I fell asleep instantly. Then, out of nowhere, the phone rang. The little alarm clock on the bedside table glowed in the shuttered room: 13:02. And here I was, alone. No sign of Paul. I reached for the phone.
‘Your wake-up call, madame,’ Yasmina intoned.
‘And my husband?’
‘No sighting of him so far. But Yusuf is still out looking, and he is phoning in regularly. Alas, not a trace.’
‘I’ll be down in a few minutes. Might you be able to call me a taxi?’
‘But the Paris flight isn’t until five o’clock.’
‘I’m not going to Paris. I’m going to . . .’
Reaching over to a pile of paper I’d dug out of my pocket before tossing my dirty clothes outside the door, I found the scrap on which Ben Hassan had written Faiza’s address. I read the details into the phone. Yasmina told me that it was a five-minute drive – and that my clean clothes were now on the way upstairs with the maid.
A quarter of an hour later I was in a taxi headed to an apartment complex not far from the entrance to the Atlas Film Studios. The complex was semi-modern, semi-brutalist in a 1970s reinforced-concrete style. There were three separate blocks, all no more than seven or eight floors tall. I asked the driver to drop me in front of Block B. I paid him and headed up four concrete flights of stairs to Apartment 402. I took a long steadying breath before pressing the doorbell, expecting either no answer or an angry woman refusing to see me and telling me to go away and never come back.
But on the third ring the door opened. There stood a woman who was surprisingly tall and stylish, albeit wildly thin, with a face once beautiful, now cracked and leathery. She had a lit cigarette in one hand, a glass of pink wine in the other. When she spoke her voice sounded nicotine cured.
‘So,’ she said, ‘you finally got here.’
‘You know who I am?’ I asked.
‘Of course I do. You’re the other wife.’
Seventeen
‘I PRESUME YOU drink a bit,’ Faiza said.
‘A bit, yes,’ I said.
‘I drink a lot.’
She motioned for me to seat myself on a brown corduroy sofa. I was in a modest one-bedroom apartment. Concrete walls painted white. A bentwood rocking chair. Splatter-paint abstract canvases. An elderly rug. A few framed photographs of Samira at varying stages of life. An air conditioner that, though effective, emitted a low wheeze. A couple of old lamps that, like the rest of the decor, seemed around twenty years out of date. A balcony which overlooked the encroaching desert.
Seeing me take everything in, noting numerous empty wineglasses and brimming ashtrays and the general dustiness, she coughed like a true smoker and said:
‘I didn’t invite you here, so I’m not going to apologise for this place. Except to say that I had a change of personal circumstances in April and had to find a new apartment in a hurry. Life, sometimes, is a series of let-downs. Especially when it comes to men, wouldn’t you agree?’
She then began to cough again wildly.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Of course not.’
She was as thin as a stalk of celery, dressed in black linen pants and a black linen shirt, with around nine gold and copper bangles on her spindly wrists. Her hair – long, very straight – was still jet black. But her skin was leathery, and her teeth were tobacco-stained.
She disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, returning with a chilled bottle of rosé and a second glass.
‘It’s Moroccan, but good.’
‘Like most of the wines I’ve had here.’
‘So Little Boy Paul married himself a much younger woman,’ she said, lighting up another cigarette.
‘I’m not that young.’
‘But you are at least twenty years younger than me . . . which, in my book, makes you a kid. More to the point you are his wife.’
‘So are you.’
‘Actually, the marriage only lasted about ten minutes . . . and then was annulled.’
‘Annulled? Really?’
‘You seem surprised.’
‘I’d been told that you were still his wife.’
‘Whoever told you that – and I have my suspicions – simply wanted to play head games with you. I am definitely Paul’s ex-wife.’
She splashed some wine into a glass and handed it to me. When I raised it she just nodded curtly.
‘No need to get friendly,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I have a class to teach – conversational English – in around forty minutes. So though speaking conversational English with you might have its professional benefits, it doesn’t please me having you here.’
I apologised for showing up on her doorstep unannounced and uninvited. ‘But I am genuinely worried about Paul.’
‘Poor you for being so involved with that fool. Because that is what he is – a fool. And one who has to shoot himself in the foot with a Kalashnikov, pausing twice to reload.’
Faiza was suddenly hit with another horrendous coughing fit. When she had brought it under control she used some wine to clear her throat, then said:
‘Well, they always told me smoking was a stupid habit. But without it life would be even more intolerable. Not that you’ve probably ever smoked a cigarette in your life. I bet you’re one of those Americans who work out six days a week.’
‘I know Paul came here to see you,’ I said, refusing to take the bait.
‘Paul came here to plead with me. To ask me to intervene with our daughter and get her to have some contact with him. Of course I refused to do any such thing.’
I took another sip of wine, choosing my next words with care.
‘I can understand why you turned him away. Especially as he has spent the last few decades denying your existence and that of his daughter. Please understand – until yesterday I didn’t know that you and Samira existed. Nevertheless, Paul has had a major breakdown and he has gone missing.’
‘Perhaps this time the disappearance will be a permanent one. I can handle self-destruction. It’s a personal choice. Like me smoking forty cigarettes a day. The difference is – mine harms only myself. Paul is someone whose self-destructiveness ends up destroying everyone else in his immediate path. When I kicked him out last night I told him to do the world a favour and kill himself.’
Pause. Then I said:
‘Your capacity for hate is impressive.’
‘And who are you – Mother Teresa?’
‘I am probably going to divorce Paul as soon as I get him back to the States. But first I am going to get him home. And away from Ben Hassan.’
‘That fat fuck – he can be your best friend and your worst nightmare.’
‘Are you still in contact with him?’
‘You mean, considering that he might have killed my father and two brothers . . . not that I entirely blame him for that.’
‘They’re all dead?’
‘Well, they are all planted in the earth now. So that should answer your question. Was Ben Hassan behind all this? That’s the great question.’
She splashed some more wine into our glasses and continued.
‘I wouldn’t blame Ben Hassan for killing them. After he helped Paul escape his shotgun marriage to me – that’s the term you use, isn’t it? – they destroyed his hands, his future as a painter. The police and the judiciary let them off with a small cash payment. But Ben Hassan was never able to hold a paintbrush again. I was so disgusted with my father for acting like a thug that I broke with him and my brothers – two not very bright stooges who did everything their father told them to. Like crushing the fingers of a man whose great sin was that he helped his friend.’
‘Didn’t you feel guilty about that too? According to the story Ben Hassan told me last night, you were pounding on Paul’s door, telling him you’d be killed if he didn’t marry you . . .’
Faiza stabbed her cigarette into the ashtray.
‘Do you have any idea whatsoever what it means to be a woman in this culture? There was no poss
ibility of negotiating with my family once I found out I was pregnant. Did I deliberately get pregnant? Put it this way – we were careless. And no, I wasn’t on the pill. And yes, it was my hope that Paul would marry me and get me out of Morocco and to the States. So I was being completely mercenary. But Paul and I loved each other back then . . . for a while anyway. I even said to him: “Marry me, get me my green card, and once we’re in the States I’ll make my own way.” But when he baulked I made a fatal error and told my father that I was pregnant. From that moment on we were doomed. Because Papa could never do anything subtly or cleverly. He always had to bring out the heavy artillery. He had to get his way, and punish anyone who tried to stop him – which was poor Ben Hassan’s fate.’
‘And did he eventually kill your father and brothers?’
‘As I said before, that is still the ongoing question. My father died in a car accident, driving alone between Casablanca and Marrakesh. According to the police report, the brakes of his Mercedes failed. They couldn’t establish if they had been tampered with or not, but there was a school of thought that someone had so significantly stripped back the brake pads that when a motorcycle swerved in front of him and my father braked, the result was catastrophic. He lost control of the car. It flipped over three times and then ignited. The chassis was so badly burnt that they couldn’t really establish if there had been foul play. Of course the driver of the motorbike was nowhere to be found. The fact that it happened late at night on an otherwise empty road . . . it all seemed to me and many others to have been carefully planned. So carefully planned that the police couldn’t even justify an investigation.
‘Then around seven years later, my brother Abdullah was found hanged at his condominium on the Costa del Sol. Abdullah had done very well in the wall-to-wall carpet and linoleum game. He’d married a very beautiful, very stupid woman quite late in life – he was over forty – and had two little girls whom he doted over whenever he was at home, which wasn’t very often. He’d expanded his business into Spain, bought a petit bourgeois seaside condominium – the man had no taste whatsoever – and was showing no signs of depression or any other signs of psychological instability. It was his mistress, a local bar girl, who found him. She was the prime suspect for a while. The thing was, Abdullah had grown almost as large as Ben Hassan. So it was very unlikely that she could have strung him up herself. The fact that he seemed to have taken three too many sleeping pills that evening raised all sorts of suspicions. She was held with her actual boyfriend under suspicion of conspiracy to murder for many months. But I was always convinced that the hand of Ben Hassan was behind it all.’
‘Why didn’t you alert the authorities?’
‘To what? To the fact that, fifteen years previously, my father had ordered his two sons to carry out an appalling act of violence on a man who, in the intervening years, had become, in his own ingratiatingly corrupt way, a sort of Mr Fixit in Casa and Rabat, and had so many connections in so many echelons of the establishment here? Not that anyone high up in government administration or the world of finance would ever admit to calling a sleaze like Ben Hassan a friend. He knew this too. It didn’t bother him. He still had “connections”. Tainted, blemished connections, but it kept him and whatever young man he was sodomising that month in a level of modest comfort. Yes, I am getting nasty. Talking too much. But after kicking our husband out of here last night, I found myself unable to sleep. As I had two classes to teach this morning I popped a Dexedrine to keep myself up. I took another one just fifteen minutes before you turned up. The wine works wonders with its speedy properties. A sort of yin-yang effect.’
Silence. I put down my glass of wine, suddenly too buzzed from the alcohol and the desert afternoon which the wheezing, consumptive air conditioner was just about keeping at bay.
‘You didn’t tell me about your other brother?’ I finally said.
‘Driss? A bigger fool even than Abdullah. Never married. Never succeeded at much. Worked for his brother running inventory in Casa. After Abdullah was “suicided” – I know that’s what happened – the man who bought up the company sacked Driss. As there wasn’t much in the way of family money – and what little Driss had inherited he spent at the roulette table and on prostitutes – he ended up as a limousine driver for a company ferrying people from the airport to one of Casablanca’s five-star hotels. Every summer he had a week off down in Agadir, our dreadful package-holiday resort. He went swimming one evening, maybe fifty metres from the shoreline. A speedboat ran over him. Split his skull in two. Being a speedboat it sped away. Not a trace of who was commandeering it, or even a glimpse of its registration. The thing is, Driss loved swimming at night – and it was his fifth night in Agadir, so I am pretty certain that someone had been watching him, working out his habits.’
A shrug. Another slug of wine. Another cigarette.
‘I don’t think I like your silence,’ she finally said. ‘It feels very fucking judgemental.’
‘Your English is impressive.’
‘So is your sense of irony.’
‘I’m hardly being ironic. I’m just trying to figure out your story.’
‘What’s to figure out? I have never asked Ben Hassan directly if he was behind everything that happened to my family. Because he has been, on one level, a very good friend to myself and my daughter. When Samira pushed me away over a decade ago – after I moved down here, but also as a result of a lot of anguish about so many things – he acted as a surrogate parent for her in Casa, and also gradually brought her around to establishing some sort of detente with her mother, for which I will always be grateful. You know she got pregnant by a French businessman. But Ben Hassan negotiated with him on Samira’s behalf. He might have headed back to his wife and children, but he does give her three hundred euros a month—’
‘Ben Hassan told me it was five hundred.’
‘Maybe he pays Ben Hassan five and he gives her three. Who cares?’
‘But that means Ben Hassan is pocketing twenty-four hundred euros a year.’
‘Yes, Little Boy Paul did tell me you were an accountant. What was a highly rational, competent woman like yourself thinking when you hooked up with such a disaster?’
I met her gaze straight on.
‘I was thinking about the sex – which was pretty spectacular. I was thinking about the sexiness of being with an actual artist – and one with real talent. I was thinking how wonderful it would be for our child to have an artist for a father.’
As I spoke these words I felt myself slipping into a haze, my boldness succumbing to fatigue. Perhaps it was the wine, or the absolute despair of the bitter woman sitting opposite me, or my naive wish to connect with someone else who once wanted everything with Paul and, like me, was betrayed by him. I took a deep steadying breath before continuing.
‘With Paul I thought I could have adventure and culture and freedom. Freedom from all the trappings of modern American life. But Paul wanted all those trappings – the nice home, the gym membership, the summers in Maine, good food, fine wine – even as he bemoaned our materialist culture. And he knew I would deliver all that to him, because I had what he lacked – which was a sense of responsibility. And a real belief in us. Our life, our future together. Of course I also made that pathetic mistake of thinking I could change him. So, yes, you’re right. I hooked up with a disaster. Guilty on all charges. Despite all that, though, despite everything he’s done, I still don’t want to see Paul come to harm.’
Silence. She reached for what must have been her fifth cigarette.
‘Do you want me to congratulate you on your directness, your openness?’
‘I just want to know two things.’
‘Go on.’
‘Did you know about Ben Hassan talking Paul into taking out this loan for your daughter’s apartment?’
‘What loan?’
‘Ben Hassan told me that Philippe gave Samira one million dirhams towards an apartment in Casablanca.’
‘Oh, please.
The Frenchie has been reasonable about giving her a degree of child support. But one million dirhams? That is beyond absurd. Samira lives in a fifty-square-metre apartment that she rents for two thousand dirhams a month – which is quite a bargain for the Gauthier area of Casa. You know she is a professor of literature at the university there, specialising in Romantic Melancholy. How apt. She got her doctorate in France, at Aix-en-Provence. Her thesis was even published. So yes, I am very proud of her. And I love being a grandmother to her wonderful son. But the idea that her Frenchman gave her a million dirhams for an apartment . . .’
I felt myself getting hyper-stressed, because I was beginning to figure out the game that Ben Hassan was playing. I said:
‘But Ben Hassan also told me that when Paul contacted him, begging to be put in touch with Samira, he said that a quick way back into her life was by matching the one million dirhams for the apartment she was buying.’
‘And Paul agreed?’
‘I’m afraid so. Ben Hassan showed me the loan agreement he signed. He’s repaying one-point-six million on a one-million dirham loan.’
‘The first I’ve heard of it. If he’d given that money to Samira – or went and bought an apartment for her . . . well, Samira and I are reasonably close now, so she would have told me. I mean, one million dirhams would buy her close to a hundred square metres in the Gauthier district. She’d be over the moon. So . . . it is clear that your husband allowed himself to be scammed.’
I picked up the glass of wine I’d put aside. I took a long sip, trying to absorb what I had just heard.
‘So Paul going missing . . .’ I said.
The Heat of Betrayal Page 20