by Janice Law
“Though the focus on this side seems to be the gallery.” I did not mention Richard and his legation buddy and their search of the premises.
“Well,” said Bernard after a moment’s consideration, “there is smuggling, and then there is—what is the English phrase—washing of money.”
“Laundering. We say, laundering money.”
“Ah, same idea.”
“I thought all money was clean in Tangier.”
Bernard laughed. “There’s something in that. But perhaps politicians are involved. All money is the same to them, but they sometimes like to hide its origin.”
Chapter Six
In the desert, it might have been different, but in the damp, seaside climate of Tangier, the corpse in Goldfarber’s studio was soon discovered. Bernard Vallotton, ever alert for a story, had visited the day after we met, and his keen nose detected something amiss even from the stairwell. He called the police. The next morning Le Journal had a front-page headline: Mystery Corpse Discovered Above Cafe Blanco.
The body was described as a European male in his forties, well nourished and healthy, with no distinguishing marks, and carrying no documents. He had a broken neck, which gave me a little shiver, remembering Goldfarber’s meaty hand on the back of mine. I did well to escape that storage closet, for if he’d come back, I’d probably be lying in the Tangier morgue beside the mystery man.
The temporary mystery man, that is. The European sector of the city was no larger than a big village and almost as closely knit. Within a day, he’d been identified as Jonathan Angleford, a forty-three-year-old former research chemist, writer, and student of Moroccan poetry. He was known among the expats of the Zone as an entertaining host, the provider of more than usually potent majoun—the cannabis-laced candy of the region—and as a font of information on Moroccan customs.
“A terrible thing,” David said to me. He was getting ready for the wake, where all the Zone was expected. “He was a harmless man, all wrapped up in the poetry he was translating. He had a nice singing voice, too. He used to sing sometimes when I played at the Meridian. Really a shame.”
“The Cafe Blanco, though. That’s a bit dodgy, yes?”
“Full of fanatical young Moroccans, but where else would you find their poets? No, the rumors are unconscionable.”
“But do tell me,” I said.
“Not as I’m a gentleman.” Have I mentioned that David is the soul of honor when sober? “Surely a man can attend Cambridge without becoming suspect for one thing or another.”
“Surely.” But I thought I would like to see what Richard thought about that, and I’d like to know the commissioner’s opinion, too, although I’d avoided him since giving a highly edited account of my last meeting with Goldfarber. “He paid me off,” I told him. “In full no less. I think I’m finished.”
“And the painting?” the commissioner asked in his leaden voice.
“I didn’t see it in the gallery. It must still be at the studio.”
“We’ll keep in touch. Come in sometime and you can collect that warrant.”
You can be sure I wasted no time doing that, although I knew full well that the commissioner could secure another one anytime he wanted. David needed to get his assault case settled and return to England, but I saw no chance of broaching the subject immediately. He was genuinely upset about Jonathan Angleford, who’d been a closer, better friend than I’d realized.
“Come with me,” he said. “It’s going to be a difficult business.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, having already viewed the deceased.
“And Edith will appreciate a good turnout.”
“Edith?”
“His widow. A very nice woman, and totally devoted to Jonathan. She’s interested in the arts, too. You’ll like her, Francis. One of your interesting females whom you’ll disfigure in paint.”
David proved right. Everyone who was anyone in the foreign colony appeared for the wake, along with a cadre of youngish Moroccan novelists with wary eyes and Western dress, and older, sad-faced Moroccan poets in threadbare white djellabas, Angleford’s literary colleagues and collaborators. The Americans were represented, too, poets and authors whom I knew in one way or another, all turned out surprisingly tidy and sober, as well as enough of our own scribbling countrymen to show the flag.
The Moroccans nibbled majoun from a big silver platter, and the infidels laid waste to the drinks trays, while the late Jonathan Angleford lay in state on a platform under a stained glass window. I didn’t want to renew our acquaintance, and I avoided the open casket until David said, “Come meet Mrs. Angleford,” and led me over to the flower-banked bier.
Edith Angleford, tall, broad-shouldered, and statuesque with jet-black hair, stood on guard beside the body, and no Praetorian could have been more impressive. Deeply tanned and too angular to be pretty, she had a shapely nose, straight, dark eyebrows on a wide forehead, a thin-lipped mouth, and noble dark eyes shadowed and swollen with sorrow. The ensemble made one of those faces, right on the edge of caricature, whose shapes and lines you can grasp immediately. I would have picked up my brush in an instant.
She took David’s hand, and he said all the right things: our regret, her sorrow, the need to be strong. Then he introduced me. She thanked me for coming, her voice low and rather hoarse, cured with cigarettes and throttled by emotion. “If I only knew why,” she said to David. “If I only knew why. I can’t get my mind around it.”
“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “Completely unbelievable, though Tangier is changing.” This was the local euphemism for the Moroccan independence movement, and Mrs. Angleford picked up on it instantly.
“It wasn’t a Moroccan,” she said sharply, “no matter where he was found. I’ll never believe that. Jonathan went safely everywhere in the city, and you see his many friends here.” She glanced around the room. “And,” in a lower tone, “he was not killed above that cafe.”
David looked surprised.
“The police as much as said so. They can tell apparently. They searched our flat.” Her eyes went dead at the memory. “As if … as if … ” She couldn’t continue, and David put his arm around her shoulders. She recovered after a minute and shook her head. “He was my life,” she said.
Though I’m skeptical of big, romantic statements, recent experiences had changed my perspective. I believed her, and perhaps that is why I took leave of my senses and bounced from one folly to the next. We were departing with the gang of transatlantic poets when she appeared at my side and laid her hand on my arm. I stopped and fell behind the others.
“Come and see me,” she said. “Please, will you do that?” She slipped a piece of paper into my pocket. “My address and phone number. But you needn’t bother to call ahead,” she added in a bitter voice. “Where would I be now but at home?”
“All right,” I said. “If I can do anything to help you, of course …”
She did not wait to hear my reservations and conditions but strode away across the room in her black dress, her heels aggressive on the tiles. I caught up with David and the poets, and we spent the rest of the evening in the Petite Socco, talking about Jonathan Angleford and applying liquid erasers to the disagreeable images of his dead, painted skin and shrunken carcass. I really wanted to forget the whole business, and maybe I would have but for a bad day at the easel.
I’d slashed yet another failed Pope, too fed up with the effort even to pass the canvas on to my needy painter friend. I was fumbling in my pocket for a pencil to sketch out yet another attempt at the pontiff, when I pulled out Edith Angleford’s note. Their house was at the entrance to the Casbah, no more than a brisk walk from my studio. I hesitated for a moment, resisting obligation and entanglements. I doubted I could give her any help, but her image was so vivid in my mind that I decided it would do me no harm artistically to see her extraordinary face again.
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The house, a pretty, white dwelling that caught the sea breeze and some of the perfume of the city’s effluent, was set into the wall of the Casbah. I knocked on the door, half-hoping that she would be out or that my visit would be inopportune. No such luck. The door opened so quickly that she might have been waiting just behind it. Edith Angleford was all in black: black sweater and black slacks, black hair, and black eyes with black circles underneath them. Her mood looked black, too, suitable for a tragic heroine in modern dress.
“Come in, Mr. Bacon. I knew I would see you again.” Her severe features lightened just a trifle.
“You must have second sight,” I joked, “because I was not sure I would.”
“Some say I do.” She had a particularly piercing gaze. I have no truck with spirits, except bottled, but I had the unpleasant feeling that she knew more than I’d expected. More than I did, probably, although I had seen her husband under the tarp in the studio and perhaps had heard him in the gallery.
“This is a wonderful house,” I said when we were settled with drinks up on the roof terrace. I was quite taken with the architecture, which was spare, white, and solid, suitable for a monk’s cell or a poet’s roost. The decor was minimal, too, with only a few bright rugs, some framed photos, including one of Jonathan in full Moroccan kit, and a shelf of Edith Angleford’s silver skeet-shooting trophies.
Personally, I tend to work in clutter; the casual juxtapositions possible in a blizzard of papers and books and paints and photographs can be suggestive. Perhaps that is why I have difficulty working away from home, where the mulch of years litters the studio floor. Just the same, I can admire the clean, tidy, and ascetic that’s really more to David’s taste than mine.
Edith shook her head. “It’s lovely in the summer but green with mold all winter.”
“The curse of seaside places. I’m a city man myself.”
“What are you doing in Tangier?”
I shrugged. “Like the song: ‘The Man I Love.’”
She smiled then, a tourist in the foreign land of disaster who has spotted a fellow countryman. “I knew I wasn’t mistaken in you.”
“And you, will you stay in Tangier now?” I asked quickly. She made me uneasy, and I wanted to postpone any revelations.
Edith looked away over the jumbled cityscape with its white walls, its faded awnings, and flat roofs: a cubist pile with a severely geometric squalor. “For the moment, maybe for always, but certainly until I find out what happened to Jonathan.”
“They say that the new police commissioner is very competent.”
“They say a lot of things. Few of them are true.”
“Especially in Tangier?”
“Most especially here.”
There was a pause. I waited. The wine was good, and I ate some of the dates she’d laid out on a little yellow dish. She remained silent so long that finally, I asked her what she thought I could do to help.
She fixed me with her large eyes, dark, sad, a little mad, too. I recognized the territory. “Tell me what happened,” she said.
“The police say,” I began, but she shook her head.
“I know what they say. I want to know what you say.”
“I didn’t know your husband, although David did. I just came to the wake to keep him company.”
“I didn’t think you would lie to me,” she said.
Naturally, I tried to bluff my way and obscure the issue. I’m rather a good liar, and most of the time I find lying easy because other people are dishonest or hedging the truth in turn. Edith was having none of it.
She interrupted me, “Shall I tell you how I know?”
“It will be news to me,” I said.
“You were the only one at the wake not to look at Jonathan. The only one. If you really didn’t know him, you would be curious and indifferent. But you were not indifferent, and you were not curious.”
An unsettling degree of observation under the circumstances! I told her I had a dislike of the dead, of seeing the dead, but she had an answer to this lame suggestion.
“Then you wouldn’t have come. And your paintings—oh, yes, I’ve seen them and admired them, too—suggest you are not so squeamish.”
She had me there, and I considered what I could tell her that would be both true and safe. “Let me ask you something first. Who was your husband working for?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did he make his living?”
I thought that her face clouded just a little. “He inherited a modest sum. With his writing and translating and my teaching at the American school, we lived here quite comfortably. By our standards, anyway. Unlike most of the expats, we didn’t expect luxury.”
“Could I ask when he received his inheritance?”
“I don’t know what that has to do with anything,” she said, clearly annoyed.
She thought I was stalling, and I was, but not entirely. “I don’t know what might be important,” I said. “So I’m asking about everything.”
I half-expected her to refuse—more people balk at confiding their finances than their sex lives—but she said, “Just after he left Cambridge, as a matter of fact. It enabled us to get married.”
That sounded like a very nice coincidence, although such things do happen, and rich aunts and uncles sometimes die in a timely fashion. But sometimes, too, bright university boys get themselves onto mysterious payrolls.
“Did he know a man named Goldfarber?”
“The owner of that local gallery, you mean? No more than I did. Although we went to a couple of openings, Jonathan didn’t really approve of Herr Goldfarber.”
“No?” That was interesting, although I suspected that, on closer acquaintance, most people wouldn’t approve of the art dealer.
“Jonathan was suspicious about how the Goldfarber Gallery acquired its stock. There was a little Matisse etching I wanted to buy, but he wouldn’t let me. He was desperately idealistic, you understand.” She bit her lip. “He wanted the world to be a better place. He thought, he really thought, that change for the better was possible. He had such faith,” she said, seizing my hand. “Such enormous faith.”
I am always half-frightened of idealists, who can justify any monstrosity, but I felt the force of her belief. Whatever her husband had or had not been, she believed in him. That undoubtedly made her a fool, but who was I to mock the follies of love? She thought her husband was wonderful, and there were days when I thought David was a prince. I knew better; maybe she did, too. “I believe he went to see Goldfarber on the day he died,” I said.
“For what reason?” I heard a sharp anxiety in her voice. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Goldfarber owed me money, and as it happened when I arrived, I was wearing a burnoose. Such as your husband sometimes wore?”
She nodded. “He always said that the locals anywhere know best how to dress. And a gesture of solidarity, too.” Suddenly, her eyes grew wet. “Not that they appreciated, particularly. To them, he was an eccentric infidel and to the expats, a doubtful compatriot as you can imagine.”
I could, indeed. Edith Angleford’s life in Tangier could not have been particularly easy, caught between an idealistic husband and not one, but two materialistic communities.
“I’d been shopping in the souk that day, and I picked up a burnoose as a souvenir. The wind was cold, and I put it on before I reached the gallery. Goldfarber had obviously been waiting for someone. He opened the door, but he was upset when he saw who it was. He tried to throw me right out, and he was nervous enough to pay me so I’d leave right away.”
“Why is this important?” she asked. She did both hostility and skepticism superbly well.
“Because I think it was your husband he was waiting for. He saw the burnoose and assumed I was Jonathan.” I gave her a brief summary of what had transpired in the gallery. With e
ven a much-edited account, I risked either incriminating myself or looking totally ridiculous. I’d like to know why serious events in my life so often include an element of farce.
Edith zeroed right in on that. “You let Goldfarber lock you in a closet?”
“I thought it was the back door.”
She stared at me for a moment. She had a good stare; I thought I’d like to see her square off against the commissioner. “But then he let you out?”
“No, he never came back. Maybe he hasn’t yet. I was left to starve,” I said, but she was not interested in my fate. “Fortunately, I got out. I had a look around the gallery and the office, where I saw some drops of blood.”
“And Jonathan lying dead! I knew it, I knew it. That horrible man killed him.”
“Probably,” I said. “But whatever had happened—and I can’t tell you more because the walls are so thick that I heard nothing definite—both were gone by the time I left the closet.”
“You saw his body.” Her flat voice carried absolute conviction. She had a remarkably forceful personality, and yet I was almost convinced that a big part of her husband’s life had been closed to her.
“Not at the gallery, Edith. Not there.”
She leaped up in great distress. “Oh, God, you went to the studio and you didn’t call the police!”
“I did ensure that he would be discovered.”
“Listen to yourself! Ensured he’d be discovered! What sort of man are you? A day late! More than a day late. You can’t imagine how I felt! How I worried! For years, we were never apart more than a day or two. And he lay there a whole day and night. Rotting in this stinking damp.”
She was right. I had no justification except necessity, which is an exceedingly flexible concept. “You asked me what happened. I have told you,” I said, standing up.
“And now you wash your hands and leave,” she said bitterly.
“Remember that I’m a visitor here with no stake in anything. I’ve told you what I know at some risk to myself. ”
“And I am insufficiently grateful,” she said sarcastically. I recognized Edith Angleford as a connoisseur of big scenes and high emotions. And strong will, too, for she was struggling to control herself. Her voice dropped several decibels, and she asked, “But you are sure about Goldfarber?”