Chaos, A Fable

by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

  He picked up the basket and left the room. He went down the service stairs without running into anyone and reached the second floor. At the end of a hallway, he saw a service cart. The doors of several rooms were open wide, and he could hear the voices of two or three women. Walking lightly, he hurried a few meters and went into the first room, almost identical to his own. He closed the door softly and locked it. He sighed with relief and waited a moment to be sure no one was walking down the hallway. He went into the bathroom, to the window that looked down on the laundry courtyard. He managed without difficulty to climb through and lower himself to the ground. His heart beating madly, he saw the courtyard door was open, and he crossed through it. A dark hallway led to a workers’ entrance, its door locked only from the inside. Hamdul-lah. Moving quickly, but without breaking into a run, he soon left the hotel behind, his suitcase still unpacked.

  On Calle de Fez, he decided to cross through the small market to get to Calle de Holanda. As always, the odors of roses and fresh meat wafted through the aisles near the entrance. Once inside the market, he stopped in front of a stall selling dried fruits.

  “Nus kilo,” he told the vendor, pointing to a hill of stacked dates on a blue plastic basin. He looked down the aisle, then up. Nobody was following him.

  “Shjral?”

  “Tlatin dirham.”

  He counted out thirty dirhams.

  “B’saha,” the man said to him. “Enjoy.”

  He took a walk around the lower part of the market, crossed to where the spices were sold. Looking over his shoulder one more time, he came out onto Calle de Holanda.

  In his room at the Villa de France, he opened the little packet of dates, ate three or four, and set the pits on the sill of Matisse’s famous window. Still life on windowsill, he thought, the date pits in the foreground.

  He took Carrie’s computer out of the pillowcase, opened it, and turned it on. I ought to erase Abdelkrim’s files, he thought. He dragged them to the recycle bin, then tried to empty it, but a box opened on the screen saying, “Error! Bad code.”

  He tried again—one, two, three times. The error persisted. He scratched his head. It can’t be, he thought.

  It was ten to eleven when he phoned Boujeloud. He was on his way, he said.

  “I’ll wait for you in the parking lot.”

  “Ouakha, khay.”

  He called Singer. No answer. He left a voicemail; he would be a little late, he apologized.

  At eleven o’clock sharp, he met Boujeloud in front of the hotel. He didn’t want to tell him he was leaving that same afternoon or that he was afraid he was being followed. (He would regret this immediately.)

  “Tell Carrie I’m very grateful.”

  “B’slemah, my friend.”

  “B’slemah.”

  He went back to the Matisse room. He looked one more time at the landscape out the window. He left the date pits where they were.

  Suddenly it was as if someone had seized him by the throat. The boy in the yellow shirt that Sultán had pointed out was standing in front of the gardens of Saint Andrew. On Calle de Inglaterra he saw Boujeloud’s Mercedes pulling out, just as another Mercedes, black, came rapidly up Calle de América del Sur and crossed in front of Boujeloud’s, forcing him to slam on the brakes. Boujeloud’s arm gestured out the car window. He stuck his head out, upbraiding the other driver. A man dressed in black quickly approached from behind his car and struck him in the temple with his fist; Boujeloud’s head and arm disappeared into the car. The man who’d hit him looked around; he had a beard and dark glasses.

  Shit, the Mexican thought as he drew back. Had he been seen?

  The bearded man put his hand through the car window, opened the door, and climbed into the car. The other Mercedes now left the street open. Boujeloud’s Mercedes, with a squealing of tires, traced a semicircle and disappeared—toward Bou Araquía? The boy in the yellow shirt had also disappeared.

  “Shit,” he said, thinking of Boujeloud.

  The phone began to ring. It was Singer.

  “Hello?”

  “I just got your message. Where are you?”

  “David, something has just happened that I can’t understand. Something terrible. I think a friend of mine has just been kidnapped. Have you had somebody watching me? Somebody following me?”

  “What? Why would you say that? What happened?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “It could be my paranoia.”

  “What are you talking about? Do you want me to come get you? Where are you?”

  The Tangier landscape he had seen in the Matisse window was changing into something else. He heard Singer’s voice continuing to ask questions. Disoriented, he hung up. He didn’t trust Singer, even though he wasn’t certain of his involvement with what had just happened. It was possible someone else had learned about Abdelkrim’s memory card. It was possible he was involved in a “very delicate” matter, as Singer had suspected.

  A long flight of stairs plunged directly across the gardens of the Grand Hotel Villa de France, ending at a gate of iron lances that opened onto the triangle of streets where the brief and violent scene had occurred. The Mexican descended the stairs with the basket containing his change of clothes, his laptop, and his djellaba, his cell phone pressed to his ear. He was trying to reach Carrie, but she was not picking up.

  III

  A chain and a lock stopped him. He slung the basket over his shoulder and started to scale the gate.

  “Shni bgrit?” he heard behind him.

  He turned his head. It was an old gardener, whom he didn’t know.

  “You can’t do that, sidi.”

  The Mexican couldn’t get his leg over the sharp lances.

  “Come down from there, sidi.”

  He obeyed. The gardener held the basket so that he could get down.

  “Smaheli. Excuse me,” the Mexican said. “I’ve got to get out . . .”

  “Blati.”

  He took a large rusty key out of his pocket to open the lock.

  The gate opened with a squeak.

  “Shukran b’sef!”

  “La shukran. Al-lah wa shib.”

  He headed down Calle de Inglaterra to the Zoco de Fuera, where there were two lines of taxis. He got into a small one and asked the driver to take him to Souani.

  IV

  The Souani garden was under construction. The lawn had been taken out, and a mini bulldozer was digging a trench that ran toward the center of the roundabout. Small groups of uniformed students sat on the cement benches, and an ice cream vendor pushed his musical cart along the circular sidewalk. In the shade of a flowering date palm, a workman assembled a small chainsaw. A curtain of dry vines covered the upper part of the trunk, some twenty meters high. They’re going to cut it down, he thought unhappily. And then, as if scandalized by his own triviality, They’ve kidnapped my friend, and I’m thinking of this! The café Al-Achab, where Mohammed used to meet his friends, was silent. Several Moroccans sat at tables all along the wall. Some were smoking. Two played cards in a corner. He sat down at a table on the terrace and ordered coffee. He tried to reassure himself again that he was not being followed. He paid for the coffee—the chainsaw had begun to buzz—and crossed the roundabout. On a little uphill street, he walked into the small labyrinth of the Souani medina. He got lost immediately. He turned around in a dead-end alley, inquired in a baqal, and in the end found Number Eleven. He wanted to make sure, for the last time, that no one had followed him. The street, very narrow, was deserted. Two cats fought over a fish skeleton just in front of Mohammed’s door. The smell of decomposition was strong. He rang the bell. Rahma opened and let him in.

  “Mohammed is upstairs,” she said. “With Abdelkrim.”

  “Ah,” he said, only slightly surprised. Somehow he had expected to find him here.

  Mohammed was seated on a m’tarba under one of his paintings, an abstraction of eyes and noses. Barefoot, he leaned against the wall, silent and apparently very tired. Abdelk
rim, thin and tall, stood in front of him. Another boy, younger than Abdelkrim and still beardless, stood at his side.

  “Salaam aleikum.”

  “Aleikum salaam.”

  They invited him to sit. The youngest, who barely looked at him, left the room to prepare tea. He wore a green shirt. But he had the awkward demeanor of the boy Sultán had pointed out in the street.

  “Do you recognize Abdelkrim?” asked Mohammed.

  “Of course.” He looked like Mohammed, but twenty or so years younger, with almond-shaped eyes like Rahma’s.

  “You came here once for a party my father threw for Mr. John. It was his birthday.”

  That couldn’t be right, he thought, but decided not to contradict him.

  “Yes,” Abdelkrim said. “I remember you clearly. Or perhaps you have a double?”

  This was the child prodigy.

  “It’s an honor to know you,” he told him. “The first Moroccan astronaut!”

  Mohammed, his face tense with worry, looked at the Mexican. He shook his head.

  “They didn’t grant him US citizenship. He cannot be an astronaut.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He’s too Muslim, they told him.”

  “What? That’s terrible. Very bad. So . . . ?”

  “So nothing. Screw them.”

  Abdelkrim said, “My father gave you some tapes and a memory card—do you have them with you?”

  He nodded yes, pointing to the basket, which he’d left next to the stairwell.

  “The tapes are there. The memory card here.” He touched his front pants pocket.

  “All right. The tapes—have you listened to them?”

  “Of course.”

  “And the memory card?”

  He took it out of his pocket.

  “Here it is,” he said, and handed it over.

  “All right,” Abdelkrim said again.

  “I could only decipher the first ones.”

  “Ah?”

  Abdelkrim looked at his father.

  “A friend helped me with the parts in Darija.”

  “A friend? What friend?”

  He explained who Boujeloud was.

  “Ah,” said Mohammed, “that djibli.”

  He was about to tell them what had happened to Boujeloud. Instead he began to explain that he hadn’t been able to read the card on his PC; he talked about his visit to the legation. They listened without interruption.

  “Singer read only the first letters,” he assured them. “Did you write them? He seemed impressed. Do you know the imams?”

  “What computer did you use?” Abdelkrim wanted to know.

  “A friend of mine’s—her name is Carrie. She lent it to me.”

  Mohammed made a grimace of disgust.

  “Singer used a PC?” Abdelkrim asked. “He put the card in a PC?”

  “I think so. Yes, he put it in.”

  “All right,” Abdelkrim said again.

  Mohammed shook his head and turned to the Mexican.

  “The legation is full of informers. I thought you knew that. It has always been full of informers. You cannot trust anyone. No one—I mean no one, my friend.”

  He agreed. He didn’t know whom to trust anymore. He said he feared someone was watching him, and decided to tell them what had happened with Boujeloud.

  Mohammed spoke to Abdelkrim in Darija: “And you can’t trust this one either.”

  Abdelkrim looked at him.

  “Can you tell me who was following you?”

  “Same age, same build as Slimane here. Yellow shirt.”

  Rahma appeared on the staircase. Without coming up to the level of the living room, visible only from the waist up, she said something in Darija to Mohammed that the Mexican didn’t understand.

  “Can you have lunch with us?” Mohammed asked him.

  He explained he had to be in Ibn Battouta at three to catch a plane to Paris.

  “Slimane will take you. No problem.”

  V

  Abdelkrim went into the room that Mohammed used as a studio; its only window looked out on the street. He closed the door, and the room darkened. Mohammed and the Mexican could hear the sound of a computer turning on. Slimane served a second round of tea.

  “Friend,” said Mohammed after a prolonged silence (although he managed to hear Abdelkrim talking on the phone behind the door in a language he couldn’t understand), “wouldn’t you like to have a smoke?”

  “Why not?” he answered without thinking. It was a mistake. He didn’t need anything to feed his paranoia.

  Mohammed set to preparing the pipe, an old sebsi that he hadn’t used for years. He asked Slimane to reach for his motui.

  “A friend brought me this kif a few days ago,” Mohammed explained while he opened the skin wrapping that held the kif. “It had been a long time since I’d seen him, and he didn’t know I’d stopped smoking. Hamdul-lah. It smells very good. Try it.”

  He took the pipe, and Mohammed, ceremonious now, put a match to it. He drew on the pipe, held the smoke in his lungs for a moment, exhaled from his mouth, and then from his nose. The kif was excellent.

  “M’sien b’sef.”

  Abdelkrim came back to the small room, sat beside him, and said in a low voice, “I think someone is following you, friend. Someone followed you here.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know. But they are circling the house, and I think it is because of you.”

  “I took every precaution,” he said.

  Abdelkrim was looking at the basket that still sat next to the stairwell.

  “Can I see what you have in there? You don’t mind?”

  He examined every single object. He put the cassettes aside. (“These,” he said, addressing no one, “I’d better keep.”)

  He opened the Mexican’s laptop.

  “May I?”

  The Mexican nodded.

  Abdelkrim put a cushion on his knees for the laptop. He looked through the main menu, clicked on two or three files (recent items), and turned it off. He seemed satisfied.

  “I don’t understand. What’s going on?” the Mexican said.

  “Your telephone—can I see it?” Abdelkrim asked.

  He took it out of his pocket and handed it to him.

  Abdelkrim examined the phone carefully—the front, the sides, the back. He turned it off, took off the cover, extracted the battery, the SIM card. He put it back together and handed it to the Mexican.

  “It’s better if you don’t use it now, if you don’t want them to monitor you. Your phone is completely open,” he explained. “Anyone can hack into it. Anyone can follow your calls and know who you’re with and what you’re talking about.”

  “OK,” the Mexican said.

  Abdelkrim closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and opened his eyes again. He said, “What are we going to do?”

  Slimane had his eyes fixed on the floor next to the Mexican’s feet.

  “This guy deserves what’s coming to him,” he said in Darija.

  The Mexican acted as though he hadn’t understood.

  “Abdelkrim, I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would they follow me?”

  Abdelkrim didn’t answer.

  “For the tapes, for the memory card?” the Mexican continued.

  “The truth is my father was wrong to give them to you,” Abdelkrim said. “I have many enemies.”

  VI

  All causes are valid, he thought. Men turn them good or bad.

  In Darija, Abdelkrim said to Slimane, “Go into the room and pray.”

  Then he looked at Mohammed. “Father, go down and eat with Rahma. Don’t wait for us. We’ll be down in a minute.”

  The boy and the man both obeyed him. When they were alone, Abdelkrim got up from his m’tarba, went over to the chest of drawers, and picked up a television remote. He turned on a monitor mounted in a corner of the ceiling; the Mexican hadn’t noticed it before. He pushed some buttons, and the Mexican stared at the scre
en.

  “It was no mistake, friend. Everything is planned,” Abdelkrim told him. “Look closely. You won’t see images like this again. Perhaps never. I hope never.”

  Two bearded men, their faces covered, were speaking in Arabic—were they Syrian? They looked at the camera. A woman’s voice translated from Arabic to French, while two lines of subtitles crawled at the bottom of the screen, one in Arabic, the other in English. The image changed to a shot taken in Somalia: two US soldiers were raping a Somalian girl. It switched again, to a scene of tortures in Abu Ghraib, then another in Guantanamo. Then—and this terrified the Mexican most of all—the screen showed a Central American jail (“Juvenile Reformatory, Las Gaviotas, Guatemala,” said the title), where some rioting prisoners were conducting a human sacrifice. While they jumped up and down to the beat of a Satanic band, they cracked open a man’s chest on some concrete steps they’d converted into an altar, and pulled out his heart. As Abdelkrim narrated, the images changed from one horror—a Kurdish girl testifying to the series of rapes she had endured (all in the name of God)—to another: on a Mediterranean beach, a young Englishman cut the throat of a young Australian (blond, blue eyed) accused of betraying the cause of the Prophet.

  All mafias—the gangs, the cartels, the governments; the Vatican, the patriarchs, and the ulema—all were as good as they were bad.

  The Mexican had stopped listening. He was transfixed by the images, his hands soaked in sweat.

  “Yes,” Abdelkrim was saying. “We’ve had to become double agents . . . But you aren’t listening?”

  He regretted having smoked the kif.

  “What was that?”

  “These operations were necessary so that certain matters could be understood. You’re a writer. Maybe you can understand this.”

  He reached out his hand and touched the Mexican’s thigh. The touch paralyzed him. He nodded his head, and the other man withdrew his hand. He had laid the memory card there. The Mexican put it back in his pocket.