Now. We must talk together now."

  Peter hesitated, then he knelt to unclasp the padlocks which attached the grill. He fumbled but finally managed to undo them. He raised the grill just high enough so Hamid could enter if he stooped.

  "You frightened me half to death, Hamid. You should know better than to frighten a man at night."

  "I'm sorry, Peter, but the night is best. We're always interrupted during business hours."

  "Well—you're inside now. You might as well sit down."

  He pulled out a stool, set it in the center of the room, then sat down himself on the yellow hassock where Kalinka used to perch.

  "So, Hamid—you've come to expel me. I've been expecting this. I've even packed a bag."

  "I'm not here for that."

  "Oh? Really? Then how much longer is the suspense to last?"

  "Look, Peter, you must get this through your head. I've no intention of expelling you."

  Peter was silent.

  "You don't believe me."

  "Why should I believe you? You've been after me for months."

  "You have it wrong. I've only come to talk."

  "You want the facts, don't you—the incriminating facts?"

  "Incriminating to whom?"

  "To me, of course. I'm not stupid, Hamid, though you may think I've been at times. Your dossiers—I know all about them. And that all these months you've been building up your case."

  Hamid squinted at him. The light in the shop was dim. Peter seemed so loathsome, such a loathsome little man.

  "Really, Peter, you have things wrong," he said. "Kalinka and I have been trying to reconstruct the past, and since you're a part of it, you're involved as well."

  "Am I supposed to believe that's why you're here?"

  "Why not? I could have kicked you out anytime."

  "Yes. That's true."

  "Why are you so frightened then?"

  "Because you have power, Hamid. I know all about that, you see. I've been kicked out of a country before." He paused. "Now there's no place for me to go. There's barely a country left that will take me in. You've already got Kalinka, Hamid. If you expel me I'll lose everything. I'll even lose my shop."

  A silence. Hamid wondered how he could break through so many layers of fear.

  "Peter, I give you my word. I have no wish to see you lose your shop. Tell me what I need to know and I'll never trouble you again."

  "And if I incriminate myself?"

  "You won't. Not with me. Everything you say will be in confidence. I'm sincere, Peter. You must take me at my word."

  Peter stared at him a long while—Hamid imagined him weighing out his trust with the same caution he used when he weighed a letter on his postal scale.

  "All right," he said finally, "ask your questions. I don't promise that I'll answer them, but we'll see—"

  "I know most of it already, I think—your membership in the party, your friendship with Zhukovsky, Kalinka's mother, Zhukovsky's death, your expulsion from Hanoi."

  "And Poland?"

  "Yes. That too. Kalinka's years in school. You were working in a factory there, she said."

  "A shoe factory near Warsaw. It wasn't much of a job."

  "But then you left and came down here. That's my question, Peter. Why Tangier?"

  "Ah—" Peter shook his head. "That was a difficult time for me. I was really up against it—up against the wall."

  "Tell me about it."

  Peter shook his head again, paused as if to clear his memory. Then he coughed and exhaled.

  "It was 1954, just after the settlement, the Geneva Conference that ended the Indochina war. I was summoned to the Vietnamese legation in Warsaw. A man there, an old partisan, told me that Major Pham Thi Nha had been killed at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. She'd volunteered to join the siege and, on the twentieth day or so, had somehow gotten killed. I never found out how—a bomb from an airplane, a shell from the French fort. It didn't matter anyway. All that mattered was that she was dead. I was still reeling from that when this man told me
his government wanted Kalinka back. At first I tried to argue with him. Kalinka belonged with me. I'd promised her mother. I'd put her in school. I was prepared to bring her up. But there was no arguing. A directive had been issued. Kalinka was an orphan, the daughter of a heroine of the resistance. She qualified for special treatment now. Her place was in Vietnam. Well, in that case, I said, I would go back there with her too. The man smiled at me and shook his head. 'We've won the war,' he said. 'We don't need foreign agents anymore.'

  "I knew then they'd never let me back. Marguerite was dead, and they wanted Kalinka too. I was desperate. You can imagine how desperate I was. The thought of losing her—I couldn't accept it. And I knew I had to do something fast if I was to keep her from being taken away.

  "I stayed up all that night, thinking, thinking, and the only thought that came to mind was the Bureau, the KGB. They'd sent me to Poland in the first place, found the school, helped me get my job, and they'd told me that if I ever needed help I could always count on them. I was an old agent, you see. They take care of us in a way. I didn't want to go to them. I wasn't even a Communist anymore. I didn't give a damn about any of it, but I was desperate and the Bureau seemed the only place to turn.

  "Their offices were in an annex to the Russian Embassy, an old palace cut up into a thousand tiny stalls. There were three of them who interviewed me. I told them my story and begged them to help. There was no problem, they said. All I had to do was reinstate myself. Then all my troubles would be solved, and Kalinka would be safe.

  "It wasn't long before I realized what that meant. They offered me a deal. I had certain skills, remember, knew lots of languages and had had experience in intelligence work. All I had to do was agree to work for them again and they'd see to it that Kalinka stayed at school.

  "Of course, I'd presented them with the sort of situation they like the best—someone very close to hold over your head, so you do everything they ask. Now understand me, Hamid—I didn't want to be a spy again. But I was desperate, and that was the only way I knew to keep Kalinka out of Vietnam. So I agreed, and a few months later I was sent down here."

  "Why? There's nothing here."

  "That's true now, though in those days it wasn't clear. I came down in 1955. North Africa was on the verge of change. The Algerian rebellion was starting up. Moroccan independence was nearly won. Tangier was an international city. It had been filled with spies since the Second World War. No one knew what was going to happen. It seemed a good place for a deep-cover agent to set himself up and burrow in. So I came down. I had a Polish passport—nothing special about that. I worked as a clerk in a bank, establishing my residency. Then I got a job as comptroller for a small import-export house. Well, suddenly the situation changed. The French and Spanish pulled out, Mohammed V became the Sultan, and Tangier became part of Morocco once again. With the end of Tangier as an international city there was hardly anything for me to do."

  "Then why didn't they pull you out? Send you someplace else?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know. Perhaps they thought I was perfect for this place."

  Hamid, watching him, knew precisely what he meant. There was something second-rate about Peter, something obviously mediocre that helped him blend with the other working foreigners, the Spanish shoemakers and Italian barbers, the Dutch clerks and French auto shop repairmen in the town. Who would ever suspect that he was anything but what he seemed, a second-rate European with a vague and mediocre past?

  "I had nothing to do all that time. Really nothing that could incriminate me now. I want you to understand that, Hamid. I never did anything against your country. I was just here to keep an eye on things."

  "What things?"

  "Oh, the ships, you know, coming and going through the Straits. I had some boys who watched them for me, and I wrote down what they saw. I never knew what passed through at night, of course, or when it was foggy and they couldn't see."

  "But that's ludicrous—to cover the Straits like that."

  "Yes, yes—I know. But I subscribed to the shipping newspapers and got lots of information out of them. I mailed my reports to a postal box in Rome. Just lists of ships and the approximate times they passed. Anyone could have done it. Sometimes I just made it up."

  "They never checked?"

  He shook his head. "I guess it didn't matter so long as it sounded right. Anyway, I was busy. I was setting up this shop. You see—I'd saved a little, looked around, and decided a shop was needed here. I'd always wanted another shop, like the one my parents had. I'd inherited their place, spent wonderful years there with Marguerite. So I set up La Colombe, modeled exactly on the Hanoi store. And I was successful almost from the start."

  Peter took great delight explaining how he'd expanded his business through the years, from merely selling merchandise to offering his customers grand service. Soon he became a clearinghouse for servants, a man who could be depended upon to find a good night watchman or fix a telephone. And all that time he'd worried about Kalinka—her letters were so infrequent, lonely, and strangely sad. He wanted her back, but knew he must be patient. He kept up his reporting on the ships until, one day, a man appeared.

  He was an important man—Peter was sure of that. A man named Prozov, a man accustomed to command. He spoke in Russian and knew all about Peter's past: Indochina, his expulsion by the French, his hopes of being reunited with Kalinka too. He was prepared to arrange that, he said, if Peter would provide a little service first. A little job. A little mission. Nothing especially dangerous, though there was always a certain risk. And if Peter refused—well, Kalinka might have to stay in Poland for many years.

  He took Peter's car, drove off, disappeared with it for several days. When he returned he told Peter to drive it to Algiers. Peter was scared then, really scared. There was something, he knew, hidden in his car. He didn't know what it was, and he didn't want to know. The French had a dossier on him—in Indochina they'd marked him as a Soviet spy. Now there were rumors they were using torture in Algeria. Remembering his experiences with the Japanese, he trembled at the thought of being interrogated once again.

  But still he did it. It was his only chance to get Kalinka back. And his mind was sharp—he was canny when he had to be. It occurred to him, driving across northern Morocco toward the Algerian frontier, his hands shaking as he gripped the wheel, frightened to death with no idea of what might be welded to the bottom of his car, that if he did get across, did fulfill the mission, he had no guarantee the KGB would keep their word. They could doublecross him, refuse to keep the bargain—so long as they had Kalinka they could use him again and again. So driving along, checking to see he wasn't followed, glancing every few seconds at the rear-view mirror, he realized that the only way he'd ever get her back would be to end his usefulness to the Bureau by making them think the French knew who he was. If he could do that they'd have no further use for him, and therefore no reason to hold Kalinka anymore.

  It was a fascinating notion, and he toyed with it the entire way, wondering how he could manage it, if in fact it was worth the risk. He was proud of the way he behaved at the frontier, like any ordinary European heading toward Algiers to have some fun. He stopped in Oran, bought the newspapers, and then got an idea of what might be in his car. The French were conducting a series of nuclear tests in the Sahara. Perhaps he was carrying equipment to monitor the blasts.

  He thought about betrayal, could think of nothing else, as he entered Algiers through a driving, torrential rain. Then he got lost in a maze of traffic circles and one-way streets; finally found his meeting place by the Jardin Exotique. He waited there, shivering in his car, until his contact came. It was an Algerian this time, someone he'd never seen, who directed him up a hill to a region of villas with walled-in grounds. The Algerian pointed to a house, got out, swung open a set of gates. Peter drove straight through into a garage, took out his suitcase, and was driven back downtown in another car.

  They'd booked him into a businessmen's hotel. He spent a ni
ght of torment there on a sagging mattress, slapping mosquitoes off his chest. All he had to do, he thought, was call the French police. If he turned informant, offered himself as a double agent, they'd make it look as though they'd been watching him for years. The Russians would see he had no further use, and then would let Kalinka go. It was a gamble, of course, the gamble of a lifetime, but one he was willing to take. He was about to call the French, had actually picked up the phone, when suddenly he remembered something which gave him second thoughts. Why had they let him see the garage where presumably they'd take apart his car? They didn't work like that, kept things compartmentalized—unless, of course, it was all a trap. Yes—then he was sure of it and knew he couldn't take the chance. If he called the French, told them about his car, and they went to the villa and found no trace, the Russians would know he was a double agent and he'd be dead within the hour. So he did nothing, sat in his hotel room, stared out mournfully at the rain. And on the morning of the third day Prozov finally called.

  "We're pleased with what you did," he said. "Your work is finished now. You'll find your car parked in front of the hotel, and you can expect delivery of the Polish goods."

  That was it—a miracle. They actually kept their word. He never heard from them again. Kalinka arrived two months later with a Polish passport bearing his own last name. He fixed up the back room of the shop so it would remind her of Hanoi.

  "So you see, Hamid, you really have no good reason to throw me out. I never spied against Morocco—I never had the chance. Everything was for Kalinka, to get her here and keep her safe. I pretended we were married, and no one suspected we were not. She was only sixteen then, but her face was timeless like Marguerite's. Even the Vietnamese wouldn't take her away when they found out we were man and wife."

  Had Peter really thought the Vietnamese would care enough to send someone to Tangier to snatch her back? It was ridiculous, absurd, yet Peter had rigorously carried this fiction out, even, years later, coming to Hamid's fiat to demand an explanation, because, as he'd put it at the time, "I'm the husband. I have certain rights."