Torch of Tangier

by Aileen G. Baron

  Together, MacAlistair and Drury yanked at Tariq, wrenching him this way and that while he bellowed and clamored for the mercy of Allah.

  With one final jerk, they hauled Tariq clear of the trench.

  Drury peered down through a funnel-like hole that opened to a glimpse of wild surf eddying against the rocks below. “He’s broken through to the Lower Cave.”

  They released Tariq and he fell forward. His right arm shot out, clutching at MacAlistairs belt for balance. The other gripped MacAlistair’s pants leg, near the pocket.

  MacAlistairs keys spilled out. He reached for them, clutching air and lost his footing. Dazed, he watched the keys disappear into the foaming sea.

  “Now how do we get home?”

  “It was the djinn,” Hasan whined, “the djinn.”

  “I’ll deal with that irritating creature right now,” Drury said.

  He brushed his hand through his hair and stalked to the alcove in the back of the cave.

  “Ayee!” Hasan whimpered. “He goes to the Bureau of the Djinn.”

  They heard Drury’s voice roll and echo in the alcove. He argued and bargained in high-pitched Moghrebhi Arabic, answered in his normal tone in English and French, and searched through his pockets twice. Tariq watched from the cave entrance.

  When he finished, Drury returned from the back of the cave. “Everything’s fine. Convinced him to move the bureau to another cave. Snatched some hair from his head.” Drury waggled a few strands of hair before Hasan’s stupefied face. “Paid him for his trouble, of course.”

  “How much did you pay?” MacAlistair asked.

  “Twenty centimes and a chocolate mint.”

  “And some kif,” Tariq added.

  “Is danger,” Hasan told him.

  “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Ayee. You must say prayers every day. Must fast on Ramadan. Must never drink alcohol, must never be unfaithful to your wife, never lie, never steal.”

  “I don’t steal,” Drury said. “And my wife doesn’t give a damn.” He waved the hair in the air and shoved it into his pocket. “If he bothers us again, I’ll burn his hair and order him to leave.”

  “Bismillah rahman rahim, ”Tariq said.

  Drury checked his watch. “Four o’clock,” he said. “Time to go.”

  “How will we start the car?” MacAlistair asked.

  But Drury had already left the cave and strolled down to the car.

  He had crawled under the dash, hot-wired the Hillman, and then drove them back to town.

  “Better not mention the Office of the Djinn,” Drury was saying, looking over Lily’s shoulder in the cramped space behind her desk. She crossed out the sentence she had just written.

  “Remember, the Prophet himself preached to the djinn. Even converted some to the faith.” Drury picked up the pages she had just finished.

  Lily wondered if he could make sense of the ink splotches, arrows and additions in the margins, and the splattering of crossed-out words. “The pages look like they were wounded in the war. I’m not a great typist.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He reached for the pile on the side of the desk, leafed through the pages, straightened the stack and arranged it neatly on the desk. “They can retype it.”

  At five o’clock, they left the Legation together. Outside the medina, they skirted the Grand Socco and approached a side street where Zaid waited in the Hillman, waited to drive up The Mountain to the villa, just as he did every evening.

  Chapter Ten

  MacAlistair sat at the piano in the salon, his fingers striking the keys, filling the room with furious music, arpeggio after arpeggio fleeing from his hand like frightened doves.

  Under the colonnaded archway, Zaid leaned against the carved doors that opened on the courtyard. He had bleached his hair that week and a bright blond curl on his forehead stood out against his swarthy skin.

  In the cool autumn dusk, under the open sky, a table had been laid for dinner next to the blue-tiled fountain. Idly, Zaid watched the servant, Faridah, dismantle the table setting, stacking bright earthenware plates into rickety piles, yanking off the white linen tablecloth. Tassels, fringing the scarf that covered Faridah’s head, wavered disapprovingly in the evening breeze.

  “Getting too cool to eat outside,” Zaid said and pushed back his strand of yellow hair.

  Faridah carried the dishes and cloth into the house toward the dining room. Strident piano chords reverberated against the tiles and quivered in the alcoves. The vibration made the copper lamps weave back and forth on their chains; lacy patterns of light on the walls swayed in dizzying arcs.

  The effort made MacAlistair cough and he stopped playing. Sweat dripped from his temples; two flaming crimson patches on his cheeks stood out against the pasty whiteness of his face.

  Zaid reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Drury watched Zaid with a bemused smile and dropped into a cushioned chair in the garden, looking away at the rose bushes, studying the mosaic pattern of the pavement.

  “What are they angry about?” Lily asked Drury.

  “Who?”

  “MacAlistair and Faridah.”

  “Are they? I didn’t notice.”

  A clatter of pots and dishes erupted from the kitchen. The odor of spices and cooking meat drifted out to them, mingling with the sweet perfume of roses, gardenias, and lemon trees in the garden.

  “Faridah is making pastilla tonight,” Zaid said.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Lily asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Zaid said. “She’s angry that her husband sends her out to work, doesn’t let her keep the money.”

  “I didn’t know she was married,” Lily said.

  Drury looked puzzled. He rose, scrutinizing Zaid with narrowed eyes. “Neither did I.”

  “Well, then,” Lily said, “why the…”

  “Come to the table,” MacAlistair called from inside. “Faridah wants to leave early.”

  In spite of the tension in the house, Lily still savored the sensuous details of the room, the polished softness of the cushions, the intricately carved plaster of the walls and ceiling, the silken carpet, the corner vitrine made of burled thuza wood and filled with artifacts—Roman figurines, ancient pottery, bronze oil lamps, gold earrings the peculiar matte yellow of ancient gold.

  She remembered the first time she had seen the cabinet.

  MacAlistair stood next to her then. “My little collection,” he said. “You see this.” He opened the cabinet door and took out a decorated glass bead with a bearded, bug-eyed face. “The Phoenicians used these as charms to allay danger as they sailed past the Straits into the Atlantic. They stopped here in Tangier, ancient Tingis, to make sacrifices. According to legend, Tingis was founded by the son of Poseidon. Ancient Berbers lived here, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, long before Arabs and Europeans came.”

  He put the charm back. “And here,” he reached into the cabinet and took out a marble bust mounted on a plinth of polished wood, “is the bust of a Berber youth from Volubilis.” He looked over at Zaid and smiled, then lovingly ran his fingers along the tangle of curls on the head of the marble youth. “You must go to Volubilis, must dig there someday. It holds the heart of Morocco. The first Sultanate under Moulay Idriss began there. Latinized, Christian Berbers ruled there before the Moslems came. Romans ruled from there, Berbers, Phoenicians, Carthaginians ruled from there. And before that, Neolithic farmers lived there.”

  Faridah had dumped the forks on top of a stack of paper napkins in the middle of the table, and now she emerged from the kitchen with a tray of silver finger bowls and towels, her eyes steamy with resentment, sweat glistening on her upper lip. The tassels on her scarf bobbed as she plopped the finger bowls and towels in front of the diners and flounced back to the kitchen.

  Drury waited until Faridah had left the room. “Tariq came into town today.”

  MacAlistair nodded in the direction of the kitchen. “Later,” he said.

  Zaid, watch
ing silently, dipped his fingers in the bowl and dried them on the towel.

  “By the way,” MacAlistair said to Lily. “You’re invited to tea tomorrow. At my aunt’s—Emily Keane Shereefa of Ouzzane.”

  Her Highness, Emily Keane Shereefa, the duenna of British-Tangier society, was a legend, famous for her charities and good works.

  Lily was impressed.

  “She’s your aunt?” Lily had seen her once, at a tea of the British Women’s Association in the El Minzah. A small, frail woman in rustling taffeta, she had moved slowly and carefully through the reception area, leaning on the arm of her grandson Phillipe.

  “My great-aunt. My grandmother was her sister. My mother brought me to see her when I was a child. She was beautiful and had a special way with children. I couldn’t forget her. I fell in love with Morocco then—with everything Moroccan.” He looked over at Zaid and smiled. “I returned for a visit after my mother died, and I’ve been coming back ever since.”

  Lily had heard that after Emily Keane’s arrival in Morocco in the nineteenth century as governess for the children of the British consul, she had married Moulay Abdulsalam es Shereef, descendant of the Prophet, nephew of the Sultan, leader of the religious brotherhood of Ouzzane.

  “She must be very old,” Lily said. “Your aunt, I mean.”

  “Almost ninety.”

  Faridah cleared away the finger bowls and returned with a tureen of lentil soup. She plunked the tureen in front of MacAlistair and stomped back to the kitchen.

  “Quite an honor to be invited to tea with Emily Shereefa,” Drury said, while MacAlistair ladled the soup.

  “Will you be there?” Lily asked.

  “Not tomorrow.” Drury took a spoonful of soup. He turned to MacAlistair. “Tariq said he saw German U-boats near Cape Spartel.”

  MacAlistair put down his spoon and wiped his face with the napkin. “Inside the Straits? On the Mediterranean side?”

  “He said they were…” Drury began. His voice trailed off as Faridah came into the dining room carrying a steaming dish almost as large as the table.

  Drury waved his hand toward her in a gesture of approval and made a show of breathing in the aroma of the pastilla. “Magnificent,” he said to Faridah.

  She paraded out. They waited until the clatter of pots came from the kitchen before anyone spoke.

  “You can talk in front of her,” Zaid said.

  “No,” MacAlistair said. “We can’t.” He dished the layers of filo dough, stuffed with pigeon and almonds, olives and sweet fruits, onto plates and passed them around.

  “What happened today?” Drury asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Zaid said. “She was looking at a book.”

  “What book?”

  “Just a popular British novel,” Zaid said. “One of those love stories women like.”

  MacAlistair picked up his napkin and threw it down again. “Rebecca. She found it at the bottom of a drawer in my wardrobe.”

  Drury frowned. “She reads English?”

  Zaid leaned forward. “She doesn’t read at all. She stole nothing.

  The argument had a hidden significance that Lily couldn’t fathom. She looked away and noticed movement behind the lattice that lined the shaded gallery of the upper floor. Drury followed her gaze as she watched the shadow pass from room to room.

  “Get rid of Faridah,” Drury said to MacAlistair. “Tonight.”

  MacAlistair sighed. “Go tell her she’s fired,” he said to Zaid.

  Zaid scowled. “Who’s going to wash the dishes?”

  MacAlistair sighed again and held out his hands in entreaty.

  Zaid stood up, slammed down his napkin, and strode out toward the kitchen.

  “How long have you known him?” Lily asked after he was gone.

  MacAlistair’s face took on a dreamy expression. “I met him the first time I came to Morocco, a long time ago. He was working at the British Legation.” His eyes seemed to smile at some secret memory. “He was so beautiful then. So graceful. When he danced, he seemed to float on a cloud, his feet just glancing the floor, his arms and hands tapering and elegant, moving like the wings of a magnificent butterfly.”

  MacAlistair paused, absorbed in memory, his eyes closed, his head swaying gently to the rhythm of a half-remembered tune.

  “And he’s been with you ever since?” Lily asked.

  “We quarreled once, some silly thing, I can’t remember now. He went to stay with his mother’s family in Meknes, just south of Volubilis.”

  The shadow of a frown crossed MacAlistair’s face. “He came back a year later, brought Faridah with him. He had changed, but I took him back, hired Faridah.” He shrugged and gave Lily an apologetic smile. “He was still beautiful.”

  They could hear snatches of Faridah and Zaid talking in the kitchen, Zaid’s voice a low hum, Faridah’s raised a little, as if she were asking questions, then gushing out in a long spate, interrupted now and then by a grunt from Zaid.

  Lily couldn’t make out their words.

  MacAlistair looked down at his plate, shaking his head regretfully. An embarrassed silence hung in the room.

  “Tell me more about your aunt,” Lily said into the silence. “It couldn’t have been easy for her and the Sultan’s nephew. Was their marriage accepted?”

  “No. Her marriage to the prince scandalized both British and Moslem society. To make matters worse, she shocked the Moslem world by appearing in public, taking baskets to the poor, visiting the sick. The prince’s reputation was destroyed and she discovered that children were dying of smallpox.”

  “That’s when she began to work on getting them vaccinated?”

  MacAlistair nodded and spread his hands on the tablecloth as if he were playing a chord on the piano. “She enlisted the help of the European community and moved to Tangier, hoping to save the reputation of her beloved prince. He died of grief two years after she left Ouzzane. She went on to wipe out smallpox in Morocco. Today, the Moslems regard her as a saint, and the Tangenos think of their marriage as a tragic love story.”

  Zaid came back into the room and sat down. “You tell her,” he said to MacAlistair. “I can’t.”

  “After she washes the dishes,” MacAlistair said.

  Faridah cleared the pastilla and brought tea. MacAlistair followed her into the kitchen. Soon the clatter of pots was drowned by Faridah’s guttural shouts. After a few minutes, MacAlistair returned. They stayed at the table, sipping sweet tea in the cool night air until they heard Faridah leave.

  MacAlistair glanced at his watch. “Time for us to look at the stars,” he said to Drury.

  Drury and MacAlistair rose from the table and left the room. Zaid took the cups to the sideboard and retrieved a deck of cards, a pad, and a pencil from the drawer. He slapped a package of Gauloises and a glass ashtray on the corner of the table and sat down to deal out cards to Lily and himself.

  Scraping sounds of moving chairs came from the roof. The low murmur of voices, mingled with crackling and rasping noises, hovered above their heads.

  Zaid fingered the cards, rearranged them, put one on the pile and reached for another.

  “What’s wrong with Faridah looking at a book?” Lily asked.

  “That was just an excuse. Her brother died and I was comforting her. MacAlistair saw us in the garden with my arm around her. He was jealous.” Zaid’s lips curled around his cigarette, his eyes narrowed against the smoke. “It’s the asthma, you know. Makes him irritable and suspicious of everyone. Sometimes he’s difficult to live with.”

  Twittering and squawking noises from the roof filtered down to them.

  “They have a short-wave radio up there, don’t they?” Lily said.

  Zaid puffed earnestly on his cigarette, picked up a card, breathed out a cloud of smoke, and spread his cards on the table.

  “Gin.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Herr Balloon waited outside, hiding below the steps behind the railing, when Lily left the Legation to go to te
a at Lalla Emily’s. This time she was ready for him.

  She maneuvered past the vegetable stalls, up the hill in the crowded street, ducked into narrow lanes swarming with mothers and children, bustling with businessmen carrying briefcases and wearing dark djelabas. She reached the seedy confines of the Petit Socco, where gossips lounged in the Spanish cafes, exchanging rumors and sipping aperitifs. All the while, Herr Balloon stayed an interval behind her.

  She wove through crowded streets to the Grand Socco, sidestepping storytellers and snake charmers, drugged monkeys and lion cubs, stalls that sold lizard’s feet to cure diseases.