‘Hello, Tax Man.’
‘Hi, Jess. Did you call?’
‘Nope. I’m on foot patrol in Irish Town. So how’s Tangiers?’
‘They don’t seem to like me much.’
‘That makes a –’ Jessica checked herself. ‘Where are you staying?’
‘Hotel Continental.’
‘Una tanita?’
‘Seen better days.’
‘And you hooked up OK with Eldrassi?’
‘Yeah. You sure he’s straight?’
‘As they go.’
‘How’s Solomon?’
‘Still complaining.’
‘I need to talk to him.’
‘I’ve scheduled you a call for 4 p.m. tomorrow.’
‘Tenkiu, Jess. And let’s have that drink when I get back.’
‘You OK, Spike?’
‘Why?’
‘You sound . . . different.’
Spike paused. ‘What do you know about Bedouins?’
‘Bedouins? Come from the desert. Move about a lot. Big on honour codes, like most nomadic people. Not many left in Morocco, I think. Why?’
‘What sort of honour codes?’
‘Blood feuds, that sort of thing. Why? Have you fallen for one?’
‘A whole tribe. So I call the Castle tomorrow at four?
‘Está penene, Spike.’
The sun was passing above the square, dragging its shadow line over the cobbles like a tarpaulin drawn by invisible ball boys. Spike’s phone rang again. ‘Yes?’ he said irritably. Damp breathing poured down the line. ‘Hello?’
‘Is Marouane.’
‘Who?’
‘From the Sundowner. You come now. Alone.’
The breathing was replaced by dead air.
Chapter 29
Swimmers and sun worshippers disported themselves in the distance. At this end of the beach, clusters of men loitered in full-length robes, cupping illicit Ramadan cigarettes, chatting surreptitiously as they glanced out to sea. A father and son flew a home-made kite, a mongrel gleefully chasing its shadow. Spike skirted around them to follow the perimeter fence of the Sundowner Club.
The gate hatch was open; Spike ducked beneath and slipped through the metal door. The velvet curtain was hooked onto a nail in the concrete; ahead, Spike saw the back of Marouane, bucket at his feet as he slopped down the bar top. He wore pink Hawaiian shorts, Jesus sandals and a hard-rock T-shirt. His hair was loose, lank black locks spilling over narrow shoulders.
Spike gave a sharp enough whistle to be heard above the brutal music. Marouane turned, tossing his cloth into the bucket. ‘You happy with your Marouane,’ he shouted. ‘Yessir.’
‘Turn the music off.’
After glancing left and right, as though appealing to an imaginary referee, Marouane moved to the bar top and turned the music down.
‘Off. Apagada.’
Finally, silence. ‘Vodka?’ Marouane said, but Spike ignored the offer, drawing up a chair beside the bench seats. As Marouane came over, he paused by the podium to lick a fingertip. A trail of crusty powder ran along the black-painted plywood; Marouane reconstituted it with his saliva, dabbing the ball of a finger onto his tongue. He grinned. ‘You like Tatiana, no?’
‘You asked to see me.’
Marouane sat down on the sticky bench seat. ‘Marouane must eat, you know?’
‘Is Zahra back?’
‘Fuck that Bedouin bitch. I see her, I cut her. No . . . Better.’ He stood and went to a doorway adjacent to the ‘private room’. Spike heard two short, crisp sniffs from inside before he reappeared, handbag over shoulder, sauntering towards the bench seats, hips jigging, one wrist cocked as he placed the handbag on the podium. Sitting back down, he pinched both nostrils, eyeballs bulging.
The handbag was made of expensive brown leather with a zip down the middle. ‘One thousand dirham,’ Marouane declared, holding out a hand, then shaking his head in frustration, hair exuding a stale pomade. Picking up the bag, he set it on the bulge in his Hawaiian shorts, unzipping it and drawing out a wallet with a familiarity that suggested lengthy acquaintanceship. He slung the wallet at Spike’s chest; it fell into his lap.
Spike picked it up. Spanish driver’s licence in the gauze flap: Esperanza Castillo, smiling, neat collar of a white frilly blouse around her neck. ‘Did you show this to the police?’ Spike said.
Marouane flashed a gold molar. ‘Police don’t pay.’
Spike opened the opposite flap – Spanish ID, picture more recent, plumper, scowling – as Marouane removed a tampon from the handbag. Using his right hand, he formed a tunnel into which he jabbed the tampon back and forth. ‘Uh, uh, uh. Big bitch,’ he chuckled.
Spike stuck out an arm. ‘The bag.’
As Marouane passed it over by the strap, Spike caught his hand, wrapping his fingers around the knuckles. Marouane frowned; Spike gave a brisk and vicious twist. His free hand grabbed at the source of the pain.
‘Drop it.’
‘I’m trying to.’
Spike twisted further until Marouane began to screech, clawing at Spike’s forearm. Finally he managed to release the strap, huddling back into the bench seat, hand to his stomach, rocking. ‘You break my fuckin’ arm . . .’
Spike reached down for the handbag, then stood.
‘Hey!’ Marouane called out. ‘One thousand dirham.’
He flicked a twenty note on the ground. ‘For the coat check.’ He was almost out of the door when he heard Marouane call after him: ‘You a dead man. You cunt.’
Spike turned. Marouane’s left hand held up his business card. The wrist drooped: he transferred it to his right. ‘I find you, cunt. Maybe Tangier. Maybe your home. But I find you.’
‘I look forward to it,’ Spike replied as he headed back out to the sunshine.
Walking along the pavement above the bar, Spike saw blood spreading beneath his bandage. A young woman was closing in; he recognised Tatiana, casually dressed in stonewash jeans and a paisley headscarf. She stopped, eyes on the ground. ‘Zahra,’ she said, ‘she gone.’ Her left eye was puffy, flaking with foundation, the scar on her chin unmasked and prominent.
‘Gone where?’
She stared across the Straits. ‘Sometimes when a person leave, first they make visit to the Café des Étoiles.’
‘Here in Tangiers?’
‘Ville Nouvelle.’
Spike nodded. There was fear in Tatiana’s good eye as it flitted from the cut on his hand to the handbag on his shoulder. ‘Listen,’ Spike said, ‘Marouane’s in a bad mood. Mal humor. Take the day off.’ He gave her a two-hundred note, then continued along the pavement.
Chapter 30
Stretching out on the unmade bed, ankles dangling, Spike listened to the rapid-fire finale of Caprice No. 13 in B flat major. No wonder they called it ‘The Devil’s Laughter’. He stared at the handbag, then reached for the central zip. It felt like opening a body bag. Sitting up properly, he emptied out the contents onto the bedclothes.
Condoms, aspirins, golden tube of lipstick. Well-used pack of tarot cards, screwed-up receipts . . . Spike checked for credit cards or cash. Not so much as a coin.
As he refilled the handbag, his hand brushed something solid. He stood and carried the bag to the light of the window. Drawing the two sides apart, he found a concealed zip at the base. He slid in his fingers and worked out a slim mobile phone.
He tried the on button: the screen flashed white then went dead. He pressed it again and nothing happened.
Turning the device over, he found a hole for the charger. He unplugged his own phone and tried it. Too small. He checked the make: Arabic.
The soundtrack of an action film boomed from next door. Picking up Esperanza’s phone, he stepped out onto the landing.
Chapter 31
Jean-Baptiste rolled his eyes, the whites reminding Spike of the skinned lambs’ heads in the souk. ‘Relax,’ Spike said. ‘It’s not about the noise. I want to take you up on your offer.’ He held out his wrist.
Jean-Baptiste glanced down at the bloodied bandage and made a series of clicking noises with his tongue. He stepped inside, leaving the door half open.
Spike followed him in. The shutters were closed, the air sweet and stale, the only light issuing from a line of four TV monitors, side by side at the edge of the room. The same film seemed to be showing on each; Spike recognised a starlet of the moment, doing ‘scared’ in the hallway of an ultra-modern house.
‘Wait here,’ Jean-Baptiste said. His accent was French, deep and languid. On the screens, the girl had responded to the danger by slipping off her hot pants and creeping through the house in her underwear. Spike looked about: four DVD players lay interconnected on the floor. A glinting pillar of blank discs stretched halfway to the ceiling. Turning to the bedside table, Spike saw a photograph taped to the wall, a hefty matron beaming beneath a floral headdress.
‘You like movies?’ Jean-Baptiste said as he upended an iodine bottle onto a cotton-wool ball and swabbed it over Spike’s cut. Spike felt a sting then saw yellowness stain the skin. The film soundtrack changed to urgent strings as the killer snuck up. ‘She should run away,’ Spike said.
‘They never do. Voi . . . là.’
Spike drew back his wrist then took out Esperanza’s mobile. ‘You wouldn’t have a charger for this, would you?’
Jean-Baptiste examined the handset. ‘C’est d’ici, uh?’
‘Belongs to a friend.’
With a knowing grin, Jean-Baptiste crouched down to the bedside table, plunging his hand into a vipers’ nest of cables. He seemed able to navigate expertly in the half-light. Spike watched him try various pins until at last he saw the blue-white glow of a phone screen. Jean-Baptiste looked up. ‘Tu veux du kif?’
Spike suddenly felt very tired. ‘Why not?’
Jean-Baptiste’s teeth flashed like bone as he reached for a drawer and took out a toffee-sized lump of hashish. Sitting back on the bed, he burnt a large crumb onto a DVD case, mixing it with sprigs of tobacco which he stuffed into the mouth of a clay pipe. The cop launched into a showdown with the killer as the girl lay unconscious, breasts straining against her bra.
Spike caught the familiar sweet herbal smell as Jean-Baptiste puffed on the pipe then handed it over. He sucked on the end, hot ash catching at the back of his throat. The iodine on his cut began to throb.
‘Oro negro,’ Jean-Baptiste said. ‘Black gold from the Rif Mountain. Le kif est dans le Rif, uh?’
‘Mercy,’ Spike replied, finally letting the smoke out.
‘Tu parles français?’
‘Pas un word.’
Jean-Baptiste took a few more puffs. A new sound from the TV, like two men in the distance sawing a tree in half. Spike felt the mattress vibrate then realised Jean-Baptiste was laughing. ‘What?’ Spike said.
‘Pas un word . . .’
Spike found he was laughing too. He took another puff, feeling tears prick the corners of his eyes. Jean-Baptiste sat back, sighing.
‘So how did you get into all this?’
‘Into what?’
Spike forgot what he was going to say. They smoked some more until he remembered. ‘The technology. Technologie,’ he added in a Clouseau accent.
Jean-Baptiste cleared his throat, suddenly serious. ‘In the Côte d’Ivoire. Abidjan. I work for the radio. Producteur de radio. One day I make a programme the police do not like. My mother’ – his eyes flicked to the bedside table – ‘she give me money for Europe. All her money.’ He puffed out slowly as though trying to cool the memory. ‘I cross to the north. Burkina, Mali. Into desert. Three thousand kilometre. Bus, lorry, camionette. One month in the desert. When I reach here, I think, it is time for Europe. But for Europe you need money and now my money is gone. So I earn’ – he gestured at the screens, as the hero cop and the starlet embraced – ‘and I wait.’
‘DVD sales holding up?’
‘Not just DVD,’ Jean-Baptiste said defensively. ‘I make slide show for tour companies. Business conference for hotels–’
‘The El Minzah?’
‘Sure. El Minzah, Mövenpick, Intercontinental.’
Spike received another numbing hit of smoke. ‘Did you meet many Bedouins in the desert?’
‘Les bédouins?’ Jean-Baptiste nodded vigorously. ‘Très costauds. Tough man, tough woman. Berber, Tuareg, black man – all are the same to les bédouins. First, les bédouins, then all else. Not like in Tanger. Know what they call me here?’
‘What?’
‘Abid.’
‘Abid?’
‘Slave.’
Spike passed back the pipe. ‘I get that sometimes.’
‘Tu parles de la merde, white boy,’ Jean-Baptiste muttered.
‘In Gibraltar,’ Spike went on. ‘The Spanish. They call us Chingongos.’
Jean-Baptiste paused. ‘Chingongo,’ he said, trying to replicate Spike’s accent. ‘What is that?’
‘A remote tribe of people who are interbred.’
Jean-Baptiste looked puzzled.
‘Incestuoso,’ Spike explained. ‘Have sex with their family.’ He contorted an eye and let his tongue loll. ‘Chin-gon-go.’
Spike saw Jean-Baptiste’s face scrutinise him in the glow of the credits. He looked preoccupied, then his eyes creased and he spluttered out a long, hacking laugh. ‘Abid,’ he sighed, ‘et Chingongo.’ He pointed at Spike; this set him off again until he wiped his eyes and crouched down to the nearest DVD player. Spike felt his inner thighs squeak as he adjusted his position on the bed. For a moment he envied the flowing cotton lightness of Jean-Baptiste’s djellaba. ‘Do you know the Café des Étoiles?’ he said.
Still on all fours, Jean-Baptiste worked himself round. ‘Is like my salon. You want to go there, Chingongo?’
‘Mais oui, mon ami.’
Jean-Baptiste gave another serious look. Then he burst out laughing again as he pressed a DVD into its plastic case.
Chapter 32
The sun was setting, the cafés and takeaway stalls abuzz. Spike and Jean-Baptiste wove through the labyrinth of lanes, towering over the locals. Every third step Jean-Baptiste seemed to stop to greet a vendor or glad-hand a shopkeeper. As he chatted to two weary-looking men with Afros, Spike asked him to wait and went down to the coast road.
The police station was starting to fill up. Spike handed over Esperanza’s handbag wrapped in a hotel laundry bag, a letter taped to the front. ‘For Inspector Eldrassi,’ he said to the duty sergeant. ‘Tell him it’s to do with the Solomon Hassan case. Solomon Hassan, you got that?’
‘Hassan. Wakha.’
Jean-Baptiste was waiting outside the police station. He carried his bulky canvas duffel bag with ease. ‘You go in there for your friend?’ he said.
‘Oui.’
He nodded, satisfied, and they continued up the coast road. The wind was picking up, billowing out the burka of a lady coming the other way like some funereal ghost. A set of three-footers broke on the beach, the Gut doing its hidden work, roiling and churning beneath the surface.
Chapter 33
The Café des Étoiles occupied the tongue-shaped end of a shabby block of the Ville Nouvelle. Two boulevards crossed at its facade; a black bin bag had been kicked into one, clipped by cars, spilling its guts. A cedar tree grew outside the main door, gnarled after a lifetime of being kicked by passers-by and urinated on by dogs, one of which cocked its leg as Spike and Jean-Baptiste passed, observing them with pink discomfited eyes.
The brown-stained interior was a fug of malodorous smoke. ‘I visit to maître d’,’ Jean-Baptiste called over the din. ‘Ski-Coca for later?’
‘Ski?’
‘Whi-ski.’
Spike watched him edge through the crowd, somehow avoiding the cul-de-sacs as he moved to a doorway in the back wall. In front, the low tables were crammed together, the spaces between filled by punters talking over the heads of those seated. At one end stood a platform where a trio of rictus-grin musicians were struggling to make themselves heard.
The two men on double bass and drums were North African, the keyboard player white. A fellow European, Spike assumed, until he passed and saw he was a freckled, albino black.
Spike sensed eyes on the back of his head. Someone hissed up, ‘Change money, friend?’ but he continued on by to an empty bar stool, where a white-haired barman was crushing mint with a pestle. Spike shouted out his order; a minute inclination of the head suggested the barman had heard.
He sat down. The two men on adjacent stools turned. One wore an ill-fitting suit, the other a hooded beige burnous. Spike took out his wallet; they glanced at one another then resumed their chat. He caught a glimpse of what looked like a European passport beneath the bar.
‘Vingt dirhams, monsieur.’
Spike paid up as a giant West African entered the postage-stamp-sized space by his stool. Gathering his drinks with a sweep of the arm, Spike withdrew to sit beside a poster advertising last decade’s visit of the Cirque du Maghreb.
After pressing his forehead against the tepid Coke bottle, Spike took a swig, then removed Esperanza’s mobile phone from his pocket. His fingertips looked large and clumsy on the keys. No more hashish – ever. The screen lit up – ‘Maroc Télécom’ – showing two bars of battery but a full signal. He checked the call list: nothing. The inbox contained four texts, each from Maroc Télécom offering hearty welcome in English, French, Spanish and Arabic. Three weeks old: evidently a local mobile had been a recent acquisition for Esperanza.
Another gulp of Coke, then Spike moved to ‘Sent items’. A single message this time, sent to a contact saved as ‘Abd al-Manajah’. Written out in Spanish: ‘Vengo man~ana como fijado’. I will come tomorrow as agreed. Sent on the 16th, the day before Esperanza died.
Spike checked ‘Contacts’. One name again: ‘Abd al-Manajah’. He looked over at the bar: the two men on stools had been replaced by newcomers. Pressing the phone to one ear and cupping the other with his hand, Spike hit call back. Five rings, ten. . . He thought about Ángel Castillo’s account of Esperanza’s last movements. Tarot cards from a fortune-teller. A trip to the beautician. Fifteen rings, twenty . . . In the dark, uneven mirror on the wall, he saw Jean-Baptiste’s head bobbing towards him over the customers.
Shadow of the Rock (Spike Sanguinetti) Page 9