The Moroccan Girl

by Charles Cumming

  “Did you think it was unlikely I would survive Marrakech?” she asked, flicking through a copy of Eastern Approaches. Carradine was reading it for the sixth or seventh time. He found the question interesting. Did she think that Mantis had overestimated the threat against her? Did she think that Carradine himself was being paranoid about Ramón and Hulse?

  “I was worried, yes,” he said. “There were too many moving parts. One minute I was being told the Russians and Americans were bumping people off, the next I was being fired by the Service. I wasn’t in a position to know what was really going on. I’m not trained. I write about this stuff. I’ve never lived it.”

  “You mean you have no proof that these men mean to kill me?”

  “None. No proof at all.”

  “But the theory of this man on the train—Karel, was it?—this was confirmed by Mr. Oubakir, no? Robert believes that there is a Russian plan to kill me, not simply to arrest me and to bring me in for questioning. That is why he sent this warning.”

  “I guess.” Carradine certainly could not think of any other reason why Mantis had acted as he did. “Isn’t that what you think?” He was beginning to feel out of his depth. “Is there something else going on that I don’t know about?”

  Bartok placed one of the pillows behind her back and sat up against the headboard. She kicked off her shoes, stretched out her legs and bounced up and down, like a customer testing the mattress in a showroom. Her legs were tanned, her toes slightly bent and calloused. Carradine noticed that the sides of her feet were marked with cuts and patches of dry skin. She saw this and said: “I have ugly feet.”

  “You don’t.”

  She looked across the bed and flashed him a smile. It was almost as if they had met before and were old friends. Of course, Carradine was aware that this was a misconception: creating an atmosphere of trust and intimacy with a man was doubtless a trick that Bartok could pull off as easily as she had kicked off her shoes. Yet he was convinced that she wanted to remain in the room, not only to extract information from him, but also because she felt safe there. She had stumbled on some sort of sanctuary.

  “I was foolish,” she said suddenly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I became lazy. I have known that they have been looking for me ever since it was announced that Ivan had been murdered. Before that, even. Robert is correct. Your friend on the train and Mr. Oubakir last night. They are all correct. The Russians want me dead. Until this moment, I did not know that the Americans had joined their death cult as well.”

  “I don’t have any proof that the Americans are involved,” said Carradine. “Only this guy Hulse creeping around and the theories of Karel and Oubakir.” Some kind of machine had been started up in the courtyard outside. “What do you mean, you got lazy?” he asked.

  Bartok gestured into the room. Her gaze was both amused and cynical, betraying the intense strain she had been under for months and months.

  “I went to Havana for a long time. Then to Mexico. Eventually down to Buenos Aires. Isn’t that what all fugitives do? Run to South America?” Her uneasy smile encouraged Carradine to agree. “Butch Cassidy. The Sundance Kid. Where did they go?”

  “Bolivia.”

  “That’s right! Bolivia!”

  He saw that she had an ability to take pleasure in small, amusing details, even as the world outside continued to press in on her.

  “I got scared,” she said. “In Argentina. Too many repeating faces. Too many strangers coming up to me in bars. I developed a paranoia.”

  “So you came here?”

  “Not at first, no.” Bartok’s answer seemed to conceal a secret that she was not yet prepared to divulge. “I went to Italy, then to Egypt. Eventually, yes, to Morocco…”

  “Which is where you got lazy?”

  “Eventually a person gets tired of running, you know?”

  “I can understand.”

  “It becomes almost as if you want to get caught, just to bring an end to it. That’s how I felt. That’s how I feel. I don’t know how much longer I can go on hiding.”

  Carradine was often at his most candid with perfect strangers. He wondered if Bartok had shown more of herself to him in the preceding two hours than she had revealed to any person in a long time.

  “Do you have family back in Hungary?” he asked.

  She shook her head quickly and decisively, as if to fend off any further questions of that kind. The telephone rang beside the bed and they both flinched. As Carradine reached to pick it up he caught her eye. They looked at each other and he felt his heart kick with desire.

  “Hello?”

  It was Michael McKenna.

  “Michael, I’m so sorry.” He had forgotten about their drink. “I fell asleep.”

  “That’s OK. Assumed that was the case. Did you find your beloved?”

  Carradine had a sudden, paranoid vision of Sebastian Hulse standing over McKenna in his room, directing the conversation, listening in.

  “Sadly not,” he replied. “Vanished into thin air.”

  “Pity,” said the Irishman. “What a shame.”

  “A real shame, yes.”

  Bartok looked at him quizzically. Carradine mouthed the words: “Don’t worry.”

  “We’re all away in the morning,” McKenna continued. “What flight are you on, Kit?”

  Carradine had not looked at his schedule. He had a vague memory that he had been booked on an easyJet flight out of Marrakech that evening.

  “I think I’m leaving after lunch,” he said.

  “OK. So perhaps we’ll see you at the airport.”

  They hung up. Carradine explained to Bartok that he had forgotten to meet McKenna for a drink. She did not seem suspicious that McKenna had rung and laughed when Carradine told her about their conversation earlier in the afternoon.

  “Billet-doux?” she said, a phrase she had never heard before and had difficulty pronouncing. “I like this expression. He is a brilliant man. We had a wonderful conversation.”

  “Didn’t you think it was a risk coming to the festival?” Carradine asked. “That somebody might recognize you?”

  She bowed her head. “That is what I meant about getting lazy. The people who know me, they know that I love literature of all kinds, that I read everything. I devour books. These men who are looking for me, they would also know this. So perhaps they put two and two together and took a chance that I would come to a literary festival, out of curiosity, out of boredom.”

  “They were right.”

  There was a moment of silence. Carradine was vain enough to wonder if she had read any of his books, but too proud to ask. He picked up two bottles of water from the bedside table and handed one of them to Bartok. In ordinary circumstances, they might have left the room and gone to the bar of the hotel for a cocktail. He would have invited her to dinner, taken her to Le Comptoir or al-Fassia for a tagine and a bottle of red. Simple pleasures that were denied to them. It was becoming increasingly clear that they were going to be stuck in his room. If Bartok showed her face outside the riad she would be scooped up by Hulse and his henchmen within minutes.

  “Why didn’t you leave straightaway?” he asked.

  Bartok frowned. “What do you mean, please?”

  “Take the passport. Take the card. Get some money. Why didn’t you take a taxi to Fez or Casablanca?”

  “I needed to know who you were,” she said. “Besides, the passport is useless.”

  “Why?”

  “It has no entry stamp.”

  Of course. Any official at a Moroccan passport desk would want to know why there was no record of “Maria Rodriguez” coming into the country.

  “Can’t you just say you lost it in the souk and this is a replacement?”

  Bartok honored Carradine with a patient smile.

  “Possibly,” she said. “That was certainly Robert’s idea. Or it is a trap and there is a flag on the passport. The Moroccan authorities get suspicious, they make a telephone
call, it is all over for me.”

  “Why would Mantis be trying to trap you?”

  Bartok appeared to have no answer to Carradine’s question. He wished that he knew more about the nature of their relationship, but she had closed off his questions whenever he had raised the subject.

  “Maybe he is not,” she conceded. “I don’t know. It is even possible the passport is a fake.”

  “But it came to me from the Foreign Office!”

  Bartok walked around the bed and came to sit next to him. Her perfume was the same scent that had been on the chair by the pool. Their knees briefly touched. She put a hand on Carradine’s back, but it was not a new moment of intimacy. Rather it was the sort of gesture that a nurse or social worker might make on the brink of delivering bad news.

  “There are things perhaps I should tell you about Robert,” she said.

  “Go on.”

  “I am afraid you are not going to like them.”

  25

  Carradine knew what Bartok was going to say before she said it. He let her deliver the coup de grâce.

  “Robert Mantis is not a British spy.”

  “I see.”

  “Robert Mantis does not work for the Service.”

  An awful, hollow feeling of shame opened up inside him. It was the secret doubt that had always nagged at him, but he had never allowed himself to face it head-on. He had wanted Mantis to be genuine. He had wanted to be a latter-day Maugham or Greene, to live as his father had lived and to experience the things he had known. Carradine had taken a business card, a copy of the Official Secrets Act and a photo ID as irrefutable proof that Robert Mantis was a British intelligence officer. He had been comprehensively duped.

  “Who does he work for, then? Or is he just a conman? A fantasist?”

  Bartok asked if he kept any alcohol in the room. Carradine had bought some Johnnie Walker at duty-free in Gatwick; the bottle was in his suitcase. He took it out, handed it to her and fetched two glasses from the bathroom, briefly staring at his own reflection in the mirror as though to remind himself what a fool he had been. She poured him two inches neat and encouraged him to join her in a toast.

  “To honest men and women,” she said, clinking his glass.

  “To honest men and women.”

  Carradine was touched that she was trying to raise his spirits, but he was in shock. He tracked back to the long conversation in Lisson Grove. He wanted to work out why Mantis had made the last-minute switch to the Sheraton. He did not understand why he had set up the meeting with Oubakir in Casablanca. What was it all for? He could not make sense of any of it.

  “I can explain.” Bartok sipped the whiskey and held it in her mouth, lips pursed, as though reading his mind. She swallowed it, letting out a sigh of pleasure. “Robert’s real name is Stephen Graham. He was born in London, educated at private schools in England. He went to Cambridge, married a French schoolteacher who left him for someone else.”

  “He told me he was still married.”

  “He told you a lot of things that were not true.” Carradine acknowledged the remark with a defeated shake of the head. “His father was an academic. From Scotland. You call this a Scotsman?”

  “A Scotsman, yes.”

  “Gordon Graham. His wife was Russian. This is the key. Yulia. I do not remember the patronymic. She came to England in the 1960s after Stephen’s father met her in Moscow on an academic visit behind the Iron Curtain.”

  “So she defected?”

  Bartok held more of the whiskey in her mouth, savoring it, indicating with quick eyes that Carradine was being impatient.

  “Wait,” she said. “Whether she defected or not is not important. I believe they fell in love and she was allowed to emigrate. Stephen Graham has worked for Moscow for his entire professional career.”

  Carradine slumped forward, shaking his head. The breath went out of him.

  “It’s OK,” whispered Bartok and touched his back. “Mantis tried to recruit me, too. Shortly after I left Ivan and moved from New York. Ivan had become violent, both toward me and in the context of Resurrection.…”

  “Simakov hit you?”

  She waved away his concern.

  “Never mind about that. All anyone needs to know is that I had had enough of him. Mantis wanted me to inform on the people I knew inside the movement. His typical modus operandi, the technique he has used in London and, I suppose, all over the world, with great success, is to pose as the traditional British spy. You said he had a briefcase, that he seemed slightly untidy and disorganized.…”

  “But also sharp, determined, thorough.” Carradine realized that countless others in his position had been comparably gullible. It was scant consolation.

  “Of course, of course.” Bartok placed the glass of whiskey by the side of the bed, allowing her to gesticulate more freely. “All of these things. He presents himself as a Service officer, he recruits agents, he runs them, they think they are working on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but all of the information they give to Stephen is channeled back to Moscow.”

  “It’s very clever.”

  “Very simple and very effective. Yes.”

  Carradine looked at her. The whiskey had brought color to her cheeks. The nape of her neck was flushed pink.

  “So you fell for this as well?” he asked.

  Bartok hesitated. “That is another story, for another time.” It was the second occasion on which Carradine had sensed that she was holding something back from him, something of significance. “The short answer is that I did work for him, but in the knowledge that he was a liar and a fraud, a false flag. A conman as you describe him.”

  Carradine asked the obvious question.

  “How did you know he wasn’t a British spy?”

  Did Bartok possess powers of insight and analysis far beyond his own? Had she rumbled Mantis within minutes of seeing his crumpled FCO business card?

  “I just knew,” she replied. “He slipped up. His story didn’t make sense. I allowed Robert to believe that he was running me.”

  “Does he still think you’re on the books?”

  Bartok looked at him as if he had lost his mind.

  “Gosh, no!” Someone clipped past in the courtyard. Bartok waited until they had passed before continuing. “A lot has happened to me since then.”

  Question after question formed in Carradine’s mind. He still did not know the truth about Bartok’s relationship with Mantis, just as he did not understand why Mantis had recruited him under false pretenses. Was it simply to use him as an extra pair of hands in the search for LASZLO—or did Moscow have a darker purpose?

  “Why me?” he asked.

  Bartok picked up the bottle of whiskey, refilled her own glass and offered more to Carradine. He nodded and she poured him another two inches.

  “It sounds as though he is going behind the backs of his employers in Russia. He knows about Moscow’s plan to have me killed. He has no means of contacting me, he does not know where I am, he has no way of warning me in person. So he hires anyone he can think of who is coming to Morocco. He uses agents in place in Rabat, such as Mohammed Oubakir, to look for me. From what you have told me, Ramón is almost certainly working for him. Graham knows from Facebook that you are coming here to speak at the festival, so he takes a chance and uses you as another set of eyes.”

  “But that’s crazy. You were a needle in a haystack.”

  “Maybe it is crazy, maybe it isn’t. You found me, didn’t you?” John Simpson was plugging his latest program on BBC World. The headlines were about to come around again. “Who is to say there are not five or six other people, all agents of Robert Mantis, walking around Marrakech tonight looking for ‘Maria Rodriguez’?”

  “All armed with passports and credit cards?”

  Bartok shrugged. She did not have the answers to all the questions Carradine might ask. She did not pretend to.

  “But why send me to the Sheraton?” he said. “Who was Abdullah Aziz? And why t
he fuck did Mantis have me deliver a book cipher to ‘Yassine’?”

  She smiled patiently, easing Carradine through his embarrassment.

  “Agents need to be looked after,” she explained. “They need to be serviced. Mantis asks you to meet ‘Yassine,’ to carry out a simple task, he is killing two birds with the one stone. Maybe he needed to get the book to Oubakir for other reasons. You said yourself that this man thinks you are a British spy.” She paused, seeming to weigh up the good sense of teasing Carradine. “You are no different to Stephen Graham!” she exclaimed. “You have pretended to be somebody you are not.”

  Bartok was apparently delighted by this insight and giggled as she drank the whiskey. The sight of her enjoying herself had the effect of making Carradine feel slightly less angry and self-conscious. She was the best sort of company: intelligent and forthright, honest and kind.

  “So who was the money for?” he asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Ramón?”

  “You meet this Spaniard on your plane. We can say this is a coincidence. There is—what?—one direct flight to Casablanca from London each day? Two, maximum. Therefore it is not unusual that you are on the same journey. He is also probably working for Robert Mantis, looking for me just as you were, just as Mr. Oubakir was doing. As for the money, perhaps it was to test you. Perhaps it was for this Ramón. Who knows?”

  Carradine stood up. One of his legs had cramped. He walked around the room, shaking it out. Bartok looked as if she found the sight of this endearing.

  “Are you all right, Kits?” she asked.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  He liked the way she mispronounced his name, making it sound like “Keats.”

  “So perhaps now I should leave you in peace.”

  Carradine stopped moving. He looked at her. It had not occurred to him that she might leave.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I should go. You have done a lot for me. You have an airplane back to London in the morning. I have taken up too much of your time.”