"Try thirty-five dirhams."
"Oh dear, what's that in dollars, would you happen to know?"
"Roughly $4.50, I believe."
"So little!" she marveled, and entering into the moment she called out to the owner, "Will you accept thirty-five dirhams for this?"
The man behind the counter gently upbraided her blue-eyed companion, shrugged dramatically, sighed and at last smiled. "Oui—yes. Thirty-five dirhams."
"There, you see?" said her new friend, and added, "Are you on tour, have they told you about Er-Rachidia? The people here are called the Shrine People, descendants of AIL It is a very special place."
"I didn't know that, either," she told him, smiling and sorting through her coins. "This is a dirham?"
"Yes—no, not that one, only the large coins, but you've not enough of them. You have bills? Ah yes, there are your thirty-five dirhams."
"How would I say 'thank you' in Arabic?" she asked.
"You would say shukren."
She nodded. "Then to you I will say thank you, and shukren to him." Presenting her bills to the shop's owner he wrapped her Koran box in newspaper, tied it with string and presented it to her.
"Shukren," she told him, smiling.
"You learn our language!" he said, delighted.
With a wave at The Man With The Blue Eyes she hurried out of the shop, and looking toward the cafe saw Janko standing impatiently beside the car waiting for her. But she was returning contented; she had actually spoken with two natives, she had made a small connection with this country and perhaps she could make something of this trip after all.
Her contentment was soon dispelled; Janko was tight-lipped and furious. "We have almost ninety more miles to drive," he said angrily, "and you delay us, just as I predicted. Need you be reminded you are not here for sightseeing and shopping?" When she simply stared at him, appalled by the tone of his voice he extended one hand and said, "I would like to see all the photographs now, I think you've been childish long enough about this."
Her own lips tightened. "Childish?" she repeated. "Mr. Janko, I have a temper, which I shall presently lose if you continue to act like this, because a great deal of rage is building in me at your attitude and at your—your positive greed over those photos. You are turning what could be a pleasant journey through Morocco into a very unpleasant trip."
"Now you prove your naiveté and your inexperience," he told her coldly. "Agents are trained never to express emotions and you have already lost your temper."
"On the contrary," she retorted, "I have not even begun to lose it."
"I can't wait," he snapped, and opened the car door for her. "Get in, we've wasted enough time." Without renewing his demand for the photos he climbed into the driver's seat and started the car.
We are now reduced to quarreling, she thought bitterly, and said no more. Glancing toward the cafe she saw that Ibrahim had begun clearing their table, and hearing the sound of the motor he looked up, saw her and waved.
Returning his wave she thought, If just once in a while I can meet people like Ibrahim and The Man With The Blue Eyes, then I may find it tolerable accompanying Janko. But she knew that she had encountered one of the more devastating kinds of loneliness in existence: that of being in close contact with someone to whom she was a nonperson, and who thereby rendered her invisible and of no consequence. t.
As Janko gunned the engine there came to her through the open window of the car the distant chant of a muezzin, the rise and fall of a stern and ululating voice as it called the faithful to prayer—Allah Akbar! Allah Akbar!—and then the voice faded in the wind and with a squeal of tires the car pulled out into the main road to head next for Erfoud where they would end this day. But there was satisfaction in knowing that informant number two had been found and identified, and that before the day ended they should be able to identify informant number three, the young hotel waiter named Youssef Sadrati.
It was dark when they reached Erfoud, and it had grown cold, very cold, so that when Mrs. Pollifax walked into the hotel she was wrapped in sweaters and shivering, ready for bright lights and a warm room. Her endurance was not to be rewarded, however, for the lobby of the hotel was sparsely furnished and dimly lit. Janko stood back while she registered and was assigned room 306, and presently a bent little man appeared, picked up her bags and led her through a labyrinth of cold cement halls, turning right and then left, the halls so dark she felt as if she was being guided through catacombs. Their destination turned out to be a courtyard in the rear whose centerpiece was a swimming pool still filled with water. At each corner of the pool a sunken lamp emitted feeble rays to interrupt the darkness and this ghostly illumination gave the water a sinister and metallic gleam so that it looked alive, with a faint subterranean movement as if made restless by some terrible secret concealed in its depths. Rows of doors surrounded the pool, each with a window next to it.
"It's certainly very dark," she confided to her escort. And spooky, she added silently, but he spoke no English and only nodded as he inserted a key into the lock of her door. She gave one more glance at the water lying sullenly behind her, and with a shiver walked into her room to meet what she guessed was a 25-watt light that illuminated a bed, a chair, a shelf and a small bathroom beyond.
She tipped the porter, thanked him, and when he had gone she hurried to the window to draw the curtain and hide the dark courtyard with its dull glistening water. She thought it possible that at another season this hotel might have some charm but at the moment it held the atmosphere of a deserted summer camp. There was neither television nor telephone in her room, the silence was tomblike and the thought of retracing her steps to find the dining room depressed her even further. Nevertheless she was hungry and sensibly concluded that a meal would cheer her flagging spirits. Pausing only to comb her hair she set out again, encouraged by glimpses of light escaping from a few drawn curtains as she passed them. With relief she reached the lobby; no ghostly hands had reached out from the hall's alcoves to grasp her, she had met with no one in the darkness and yet she still felt oddly pursued. To restore her sense of competence she went immediately to the bar and ordered a bottle of mineral water with which to brush her teeth. Carrying it with her she marched into the adjacent dining room and was astonished to find it brightly lighted and occupied by a large party of tourists seated at a long table.
"Madame is in the party from France?" asked a young man hurrying to meet her.
She turned to look at him. He wore the waiter's uniform of black trousers, a black vest that was too tight for him, black tie and white shirt. He was clean-shaven, with an eager brown face and soft dark eyes, and seeing him she smiled brilliantly at him because he was Youssef Sadrati, she had found him, he was here and operative. She longed to address him by name, shake his hand, tell him that she had carried his photograph with her all the way from America but she only shook her head. "No, I'm alone," she told him.
He led her to a table and explained why he could not present her with a menu. "There is only a tajine tonight," he said apologetically, with a gesture toward the part)' of tourists. "So many!"
She smiled. "Then I will have tajine, yes."
"Thank you, madame," he said with considerable relief, and headed for the kitchen.
A minute later Janko entered the dining room and took a table in an opposite corner; presumably he had seen Youssef and satisfied himself as to his identity. He did not look at her nor did she look at him again. She sat and patiently waited for her tajine and watched her dinner hour slowly turn into nightmare because she sat for thirty minutes before her dinner arrived and then it was cold; a tyrant of a headwaiter loudly harangued his waiters and the group of tourists grew noisier and noisier. Mrs. Pollifax had reached the plateau of dessert when the headwaiter impatiently wrested a tray of glassware from a waiter who moved too slowly, then tripped and fell to his knees, littering the floor with broken glass; nightmare had turned into farce. Suppressing a somewhat hysterical laugh she finished her
flange, stumbled back through long dark halls again and with relief entered her room where she brushed her teeth, undressed and fell exhausted into bed.
She had been asleep for a long time when she was awakened by the small but insistent sound of someone fumbling with the lock on her door. She did not move. It was too dark to see the door open but when she felt a sudden draft of night air across her face she knew that her room had been entered; the faint click of the door's closing confirmed it.
Bishop had warned her about thieves but she did not think her intruder a stranger. Back in Fez she had suspected this possibility: determined to gain the photographs, Janko was choosing tonight to rob her of them.
5
Tense and watchful she lay in bed and rued the care with which she'd closed the curtains at the window: not so much as a splinter of light entered the room, which made it necessary for her to rely on instinct and hearing alone. Usina both she guessed that her intruder had reached the shelf that served as a desk and on which her two bags stood, and a moment later this was confirmed when a pencil-thin light shone briefly across the wall before it disappeared inside the blue khaki bag that held her clothes. He had been careless in turning on his flashlight too soon—it had outlined his profile, leaving no doubt of his identity—but he was not careless a second time, he worked in the dark. Listening, she closed her eyes, surprised by the atavistic sensitivity that could still be brought into play in the twentieth century: it was easier to listen with her eyes closed, it concentrated her hearing exclusively on sound, on the infinitesimal whisper of cloth moving against cloth, the rustle of an envelope being opened in her second bag, a small intake of breath as Janko found a photograph, and the expulsion of breath as he learned the photo was of an American male. There was the slow, nearly soundless unzipping of pockets at the side of each carry-on bag, and then his move to the left to investigate the small bathroom.
She winced as she understood that he would look next for her purse. Long ago she had adopted the habit of keeping it very near her on her travels in case of just such an occurrence, and tonight it was on the floor next to her bed within easy reach of her hand. If he found it and risked looking through it for the photos she thought this would present her with certain interesting choices: she could either continue to feign sleep or she could deliver a good sound karate chop to his head, which would render him unconscious and was precisely what he deserved. It was wonderfully tempting to consider a karate slash as he knelt beside her bed, and she thought about it with enthusiasm. She could explain later, very innocently, "I'm so terribly sorry, I assumed you were a burglar!" It would scarcely improve a wretched relationship but what a marvelous way to vent some of the anger that she was repressing!
But then what?
She sighed as she relinquished such a delicious idea; she reminded herself that Carstairs had assigned them both to this job, they were co-agents, and the job not half done yet, and of course Janko would be furious at being discovered in her room and even more furious at being hit over the head, and they would still have to work together. She thought with regret that it was a great pity but really she must abandon the idea.
He had finished his brief search of the bathroom now and was back in the room again. She sensed him moving closer and guessed that he had dropped to the floor to begin a stealth}' approach to her bed and the thought of him on hands and knees struck her as suddenly ludicrous and she had to suppress a laugh. Soon she heard his fingers grasping her purse and slowly, softly opening it, and with eyes not entirely closed she became aware of that same pinpoint thread of light as he examined its contents.
Enough, she decided, and with a few appropriate murmurs turned over in bed, coughed gently and turned over again.
She had startled him, and she felt a jarring of the bed as he lifted his head so abruptly that he bumped it against the bed-frame. This was followed by a muffled gasp and then silence as he waited, listening. When he was satisfied that she'd heard nothing and was still asleep he rose to his feet and tiptoed to the door; a moment later the door opened and silently closed behind him.
It was over.
She was up at once, wide awake and released from all pretense of sleep but not from her sense of outrage at this invasion of the night. Reaching for her own tiny flashlight she groped her way to the bottle of mineral water on the shelf, poured herself a full glass and stood in the darkness sipping it and thinking, her anger mounting as she thought of his being so obsessed over the photographs that he would try to steal them while she slept.
There was also the realization—but it occurred to her only now—that Janko had not left entirely defeated: he had left with the knowledge that she'd not concealed the photos in either of her two bags or in her purse, and therefore they would have to be on her person.
And that was MY mistake, she thought, / should have started mumbling in my sleep before he reached my purse and certainly before he finished his search of it.
Knowing this, what would he do next to wrest them away from her?
But what challenged her most of all as she stood there in the darkness was why he was so insistent about the photographs. There was his monstrous ego, of course, and his anger at her being assigned to join him . . , were either enough to explain his actions tonight?
She did not dare turn on a light that might subtly illuminate the curtain and seep through to the walkway outside. Trusting to the thin beam of her pocket flash she opened her blue carry-on bag and extracted a book to calm her, and turned back to bed. As she moved toward it the dime-sized beam of light fell upon something small and furry next to the bed, not far from her purse, and she gasped, suppressing a cry of alarm.
But the furry object didn't move, it didn't scurry away at her approach and when she cautiously knelt beside it she found that it was not a small animal at all. It lay there lifeless, small, black and—puzzled, she picked it up and discovered that it wasn't fur, it was hair.
Baffled, she carried it into the bathroom, closed and secured the door behind her and risked turning on the dim overhead light. The object she held measured roughly one and a half inches long by an inch wide; the hair was black, healthy and thick and it was affixed to a rough sort of cloth which held remnants of adhesive. The revelation of what this had to be filled her with astonishment.
She was holding one half of a man's moustache.
It was this that Janko had left behind, apparently jarred loose when his head bumped the bed.
Her reaction was swift; she quickly turned off the light and retraced her steps to the bed where she dropped Janko's moustache on the floor again as if it were a live and ticking bomb— and indeed it was, she admitted as she sat down on the bed to calm and marshal her turbulent thoughts and consider what this meant. The ramifications seemed to her quite grave. If her first thought was he mustn't know I've seen this, and her second thought was how soon will he return for this, she knew that she was only avoiding the third and most crucial question of all: If Janko's moustache was false, how much else about him was false?
If his moustache was a fake, were those ridiculously heavy brows of his false, too, and where were these questions taking her, and why was there a chill running down her spine: She groped her way back to the beginning of this, to a Janko so insulted by her joining him in Fez that only her refusal to hand over the photographs had prevented her being dismissed and left behind. For some important reason it had been imperative for him to travel alone, and it had been equally important for him to gain those photographs, his need so acute that he'd now been reduced to robbery.
And the moustache he wore was false. Why?
And now, with a nearly heart-stopping sense of shock she returned to the terrible death of Hamid ou Azu.
Oh come now, Emily, she protested, what you're thinking is insane, he was drinking beer at the bar in the hotel during those two hours, remember? Furthermore this is a man cleared and assigned by Carstairs and his department, he has the right name, he was in the right place and at the right
time, and he expected a Mrs. Pollifax . . .
But it wasn't insane, of course, and she knew it. Hamid ou Azu was the first informant in a network of seven they'd been sent to check out; together she and Janko had found and identified him, and then they had separated. She could not explain the four beers in the hotel bar but she could no longer dismiss the coincidence—not now—when ninety minutes later Hamid ou Azu was mysteriously dead with a knife in his back, and if she and Dasran had not returned by that same street in the medina she would never have known of his death. Or his assassination.
Who was Janko working for?
She was aware of her mind frantically attempting to rationalize away a murder that could still be coincidence; she wanted to blot out the horror of her suspicions but nothing explained away her terrible unease.
Had Janko betrayed his superiors? Was he working with or against her?
And waiting for her still was the awfullest possibility of all: If Janko had somehow returned to the medina in Fez yesterday and killed Hamid ou Azu—if her fifteen U.S, dollars had not bought her the truth—then what about Ibrahim, the second informant whom they'd verified that afternoon in Er-Rachidia?
She thought, I must telephone from here to the Cafe Gharbee in Er-Rachidia. I'll ask to speak to Ibrahim . . . I'll tell whoever answers that I left something behind yesterday, a kerchief, a scarf . . . I'll explain that only Ibrahim would remember, would know . . .
And he will come to the phone, she added, and I will be reassured and everything will be all right.
She glanced at her watch and saw that it was 5 a.m.—too early—surely it would be better to wait until six o'clock? But in any case, and no matter what news her phone call brought, it was time now to make certain that Janko never gained the snapshots he was so bent on retrieving.
Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish Page 5