by James Lepore
As she smoked, voices drifted into the bedroom from somewhere in the apartment. Naked and feeling suddenly vulnerable, she found Lahani’s shirt on the floor next to the bed and put it on. One of the voices was Lahani’s. The other she could not make out until she remembered the forceful, oddly sing-song Arabic of Mohammed as he spoke to the three young men in the Carrières Thomas souk courtyard a few weeks ago. She took the tape recorder from her bag, turned it on, and slipped it into the monogrammed front pocket of Lahani’s pure white, beautifully tailored shirt, stepping silently into the long hall that led from the rear of the apartment, where the bedrooms were located, to the living room and kitchen area. Before the corridor ended she stopped to listen. The voices, definitely those of Lahani and Mohammed, were much clearer now. Breathing slowly, calmly, remaining in the shadows of the hall, she peered into the living room where she saw Lahani and his stocky driver sitting across from each other in brocaded wing chairs, a small inlaid table with glasses of water on it between them. Their faces were illuminated by a shaft of moonlight from the slightly ajar door to the balcony behind them. They talked quietly for some five minutes, Mohammed leaning forward at one point and seeming to repeat several times the same questioning phrase. From outside, the call to morning prayer could now be heard, piped here as almost everywhere in Casablanca through loudspeakers, but nevertheless strangely beautiful and compelling. Megan watched as the two men stood and faced east then went through the ritual of bowing, standing again, prostration, sitting, and finally prostration again, reciting the prayers of salat as they did. When they were done, they exchanged inshallahs and kisses on each cheek and then Mohammed left and Abdel went out to the balcony.
Megan had been with Lahani on many occasions coincidental with the prescribed times—before dawn, midday, four PM, sunset, and before midnight—for the salat ritual, and had never seen him pray before. Pondering this, she reached into her shirt pocket and turned off the recorder. The clicking sound this action made was not loud—it was all but silent—but it made Megan paranoid. Before turning back toward the bedroom, she chanced one more look into the living room. There, standing in the entrance foyer, was Lalla, staring at Megan as she placed her key into a deep pocket in her djellaba. Lalla’s eyes were as clear and as piercing as the ones on the Afgahni mountain women she had seen in National Geographic pictorials. Megan nodded and said, sabaah al-khayr, Lalla—“good morning, Mrs.”—having picked this up along with a few other stock Arabic phrases during her time in the country. Then she turned and walked slowly back to the bedroom, where she quickly put the recorder back in her bag.
This taping was not impulsive, as the previous one of Mohammed and his young friends had been. She was angry at Lahani, but frightened as well, and knowing someone’s secrets was always a useful means of protection. In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth and dabbed perfume in strategic spots on her exquisite body, then she slipped off the silk shirt and got into bed. She would have to act for a few more hours, something she had been doing well for many years, given all the men she had seduced who she basically despised. It was different now, though. There was vastly more at stake. Lahani had spoken of dual Saudi and American citizenship for their child, whom he expected confidently would be a boy. Of private tutors, of his son’s role in the family business—this the first mention of a family by the charming but highly discreet Lahani. It wasn’t simply these remarks that triggered Megan’s reaction, though they were bad enough. It was Lahani’s attitude. He seemed to know, as a fact, that Megan would bear the child and that he would control its destiny. This chilled her, because it struck her that she was in a Muslim country, where fathers reigned supreme and where Abdel, the Muslim father of her child, had untold wealth, power, and connections. Her response had been to demurely agree while secretly planning to get on the earliest flight to anywhere in Europe.
Lahani was the lover that women dreamed of, strong, masterful, and ready at short intervals to give and receive great pleasure. She was sure he would want to have her when he returned to bed. He did, and she acted her part flawlessly, receiving him with award-winning delight. But while he was inside her, pressing his body insistently against hers, slowly getting ready to climax, she remembered him in a different prostrate position as he prayed just a few minutes earlier. The devout Muslim acknowledging his God was now thrusting at her and moaning. Something dark and cold took hold in Megan’s heart, something beyond mere fear, as Lahani’s moaning increased and he had his orgasm and she managed to fake hers. Afterward Lahani fell soundly asleep, as he usually did after they made love, and Megan slowly rose and went into his lavishly appointed bathroom where she washed his semen from her and then, not satisfied, decided to take a shower, to wash again.
In the tile-and-glass enclosure, the hot water loosed the cold fingers gripping her heart. She stood for a long time, her head bowed, as the water from the shower mingled with her tears. But there was no self-pity in Megan Nolan. None. Composed again, her eyes red but dry, rubbing herself down with one of Lahani’s thick Egyptian cotton towels, she acknowledged that she had played her game of seduction and plunder one time too many. And that she had played that game with the wrong man. She could not have picked one more wrong than Abdel al-Lahani, who, powerful and single-minded, neither desperately needed her nor supinely loved her like other men had. And there was something else about him, something having to do with his praising Allah so humbly and then fucking her so proudly. Something that made her skin crawl. Now, for the sake of the child in her womb, she would have to outwit him.
She had no doubt that she would.
Two hours later, Mohammed drove her to the Farah and waited while she packed her things and checked out. He dropped her off at the front of the Hyatt and again waited in the circular drive while she went in. Instead of checking in, though, she went up to the second-floor coffee shop where she could look down and see Mohammed standing, still and observant, at the passenger side of the limo, watching the hotel’s front doors. She gave her two large suitcases to the concierge along with a large tip and asked him to have them put into the room she had reserved the day before, knowing that if she checked in herself, the hotel would hold on to her passport for a day or two while they registered her with the Foreign Office. Then she walked out the back of the lobby and along the winding garden paths that connected most of the swanky downtown hotels until she reached the terrace of the Oasis, the Farah’s bar. There, she eventually found Elnardo carrying Bloody Marys to a group of early tennis players. When he was free, she asked him to get a cab to meet her at the Farah’s service entrance, which he did, unquestioning and with a friendly, conspiratorial smile.
In the cab, Megan asked the driver to recommend a quiet pension in the city’s old colonial neighborhood. He took her to a place called La Parisienne that looked charming, but she didn’t go in there either. She sat on a small strip of grass across the street and watched a group of boys playing soccer on a dirt field next to a cemetery. When she was sure she was not being watched herself, she picked up her two small bags and walked around the corner to La Porte Rouge, whose red door and small sign she had spotted from the cab. In her room she called Air Maroc and booked a fight to New York for the next day at one PM. Then she called down to her host, a fat Frenchman whose bald head was sweating despite the fact that the place had more than adequate air-conditioning, and asked for ice. He reminded her that he needed her passport and she assured him that she would drop it off on her way out later in the evening. When the ice came, she wrapped a large handful of it in a towel, which she held to her forehead as she lay down on the bed. To wait.
She would not get her story, but she had other things on her mind now. Her father, for example, and making amends. Thinking of him and his reaction to her news, she let her memories come. Of her aching love for him as a girl. Of her bitter tears when he left on his long trips. Of how unimaginably happy she had been when he bought the house in New Canaan and then eventually stopped going away. Of how content
she had been—more than content, ecstatic in the way only a lonely little girl can be—to have the small pieces of himself he was willing—or able—to give in the years that followed. Of the nights she cried, fearing that he would leave her again. Of how her preteen friends had envied her her movie-star-looking father. Of their rare but wonderful outings to the mall, to the movies, to the park. Pat would help her raise the child, and in this way she would make amends. At this thought, unthinkable only a few weeks ago, Megan smiled her first genuine smile in a long time.
While placing her call to Air Maroc, Megan had thumbed through the Porte Rouge’s information portfolio, where she had come across a small color brochure that urged her to visit its sister hotel in Paris, the Hotel Lorraine on Rue des Fleurs. While idly looking through this badly done three-page leaflet, a postcard with a picture of a saint on it—St. Thérèse of Lisieux—had fallen out. She had picked it up and brought it to the bed with her, and now, still holding the ice to her head, she lifted it and read the prayer on the back:
MIRACULOUS PRAYER TO THE LITTLE FLOWER
O Little Flower of Jesus, ever consoling troubled souls with beavenly graces, in your unfailing intercession I place my confident trust. From the heart of our divine Savior, petition those blessings of which I stand in greatest need, especially ... (Here mention your intention). Shower upon me your promised roses of virtue and grace, Dear St. Thérèse, so that, swiftly advancing in sanctity and perfect love of neighbor, I may someday receive the crown of life eternal. Amen.
Megan turned the card over and looked at the picture of the simple and vastly humble Carmelite nun who had died at the age of twenty-four and was canonized twenty-eight years later by Pope Pius XI. Here mention your intention, Megan smiled again, though this one was quite rueful.
“Take care of my baby, St. Thérèse,” she said out loud, her first prayer since she left the church at age six, right after her first communion. She had wondered at the time if her father would notice, sure that he would not, and of course she had been right. He would notice the change in her now, though. Of that she had no doubt.
~23~
PARIS, JANUARY 7, 2004
As Pat and Catherine were reading of the murder of Charles Raimondi, a tall, handsome Arab, carrying a Vuitton briefcase, and his squat, balding, not-so-handsome older companion, also Arab, were checking out of Paris’s Ritz Carlton hotel. Both were well-dressed, the tall man elegantly so, the smaller one, though his clothes were perfectly cut, not quite able to pull it off, like the proverbial farmer visiting the big city. Outside, they stowed their Gucci bags in the trunk of a waiting Mercedes sedan and then got in the backseat. In front were two men of similar age, size, and bearing, but wearing jeans, Nike sneakers, thick sweaters, and leather jackets. They drove west through the city on Avenue Victor Hugo into the Bois de Boulogne, the famous woods that at night were awash with characters out of a Fellini movie, all looking for sexual and/or commercial success, but that in daytime were just a large, pleasant, heavily wooded park. Making their way deliberately—and watchfully—around a placid lake, they came finally to a car park behind a boathouse that was closed for the winter. Here, all four men quickly stripped and the two in the back exchanged attire with the two in the front. The tall Arab handed two passports and an envelope containing two airline tickets to his counterpart in front, and then he and his companion exited the car and watched as it slowly drove off. They walked across the car park—looking like any two of the more than six million North African Muslims who had immigrated to France in the last ten years—and got into an older-model gray Peugeot. In the backseat were two young Arab men, Saudis, in their mid-twenties, dressed in jeans and ski jackets and woolen caps and gloves. Nods and one-word greetings were exchanged, and then they left the park, the small, squat man driving.
The tall one still had his briefcase. He opened it as his companion headed out of the city, extracted one of a dozen or so slender compact cell phones, and pushed one of his speed dial buttons. When it began to ring, he put it on speakerphone and placed it on the console of the small car, between him and his companion.
“Yes, Onyx,” a man answered.
“You have heard?”
“Yes, I saw it on CNN an hour ago. Where are you?”
“I am about to get on a plane:”
“And Mohammed?”
“He is with me:”
“Good. It is best:”
“Yes.”
“Did you go to the convent?”
“Yes.”
“Anything?”
“No, no luck:”
“And the father and the French detective?”
“I have lost them:”
“As I said, I can no longer help you:”
The tall man was silent, as if to express his reluctant acceptance of this fact.
“Are you coming to Riyadh next week?”
“Yes,” the tall man answered.
“Good. I will stop by to see you. God be with you:”
“And with you, Uncle:”
The tall man clicked the phone off and, cranking the window down a few inches, slipped it into the stream of traffic.
“You did not tell him about the two men lost last night,” said the driver.
“No, I did not:”
“You should have sent me:”
“It is just as well. If the father and the woman arrive in Kolin, we will kill them, too:”
“We are better off, just the two of us:”
The tall man did not answer. He was thinking of Megan Nolan. She was smarter and braver and much more vicious than he had thought. “It was bitter cold that night,” the old nun had said. “To leave the child out like that, Monsieur ... Yes, it was quite unfortunate:” She had killed the child. Soon, she would pay with her own life, worthless as it was. In the trunk of the Peugeot was a small arsenal: grenade launchers, dozens of grenades, AK-47s, handguns, and enough hexogen to blow up all of Kolin if necessary. The two in the back, Jamal and Kumar, raised in the best madrassahs the kingdom had to offer, were explosives experts as well as religious fanatics. They were living only for the day when they could sacrifice themselves on his orders.
They were heading east on the Periphique, the ring road that circled Paris, in moderate traffic. The drive to Prague would take about seven hours. From there to Kolin was no more than another hour. By this time tomorrow, it would be done.
“There are four of us, my friend;” the tall man said, remembering finally that his companion had spoken and should be answered.
“You mean our martyrs in the back? Soon we will be two again:” They were speaking in French, a language they knew to be completely foreign to Jamal and Kumar.
“Yes, of course,” said the tall man. “They will be in heaven with their virgins:”
“And soon the Falcon will fly back to Andalus, inshallah.”
“Yes, Mohammed, inshallah.”
~24~
NUREMBURG, JANUARY 7, 2004
Geneviève LeGrand, having interrogated many suspected criminals in her day, felt uncomfortably like the tables had been turned. She mused for a moment about the cause of this role reversal, Charles Raimondi, whose duplicitous life and sudden, brutal death had brought her interrogators so swiftly to her hotel room door in Nuremburg. She had allowed herself to believe that she was still desirable, that her beauty was not marred, but rather enriched by age. How foolish. How utterly banal. Personal humiliation, however, she could accept. She understood that suffering was the price of vanity. But now it seemed that in addition to personal humiliation, her fantasy of a romantic liaison with the handsome and much younger Raimondi might have caused the demise of her career and her professional reputation as well. That would be a bitter pill.
“Did you call him when you saw the flowers in your room, Geneviève?” Marcel Dionne asked. He was the good cop, handsome, baby-faced, using her first name, speaking softly. Only he wasn’t a cop. He was DST, and not simply DST but a member of a special homeland security a
ntiterrorism unit so secret that only those at the highest level of law enforcement in France even knew it existed. LeGrand did not miss the irony in the fact that, as an assistant chief inspector of police, she had been one of the recipients, two months after 9/11, of a memo from the interior minister himself advising of the formation of this task force and urging the fullest cooperation with its members.
“Yes.”
She had placed the flowers—hothouse roses and carnations—in a tall glass vase on the room’s spacious desk, where she could see them from bed. Looking at them now, it was hard to believe that Raimondi was dead and, more incredible, that he was the subject of an antiterror investigation. But there it was.
“And? What did he say?” Dionne pressed her.
“He said a complication had arisen regarding the Megan Nolan case. He told me not to discuss the case with anyone until he and I could meet and talk in person. We arranged to have dinner when I returned to Paris:”