by James Lepore
He sat a few feet from Megan, crossing his long legs, smoothing his trousers, and then clasping his manicured hands on his lap before speaking. “Is this your first trip to Marrakech?”
“No.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I don’t know yet:”
“May I suggest a place? I am there often:”
“Of course. Where do you stay?”
“I have my own place. But I know several hotels where Westerners are welcome. If you give them my name it will help:”
“And your name is?”
“Lahani. Abdel al-Lahani. My Western friends call me Del. And yours?”
“Megan Nolan.”
“You are American.” This was a statement, not a question. It was obvious that she was American and therefore it was not a very insightful statement. But something about the way he said it gave Megan pause. Could it actually be condescension? Or better yet, contempt? The tone of superiority in his deep and confident voice was barely detectable, but nevertheless there, and it sent a mild thrill through her heart. A thrill that stirred the demon anticipation that had been sleeping there for quite some time.
“American,” she answered, her voice neutral, her eyes flat. She could tell by her new friend’s New York or Parisian-cut suit and impeccable grooming that he had money and decent taste. These were two of her three prerequisites in a man she might take to bed. The third was harder to define. She often thought of it as unconscious superiority, the kind so obvious in royalty or celebrity or the bored children of the nouveau riche. Whatever it was, she knew it when she saw it, and if the Arab sitting next to her had it in the abundance she thought he did, then the dance might be on.
“And you?” she asked.
“I am Saudi Arabian:”
“I see. A prince of the blood?”
“No, nothing of the sort. I am a businessman. That is all:”
“What kind of business?”
“I sell influence:”
“What kind of influence:”
“The kind that gets people large government contracts—to explore for oil, to build factories, to rape the land:”
“How is it that you have this influence to sell?”
“Such a good question, but one that would take time to answer. Perhaps we can have dinner in Marrakech. I will be there for five days. My home is in the medina. There is a small hotel on the same block, the Sultana, that you would like very much, I think.”
Megan thought this offer over, seeing, dispassionately, all the phases of the relationship unfold before her mind’s eye. So sure of himself, this rich Saudi.
“I leave for Zagora tomorrow,” she answered.
“Zagora? In the mountains? What brings you to Morocco, Ms. Nolan, may I ask?”
“I’m a writer. I’m researching a story.”
“What kind of story?”
“There is a blind family living outside of Zagora, in the foothills. Husband, wife, six children, five of them blind. I am going to interview them:”
“And how did you hear about this family?”
“A friend of mine was in the Peace Corps there. He told me about them:”
“And what will you write about them? That they are blind and poor?”
“Yes, the usual bullshit:”
After she said this, Megan casually put her cigarette out in the dirt at her feet, turning away from Lahani for a second. When she turned back, her features composed, even tranquil, she looked for but saw no trace of a shadow in the businessman’s dark, deep-set eyes. Indeed, he smiled and barked out a short laugh, throwing his head quickly back as he did.
“Such cynicism,” he said. “And who will buy such a story?”
“If I understate it enough, The New Yorker, or Harper’s.”
“No drama:”
“God forbid:”
“God forbid. Do you believe in God, Ms. Nolan?”
“No, but it’s faith that matters, not belief.”
“A fine distinction:”
“Not so fine. And you? Are you a believer?”
“I am Muslim. For me there is Allah and no other.”
“You’re not a terrorist, are you?” Megan asked. “A Wahabi madman?”
“Such direct questions,” said Lahani, “are not asked in the Arab world.” Megan watched his eyes as he spoke. She had meant to insult him and his culture. But again he seemed amused, not in the least angry or put off. Her intention was not to get a glimpse of what the real Abdel al-Lahani might look like beneath the highly civilized mask he wore, although that glimpse might be interesting, and useful. It was to set the pattern of their relationship early. But either he was very clever, very much in control, or the mask was real. Each of these alternatives intrigued her, as did the way his dark eyes flashed brightly when he smiled and laughed. He was handsome, she had to admit, and there was an intriguing hint of cruelty in his finely sculpted lips and mouth.
“Are they answered?” she said.
“Your question is a statement, is it not, Ms. Nolan? I am in charge, you are saying. I am not afraid. Statements do not require answers:”
“I already know the answer.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, you either are or you aren’t.” It was Megan’s turn to smile. As she did, her face, which had shown no emotion throughout the conversation except perhaps mild curiosity, was suddenly transformed. Her austere beauty no longer a barrier, her smile became an invitation: to innocence and corruption, joy and pain. As smiles went it was pretty breathtaking, and she could see from Lahani’s reaction, watching as he drank in his first taste of the most dangerous drink he would ever take, that he thought so, too.
“Good, then we can have dinner tonight:”
“It will have to be late. I have to sleep, and make some calls:”
“By all means. Say the lobby of the Sultana at ten?”
The Sultana was indeed an exquisite hotel—some twenty well-appointed rooms surrounding a hushed and verdant courtyard with a splashing fountain and reflecting pool at its center. While her tub was filling with hot water, Megan stood on her balcony looking down on the courtyard. The fountain was in the form of a lion’s head spewing water from its flared nostrils. She watched the reds and yellows of the pool’s tiled floor shimmer as the water moved in concentric waves over them toward the outer rim of the pool and then lapped back. Megan loved irony. She saw it as the ultimate cosmic hypocrisy, the final revenge of the gods of fate against humans who were too vain to know they were vain. It was therefore a matter of the most supreme irony to Megan that after ten years of tramping around Europe, caring for nothing except seducing rich men, accepting with thinly veiled disdain their gifts of cash and jewelry while letting them know that she was in charge of her own life and of theirs, she had succumbed to something outside of herself.
On September 11, 2001, she had been in bed with one of these men, a beautiful twenty-four-year-old graduate student in linguistics at the Sorbonne, whose father owned some fifteen high-brow jewelry stores throughout France. She had returned from the bathroom after their afternoon lovemaking to find Alain at the edge of the bed, glued to the television screen in their room at the Ritz, his eyes agog. A Noam Chomsky conspiratorialist, he was later to declare with confidence, his veneer of bored sophistication back in place, that it was the Jews who flew the planes into the buildings in New York and Washington. But that afternoon his face was unguarded as his child’s brain absorbed the events transpiring across the Atlantic—several thousand Americans dead, the president and the Congress scurrying for safety, America in shock as it watched the repeated clips of the twin towers being hit and then collapsing. On that face Megan saw satisfaction and delight. And to her amazement she was angry. The smugness on the femininely beautiful face of America-hater Alain Tillinac had struck Megan Nolan dumb. To this day she summoned up that face, that look, with revulsion.
She sent Alain home and spent the rest of September 11 herself glued to the television. The
next day she went to Paris’s huge Bibliothèque Publique where she read all of the national and international papers. Then she saw a free computer, went to it, and typed al-Qaeda into its search engine. That click of her mouse had since led her down many paths in Europe and the Middle East. The latest had taken her to Morocco, where she was researching a story not about the blind family in Zagora but about its one sighted member, the eldest son, whom she had reason to believe was a member of an obscure terrorist group called the Al Haramain Brigade. And now there was another irony. There was a new rich man in her life, the first man, period, since the effete Alain Tillinac. This man had already been helpful. He had driven her in his Mercedes limousine from the train station to the Sultana, where he arranged for her to get a quite beautiful room overlooking the courtyard with its lovely fountain. He had also promised to find a competent and trustworthy driver/translator to take her to Zagora, a rugged drive across the Middle Atlas Mountains, nearly to the edge of the great Sahara. And he was a sophisticated Muslim, a Saudi who could perhaps help her gain insight into Wahabism, the most extreme form of Islamo-fascism, a “religion” that called for the murder of all infidels, including not only Christians and Jews, but all non-Wahabi Muslims as well. The ultimate in ethnic cleansing.
Abdel al-Lahani was handsome and sexy and exuded power, and she hadn’t been with a man in over a year. He saw her, she was certain, as the next in a long line of sexual conquests. Perhaps she could pick his brain and his wallet and disabuse him of such thoughts all in one fell swoop. Smiling to herself, she turned and went into her room, where she would soak in her bath and reintroduce herself to the old Megan Nolan.
~5~
PARIS, JANUARY 3, 2004
Catherine Laurence had called Pat Nolan on her cell phone from the lobby of his hotel. Afterward she crossed the street and found an empty park bench from which she could watch Le Tourville’s elegant front entrance. She wore a suit similar to the one she had worn the day before. This one was a charcoal gray. Under it she wore a pleated tuxedo-style blouse with a black string tie and a silver choker at her neck. Underneath she had on the simple, barely-there black bra and panties that had driven her husband wild when they first met. Her half-heels were not stylish, but she walked a lot in her job and, at her height—close to five-ten—she really didn’t need to accentuate legs that, though men clearly noticed and seemed to like, she felt were much too long. On bad days she felt like a giraffe, or a newborn colt.
The knot that she had felt in her stomach yesterday when she met Nolan had surprised and pleased her. Surprised because she had felt nothing like it for several years, and pleased because she could savor it without having to even think about an entanglement with Nolan, whom she had assumed until an hour ago she would never see again. It was likely the protection afforded by this thought that emboldened her to don her sexy underwear that morning, to go forth as a sexual being once again. She had pictured the tall and handsome American on an airplane, not sitting across from her at dinner in her apartment in Marais.
Catherine, her legs crossed, her black trench coat on her lap, listened idly to the band while reviewing the strange case now solely, it seemed, in her hands. She had been a policewoman long enough to know that she could believe anything of anybody. But the years had also taught her to trust her intuition, and her intuition told her that Pat Nolan was no aider and abettor of terrorism. There were, however, missing pieces to the Pat Nolan puzzle. Why the rush to cremation? Why the reaching and touching of his daughter”s left hand through the hospital sheet? And, most intriguing, why the sharp look, fleeting but discernible, in Pat Nolan’s eyes when the sheet was pulled down to reveal Megan’s face? A look that spoke not of anguish or of relief, but of something closer to surprise and possibly confusion. Nolan, who had been told to expect the worst, did not look like a man who would be surprised or confused by much.
It was also in Catherine Laurence’s intuitive nature to question authority. Her periodic performance reviews made consistent reference to her “difficulty in adapting to situations,” which in French politically correct newspeak meant she refused to follow orders to a T, to bow without dissent to the dictates of all superiors. Why, Catherine asked herself now, was the antiterrorism division of the Judicial Police not involved in the Nolan matter, a case with grave national security implications? Why the DST on its own? Why were the Moroccans not interested in pursuing a man who had killed thirty of their citizens? And why was LeGrand taking orders from Charles Raimondi? Perhaps he really was DST, but Catherine would have bet her pension—the sacred cow of all French statists—that he was not. Underneath that facade of glamour and smugness he was a coward, and no coward could last long in the DST, with its roots in la Resistance and its line of unsung but true heroes from then until the present.
With the band between songs, Catherine stopped her analysis, and in the last of the day’s light, made her second careful sweep of the park, taking in the entrance at the corner of Avenue de la Mottes Picquets, where a middle-aged man in a tan trench coat was buying a bag of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor; the people walking on either side of a low wrought iron fence; the bandstand with a small group of jazz lovers standing nearby waiting for the next selection, and those sitting on benches situated, like hers, on the edge of a manicured lawn. On one of these were two young Arab men in jeans, athletic shoes, and down jackets, unzipped in the mild weather. When she first spotted these two, on entering the park, she thought she saw, briefly, a patch of dark brown leather tucked under the rib cage of the one nearest her. When she looked now she saw that his red jacket was pulled closely to his chest.
The endpoint of her sweep was Le Tourville’s elegant entrance, with its Belgian block courtyard and tall glass doors under a stylishly undulating portico of stone and glass. Standing under the portico, in khakis and a weatherbeaten leather jacket, was Pat Nolan. He looked better-groomed than he had the day before, with his five o’lock shadow gone and his thick wavy hair parted and brushed away from his forehead. She could see the whites of his eyes as he, too, seemed to make a casual reconnaissance of the hotel’s busy courtyard, as if contemplating whether or not to hail one of the cabs parked near its entrance. Catherine watched as Nolan instead put his hands—large and cleanly sculpted hands, masculine hands, she remembered—in his jacket pockets, made his way out of the courtyard, and then turned right, in the direction of the Métro station on the corner. The Arabs, she noted, rose and headed, not quite casually, in the same direction.
She made it to the platform in time to follow all three of them onto a train heading north across the river. She took a seat at the far left end of the car. The Arabs, perhaps in their mid-twenties and evenly matched in height and wiry build, one in red and the other in a blue jacket, stood a few meters away, holding on to the chrome poles that marked the car’s center sliding doors. Beyond them by another meter or two, Nolan sat on a side bench. Settling into the gentle rocking motion of the train, Catherine wondered where they were going and what would happen when they got there.
~6~
PARIS, JANUARY 3, 2004
Inspector LeGrand had asked Pat if he was aware of any friends or associates that Megan may have had in Paris, and he had answered no, which was the truth at the time. But the bank receipt in Megan’s wallet had reminded him of one: a gypsy fortune-teller named Annabella Jeritza, whose storefront operation in Montmartre Megan made it a point to visit at least once a year, around the Christmas holidays if she could at all arrange it. Megan had spoken of Madame Jeritza over the years, but it was not until she dragged Pat with her in 1999 that he realized that an incongruous but genuine friendship had taken root between them. Megan had brought her a Christmas present that year, and though the old crone had charged them each the full fare for telling them their futures, afterward she had closed the shop and fed them tea from a samovar and flaky pastries dripping with honey. There had been a firm knocking at the front door and the telephone had rung several times, but Jeritza seemed ob
livious as she concentrated on their small party, which ended when her son, a swarthy and swaggering little man in his forties, came home drunk and knocked over the whiskey bottle that Annabella had been using to fortify their tea. Pat, though more than a little drunk, did not miss the light that appeared in the old crone’s eyes when she looked at Megan, whose hand she occasionally held and quietly stroked.