Every house, every corner of the network of small streets, was part of a landscape from his past, familiar yet at the same time terrifying. He remembered, in spurts, moments from his childhood. They say that when the fox is on the run, he enjoys the thrill and danger of the chase as much as the pack of hounds and the hunters—as if it were a game. He walked quickly, sometimes breaking into a run. The game was to hide among the people or in the cranny of some wall so that he could look behind him. I’m going crazy, he thought.
Shaken by his discovery, and uneasy at having stood up to Singer—the supposed agent—he turned down a street of jewelry shops, toward the Zoco Chico. Then he climbed up the Calle de los Nazarenos. Our street, he thought (though this seemed absurd to him under the circumstances), lengthening his stride, the backpack holding the laptop on his shoulders. He turned again up a little curved street with no visible name—Cordoneros?—and then back down a wider street until he reached the Plaza Dar Baroud, the old arsenal, and finally Calle de las Babuchas. He stopped in front of a bazaar from whose doors hung clusters of slippers of various colors and sizes. He looked around. A few paces away stood a meek-looking old man—white bearded, tall, slender. Seeing the Mexican standing there, the man said in Spanish, “Looking for something, sidi? Come in. I have things I think you’ll like.”
Behind the old man hung a row of djellabas of apparently good quality.
The street was empty. He walked into the shop, trusting that no one would see him go in.
He chose a cream-colored djellaba. On seeing himself in the rusty mirror that the old man held in front of him, he thought he didn’t look bad. Then he chided himself for indulging in such vanity at a time like this.
“Enta tanjaoui!” said the old man, smiling in seeming complicity.
“Iyeh?”
They had barely negotiated the price, but he was ready to leave the shop, satisfied with his purchase, his disguise.
“Shukran b’sef.”
“Al-lah-yau nik.”
He turned two or three corners, headed up again toward the casbah, and walked into a small restaurant next to Bab el-Assa. He sat inside, asked for a mint tea, and then went to the bathroom, down in a narrow basement that smelled of urine and humidity. A couple of large flies orbited around the hole in the floor. He took off the djellaba and opened up the backpack. He extracted the laptop and stuck it between his abdomen and his belt. Out of the top pocket of the backpack, he took out his passport (which he’d carried with him since that morning when he’d had to go to the bank to get cash). “Hamdul-lah,” he said in a soft voice. Having the passport with him gave him a feeling of security that he needed now. He tucked the passport in the inside breast pocket of his jacket and buttoned it tight.
He decided to get rid of the backpack. He emptied it completely—glasses and case, a pack of chewing gum, a Swiss Army knife, a notebook, a pen—and put all the contents into the pockets of his jacket. He put on his djellaba again. He rolled the backpack into a ball and stuffed it, with difficulty, into the bottom of the little trash can of the restroom, which he then covered up with a layer of toilet paper. The precautions, probably unnecessary, calmed him; when he got back to his table, he felt fairly sure that nobody was following him.
He drank some of his tea, paid his bill, and then, shifting the computer under his belt to keep it in place, joined the many Tangerines and tourists passing through the casbah. He was less troubled now but still alert to any sign of a pursuer.
He went down the Calle de Italia until he reached the Zoco de Fuera, where he found a taxi.
In Tangier there are two kinds of taxis. The petits taxis are coupes, painted blue with a horizontal band of egg yellow; the grands taxis are white- or cream-colored Mercedes-Benzes. Most people considered it a sign of arrogance to sit in the back seat as Europeans usually do. The Mexican took a petit taxi and sat in front.
Instead of asking the driver to take him to Hotel Atlas, where he was staying, he said, “Grand Hotel Villa de France, please.”
“Where?”
“You don’t know it?”
“Where is it?”
“The corner of Inglaterra and Holanda.”
“Certainly.”
He decided he didn’t want to take any risks. He would pay for the five-star hotel for one night.
They drove uphill along Bou Araquía, the street that borders the Muslim cemetery. It was an unnecessary detour, but he said nothing. The ancient, long wall of the cemetery, where beggars used to sit, had been demolished, and now the merchants of pity had to practice their trade elsewhere; the lamentations of their liara and their qsbahs were a thing of the past.
“Excuse me,” he said to the driver, and began to remove the djellaba. The driver looked at him out of the corner of his eye.
“Makein mushkil. No problem, sidi.”
His phone began to ring. By the time he got the djellaba off, he’d lost the call. Singer’s number appeared on the screen. He left it alone.
With the djellaba rolled up under his arm and the computer still under his shirt, he crossed the parking lot of the Grand Hotel Villa de France and went down the stairs toward the patio with the fountain and the arches.
He hadn’t been to the hotel in a long time. It had closed around 1993 after losing one star. An Iraqi company had then bought it and remodeled it. At the new reception desk, he felt strange. The bulldozer of time had demolished the old lobby. In place of the threadbare Berber rugs, the floor was covered with modern carpeting, and the Andalusian stucco and ceramic mosaics had been replaced by imitation marble and mirrors. On one of the walls was a poster reproducing Matisse’s Paysage vu d’une fenêtre. The new proprietors boasted of having preserved—in one of the third-floor rooms—the window from which Matisse saw this view of Tangier. The Mexican contemplated the reproduction with its flat perspective and bold colors: the walls of Saint Andrew’s church, the gardens and the plaza of the Mendubía. The receptionist, a tall, young Moroccan woman affecting French manners, told him that the Matisse room was available for no additional cost. Now that the book fair was over, the hotel was empty.
“I’ll take it.”
“Trés bien, monsieur. Your passport, please.”
He showed her his passport and handed her his credit card.
“Voilà,” she said, giving him an electronic key and the password for the internet. “Matisse1912,” he read on the little strip of paper.
“Bonne nuit, monsieur. Pas de valise?”
“Non. Merci.”
He was looking out at the Tangier night through the celebrated window, mentally comparing the master’s painting with the scene that lay before his eyes, when the ring of his phone brought him sharply back to the present. It was eight thirty.
“Hello,” the Mexican said dully.
It was Singer.
“Ah, I’m glad to catch you. I called you just a moment ago. Am I bothering you?”
“No.”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“Are you at your hotel?”
“Yes,” he half lied.
“The Atlas, yes?”
He preferred not to answer.
“Good. Look. After you left, I thought more about that computer. Don’t worry, I found another Mac.”
“Perfect.”
“OK, eleven o’clock tomorrow morning, then. Don’t you want me to come by and pick you up at the hotel?”
“No, thanks.”
“Very well. Look . . .”
He looked down at the little phone with the desire to hang up.
“I need you to understand now,” Singer went on. “I’ve done a little research . . . This kid, Abdelkrim . . .”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, he might be involved in something”—his voice lowered several tones—“very delicate. I’d rather not talk about it over the phone. Tomorrow I’ll give you the details. OK?”
“OK. It’s getting kind of late for me. Excuse me.”
“Yeah. Have a great dinner. You’re sure you don’t want me to swing by and get you in the morning?”
“No, thanks very much.”
“Good night.”
“Yes. Good night to you too.”
After hanging up, he dialed Carrie’s number. Boujeloud answered. The Mexican asked him to come by in the morning and pick up the laptop.
“I’m not at the Atlas now,” he explained. “I’m staying at the Villa de France. Can you come a little before eleven?”
“Ouakha, Ouakha.”
He opened the laptop and connected to the internet. He looked through his email; there was nothing urgent to answer. An article of his about Central American drug traffickers was going to be published in El País; his Spanish editor congratulated him. A column that he had published in Vanity Fair a month before had received, as of this moment, only five “likes.” Disgruntled, he read it over again:
An Asian Fable
I’m traveling through Europe with my twelve-year-old goddaughter and one of her friends from high school, so I must update my learning. But during an after-dinner conversation of the kind one often has on such trips, I find myself at a loss to explain the difference between human intelligence and what may seem like intelligence in machines. I present two or three arguments that, I’m afraid, don’t manage to convince the girls, who have just read, in Paris, a text called Identifying Humanoids: A User’s Guide, a pamphlet for a questionable product called Somatic Design, accompanied by this note: “This leaflet contains basic information on the interaction of humans with imitation humanoids in 3D.” A joke, obviously, but it’s alarming, most of all because the girls seem to have taken it seriously.
A few days later, a likely illustration of a peculiar aspect of human intelligence comes to me in a dream.
It was one of those dreams in which the dreamer is a neutral entity, bodiless, a mere spectator. We find ourselves on the Mediterranean coast of Syria, in a landscape of white sand, blue sea, and men dressed in black. A group of illegal immigrants is about to board a barge, to escape a mob of militia—are they ISIS? In the group there are five children without parents; they’ll be the last to come aboard. A dilemma arises: there is space for only three of them. A decision needs to be made: Who will be left behind on the beach?
If the problem were presented to a machine or to an adult mind, the solution would be simple: luck or caprice would dictate the outcome. But it so happens that the children—who had become the best of friends on the journey that brought them from a city slum (it might have been in Aleppo or Tadmur) all the way to the coast—are the ones who must solve the problem. At the end of a brief discussion, the children turn to the captain of the barge to give the only humane response possible: they’re not willing to play that game. They will stay together on the beach. The adults are exasperated. The children stick to their decision. The captain gives the order to set sail. As the boat moves out to sea and the waves grow larger and larger, the children see a cloud of dust rising on the horizon inland. It might be the genocidal militias approaching. The five children at that moment become the secret and privileged guardians of something exclusively ours—the human essence—and which, like a sense of the absolute, can sometimes be communicated through words.
In the darkness of the little Parisian hotel, newly awakened from a dream turning to nightmare, I think: the destiny of the adults who set out over the rough sea, though at first sight better than what lies in store for the children—who are now burying themselves in the sand—is as uncertain as any other human destiny. But the children’s destiny is more certain. The decision they have just made on that Syrian beach (or is it only in the dream?) has made them heroic and thus immortal.
He went down for a light dinner in the hotel restaurant. The waiter who served him was an old man who seemed to him strangely familiar. He knew him, in fact. Many years ago, someone had pointed him out, claiming he was an informer. He didn’t care for the way the man was staring at him now.
That night he had another strange dream. A guide was leading him through a kind of planetary museum. At a certain moment, the guide left him alone, but he could still hear his voice—smooth, explanatory. He opened his eyes without quite waking up, and he could see a bird hovering in front of the window. The voice came from this bird, he thought, still in the dream; its eyes were two points of red light. Or is it a drone? he asked himself, startled. He awoke.
Shroud
I
It was after seven thirty in the morning. From the Matisse window, he could see the deep and luminous blue sky and hear the clear cries of a bird—was it a crow? Now, in the morning light, his fears and suspicions seemed exaggerated, even absurd. David Singer was not a secret agent; he was merely doing his duty as a citizen and a functionary of the American empire. It was normal that he would see something alarming in Abdelkrim’s words, that they’d make him think he was connected with an enemy, even one as fearsome as ISIS. Singer would not, on account of that, have had him followed in order to seize Carrie’s computer and Abdelkrim’s memory card.
There was something left to read on the card, and Singer was eager to help him with that task. If they found evidence of a possible connection with a terrorist or subversive organization, well, he’d let Singer take matters into his own hands. He would limit himself to letting Mohammed know (he would find a way) and would go ahead with his trip, perhaps that same day.
He called room service to have a continental breakfast brought to his room. After finishing it, he stayed awhile, absorbed, watching the Moroccan sky, the Bay of Tangier, the gardens of Saint Andrew and the Mendubía. He decided to walk over to Hotel Atlas to shower and change before meeting Boujeloud and going down to the medina. As a precaution—surely unnecessary, he thought—he hid Carrie’s laptop in his pillowcase and hung the little “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door as he left the room.
On Calle de Fez he stopped to buy newspapers—El País, Libération, and Al-Alam, a new Moroccan daily—and took a stroll down Calle de Abd-el-Nassr. As usual, a beggar, who everyone said had lost an arm and a leg twenty years ago in the war against the Polisario Front, sat there. As a compensation for his loss, the Moroccan government allowed him to sell kif and hashish on the public thoroughfare. Even though smoking made the Mexican a little paranoid, he wanted to perform the North African ritual once again.
“Salaam aleikum.”
“Aleikum salaam.”
“Culshi m’sien?”
“Hamdul-lah.”
Out of courtesy, the Mexican was in the habit of exchanging a few words with the man before he asked for the goods.
“Somebody’s following you,” said Sultán—that’s what everyone called the man. “Don’t look back. A boy is watching you—white pants, yellow shirt. Better not buy anything now, my friend.”
“Are you sure?”
He let a few coins fall to the ground as if by accident; he crouched down to pick them up, so as to cast a look in the direction Sultán had indicated. A boy fitting the beggar’s description stood there, on the corner of Calle de Fez, one street down, showing a studious lack of interest. It looked as if he were using a knife to write something on the pitted wall.
“Thank you.”
He handed some coins to Sultán, who thanked him without enthusiasm.
“For a coffee,” he said.
“Thanks, friend.”
He turned the corner and went up Moussa Ben Noussair toward the hotel. Before going in, he looked in all directions. He didn’t see the boy; anyway, they already knew where he was staying, he thought. He went up to his room, shrouded in fear.
Who was after him? It’s absurd, he said to himself again. He shouldn’t let them intimidate or manipulate him. He wouldn’t go back to the legation—any excuse would suffice. He would go and make a copy of the memory card, just in case. Then he would visit Mohammed.
He went into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet, ready to look through the newspapers.
II
He let the shower stream over his head and back, trying to clear his mind. Possibly the boy was following him. Would he be lying in wait for him at the hotel entrance? Should he call Singer to ask him about this? After all, wasn’t it possible that someone else was watching him—not on the American’s orders but on those of some other person or group equally interested in Abdelkrim’s memory card?
He got out of the shower, dried himself off, and quickly got dressed. He turned on his laptop (it was almost ten already) and connected to the internet. He bought a plane ticket for that afternoon to Paris and requested his boarding pass. He had to be at the airport by three o’clock. He decided to leave his room at the Atlas just as it was; he would take with him only a change of clothes and the laptop, which fit in his Moroccan basket. He peeked out the bathroom window, which looked onto a narrow and shady back courtyard, where the hotel maids hung the sheets and towels to dry. He saw a metal door that opened onto the street; he’d be able to slip out that way. But he was on the fifth floor.
Chaos, A Fable Page 7