by Tahir Shah
Ghita had dressed up in a profusion of couture, pieces that had not enjoyed any takers on the streets downtown. Her scarf was by Fendi, and her dress by Chanel, the hat a Fleur de Paris creation, and the belt was Hermès. A gift from Ghita’s father, it was far too precious to sell, even by a spiteful daughter.
Unlike the Ghita Omary of old, she now felt self-conscious at being so overdressed. But she knew very well that the only way to be taken seriously at Chez Louche was to be way over the top.
Swaggering towards the entrance, she allowed the pair of towering Nubian guards to pull the doors apart, while the Chinese dwarf attendant scattered rose petals at her feet. More importantly though, she made an effort to appear completely nonchalant and bored by it all, as if she had seen it a thousand times before – which of course she had.
Her foot hadn’t taken a single step through into the leopard-skin interior when Laurent Louche himself waddled up and air-kissed Ghita’s cheeks.
‘My darling!’ he swooned. ‘Where have you been? I have been worried sick about you!’
‘Monaco,’ Ghita replied conceitedly. ‘But it is so tiresome in winter. You know how it is.’
‘So drab,’ screamed Laurent. He gave a snigger. ‘But who has been doing your hair my darling? Not that monkey at the Salon Mustique?’
He snapped his fingers and a gaggle of fledgling attendants slipped out from crevices. Dancing around her with garlands and scattering yet more petals, they directed Ghita to a throne-like seat, and the business of beautifying began.
Laurent himself swanned about, fussing over his clientele, he lavished superlatives, and his own inimitable wisdom.
‘You must leave him, but only after taking him for every penny he’s got,’ he told a pretty Italian woman dressed in pea-green silk. And he said to another: ‘What do you think beauty is for, if not as a tool to get what you want from a man?’
One of the reasons that Chez Louche was such a financial success was that its proprietor decided what treatment he would administer to each woman who came through the door. He would not have dreamt of allowing them to decide for themselves.
By rationing the most expensive techniques, he created an insatiable demand. A day didn’t go by without a craggy matriarch from the good side of Anfa begging for one of the more extravagant procedures, and being turned away.
A team of fourteen staff laboured at the throne on which Ghita perched, a glass of chilled vintage Krug in her hand.
After forty minutes, Laurent Louche glided up with an antique mirror. It had once been owned by the English mistress of Napoleon III. He held the glass to Ghita’s face.
‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’ he giggled.
‘You work wonders my darling,’ she said.
Louche blushed, and fell at her knees, his lips pressed gently to the back of her hand.
Choosing the moment, Ghita looked into Laurent’s eyes and blew him a kiss.
‘I have a favour to ask you, my dearest,’ she said.
‘If it’s not a big one I shall be cross.’
‘I feel awful at asking anything of you at all,’ Ghita said, moistening her lips with champagne.
Laurent Louche tapped a fingertip to his ear.
‘Whisper in here my darling,’ he said, ‘and your wish shall be my command.’
One hundred and thirteen
Uncertain quite what to do with Bogart’s treasure, Blaine took it back to the secret apartment and hid it in his satchel.
The fact that Ghita had solicited services from the witches of Sidi Abdur Rahman suggested she might be unnerved at the thought of having a black-magic manuscript in her home.
The American was about to put the satchel on the shelf in the hallway, when something caught his eye.
The bottom edge of the bag had a small tear along it, where the two main seams joined. He didn’t remember ever noticing it before. Taking it through to the window, he prised the two seams apart. Strange, he thought, it’s out of shape. Without thinking, he delved his fingers into the hole.
A moment later he was holding a booklet.
Its cover was red, adorned with a globe, olive branches, and the words ‘United Nations Laissez-Passer’.
One hundred and fourteen
The prison van was constructed from armoured steel, the kind used in bullion trucks. It had a bullet-proof glass windscreen, and a sealed compartment for the convict. There was even a spray nozzle mounted on the ceiling, through which nerve gas could be piped in the event of an attempted break-out.
The van made its way through the gauntlet of security checks, but never once were the doors opened, for fear that the prisoner would try to escape.
Hicham Omary spent the entire journey crouched on the floor, his hands still cuffed behind his back. Thankfully, the blindfold had been untied at the last minute, before he was loaded in.
For the move, Omary had been dressed in fluorescent orange overalls. In the unlikely event he managed an escape, it would be easier for a sniper to spot him and to bring him down.
But escape was the last thing occupying Omary’s thoughts.
Incarceration had taught him to mind-wander. Staring at a fixed point on the floor or the wall, he would begin the spiral down through layers of interwoven memory. The technique tended to take him to the bedrock of his youth, played out in the carefree streets of Casablanca’s downtown.
All of a sudden he was playing marbles in the dust.
There were three of them – Adil, Hassan and he. For an entire summer they spent almost every minute together. How old could they have been?
Omary squinted to see the detail. Seven? Eight?
They always went to the same place – a disused cinema across from the old Christian church, not far from the Hyatt. Through that long scorching summer they had made it their den.
They called it Dar Majnoun, ‘House of the Possessed’.
Sometimes they used to rip up the floorboards and set fire to them, or smoke cigarettes cadged from the old winos in the nearby bars, or scrawl their names on the walls with sticks blackened in the fire.
For Omary, the den was part of his own fantasy, of being a Berber warrior, protecting the family’s homestead in the centuries before the Arabs came.
One night they all cut their forearms with a penknife and pressed the wounds together, swearing an oath of life-long fraternity, a friendship bonded by blood.
The van hit a bump and Omary’s memory was jolted fast-forward.
He was much older now – twenty-two or -three.
He had a little office in Derb Omar, not much more than a lean-to up on the roof of a disused warehouse. But to him it was the beginning of great things.
He could see himself in there as though it were yesterday.
Piles of papers from deals he had already done. There were boxes of stock – plastic toys from Hong Kong and women’s lingerie from southern Spain. And there were half a dozen tea crates packed with vials of cheap perfume.
They were minuscule, holding no more than a few drops of the precious liquid, and so were affordable to the middle class. Omary, who had dreamt up the scent himself, called it l’Eau de Topaz. The fragrance was a massive hit – so much so that the black market price was ten times what he sold it for.
The van took a sharp turn and the floor rattled hard.
Where were Adil and Hassan right then, he wondered? Where were his blood brothers in his time of need?
Omary frowned, then let out a slow sigh. He knew the answer but had somehow suppressed it, forcing it to the back of his mind.
Hassan had been arrested for stealing a Frenchman’s car, and gone to jail, so beginning a career of petty crime. Their paths had crossed from time to time in the early years, Hassan begging for cash or imploring him for a job. Each time he turned up he was more derelict, ravaged by the woes of drugs and drink.
And Adil?
He had stowed away on a cargo ship to Copenhagen, and had sent a smudged postcard fr
om Vladivostok a year or two later. He claimed to have found true love with a girl from the Ukraine, a girl with emerald green eyes. Omary had written back to the address at the bottom of the card. But he never heard anything more.
There was a rumble of thunder in the distance.
Then the rain started as a light shower, but quickly turned torrential. The clatter of it on the roof was somehow comforting, as though it was a link with nature, a reminder that there was more to life than incarceration in cell blocks conjured from concrete and steel.
The road descended a steep incline, the tyres whirring as they corkscrewed down through a series of sharp turns.
Concentrate hard and Omary could just about hear the guards up front.
They were discussing a local soccer team, their accents from the villages in the hills outside Marrakech. He struggled for a deep breath and coaxed his head down towards the sheet steel floor.
The lower down he crouched, the less strained his breathing.
For a long while the vehicle rumbled down an even stretch of road. It sounded like a highway. But, as far as Omary could tell, they hadn’t stopped at a tollbooth.
Suddenly, an alarm sounded in the distance, a high-tech electronic buzz. It was followed by a grating noise, a series of clunks, a thud, and by a whistle sounding off.
The brakes were jolted hard, and the prison van stopped.
Then the ritual of opening the doors and securing the prisoner followed.
It took an age.
And each time it was acted out, Omary laughed to himself. If the recent experience had taught him one thing, it was that prison was nothing like it was in the movies.
In reality there was none of the James Bond bravado, the death-defying stunts to win freedom, or the sarcastic one-liners spat at the guards.
Real incarceration was an agony of uncertainty and jaw-dropping boredom, tempered with zeal... the zeal to go unnoticed.
Omary was taken straight to a holding cell. It was spacious, very cold, and smelled of sulphur.
On the far wall were arranged half a dozen wooden batons. They were well-worn but good quality – imported – with nylon straps to allow them to be swung from the officer’s hand.
A guard with a wart-ridden face took the prisoner’s fingerprints. After that he made him sign five or six blank sheets of paper. Omary assumed that they were for producing false confessions, if needed at a later date.
An hour later, he was in his new cell.
It was large, fifteen feet square, with a squat toilet in the corner, and a broken wooden packing crate, a piece of furniture that could be used as a stool, or almost a bed.
Best of all though, there was a view on the outside world. It wasn’t much – not more than three or four inches across. But if he pressed his nostrils up to it, Omary could breathe pure air.
Breaking down in tears, he fell to his knees.
‘Thank you, thank you!’ he whispered over and over. ‘Thank you for this luxury!’
One hundred and fifteen
The nurse was doing her rounds, passing out little green pills to everyone on the fifth floor of Clinique Mogador.
Propped up with three pillows, the bandage on his head now gone, Monsieur Raffi took his ration and gulped them down. He was about to close his eyes for a snooze, when he heard a voice. A voice in English.
‘I might have been killed!’
The shopkeeper looked up, rummaged for his spectacles.
‘Ah, bonjour Monsieur Américain,’ he said.
Blaine’s expression was uncharacteristically stern.
‘I know it was you who hid it!’ he shouted.
‘Excuse me?’ replied Raffi.
‘I could be lying in a morgue right now!’
Monsieur Raffi took off his glasses, wiped them on the sheet, and slipped them on again.
‘I do not follow,’ he said, blinking.
Blaine moved closer, his shadow inching up over the bed.
‘You hid the UN passport in my satchel,’ he said indignantly. ‘That time I brought it in and put it on your chair.’
The shopkeeper blinked again. He moistened his lips.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘How ever did you guess?’
‘That it was you?
‘Yes.’
‘Because of a little receipt that I found in the back.’
‘A receipt?’
‘For a silver cigarette box. It bore your signature.’
‘Ah,’ Raffi said once again. ‘I wonder how that got in there.’
He took a sip of water, rinsing it around his mouth.
‘I should never have accepted the passport as payment,’ he said. ‘I knew it would lead to nothing but danger.’
Blaine sat down beside the nightstand.
‘If you knew, then why did you give it to me?’ he asked gruffly.
‘Don’t you see?’ the old man asked.
‘No, I don’t!’
Monsieur Raffi shifted in the bed.
‘Because that passport is of such value to so many people that it raised... how can I say...? It raised the stakes.’
‘What stakes?’
Raffi took in Bogart’s face on the nightstand, the strand of cigarette smoke curling up from his hand.
‘You came to Casablanca in search of adventure,’ he said. ‘And that document was nothing more than a catalyst, a cast iron guarantee.’
‘That I found instant death?’
‘That you found adventure!’ Raffi exclaimed. He began to choke, then wiped a hand to his mouth, clearing his throat. ‘After all, the worst crime is to live a wasted life – a life of mediocrity, one untouched by uproar.’
‘But I could have been killed!’ Blaine exclaimed, repeating himself.
‘Surely it was a trifling insignificance, for it opened a door to a memorable experience.’ Monsieur Raffi coughed and then swallowed. ‘As for your reward, it’s the passport itself,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll find a use for it – I certainly shan’t.’
Blaine frowned.
‘But what of the murdered student?’ he replied.
The shopkeeper shrugged.
‘These things happen.’
‘Murder?’
Raffi shrugged again.
‘Oh yes,’ he said with nonchalance, ‘it happens all the time.’
‘But why did they kill him – if he didn’t have the passport?’
‘I dare say he had something else.’
‘Something worth killing for?’
‘Of course.’
His gaze moving fitfully from the bed to the nightstand, Blaine found himself looking hard at his idol, Humphrey Bogart. There was something so confident about him. It was as though every trial and tribulation he had ever endured was marked on his face. Yet despite all the scars of life, he was calm, aloof.
Blaine blew into his hands.
‘I’ll never understand this city,’ he said.
One hundred and sixteen
Ghita may not have known the Falcon’s identity, but she did know the ways of men.
Given an opportunity, the male gender always resorted to the same predictable pattern. They craved stimulants, attention and adrenalin thrills. And, they hankered for the gentle comfort of the female form. But, of course, for a man with power and wealth, one woman is never quite enough.
It was for this reason, Ghita felt sure, that the Falcon would have at least one mistress in tow. As she pondered it, the lover was likely to be a woman with a raw sense of self-preservation, and looks that were on the wane. Such a woman could, she mused, be the key to dismantling the gangster’s realm.
And who better to track her down than Casablanca’s greatest expert on the fairer sex – Laurent Louche? Having been a regular client since she was a child, Ghita knew that she could rely entirely on both his discretion and consummate skill.
Less than a day after whispering into his ear, she was provided with a name and address.
The details of Mademoiselle Mimi.
&n
bsp; Unsure how best to make first contact, Ghita decided to write a letter. Handwritten on heavy-grade writing paper, the script was confident and neat.
Mimi was cooing over her Chow Chow when it arrived, brought by a young private messenger – none other than Saed. She signed for it, took it inside, and held the envelope to the light.
Intrigued, she ripped it open, lit an Egyptian cigarette, lounged back in her chair, and read:
My dear Mimi, I believe that all women have a duty to one another – a duty to defend ourselves from the venomous and ill-intentioned desires of men. Part of this duty is to look out for each other, and it is in this spirit that I am writing to you now.
I have it on the very best authority that the gentleman with whom you are amorously engaged has taken a new and much younger companion. She intends to usurp your coveted position.
And, I understand that the gentleman in question intends to relieve you of your lodgings and the gifts he has showered upon you, and bestow them instead on his new love... Mademoiselle Fifi.
For now, it is imperative that you do nothing, not until I contact you again with instructions.
Yours sincerely,
G. O.
Feeling faint, Mimi allowed the letter to fall to the floor, where it was sniffed eagerly by the Chow Chow, his nose picking up the scent of Chanel No. 5. Then, pressing her small delicate hands to her face, Mimi wept like she had never wept before.
After that, drying her eyes on a square of printed Thai silk, she began to brood.
Half a dozen times in the next hour she reached for her iPhone and began to make the call. But each time something cautioned her to stop – the need for the perfect revenge.
One hundred and seventeen
The next morning, Blaine and Ghita were sitting in Baba Cool trying to come up with a plan, when Saed hurried in. Putting down his shoeshine box, he drew up a chair.
‘I have got good news,’ he said softly. ‘News about the Falcon.’
‘What is it?’ asked Ghita.
‘Every month the money is collected... all of it... the money from the Falcon’s business. And it is counted. Then they take it away, from Club Souterrain.’