Moroccan Traffic

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘So what does he want?’ said my mother, sitting down and switching the television on to full volume. She didn’t say a thing about blowing the gaffe to Sir Robert.

  I realised she had dismissed the fact as now unimportant. I realised I was telling her nothing about Mr. Morgan she hadn’t already worked out. This is the trouble with our relationship. I said, ‘He wants a personal line on Sir Robert?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said my mother.

  I thought. ‘He wants to pick up shop floor gossip on Kingsley’s?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said my mother.

  ‘And he likes your cooking,’ I said. ‘But you’re not damn well coming to Morocco. And Sir Robert won’t let him in either.’

  ‘Are you joking?’ she said. ‘Whatever that brainbox wants, Kingsley’s can’t afford not to give him.’ Behind the smoke, I thought she was smirking.

  She could smirk. The Chairman wasn’t running a package tour. I could see myself in Morocco. And Sir Robert. And Charity. I could see Sir Robert gratefully clinching his deal while, from his boat at the seaside, Johnson Johnson blindly commuted to finish his portrait. But Mr. Morgan and Mother I couldn’t see.

  My mother could. My mother stubbed out her broken-kneed gasper. ‘Me and Morgan and Johnson. It’ll happen, Wendy,’ she said, coughing absently. ‘Change gives Birth to Leaders. You pour us two nice Cockburn’s Aged Tawnies while I fix us some travel insurance. Them Tuaregs is a shower of Vikings.’

  Chapter 4

  I flew with my mother to Morocco. As she informed me (and the rest of the passengers), we travelled above France, Spain and either the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, since Morocco, being in the north-west corner of Africa, is bordered by both. As we landed, she noticed a camel. Although expecting a camel, she was rendered temporarily silent, and kept briefly in that condition by the fact that in Morocco the officials speak French. We had, as it turned out, a great deal to do with officials.

  I prefer not to think of the two weeks before we left England. In malign and orderly succession, Mr. Morgan came to fix the plumbing, announced he was leaving for Toubkal and departed, carrying a ham and a polythene bag full of goulash, both of which were confiscated, as we later learned, by the Customs. Mr. Johnson withdrew from communication and presumably also set off, money no object, eventual destination Essaouira. Sir Robert, in a brief conversation, suggested that, at Kingsley’s expense, I should take my sick mother on vacation to Marrakesh. The suggestion had been Mr. Morgan’s since, after all, I had just come back from one holiday. It was the first hint I’d been given that the Chairman and Chief Executive of MCG had actually agreed to meet Sir Robert privately in Marrakesh. And I, his EA, was the person chosen to go with my Chairman. Not Paul or Frank or any of our top men whom everyone knew, but me, with my sick mother. That was the malign bit.

  The news of my sick mother spread round our temporary office at Hendon, and was not entirely believed. My coffee was delivered unsugared by Trish, and amusing dialogues about Beau Geste and Ealing took place between her and Val Dresden. Jokes about Morocco Bound and Humphrey Bogart occurred to nearly everybody: I grew very tired of Sam’s tune. I spent a lot of overtime with Paul Pettigrew, being made to memorise figures, and memorise ways of transmitting fresh figures. I learned more than I had ever known before about the affairs of the Kingsley company, and what was known of the affairs of our target. I didn’t think of MCG as our victim. I thought of it as an enhancement and rescue operation. When I got home, I rehearsed it all with my mother.

  Just before we flew out, Sir Robert called me in and spoke quite seriously about my hard work, and what a lot it meant to him personally. He added that, as I knew, Lady Kingsley would be in Morocco with him, and if I received a note from her, I was to respond to it. In this way, I should have an excuse to be present at meetings. Lady Kingsley was quite willing to do this but would not, of course, attend the meetings herself.

  After that he paused and said, ‘And there’s something else you should know. The chap they found dead by the safe. Remember?’

  I wondered what he was going to say. Up till then, the body had never been identified. Sir Robert said, ‘I’ve just heard from the police. He wasn’t killed by the bomb. He was shot before it went off. He’d been murdered.’

  In our office. In the Boardroom. Seminars don’t cover this sort of thing. I said, ‘Why?’

  Sir Robert shook his head. ‘Terrorists are unstable people. The police posit a quarrel, an accident.’

  It seemed likelier to me that the murder had to do with the safe-breaking. I nearly said so. Then I realised what he was really telling me. The police didn’t know that someone had been through our strategy files, because Sir Robert had said nothing about it.

  I thought about it, although not for long. I could see that there were several good reasons for silence. A witch-hunt for a culprit might upset the precious MCG meeting. He wouldn’t want a suggestion of leaks, which might shake Kingsley’s position in the market. And he didn’t have a compulsion to track down the villain for there was no sign that any use had been made of the figures. Perhaps because the man who meant to use them was murdered.

  There was, of course, the matter of justice to be considered. But I thought the police could get on with it quite well without Sir Robert’s help or mine at this juncture. I said, ‘I understand. Well, thank you for telling me.’

  Sir Robert said, ‘There’s a little more to it, Wendy, than that. Overseas, there may be other attempts to interfere with us. You’ve worked so unstintingly that I hesitate even to say it. But I have come to wonder if you wouldn’t be safer staying in London.’

  I said, ‘No one else knows the figures. There isn’t time.’

  ‘I know enough to settle things broadly. I should go alone,’ said Sir Robert. ‘You shouldn’t have to run into danger. And there’s the risk to your mother as well.’

  I looked at him in amazement. His own mother had worn out five husbands.

  I said, ‘My mother feels as I do. The bottom line is the company’s welfare.’

  ‘Wendy,’ he said. ‘If you really think so.’ He looked a little shaken. Upper management, even today, don’t always recognise how far executive training has come. I went home, and packed, and refrained from saying anything about murdered safe-breakers until our plane was irretrievably airborne. There is a bottom line. There is also a sub-bottom line; and I didn’t want to explore it. My mother and I left, resolutely, for Morocco.

  We didn’t have long to wait for the unpleasantness. It began at Marrakesh, when a Customs search at the airport revealed a radio-cassette player we weren’t supposed to have, plus thirty cassettes ranging from Corporation Finance and Takeover Strategy to How to Turn Sales Mice into Tigers. My mother had packed everything needed to send me up the corporate ladder and get us both jailed. The authorities were rigid with suspicion even before they got to her gas escape hood and her biomagnetic regulator bracelet and her packets and bottles against paratyphoid A and B, TB, gamma globulin (hepatitis and tetanus), and a sure fix for polio and malaria. When they penetrated to her anti-AIDS outfit at last, they just laid out the syringes, the needles, the sutures, and sent for the police. It was just as well I speak French.

  After the British consul arrived, we were allowed away with a warning and sent off to our hotel with the courier, who had gone very silent and didn’t have the intellectual equipment, anyway, to handle my mother on an expense-paid trip to the land of the Desert Song.

  By that time, it was dark. It was nevertheless warm when we finally got into a taxi and began driving through flat, lightless land from the airport. When we suddenly stopped, I saw we had caught up with a lot of other taxis and cars and horse-drawn vehicles and donkeys and people, who all seemed to be waiting. My mother put down the window, letting in a hubbub of noise, and some flowery smells, and some less than flowery. I could see – I knew it by now – a police uniform. My mother said, ‘Oh my God: they’re going to body-search us again. You know I put my girdle back on in
side out? You know that’s bad luck?’

  My mother’s Strong Control girdles are shaped like beer barrels: they must have had to send for a cooper. I said, ‘Why are we waiting?’

  The driver turned round. He said, with reproof, ‘The King passes.’

  At the time I was surprised. I looked out of the window. I saw, far back on the road from the airport, a black line of US stretch limos, making their way to the city. The motorcade hummed slowly nearer. A posse of motorcycle outriders came up and passed, followed by two limousines, both totally darkened. Behind them was a third, lit from within, in which a figure leaned back, amiably waving. There followed a fourth, also lit, which contained men in European dress, conversing together.

  One of them had black hair, a cracked nose and glasses. Also a tailored dark suit, with classic white shirt and neat tie. I wouldn’t have recognised who it was, except that the cavalcade slowed, and I saw him quite clearly in profile.

  Johnson Johnson, who might have a yacht on Essaouria but who was not, it was clear, safely sharing it with a friend. J. Johnson who, bitchily, must have been telling the truth from the start. He had claimed to have a portrait commission, and it was all too clear now that he had. He must be painting the Moroccan royal family.

  I tapped my mother’s unyielding arm. I said, ‘That’s the man I had lunch with two weeks ago.’

  ‘The King?’ said my mother, with interest. She didn’t mean it. Her eyes were fixed on the bifocal glasses.

  ‘Just about,’ I replied. I felt disturbed. I said, ‘He must be staying in Marrakesh, same as we are. Now what do I do?’

  My mother said, ‘You’re telling me that sharp item in the suit is your painter? What you do, Wendy, is zilch. He don’t suspect that you’re here: he don’t need to find out that you’re here. End of problem.’

  ‘That is the King’s cavalcade,’ said the courier.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You have a friend in the King’s cavalcade?’ said the courier caustically.

  ‘Just one of the great English portrait painters,’ said my mother, before I could kick her.

  There was a silence inside the car, if not outside, where the traffic, blaring, was beginning to move again. The driver said, ‘The papers say that in honour of the Anniversary of the Enthronement of the Monarch, the royal family are allowing themselves to be painted. By an English painter.’

  My mother pulled her arm out of my grasp and said, ‘Well, that’s him. Johnson.’

  ‘You know this Johnson?’ said the courier cautiously. His veins had begun to lie down. ‘Yet you do not stay at the Hotel Mamounia?’

  Sir Robert and Lady Kingsley were about to stay at the Hotel Mamounia. For several hundred pounds per night less, my mother and I were staying at the Hotel Golden Sahara: poolside restaurant, sight-seeing facilities and a display of Berber dancing and horsemanship on Mondays and Thursdays. I said, ‘Mr. Johnson has a yacht at Essaouira.’

  The driver and the courier digested this information.

  ‘Maybe,’ said the courier at last. ‘But it is several hours from Marrakesh to the sea. He will have a suite in the Mamounia. It is the custom.’

  My mother patted my hand. ‘You think Sir Robert can’t handle this? Of course he can. And what interest has Mr. Johnson in City affairs? None. You told me.’

  I knew all that. I was there when Mr. Johnson brushed off Ellwood and Seb with a shovel. I was also there when Mr. Johnson saw Kingsley’s blow up, and was angry. I wondered if Mr. Johnson would have recognised the corpse by the safe. I thought, next time I spoke to Sir Robert, I might mention it.

  At the hotel, I found two messages waiting. One, from Lady Kingsley, asked in terrible writing if I would come to the Mamounia next day at four to take tea with her. The other, from Mr. Morgan, was addressed to both my mother and me, and simply said he’d called and was sorry to miss us. I said to my mother, ‘I thought he was climbing Toubkal?’

  ‘He must have climbed it,’ she said. ‘We’ve got the morning free then tomorrow? I’m going to see some viable Arabs.’

  Unfortunately, I knew what she meant by viable Arabs. She meant Omar Sharif, Peter O’Toole and the Desert Song version of Batman. I gave her the guidebooks, to let her see they weren’t in the index. I promised to take her to the Romantic Old Town in the morning, to inspect the Assembly of the Dead and the souks. I unpacked before going to bed. That is, I unpacked everything but the Kingsley MCG papers that Sir Robert had entrusted to me, which I left tidily locked in the suitcase. If there were villains about, they would be rifling Sir Robert’s luggage, not mine. I thought I was in command of the situation.

  Next morning I rose, shared a five-course breakfast (extra) delivered (extra) by room service at the behest of my mother, and bought the only newspaper remaining in the hotel shop. It was in French. Postponing the Assembly of the Dead by mutual agreement, I read it by the pool at the feet of my mother, who was bestowed on a lounger with her Sony Walkman clamped to her ears. The cassette cover lay in her lap: Overcome the Credibility Robbers in your Speech Patterns. She said, ‘Them foreigners over here: they play football, then?’

  I followed her gaze to the newspaper photograph. I said, ‘That’s the Crown Prince of Morocco and the President of FIFA and the Wali of Casablanca attending the opening ceremony of the Africa Cup along with Mrs. Daniel Oppenheim and her husband. Next to it is a picture of the opening of Horse Week at the Royal Polo Club: the foreigners over here also ride horses. Next to that is the opening match for the Royal Tennis Trophy. . .’

  ‘You don’t need to push it,’ said my mother. ‘They’re an energetic little kingdom, I grant you. But what about all them sad-looking little boys in that picture? Someone nicked all their tickets?’

  ‘It’s all in honour of the Festival of the Enthronement,’ I said.

  ‘Well, they don’t look happy, poor little mites,’ said my mother. She bent closer, and I laid a casual arm over the caption. A shadow fell on it. A once-heard Transatlantic voice said, ‘Miss Helmann? Miss Wendy Helmann, that’s right?’

  Pug-faced, crewcut and peeling: Mr. Ellwood Pymm of the Canadian press, last seen in Johnson’s club, having lunch with the liquidised Seb. I dispatched an inclination to gape, frown or scream. I said, ‘Mother? This is—’

  ‘Ellwood Pymm, the Express of Toronto,’ he said. ‘Met your lovely daughter in London. I can’t believe it. You’re on vacation?’

  He was even wearing a tie. ‘You’re not?’ I said.

  ‘Comes with the job,’ said Ellwood Pymm. ‘Boys and girls imbibing the spirit of Morocco to take back to the wonderful listeners and readers in Canada. Six jerks from the press, and six radio. You like the hotel?’

  ‘So far,’ I said. ‘How long are you staying?’ With some adroitness, my mother had concealed the cassette case on the cloth covered piste of her lap. Its successor lay on the grass: Be Ready to do Handsprings to Resolve Each Perceived Service Failure.

  Ellwood Pymm said, ‘I guess long enough to see all those monkeys perform in the square. We’re off to the ski slopes this morning. What’s the place called? Johnson said we mustn’t miss it.’

  ‘Johnson?’ I said.

  The skin on his nose was flaking off like pink coconut. He said, ‘The guy who lunched you in London. He fixed a deal with Kingsley to finish the portrait. You know?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know Johnson had arrived. Does he ski?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Ellwood Pymm. ‘But he says there’s no snow and a great hotel that specialises in Canadian rye. He says if we play our cards right, we could stay there all day. Have you ever spent a day on mint tea?’

  ‘Arabs drink it,’ said my mother. ‘And they saw off the French. What’s Canadian rye done for you?’

  ‘Well, it keeps the Scots out of the bars,’ said Ellwood. ‘I don’t suppose, Mrs. Helmann, that you’d allow your lovely daughter to come with us to Asni? She’d be perfectly safe. Twelve nice boys and girls, and a swimming pool, Johnson
says.’

  My mother gazed back at Ellwood Pymm, with her olive face and round, ringed black eyes and hand-painted headscarves and three layers of King’s Road ethnic caftan hefted over her girdle. Even in one hour in the shade, she had darkened like a Polaroid film. She said, ‘I remember what it’s like to be young and pretty and a bee round a honeypot. Of course, take Wendy away. Don’t think of me. We was going to the Assembly of the Dead and the souks. Another day, we will go. If I am well enough.’

  I looked at Ellwood Pymm and he looked at me. I said, ‘I’m afraid. . .’

  He had lovely American manners, when he was sober. He said, ‘Mrs. Helmann, of course I wouldn’t deprive you of Wendy. Some day, if I may, I’ll come and take you both out. Meanwhile, you look after yourselves. You go to the souks. You know the lingo?’

  ‘No,’ said my mother swiftly.

  Ellwood Pymm said, ‘Then why don’t I lend you a phrasebook? You let me have it back when you’re finished. Don’t thank me. Have a wonderful day! This is an amazing old country.’

  I took the handbook he was holding out. It was entitled Making Arab Friends for Your Company and meant that, whether I wished it or not, he and I were going to have another encounter. My mother looked emotionally grateful. I gave him a smile full of muted appreciation. He lifted the straw hat he had been carrying and prepared to move off. His eyes fell on my forgotten newspaper. ‘Poor little sods,’ he said, with compassion. ‘Now that sure wouldn’t occur in Toronto.’

  To reach the walled town of Marrakesh, it is necessary to pass through the wide modern streets of the French city, built during the Protectorate and sunnily Western in style. Between the palms, the orange trees and the marigold beds of the boulevards, horse- drawn victorias full of red tourists are jammed between yellow taxis and droves of snarling Motobecane Vespas Super Bleu ridden by determined veiled women in glasses. At my request, our little taxi dropped us in the shopping quarter, where my mother, before meeting Omar Sharif, required to buy modern postcards.