Tangier: A Novel

by Stephen Holgate

  “It’s on me,” Draper said.

  Less out of generosity than from a reluctance to be beholden to someone with whom he had nothing in common, Chaffee tried to ignore him and pulled a few bills from his wallet, but Draper waved off the waiter, saying, “I’m good for a couple of drinks here. It’s your lucky night.”

  The waiter returned and they drank in silence. Chaffee sipped at his bourbon and gazed up at the walls, decorated with photos from decades past—smiling party-goers in ’70s glitz, mustached men and long-haired women with the self-conscious “natural” look of the ’60s, sport-coated celebrities of Tangier’s ’50s heyday, elegant diners of the ’40’s, the women in silk and pearls and furs, the men in double-breasted suits or the uniforms of forgotten armies.

  Draper drank his beer from the bottle, his fingers around its neck, his Adam’s apple bobbing with each swallow.

  “You work behind the bar?” Chaffee asked.

  “No, I . . . ” Draper forced a laugh. “You didn’t see my picture in the lobby? I play the piano. Just middle of the week stuff. Unless Patrice takes a Saturday off. He’s the main man here, played this room for years. Like Bobby Short at the Carlyle, y’know? They give him a meal allowance and a room, a monthly wage, everything. Me? Just nightly pay and tips. The hotel’s practically empty. I mean, no one’s coming to Morocco right now. Wrong season or something.” He finished off the beer and set his bottle on the brass table. “The place is half empty and they still won’t give me a room. Great place, though. Lots of class,” he added with no apparent irony. “I got another gig down the coast a little ways. Asilah. Artsy little town. I play at a bar there run by this old French lady. Been there forever. The bar, I mean. The lady too, I guess. I swear she’s a hundred years old. Sits in a corner of the room smoking cigarettes from a holder and drinking some weird French drink. I play weekends. Doesn’t pay as well as weekends here would, but, hey, it’s a gig, right?”

  Draper looked around the room one more time, sizing up his audience, which on this evening consisted of two European couples and a party of young Moroccans. Maybe ten people in all.

  “Well, I guess I better get to work.” He stood and gave the top of his head a tap to make sure his toupee was still in place.

  No one looked up as Draper sat down at the piano. He leaned over the keyboard, his hands poised in the air, then launched into an upbeat tune that Chaffee recognized from some Broadway show. To his surprise the American played well, his hands quick and light, his playing expressive. When he finished no one applauded.

  Chaffee worked on his bourbon, ordered another, felt himself start to relax. Maybe he’d be able to sleep when he got back to his room. He listened to Draper a little longer. The pianist played the standards in a straightforward style, nothing fancy, but with a nice touch, a quietly-turned nuance here, a clever riff there, playing for himself to the unresponsive room.

  Alhough he respected his countryman’s professionalism, and he could sure as hell play that piano, Chaffee didn’t particularly want to be there when Draper finished his set. So he paid for his second bourbon and took the chilly walk back to the hotel.

  FOUR

  The Spanish consular official, a Señor Sandoval, seemed at an even greater loss than the young Frenchman the day before. A tall, elegant man in a dark suit, Sandoval closed his eyes and tried to get the story clear in his head.

  “So. Your father was French. You are American. That is fine. But what has this to do with the Spanish government?”

  “I understand that Tangier was a sort of open city before the war, governed by a consortium of European governments. No one really in charge. A wide open place.”

  A faint smile flickered across the Spaniard’s eyes. “Tangier is still a wide open place. But yes, that is correct.”

  “And your government assumed sole control when the war started.”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite . . . ” The man made a small deprecating gesture.

  Chaffee noticed that, despite his elegant appearance, Sandoval bit his nails.

  “My father wrote to my mother about needing an exit visa from your government. It’s the last communication he ever made to us. To her. I thought there might be some record of his having contacted your consulate, some kind of paper trail.”

  Sandoval cocked his head to one side, skeptical. “I suppose if he applied for a visa he would have needed to fill out certain forms. But that would have been more than fifty years ago.”

  “Is there any chance you would still have those records here?”

  “Here? No. If we have something, it will be in Madrid. They never throw anything out. But this is assuming your—you said it was your father, yes?—that your father applied for a visa, and that anyone in the Foreign Ministry wants to take the time to look for it. I am not an optimist.” This last seemed more an expression of a deeply held philosophy than a comment on the likelihood of finding anything relevant.

  Either way, Chaffee understood it was his cue to leave. The conversation had taken even less time than his interview at the French Consulate the day before. Chaffee looked around the Spaniard’s nondescript office and sighed his disbelief at having to do the sort of thing he would have dispatched a staffer to run down just a few weeks ago.

  He wrote the name of his hotel on a piece of paper and handed it to Señor Sandoval, who looked at him quizzically.

  “In case you find something and want to contact me,” Chaffee said.

  “Ah, yes. Of course.”

  The shadows scrolling across the room told Chaffee the sun had passed its zenith. “Like my life,” he muttered to himself as he sank into bed. Other men shrugged off this waning of the light as an inevitable part of middle age. But why should he kid himself? Middle age? He was fifty-five. How many hundred-and-ten year-old men did he know? Yet, all his years of experience hadn’t kept him from getting sucked into a fool’s errand. Grunting with the bitter taste of failure, he faced the fact that after a journey of four thousand miles and two short appointments with low-level bureaucrats, he’d come to a dead end. Swinging his feet off the bed with a determination he did not feel, Chaffee picked up the phone to ask the desk clerk to reschedule his flight back to Washington. For the length of a long breath, he sat with his finger poised over the dial. Then he returned the receiver to its cradle. Though disgusted with himself for allowing his mother to browbeat him into making this journey, he couldn’t bear the thought of admitting to her that he couldn’t find her husband. He had over the last few months swallowed enough failure to last him a lifetime and wanted no more of it.

  For the first time in his life, Chaffee allowed himself to think about how tough things must have been for his stepfather. Dalton, he had always called him, never Dad, had been the only father he’d ever known. But being real, mere flesh and blood, the man never stood a chance in a matchup with the abstract perfection of Rene Laurent. An official with Treasury, and later with the World Bank, his stepfather always treated him well. Yet, as a boy, Chaffee told himself that Dalton lacked a father’s understanding, the warmth and guidance he imagined his real father would have given him. In truth, Dalton’s affection had been his to take if he hadn’t instead gone through childhood acting like the son of a god—distant and unapproachable, but still a god. Too late now to make it up. Dalton had been dead for years, taken by a heart attack at a conference in Geneva.

  It had been Dalton who once tried to explain his mother to him, and, to some degree, his father, too. “Marriage back then, among those people, wasn’t quite what we think of now,” he’d said. “Both of their families were . . . ” He’d searched for the word. “. . . privileged. Well positioned. They married their own kind. I mean to say you couldn’t have all these great genes escaping into the general population.” Dalton had smiled, but at fourteen, Chaffee didn’t want to acknowledge the joke. After all, they were his genes, too. “Your father’s family had large estates. Some kind of title. He was a diplomat and a diplomat’s son. Your mother’s famil
y owned a couple of factories. They met a couple of years after he had entered the Foreign Ministry. Their families approved, and it was done. Kind of like a business arrangement. Back then you got married first, then waited for love to sort of emerge over time. They were married less than two years. Your father traveled a lot. They barely knew each other, really. And then it was all over. Between the Depression and the war, their families lost everything. After she came to the States, your mother ended up teaching English at the IMF to people like me. And your dad, well, he disappeared.”

  Disappeared. That was the word. Yet, to a teenager mining the inexhaustible vein of adolescent resentment, it had felt like desertion. Chaffee wanted to ask if his parents’ love had found time to emerge, as Dalton put it, before the war separated them. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask anything so personal of his mother’s second husband.

  Or, perhaps, he didn’t want to know the answer.

  He looked around his room with a despair that even his resignation hadn’t caused him. How had he ended up here, playing out this nightmare? While planning his trip, Chaffee had imagined that, once in Tangier, he would smoke out the tortuous path that led through countless twists and turns to his long-lost father, like the detective in an old black and white film. He would talk to a mysterious man in a room above a bar, the smoke-filled air stirred by an old ceiling fan or exchange whispers over a glass of cognac with some sharp-faced rogue at a café near the port. Or maybe he’d slip a fifty to an unshaven guy who knew more than he was supposed to. And one dark night he would find his father, a victim of amnesia, or held prisoner somewhere all these years, tortured by the fact that he had never laid eyes on his son.

  He could do it; could make it happen. He was, after all, an exceptionally capable man, one who had honed his skills in the most powerful city in the world. Yet, after getting a polite brush off from a pair of diplomatic underlings, he was finished. Unable to go forward. Unwilling to go home.

  So, he stayed in Tangier, spending hours in his room reading detective novels he bought at a bookstore catering to tourists. When their thin pleasures gave out, he put on his overcoat and went outside.

  He took a misanthropic satisfaction in slipping the would-be guides who hovered outside the hotel’s entrance, then strolled the boulevards of Tangier, nosed around the markets set up on the steps leading down toward the port. He practiced his French on the vendors, felt it coming back, a few words here, a bit of syntax there, bringing with it memories of his boyhood and his mother, her insistence that he master the grammar—complex, logical, unforgiving—the grammar, that is, but, yes, also his mother. But his fleeting sense of purpose soon dissipated and he slouched along the city streets, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, mourning the death of the man he thought he was.

  At a clifftop museum, once the residence of an American millionaire, he skipped past exhibits on Matisse’s stay in Tangier, on Morocco’s independence movement, and on the mountain tribes of the Rif to look at some photos taken during the war, scanning them closely in the absurd hope that he might see his father in one of them, wearing that familiar suit with the peaked handkerchief in his breast pocket.

  He stopped by the telephone and telegraph office and looked through that rarity of rarities, a local phone book, and found Lahlou, Lamrani, Laoui and, Legrand, but no Laurent. He shook his head, feeling like a fool for thinking it might have been that easy.

  One afternoon, while wandering through the medina, which had looked bright and welcoming from the ship, yet felt sinister and claustrophobic once caught in its maze of narrow passageways, he came upon an old building that had once housed the US government’s diplomatic mission, but was now a museum. With nothing better to do, and in no mood to spend the rest of his day in his hotel room, he knocked on the door.

  A young, well-dressed Moroccan greeted him and asked if he would like a tour.

  “I don’t know. Is it worth my while?”

  “Very much so, sir,” the young man said.

  Chaffee looked around him, skeptical. “Well, let’s get going then.”

  The old building proved to be a rambling warren of attractively mismatched rooms rising around a tiled courtyard. While the young Moroccan spoke of its history as a diplomatic post, Chaffee toed the old, dark carpets and regarded the decorative lanterns and arched doorways.

  A large room was set up with rows of chairs facing a raised platform.

  “We regularly stage small concerts and lectures,” explained the young guide in his rather formal English.

  Chaffee nodded toward the far end of the room. “What’s behind there?”

  The Moroccan turned toward the pair of closed wooden doors. “Ah. That is private, sir. The living quarters of the director.

  “Someone still lives here?”

  “Yes, Mr. Erickson and his wife. Mr. Erickson was formerly the Cultural Attaché at the Embassy in Rabat. After his retirement he returned with his wife to Morocco. He has been the director for a number of years.”

  Chaffee looked around the large room and asked himself if he should have done like his friend Courtenay and wangled an ambassadorship instead of spending all those years in Washington. “Too late now,” he muttered.

  “Sir?”

  “Nothing. How long did you say this was a diplomatic mission?”

  “Many years. Even during the World War II. In fact—”

  “Ah. Ali, we have a guest?”

  The double doors at the far end of the room had opened, and a tall white-haired man appeared. He walked with the shuffle of someone in chronic pain, though his still-imposing frame spoke of physical power not yet extinguished.

  “Yes, Mr. Erickson. I was about to show this gentleman the closet.”

  The old American chuckled. “Ah, yes, the closet.” He held out his hand. “Lars Erickson.”

  Chaffee felt the strength of the other man’s grip. “Christopher Chaffee,” he said.

  It was no more than a narrowing of the older man’s eyes, a change in the grip of his handshake, but Chaffee knew the man recognized his name.

  Erickson hesitated before offering an icy smile. “I’ll be happy to show our guest around, Ali.”

  With a slight bow, the young man turned and made his way back toward the front door.

  The director clasped his hands behind his back and indicated with a nod that Chaffee should come with him as he made his way through an arched doorway and down a carpeted hall. His eyes stayed on Chaffee as they walked.

  “You’ve been director here long?” Chaffee asked, wishing to change the unspoken topic.

  “Nine years. I guess some would consider that a long time,” he said, his words covered by a layer of frost.

  “You must find your duties pleasant.”

  “It’s a trust. I try to perform it with integrity.” Erickson glanced at him, making sure the remark hit home. “So, what brings you to Tangier, Mr. Chaffee? Escaping the heat of Washington?”

  If it had been August, the remark would have seemed innocent enough, but in November its meaning could not have been more pointed.

  “No,” Chaffee snapped.

  “Sorry, I meant no—”

  “Let’s drop it.”

  The older man made a deferential nod that held no deference.

  They came to a narrow door set into the wall along the hallway. “The famous closet,” Erickson said and opened the door to reveal just that, a shallow closet backed by a row of empty shelves. He clearly enjoyed the blank look on Chafee’s face.

  Like a magician performing his favorite trick, Erickson pushed against the closet’s back wall. With a faint groan of concealed hinges, the wall swung open to reveal a large empty room, its interior illumined by a small dormer.

  “The OSS—precursor to the CIA—used it during the Second World War,” Erickson said. “They had operatives working here in the legation, helping to plan the Torch landings in North Africa in 1942.”

  Chaffee looked around the old spies’ nest, trying t
o imagine the men who had worked in it, men encouraged to deceive others, break laws, betray trusts. “I guess they’re all dead and gone now.”

  “Most. Not all. Every year or two, one or another of them comes by to poke around—a former diplomat or former spy, I never ask. They’re often full of stories from their years here, back when they were young men.” The museum director put his hands in his pockets and looked out the dormer. “A couple of OSS types retired to Tangier. One died a few years ago. The other is still here.” Erickson nodded toward the doorway and led Chaffee back into the hall, shutting the closet behind them.

  The tour finished, the older gave his fellow American a cool regard and perfunctory handshake. “Well, if you’ll forgive me.”

  He walked back along the hallway, his hands clasped behind him, leaving Chaffee to find his own way out.

  FIVE

  Dreading the false intimacy that came of being fellow countrymen, Chaffee avoided Draper over the next couple of days—a task made easier, Chaffee had to admit, by the fact that Draper made no effort to seek him out either.

  Inevitably, though, one afternoon, as he came in from one of his aimless walks, he found the other American sitting in the hotel lobby talking to the dapper desk clerk, who sat in the chair next to him. Chaffee barely recognized Draper without his toupee, and he didn’t much care for the idea of staying in a hotel where the desk clerk felt free to sit in an easy chair hobnobbing with the guests. He wondered if he should complain to the owner. At the same time he envied their evident ease with each other.

  “Hey, Chris, how you doing?” Draper called.

  The clerk took his time getting up from the chair and returning to his post behind the desk.