Shadow of the Rock (Spike Sanguinetti)

by Mogford, Thomas

  ‘Eventful.’

  ‘The variety of the rainbow creates its appeal.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Spike replied as he went upstairs.

  Nearing his room, he heard screeching tyres and machine-gun spray. He stopped, rapping at the door. He thumped harder until it was opened by a tall, well-built black man with shoulder-length dreadlocks. ‘Ouai?’ The air behind him stank sweetly of hashish.

  ‘Can you turn that down?’ Spike shouted. ‘Menos ruido?’

  The man shook his head, dreadlocks held in place by multicoloured beads.

  ‘I’m in the next-door room,’ Spike said, feeling fatigue drape him like an oppressive cowl. He tucked his hands pillow-like behind an ear.

  The man’s face brightened. ‘Ah. Mes excuses.’ As he turned away, Spike made out a glowing bank of TV monitors. The noise quietened and he reappeared, smiling. ‘Jean-Baptiste,’ he said, proffering a pink-palmed hand. The skin was rough yet soft, like the bottom of a dog’s paw.

  ‘Spike.’

  Jean-Baptiste’s eyes fell to Spike’s cut. ‘Tu veux du . . .’

  Spike shook his head, then went next door, collapsing on his bed as the fan wheeled above. He shut his eyes, trying to think of the name Zahra had used when he’d approached her. What had it been? Sleep tugged at his brain like a crafty hand on the corner of a blanket.

  Chapter 23

  After bandaging the cut on his wrist, Spike stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. The pink domes of mosquito bites spotted his forehead. He threw cold water over his face, remembering a story he’d read about Paganini. In the winter of 1786, when Paganini had been four years old, his parents had thought he’d died of measles. They’d laid him to rest in a chilly pauper’s grave until the undertaker had seen a wisp of condensed breath emerge from his shroud. The boy had been removed from the coffin and nursed back to health, and the next year his father, a mediocre mandolin player, had pressed a violin into his bony hands. The ghoulish rumours had started when the boy had begun composing sonatas aged seven. They’d stepped up a level when he’d played his first solo concert at nine. Look closely, the people of Genoa whispered, and you will see the Devil guiding his elbow.

  The receptionist was still at the desk.

  ‘Don’t you ever sleep?’

  The receptionist looked up from his book. ‘How short is the night for those who sleep well.’

  ‘What are you reading there?’

  He held up a front cover marked by curly Arabic script.

  ‘Quotations?’

  ‘A man must take his wisdom even from the side of the road.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ Spike said as he handed over his room key.

  The dining terrace of the Continental overlooked an apron of shipping containers. A female dog was lying in their shade as a male sniffed her rear. The female kept her tail down, head firmly on forepaws.

  The Arabs were fasting, the Europeans breakfasting. Spike sensed the Spanish couple observing him from behind. The man with the sideburns now had a split lip. Spike wondered what adventure they ascribed to the wound on his wrist.

  He drank his coffee – warm and milky, better than the reconstituted orange juice that had preceded it – and stared out at the Straits, where a succession of freight and cruise liners was coming and going from the quayside. On the furthest coastline, his father Rufus would be eating his breakfast egg, slippered, dressing gown gaping as he fed the occasional buttered soldier to General Ironside. Routine: the doomed attempt to defeat the march of time. The past wasn’t truly past if it could be repeated.

  Spike stood and headed for the coast road.

  Chapter 24

  The duty sergeant was reading the next day’s Journal de Tanger, but the rest of the waiting room had emptied out. Spike walked past him to a side door, where a man at a desk was scowling at a large computer monitor, as though not quite sure what it was, still less how it had come to be there. He wore a brown corduroy suit rather than the sky-blue shirt and peaked cap of the sergeant outside. Beside one hand lay an overflowing ashtray.

  ‘Inspector Eldrassi?’

  The man raised his eyes, face long and grey, like a lolly sucked dry of flavour. Contrasting with the sallow skin was a suspiciously dark moustache.

  ‘Jessica Navarro gave me your name. Hablas inglés?’

  His expression animated, as though he’d been flicking through a mental file of e-fits and come across a match. ‘The beauty from Gibraltar,’ he said, laying his cigarette in the crematorium of its predecessors. ‘They send me there for trafficking conferences. I speak the best English.’

  ‘Spike Sanguinetti.’

  The man stood up properly. ‘Inspector Hakim Eldrassi. You are also a policeman from Gibraltar? Here on holiday?’

  ‘Lawyer. Here on business.’

  Hakim withdrew his hand and rubbed it on his brown corduroy trousers. He motioned with his chin to a chair opposite the desk. ‘Five minutes.’

  Spike sat down. ‘I represent Solomon Hassan.’

  Hakim shook a cigarette from his pack even though the previous one was still smouldering. ‘He is on his way back to Tangiers, I hope?’

  ‘We’re seeking to prevent extradition.’

  Hakim’s eyes closed in weary disbelief. ‘There is an arrest warrant, Mr Sanguinetti. He has a case to answer.’

  ‘We consider Tangiers Prison to be unsafe for a Sephardic Jew. Even if my client were only in custody overnight, that would still represent a breach of his human rights.’

  A smoke ring hung in the air, stretching to a Munch-like skull before disappearing. ‘Why are you here?’ Hakim said.

  ‘Seeking evidence of anti-Semitism within your penal system.’

  ‘But here,’ Hakim went on, ‘in front of me. Now.’

  ‘Have you been to the Sundowner Club?’

  ‘In this room,’ Hakim said, ‘we do not care for it when people answer a question with a question.’ He threw some ash into the tray with a practised flick. On his desk Spike saw the same triangular card he’d seen in the hotel: Together Against Terrorism.

  ‘It’s a clip joint,’ Spike continued, ‘on the beach. The murder victim, Esperanza Castillo, was there the night of her death.’

  ‘With your client, no?’

  ‘Did you know Esperanza was involved in a fight at the Sundowner a few days before she died? With a waitress.’

  Hakim sucked hard on his cigarette, as though it were somehow to blame. ‘We are considering no other suspects until your client comes back to answer the charges against him.’

  ‘You’re not following other leads?’

  ‘Guilty men run, Mr Sanguinetti. Your police friend, Miss Jessica, will tell you that. In fact, she is the only reason I am still talking to you.’

  ‘And I’m the only person doing your job.’

  Hakim frowned.

  ‘Last night I went to see this waitress. A jeep tried to run us over.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Chinatown.’

  Smoke flowed simultaneously from Hakim’s mouth and nose. The laugh changed to a cough, which racked his wiry chest until he covered his mouth with a fist, spitting then swallowing. ‘Chinatown,’ he gasped. ‘Normally they just beat you to death with a baseball bat then try to sell your organs. Did you see the number plate?’

  ‘Too dark. But it was a black jeep with tinted windows. Bull-bar bumper.’

  ‘You should not go to Chinatown, Mr Sanguinetti. Especially at night.’

  ‘Like I say, I’m being forced to do your job for you.’

  Hakim’s face settled into a glare. At the end of his office sat a plywood cabinet, a plastic-framed photo of the King on the wall above, so standardised that Spike realised the one in the Dunetech office must have been a personal gift. Hakim rose, walking over and rattling open a drawer. Ash crumbled down as he drew out a Manila folder.

  Back at his desk, he shoved a bulldog-clipped sheaf of forensic photographs into Spike’s hand. The top one was a black
-and-white head shot. Esperanza’s dark shoulder-length hair was washed back from her forehead. Her face was paler than the sand around her and her upper lip shadowed by a faint moustache, like a self-portrait by that Mexican artist. She wore a bolt through one eyebrow and a metal stud beneath her lip. Her cheeks were plump and her eyes open, milky-white, as Solomon had said, with a vacant upward stare that chimed somehow with her strange, other-worldly beauty. Spike brought the photo closer: the cut was just a nick to the left-hand side of her neck, no bigger than a comma. The only indication of depth was the blackness and bruising around.

  He turned to the next photo, in colour this time, taken from further back. A juvenile crab was entwined with her armpit hair. Bangles racked up her right forearm.

  ‘So,’ he heard Hakim say as he fired up another cigarette, ‘the victim and your client are having a drink on the beach. Your client removes the victim’s underwear – still missing, if she had any – and they engage in sexual activity. Digital penetration, say forensics; finger-fucking, you might call it.’

  Spike reached for the last photo, a full body shot. Esperanza’s floral dress sheathed her thighs, revealing a dark raised triangle beneath the cotton. The straps were a rusty brown.

  ‘Your client is carrying a knife,’ Hakim went on. ‘He leans into the girl, who trusts him, and slits her external jugular with a flick of the wrist. Then he drags her body into the sea – which destroys any traces of DNA – and escapes to Gibraltar.’

  Spike turned over the last photo: stamped in red on the back was ‘Sûreté Régionale de Tanger’.

  ‘And you,’ Hakim said as Spike reaffixed the bulldog clip and slid the pictures back, ‘wish to free this murderer on a technicality.’

  ‘We just want him tried in Gibraltar.’

  ‘Because it is more likely he will escape conviction.’

  ‘What if he’s not your man?’ Spike said. ‘Have you even entertained that possibility?’

  ‘He has no alibi.’

  ‘Nor motive.’

  ‘A man, a woman – what more motive do you need?’

  ‘Have you checked for CCTV footage?’

  ‘There were no working cameras on his route home.’

  ‘And no witnesses to prove he was even on the beach at the time of death.’

  ‘The time of death is not yet confirmed.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A second post-mortem is being done in Madrid.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘At the request of her stepfather. A powerful man, I am told.’ Hakim began tidying up the photographs.

  ‘Inspector Eldrassi,’ Spike said, ‘I’ve known Solomon for thirty years. He’s not capable of murder.’

  ‘Sometimes the less you know, the more you see.’

  ‘Is that the motto of the Sûreté Régionale?’

  Hakim grinned hazelnut teeth. ‘You introduce me to someone you know. You are affected by your experiences of them. I see the person.’

  ‘Maybe you see a quick prosecution to keep the governor of Tangiers happy.’

  ‘I see you, Mr Sanguinetti,’ Hakim said, face shrouded in smoke like a cheap mystic. ‘You are familiar with death, for example.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘When you looked through those pictures your face was still. No shock, even when you saw the crab. You have known death. A parent perhaps. A sister.’

  Spike felt his jaw tighten. ‘Maybe I see you, Inspector Eldrassi.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You’ve lost your religious faith. But it’s not that which keeps you awake at night. It’s fear. Fear because you can’t shake off the thought you’ll still go to hell.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because you look exhausted. And you’re smoking in the daytime during Ramadan.’

  Hakim smiled and nodded slowly. ‘Your five minutes are up, Mr Sanguinetti,’ he said as he crossed the room.

  ‘Go back to the Sundowner Club,’ Spike called over. ‘Have a chat to the barman, Marouane. He’s a small-time drug dealer.’

  Hakim shut the folder away with a definitive thunk. Moving to the doorway, he stuck an arm into the entrance hall.

  ‘That cut,’ Spike said, rising to his feet. ‘It looked precise. Stanley knife? Scalpel?’

  ‘The pathologist believes it was done with an Eid knife; just the tip pressed into the vein.’

  Spike shrugged.

  ‘You know of Ramadan but not the Eid? Maybe you have no religion either. It is a festival twice a year. Once to mark the end of Ramadan, another a few months later. Sometimes we kill a lamb to celebrate. A symbol of Ibrahim sacrificing his child, Ismail. A small, sharp knife cuts the throat. They sell maybe five thousand a year in Morocco.’

  ‘Solomon Hassan is Jewish.’

  ‘Jews slaughter lambs, do they not, for Passover?’ Hakim ushered Spike through. ‘I’m a busy man, Mr Sanguinetti. Until your client comes back, the case is on hold.’

  ‘Can I have access to Solomon’s flat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will you get me into Tangiers Prison?’

  ‘You do not stop, do you?’ He lifted a hand to Spike’s shoulder. ‘You are intrepid; I respect that. But if your case against extradition depends on information about our prison, I suggest your client will be back here sooner than you think. Two places a foreigner does not go. One is Tangiers Prison. The other is where you went last night.’ Hakim patted himself down for more cigarettes. ‘Catch the next boat home, Mr Sanguinetti. And send your client back the other way.’

  Two beefy policemen were coming through the main door, sub-machine guns at their sides. They nodded respectfully at Hakim as they passed.

  Spike stepped out onto the street, where the late-morning sun was already blistering. A black jeep was parked on the pavement, ‘Sûreté Nationale’ painted on the side, windows tinted. Spike stood back and snapped a picture on his mobile phone.

  Chapter 25

  Shaded beneath a date palm near the police station, Spike dialled Nadeer Ziyad’s number. Opposite, on the central reservation, a young black man was asleep in the sunshine. Spike wondered at the thickness of his woollen roll-neck, before realising he must have climbed the Atlas Mountains to get here, trudging through the Sahara. Even summer nights in the desert were said to be bitterly cold. Where had he started his journey? Mali? Cameroon?

  No answer from Nadeer; no voicemail facility either. Spike put away his phone and drew out the invitation he’d taken from Solomon’s office. ‘Dunetech Investor Roadshow, Saturday 24th’. The 24th was today. A business conference was surely improbable on a Saturday, Spike thought, until he recalled that the Muslim day of rest was Friday. Hence yesterday’s skeleton staff at Dunetech, perhaps.

  There was a map on the back, which he followed into town, thinking as he walked of Zahra, of the close fit of her jeans beneath her kaftan, of her excellent, foul-mouthed English, husky-voiced as though recovering from a bout of karaoke the night before. He checked the photo he’d taken of the police jeep, trying to remember if there’d been any side markings on the vehicle which had rammed them in Chinatown. It had been too dark to be certain.

  The El Minzah Hotel was just past the souk, its sparkling glass doors manned by three porters in fezzes. Seeing the stars arching resplendently above the name, Spike wondered, not for the first time, why he’d heeded his father’s advice on accommodation.

  ‘Je peux vous aider, monsieur?’

  ‘Here for the Roadshow.’

  ‘Start ten minute ago.’

  ‘My driver got lost.’

  One of the porters led Spike through the lobby. The front desk was adorned by a vase of white Casablanca lilies and a crystal decanter of brandy. Past a bank of old-fashioned payphones, a side door was guarded by another porter. The A-board outside welcomed investors to ‘The Dunetech Roadshow’; Spike flashed his invitation and was shown into murmuring, air-conditioned darkness.

  At one end of the room was a stage, above which a film was projected onto
a state-of-the-art screen. Rows of folding chairs were set out in front, an aisle in between. Spike spotted an empty seat near the back by the DVD trolley.

  Faces turned, European mainly. Symphonic music and a recorded voiceover were emanating from the stage. Spike heard ‘. . . over two thousand megawatts of energy . . .’ spoken by an actor whose tones he vaguely recognised. Most of the audience wore lightweight summer suits. Spike was in espadrilles, cargo trousers and a T-shirt.

  ‘The sands of time are running out,’ the actor’s voice said, ‘so the time is right . . . for Dunetech.’

  The rear wall was lined by soft velvet curtains; Spike backed along them before stepping forward into the aisle. A young Moroccan glanced over from the DVD projector, then resumed pressing buttons.

  A prospectus gleamed on the chair, which Spike scooped onto his lap as he sat. The film had switched to sweeping silent images, aerial shots of rows of solar-power units, squatting like triffids in the desert. Their numbers began increasing exponentially, demonstrating how much larger the power field could grow. The last shot panned across an army of mirrored machines, massed to the furthest horizon before the screen switched to black and the Dunetech logo faded in.

  Enthusiastic applause swept the room. A woman sitting close to Spike – Japanese or Korean – leaned into a male colleague, whispering in his ear before clapping like an apparatchik.

  The projectionist began fiddling with a control panel. The lights came on. The applause ramped up further as Nadeer Ziyad stepped onto the platform. He soaked it up, then raised his arms. ‘Shukran,’ he said, stepping higher onto the lectern. ‘Namaste. Arigato. Sheh-sheh. Thank you.’ He slid on a pair of rimless specs.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the nature of solar power is such that –’ Abruptly he glanced up and removed the glasses. ‘My country,’ he said, smiling as he leaned a forearm on his notes, ‘my beautiful, crazy country.’ He looked around the room. ‘How much of our energy do we import from abroad? Twenty per cent? Thirty?’ He shook his head. ‘Ninety-six. Ninety-six per cent! No oil to speak of, nor natural gas. In order to make our energy affordable, it must be heavily subsidised by the government. Unfortunately, this eats up resources which could otherwise be dedicated to helping wipe out Morocco’s most dreadful affliction.’