Chaffee growled under his breath, fighting the impulse to tell him that a few months earlier, when he had still been director of a federal agency, he could have traveled on an official passport and insisted on speaking directly to the Consul General or even the Ambassador in Rabat, rather than sitting in this tiny office, soliciting the assistance of some bottom-feeding Third Secretary.
Instead, he forced himself to smile.
“As I told your receptionist, I’m looking for any information you might have on a Monsieur Rene Laurent.”
Janvier made a theatrical frown. “He is French? Or an American like yourself?”
“No, he was French.”
“Was French. And now?”
Chaffee thought what a pleasure it would be to throttle this supercilious sonofabitch until his tongue turned black. With an effort that warned him that his body might outlive his soul if he kept this up, he dredged up another smile. “It’s difficult to explain. The man I am looking for is my father.”
The young man cocked his head as if he hadn’t caught this quite right. “But your name is . . . ”
“Chaffee. Yes. I was born Christopher Laurent. My mother remarried and I took my stepfather’s name.”
“So, monsieur is French.”
“I was born American. Technically, I am a dual national.”
Janvier leaned back in his chair and regarded Chaffee for a long time. When he leaned forward again, his manner had changed. Apparently, he had made some decision about this American and now lowered his guard a bit.
“And you believe your father is here in Tangier?”
“It is possible.”
“Possible. If so, how long he has been here?”
“I’m not sure.”
Janvier squinted at him. “Is he ill? In difficulties with Moroccan authorities?”
“No, nothing like that—at least I don’t believe so.”
“Then why do you think—?”
“I have a letter. Sent from Tangier by my father years ago, through your diplomatic pouch.”
The consul’s mask of aplomb showed its first crack. “Through our pouch?”
“He was a French diplomat. Like yourself.”
The young man’s eyebrows popped halfway up his forehead.
“But the letter was never delivered,” Chaffee continued. “I don’t know why. Perhaps the confusion of war. Someone apparently stumbled upon it recently in a file at the Quai d’Orsay and sent it on to my mother. It’s the last word we have from him.”
Janvier frowned in thought. “And when did he send this letter?”
“The summer of 1940.”
“My God, that was during the Second World War. Why do you think he is still here?”
Impelled by hope and his mother’s insistence, Chaffee had for two weeks avoided asking himself this question. “It is the only thing we have to go on. We’d been told . . . my mother had been told, that he never left France, had been arrested by the Vichy government for his opposition to the Nazis after France surrendered. We were told he died in prison late in the war. This letter changes all that. Instead of being in France, apparently he was here—at least at some point.”
The furrow between the young Frenchman’s eyes deepened. “And he was doing here what?”
Chaffee took the letter and the photo from his coat pocket and placed them on the desk, smoothing them open with the side of his hand. “I don’t know. The letter contains some hints, but I haven’t figured them out.”
The French consul glanced at the photograph, then at the man before him.
Chaffee wanted to tell the young man he needed to look past his thinning hair, the extra pounds, the sagging skin. Then he would see how much they looked alike.
After countless readings over the last couple of weeks, Chaffee knew its brief contents by heart.
Dear Marie-Therese (it read in French):
I am in Tangier and safe, at least for the moment. Torrence—you remember him from Brussels—has promised to forward this note to you in Washington through the diplomatic pouch.
I’m sure you’ve read about what happened to the others. Now I don’t dare head for Casablanca and can’t go back to France. Perhaps I can get a ship back to Spain if I can get an exit visa from the Spanish, who are running things here for now.
I must hurry as apparently I am notorious now and it will be trouble for Torrence if the Consul General finds I’m here.
I can only hope this letter reaches you. I fear that your reception at what is now a Vichy embassy in Washington will be even colder than mine here.
Torrence is tapping his foot.
Sincerely
Yours, Rene
Even allowing for the haste in which it was written, the letter struck Chaffee as cold. “Sincerely yours.” Like a business letter. No expressions of affection. Most of all, no mention of their expected child, himself. He was not in his father’s thoughts at all. He didn’t like to admit how much that hurt.
Janvier looked at him. “So, you say your father was here, yet it looks as if he were heading for Spain. He speaks of others and implies some form of danger, but we have no idea who they might be or what danger he faces. You say he died in prison and yet you also say he was perhaps not in prison at all. I do not understand. At all.”
Chaffee’s jaw clenched. “Look, I don’t claim to understand. I only know that the story we have been told may not be true. And if that story isn’t true, perhaps, just perhaps . . . well, I have to try to find out what happened.”
Janvier cocked his head to one side. “Bon. This is all very interesting, but, again, even if he somehow escaped arrest by coming to Tangier, I do not understand why you would think he’s still here.”
Chaffee couldn’t bring himself to say to this young man—hell, this kid—that he had come because his mother, against all good sense and lacking any proof, believed to the depths of her obsidian heart that her husband was still alive and in Tangier. “I don’t understand either, but I have to try.” In exasperation, he flicked his hands up.
“You see, I have to understand, I’ve never met my father. If there’s any chance . . . God.” Chaffee closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted—and disgusted that he should be forced to explain his sentiments to this low-level bureaucrat. He opened his mouth to insist on speaking with the Consul-General, a man perhaps his own age and of something like his own status.
The joke sprang out at him like a jack-in-the-box. He had no status anymore. The realization hit him hard—his agency lost, position gone. He slumped in his chair.
The young consul lowered his eyes and said, not unkindly, “It seems to me you should have checked first in Paris, with the Ministry, rather than coming all of this way. Everything here would have been sent to the archives in Paris decades ago. Like your letter.”
Chaffee made an effort to recover, sit up straight. “I checked with the Quai d’Orsay before I left Washington. All they know is that they found the letter in a box with some unrelated documents, equally ancient. They could see it had been en route from Tangier to Washington and never delivered. My father had been posted to Washington, but had not yet left France when the Germans broke through. He put my mother, pregnant with me, on a ship to America, told her he would follow in a week or two. But he never came. Paris—your ministry—has said they have nothing more. Only this. So I came here thinking perhaps . . . ”
In fact, he wasn’t sure what he was thinking.
The young Frenchman wagged his head and tried to put things back on a more solid basis. “You say you thought he died in prison. There is no record of this?”
“No. At least no one ever showed anything to my mother. Someone in the Ministry simply told her that it was their understanding he had died in prison in the autumn of 1944. Things were in chaos then, after D-Day, the Germans retreating. Your colleague in Paris didn’t think it strange that there was no official record of my father’s death.”
The telephone rang. Janvier exchanged a few words with th
e person at the other end of the line and hung up. “Where were we?” he asked, but Chaffee could see that Janvier had already moved on and was trying to find a polite way to conclude their conversation. “Yes, it would seem he was indeed here, Monsieur Chaffee. But why you, or anyone, would think he was still . . . ” He shrugged. “It is—what?—more than fifty years since your father wrote this letter.”
His arguments exhausted, lacking official status, without influence, Chaffee could not impose on any more of this young man’s time. After weeks spent planning the trip, after the long journey from Washington, Chaffee only now realized how absurd his story sounded, how ridiculous he must appear.
He spread his hands in front of him, unable even to look the young Frenchman in the eye. “I have to try. That’s all.”
Janvier refolded the letter and handed it with the photo back to Chaffee. “Mr. Chaffee, I know you wish to think this is a unique circumstance. But I have heard stories similar to this. A husband travels to a distant country and never returns, cannot be located. In the few cases where we eventually find the missing husband, or, in one case, a missing wife; it turns out that they had disappeared because they did not want to be found. For whatever reason, they had started new lives and were content not to go back to their old ones. I suppose in wartime it might be an even more common occurrence.”
“Not my father!” Chaffee spoke all the more sharply for not being sure if he was insisting on a truth or denying one.
Janvier bowed his head. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I will do what I can.”
Politely dismissed, his emotions spent, Chaffee rose to his feet. “That’s all I can ask.” Ask? He’d been accustomed to commanding. The bitter realization of his own impotence depressed the hell out of him.
Janvier accompanied him downstairs. Chaffee the director of a United States government agency, would have expected no less. Chaffee the disgraced official and unemployed private citizen appreciated the courtesy.
“I will look into whatever archives we have here,” Janvier said as they shook hands. “But you will want to check with the Spanish. They controlled Tangier during the war. They have a consulate in Tetouan and, well, who knows?”
It was the most elegant way of saying goodbye.
THREE
It took half an hour to place the call to the United States. His wife’s voice sounded tinny and flat over the phone in Chaffee’s room. He told her of his conversation at the French Consulate and his doubts that anyone would put much effort into searching for documents on his father.
“They can’t just let it drop, Chris. Tell them who you are.”
“Tell them I’m a former regulatory chief but was forced to resign because of a bunch of pissant—” He drew his hand down his face. “Anything more on the . . . the . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word. Indictment.
His wife, too, avoided it. “I called Deptford’s law office. Apparently he’s got a friend at DoJ who keeps an ear to the ground for him. I’m not sure I’m supposed to know that. Anyway, no news is good news.”
“No news is just no news.”
“You sound like you’re giving up. Think of all the positions you’ve held.”
The average Georgetown party-goer’s intuitive feel for influence and position was as finely tuned as a concert master’s ear for pitch, and Julie, though she had her own job with a non-profit, had enjoyed the prestige of being Mrs. Agency Director. She felt Chaffee’s loss of position almost as keenly as he did.
“Sure. Look at the positions I’ve held. And look at how it all ended.”
“Maybe you’ll be better off for it. I’m not sure I was much enjoying the guy you’d become.” She softened the remark with a little laugh, but he knew she meant it and it hurt.
“Okay, I was a sonofabitch. But I had to be a sonofabitch to get to where I was. Washington’s no town for candy-asses,” he said. “You have no idea.”
“Well, you’re not there anymore, Chris, so you can knock it off now.”
He tried to counterfeit a little grace, laugh with her, but couldn’t bring it off. He was in no frame of mind to consider the possibility she was right. He sagged back on the bed, drained and dispirited. “I wish you were here,” he said. She sighed and he could almost feel her breath on his ear. “I wish you’d traveled with me more when I had the agency.”
He regretted the subtle whiff of blame clinging to his words, as if she were somehow responsible for his misdeeds.
“Baby, better I should have stayed home and filled out your travel vouchers.”
“Okay! Jesus.” Humiliation warped his voice. “Hell, I apologized. Publicly.”
“It might have helped if you’d meant it.”
A surge of anger rolled through him then quickly dissipated leaving him empty. Whatever flaws a married couple might discover in each other over twenty-seven years, she had always been honest with him, always told him the truth, even when he didn’t want to hear it. But he had found it more gratifying to listen to the others, the ones who told him he was brilliant, supremely capable, blessed with limitless possibilities. Now he knew that every unquestioned compliment had been a dagger to his soul.
“Yeah,” he sighed, feeling weary and low. “I suppose it would have helped if I’d meant it. God, I’m glad to be out of that city.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Chris. That’s what you’re doing.”
“Well, if you want something done right . . . ”
“Very funny.” She said it quietly. “Look, I think Phil Courtenay got himself appointed ambassador in Rabat. You should call him and tell him you’re there. If you won’t, I’ll call over to the State Department myself and let them—”
“Just leave it alone, Julie. I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.” He blew out a long breath and looked at his watch. “I’m sorry. I’m tired. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. Call Mother and tell her I went to the consulate and they’re doing what they can. I’ll call again in a couple of days.” He couldn’t bring himself to hang up. “I wish you here with me,” he said again.
“Yeah, me too.”
They said their goodbyes and he laid his head on the pillow, but found that while he could hardly keep his eyes open a few hours earlier, he was now wide awake. After half an hour of trying to persuade himself he would be asleep any moment now, he got up and got dressed.
It was past ten o’clock, and except for a lone guest handing his room key to the dapper man at the front desk, the lobby was empty.
“Ah, Mr. Chaffee,” the desk clerk said.
“Is there anywhere around here where I can get a drink?”
The other guest, a tall, gangly fellow of perhaps forty, dressed in a cheap suit and a bad toupee, looked first at the clerk, then at Chaffee.
“Hey, if you want to bend an elbow with a fellow American, I’m heading for the Minzah Hotel.” The man’s wide-set eyes, one slightly lower than the other, gave him the look of an obscure species of fish.
Chaffee was in the mood to drink alone and was specifically not interested in spending his evening with someone who started a conversation with “Hey.” But he needed a drink and this was apparently the man who could lead him to it.
“Sure,” Chaffee said, sounding anything but. The nuance, easily discerned by anyone back in Washington, passed over the man’s head.
“Pete Draper,” the man said, and thrust out his hand
“Christopher Chaffee.” He watched the other American’s eyes and was grateful to find no flicker of recognition.
“Yeah, great bar at the Minzah,” Draper said as the two men walked in the night air. “I’d say that even if I wasn’t working there.” He paused for Chaffee to say something in return. When he didn’t, Draper went on without him. “Best hotel in town.” He looked at Chaffee as if to see if he was still there. “So. Where you from?”
“Washington.”
“Which—?”
“D.C.”
; “Ever been to Morocco before?”
“No.”
Chaffee could feel Draper groping for a conversational opening, like a rock climber searching for a handhold, but he was in no mood to help him.
“Funny, thing,” Draper said. “I’m from Washington, too. The state. Little town called White Salmon. Right across the Columbia River from Hood River. That’s in Oregon. Ever been to Hood River?”
“No.”
“Great place.” He shook his head. “Apple country. Lots of pears, too. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here.”
“No kidding.”
Discouraged, Draper fell silent.
“Look,” Chaffee said, “I’m sorry. I just got in today. Tired. Not good company.”
The gangly American shrugged equably. “S’all right. I know how it is. Takes a guy a few days to get his clock reset. And Tangier isn’t exactly Washington, D.C.”
“Or Washington State.”
“That’s for sure.”
Chaffee braced himself for questions about what he was doing in Tangier, or unsolicited revelations about how Draper had come to be there, but the other American finally realized he was in no mood to talk and they continued in silence until they came to a wide boulevard.
A few couples strolled along the sidewalk and an occasional car went by, but it was a quiet night. The wind had eased and the lights from the port twinkled in the damp sea air. In the distance, a ferry of the day was approaching the dock, lights blazing against the night sky. Probably the last one of the day.
After the cool evening air, the Minzah was bright and warm and welcoming. Dark woods gave the place a sense of solidity and arabesques carved into the plaster walls decorated the spacious lobby. A man in a fez opened the door for them and Chaffee told himself that he should think about changing hotels. This was the Morocco Chaffee had carried in his head, like a film-noir movie set or the half-remembered description of a palace from A Thousand and One Nights.
Draper led him through the lobby to the lounge, a large open room with a zinc-topped bar and an unattended baby grand. Draper nodded to the hostess as they entered, waved to the bartender, then led Chaffee to a pair of heavily cushioned chairs near a low brass table. Chaffee ordered bourbon and Draper asked for a bottle of French beer.
Tangier: A Novel Page 2