The Torch of Tangier

by Aileen G. Baron

  Lily glanced over her shoulder. They had lost the German.

  Drury threaded his way through a maze of narrow streets and paused before an ornate carved door set into a blue tiled arch covered with Kufic script.

  “A mosque?” Lily asked.

  “A medersa, a religious academy.” Drury knocked on the door. “The mosque is next door.”

  A young man in a white djelaba opened a small entry cut into the door. Lily peeked into a serene, mosaic-tiled courtyard. In the center, a three-tiered fountain sparkled with water spilling from level to level.

  Drury nodded to the youth at the door.

  The boy nodded back. “He’s expecting you. I’ll fetch him.”

  The young man disappeared through the courtyard into a room hidden behind a colonnaded gallery.

  “We’re waiting for someone?” Lily asked.

  “The Imam in charge of the medersa.”

  In a few moments, a lean man floated across the courtyard, a silk burnoose billowing behind him. He was thin and elegant with a handsome razor of a face adorned with a pointed goatee.

  “Sabach el kir,” Drury said. “Good morning.”

  “Sabach el nur.” The man eyed Lily. “You bring a friend?” His nose halved his face like the beak of a bird.

  “My assistant.” Drury turned to Lily.

  The holy man hesitated. “Welcome.” He moved out into the alley and closed the door behind him and turned to Drury. “You bring a Romany woman here? To the house of Allah?”

  “Lalla Sampson helps me to help you,” Drury said.

  Lily gave the Imam a tentative smile and stepped away from the door in deference to the holiness of the place.

  The Imam made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and splayed out the other fingers of his right hand. “You see this?” he said, holding his hand against the calligraphy on the tiles around the doorway. “This is the name of Allah.” The configuration of his fingers matched the writing behind them.

  Lily looked from Drury to the Imam. She stepped further back.

  Drury reached for her arm and guided her forward. “In the work we have to do, Lalla Sampson is needed.”

  “Nevertheless. A Christian woman in the medersa?”

  Needed for what kind of work? Lily wondered.

  “You must understand,” the Imam said to Lily, tracing a graceful arc with his arm, his fingers still patterned in the name of Allah, “that when the French arrived, they brought bold women and new customs with them. The French were powerful and new, we were weak and old. We have yet to recover from the shock.”

  “Soon that will be over,” Drury said.

  “Inshallah. If Allah is willing. We must keep the same traditions. The same way to prepare food, the same way to make tea, the same way with the wind.” His arms fell; his head bent to the side. “Still, slowly, slowly, we change. Wisdom comes from God. But haste comes from Satan.” His voice trailed off.

  “About the fifty thousand francs…” Drury said after a pause.

  The holy man scanned the alley. “We cannot talk here. Someone will hear.” He lowered his voice. “Tomorrow they will know, in Asilah, in Casablanca, as far away as Meknes. Rumors spread through the souk like lizards slithering across the pavement, through the stalls, from the spice sellers to the leather workers, from the wood carvers to the brass makers.”

  “Then meet us on The Mountain,” Drury told him. “Tomorrow night.”

  The Imam nodded and smiled. He opened the door and turned to leave.

  “In Marrakech, where I lived as a boy,” he said over his shoulder, “going to the mountain meant starting a revolution.”

  “Right,” Drury said. “Come to The Mountain and we’ll drive out the French and Spanish.”

  In spite of her wariness, Lily felt a brief tremor of excitement.

  “Inshallah,” the Imam said. “May it come to pass with the will of Allah.”

  He stepped over the threshold, back into the medersa, and closed the door behind him.

  “What was that about?” Lily asked.

  “He’s a friend of the ghazi of the Moroccan Nationalist Party. They want economic and political opportunity, education.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “We can promote it, stir things up a bit. We call the Imam the Mekraj.”

  “Why? What does it mean?”

  Drury didn’t answer.

  Chapter Nine

  Drury appeared in the doorway with a tall man wearing an officer’s uniform.

  “Major Adam Pardo,” Drury said. “Lily Sampson.”

  The major extended his hand. “Adam.” When he leaned forward, the papers Lily had stacked on the edge of the desk fell to the floor.

  The major looked up at Lily, his eyes as blue and brilliant as mosaic tiles. He knelt to pick up the papers. “So sorry.” His face broke into a dazzling, apologetic smile. Lily caught her breath. He has a lot of teeth, she thought.

  “Adam’s G2,” Drury said. “Army Intelligence.”

  Lily stood up to lean over the desk and watch him gather the fallen papers. “He seems brighter than that.”

  The major picked up the papers one by one and made a stab at putting them in some sort of order, then glanced up at her with another smile.

  “Who’s your dentist?” she asked.

  “At the moment, just some guy in Gibraltar. But in real life, I go to a Dr. Steiner in Boston.”

  Armand Korian’s sticky-sweet pipe tobacco wafted toward them from the corridor. He knocked on the open door and belched smoke into the room.

  “Telephone.” He aimed the stem of his pipe at Drury. “For you.” He turned to leave. “In Boyle’s office.”

  Drury gave Korian a grudging nod. “Be right back,” he said and followed Korian down the hall.

  The major continued to collect papers from the floor. “Drury tells me you can be trusted.” He rose and stacked the papers on the side of Lily’s desk.

  “With what?”

  “He tells me you’re reliable, responsible, adaptable.”

  “That’s right. Infallible, sensational, spectacular.” Why would Drury discuss her character with a stranger?

  “All that.” He flashed his teeth again. “And more.”

  He leaned toward her, both hands on her desk. Lily flushed and backed away.

  Korian passed the door and lingered a moment, openly curious. He gaped at them and moved on slowly, still peering into the office. The major tugged at his belt. His face had gone red. He looked down, brushed his sleeve with his hand.

  Drury rushed down the hall to the office, pushed Korian out of the way and burst into the cubbyhole, white-faced. “Got to go.”

  “What happened?” Lily asked.

  She watched Korian pause as he left, straining, poised to listen through the back of his head. She signaled Drury to wait.

  Korian drifted down the hall, hesitating, moving on again, wavering, sauntering slowly back to his office.

  “They arrested Suzannah,” Drury said when Korian was finally out of sight.

  The major looked startled.

  “Got to go,” Drury repeated.

  “I’ll go with you,” the major said.

  They scooted out, leaving the door open, and leaving Lily to wonder, in their wake, why Drury and Major Pardo were so concerned about Suzannah.

  She shrugged, put the stack of papers in order, and went back to work and began to polish the final draft of a chapter on the politics of social change.

  From time to time, Korian passed in the hallway, glancing in her direction. He’s waiting for me to start a conversation, Lily thought, find out what I’m working on. He wants to know everything. Just ignore him; just keep working.

  In the early afternoon, Korian stopped in the doorway and leaned against the jamb, droopy-eyed, clearing his throat, running his finger along the bowl of his pipe, waiting for her to stop writing. Finally Lily looked up. He came int
o the room and leaned over the desk and stuck the pipe into his pocket.

  “I was wondering, Lil….”

  “My name is Lily.”

  “Sorry.”

  Korian leaned over her. His skin was pearly and yellowish, his eyes, lids dropping, held a peculiar glint.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Just tired.”

  She could feel his breath on her shoulder as she continued to edit the report. Korian lifted the pen from her fingers and put his hand over the foolscap pad. “I was wondering, Lily, if we could have dinner tonight. I know a place in the medina.”

  “I have to wash my hair.”

  “You have to eat too.”

  “Besides,” she said. “You look like you need some rest.”

  Drury’s voice came from the hall. “She’s already made arrangements for dinner.”

  Korian looked up, his hand still on the report. “With you?”

  Drury came into the room and walked over to the desk. “You’re not the only pickle in the barrel.” He lifted Korian’s hand from the pad of paper and jostled him out of the way.

  Korian’s face flushed purple.

  Drury lifted his chin as if standing his ground. “You look angry enough to spit.” He held the pad in one hand, lifted a pencil from the tray on the desk and drummed on the table. “We have work to do. And so do you.”

  He waited.

  Korian turned to go and Drury slapped the pad on Lily’s desk.

  “What happened with Suzannah?” Lily asked after Korian’s footsteps faded down the hall.

  “All taken care of.” Drury sat down and tilted back in his chair. “False alarm. Some papal delegation is visiting. Guardia Civil picked up all the prostitutes. Imagine! Arresting prostitutes in Tangier.” He smiled, snapped the chair upright and stood up.

  He reached over to Lily’s desk and began sorting pages, making corrections, collating them with ones he brought from his own batch of papers.

  Lily cleared her throat. “Major Pardo…” she ventured.

  “What about him?” Drury looked up. “He asked to meet you.”

  “Why? What does he want from me? You know him well?”

  “We crossed paths when I was in graduate school. Came into the anthropology program in Columbia after I came back from my fieldwork.”

  “So it’s Doctor Pardo?”

  “He teaches at Harvard.” Drury went back to the manuscript, correcting lines here, adding words there.

  “What does Doctor Pardo want?”

  Drury kept busy with the papers. “This is pretty good, as far as it goes.” He tapped his fingers against the page he had been reading. “We ought to do a section on Concepts of the Supernatural. People love that.”

  “You mean the five pillars of Islam, that sort of thing?”

  “Djinns, of course,” Drury said.

  “Like the ‘Office of the Djinn’?”

  ***

  Lily remembered.

  Drury had haggled with a djinn in his “office” at the back of the cave during the excavation. Tariq and his brother Hasan had been muttering about djinns since Drury found the Neanderthal jaw.

  Everyone knew, Hasan had warned them, that the djinn lived in old bones and relics. Each time they found a fragment of bone, Hasan would jump away, crying out, “Ben Adam? Is it human?”

  Hasan always carried a bag of salt at his belt because, he told Lily, it was well known that djinns abhorred salt. Before he entered the cave each day, Hasan would sprinkle it on the ground, rub it on his clothes, and making a face, would swallow some, washing it down with great gulps of water.

  Once Tariq took Drury aside and explained soberly, “Hasan thinks that the bones are here because this is the bureau of the djinn.”

  “Not to worry,” Drury had told him. “I’ll speak to the djinn.”

  Nothing happened until the day of the djinn, the day after Zaid had injured his eye, the day Zaid—hand on his forehead, a patch over his swollen eye—had remained in the villa in Tangier, lounging on the settee in a room off the garden.

  Remembering what had happened to Zaid, Hasan had refused to enter the cave, lingering on the apron outside. Zaid was injured, Hasan insisted, because the djinn was angry that they had stolen his cache of bones.

  After much argument and waving of arms, Tariq convinced his brother to get back to work. “You go outside,” he told Hasan. “Work at the screen.” The djinn would not venture into the light of the sun, Tariq assured him.

  For most of the day, Tariq, with an air of resigned bravado, dug by himself in the trench. He hoisted the baskets of loose dirt to his shoulder with a groan, staggered out to Hasan, and dumped them into the rocker screen for his brother to sift.

  Lily and Drury were working in the soft brown soil near an alcove in the back of the cave when they heard a cry from Tariq. “Ayeee! Ayee! Bismillah rahman rahim. In the name of God the merciful and compassionate.”

  Lily and Drury rushed to Tariq and found him sprawled across the trench, one leg sunken through the floor of the cave.

  “He’s fallen through.” MacAlistair began tugging at Tariq’s arm.

  “It’s the djinn,” Tariq cried, thrashing and twisting, “pulling me down to the center of the earth.”

  “Stop caterwauling and climb out of there,” Drury said and grabbed Tariq’s other arm.

  Together, MacAlistair and Drury yanked at Tariq, wrenching him this way and that while he bellowed and clamored for the mercy of Allah.

  With one final jerk, they hauled Tariq clear of the trench.

  Drury peered down through a funnel-like hole that opened to a glimpse of wild surf eddying against the rocks below. “He’s broken through to the Lower Cave.”

  They released Tariq and he fell forward. His right arm shot out, clutching at MacAlistair’s belt for balance. The other gripped MacAlistair’s pants leg, near the pocket.

  MacAlistair’s keys spilled out. He reached for them, clutching air and lost his footing. Dazed, he watched the keys disappear into the foaming sea.

  “Now how do we get home?”

  “It was the djinn,” Hasan whined, “the djinn.”

  “I’ll deal with that irritating creature right now,” Drury said.

  He brushed his hand through his hair and stalked to the alcove in the back of the cave.

  “Ayee!” Hasan whimpered. “He goes to the Bureau of the Djinn.”

  They heard Drury’s voice roll and echo in the alcove. He argued and bargained in high-pitched Moghrebhi Arabic, answered in his normal tone in English and French, and searched through his pockets twice. Tariq watched from the cave entrance.

  When he finished, Drury returned from the back of the cave. “Everything’s fine. Convinced him to move the bureau to another cave. Snatched some hair from his head.” Drury waggled a few strands of hair before Hasan’s stupefied face. “Paid him for his trouble, of course.”

  “How much did you pay?” MacAlistair asked.

  “Twenty centimes and a chocolate mint.”

  “And some kif,” Tariq added.

  “Is danger,” Hasan told him.

  “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Ayee. You must say prayers every day. Must fast on Ramadan. Must never drink alcohol, must never be unfaithful to your wife, never lie, never steal.”

  “I don’t steal,” Drury said. “And my wife doesn’t give a damn.” He waved the hair in the air and shoved it into his pocket. “If he bothers us again, I’ll burn his hair and order him to leave.”

  “Bismillah rahman rahim,” Tariq said.

  Drury checked his watch. “Four o’clock,” he said. “Time to go.”

  “How will we start the car?” MacAlistair asked.

  But Drury had already left the cave and strolled down to the car.

  He had crawled under the dash, hot-wired the Hillman, and then drove them back to town.

  ***

&n
bsp; “Better not mention the Office of the Djinn,” Drury was saying, looking over Lily’s shoulder in the cramped space behind her desk. She crossed out the sentence she had just written.

  “Remember, the Prophet himself preached to the djinn. Even converted some to the faith.” Drury picked up the pages she had just finished.

  Lily wondered if he could make sense of the ink splotches, arrows and additions in the margins, and the splattering of crossed-out words. “The pages look like they were wounded in the war. I’m not a great typist.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” He reached for the pile on the side of the desk, leafed through the pages, straightened the stack and arranged it neatly on the desk. “They can retype it.”

  At five o’clock, they left the Legation together. Outside the medina, they skirted the Grand Socco and approached a side street where Zaid waited in the Hillman, waited to drive up The Mountain to the villa, just as he did every evening.

  Chapter Ten

  MacAlistair sat at the piano in the salon, his fingers striking the keys, filling the room with furious music, arpeggio after arpeggio fleeing from his hand like frightened doves.

  Under the colonnaded archway, Zaid leaned against the carved doors that opened on the courtyard. He had bleached his hair that week and a bright blond curl on his forehead stood out against his swarthy skin.

  In the cool autumn dusk, under the open sky, a table had been laid for dinner next to the blue-tiled fountain. Idly, Zaid watched the servant, Faridah, dismantle the table setting, stacking bright earthenware plates into rickety piles, yanking off the white linen tablecloth. Tassels, fringing the scarf that covered Faridah’s head, wavered disapprovingly in the evening breeze.

  “Getting too cool to eat outside,” Zaid said and pushed back his strand of yellow hair.

  Faridah carried the dishes and cloth into the house toward the dining room. Strident piano chords reverberated against the tiles and quivered in the alcoves. The vibration made the copper lamps weave back and forth on their chains; lacy patterns of light on the walls swayed in dizzying arcs.

  The effort made MacAlistair cough and he stopped playing. Sweat dripped from his temples; two flaming crimson patches on his cheeks stood out against the pasty whiteness of his face.