The Fury of Rachel Monette

by Peter Abrahams

  They sat in the dining room, Cohn at the typewriter and Calvi pacing around the table. These speech-writing sessions were usually noisy and full of argument, but this one was subdued. Calvi paced and drank and hardly said a word. Cohn typed and drank and composed almost all of it himself. On the other side of the arch that separated the dining room from the living room they could see Gisela lying on the couch, lit only by the flickering blue light of the television. She was watching a program about seal hunting in the North Atlantic and eating chocolates from a box on the floor. Above the soft percussion of the typewriter they could hear the little voices in the television yelling at each other. If they looked they could see Gisela’s strong heavy thighs naked below the hem of her short skirt. From time to time they did look. They thought different thoughts. None of this made an impression on Gisela. Except for the opening and closing of her eyes and mouth she was inert.

  “That’s that,” Cohn said finally. He shuffled the papers together and laid them on the typewriter. “You’re sure you don’t want a little more punch in it, Simon?”

  “Aren’t you the one who has been nagging me about the peace talks?” Calvi asked testily.

  “That doesn’t mean we have to emasculate ourselves.”

  The annoyance drained from Calvi’s eyes and for a moment his gaze seemed to be directed inside. He picked up the bottle and emptied it into the two glasses. “Let’s leave it like this, Moses,” he said quietly. “It will get the job done.”

  “Whatever you say.” Cohn shrugged. Calvi took him to the door and switched on the front light. Outside the man in the broad-brimmed hat peered down the street, as if he were expecting someone any moment. Cohn mounted his bicycle and wobbled into the night. He wasn’t a drinking man.

  Neither was Calvi. When he awoke in the morning his insides felt bruised and his head throbbed. The soft golden light that the tourists raved about made his eyes water. He groaned to himself, and groaned again more loudly to discover if anyone was paying attention. But he lay alone in bed.

  Shakily he got out of bed and walked down the hall. Gisela was on the telephone in the kitchen, speaking in German. She had pinned her blond hair back off her face. Her skin had a smooth healthy lustre. The little T-shirt she wore stretched tightly across her breasts. She waved at Calvi as he came in, glancing at his body. Something in the glance made him feel old as the hills.

  She replaced the receiver. “Who was that?” he asked her in German, without thinking.

  She looked up in surprise. “I had no idea you spoke German,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me, you silly thing?”

  Suddenly he didn’t feel his hangover anymore, as if the surge of fresh blood that swept through him had washed it away.

  “I don’t really,” he said. “Just a few words, that’s all.”

  “But your accent was excellent! Say some more.”

  “I don’t know more.”

  “You must. Come on, Simon, talk to me in German.”

  “Auf Wiedersehen.” He pronounced the words very badly.

  She pouted. “You’re not trying.”

  “How can I? I don’t know the language. I speak Hebrew, English, French, and Arabic. And Mughrabi. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Don’t be angry, Simon,” she said. “I got excited, that’s all. It would be nice if you could speak German. There are things I could say to you in German that I can’t say in any other language.”

  He walked across the kitchen and kissed her on the mouth. He would make use of that surge of blood. “Like what?” he said.

  She wriggled herself against his skin and held him. After a while she said, “Not here, Simon.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not comfortable. Let’s go to bed.”

  “If you want.”

  “Carry me.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  But after she had not forgotten. “I’m amazed that you could learn any German at all in Morocco,” she said.

  He reached across her and took a cigar from the drawer in the bedside table. “I didn’t,” he said. He lit the cigar and laid his head back on the pillows. “The few words I know I learned here. There are a lot of Germans in Israel.”

  “Do you mean German Jews? I thought they spoke Yiddish.”

  He drew deeply on the cigar. He felt much better. “And German. They’re very snotty.”

  He left her sleeping soundly, her mouth a little open. Sunday is not a holiday in Israel, but Calvi had come to believe in the American-style weekend and he usually spent Sunday mornings walking around the city. He dressed in his old green corduroy suit with patches on the elbows, and wore the stout leather shoes he had ordered from a British manufacturer of outdoor equipment.

  When he stepped outside a warm breeze touched his face. It ruffled the leaves of the carob tree across the street. Its branches extended far over the road in one direction, but almost not at all in the other, making the tree look as if it had an avant-garde coiffeur. In its shade a man had set up an easel and was gazing with intense concentration at the walls and trees that enclosed Calvi’s villa. The man wore a broad-brimmed hat. Calvi wondered when he slept. Perhaps several men shared the hat.

  Calvi crossed the street and walked right by the man. Under the brim was an olive-toned, middle-aged face that needed a shave. The man wore thick spectacles, but they didn’t hide the fatigue in his eyes. He appeared not to notice Calvi at all. As Calvi passed he turned to look at the painting on the easel. He saw a study of his house and garden that, even unfinished, projected a mood of quiet and peace. He thought it was very good, and had a wild notion of offering to buy it.

  He walked on, moving in the direction of the Old City. After he had gone a few hundred feet he looked back, and saw the man walking about half that distance behind him. He still held the paintbrush in his hand. Calvi didn’t alter his speed, or look back a second time.

  Two fat American women were having their picture taken in front of the careless arrangement of stones known as Herod’s family tomb. The photographer, a little man with a thick guidebook stuck under his arm, clicked the shutter, preserving for eternity their affable pose, each with a flabby arm over the other’s shoulders.

  “So is Herod in here, Mervin?” one of them asked.

  “Good question, dear,” the little man said. “Apparently it’s only members of the family. In fact he ordered most of them killed himself.” He consulted the book. “If you want to see Herod we have to go to Bethlehem.” But the women had stopped listening and were talking about something else.

  Calvi walked around them and entered King David Street. As he approached a bus stop the number fifteen bus arrived, headed north. He timed his arrival so that he reached it just as the last passenger boarded. He slipped through the closing door, paid the driver, and sat down. Three stops later he got off and hailed a taxi going the other way. From the passenger seat Calvi saw the man in the broad-brimmed hat running clumsily past the King David Hotel. His wet paintbrush touched the arm of the woman who wanted to know where Herod was. She looked at the green smear it left and yelled something after him.

  The taxi took Calvi to a dilapidated garage in the southeastern part of the city. As he opened the car door he nearly knocked over an Arab woman who was panting under a large bundle of firewood she carried on her back. A few feet ahead her husband rode on the back of a tiny donkey that wasn’t having an easy time either. The wife, bent almost double, had a view of the donkey’s hindquarters, and not much more. The man’s thin sculpted features were composed in an expression of dignified benevolence, as if he had just taken the city.

  Around the single gas pump a few scrawny chickens fought over bits of oil-soaked feed that lay in the dirt. A toothless Arab wearing a stained and shiny red suit emerged from the bare room inside and looked inquiringly at Calvi. His eyes gleamed. Calvi glanced through the cracked panes of the window and saw two other men, sitting around a bubble pipe. Calvi told him what he wanted.

  The man
went back inside and returned bearing an iron key of the size you would need to open the cathedral at Chartres. He led Calvi into an alley, where they walked beside a head-high cement wall covered with lurid movie posters. They showed bare-chested Arabs with jeweled belts waving curved swords and glaring hotly at each other. The only thing wrong with them was that they didn’t look like Arabs; they looked like Rudolf Valentino in harem pants.

  They came to a thick wooden door in the wall. A beautiful barefooted little girl with thick black hair and big brown eyes sat in front of it, doing nothing. In an angry voice the toothless man said something that Calvi didn’t catch and she ran away.

  The man placed the key in the lock and turned it. It opened without a hitch. The man removed the key and put it in his pocket. He was proud of that key.

  They stepped through the doorway and into a small dirt yard surrounded on all sides by cement walls. In the center was a dry and cracked stone fountain surmounted by a curly-haired marble god who looked Greek. Decaying around the fountain were four automobiles. Two of them had no wheels, the third had wheels but no doors. The fourth was a rusty ambulance with broken headlights. It had the right number of wheels and doors.

  “What do you want for the ambulance?” Calvi said.

  The toothless man looked shocked. “I can’t sell the ambulance,” he said. “Never.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too valuable.”

  After a while they returned to the garage to talk further. The toothless man fetched a chair that was less broken than the others for Calvi. The two other men at the table smiled at him. They shared the bubble pipe. They talked about the weather and kids today. They praised his command of Arabic. A woman entered bringing sweet coffee and little cakes that tasted of powdered sugar and motor oil. They smoked some more and watched the flies go after the cake crumbs. Soon Calvi’s hangover began to make a comeback. When the toothless man saw that his eyes were sufficiently glassy he named an absurd price. Calvi accepted at once. Calvi and the toothless man shook hands. Calvi and the other two men shook hands. The three Arabs shook hands.

  Calvi paid the money and got ready to leave. Before he did he asked that the ambulance be repainted, in the same ambulance colors, and that the flashing red roof light and siren be in good working order.

  “Ah,” groaned the toothless man as if his appendix had burst. He thrust the wadded bank notes back across the table with a revulsion that suggested they were leprous. They settled on a new price.

  Calvi told him that it must be ready by the end of the month, and told him who would come to call for it. He stood up and they all shook hands again. When he left they seemed genuinely sad, and Calvi knew they were.

  II

  14

  The drunks had finally gone to sleep or passed out. In the oval window of the airplane Rachel saw a sallow reflection of her face. Beyond it there was nothing but the blackness of the Atlantic night.

  She reclined her chair as far as it would go and closed her eyes but she was unable to sleep. She thought of her last telephone conversation with Trimble.

  “Of course we’re keeping the case open,” he had said. “We haven’t given up on tracing the black car, and something may turn up on the blond man.” But the FBI had found no record of a graduate student named Gurt Weiss enrolled in any university in Munich, and no one had ever heard of a German encampment named Siegfried in a place called Mhamid or anywhere else in North Africa.

  On the drive to Kennedy Airport her father had reiterated these facts. “Let the professionals handle it,” he told her.

  “Adam’s been missing for over a month. That’s not handling it.”

  “But—”

  She gripped his shoulders hard. “Adam is alive. I’m going to to find him.”

  At the last minute he offered to go with her. “But who would take care of the fish?” she had said. She meant it lightly but it brought a hurt and slightly shameful look to her father’s face. She leaned forward and kissed his forehead.

  “Have you got enough money, Rachie?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She kissed him again and went through the glass doors where a tired young man waited to search her bag.

  To the east the sky began to lighten. A band of red gold appeared on the horizon dividing space into two endless halves of navy blue. Rachel pictured herself sitting in a padded chair bolted to a hunk of metal speeding over the cold sea. She hated flying.

  Dawn brought the stewardesses in fresh make-up, applied thickly enough to hide signs of fatigue, or anything else. They woke up the passengers to give them tepid, bitter coffee and jellied rolls of the sort a tongue could feel but not taste. Everyone was eager to get off the plane; she could hear it in the captain’s voice when he told them it was he speaking.

  True to his word he landed the plane on the runway at Mohammedia Airport, north of Casablanca. Then he drove it around the tarmac for a while giving the stewardesses a chance to walk up and down the aisle ordering everyone to remain seated. They were released at precisely 8:32 in the morning, Tuesday, the twenty-third of March. Rachel knew that because she was adjusting her watch on the captain’s instructions.

  Inside the terminal a fat man in a gray uniform held out his hand for her passport. He opened it to an unmarked page and stamped it hard, so it would stay stamped. She was admitted into the country.

  The first place she visited was the luggage carousel. A dark youth with a broken zipper beat her to her suitcase and in English demanded a four-dirham ransom. She explained in French that she had not yet had opportunity to change money, consequently she herself had no dirhams. Her accent sounded strained and arrhythmic in her ears, but the boy didn’t seem to notice. He smiled and handed her the suitcase.

  “You owe me,” he said in French.

  “The next time,” she answered. Despite everything she felt excitement at being in a strange place.

  On her way to the car rental counter Rachel made a detour and entered a door that had the word for women written on it in five languages, and also displayed a black plastic silhouette that looked like a man wearing a dress. She went into one of the cubicles, closed the door, wiped off the seat with the coarse brown tissues which the tin box dispensed one at a time, and sat down. On the inside of the door in front of her face she saw fingerprints etched in human waste. Rachel laughed out loud. She had left the deodorized world of the west far behind, but she knew the culture shock had come and gone, passing through her in that one moment. She was glad it had happened while she was still in no-man’s land.

  At the car rental counter, operated by an international agency, Rachel asked for something with four-wheel drive. At first she spoke French, but the attendant, a dark woman with dyed blond hair who weighed less than she was meant to, held steadfastly to English, so Rachel gave up. In English she felt more muscular, and she needed all her strength to wrest the automobile from the woman. It was almost noon before she drove away in a dusty Land-Rover with an ashtray full of date pits.

  On the flight Rachel had studied a detailed road map of Morocco. She had plotted the route from Casablanca to Mhamid and added the figures that marked the distance in kilometers from point to point along the way. They came to a total of six hundred and ninety, slightly more than four hundred miles. She had planned to complete the drive in one day, but she did not reach Mhamid until Thursday morning.

  She couldn’t blame the car—it ran without difficulty. Or the roads—except in the High Atlas, where children waved raw chunks of amethyst at her, they were straight. Only the last ninety kilometers, from Zagora to Mhamid, were they not paved as well. It was her own fault. A tiredness overcame her on the journey that made her sleep for fourteen hours in an expensive dirty hotel in Marrakech and twelve more in an expensive clean one in Zagora. Even on the road her eyes constantly felt heavy, and she didn’t exceed fifty miles an hour.

  Soon after Zagora the mood left her quite suddenly. Perhaps it was dispelled by the sight of the first sign pointing tow
ard Mhamid. Rachel followed the graded dirt road which clung for a while to the west bank of the Oued Draa, a mean trickle that managed to sustain narrow bands of palm groves on both sides. The green of their fronds, in the midst of the surrounding waste, seemed more succulent to her than any green she had known before.

  The road turned away from the valley of the Draa and led her across a plain of sand and pebbles. Bare brown mountains ringed her on all sides; whenever Rachel looked at them they receded before her eyes. She did not see another person until the road rejoined the Draa.

  She smelled the date palms long before she saw the trees themselves, surrounding a small village walled in reddish stone. A group of little boys sat barefoot beneath the trees, each holding chalk and a slate and facing a bearded old man who stood in front of them. The boys watched Rachel pass. Many of their faces were black, but some were lighter than Rachel’s. Rachel waved. The old man said something in a sharp voice and the boys turned their heads away.

  Beyond the village the road ran once again along the bank of the Draa, now completely dry. The trickle of sluggish brown water had become a line of polished stones. As if in sympathy the road, too, grew rougher and began trying to shake the Land-Rover apart. Rachel found it easier to leave it completely in favor of the hard-packed plain.

  After a while the first dunes appeared, forcing her to return to the track. Then, divided here and there by the sand came a last resurgence of palm groves. Through the trees she could see small villages, some of them fortified. Suddenly the rutted track became smooth black asphalt and the noise of rattling metal was replaced by the quiet hiss of the tires.

  The palm groves ended and Rachel found herself in the central square of a small town. Several jeeps of various manufacture stood at different angles in the middle of the square, more abandoned than parked. The whole town had that forsaken look. There were no people or animals in sight. The doors of the faded yellow-cement buildings that surrounded the square were closed, and the windows covered with crude wooden shutters. Two buildings slightly taller than the others faced each other across the square. One was the gendarmerie, the other the Hotel Mhamid. Neither looked inviting.