Moon over Tangier (The Francis Bacon Mysteries Book 3)

by Janice Law

  The door was still locked. I gave it a thump and a kick for good measure but got no response. With possibilities multiplying like rats, I hurried to the main avenue and hailed a cab. “Goldfarber Gallery off Avenue Pasteur,” I told the driver. Maybe Goldfarber had changed his mind about the painting, but I hadn’t changed mine about that two hundred pounds.

  Indeed, my mind was so firmly on my finances that I forgot to take off the burnoose and ignored the blustery wind that blew the hood up over my hair. At the gallery, I pushed the bell and waited, then tried again. When there was no response, I leaned on the button and let the bell keep ringing. In time, I heard the crisp sound of the bolt being drawn, followed by the rattle of the latch.

  The door swung open, and I was inside before he recognized me.

  When he did, he wasn’t pleased. “Francis! What the hell are you doing?” Goldfarber’s heavy face was flushed and angry. “Why are you here?”

  “A better question is why weren’t you at the studio? We were supposed to meet more than an hour ago.”

  “Something came up.” Goldfarber was not just irritated but nervous. He jerked the door open and said, “I can’t deal with you now. Get out and come back later.”

  “You owe me two hundred pounds,” I said. “Pay me and I’m off in a moment.”

  “You’ll leave now if you know what’s good for you.” He shoved the door shut again, suggesting that he didn’t want anyone to see me.

  “You have your painting. I want my money.” I counted on his nervous eagerness to give me what I wanted, and although he was tempted to threaten and perhaps to attack, he thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out a bundle of cash.

  “Now get out of here,” he said.

  Before I could put the money into my wallet, Goldfarber had opened the door and laid one of his large hands on the back of my neck. I expected to be launched onto the sidewalk, but suddenly I was propelled back into the gallery with a burst of German profanity that really did take me aback.

  He slid the bolt in the door and turned to me with a wild look. “You must not be seen here!”

  “Is there a rear exit?”

  Instead of answering, he grabbed my arm and rushed me across the gallery to a dark and narrow corridor with stairs along one side. At the end was a tall, old-fashioned door. He unlocked it, but instead of stepping outside, I was shoved inside a glorified closet. I shouted and threw my weight against the door, but he’d already turned the key. Then the bell rang, high and insistent, drowning out my complaints. With another burst of distinctly low German, Goldfarber ran to the front of the building.

  I figured this was the important visitor, the one he’d opened the door for only to find yours truly. It was interesting that I’d been wearing the local garb at the time, suggesting he’d expected a Moroccan. I put my ear to the door. Across the gallery came the murmur of voices. I thought that I could distinguish Goldfarber’s, but the substance, even the language, of their conversation was impossible to determine. They crossed the tiled gallery, and I shrank away from the door against the wall. Goldfarber was a formidable specimen; I was not keen to meet someone who could put the wind up him.

  I waited for their approach, but the footsteps faded again. Another little session in the back room? If so, discretion was the order of the day; I heard nothing. I might have been alone in the building. Had they managed to leave unheard? I was beginning to wheeze from nerves and dust, and my legs had started to prickle and fall asleep, when I thought I heard steps in the gallery again.

  I put my ear to the door. Stealthy footsteps? I thought so. And another ambiguous swishing sound. Was something being dragged across the floor? That was a bad sound, bringing with it a bad thought. Now the door. Visitor leaving? I waited. To call while the mysterious guest was on the premises might be disastrous. But what if Goldfarber left with his visitor? The building had thick walls; the little store room had a stout door. I could be there for quite a while.

  I’m not fond of dark, enclosed places at the best of times, and I didn’t fancy being left in a commercial building that might be closed for days. Maybe longer, depending on just what had transpired between Goldfarber and his visitor. Soon my anxiety about what might happen when the dealer returned was replaced by the fear that he might not return at all.

  By this time, my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, broken only by a strip of light seeping in over the threshold. The door, afflicted with wood worm or dry rot, was shy of the floor. Just how long had I been inside? I lay down, an awkward business, as there seemed to be storage racks protruding from every side and stuck my watch close to the little band of light: four p.m. It felt much later, but still I’d been there over an hour. Whether Goldfarber was coming back or not, I wanted to get out.

  Think, Francis. That’s what my old Nan used to say whenever I was in a pickle. I leaned against the door, rattled the handle, and peered into the keyhole. That was blocked by the key. I got off the floor and began to explore the racks. Framed pictures, canvases, and then a stack of—what? Portfolios. Yes, with paper, drawings, and prints. I took one out. Nice heavy paper, thick and strong. I slid it under the door and positioned it beneath the lock.

  In Nan’s detective stories, people were always equipped with knitting needles or locksmith’s picks or pocketknives with useful blades. I returned to the storage racks. Most of the canvases were still unframed, but at least one of the smaller framed pictures had its hanging wire, which I unwound from the eye hooks. Stiff enough? You won’t know until you try, Francis.

  I began a delicate operation with the wire, trying not to let the frayed ends get stuck but still using enough force to dislodge the key. After several abortive tries, I doubled up the wire and gave a good sharp push. The key rattled out of the lock. I took a deep breath before I peeked under the door. Had I pushed too hard? Had the key bounced off the paper? I squashed my face against the floor and squinted. No key. Not that I could see.

  By this time, my breathing had been reduced to a rasping wheeze. I seized the edge of the paper, and, so as not to tip the key off if it should be there, I slid the drawing carefully back under the door. Steady, steady. A little clink—that was the key hitting the bottom of the door. Now to get it under. I tried to keep my lungs operational until I got the tips of two fingers on the key.

  I struggled to slide it inside despite the uneven lower edge of the door. I made several attempts and used most of my vocabulary before I maneuvered the key close to the door jamb and flicked it inside. I stood up, gasping, to try the lock. The mechanism was old and loose, but after several minutes I persuaded the wards to engage and the door to open.

  I looked down at the floor. Light from the narrow gallery windows revealed that I’d made use of a Balthus drawing. I felt better; he’s not one of my favorites. Just the same, I returned it carefully to the portfolio. Like him or not, he’s a fine draftsman.

  I was locking up the store room when I heard a noise at the front door. Goldfarber returning? I left the key in the lock and bolted for the stairs. I managed two steps before the door opened. I pressed against the wall of the stairwell and tried not to breathe.

  “Hello,” someone called. “Is the gallery open?” There was something familiar about the voice, but I thought it best to stay where I was. “Herr Goldfarber?”

  “Something fishy here,” said another voice.

  “Have a quick look around, shall we?”

  The voice sounded like Richard’s. Could he have come to see the drawings and buy one on the sly? I was about to call out to him, when I heard him say, “Look for any records, financial documents. We may not get such a good chance again.”

  I shut my mouth and started backing cautiously up the stairs. I had almost reached the top when I heard steps in the corridor. I froze again. Whoever it was had only to look up. Even in the dim light I’d be visible, and now I regretted not calling out to them.


  There was a shout from below. “Something’s not right here; come look at this.”

  Richard—I definitely recognized his voice even without the little camp jokes and unctuous gentility—said, “Be right there,” and he walked back to the gallery.

  There were three doors at the top of the stairs. One was locked. One was a bathroom, and one led to the roof. Roofs are all right. Fire watching with Arnold during the war got me over any fear of heights. I hurried up the iron stairs and came out into the late sunlight. I was looking over an expanse of roofs, some with pigeon houses and potted figs, some with awnings over chairs and tables. Fortunately, no women in sight as yet. The Muslim ladies of Morocco keep to the home. Their outings are to the roof gardens in the evening, and it’s the worst of bad form for foreign men to be on roofs overlooking theirs. As I was now. I needed a ladder. An outside staircase. The wings of the Muse.

  Richard and his friend were searching the gallery. I was pretty sure of that. Would they come upstairs? Yes, I thought they would. Would they bother with the roof? Uncertain. There was what I took to be a water tank and a little shed that held a generator for emergency power. That was interesting, but perhaps Goldfarber really did live in the gallery, and that convenient divan was not just for fun and games.

  On my circuit around the roof, I noticed a rickety ladder against the water tank. Though hampered by the burnoose, I scrambled up. Ah, a covered top with a shallow slope. I tested it cautiously. I didn’t fancy being drowned like the Duke of Clarence. Shakespeare gave him some decent wine for his fatal tumble; I’d probably get dodgy water and mosquito larvae.

  But Richard and his friend would certainly come up if I weren’t hidden. One of the laws of the universe is that when I’m in a pickle, things can only get worse. I stepped over the edge and very cautiously tested the top of the tank. A creak, a little groaning protest from wood and old metal but nothing more. I lay as flat as I could and waited.

  The evening wind stirred up, brisk and cold. I checked my watch for what seemed the fiftieth time. If I waited too long, they would be gone, but Goldfarber might be back. I’d decided to risk descending, and I actually had one foot over the edge when I heard steps. Back onto the top with creaking and groaning. No sudden moves, Francis!

  “It’s got to be here somewhere,” Richard said.

  “Damned if I see where. We may be wrong, you know. He may use somewhere else.” That was the friend. I lifted my head cautiously. He was young, quite a bit younger than Richard, and blond. Thin, too. Well, well, my admirer from the medina. So much for youth and beauty and the passions of strangers.

  “Maybe, but I think not,” Richard said.

  I dropped my head and listened to them moving around on the roof. The door of the shed opened. No joy there, apparently, because they resumed walking back and forth. Then I heard Richard laugh. “Well, would you look at that.”

  Had I been spotted? My lungs seized up, and I had a bad moment when I thought I must cough. The blond man began swearing.

  “No one ever said Goldfarber was stupid,” Richard said. He patted the water tank like a horse. “Wound his antenna around the tank. Hooked it up, my boy, when he made a transmission. I think we’ve rumbled him.”

  “Still, no sign of a transmitter.”

  “Oh, he’ll keep that hidden. He knows we’re onto it.”

  Footsteps now toward the stairs. A moment later, they were gone, and I sat up. The sky was rapidly darkening, and I saw few signs of electricity in the town below. Another outage. We might be dark for a few minutes or several hours. I needed to make my way back down before the building went totally black. I waited at the top of the outside stairs and listened. No sounds. I paused again at the top of the inner staircase, but the building remained silent. I crept down in complete darkness, flailed around for a moment, then felt my way along the corridor until I saw the faint rectangles of the gallery windows.

  I felt my way along the wall toward the main door, and I was doing fine until a stout piece of ironwork caught me just above the ankle and pitched me onto the tiles with a great clatter and rattle. I clutched my leg, relieved my feelings with profanity in several languages, then groped in the blackness until I touched wrought iron. I’d tripped over one of the gallery’s handsome standing candelabras, a useful decoration in a city with erratic power.

  I got to my feet, set up the candelabra, and fumbled in my pocket for the matches that everyone, smoker or not, carried for just such emergencies. Once equipped with a candle, I decided to take a quick look in Goldfarber’s inner sanctum. I found a few papers on the floor, a tipped over chair, but no real disarray. I suspected that Richard and his companion had tried to leave everything as they’d found it. Which meant that something had happened before Goldfarber left.

  Something trivial, I thought, for there was no damage nor any sign of a serious struggle. In fact, as accustomed as I am to having spatters of paint everywhere, I almost missed the red spots on the edge of the desk. They were still sticky, and they looked like blood. Had Richard and his pal noticed them? Maybe, maybe not. They’d been after antennas and financial records, but, combined with that odd swishing sound and the single footsteps in the gallery, those little spots were a sign that either Goldfarber or his visitor had come to grief. Get out of here, Francis!

  I was at the door before I thought of the faux Picasso. It tied me to Goldfarber, and if Richard should discover it, I’d be open to blackmail. Although I’m quite indifferent to the usual threats of sexual exposure, no serious painter can afford to be linked to forgery. I could almost hear Richard’s usual campy speech sliding into the chilly and efficient voice I’d heard in the gallery. I could guess his price, too. Nothing so vulgar as money or even a painting. Rather, I’d be doing work for Tangier’s new police commissioner, or perhaps for whatever mysterious British spy shop that employed Richard.

  Neither was a good prospect, so though I was loath to do anything but make an immediate exit, I checked both the store room and the gallery. Nothing. Probably the faux Picasso was still locked up in the studio. I was stymied until I remembered Goldfarber opening the desk for the key. Watching at every step for any little drop of blood, I used my handkerchief to open the center drawer. Among a variety of keys, I recognized the square, modern Yale to the studio.

  I hailed a cab well down the avenue and got out on the street behind the studio. Once upstairs, I hesitated, strongly tempted to leave both the “Picasso” and Goldfarber’s dangerous orbit. But I had his key, probably the only one, and Richard and his pal either didn’t know about the place or weren’t interested in anything but transmitters. I unlocked the door and stepped inside. Naturally, my eye went first to the easel with a featureless Marie-Thérèse Walter in the middle of erotic reverie. She was nicely dry, too; I’d guessed right with the house paints.

  I should, of course, have grabbed it and made my exit. But I couldn’t resist putting in the last few lines of her closed eyes, soft mouth, and fingernails. I picked up a small, clean brush and opened a tin of black paint. One line, two, three: there was her face. Four, five, six: hands complete, and I’m not sure the master could have drawn them any better. I wiped the brush and, like a tidy artisan, went toward the sink where Goldfarber kept a container of turpentine.

  It was only then that I noticed several crates piled near the sink with stacks of paint cans and a heap of canvas drop cloths. One cloth looked odd in a way I didn’t much like. I moved closer and took a deep breath, then used the handle of the brush to lift one edge of the canvas. I saw the hair first, dark and matted with blood, then a tanned face with light expressionless eyes above a wide, broken nose and a toothy mouth with a trickle of blood at one corner. Not Moroccan, though he was wearing a burnoose. And not Goldfarber, either. This was a smaller, slighter man, identity unknown but status definite: the mysterious shock had happened. What was once alive, talking, scheming, fighting, playing was now so much raw meat.r />
  The transformation had been recent, very recent by the look of him, and his skin was cool not cold. I was sure that this was the visitor whom Goldfarber had been nervously awaiting. Whatever his anxieties, they hadn’t kept him from murder, and my heart started to hammer as I realized the narrowness of my escape, which I must now make good.

  I was at the door before I glanced back at the easel. Leave no evidence, Francis! I took off the burnoose, wrapped the picture in it, and hustled downstairs.

  Chapter Five

  Fortunately the city’s erratic electricity returned, or I would have walked right into the big Mercedes parked in front of my building. If I was not mistaken, the elegant white car belonged to Richard, last seen with a secret service–type combing through the Goldfarber Gallery. Not someone I wanted to meet at that moment, not with images of the dead man fresh in my mind and a forged Picasso tucked under my arm.

  Quick turn to the left, head toward the water, take the hill to David’s rented house. I saw lights upstairs and heard the sound of a jazz trumpet over a throbbing bass and a stride piano—the favorite record of a certain pretty beach boy. This was an evening for visits and entertaining, and I felt the thin, cold thread of jealousy. Irrational, really, when I am so fond of carrying on myself and of getting up to one thing or another, legal and otherwise. But love isn’t rational.

  The Greeks were right: irrationality leads to tears and violence and messes of one sort or another, such as those I am fond of depicting. Consider poor Phaedra, if you doubt me, or look at The Bacchae. Of course, in The Bacchae, neither rationality nor madness leads to salvation, which is more or less my view of life. The old dramatic poets of the Peloponnesus grasped the reality of the universe. I try for something similar, but when I get close to it on canvas, half the critics and most of the public are horrified that the results are so “violent,” so “exaggerated.”