Tangier: A Novel

by Stephen Holgate

  “Fine,” Chaffee replied in a way meant to forestall conversation.

  Draper missed the signal. “Hey, I’m going down to Asilah this evening. Got my weekend gig there. I thought maybe you’d like to come along.”

  “Tonight? Ah.” He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Hey, no problem,” Draper said as if the refusal hadn’t hurt. “Just thought I’d ask.”

  As Draper rose to leave Chaffee realized with a sudden twist of regret that, in fact, he yearned for some company. But he couldn’t find it in him to unsay the words he’d spoken.

  Instead, he turned to the desk clerk and asked for his key. The Moroccan retrieved the key from its cubbyhole along with an envelope.

  Puzzled, Chaffee nodded at the envelope. “What’s this?”

  “It is a message for you, Mr. Chaffee,” the desk clerk said, as if stating the obvious were one of the hotel’s signature services.

  Chaffee told himself he would definitely talk to the owner about this guy.

  In its upper corner, the envelope bore the address of the French Consulate. Though Chaffee had dismissed the chance of learning anything of importance from the irritating young consul, a prickle of sweat broke out on his hands as he tore the envelope open.

  The stationery was of the best quality and carried the seal of the French government, but its message—in English—could not have been more pedestrian. Following a polite salutation it read:

  After an exhaustive search of our archives here and in Paris, we can find no reference to M. Rene Laurent other than a few routine documents, including those relating to his appointment to Washington for the autumn of 1940.

  Though there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the letter you brought to the Consulate, we can find no indication of his presence in Tangier in the summer of 1940, or at any other time.

  The letter closed by asking Chaffee to “Be assured of the expression of my highest regards,” and signed, “Bernard Janvier.”

  “Exhaustive, my ass,” Chaffee muttered. No one could possibly have made more than a cursory search since he had visited the consulate. And “No reason to doubt the authenticity of your letter”—one of those phrases that means exactly the opposite of what it says.

  So Janvier thought there was something phony about the letter. But who would forge such a letter, and why? No, the letter had to be real. “Screw Janvier.”

  “Pardon, monsieur?”

  Chaffee glared at the desk clerk. “Nothing.” He leaned against the counter, knowing for a certainty that he would discover nothing more about his father. Not on this trip. Not ever.

  “Look, I want you to call Air France and make a reservation on the first available flight to Washington.”

  “You are leaving so soon, Mr. Chaffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “Their offices are closed by now. I will call first thing in the morning. You wish to fly out through Madrid? Rabat? Casablanca?”

  “Whichever one can get me out of here the fastest.”

  His mind made up to leave, Chaffee slept well that night and came down early to see if his reservation had been made.

  The man behind the desk—did he never sleep? never change his suit?—told him that the Air France office didn’t open until ten, but he would call as soon as they were in.

  Chaffee started for the door, but turned when the man behind the desk called, “Ah, Monsieur Chaffee. Another letter came for you this morning.”

  This one had come from the Spanish Consulate—the other shoe dropping. Certain the envelope contained the same sort of polite brush-off he had received from the French, Chaffee thought of tossing it away unopened. Instead, he tore it open and took out its single sheet of paper. He looked at the clerk. “Can you read Spanish?”

  “Of course, Mr. Chaffee.”

  “I wonder if you would . . . ”

  “Certainly.”

  As he expected, the letter from Sandoval stated that a survey of the limited archives held in Tetouan had turned up nothing regarding any visa application from a Rene Laurent in 1940, or at any other time.

  Though he told himself this was exactly what he had expected, Chaffee was surprised by the sense of disappointment rising from a corner of himself that had still hoped for something more. He held out his hand. “Thank you. I’ll take it with me.”

  But the man pulled it back. “A moment, Mr. Chaffee. There is more.”

  His open hand still extended, Chaffee nodded uncertainly at the clerk to continue. The Moroccan resumed reading:

  “However, the initial search of records in Madrid revealed a memo in our files, a copy of which has been faxed to me, indicating that our security services in Tangier had briefly, in the summer of 1940, followed the movements of a Señor Laurent (no first name). This surveillance was called off in the fall of 1940 at the request of German intelligence services. This—”

  Chaffee shook his head. “I’m sorry. What was that? The last part.”

  The desk clerk looked at him and repeated, “This surveillance was called off in the fall of 1940 at the request of German intelligence services.”

  The Moroccan paused, but Chaffee seemed unable to reply, and the desk clerk continued. “This memo moved me to ask for a more thorough search of our records, but I regret to say no additional information has been found. I hope, nevertheless, that you find this of some value. Sincerely, Diego Sandoval.”

  The clerk handed the letter to Chaffee, who stood in the middle of the lobby staring at it, trying to grasp its implications—and certain now that he would not be leaving Tangier anytime soon.

  PART II

  SUMMER 1940

  SIX

  Exhausted, Rene Laurent leaned against the railing as the ferry pulled away from the dock at Algeciras. With no breeze to break the heat, the metal burned his hand. The Mediterranean, as if it too were exhausted by the summer heat, lay smooth as a mirror, and the ship’s prow barely disturbed the water as it made its way across the Straits toward Tangier.

  He let out a long sigh. Each day of the two weeks since he left Bordeaux, and of the two months since the Germans broke through, had weighed on him like a stone until he thought the burden would crush him. With Europe disappearing astern, he felt the weight start to lift and his spirits rise. But he reminded himself he couldn’t relax yet. Safety still lay over the horizon, in Tangier.

  Once the ship docked, he told himself, he would find a quiet hotel and a bed with clean sheets and would sleep for twenty-four hours. When he woke he would stop by the consulate for news and let them know he had not simply disappeared. Then he’d catch a train south to Casablanca, where he would find his colleagues who had sailed from Marseille weeks earlier, and together they would set up the government in exile. Then he could start his life over. Before he left Bordeaux, he’d told them he didn’t care what position they gave him, as long as he could serve in a new Foreign Ministry, staffed by new men like himself, men who might have been beaten but were not defeated.

  Laurent tried to remember the last time he’d had a full night’s sleep. It would have been in early June, before the Germans had, in hours, smashed through the lines that in the previous war had held for four years. After they broke through, the ordered façade of life within the Ministry had collapsed. Work became increasingly frenzied, but accomplished nothing. Indecisive meetings were convened, recessed, resumed, then abandoned. Hastily written reports laid out detailed options that bore no resemblance to reality. Middle of the night phone calls led to further meetings that played out like fever dreams, presenting Laurent with the frightening spectacle of watching men he admired stumble around like sleepwalkers. The leaders lashed out at each other, at the generals, and at the French people, who, they occasionally implied, thoroughly deserved this reckoning. Curiously, none of them seemed to blame the Germans, even as their panzers spread across the map like a bloodstain, cutting off the British army and much of the French, and throwing them into the sea while the rest of the French army stood pa
ralyzed.

  With the Germans bearing down on Paris, Laurent had sent his wife, Marie-Therese, to Le Havre. There she could board a ship for Washington, where he was scheduled to take up his post later that summer as head of the political affairs section, a coup for a diplomat as young as himself. He told her he would join her as soon as the situation had stabilized, not realizing that it never would, at least not before the government he worked for had ceased to exist.

  In the days after she left, the ministries, the Prime Minister’s office, the army staff, all of them, broke down in shock and despair relieved by moments of irrational confidence that gave way to an acceptance of—even a longing for—the defeat that would end their struggles. With the Germans only days from Paris, the government fled, first toward the Loire, then, as in previous wars, to Bordeaux, the lover’s leap of French republics.

  Along the way there were more meetings, held on the run in country chateaux or city halls or empty school houses. Churchill and Anthony Eden flew in from London, exhorted them to fight on, left, came again, saw how it was and flew away for good. Meanwhile a silent rage burned in Laurent and the others like him, the junior diplomats, who stood along the walls while the ministers sat at long tables and babbled like opium eaters.

  Finally, exhausted and befuddled, the government surrendered. Fittingly, it turned its responsibilities over to an exhausted and befuddled old man. Petain, the hero of the last war, was, by the sufferance of the Germans, allowed to set up a collaborationist government in the spa city of Vichy.

  Laurent sat in Bordeaux, uncertain what to do next, or whether he still had a job. The new cabal was aware of his hatred for the Nazis, and, by extension, for themselves, the men who had surrendered to them. Meanwhile, he wondered what kind of reception his wife would receive from an embassy now controlled by Petain and the Vichy government.

  About this time, one of the young bloods like himself, a man named Lapointe, sought him out in a quiet corner and whispered that a breakaway group would soon head for Morocco to set up a government in exile rather than live in shame under the Vichy regime. Pierre Mendes-France, the former Finance Minister, was with them, Lapointe said, adding that Petain’s people had surprisingly offered them the use of a naval cruiser to get to Casablanca. Laurent solemnly shook hands and said he would join them.

  Most of the breakaway group left the following morning, but Laurent remained behind for two more days, trying in vain to contact his wife, who should have arrived in America by now. His ministry driver, a sturdy man, named Vladimir by his left-leaning parents, told Laurent that he could commandeer a car—which sounded much better than stealing one, though it amounted to the same thing—and head for Marseille, where the others were boarding ship for Casablanca.

  However, by the time they left Bordeaux the road to Marseilles was blocked by a barely moving sludge of refugees. After three days in which they made less than three hundred kilometers, Laurent told Vladimir they had no choice but to turn south toward the Spanish border and head overland for Morocco.

  The traffic only worsened and days passed before they could present themselves to Spanish officials, who looked at Laurent’s diplomatic passport and let him cross, though they refused to allow his car or driver to enter with him. Vladimir, of a caste born to resignation, shrugged, shook hands, and wished him well. Laurent took up his suitcase and crossed the frontier on foot as part of the avalanche of humanity rumbling toward Spain or Portugal or Africa or anyplace the Germans had not yet reached.

  Days on trains that seemed never to move or in buses that moved more slowly than the refugees walking along the roadside eventually brought him to the port at Algeciras and passage on the ferry, made more expensive by a hefty surcharge of bribery. Now Tangier lay just over the horizon. With luck, and some help from the consulate, he would join the others in Casablanca in the next day or two.

  When the sea air had cleared his head, Laurent took his suitcase and staggered aft along a crowded passageway toward the benches on the open deck.

  He found not only the benches, but every bit of open deck already converted into a temporary camp for the hundreds of refugees on board—French, Belgian, Dutch, Poles, Czechs, Jews of all nationalities, and god-knew-who-else, all knocked loose by the astonishing speed of the German advance. He finally lay down in a passageway below decks and, using his suitcase for a pillow, slept for a couple of hours.

  Late in the afternoon the ship eased into a slip at Tangier and disgorged its cargo of human refuse, which surged toward the customs house like a flash flood loosed into a canyon.

  Spanish customs officials waved their arms and blew their whistles, but found that the passengers were far more determined to get into Morocco than the officials were to stop them.

  A few of the most unlucky, with sanctuary in sight, were rounded up and sequestered in a bare room, where they stood with their heads down, shoulders slumped, too weary even to be frightened.

  Pushed by the mob, Laurent reached for his passport, folding between its pages part of his diminishing supply of francs, and presented them to a customs officer.

  The official found the money and held it up like a dirty diaper.

  “What is this?” he asked, tossing the francs onto the counter in front of him. “Worthless,” he said with a full quantum of contempt before looking at Laurent’s passport. “This is a diplomatic passport. Where is a copy of your diplomatic note?”

  “What?”

  “You should have a diplomatic note credentialing you to Tangier.”

  “I’m not posted here. I’m transiting an open city on my way to Casablanca. I need no credentials.”

  “No. Since the Declaration of July 9, you are passing through Spanish—”

  Laurent lost the rest of the official’s speech in the crosscurrent of voices around him, but he understood its meaning and the likelihood that he would either be put back on the ship or herded into the crowded room he had seen moments earlier. With the adrenaline rush of a hunted man, he snatched his passport from the official’s hand, scooping up his money in the same gesture, and rode the wave of humanity surging toward the doors. Over the sound of the desperate men and women around him he heard the customs official shouting, “Señor, you must come back! You are not permitted to—”

  By then he was outside and shoving his way toward a line of taxis.

  SEVEN

  The young man descended the stairs into the consulate’s lobby, glancing over his shoulder as if afraid he was being followed. In comportment and dress he looked much like Laurent, though darker and half a head shorter. He did not bother to appear happy to see his visitor.

  “My God, Laurent, what are you doing in Tangier?”

  “I arrived yesterday from Spain.”

  Torrence’s eyes darted around the empty lobby. “Come up to my office,” he murmured, taking Laurent by the arm and hustling him upstairs.

  Laurent had known Michel Torrence when they were lowly Third Secretaries in Brussels. In the few years since, Laurent had risen rapidly within the Ministry while Torrence had advanced perhaps a little less quickly than someone of his age and rank might hope.

  Neither of them said a word as they climbed the steps toward Torrence’s small oak-paneled office on the second floor. With a quick glance up and down the corridor, Torrence shut the door behind them.

  Laurent collapsed into a chair.

  “What are you doing here?” Torrence asked again.

  “I told you—“

  “My God, you look terrible.”

  “Until last night, I’d barely slept in over—”

  “Your clothes . . .”

  Laurent looked at himself, his suit wrinkled and grimy after weeks on the run. No wonder Torrence regarded him like a beggar who had appeared at the back door.

  “I haven’t had a chance to—”

  “You’ve come from Spain?”

  Laurent tried to smile. “Let me finish a sentence, would you?”

  “First, I heard you wer
e headed for Washington. Then you’re in Bordeaux. Then someone tells me you’re with Mendes-France and that bunch down in Casablanca.”

  “You’re half right on all counts.” Through his own weariness, Laurent tried to recall to Torrence the friendly relationship they had enjoyed in Brussels. “I gather that mine is not a welcome presence.”

  “Oh, it’s not—” Torrence forced a smile. “But what are you doing here?”

  “I thought courtesy required me to present myself to the Consul General before joining the others in Casablanca. I assume he’s in contact with them.”

  “Bouf!” Torrence waved his arms in disbelief. “Are you really that out of touch?”

  It struck Laurent that his former colleague was enjoying scoring points in a game that, until now, he hadn’t realized they were playing.

  “I haven’t had much chance to read the papers.”

  Torrence stood behind his desk, nervously rubbing his hands together. “But the radio has been full of it.”

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  Torrence’s eyes flickered toward the door and back to Laurent. “They’ve been arrested. All of them.”

  Laurent’s mind went blank, as if someone had kicked out the plug. Finally, he managed to say, “The ones in Casablanca? Who arrested them?”

  “Who do you think? Petain’s men.”

  Laurent threw his head back and sighed. “So Petain gave them a ship just so he’d know who was lined up against him.”

  “Of course. They’re in charge now. They have the army on their side. They have the church on their side, the business community—”

  “Not to mention the Germans.”

  “Don’t sound so superior, Laurent.” Torrence made a display of his irritation then relented. Having clinched the game, he had no need to keep running up the score. “Face facts. We lost. There’s a new regime. Maybe not the one we would have wanted, but it’s our government now.”

  Laurent raised his eyebrows but couldn’t think of a response that wouldn’t end with Torrence throwing him out.