by Janice Law
They wouldn’t know what I felt in David’s front room, listening to the sounds floating down from above. My heart turned to fire, my head to ice, and my skin shriveled away and sloughed off, leaving my nerves bare. That’s what I strive to put on canvas, and it doesn’t look very polite. Not at all.
I hated David and loved him and was jealous of his boyfriends. Nan’s voice echoed faintly in my ear: You must take the bitter with the sweet, Francis. My old Nan was tough, and she made me practical. While a jealous scene might be just the ticket, delicious at the moment and opening possibilities for an even more delightful reconciliation, I had a forged Picasso; a corpse in Goldfarber’s studio; a blackmailing police commissioner; and, in Richard, trouble up on the Mountain. I needed to find a hiding place for the canvas, preferably immediately.
My studio was no good. David’s house wasn’t ideal, either, but I didn’t have a lot of options. When an ignoble jealousy suggested that since he was the reason for this particular pickle, it was only fair he share the risks, I considered the room. Square and whitewashed, it sported the requisite tiled floor and wooden shutters, but no convenient closet or lockable armoire. There was a sagging green sofa, a couple of carved chairs, and the room’s sole beauty, a Berber rug, all reds and earth tones, that David had hung from a thick pole.
I went into the kitchen for a hammer and a couple of small nails. I lifted the pole off its hooks and put two nails into the plaster behind where the rug would hang. I balanced the “Picasso” on the nails, replaced the rug, and stepped back. The rug hung straight and smooth, nicely covering the canvas beneath.
Once again, I was tempted to make a scene or at least to leave a message. I was mentally composing something both witty and scathing before I came to my senses. I put away the hammer and slipped out of the house. I had two hundred pounds in my pocket, and, given how quickly I can burn through money, I decided to hit the cafes immediately. After the events of the day, I needed a drink in the worst possible way, and I wanted to find some thirsty journalists willing to gossip about murder.
Soon I was combining business with liquid pleasure. Jock Fergusson wrote for the Gazette & Mail. “Everything of interest to the British colony: our motto and our mission,” he said, though he’d be the first to admit that cricket scores and gossip were the paper’s lifeblood. Jock had driven a Crusader tank in North Africa and developed a surprising affection for the desert, as well as a deep and—as far as I could see—unquenchable thirst.
“Would the British colony be interested in a murder?” I asked him. We were getting confidential in an out-of-the-way Spanish bar—small, dirty, and cheap. In the background, an aging Flamenco singer wailed about love’s sorrows and life’s regrets as if she’d had plenty of experience. Between her and the hard-drinking clientele, it was about as private a place as one could find in the city.
“They love a murder,” Jock said. “Bred in the British bones, you ken. They love mysterious murders the best and gruesome ones next best, but only if the victim is British. We don’t give a line to a native’s killing. With other nationals, it’s a judgment call.”
Jock had a red face and a W. C. Fields nose. After a particular liquid indulgence, he had difficulties with certain consonants, but his eyes stayed cool and cynical. Even half-pickled, he was sharp. I just had to discover what I needed before he reached the full-pickled state, which he described as “reaching the Empty Quarter.” Jock did like a desert metaphor.
“This was a Spaniard.”
He made a little gesture with his hands. “Not quite a native but definitely not British.”
“Little more than a boy,” I said. “Someone cut his throat. That’s the story, anyway.”
Jock perked up at this. “The story, huh. From whom?”
“Our esteemed new police commissioner.”
“Really.” He glanced around the bar with a dubious air. “You meet him around here?”
“I met him in his office. To make a long story short—”
“Professionally speaking, I like a long story …”
“You’re getting the short version. He’s been after me to find out more about the man he thinks employed the boy.”
“Really, Francis. You move in interesting circles. And you just a visitor to our fair city.”
“The boy was apparently regularly employed touching up dirty pictures. That ring a bell?”
He made a show of consulting his whiskey, and I signaled for the barman to top up the glass. “Well,” Jock said after a minute, “there’s Calloux. His specialty is little boys and girls in tasteful shades of gray. I’ve heard he has to retouch in color for the modern market. Possibly the boy worked there, though I doubt it. Calloux’s an artisan of the old school, half genius, half pervert, and he takes pride in his craftsmanship. Anyway, even the newest police commissioner would know about Calloux. His studio is one of the landmarks of the town for those of a certain taste.” He made a face. “Personally, I draw the line at children.”
“Like all good men,” I said. “But you would have known if a boy had been murdered?”
“A European boy? Probably. But one of the beach boys or other native children …” Jock shrugged. “Considering the level of general misery, there isn’t really much violence, but people do disappear. They go back to the Rif, back to the desert, down to the bottom of the sea; who knows. In hungry times, children are especially fragile.”
Something in his voice made me think that he’d maybe lost a child and that it was not just bad war memories and a taste for the desert that had brought him to the Gazette & Mail. “Could you ask around, Jock? Your professional colleagues, maybe? Is there anyone in the Spanish Zone you could contact?”
“Aye, there’s where you’d have to ask. No Spanish, have you?”
I shook my head. “Not enough.”
“I’ll see what I can do. And try Bernard Vallotton at Le Journal. Being a daily, they have a lot more columns to fill, making them a less discriminating market, if you know what I mean,” Jock said and winked.
I did. Le Journal had a fair bit of actual world news. Jock and I drank long enough to come within sight of the Empty Quarter, but I learned nothing else. I really didn’t have too many hopes of his French colleague, but the next day I called Monsieur Vallotton and invited him for lunch.
I like a good lunch. I like fish prepared by a real French chef and nicely cooked vegetables and Moroccan salads and as much Chablis or champagne as I can afford. The journalist turned out to share my tastes, and while the little cafe was unprepossessing, it had a French cook. Bernard Vallotton, pale, thin as a greyhound, and dressed in a fine, if rumpled, gray wool suit and an open-necked shirt, was favorably impressed.
He sampled his salad and nodded his head, which was decidedly expressive in an angular fashion and topped with thick brown hair cut en brosse. “This is the coming thing, you know, monsieur.”
“Call me Francis,” I said.
“Francis, most certainly. The coming thing in cuisine will be a fusion of French and foreign. La belle cuisine will conquer the postwar world, I’m convinced, but with tasteful local additions like this delightful salad. Don’t you agree?”
I did. Agreement is so pleasant en francais; the language has so many ways of being agreeable without necessarily committing one to anything. Even better, Bernard Vallotton was originally from Paris, and since I’d learned my French there, we were getting on famously. The French have a proprietary interest in vowels and nasals as well as cuisine.
Bernard was a real gourmet. He discussed the freshness of the fish and pronounced it excellent. “It was surely swimming in the Med this morning, Francis.”
I thought that very likely.
The sauce also met his approval and led to an enthusiastic conference with the waiter. Was there not a dash of cumin? And cinnamon, too! Most interesting! He emphasized his points with pale, boney hands, ev
ery finger stained brown with nicotine. It was several minutes before he let the waiter go and turned his attention back to me. “Merveilleux. As I was saying, Francis, a touch of the exotic within the traditional. We cannot be hidebound. La cuisine is a living thing.”
And so on. It took a respectable tart with cheese on the side and many compliments for the perspicacity and range of Le Journal’s coverage before I managed to steer the conversation to homicide. “I am surprised, Bernard, that perhaps—just perhaps, now—your fine journal missed a murder a little while ago.”
He raised his eyebrows, and his black eyes turned chilly. I could see that he was as serious about journalism as he was about la belle cuisine. “This cannot be. If you had said yesterday, maybe. But a while ago? Impossible.”
“My feeling, of course, but here’s the thing.” I unfolded a much-edited story about the young Spaniard with his throat cut. “He’s said to have been a painter, employed in retouching photos or maybe paintings.”
“Retouching paintings covers many sins.” Vallotton ran a hand through his thick, dark hair and nodded for emphasis.
“I couldn’t agree more. But Tangier doesn’t have many galleries and photo shops. You would surely know them all.”
“I would. And the killing of a worker in one of them would be news.”
“And the story in Le Journal the next morning?”
“Absolument.”
“Am I to think that the photo was faked?”
“By our Zone gendarmes? Who knows with les flics today. We have troubled times, Francis, between bomb-throwing Moroccans and the colons’ Presence Francais thugs. But there is another possibility—that the photo is real but the killing occurred elsewhere.”
I was not sure that made me feel any better; the murder of a painter never puts me in good humor. “Where would be a likely place?”
Bernard lifted his bony shoulders and gave an eloquent shrug. “There is a powerful amount of smuggling in and out of the International Zone. Fast boats go out every night from Tangier to the Spanish Zone, and cargo comes in from the desert of the French Zone. Smuggling has been a way of life here for generations, and now with Istiqlal, it is considered a patriotic duty.”
I must have looked puzzled because he added, “To deprive French customs of revenue, of course. In the hope that France will return the king and pull out of Morocco. As if we were a nation of shopkeepers—no offense intended, Francis—that cares only for money. France is, first to last, animated by la gloire!”
I thought money talked with most French, too, but it didn’t seem the moment to say so. “What about Istiqlal?”
“Istiqlal would like patriots to concentrate on arms and grenades and material for the revolution. Poor fools! Most Moroccans just want to make a killing on cigarettes or liquor or whatever commands the price of the moment. So there can be conflicts. Smugglers have wound up dead for one reason or another.”
“Spaniards, too?”
“Most certainly. There was a case in the Spanish Zone not long ago. It’s possible the boy you mention was killed there. I could tell if I saw the photo.”
“The photo is beyond my reach. But would your paper have a photograph of the dead smuggler?”
“I could look,” said Bernard. “Could there be a story for me?”
Now it was my turn to shrug. “What about pictures, paintings? Any point in smuggling them in—or out?”
“There’s not a huge market. I notice even Goldfarber’s gallery is only open sporadically.”
“It must be difficult for him to make a living,” I said cautiously.
“Are we speaking of him? As the boy’s employer?” Bernard was quick on the uptake. No Empty Quarter for him. I reminded myself to be careful.
“That is one theory. From what you’ve just told me, I now think it unlikely.”
“You are wrong there, my friend. Herr Goldfarber has his fingers in a lot of different things.”
“Including smuggling?”
“I hear that he’s interested wherever there’s money to be made. And he must have some other source of income, because while the gallery does not seem busy, it remains open with what I’m told is some good stock.”
“A mixed bag,” I said, “but, yes, some fine things, too. All prewar.”
“War loot, most likely. Probably why the Jews don’t trust him, though he is one of their own, and the community is famously close-knit. I find that interesting, don’t you?”
I could only agree.
“And he has, shall we say, interesting friends.”
I thought about the cafe beneath the studio. “He certainly has a studio for ‘retouching’ paintings in an interesting building.”
“Where?”
I mentioned the address.
Bernard perked up. I’d clearly told him something that he did not know. “Right above one of the hotbeds of the revolution! That cafe is popular with Istiqlal as well as with some small freelance groups. They’re mostly hot air here at the moment, but they’ve been lethal in Casablanca and Marrakech and the outlying areas.”
“Reason enough for Goldfarber to attract the attention of the police?”
“One would think. But so far no one is too sure what his game is. It extends beyond the gallery. I’m certain of that.”
“You might look into that studio,” I said. I dared not say more. The longer it took the police to discover the dead man, the better for me. The young Spaniard was another matter. His killing had indirectly made me useful to the police, and I wanted to know more about him. “If you were to find a photo—I mean of the young man killed in the Spanish Zone—could you let me know? Could I possibly see it?”
“I don’t see why not. We might walk off this excellent lunch and check at the office now. What do you say?”
I signaled the waiter. “I am in your debt, Bernard.”
“Wait and see if I can find the photo,” he said.
That was how I came to spend an afternoon in the smoky office of Le Journal, a building permeated by the smell of ink and cigarettes and filled with the clicking of typewriters, the clatter of linotype machines, and the bells of the teletypes that signaled breaking news. Bernard led me down a narrow staircase to the “morgue,” where the paper’s clippings rested in green metal cabinets or in brown folders arrayed along the shelves and heaped in unstable piles on the big worktable.
I doubted he would be able to find anything, but Le Journal clearly had a system. Bernard moved confidently along one shelf, checking the minuscule date labels, then selected a bulging accordion file and set it on the table. “Three weeks ago,” he said as he drew out a story. “Your French extends to reading?”
“A little slower than in English, but yes.”
“Very well. You might want to read over this week of stories. The pictures are too small to be useful, but here are the original photos.”
He laid a couple of glossy eight-by-elevens on the table. One showed a square-faced young man with high cheekbones, a wide brow, and a thin, straight nose. His closed eyes were beginning to sink into the darkness of the skull; his teeth were beginning to emerge from the shrinking flesh: a morgue shot and, I thought, a painting in embryo. Don’t be distracted, Francis. He had the same black hair, all right, quite long, and a stained white cloth was wrapped around his throat. My immediate impression was that he looked neither Spanish nor Moroccan, but I recognized the second photo immediately: it showed the “Spanish boy” lying face down in a pool of dark liquid.
I tapped the photo. “This is the same picture.”
“Careless of them. They assumed that you would not double-check.”
“Yes,” I said. The carelessness of the powers that be is an article of faith with me, but I had another, more disagreeable thought. Maybe the commissioner and Richard, too, had anticipated that I would come to a bad end like the Spanish boy. J
ust the same, there must have been some reason for selecting this photo when there were surely others. “Could he really be connected in any way to Goldfarber?”
“I have no opinion. Read the stories and tell me what you think.”
I began with a short piece headlined Sordid Killing in the Spanish Zone. Quite predictably, Le Journal’s writer had focused on smuggling as a possible angle. The victim, Julio Martinez, had been killed in a dive near Tetouan’s port after what was described as an “altercation.” The Spaniard had been carrying a Czech passport, which raised interesting questions, and he’d been employed as a housepainter, working on the decoration of what the paper described as “a large private house in the city.”
I thought I’d like very much to know who owned the “large private house” as well as how Señor Martinez had acquired that Czech passport—or, alternately, given his Eastern European features, how he’d acquired documents in the name of Julio Martinez.
Later editions of Le Journal failed to answer these interesting questions, although I learned that the waterside tavern was a well-known haven for smugglers and that the unlucky Martinez died after a back room card game went bad. I remembered that another queer genius, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s predecessor and rival, had meddled with spies and met a similar fate in a similar venue. Mind yourself, Francis!
But what of Martinez, himself? The paint on his clothes and hands was now easily explained. Smuggling seemed a much more likely interest for the Zone police than forged pictures. But what was he smuggling, and could paintings be involved in some way? I doubted that. Sculptures can be used to move drugs or jewels, but currency traders had easier ways to move bills than behind pictures, and with drugs, liquor, or cigarettes, bulky paintings would only be a handicap.
“There’s no indication of what Martinez might have been smuggling,” I said to Bernard over an aperitif later. “Is there?”
“No. I’d guess liquor or cigarettes. Ever popular and requiring no great expertise.”