Shadow of the Rock (Spike Sanguinetti)

by Mogford, Thomas

‘And Zahra is a sans-papier?’

  ‘You know Zahra also?’

  ‘She argued with Esperanza, right?’

  ‘One time.’

  Spike held out another note which Tatiana tucked into a different boot. ‘Esperanza come into the club,’ she said. ‘She see Zahra, and when Esperanza see . . .’ Suddenly she climbed to her feet, enjoying the pantomime now. Through her lace bra Spike made out large, dark areolae. ‘Zahra shout at Esperanza. Then . . .’ She stabbed forward with an arm.

  ‘She cut her?’

  ‘Champagne wine. In her face. Then Esperanza stand and leave.’

  ‘Why did Zahra throw the drink?’

  ‘Maybe Esperanza touch her wrong. Or . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Another hundred dirham gone.

  ‘Two days later,’ Tatiana said, ‘I see Esperanza’s jeep. Zahra inside.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Where does Zahra live?’

  ‘In Chinatown. Like all the girls.’

  ‘Where’s Chinatown?’

  ‘In the hills.’

  ‘Address?’

  Tatiana smiled. ‘No address for Chinatown, estúpido.’

  ‘Does she have a mobile number?’

  Tatiana hovered above Spike. ‘You strong tall man,’ she said. ‘But gentle eyes.’ She reached out a hand. ‘You put contact lens for the colour, no?’

  Spike caught a hint of sugar almonds on her skin. He’d known a girl once who smelled like that. She hoisted a leg over Spike’s lap. ‘Sometimes I like to know a man,’ she said, lowering herself down, ‘before I give him secret . . . informations.’

  Spike raised his hands to her sides, feeling the jutting prominence of her ribs as he eased her down onto his own chair. She edged her thighs apart; the gusset of her thong was dark-stained. Spike reached again for his wallet. ‘Here’s two hundred more. Now go home. And be careful who you dance for.’

  The girl snapped closed her thighs. ‘I prefer a man who fuck,’ she said, fluffing out her crisp white hair. ‘Maybe you only talk because you cannot fuck. Spanish zamel.’

  Spike held open the door back into the club. A new song blared: ‘Rock the Casbah’ by The Clash. The girl pushed past, the top of each buttock embossed with a cherry-red welt.

  Marouane was standing behind the bar, hunting for scurf in his hair. On the previously empty podium, an Arab boy in cut-off shorts and Cleopatra eyeliner was humping a pole. Beneath, Spike recognised the two Spaniards from the reception of the Hotel Continental.

  The bespectacled businessman drank alone, scouring the room, legs folded daintily among the cushions. Spike walked over, leaned in close and whispered a few words in his ear. Then he left.

  Chapter 17

  Spike crossed the waiting hall of the Sûreté Nationale on Avenue d’Espagne. The fissured marble floor was covered by men reclining in traditional dress. The air smelled like a classroom in midsummer.

  At the desk, a duty sergeant was reading the Journal de Tanger. Spike asked for Inspector Eldrassi; without looking up, the duty sergeant waved a benedictory hand across the silent, waiting congregation. Spike saw they formed a sort of queue. He asked when Eldrassi would be available. ‘Demain,’ the sergeant replied, flipping to the sports section.

  Outside, dusk clung on, as though afraid to surrender to night. The restaurant terraces were bustling with men eating sweetmeats. Spike realised Tatiana was the only woman he’d exchanged words with since arriving.

  There was a bank opposite; Spike went to the cashpoint. A heavily armed security guard stood by as he made the withdrawal. On the other side of the avenue, three young black men looked on. Sans-papiers probably, awaiting their chance to steal across the Straits. Spike had read countless articles on the risks involved – bloated, cracked bodies washing up each month on Spanish beaches, victims of unscrupulous boat runners, victims of the Gut.

  A petit taxi swerved to a halt, responding to Spike’s European height and clothes. The driver had a package of greaseproof paper on the passenger side; he drew it onto his lap as Spike got in and shunted back the seat. ‘Chinatown.’

  ‘Comment?’

  Spike pointed up the hill to where the city rose. The driver shrugged. ‘On va à Chinatown, donc.’

  Chapter 18

  Spike forced down the stiff window to let the curried air circulate. Once they’d passed through the Ville Nouvelle, with its ornate, Parisian-style apartment blocks, they crested the hill and rolled down the other side. Vandalised, half-finished buildings – breeze blocks and rusting girders – protruded from a cacti-studded wasteland. The road began to dispense with pavements, then markings, then traffic altogether until a jeep drew up behind. Once it had grasped that the taxi couldn’t speed up, it overtook on a blind corner.

  The driver braked suddenly as a tall man with a long white beard emerged from the wayside, guiding some goats over the road. Kids crossed behind, bleating. Somewhere a dog barked.

  They drove on, turning left down a potholed track. The food parcel bounced on the driver’s lap. He stopped the car. ‘C’est Chinatown.’

  Spike stared down the slope to a line of low-slung brick buildings clustered at the bottom of the track. The light was poor but they appeared to have sprung up in a dip between two hills, like fungus on a moist enclosed part of the body.

  ‘It’s a shanty town?’

  ‘Bidonville.’

  ‘Can you get any closer?’

  The taxi driver crunched on his samosa. He was a small, bug-eyed man with pictures of small, bug-eyed children gummed to his glove compartment. Spike took out his wallet and removed a hundred-dirham note.

  The driver shook his head. ‘Bad place for taxi.’

  Spike looked again down the slope. A few lights were visible. It clearly had electricity. ‘Why’s it called Chinatown?’

  ‘No laws for building.’

  ‘Seems quiet.’

  ‘People working. In the city.’

  ‘Bedouins?’

  The driver coughed a flake of samosa onto his beaming children. ‘Tu parles des bédouins?’

  ‘Do Bedouins live in Chinatown?’

  ‘Desert peoples . . . C’est bien possible.’

  Spike put away the note and held up a two hundred. The driver restarted the engine and they continued another fifty metres up the road before turning left. This time they drove further down the rough, unsurfaced track. Reeds sprouted by a stream; a patch of dusty scrubland revealed two burnt-out cars, kissing bumper-to-bumper like some untitled art installation. More brick buildings ahead; the driver switched off the engine.

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ Spike said, signalling the number with his fingers. As Spike opened the door, he felt a tap on the shoulder. ‘Attention, uh?’

  Outside, the air smelled sulphurous. Spike removed some low-denomination notes from his wallet and stuffed them in the top pouch of his cargo trousers. The driver watched on in silence, chewing his samosa.

  Chapter 19

  The ground consisted of layer upon layer of trodden rubbish: flattened cans, shredded sackcloth, powdered glass. A stream snaked between the brick shacks. Its stench – eggs and rotten meat – suggested open sewer. The tall, nuclear-green reeds grew on one side only, giving Spike a glimpse of a brownish sludge oozing through the centre.

  Covering his mouth and nose, he followed the stream between the buildings. The walls, he saw, had plywood embedded in the brickwork. Sticking from the top of one was an incongruously modern satellite dish.

  Spike gagged as he neared the water. Beneath the surface lay an eyeless mongrel puppy, its chest swollen, guts flapping in the current like pink pondweed. He put a hand to his neck as he passed, folding a soft mosquito beneath.

  The stream continued on through the settlement, forming a muddy half-moon-shaped bank. A few plastic tables had been pushed together, at which a group of men sat smoking clay pipes and playing cards. All wore thick black moustaches, their faces darker than the o
ther Moroccans Spike had seen, Indian almost. Paired with white djellabas were coiled, light-blue turbans.

  Candles guttered on tables, an electric light fizzing behind, dive-bombed by suicidal, shiny-backed beetles. A woman in a headscarf sat cross-legged on the mud, shelling pods with a knife as a child played nearby with a food wrapper. The cables feeding the naked bulb looped away over corrugated roofs – illegally siphoned electricity, Spike supposed. ‘Zahra, por favor?’ he called, holding out the photograph of the girl.

  The child stared up, open-mouthed, as her mother continued shelling. One of the card-players crooked a fingertip to the left. Spike gave a nod, hearing urgent, whispered rasps as he walked away.

  Of the twenty minutes Spike had asked the driver to wait, five had elapsed. A thicker, more faecal smell began to coat the back of his throat as he turned into a gap between the huts. Through an open door he saw the flicker of a TV, a rag-draped figure prostrate before it on a camp bed.

  Despite the condition of the buildings, Chinatown appeared to follow a grid system of sorts: parallel roads intersected by narrow alleyways. Spike continued left. Scrawled on a door was a painting of some rapt children with the words École Primaire Mohammad VI. The dark, plastic-sheeted windows were too murky to see through. Spike glanced up to the sky: the last of the sunlight had gone.

  On the opposite side of the road, a bulb gleamed from an open-fronted shack. A youth appeared by Spike as he crossed over, cycling tight against him, aligning his wheels in the tyre tracks scored in the dried mud. He was staring so fixedly at Spike that his front axle caught in the furrow and he almost fell.

  The facade of the shack was made of sliced-up plastic pallets. A man was sitting inside, eating with his fingers as a TV blared out Al-Jazeera news. A balding parrot clattered above him in a cage.

  ‘Hola?’

  The man suspended his fingers by his lips as Spike drew closer. ‘Zahra la beduina?’ he said. ‘Dónde?’

  ‘À gauche,’ the man said. ‘Gauche, gauche.’ He crammed his fingers to his mouth. The parrot chewed at the bars of its cage.

  The moon was visible, just a nail clip of white in the hazy, blue-black sky. Ahead in the street, Spike saw the boy on the bicycle joined by four other youths. They were all watching him too.

  He turned into the next alley. Some sort of shop, a rack of exhausted-looking vegetables outside and an old, aproned woman hunched on a stool, serving a girl. As Spike drew closer, the girl glanced round. Then she picked up her plastic bag and walked quickly away.

  Chapter 20

  Spike kept ten metres behind the girl. Her black kaftan flowed outwards, a sequinned headscarf concealing her face as she glanced around, increasing her speed. They were one behind the other now, following the raised, mud-packed ridge between the tyre tracks.

  ‘I’m a friend of Esperanza’s,’ Spike called out.

  The girl crossed the road beside a half-built breeze-block wall.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Tatiana.’

  She dropped a handle of the plastic bag. Tomatoes and aubergines bounced to the ground. She cursed, crouching as Spike loomed above. Behind, a vehicle began to glide silently along the road. Spike turned to look: a jeep. He took a step closer to the girl. ‘I’ve been to the Sundowner Club.’

  She continued gathering groceries.

  ‘You’re Zahra, aren’t you?’

  ‘Why don’t you fuck off back to Ángel?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Or I’ll scream,’ she added in surprisingly clear English.

  A tin can had rolled into the tyre tracks; as Spike bent down for it, he glimpsed the girl’s tight denim jeans stretch beneath her kaftan. The sequins on her headscarf began to glitter in a beam of light; the jeep had performed a U-turn and was peeling back towards them. It traversed the road until it was facing the girl, stopping twenty metres shy, engine on, headlights blazing through a bull-bar bumper.

  Spike picked up the tin can, then heard the engine rev. ‘Zahra!’

  The girl snapped up her head as the jeep roared towards her. Sprinting over the road, Spike launched himself into the air. He smelled her sharp, citrus perfume as he pressed himself against her clothing, bruising his shoulder as they thudded down together onto the hard ground. She elbowed him in one kidney, then scrambled to her feet.

  The lights of the jeep glowed red. Hubcaps scraped against ridges of crisp mud. Zahra crouched again, gathering her shopping.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The reverse lights of the jeep had been replaced by sharp yellow beams. Spike gave Zahra a shove; she took a step forward, dropping her bag before starting to run. Spike followed her into a narrow side street. Headlights tickled its mouth, disappearing before returning more strongly. ‘Down here,’ Spike said.

  The walls on either side of the alley were made of cemented, blue-grey breeze blocks. Glassless windows above revealed dark figures silently watching. Rats scuttled in front, shifting one behind the other like a relay team. A pothole of stinking softness slurped at Spike’s foot as Zahra streaked ahead with long strides – she seemed focused, unsurprised.

  Spike heard the engine rev behind them. ‘Stop,’ he called, catching her up. She spun round, fist emerging as though to strike him.

  ‘We can’t outrun it.’

  The headlights gleamed into Zahra’s almond eyes; she glanced back, then dashed towards the side wall.

  The breeze blocks were piled seven feet high. Zahra leapt up and got her hands on the top, holding herself in position before slipping back.

  Spike dropped to his knees like a sprinter. ‘Stand on my back.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go on!’

  Spike felt pressure on his spine as Zahra’s feet pressed downwards. He forced his neck up, her weight finally lifting as she got a hold on the wall above.

  The headlights were almost on him. In a single fluid motion, Spike got to his feet and threw himself at the wall. His fingers gripped the top edge and he held himself there, lungs burning, espadrilles paddling against rough breeze blocks.

  He hauled his legs into the air as the jeep sped beneath him. Further along, it stopped. There was a sharp double click of doors opening.

  Spike felt a touch on a sinew-twisted shoulder. He pulled himself higher, scraping his stomach muscles until he came to rest face down in a flat, asphalted space. Feet pounded the mud below. A flashlight raked up and down the wall.

  Spike’s shoulder joints sang in a hot and not unpleasant way. The girl grabbed his hand; he’d cut himself, he saw as he stood. They edged for a while along the platform until Spike felt his neck jerk back, the top of his head slamming into a low-hanging pole. He put a hand to his hair, testing for blood, then felt Zahra touch his arm, steadying him. They crouched together in the darkness, the only sound now the pitch and fall of their chests. From below came the slam of car doors. An engine restarted.

  Spike sat down, leaning dizzily against the surrounding wall. He felt her breath warm his face. ‘Thank you,’ he heard her say. Then he closed his eyes.

  Chapter 21

  The back of Spike’s head was leaning against a rough surface, sandpaper or pebble-dash. The air smelled of hot cat piss. He groped in his pocket for his phone, then manoeuvred it over his eyes. He’d only been out for five minutes. And she was gone.

  He hauled himself up. His head throbbed; he explored with his fingers, finding a large bump above the hairline. The skin of his forehead felt taut, uneven with mosquito bites. Balance regained, he edged along the platform, waiting for his eyes to adjust. A makeshift frame of bamboo scaffolding seemed to be holding the structure up, a dusty back road three metres below.

  After testing the bamboo, Spike started to climb down. His shoulders ached. There were more bites on his ankles, slick blood on the back of his wrist. He licked it and tasted ferrous grit.

  Once on the ground, he saw stars spangling the night sky like the sequins on Zahra’s headscarf. At the end of the street, a bonfire crackled, three
or four silhouettes gathered round, turning some kind of meat on a spit. Woodsmoke and burnt flesh carried in the air. Beyond, Spike made out the jagged shape of a bicycle.

  Fresh tyre tracks scored the mud; Spike kept to the shadows until he caught the first whiff of the stream. The outdoor café appeared, card-players gone, bearded proprietor slowly clearing tables.

  Jogging now, Spike followed the bank, dry-retching as the miasma strengthened. Two bristly yellow dogs burst from the rushes and ran at his ankles, thrilled at the speed. Once past the brick buildings, Spike felt his heart lift as he saw the triangular roof panel of the petit taxi.

  The driver was slumped at the wheel; Spike tapped on the window and his head shot up. Blinking bulbously, he reached over and tugged up the passenger lock.

  ‘Hotel Continental,’ Spike said, and the driver twisted on the headlights.

  As they reversed, Spike saw a figure appear between the buildings. They rumbled away, pursued by the barking pack of dogs. The figure was gone.

  Chapter 22

  The cafés on the Avenue d’Espagne were busy, black-tied waiters shuttling between groups of locals and tourists. Seeing a table of tanned, laughing Europeans, Spike felt a powerful urge to go and join them.

  ‘Slow here,’ he said as the police station came into view. A youth with a fishing rod over one shoulder was arguing with a man in chef’s whites, their dispute overseen by a harassed-looking sergeant. Spike caught sight of a crowded hallway behind. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Carry on.’

  They stopped at the walls of the Medina, the streets above too narrow for cars. The driver hit a button on the meter: ‘Bonne continuation,’ he grinned once he’d registered the size of the tip.

  A few late-night hawkers ambled over but their hearts weren’t in it. As Spike passed the Grand Mosque, he saw a strip-lit room where lines of men chanted, kneeling and bowing in unison. Looked like good exercise.

  Outside the hotel, the guard was watching football in his cabin, devouring couscous from a paper plate. Spike strode past him to reception. The lighting from the chandelier created a soothing atmosphere as the receptionist perched contemplatively at his desk. ‘A good night, monsieur?’ he said.