Marrakech Noir

by Yasin Adnan

He sat on the café’s terrace, taking a spot among the customers, perhaps fishing for a stray piece of information here or there about this gang. People in the café were talking about the ransom, surprised that no amount was specified in the communiqué. Soon, they began to joke and one of the wittier customers among them asked whether it was birds that had dropped this paper rain.

  “No, it was the sky itself,” someone else replied.

  The investigator guessed that the omission was intentional, and that the next communiqué would no doubt be released soon with more information. The investigator thought that the kidnappers were testing the waters to see who was with them and who was against them. He finished his coffee and got up, folding the communiqué before stuffing it into his pocket.

  He wandered around after that, driving through Massira and Sidi Youssef Ben Ali. Here he didn’t see the communiqués anywhere. His eyes scanned people’s hands, but to no avail. He got out of his car and asked everyone he bumped into about the Band of Merry Men and their communiqué. No one knew anything about either. He continued in this fashion until he came to the conclusion that the circle was closing around the kidnappers. He started to plan the next phase of his search.

  But a second communiqué from the Merry Men gang didn’t allow the investigator time to maneuver. These new papers were distributed in huge numbers across the city. The new text included the ransom amount, set at two million euros.

  The communiqué was glued to many doorways throughout Marrakech, including Bab el-Futouh, Bab el-Khemis, Bab el-Jadid, Bab Doukkala, and Bab el-Rouha. No one could solve the riddle of why these particular gates had been chosen. The Band of Merry Men’s demand that the ransom’s sum be paid in euros prompted people to think that the kidnappers might be a group of former immigrants, perhaps people who had come from Spain or Italy. This speculation reached the ears of the investigator, and he immediately recalled the story of some young Marrakechi men who had been kicked out of Spain at the beginning of 2011 because of their undocumented status. However, the story that circulated about them here in Marrakech was something entirely different, especially in Sidi Maimoun, where they had been born and raised. It was said that they had been detained in Spain for their involvement in a plot to steal the World Cup trophy that the Spanish national soccer team had won in South Africa. The Spanish police had arrested them while they were lurking around the Royal Spanish Football Federation headquarters in Madrid, where the World Cup trophy was stored in a safe on the seventh floor. The men confessed to having planned to steal the cup and bring it to their country; they had wanted to melt the trophy down. The investigator laughed every time he recalled this odd story.

  He dug deep without reaping any results, and he was beginning to grow despondent. At the beginning of the investigation, he didn’t think that a kidnapping case could be more frustrating and unsolvable than an everyday crime, or a rape, or even a terrorist bombing—that is, if the kidnapping were even real. The communiqué suggested it was, but what was this Band of Merry Men? No one had even heard of them before this.

  After nine days, the investigation was wrested from the investigator, just as power had been taken away from the mayor. A new group of men described as resolute, powerful decision makers came from Rabat to take control of the case.

  7. The Mysterious Enrique Aldomar Suddenly Appears

  His name had been on the tips of a million tongues since his disappearance, and in less than a week, he had become the most famous missing person in the world. The burning question swirling in everyone’s heads: How will this affair end? Everyone imagined the end differently, but Enrique Aldomar alone determined its conclusion.

  His appearance was preceded by mysterious hints of his presence in different locations around Marrakech, sometimes even in two different places at once. Many recognized him from the ubiquitous photographs. They were enticed by the high monetary reward that the authorities offered to anyone who discovered his whereabouts. But the most astonishing thing was the testimonies that came in confirming that the director had appeared and then disappeared like a desert mirage. As soon as one person was sure they’d recognized him, he would evaporate into thin air without a trace.

  It was difficult to believe all of these stories. The places where Aldomar was seen were as diverse as Marrakech itself. He appeared, according to eyewitness accounts, in Hay Hassani, Unité Quatre in Daoudiate, and even Avenue el-Mssalla in Sidi Youssef Ben Ali. The times of his appearance were just as varied—at midnight, at dawn, in the afternoon, at dusk. A myth was quickly established about the director, a man who appeared and then vanished. People had fun with his game of hide-and-seek, and they began to weave tales for one another of Aldomar’s visits to their homes, how they had shared food and drink with him, only for him to vanish all over again.

  A reporter for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, which had been following the story from the beginning, used the expression the wandering specter of Enrique Aldomar in one of its articles, and published reports of his appearances and disappearances. Despite that, not one person on the Spanish shore could definitively confirm that the man was still alive. As for the Moroccan side, the ones calling the shots remained cautious, and this was the word that was repeated endlessly in news reports.

  * * *

  For reasons only he knew, Enrique Aldomar decided to reappear without warning in the infamous Derb Sidi Bouloukat neighborhood. He was in the lobby of the Hotel Kenz, sitting in a director’s chair, with an innocent look on his face, his lips drawn into a sly smile. There was a large crowd of photographers surrounding him, as well as newspaper and television reporters from around the world. A few special investigators came along with aides. It was apparent that most of these people had been informed of the director’s return ahead of time.

  They all stood there without speaking, waiting to find out who was responsible for the director’s disappearance—the cameras flashed and clicked. Then Enrique Aldomar’s voice flowed low and soft. He praised cinema and children and their imaginative energy, and spoke about Spain, struggling with its immigrants and its Arab heritage; he spoke about misunderstandings being like an engine of history, and about literature as the twin brother of cinema. The director also spoke about fantasy being intertwined with reality, and about how all it takes to see fantasy in full relief is to lightly scrape reality’s surface. He spoke about his upcoming film, which would examine the fallout from the disappearance of a famous foreigner in one of Marrakech’s shabbiest alleys.

  That afternoon, Aldomar talked about many other things—but he wouldn’t say a word about the story of his kidnapping by the Band of Merry Men, where he’d been hidden, or the circumstances surrounding his disappearance in Marrakech.

  Translated from Arabic by Alexander E. Elinsosn

  Looking at Mars in Marrakech

  by Abdelkader Benali

  La Mamounia

  1.

  Marcel had bad memories of Marrakech. But it hadn’t always been that way. The first time he saw the city it took his breath away. The red light sliding over the walls, the snowcapped mountains of the Atlas in the background, the swallows that wove through the palm trees, and the three gleaming balls on top of the Koutoubia Mosque that storks flew around like satellites. The long, wide streets seemed to be endless. Everything looked as if it had been made for another time, perhaps another planet; a city that had been built for the inhabitants of the future.

  One day, Marrakech’s beautiful curtain was drawn back and revealed another face—indifferent, aloof, and criminal. Marcel had been ripped off, robbed of something dear to him, and he had left with his tail between his legs, never to return.

  Once home, he never spoke to anyone about it. It lay stowed away in a place that never saw daylight.

  “It’ll be different this time,” his agent said. “And you do have to start working again, don’t you? A broke writer can’t write. The imagination won’t work.”

  The hopeless financial situation he had ended up in had come as
a complete surprise. With the money he had earned from extracting oil on Mars, he had hoped to buy time to write.

  Mars had been good to him. The vast quantities of oil that had been discovered there ten years before had created a boom. When they devised an ingenious system that made traveling to Mars take only a couple of months, the amount of traffic back and forth increased exponentially. The shuttles went faster and faster, and he received a job offer that made use of his analytical abilities. The remuneration persuaded him, not Mars. He supported a drilling team on the red planet, which creamed off the oil fields by setting up a system to find buyers within a couple of hours of the source being discovered. The first to make an offer benefited from the small margins. It wasn’t difficult work, but it was intense. The drilling team worked twenty-four hours a day, which meant that he hardly got any sleep. He had to be on alert in case of new discoveries. But the money compensated for everything. When he lay in bed, he made the most wonderful financial calculations, involving acquisitions and investments, and had money left over to go traveling. He even returned to Earth with an extra bonus. The red planet had made him happy.

  When he did get back, however, he discovered that inflation had evaporated the capital he’d built up. The oil boom had flooded the markets with cheap money, which had pushed up prices. The cost of a good television—one he’d had his eye on—had gone up so much that it was beyond his budget. Only six months after his return, and he had to start over again. Now he cursed his time on the red planet. And to make matters worse, his wife had lost her job as well, a blow she took without concern, because she had become devoted to a charismatic guru who had convinced his disciples that the only real capital was the “courage to let go.” She had started to let go of things, and she did that so well that her nonattachment led to her being able to levitate above a mat.

  “I’m the only one in the group,” his wife said proudly. And she parried his requests to think about the future with: “The future is now.”

  There is something in that, he thought. The future is always now. Amid the male company on Mars, he had forgotten how to talk to a woman. After a few days, he had a riposte for her, particularly because the bills had started to arrive. “If the future is now then it’s still a shitty situation we’re in.”

  “Everything is just a question of perception,” she reasoned. “You’re only seeing it with one eye.”

  “Only seeing it with one eye?” Marcel put his palm over his left eye and examined the bills. “Even if I do look at it with one eye, I can still see that we’ve got a problem. The bills haven’t been halved.” He turned to her; yoga had kept her fit and healthy. It had made her younger. Her calves were hard, but he knew that if he touched them, they would feel warm and soft. When they got bored, they had sex. It was never a disappointment and he forgot his financial problems for a little while. In bed, even he had the courage to let go.

  “If you close your eyes, you can see a new universe,” she said.

  He’d had enough of new worlds for now. “The universe is empty and indifferent. You make more of it than it is.”

  On Mars, he’d hardly had any time to gaze into the universe; everything had revolved around drilling. Luckily, there had been a good satellite connection with a couple of his favorite talk shows, which offered a bit of relief. He lived for those moments of reprieve between shifts.

  2.

  In the evening, Marcel looked through a telescope at Mars, where he had left his colleagues behind. He never should have left. He cherished the long conversations they’d had with each other. What he’d told them about Marrakech, the Red City. “We’re on the red planet, but the Red City is also special,” he would say. Then he would tell them about the couple of times he had been there. But he only told them the good things. The men were not travelers—they hung onto his every word. Some had never been more than sixty miles from home before their journey to Mars. Most of them came from little American towns he’d never heard of before, and weren’t planning to ever go anywhere else again once they got back.

  “When we return, let’s all go to Marrakech together,” proposed one of the men one night.

  “I’m never going back to Marrakech,” Marcel vowed. “Apart from everything that was wonderful, I had a bad experience there.”

  “And that’s why you’re on Mars,” they told him supportively. “You can’t be farther away from your problems.”

  “Yes I can,” Marcel had said. “Because I’m so far away, I feel less—but what I can feel, I feel all the more.”

  It went quiet around the table. He realized that he had expressed a feeling that they all understood. The men respected his privacy. They all had something to hide. If being on Earth was always painful, then there definitely must be something to hide. Could someone be so far away without suffering? They all felt better on Mars than at home.

  3.

  The agent kept ringing. He was a persistent type who owed his success to hard work rather than big breaks. Getting rich is like threading beads was the man’s motto.

  The job was to write the biography of the major media magnate Max Hirschfeld. What a name! Hirschfeld always appeared on the lists of movers and shakers around the world, and he had taken up residence at the Mamounia, the famous luxury hotel where the British prime minister Winston Churchill had spent his summers. The man had painted hideous pictures there that raised huge amounts at auction. Marcel was already anticipating having to spend two weeks with an egocentric, conceited, rich narcissist who wanted his every fart recorded for posterity. Marcel could use the money, but it would be at the cost of his psychological well-being.

  “When I suggested that you be the one to write it, he agreed immediately,” said his agent.

  “Does he know my work?”

  “No, but he liked your name,” his agent told him. “His favorite grandfather was named Marcel.”

  “It’s always something like this,” Marcel said, exasperated.

  “Don’t knock it!” The agent had called on a Friday morning; the man smelled money. “If it makes it any easier, I won’t charge you any commission . . . just the other party. What do you think of that?”

  Marcel didn’t try to explain that he really did not want to go to Marrakech. “I’ll gladly go to New York or London or wherever else he lives.”

  “As long as he likes it there, he’s staying in Marrakech.”

  “Can’t it be done virtually?”

  “Don’t be daft! You’ve got to see the man,” his agent scoffed. “Smell him, experience him. Otherwise, we’ll find someone else to do it.”

  His wife was levitating above the yoga mat in a side room. It was a mystery to him how she managed it. It made her attractive: freeing her exceptional body from weightlessness with one jump, throwing her on the bed, and calmly unrolling the Lycra clothes so that she was as naked as light. He had never known that she had so much inner power. After his journey to and from Mars, he’d had enough of weightlessness. The sensation of floating didn’t compensate for the inconvenience. His wife mumbled something in his ear about self-awareness and transition. The last thing Marcel wanted to hear about was self-awareness and transition. What he wanted to hear was that she’d had enough of living in the here and now and that she had applied for a job. But there was no point in bringing that up, since he had fallen a long way in her esteem. His reluctance to talk about his time on Mars didn’t go over well with her, either.

  “Your lack of communication is appalling,” she chided, as she began slamming doors. After which they had sex; that’s the way it went every time. He never got used to it, but it was always enjoyable.

  It wasn’t a bad thing that he ultimately hadn’t earned any money on Mars, of course, but she would have appreciated the trip more if the journey had changed him . . . and it hadn’t.

  “I was too busy working to change,” he’d told her.

  She found that strange. “You’re not living in the here and now.”

  4.

&nbs
p; It was Saturday night. Marcel had difficulty sleeping, so he read about potential investments on the computer. Perhaps it might be better to invest what he had left to make good on some of his losses. Good times always follow the bad times. On Mars, his friends had told him about what they did with their money. Investing seemed a sensible option, according to some of them. Everyone did it in the United States. He should do it too. So, in the middle of the night, after three glasses of whiskey, he bought shares with what was left of his capital.

  It was fast—faster than he’d expected. He prepared his portfolio after just two swigs of whiskey and went to bed cheerful. His wife was asleep, but he woke her and convinced her to make love. She enjoyed the smell of whiskey on his breath.

  5.

  The stock exchanges opened with huge losses on Monday. The Central Bank responded to the panic by printing a substantial amount of money. It had to be done to preserve what was left of public confidence in the monetary system, otherwise it would have meant disaster. “They’re Printing Money!” was the news headline.

  Again, Marcel thought.

  Even more inflation! It would take months, perhaps years, for his investments to recover their value. He had little, he had nothing, and what he did have was worth even less. He had never been so miserable in his life. Marcel hid his wife’s yoga mat to stop her from making his mood even worse with her levitating. The panic in her eyes when she couldn’t find it was somewhat of a comfort. If he had to suffer, then she had to as well. He didn’t tell her about his losses. He had become a heartless man because of what had happened to him. So, in desperation, he rang his agent.

  He told his wife that he would be away for a month, which was not too bad in comparison with the four years on Mars. But she was more emotional than the last time. It almost certainly had something to do with the crisis.

  “You will send money for the housekeeping, won’t you?” she asked.