by Hob Broun
“Come on, then.” Tomas emptied his pipe on the street and, as Christo steered the Rover inside, pulled a corrugated steel door down behind them.
Not much action under the low concrete ceiling. Two wiry men in newspaper hats squatted on either side of an upended crate playing dominoes. A pie-faced boy in sandals and a canvas jumper drowsily taped over a car’s windows prior to spray painting. An equally drowsy blues sax came out of a stripped-down speaker cone balanced on the disfigured rear end of a Peugeot, accentuating the junk-sick bunker atmosphere.
Tomas bobbed his big blond head, shuffled to the beat. “Your only decent export, jazz. The mighty tree that grew from the death culture. You dig Horace Silver?”
“The most.”
Christo was thrown hopelessly off stride, having expected a razor-sharp pro, finding instead this solemn boho who poked him now, called his attention to the piano passage coming up.
“You hear the genius? It makes me think of a rain forest.”
Solid, Pops. Just as Christo focused his concentration on the skittering chords, Tomas broke away, all business.
“She is brand new, eh? With all the papers?” Without awaiting an answer, Tomas spoke to the pie-face in mongrel Berber French. Stroking the Rover’s flanks, rapping on it here and there, the boy grunted something back. “Abdel is my best man,” Tomas said paternally. “A born engineer.”
“That’s good to know.” Christo could feel himself twitching.
“You’re in some kind of hurry?” Tomas made a treadmill motion with his hands.
“Well, I didn’t come to see the sights.”
“All right. Commerce on an empty stomach, then.” Tomas pulled him around to the rear of the car.” We will cut down through here, you see? By my estimation we will need eight cubic feet of space. If necessary, we can squeeze more up here behind the firewall. Also, a few modifications so that the final weight will tally with what is on your manifest. Abdel will take care. And once the load is in, he will seal up, putty, sand, repaint and you will be ready to go.”
Christo looked suspiciously at the vapid pie face.
“Don’t worry,” Tomas said. “He is paid from my share.”
Feeling tentative, Christo examined oil stains on the floor, listened to the men slapping down their dominoes. “So when do we go to meet the man?”
Tomas had cupped one ear, absorbed in the sound track again. Christo repeated himself, an obstreperous buzz in his voice that hung in the dead air that followed.
Tomas winced. Then, shaking his head as the band picked up its chorus, he growled, “Right away then. But I suggest you calm down on the way. I don’t like strain.”
Calm down, quiet. It was good advice, except the speed had Christo ready to run through walls, his ganglia red-hot and smoking. Get any more alert and he’d crack like a candy egg. But still he needed the friction, knew he operated best that way.
By the time they reached the village, there were indentations in Christo’s thumb from the nails at the end of the rabbit’s foot he’d been squeezing reflexively. He was sweating under a heavy woolen djellabah. The long, tentlike garment made him claustrophobic, but Tomas had insisted.
“No use looking any more conspicuous than you have to. And keep the hood up, it will hide your face.”
Now, as they crossed the dirt road with sun angling over tile roofs and into their faces, he cautioned, “Keep watch on yourself and show respect for these people. Remember, we’re infidels.”
The Swede was calling all the shots; Christo accepted his own docility. He simply wasn’t prepared. It was like an inescapable dream where everything took him by surprise. He felt as helpless as a cork on rough water and more than willing to be led.
They passed under a stone arch furrowed by several hundred years of windblown sand and entered the souk. It was a scene in suspension and the only sound was the buzzing of flies. Goats nosed around in the dust, too listless to heed tethering. The more prosperous merchants had been able to put together stalls of lumber rescued from cooking fires and rubbish heaps, while the rest just sat on the ground with a few articles before them on a cloth—one woman with henna-stained palms offered a rusted flywheel, assorted nuts and bolts, a pile of tiny airline soap bars. Next to her, a crippled boy had loose cigarettes and a half-dead chicken that twitched feebly at the edge of his ragged blanket, its feet bound with reeds.
Christo felt a queer internal tremor as he realized there were no other customers.
“Don’t be fooled by what shows,” Tomas murmured as he stopped to purchase ten centimes’ worth of dried chick peas. “This one here, his real business is in virgin boys.”
Christo lurched as an olive vendor tugged his flapping sleeve. Tomas smiled thinly and said it might be wise for him to buy.
“Good will?”
“A gesture. Gestures and ceremony, these things are paramount here.”
“Back home we call it public relations.” Christo thought: A clever line, I must be doing better.
With olive juice dripping down his arm from the paper cone, Christo followed his guide into a hut that smelled like wet dog. The counter was a plank laid across two kegs, and the little girl behind it (she could not have been more than ten) had a whore’s tired, smirking face. She opened two warm Cokes without being asked, listened with meandering eyes as Tomas instructed her, then dropped the coins he gave her in a cloth sack that hung under her skirts.
Back outside, Christo tossed away his olives and collapsed against the wall, caught by the sensation of a mental fissure through which dizziness rushed in a torrent. He was marinated in sweat.
Tomas gulped Coke, wiped his mouth. “These Arabs love the sugar. That’s why most of them have brass teeth.”
Christo rocked on his heels, touched the crease in his trousers for reassurance. “What now?” he managed.
“Nothing now. We wait. The girl will take my message and after a while they will come for us. For now we just sit.”
“Sorry. I must have left my patience on the plane.”
Christo closed his eyes to the glare and tried to fold his arms and legs into a napping posture. But recent images whiplashed across his inner eye: Tomas’s dank garage, the threatening clutter of the city, aboriginal faces self-righteously blank.
“Maktub,” Tomas said.
“What?”
“Fate. What will be, will be.”
Yes, Christo silently commented, that’s just what I’m afraid of.
A noise like an electric shaver cut the air followed in a burst by music from the other side of the wall: dolorous yodeling embroidered by an epileptic clarinet. In the thin belt of shadow that intersected the square, boys had been playing a game with round stones; now they broke away and moved briskly in a pack.
“Hashish? Monsieur pour hashish?”
“English? Deutsch? Good dope for you. Ich haben.”
Christo rose to his feet as they pressed in, but Tomas pulled him back down. “Don’t encourage them.”
More and more came, as if a chemical signal had been released drawing them like insects to a food source, Christo felt waves of sour boy-breath on his face as they shoved and clamored, cried their incantation: “Hashish! Hashish!”
Slapping heads, an older boy thrust his way to the front. “You waste your time with these filthy childs. I take you somewhere no big noise. You sit, have tea, smoke best hashish all you want, no problem. Listen all new tapes just flown in. Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones.”
“Cessez donc!” Tomas cocked his fist “Cessez.”
They recoiled momentarily, then surged forward, giggling and aping Tomas—“Cessez!”—in shrill, taunting voices. The first brave hands shot out to poke and tug; the first rumble of animal menace rose like heat from the ground.
Tomas stood quickly. “Let’s walk.” They drove through wild puppy furor, but were clear for only a few seconds before it reformed around them in a circular dance that combined entreaty and defiance.
It was eerie, the way th
ey froze all at once, went mute. Christo tensed, expecting the worst, but the pack began to dismantle, boys drifting away in bashful groups of three and four. From the direction in which they carefully did not look, it was possible to detect the cause of their submission.
He was tall and elegantly slim in his Western clothes, his dark face dominated by eyes like a pair of ray-gun apertures, one sweep of them more than enough; a terrible power quickly flashed. Just from the way he set himself, it was clear he had the juice, that he would be a chieftain of the streets anywhere—Bedji or Lima or Chicago.
“Ibrahim.” Tomas approached him. “Salaam aleikum.”
“Aleikum salaam.”
They grasped wrists in a kind of Indian-wrestle greeting. Christo was introduced as an “American businessman.” Ibrahim bowed deeply, emitting a powerful fume of bay rum.
“You come yourself to meet us,” Tomas intoned. “We are most honored.”
“We in turn are honored by your visit.” Ibrahim had a rolling, staff-announcer’s baritone. “This way please, and we shall ride.”
The car was long and black, and pitted by rust and by the sharp stones that were everywhere. It had to be the only Oldsmobile in town. Ibrahim drove at cortege speed through several miles of dismal countryside, gray-green succulents and disintegrating rock. Tomas whispered urgent cultural lore.
“From now on, we are in the care of the family. They will dictate the atmosphere. They will decide how and when to complete the transaction. In Islam, the most important thing is how one provides or accepts hospitality.”
“Okay, okay,” Christo said irritably. And to himself: Good manners? Something else I don’t have.
Turning off the main road and passing through a chicken-wire gate, they pulled up at a low, oblong warehouse with a shining tin roof. Ibrahim’s curt horn beeps fetched out a fervently obsequious little man who opened doors and ushered them inside; where his nose should have been, there was a tan hole.
Everyone wore sunglasses except Ali Mustafa, the patriarch, a generous dumpling of a man in a crisp linen tunic, who soaked up deference with the careless inveteracy of a mullah. Clearly, he was running the show. Welcoming his guests to a fragrant sanctum where carpets had been laid over the floor, he bade them recline among the cushions that encircled a brass table. He snapped his fingers and a tray of sweet mint tea in glasses was brought. Christo took his cues from Tomas during the long Arabic toast. The tea was like syrup and made him sweat even more profusely inside the djellabah. The glasses were replenished and a young relative played a halting version of “My Blue Heaven” on the flageolet. Ali Mustafa beamed.
“We thank you for your long trip,” he said.
“Yeah, great to be here,” Christo said, like someone on a talk show.
“Your wisdom in coming is to your credit. It pleases me much to open my doors for citizens of the world. Since I am a child and my father teaches me to sift kif through horsehair, I am dedicated to a search for better and better ways to make and preserve hashish. Please to come now with me and see for yourself.”
More sunglasses, more relatives. They were busy as beavers in the processing room. Ali Mustafa knelt beside one of his cleaners, dipped into the man’s wide metal pan and rubbed fine powder through his fingers.
“Just to touch our hashish is a pleasurable thing.” He opened his hand to display the resinous globules that adhered. “And you will see the color, how dark. These plants, my friend, extraordinaire. Most we pick before the strong winds come, but these we grow terraced behind a mountain and protected. We wait and wait to pick, and the ripeness is so sweet to make perfume in the valley at night. You see now how it takes form.”
From one of the gallon cans, Ali Mustafa scooped an expertly exact amount of his product onto a square of cellophane, laid a second square on top and placed this sandwich in the lower plate of a hand press.
“My grandsons invent this machine. The heat is inside, by electricity. No flame.” He turned a small black dial, activating the scavenged element of a steam iron, then spun the crankshaft; the plates clamped together. “Now is the beauty. The spirit of hashish, comme on dit … It unites. The essence set free in the heat.”
The slab he removed moments later was fudge brown, smooth and sealed airtight in cellophane.
“This,” holding the slab over his heart, “this is the pride of Ali Mustafa.”
Once more around the brass table, they waited in reverent silence while the narghile was prepared. Made of cut green glass, it had four flexible, gold-embroidered smoking tubes attached to amber mouthpieces. The urn-shaped bowl was filled to the rim with alternating layers of black tobacco and hashish, a hot coal nestled on top.
Ali Mustafa leaned close to present one of the mouthpieces and Christo saw his eyes were milky and brown like an old dog’s. Suspicion churned inside, stirring up from Christo’s cloudy bottom the urge to see conspiracy. Their cunning scheme: banish his vigilance to an island of smoke, fill his head with hash anarchy, then ambush with curved blades. A piece of throat for every family member. Something now at his ribs.
But it was Tomas nudging him. All right, if only for protocol. Christo inhaled, water bubbling and rebounding off the glass, smoke jetting into his lungs. A kick in the chest from a mule. He clapped his hand over nose and mouth to hold down the coughs.
“Very smooth,” Tomas offered, blue smoke billowing from his nostrils. “And the taste, very fresh. Your skill is unique, Ali.”
Christo could only nod agreement. He had exhaled by now, but articulate speech was beyond him. His eyes were tearing and his throat rippled upward. He took another toke, more cautiously this time, but still felt that mule kick.
“Superb,” he rasped. Protocol.
Ali Mustafa chuckled, tossed another chunk of hashish onto the hissing embers. “Superb, my traveling friend, mais oui. Your pleasure is mine also.”
Christo inhaled through clenched teeth, rocked back with eyes closed.
“He flies now, you see? He pilots the magic carpet.”
As Christo sank deeper into the cushions, puffing steadily, he recognized that he was conquered, could no more lift an arm to ward off imminent disaster. He saw Tomas and Ali Mustafa conversing under white corollas, their mouths moving wetly, their hands punctuating the air. The sounds came to him, but none of the words. Let them do their worst, then. Let his uneasy life seep away into these cushions. He could repudiate it all.
Ibrahim looming above him then, a cold presence, and Tomas pulling him upright.
“It’s time for the money.”
“Hmm?”
Ali Mustafa knitted his sausage fingers. “I know you are men of honor.”
“The money,” Tomas hissed. “Show them the bloody money.”
Through bunched cloth Christo felt along his waist where the heavy belt had chafed him. Staggering to his feet, smiling hazily, he dropped his pants.
Casa Nocturne, the villa the Ulrichs were subletting from a British rocket engineer, had a sweeping view of the harbor from its tiled patio. Christo slouched in a canvas chair, his feet propped on the balustrade, and gazed down at a berthed cruise ship, which was strung with lights and gave off faint twitters of cocktail music. Acacia leaves fluttered overhead in a breeze that pushed ahead of itself the aroma of deep-fried seafood.
Tomas had been furious with Christo’s inept comportment. A wonder they hadn’t both been left in a gully, he said. Back at the garage, once they’d finished loading the Rover’s carefully padded deadspace, Christo had thrown Tomas his cut like a bag of giblets.
“Milbank sends me his office boy.” Tomas had folded his arms, struck a pose of pedagogic disdain. “It’s not worth getting angry about.”
Office boy? Maybe. Christo shifted his eyes from the harbor to the Beaujolais in his glass. He imagined Tomas hemmed in by ski-masked zealots, on his knees before a crate of rifles packed in cosmoline. That much of a pro, he thought, I don’t need to be.
“More wine?” Inge Ulrich stepped onto
the patio, surfer-blond bangs fringing over her brow like a torn hat.
“Sure. I’ll take a splash.”
“Such a lovely moon from here. And the ships.”
Christo had been presented to her in his biochemist’s guise; he was supposed to be on his way to a university lectureship in Accra. Inge, her husband explained, was deeply concerned with physical health and purity.
“No mention can be made of your business here. It would be extremely unpleasant if she found out I am involved in something she considers destructive. But she never objected to my arms business. ‘Just machines,’ she would say. ‘I have nothing against machines.’ Does that make sense?”
But Inge had always lived on contradiction; and in ways Tomas knew nothing about.
Years ago in Stockholm she was a prostitute, an addict. She was tough enough to keep the pimps off her back, but she was afraid of the dark and kept a crucifix under her pillow. Her steadiest customer was a physician whose wife had been maimed in a train derailment. He paid Inge generously to put on rubber boots and defecate over a glass coffee table while he lay underneath. On the promise that she service him exclusively, he installed her in a deluxe apartment, supplied her with ampules of morphine that she stored in the egg tray of the refrigerator. But Inge’s promise was as empty as her merchant’s heart. A private detective reported that she was seeing as many as five clients a day.
The physician was distraught, bent on revenge. He took her to his chalet on Lake Vattern and handcuffed her to steel rings in the attic floor. For five days he denied her food and sleep, beat her with hemlock boughs and pierced her with heated safety pins. This was behavior modification of the crudest type, but when at last he freed her, dumping her scab-covered body in a roadside snowbank, Inge felt immeasurably cleansed. From that day forward, she had not touched so much as an aspirin and, until her marriage to Tomas, was doggedly celibate.
Inge had learned that truth extended no farther than the surface of her skin, that flesh and bone were all the wealth she’d ever have. Now she drank no water that had not been boiled first, and confined her diet to vegetables and whole grains. She douched with ginseng vinegar and all day long gobbled papaya enzyme and bee pollen tablets mailed to her from London.